Last Call: Expiration Date Part 16

An instant later he had to grab the padded vinyl seat of the barstool to keep from falling over.

Kootie's mouth opened, and for several whole seconds a series of wordless but conversational-tone cat warbles yowled and yipped out of his throat; finally, after his forehead was hot and wet with the effort of resisting it and he had inadvertently blown his nose on his chin, he just stopped fighting the phenomenon and let his whole chest and face relax into pa.s.sivity.

"Duh," came his voice then, clear at last. "Du-u-h," it said again, prolonging the syllable, indignantly quoting it. Then he was looking up at the bartender. "Thanks, boys," said Kootie's voice, "but never mind. All a mistake, sorry to have wasted your time. Here, have a round of beers on me." After a pause, Kootie's voice went on, "Kid, put some money on the bar."

Catching on that he was being addressed-by his own throat!-Kootie hastily dug into the pocket of his jeans and, without taking out his roll of bills, peeled one off and pulled it out. It was a five; probably not enough for very many beers, but the next bill might be a twenty. He reached up and laid it on the surface of the bar, then ducked his head and wiped his chin on his shoulder.

"Lord, boy, a fiver?" said his mouth. "I bet they don't get many orangutans in here. Who are these fellas, anyway, son? Mexicans? Tell 'em in Mexican that this was a misunderstanding, and we're leaving."

"Uhhh," said Kootie, testing his own control of his voice. "Lo siento, pero no yo soy aqui. Eso dinero es para cervezas. Salud. Y ahora, adis."

"Oh," he heard himself add, "and get matches, will you?"

"Uh, y para mi, fosforos, por favor? Mechas? Como para cigarros?"

After another long several seconds, the bartender reached out and pushed a book of matches forward to the edge of the bar.

Kootie reached up and took it. "Gracias."

Then he could almost feel a hand grab his collar and yank him away from the bar, toward the door.

(But even with the pressed carbon disk, if you were relying on just the current set up in the wire, there was clarity but no reach; all you had was a little standing system. To fix that, the changing current in the wire had to be just the cue for changes that would be mirrored big-scale in an induction coil. Then the signal could be carried just about anywhere.) "Trolley-car lines," Kootie heard himself say as he pushed open the door and stepped out into the cold evening again. Standing on the curb, he waited for the headlights of the cars in the eastbound lanes to sweep past, and then he limped out across the asphalt to stand on the double yellow painted lines in the middle of the street. His head bent forward to look at the pavement under his feet. His mouth opened again, and "Find us a set of streetcar lines," he said.

"There aren't any," he answered-hoa.r.s.ely, for he had forgotten to inhale after the involuntary remark. He took a deep breath and then went on, "There haven't been streetcars in L.A. for years."

"d.a.m.n. The tracks make a nice house of mirrors."

Trucks were roaring past only inches from Kootie's toes, and the glaring headlights against the dark backdrop of the neighborhood made him feel like a dog crouching on the center divider of a freeway; and briefly he wondered how Fred was.

His attention was roughly shoved away from the thought. "After this next juggernaut, go," said his own voice as he watched the oncoming westbound traffic. "Have they always been this loud?"

"Sure," Kootie answered as he skipped and hopped across the lanes after a big-wheel pickup had ripplingly growled past.

On the north sidewalk at last, Kootie limped east, his back to the blurred smear of red over the western hills under the clouds. Of course he knew now that he had not lost Edison's ghost after all, and he suspected that he had known it ever since he had involuntarily hidden from the slow-moving police car two hours ago; but the old man's ghost was not shoving Kootie out of his body now, and so the boy wasn't experiencing the soul-vertigo that had so shattered him at the Music Center.

Actually, he was glad that the old man was with him.

"Well now," said his voice gruffly, "did you get the firecrackers?"

Kootie's face went cold. Had those firecrackers been important? Surely he had lost them along with everything else that had been in the knapsack or in the pockets of his heavy shirt-but then he slapped the hip pocket of his jeans, and felt the flat square package.

"Yes, sir!"

"Good boy. Haul 'em out and we'll squelch pursuit."

Kootie hooked out the package and began peeling off the thin waxed paper. The things were illegal, so he looked around furtively, but the TV repair shop they were stopped in front of was closed, and none of the gleaming car roofs moving past in the street had police light bars. "Why would an orangutan go into a bar?" he asked absently.

"Sounds like a riddle. You know why the skeleton didn't go to the dance?" Kootie realized that his mouth was smiling.

"No, sir."

"He had no body to go with. Hardy-har-har. How much is a beer these days?" Kootie's hands had peeled off the paper, and now his fingers were gently prizing the firecracker fuses apart. Kootie didn't believe he was doing it himself.

"I don't know. A dollar."

"Whoa! I'd make my own. The joke is, you see, an orangutan goes into a bar and orders a beer, and he gives the bartender a five-dollar bill. The bartender figures, shoot, what do orangutans know about money, so he gives the ape a nickel in change. So the creature's sitting there drinking its beer, kind of moody, and the bartender's polishing gla.s.ses, and after a while the bartender says, just making conversation, you know, 'We don't get many orangutans in here.' And the orangutan says, 'At four-ninety-five a beer, I'm not surprised.' "

Kootie's laugh was short because he was out of breath, but he tried to make it sound sincere.

"Don't like jokes, hey," said the Edison ghost grumpily with Kootie's mouth and throat. "Maybe you think it's funny having to pay four-ninety-five for a beer. Or whatever you said it was. Maybe you think it's funny that somebody could be trying for an hour to tell you what you got to do, but your intellectual grippers ain't capable of grasping any Morse except plain old SOS! Both times I proposed marriage, I did it by tapping in Morse on the girl's hand, so as not to alert anyone around. Where would we be, if the ladies had thought I was just ... testing their reflexes? I knew Morse when I was fifteen! d.a.m.n me! How old are you?"

Kootie managed to p.r.o.nounce the word "Eleven." Then, momentarily holding on to control of his throat, he went on, defiantly, "How old are you?" What with being unfairly yelled at, on top of exhaustion and everything else, Kootie was, to his humiliation, starting to cry.

"No business of yours, sonny." Edison sniffed with Kootie's nose. "But I was a year short of seventy when I bet Henry Ford I could kick a globe off a chandelier in a New York hotel, I'll tell you that for nothing. Quit that crying! A chandelier on the ceiling! Did it, too. Did you see me kick that guy back there? What the h.e.l.l have we got here?" Kootie's hands shook the nest of firecrackers.

"F-fire-" Kootie began, and then Edison finished the word for him: "Firecrackers. That's right. Good boy. Sorry I was rude-I shouldn't put on airs, I didn't get my B.S. until I was well past eighty-four. Eighty-four. Four-ninety-five! Oh well, we'll make our own, once we've got some breathing time. Breathing time. Hah."

Two black people were striding along the sidewalk toward where Kootie stood, a man in black jeans and a black shirt and a woman wearing what seemed to be a lot of blankets, and Kootie hoped Edison would stop talking until the couple had pa.s.sed.

But he didn't. "You like graveyards, son?" Kootie shook his head. "I got no fondness for 'em either, but you can learn things there." Air was sucked haltingly into Kootie's lungs. "From the restless ghosts-in case the bad day comes, in spite of all your precautions, and you're one yourself."

The black couple stared at him as they pa.s.sed, clearly imagining that this was a crazy boy.

"Leave no tracks, that's the ticket. I did all my early research in a lab on a train. Take your shoes off. Daily train between Port Huron and Detroit; in '61 I got a job as newsboy on board of it, so I could have a laboratory that couldn't be located." He sniffed. "Not easily, anyway. One fellow did find me, even though I was motivating fast on steel rails, but I gave him the slip, sold him my masks instead of myself. Take off your shoes, d.a.m.n it!"

Kootie had not really stopped crying, and now he sobbed, "Me? Why? It's cold-" Then he had suddenly bent forward at the waist, and had to put weight on his bad ankle to keep from falling. "Don't!" He sat down on the concrete and then began defeatedly tugging at the shoelaces. "Okay! Don't push!" His hand opened, dropping the firecrackers.

Edison inhaled harshly, his breath hitching with sobs, and Kootie's voice said, brokenly, "Sorry, son. It's (sniff) important we get this done quick." Kootie had pulled off both his shoes. The concrete was cold against his b.u.t.t through his jeans. "Socks too," wept Edison. "Quit crying, will you? This is ... ludicrous."

Kootie let Edison work his numbing hands, stuffing the socks into the shoes and then tying the laces together and draping the shoes around his neck. He straightened carefully and leaned against the window of the TV repair shop. He half hoped the window would break, but even with Thomas Edison in his head he didn't weigh enough.

"Your furt's hoot," spoke Edison, interrupting Kootie's breathing. "Excuse me. Your foot is hurt. I'll let you get up by yourself. Grab the firecrackers."

Too tired to give a sarcastic reply, Kootie struggled to his feet, closing his fist on the firecrackers as he got up. Standing again, he shivered in his flimsy shirt.

"Now," said Edison, "we're going to run up this street here to our left-we're going to do that after you start to-no, I'd better do it-after I start dropping lit firecrackers on your feet."

At that, Kootie began hiccupping, and after a moment he realized that he was actually laughing. "I can't go to the cops," he said. "I got a one-armed murderer following me around-and a dope fiend cooking me dinner on a car engine, and my parents-and anyway, now Thomas Alva Edison is gonna chase me up a street barefoot throwing illegal explosives at my feet. And I'm eleven years old. But I can't go to the cops, hunh."

"I liked that trick of cooking on the engine." Edison had made Kootie's hands cup around the matchbook and strike a flame. "I'm saving your life, son," he said, "and my ... my ... soul? Something of mine." He held one of the lit firecrackers until the sparking fuse had nearly disappeared into the tiny cardboard cylinder. Then, "Jump!" he said merrily as he let go of it.

Kootie got his foot away from the thing, but when it went off with a sharp little bang his toes were stung by the exploded shreds of paper.

He opened his mouth to protest, but Edison had lit two more. Kootie's head jerked as Edison cried, "Run!" and then Kootie was bounding up the narrower street's shadowed sidewalk, both feet stinging now.

"f.u.c.king-crazy man!" the boy gasped as another firecracker went off right in front of the toes that had already been peppered.

The next one Edison didn't let go of; he held it between his fingers, and the rap of its detonation banged Kootie's fingers as painfully as if he'd hit them with a hammer. "What the d.a.m.n h.e.l.l-" Kootie yiped, still leaping and scampering.

"Watch your language, boy! You'll have the recording angels hopping to their typewriters! Keep a clean mouth!"

"Sorreee!"

In the back of his mind, Kootie was aware that Edison's children had hated this, too, having their footsteps disattached from the ground; for an instant he caught an image of a girl and two boys hopping on a lawn as exploding firecrackers stippled their shins with green fragments of gra.s.s, and fleetingly he glimpsed how strenuous it had been to get Tommy Junior to shinny up a pole and grab the coins laid on the top-how Edison had finally had to rub rosin on the inside of the boy's knees so that he could get traction. It had had to be done, though, the children needed to be insulated every so often, for their own good.

He was hopping awkwardly, and the whoops of his breath burned his throat and nose. At least no one was out on this street at the moment; to his left, beyond a chain-link fence that he grabbed at again and again to keep his balance, dusty old hulks of cars sat in a closed bodywork lot, and the little houses on the opposite side of the street were dark.

One of Kootie's bouncing shoes had caught him a good clunk under the chin, and his ankle was flaring with pain, when Edison finally let him duck around a Dumpster in an empty parking lot and sit down on a fallen telephone pole to catch his breath. The nearest streetlight had gone out when Kootie had pranced past beneath it, and now as he sat and panted he watched the light's glow on the nearest cinder-block wall fade through red toward black.

Kootie's mouth hissed and flapped as he and Edison both tried to use it at once. Kootie rolled his eyes and relaxed, then listened to Edison gasp out, quietly, "If I was your father-I'd wash out your mouth-with soap."

Kootie had heard the phrase before, but this time he got a clear impression of a father actually doing that to a son, and he shuddered at the picture. Kootie's own father had not ever punished him physically, always instead discussing each error with him in a "helpful dialogue," after which the transgression was respected as having contributed to a "learning experience" that would build his "self-esteem."

"Well; that's plain bulls.h.i.t," Edison went on in a halting whisper, apparently having caught Kootie's thought. "When I was six years old I burned down my father's barn-I was trying to ... ditch a playmate who'd been following me around for a year or so, of course at that age I didn't know about tricks like blowing up your footprints with firecrackers!" He wheezed, apparently laughing. "Oh, no! Burned to the ground, my father's barn did, and my little friend was still no more ditched than my shadow was. What was I saying? Oh-so I burned down the barn, and do you think my father discussed it with me, called it a-what was it?"

"A learning experience," said Kootie dully. "No, I suppose he didn't."

"I'll say. He invited all the neighbors and their children to come watch, and then he d.a.m.n well whipped the daylights out of me, right there in the Milan town square!"

Kootie sniffed, and from across all the subsequent years of the old man's acc.u.mulated experiences, a trace of that long-ago boy's remembered despair and fear and humiliation brushed Kootie's mind.

For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then Kootie whispered, "Can I put my shoes and socks back on now?"

"Yes, son." He sighed. "That was for your own good, you know. We'll do better evasion tricks when we get the time, but the gunpowder cakewalk will probably have foxed your-what was it? one-armed murderer?-for a while. Slow him down, at least." Kootie's hand wavered out, palm down and fingers spread, and then just wobbled back to the splintery surface of the wooden pole. "You're tired, aren't you? We'll find some place to sleep, after we've taken one or two more precautions. This looks like a big city, we'll be able to do something. Before all this started up, I had the impression I was in Los Angeles-is that where we are?"

"Yes, sir," said Kootie. "Not in the best part of it."

"Better for our purposes, maybe. Let's move east a couple of blocks here, and keep our eyes open."

"Which way's east?"

"Turn right at that light. Need directions, always ask a ghost."

CHAPTER 23.

"I have tasted eggs, certainly," said Alice, who was a very truthful child; "but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know."

"I don't believe it," said the Pigeon; "but if they do, why, then they're a kind of serpent: that's all I can say."

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland IN THE OFFICE ON the ground floor of his apartment building, Solomon Shadroe had finally stopped staring at the horizontal white line on the television screen, and had plodded to his desk to resume doing the month's-end paperwork.

He didn't like the line being there on the screen at all, but at least it had stopped flaring and wiggling.

At last he pushed his chair back from his desk; he had finished writing the October checks and had then laboriously calculated the balance left in the account. As he stared at the worn blotter it occurred to him that pencil shavings looked like sc.r.a.ps of garlic and onion skins-his desk looked as though someone had been chopping together a battuto.

Garlic and onions-he remembered liking them, though he couldn't remember anymore what they had tasted like. Something like fresh sweat, he thought as he stood up, and a fast hot pulse.

His cup of Eat-'Em-&-Weep tea was lukewarm, but he drank off the last inch of it, tilting the cup to get the last sticky red drops. He put the cup down on the cover of the old ledger-style checkbook and took a can of Goudie snuff out of the desk drawer.

As he tapped out a pile of the brown powder onto his thumb-knuckle and raised it to his nose, he looked at the high built-in shelf on which sat three of his stuffed pigs. They had been burping away like bad boys during the half-minute when the line on the TV screen had been acting up, but-he looked again to make sure-the line was still motionless, and the pigs were quiet now. Johanna had the radio on, and the only noises in the office were the rolling urgencies of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark."

"Too loud?" asked Johanna from the couch where she lay reading a ladies' magazine.

Shadroe took a deep breath as he inhaled the snuff. "No. Just finished it up. Utility bills eating me alive. Gonna feed the beasties now." He got to his feet and plodded to the shelves.

"Oh good. Beasties!" she called to the screened window. "Din din din!"

Shadroe pried two white paper plates out of a torn cellophane wrapper and laid them on the coffee table. Onto one he shook a handful of Happy Cat food pellets from a box on a chair. Then he dug a handful of smooth pebbles out of his shirt pocket and spread them on the other plate.

He had taken Johanna to the Orange County fair this summer, and in one of the exhibit halls his attention had been caught by a display called the "Banquet of Rock Foods Collection." The display had been an eclectic meal laid out on a lace tablecloth: on one plate sat a hamburger, pickles, french fries, olives, and what might have been a slice of pte; on another sat a stack of pancakes with some jagged fragments of b.u.t.ter on top, with a sunny-side-up egg and two slices of underdone bacon alongside. There had been other things too, a narrow roast turkey with ruffled paper socks on the ends of the drumsticks, a thin slice of toast, a boiled egg in an egg cup. The thing was, they were all rocks. Somebody had scoured deserts all over the west to find pieces of rocks that looked like food items.

He had wondered at the time if any raggedy old derelict had ever sat down at the table and tucked a napkin into his outermost grimy shirt. There had been a relish jar, Shadroe recalled, filled with tiny cubes of green gla.s.s-a spry old ghost could probably wolf down a spoonful of that before being hauled away.

In the months since, he had been putting out two plates at night-one with catfood for the possums, as always, and one with delectable looking rocks for the poor hungry old wandering ghosts. The rocks were often gone when he came back from the boat in the morning. In a catalogue recently he had seen a set of Mikasa Parklane crystal candies for a sale price of eighteen bucks, and he meant to get some to dole out during the cold nights around Christmas.

He had once read that Chinese people bury raw eggs in mud, and then dig them up years later and eat them. When he thought about that he was just glad that he couldn't remember taste, but apparently Loretta deLarava was not so fastidious-she didn't mind eating things that had long ago lost their freshness.

In his head he made up a lyric for the pounding Springsteen song: Did your face catch fire once?

Did they use a tire iron to put it out?

It had been in 1962, on the set of Haunted House Party, that he had first met Loretta deLarava.

He'd been trying to make the shift from being a teen TV star to getting young-adult movie roles, but couldn't seem to shake the Spooky persona he'd acquired during the five years of "Ghost of a Chance." (People would keep asking to see him do the Spooky Spin, the dancelike whirl that, on the show, had always preceded his disappearing into thin air.) This was the fourth movie he'd worked in since CBS had canceled the series, and like the first three it had been a low-budget tongue-in-cheek horror picture, filmed at a pace almost as fast as TV work.

The novice production a.s.sistant had probably been about thirty years old, though it was hard to be sure-she was already overweight even then, and her jaw and nose were noticeably misshapen even after evident reconstructive surgery. (Did they use a tire iron to put it out?) Her name was deLarava-she claimed that it had originally been two words but had been inadvertently combined into one, like DeMille's, by a careless ad-copy writer. She had quickly outgrown the modest PA ch.o.r.es-somebody else had had to be found to make the coffee and drive to fetch paper clips and saber-saw blades, for, within days of starting, deLarava was filling out time cards and writing the daily production reports. Her credentials were hazy, but clearly she had had experience on a movie set.

"Sun's down," said Shadroe after putting the plates outside and coming back in and closing the door. "Draw me a bath, will you-" He paused to inhale. "-sweetie?"

Johanna put down the magazine and sat up. She glanced at the television screen, but the line was still steady and motionless. "Not ice?"

"Ice," he said firmly. "A lot of it." He looked at the TV too, and sighed. Can't wait till my alma mater actually goes nova, he thought. "Ice every night," he went on in his labored voice. "Until Halloween's past. Anybody from the building," he added. "Should come knocking. Tell 'em I walked to the store, unless. There's actual blood or fire."

" 'Sol,' " said Johanna in a drawling imitation of a tenant they'd had for a while, "I heard a noise?-in the parking lot?-so I shoveled your mailbox full of dirt.' "

The tenant had thought he'd smelled gas from a neighboring apartment, and, unable to reach Shadroe, had in a panic broken out all the windows in his own apartment. In the years since that tenant had left, Shadroe and Johanna had endlessly amplified on the man's possible responses to emergencies.

"Heh heh," said Shadroe levelly.

The couch springs tw.a.n.ged as Johanna levered herself up, and then the floorboards creaked as she padded barefoot to the next room; after a few seconds he heard water booming into the big old claw-footed cast-iron bathtub he had installed in there a couple of years ago. He used to take makeshift showers at dawn out behind the garages, holding a lawn sprinkler over his head, but a tenant had seen him one time and complained to the police-even though Shadroe had always been wearing jockey shorts when he did it-and anyhow he had had to stop.