Expiration Date (5 page)

Behind him now he heard the familiar puff of air brakes and the roar of a bus engine, and a moment later the big black-and-white RTD bus had gone grinding and sighing past on his left. Kootie distantly hoped that the old man had got aboard, and was going to some job that he liked, and that to him this city was still the malls-and-movie-billboards place Kootie remembered living in.

He watched the bus move ponderously through the lanes of morning traffic—what was down in that direction? The Farmer’s Market, Kootie recalled, and that Jewish delicatessen where a big friendly man behind the fish counter had once given him samples of smoked whitefish and salmon—and Kootie saw a police car turn north from Beverly.

There was a pair of pay telephones in front of a minimart ahead of him, and he slanted his pace to the right, toward them, walking just fast enough so that he could be standing there holding a receiver to his ear when the police car would be driving past at his back. When he got to the phone he even went so far as to drop one of his precious quarters into the slot. I need time to think, he told himself.

He was imagining waving down the police car, or the next one that came by. He would let himself just hang on to the door handle and cry, and tell the officers everything, and they would all go back to Kootie’s house on Loma Vista Drive. He would wait in the car with one of the cops while the man’s partner checked out the house. Or else they’d radio for another car to go to the house, and they’d take Kootie “downtown.”

And then what? Several times during his long night’s trek he had paused to close his eyes and try to believe that his parents weren’t dead, that he had just hallucinated all that terrible stuff about them being dressed up for a wedding in the living room and at the same time sitting murdered in the atrium, and about the one-armed hobo rushing up the hall and trying to grab him; and he had tried to believe too that the glass brick in his shirt pocket had nothing to do with the people he was encountering; and he hadn’t once been able to believe either thing.

Could he believe them now, now that the sun had cleared the rooftops of the shop buildings across the street and all these distracted, ordinary strangers were busily going to work?

He could do an easy test. With a trembling finger he punched the 9 button once and the 1 button twice. I can still change my mind, he told himself nervously. I can still just run away from this phone—jeez, walk, even.

There was a click in the earpiece, and then a man’s blurry voice: “…and I told him to just go fuck himself. What do you think of that? I don’ gotta…” The voice faded, and Kootie was listening to the background murmur—laughter, mumbling, glasses clinking, someone singing. He could just barely hear a child’s voice reciting, over and over again, “In most gardens they make the beds too soft—so that the flowers are always asleep.”

Kootie’s chest was empty and cold. “Hello,” he said, in a voice that might have been too loud because he had to talk over the sudden ringing in his ears, “hello, I was trying to get the emergency police number—” It could still be all right, he thought tensely, all the L.A.-area phones could be crossed-up in this way—but even just in his head, just unspoken, the thought had a shrilly frightened tone. “Who have I reached, please?”

For a moment there was just the distant clatter and slurred speech, and then a woman’s voice, choking and thick, wailed, “Al? Al, thank God, where are you gonna meet me tonight? That supermarket parking lot again? Al, my legs’ve swelled up like
sausages
, and I need—”

Kootie hung up the phone without dropping it, and he was able a moment later to walk easily away down the Fairfax sidewalk; but he was surprised that the air
wasn’t coagulating into the invisible molasses that, in nightmares, kept him from being able to drag one foot ahead of the other.

It was all real. The sun was up, and he was wide awake, and that voice on the phone had been the voice of the old crazy woman he’d run away from in the parking lot, hours ago. His parents really were dead, obviously killed because he had broken the Dante and taken away the glass brick.

Kootie
had killed them.

And even though the police wouldn’t ever believe that, they would make Kootie do things—like what? Identify the bodies? No, they wouldn’t force a
kid
to do that, would they? But he’d still have to make probably a million
statements
, which would either be true and sound crazy, or be lies and sound like a kid’s lies; and eventually he’d be put into a foster home somewhere. And how would the telephones behave
there
? What sort of person would be in charge of the place, or soon come visiting? And if by then they’d decided he was crazy, they might have him in restraints, strapped down on his bed.

He recoiled away from a memory of duct tape.

If he just got rid of the glass brick, would all this stuff stop happening? But who would eventually
find
it, and why had his parents kept it hidden?

He remembered a Robert Louis Stevenson story about a devil in a bottle—it could get you anything you wanted, but if you died owning it you’d go to hell—and if you wanted to get rid of it you had to sell it for less than you’d paid for it, or it would come back to you even if you threw it into the ocean.

Was this thing worth money, could he
sell
it? Was
it
a “cigar”? If so, he could have got a hundred dollars for it from the Jaguar woman last night. It seemed to him that a hundred dollars was a good deal less than what he had paid for it.

There was a low, white-painted cinder-block wall around the little parking lot of a strip shopping center ahead of him, and he crossed to it and hiked himself up to sit on the coping. He glanced around at the wide, busy intersection and the sidewalks to make sure no one was paying any particular attention to him and then he unbuttoned the pocket of his heavy flannel shirt and lifted out the glass brick. It seemed to
click
, very faintly deep inside, when he turned it in his hand.

This was the first time he’d looked at it in sunlight. It was rectangular, but bumpy and wavy on its surfaces, and even when he held it up to the sun he couldn’t see anything in its cloudy depths. He ran a finger around its narrow side—and felt a seam. He peered at the side surfaces and saw that a tiny straight crack went all the way around, dividing the brick into two equal halves.

The two guys that had robbed him so long ago last night had taken his Swiss army knife, so he worked a fingernail into the groove and twisted, and only managed to tear off a strip of his nail. By holding the glass thing between his palms, though, with his fingers gripped tightly over the edges, he was able to pry hard enough to feel the two glass sections move against each other, and to be sure that the thing
could
be opened.

He pressed it firmly together again and took off his backpack to tuck the brick safely down among his tumbled clothes. He pulled the flap down over it all and then, since the plastic buckles had been broken last night, carefully tied the straps tight before putting the backpack on again. Maybe people wouldn’t be able to sense the glass thing so easily now.

Like a gun, he thought dully, or a grenade or blasting caps or something. It’s like they had a
gun
in the house and never told their kid even what a gun is. It’s their
own
fault I somehow accidentally got them killed by playing with it.

If I open it—what? A devil might come out. A
devil
might
actually
come out. It wouldn’t matter whether or not I believe in devils, or that my friends and the teachers in school don’t. People in 1900 didn’t think that radium could hurt you, just carrying a chip of it in your pocket like a lucky rock, and then one day their legs fell off and they died of cancer. Not believing something is no help if you turn out to be wrong.

He heard the short
byoop
of a motorcycle cop’s siren and looked up nervously—but the cop was stopping way out in the intersection, and, as Kootie watched, he climbed off the blue-flashing bike and put down the kickstand and began directing traffic with broad slow gestures. The traffic signals had gone completely out sometime during the last few minutes, weren’t even flashing red; and then even when the policeman waved for the southbound lanes to move forward, the cars and trucks and buses stayed backed up for another several minutes because nearly every driver had stalled and had to start up again.

As Kootie crossed Beverly, the sound of grinding starter motors was echoing among the lanes behind him like power saws.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

O
NE
of them had finally been for real.

It had been two hours since the Greyhound bus had pulled out of the dawn-streaked yard of the Albuquerque station, subsequently finding the 1-40 highway and cranking its way up through the dry rock Zuni Mountains, downshifting to follow the twisting highway among the ancient lava beds, and booming down the western slope to roar right through Gallup without stopping; but when the bus finally swung off the 1-40 at the little town of Houck, just over the border into Arizona, Angelica Anthem Elizalde simply kept her seat while most of the other passengers shuffled past her down the aisle to catch some fresh morning air and maybe a quick cup of coffee during the fifteen-minute stop.

She looked out her window. Though it was now eight-thirty, the, bus was still casting a yards-long shadow, and the shadow pointed west. She shivered, but tucked her ladies’ magazine into the pocket of the seat in front of her.

She had hoped to distract herself with its colorful pages, but had run aground on an almost hysterically cheerful article about how to cook squash, with a sidebar that addressed “Twelve Important Squash Questions”; and then she had been forced out of the pages again by a multiple-choice “Creativity Test,” which gave high marks to the hypothetical housewife who, confronted with two mismatched socks after all the laundry had been put away, elected to (C) make hand puppets of them rather than (A) throw them away or (B) use them for dusting.

None of the listed answers had been anything like “burn them,” “eat them,” “bury them in the backyard,” or “save them in case one night you answer the door to a stranger with bare, mismatched feet.”

Elizalde managed a tight smile. She flexed her hands and wondered what work she would find to do in Los Angeles. Typist, again? Waitress, again?
Panhandler, bag lady, prostitute, a patient in one of the county mental hospitals in which she’d done her residency—

—a felon locked up in the Sybil Brand Institute for Women—

She quickly fetched up the magazine out of the seat pocket and stared hard at a photograph of some happy family having fun around a swing set (—probably all of them models, really, who had never seen each other before lining up there for the picture—) and she thought again about turning back. Get off the bus at Flagstaff, she told herself, and catch the 474 bus, take it all the way back to Oklahoma City, be there by eight-thirty tonight. Go back to the big truck stop under the Petro water tower, tell the manager at the Iron Skillet that you were
too
sick to call
in
sick when you failed to show up for the waitress shift last night.

Get back on that old heartland merry-go-round.

For nearly two years she had been traveling, far from Los Angeles, working in restaurants and bars and small offices, along the Erie Canal from the Appalachians to Buffalo, and up and down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cairo, and, most recently, along the Canadian River in Oklahoma. She’d celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday with half a dozen of the Iron Skillet waitresses in the bar at O’Connell’s in Norman, twenty minutes south of Oklahoma City.

At least L.A. would be fairly warm even now, in October, four days before Halloween. The Mexican street vendors in the Boyle Heights area might already be selling
El Dia de los Muertos
candy, the white stylized skulls and skeletons—

(—Shut up!—)

Again she forced herself to stare at the family in the magazine photo, and she tried to believe that it really was a family, that they were genuinely enjoying some—

(—long-lost—)

(—Shut up!—)

weekend in the backyard, oblivious of this photographer—

…It didn’t work. The adults and kids in the photograph just looked like models, strangers to each other.

Elizalde remembered driving the L.A. Freeways at night, snatching an occasional glance to the side at some yellow-lit kitchen window in a passing apartment building, and always for one moment desperately envying the lives of whatever people lived there. She had always imagined hammered-copper roosters on the kitchen wall, a TV in the next room with “Cheers” getting innocent laughs, children sitting cross-legged on the carpet—

(—Shut up.)

That had never really worked, either. Maybe those apartments had all been vacant, with the lights left on. She folded the magazine and put it back.

A few moments later she jumped, and looked toward the front of the bus just before the first returning passenger stepped aboard, rocking the bus on the shocks. Elizalde sighed. No, she couldn’t go back to Oklahoma.

For about twelve hours now she had been doing this, reacting to noises and jolts just before they happened. She’d been in bed when it started, and she’d awakened in her darkened apartment just before the clock radio had blared on. At first she had thought some mental clock had been keeping track of the time while she’d slept—she’d found herself remembering her grandmother’s saying,
Es como los brujos, duerme con los ojos abiertos:
He is like the witches, and sleeps with his eyes open—but the effect had continued as she’d proceeded to get ready for work, so that she’d flinched before water had come out of the shower head, and nearly dropped her hair dryer because it had seemed to quiver animately in her hand just as she was about to push the On button.