Expiration Date Page 2

  His left arm, which had been cold all day despite the hot air that was dewing his forehead with sweat, was warm now, and of its own volition was pointing west. With his grubby right hand he pushed back the bill of his baseball cap, and he squinted in that direction, at the close wall of the theater, as if he might be able to see through it and for miles beyond the bricks of it, out past Hollywood, toward Beverly Hills, looking for—

  —An abruptly arrived thing, a new and godalmighty smoke, a switched-on beacon somewhere out toward where the sun had just set.

  “Get a life,” he whispered to himself. “God, get a life!”

  He pushed himself away from the pole. Walking through the crowd was awkward with his arm stuck straight out, though the people he passed didn’t give him a glance, and when he got on an RTD bus at Third Street he had to shuffle down the crowded aisle sideways.

  And for most of the night all the crickets were silent in the dark yards and in the hallways of empty office buildings and in the curbside grasses, as if the same quiet footstep had startled all of them.

  CHAPTER 2

  “… when she next peeped out, the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky.”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  KOOTIE TRUDGED BACK UP the quiet dimness of Loma Vista Drive toward home. He was walking more slowly than he had been a few minutes ago on Sunset Boulevard, and now that he had got his breath back he realized that he was limping, and that his side hurt worse than ever. Probably that punch in the stomach had cracked a rib.

  Tomorrow must be trash day—all the wheeled green plastic trash cans were out along the curbs. His neighbors’ houses, which he had always scornfully thought looked like 1950s-style Japanese restaurants, were hidden behind the trees, but he knew that behind the ARMED RESPONSE signs on the lawns they were probably all dark at this hour. He was sure that dawn couldn’t be far off.

  He leaned against one of the trash cans and tried to ignore the hard pounding of his heart, and the tight chill in his belly that was making his hands sweat and shake. He could claim that burglars had got in, and kidnapped him because he had seen them, because he was a witness who could identify them in a lineup; they had panicked, say, and grabbed him and fled after doing nothing more than break the Dante. Kootie had managed to escape … after a fight, which would be how come his left eye was swelling shut and his rib was perhaps broken.

  He tried to believe the burglar story, which he would probably have to tell to some policeman—he tried to imagine the fictitious burglars, what they had said, what their car had looked like; and after a few moments he was horrified to realize that the tone of the whole thing just rang with kid-ingenuity, like the “concerto” he had composed on the piano a year ago, which had sounded every bit as good and dramatic as Tchaikovsky to him at the time, but later was somehow just meandering and emphatic.

  A kid just couldn’t see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something, or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats.

  A grown-up would probably have been able to tell that Lumpy and Daryl weren’t nice guys. Well, shit, Koot my man, you can stay in my garage—it’s right down here, nothing fancy but it’s got a bed and a refrigerator—and you can work for me detailing cars.

  It had sounded all right.

  And then pow behind a Dumpster, and hard hands turning out his pockets while his knapsack was dragged off his back and all his carefully folded clothes were flung out onto the littered pavement, and a moment later Kootie was alone in the alley, snuffling and choking as quietly as he could and shoving his clothes back into the broken knapsack.

  The glass brick had slid under the Dumpster, and he had had to practically get down on his face and crawl to retrieve it.

  At least he could still return that. And his parents had to take him back. He didn’t care what punishment they would give him, just so that he could soon be in his own room again, in his own bed. Last night he had dreamed of going to college, of getting a “B.S.,” which in the dream had meant something besides bullshit. The dream had given him the (stupid!) determination to finally put his (stupid!) running-away scheme into actual (stupid!) action.

  He hoped he never dreamed again.

  He pushed away from the trash can and resumed limping up the street, from one silent pool of agitated street light to the next. Go to bed and put it off until morning, he thought miserably. They might think I’ve spent the night at Courtney’s house, and … No. There was the busted Dante to raise the alarm. Still, sneak into bed and deal with everything tomorrow morning.

  The curb by his own driveway was bare—no trash cans. That wasn’t reassuring. His mom and dad must be too upset to think of taking down the cans. But maybe they were off in the car right now, looking for him, and he’d be able to—

  No. As he started limping up the white cement driveway he saw their Mercedes against the lights of the kitchen. And the leaves of the peach tree to the right of the house were yellowly lit, so his bedroom light was on too.

  Shit, he thought with despairing defiance. Shit shit shit, and I don’t care who knows it. At least there’s no police cars. At the moment.

  He tiptoed across the grass around to the garage on the north side of the house. The laundry-room door was open, spilling light across the lawn, and he crouched up to it and peered inside.

  The gleaming white metal cubes of the washer and dryer, with the colorful Wisk and Clorox 2 boxes on the shelf over them, were so achingly familiar a sight that he had to blink back tears. He stepped in and walked quietly, heel-and-toe, into the kitchen.

  He could see into the living room—and there were two elegantly dressed people standing by the fireplace, a man and a woman, and only after a moment did he recognize them as his mom and dad.

  His dad was wearing … a black tuxedo, with a ruffled white shirt, and his mother had on a puffy white dress with clouds of lace at the wrists and the low neckline. The two of them were just standing there, staring at different corners of the room.

  In the first moment of frozen bewilderment Kootie forgot about wanting to cry. Could they have put on these crazily formal clothes just to greet him when he returned? His father’s hair was styled, obviously blow-dryered up, and … and the hair was all black now, not gray at all.

  Kootie took a deep breath and stepped out onto the deep tan carpet. “Mom?” he said quietly.

  His mother looked much slimmer in the dress, and he noticed with disbelief that she was actually wearing eye makeup. Her calm gaze shifted to the ceiling.

  “Mom,” Kootie repeated, a little louder. He was oddly reluctant to speak in a normal tone.

  His father turned toward the kitchen—and then kept turning, finally fixing his gaze on a chair by the hallway arch.

  “I’m sorry,” Kootie whimpered, horrified by this grotesque punishment. “Talk to me, it fell and broke so I ran away, I’ve got the glass thing that was inside it—”

  His mother raised her white-sleeved arms, and Kootie stumbled forward, sobbing now—but she was turning around, and her arms were out to the sides now as if she was doing a dance in slow motion. Kootie jerked to a stop on the carpet, abruptly very frightened.

  “Stop it!” he screamed shrilly. “Don’t!”

  “Fuck is that?” came a hoarse shout from down the hall.

  Kootie heard something heavy fall over, and then clumping footsteps in the hall—then a homeless-looking man in a ragged nylon wind breaker was standing there scowling crazily at him. The big man’s whiskery face was round under a grimy baseball cap, and his eyes seemed tiny. He blinked in evident surprise at the slow-moving figures of Kootie’s parents, but quickly focused again on the boy.

  “Kid, come here,” the man said, taking a quick step into the living room. He was reaching for Kootie with his right hand—because his left hand, his whole left arm, was gone, with j
ust an empty sleeve folded and pinned-up there.

  Kootie bolted to the left into the green-lit atrium, skidding and almost falling on the sudden smooth marble floor, and though he clearly saw the two figures who were sitting in chairs against the lattice wall he didn’t stop running; he had seen the figures vividly but he hit the backyard door with all his weight—it slammed open and he was running across the dark grass so fast that he seemed to be falling straight down from a height.

  His hands and feet found the crossboards in the back fence and he was over it and tearing through ivy in darkness, getting up before he even knew he had fallen—he scrambled over a redwood fence and then was just running away full tilt down some quiet street.

  His eyes must have been guiding his feet on automatic pilot, for he didn’t fall; but in his head all he could see was the two figures sitting in the chairs in the atrium, duct-taped into the chairs at neck and wrist and ankle—his overweight mother and his gray-haired father, mouths gaping and toothless, eyes just empty blood-streaked sockets, hands clawed and clutching the chair arms in obvious death.

  CHAPTER 3

  “… Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.”

  “I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

  “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  PETE SULLIVAN OPENED HIS eyes after the flash, but seconds went by as he watched a patch of sky through the screened window of the van, and he didn’t hear any thunder. He sat up in the narrow bed and wondered whether silent flashes behind one’s eyes were a symptom of impending stroke; he had been unaccountably jumpy tonight, and he had played a terrible game of pool in the bar here after work, flinching and clumsy with the cue stick.

  The thought of incipient stroke wasn’t alarming him, and he realized that he didn’t really believe it. He swung his bare feet to the carpeted floorboards and stood up—years ago he had replaced the van’s stock roof with a camper top that raised the ceiling two and a half feet, so he was able to stand without bumping the top of his head—and he leaned on the little sink counter and stared out through the open window at the Arizona night.

  Tonto Basin was down inside a ring of towering cumulus clouds tonight, and as he watched, one of the clouds was lit for an instant from inside; and a moment later a vivid fork of lightning flashed to the east, over the southern peaks of the Mogollon Rim.

  Sullivan waited, but no thunder followed.

  The breeze through the screen smelled like the autumn evenings of his boyhood in California, a cool smell of rain-wet rocks, and suddenly the stale old-clothes and propane-refrigerator air inside the van was confining by contrast—he pulled on a pair of jeans and some socks, stepped into his steel-toed black shoes, and slid the door open.

  When he was outside and standing on the gravel of O’Hara’s back parking lot, he could hear the noise from the bar’s open back door—Garth Brooks on the jukebox and the click of pool shots and the shaking racket of drink and talk.

  He had taken a couple of steps out across the lot, looking up vainly for stars in the cloudy night sky, when a Honda station wagon spoke to him.

  “Warning,” it said. The bar’s bright back-door light gleamed on the car’s hood. “You are too close to the vehicle—step back.” Sullivan stepped back. “Thank you,” said the car.

  The thing’s voice had been just barely civil.

  Sullivan plodded back to the van for cigarettes and a lighter. When he was back out on the gravel, the Honda was quiet until he clicked his lighter; then the car again warned him that he was too close to the vehicle.

  He inhaled on the cigarette and blew out a plume of smoke that trailed away on the breeze. “Too close for what?” he asked.

  “Step back,” said the car.

  “What vehicle?” Sullivan asked. “You? Or is there somebody else around? Maybe we both ought to step back.”

  “Warning,” the thing was saying, speaking over him. “You are too close to the vehicle. Step back.”

  “What’ll you do if I don’t?”

  “It’ll go off like a fire siren, Pete,” came a voice from behind Sullivan. “What are you teasing a car for?”

  It was Morrie the bartender, and out here in the fresh air Sullivan thought he could smell the beer stains on the man’s apron. “He started it, Morrie.”

  “It started it. It’s a car. You’ve got a call.”

  Sullivan imagined picking up the bar phone and hearing the flat mechanical voice telling him that he was standing too close to a vehicle. “The power station?”

  “Didn’t say. Maybe it’s some local dad pissed about his daughter being messed with.”

  Morrie had turned and was crunching back toward the lit doorway, and Sullivan tucked in his T-shirt and followed him. It wouldn’t be some citizen of this little desert town—Sullivan was one of the apparently few tramp electricians who didn’t get drunk every night and use his eight-hundred-a-week paycheck to sway the local girls.

  Besides, he’d only been in town this season for a week. Last Friday he’d been bending conduit pipe and pulling wires at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station a hundred miles west of here—and during this last week at the Roosevelt Station, outside of town, there had been too much overtime for him to do anything more than work, come back here to gulp a couple of Cokes and shoot a couple of games of pool, and sleep.

  The noise of conversation increased when he walked in through the back door after Morrie, and Sullivan squinted in the sudden glare of overhead lights and neon beer signs. He walked to the bar, and Morrie was already behind it and tilting a plastic cup under the Coke tap. The telephone was on the bar with the receiver lying beside it.

  Sullivan picked it up. “Hello.”

  “Pete? God, you’re a creature of habit—every year working the same places at the same seasons.” She sounded angry.

  It was his twin sister, and his hand tightened on the receiver. “Sukie, what—”

  “Shut up and listen. I’m at a hotel in Delaware, and the front desk just called me. They say somebody hit my car in the lot, and they want me to go down and give ’em insurance information. I—”

  “Sukie, I don’t—”

  “Shut up! I woke up on bar-time, Pete! I was bolt upright a second before the phone rang, and then I felt the plastic of the receiver before my hand hit it! I could feel my pupils tighten up a second before I turned on the lamp! Nobody hit my car, I’ll bet my life on it! She’s found me, and she’ll find you—she’ll have people at the desk here waiting for me, and she’s got people out there where you are, you know she does. And you know what she wants us for, too, unless you’ve managed to forget everything. I’m looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye right now, if you care; this is for you. Go straight out of there, right now, and drive and—this call is through the goddamn front desk, I know they’re listening—go to the place where we hid—a thing, some things, okay? In a garage? It’s what you’re gonna need if she’s—wanting us again. For any purpose.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Do you know the thing I’m talking about?”

  “I think so, the … where you can’t hardly walk for all the palm fronds on the pavement, right? And you’ve got to crawl under low branches? Is the … thing still there?”

  “I’ve never moved it.”

  “But I can’t just walk away here, Sukie, I’d have to … God, go to Radiation Control and get a Whole Body Count, that takes twenty minutes right there, and for my paycheck—”

  “Walk away, Pete! It’s just a job.”

  “It’s the Arizona Public Service,” Sullivan told her evenly, “that’s Edison-owned, just like all the utilities are—the East Coast is all Con Ed, and the West Coast is California Edison, and even Niagara up there is on the Edison grid. It’s all Edi
son, coast to coast. I’d never work for any of the utilities again.”

  “A.O.P., dude.”

  “Sukie, maybe somebody did hit your car,” he began, then realized that he was talking to a dead phone. He hung it up and pushed it toward Morrie.

  “Sukie?” the bartender said.

  “My sister. Somebody ran into her car and she wants to make a federal case out of it.” Sullivan was remembering how awkwardly he’d played pool earlier in the evening, and he was annoyed to notice that his hands were trembling. He pushed away the Coke. “Give me a shot of Wild Turkey and a Coors chaser, would you?”

  Morrie raised his eyebrows, but hiked up the bottle of bourbon without remarking on the fact that this would be the first real drink Sullivan had ever ordered in the place.

  Sullivan sat down at one of the stools and slugged back the bourbon and then chased it with a long sip of cold beer. It made him feel closer to his sister, and he resented that almost enough to push the drinks away.

  But not quite. He waved the emptied shot glass at Morrie and had another sip of the beer.

  I’m looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye right now, if you care.

  Commander Hold-’Em was Sukie’s name for the Grim Reaper—Sullivan believed she’d derived it from the name of some poker game that she always lost at—and it was also what she had always called whatever gun she carried. For several years, in the old days in L.A., it had been a .45 Derringer with two hollow-point bullets in it. Commander Hold-’Em would certainly still be something as effective today. Sullivan wondered if she would kill herself before even going down to the front desk and making sure that the call had been a trap. Maybe she would. Maybe she had just been waiting, all these years, for a good enough excuse to blow her goddamned head off. And of course not neglect to call him first.