Expiration Date

  The Edison truck had pulled up then, and a man in bright new blue jeans and a Tabasco T-shirt had opened the passenger-side door and hopped down to the pavement.

  “Oaks?” he said. When Oaks nodded, he went on, “Here she is. Driver’ll pull into an alley and let the van aboard, and then you got half an hour of drive-around time. More than that, and your monthly rate increases. What’s in the box?”

  Oaks held out the cardboard box on the fingertips of his one hand, like a waiter. “Next month’s payment, in advance.”

  The man took it. “Okay, thanks—I’ll see he gets it.”

  A new Chrysler had pulled in behind the truck, and the man carried the box to it and got in.

  Oaks had looked bleakly at the orange and black and yellow truck—Halloween colors!—then sighed and walked around to the back as the Chrysler drove away. When he’d pulled up the sliding back door, he’d been grudgingly pleased to see the things he’d asked for laid out on the aluminum floor: a flashlight, twine and duct tape, and a Buck hunting knife. In the front right corner he could see the gun the driver had apparently insisted on, a shiny short-barreled revolver. Won’t be needing that, Oaks had thought as he’d grabbed the doorframe, put one foot on the bumper, and boosted himself up.

  CHAPTER 31

  And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone!”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  EVEN BY STRAINING ALL his muscles, all together or against one piece of restraining tape at a time, Kootie had failed to break or even stretch his bonds; though he could reach his fingers into the pockets of his jeans.

  The flashlight swung wildly as the man climbed over the passenger seat and leaned down over Kootie. He reached out slowly with his one arm, closed his fingers in Kootie’s curly hair, and then lifted the boy back up to a sitting position. Then he sat down on the console, facing Kootie, and stared into the boy’s eyes.

  Kootie helplessly stared back. The one-armed man’s round, smooth face was lit from beneath by the flashlight, making a snouty protuberance of his nose, and his tiny eyes gleamed.

  “No ectoplasm left, hey?” the man said. “No dog-mannikin today?” He smiled. “Your mouth is taped shut. You’ll be having trouble expiring, just through your nose that way. Here.” He leaned forward, and Kootie wasn’t aware that the man had a knife until he felt the narrow cold back of it slide up over the skin of his jaw and across his cheek almost to his ear, with a sound like a zipper opening.

  Kootie blew out through his mouth, and the flap of tape swung away from his mouth like a door. He thought of saying something—Thank you? What do you want?—but just breathed deeply through his open mouth.

  “My compass needle points north,” the man said. “Your smoke is clathrated. You need to unclamp, open up.”

  He lowered his chin, pushing the flashlight to the side, and he held his right hand out so that it was silhouetted against the disk of yellow light high up on the riveted truck wall. Squinting up sideways at the projection, the man wiggled his fingers and said, with playful eagerness, “What would you say to a … rhinoceros?” He bunched the fingers then, and said, “Clowns are always a favorite with little boys.” The thumb now made a loop with the forefinger, while the other fingers stuck out. “Do you know what roosters say? They say cock-a-doodle-doo!”

  Kootie realized belatedly that the man was doing some kind of shadow show for him. He blinked in frozen bewilderment.

  “Helpful and fun, but not very exciting,” the man concluded, lowering his arm and letting the flashlight swing free so that it underlit his face again. “What could be more exciting for a lonely little angel than a flight up the hill to where the rich people live? Aboard a charming conveyance indeed! I believe I can provide a snapshot of that.”

  He stared into Kootie’s eyes again, and hummed and bobbed his round head until the spectacle of it began to blur from sheer monotony. In spite of his rigid breathlessness, Kootie thought he might go to sleep.

  All at once the motion of the truck became jerky and clanging and upward, and the seat under him was hard wood. He opened his eyes, and jumped against his restraints.

  Cloudy daylight through glass windows lit the interior of a trolley car climbing a steep track up a hill. Kootie’s seat was upright, though, and when he looked around he saw that the trolley car had been built for the slope—the floor, seats, and windows were stepped, a sawtooth pattern on the diagonal chassis. A city skyline out of an old black-and-white photograph hung in the sky outside.

  There was a little boy wearing shorts and a corduroy cap sitting in the window seat next to Kootie, and he was staring past Kootie at someone across the aisle. Kootie followed the boy’s gaze, and flinched to see the round-faced man sitting there, still wearing stained old bum clothes but with two arms and two hands now.

  “Where is the gentleman you boys came with?” he asked.

  The boy beside Kootie spoke. “In heaven; send thither to see; if your messenger find him not there, seek him i’ the other place yourself. But, indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.”

  “Hamlet to Claudius,” the man said, nodding. “Showing as a youngster, then, eh? Why not?” He smiled at the boy. “What’s the matter, don’t you like my pan?”

  “Not much,” the boy said.

  The man chuckled. From under his windbreaker he pulled a pencil that was a foot long and as wide around as a sausage, and with his other hand he pulled out a giant pad of ruled white paper. “At the top of the hill I’ll fill out the adoption papers on both you lads,” he said affectionately.

  The boy next to Kootie shook his head firmly. “I have a snapshot myself,” he said.

  Then the whole length of the cable car fell to level, silently, the front end down and the back end up, though none of the three passengers were jarred at all. It was just that the seats and floor were all lined up horizontally now, like a normal car. The gray sunlight had abruptly faded to darkness outside the windows, and flames had sprung up in little lamps on the paneled walls.

  The car was longer and broader now, chugging along across some invisible nighttime plain. The man with the little eyes was sitting several rows ahead now, and he was wearing a ruffled white shirt and a gray cutaway coat. In the aisle next to him stood a tall black man—his clothes were as elegantly cut, but seemed to be made of broad teak-colored leaves stitched together.

  From behind Kootie came a boy’s voice: “Newspapers, apples, sandwiches, molasses, peanuts!” Kootie turned around awkwardly in the seat belt that was still taped to his wrists, and saw the boy in the corduroy cap. A big wicker basket was slung over the boy’s arm now, and he was slowly pacing up the length of the car, looking straight at the two men at the far end.

  “Where are we?” Kootie whispered when the boy was beside him.

  “An hour out of Detroit,” the boy said without looking down, “two hours yet to Port Huron. Sit tight, Kootie. Newspapers, peanuts!” he went on more loudly. There were only the four people in the train car.

  The man who now had two arms was staring at the boy. “I remember this!” he said softly. “You were him? Christ, what year was this?”

  For a moment the boy with the basket paused, and Kootie sensed surprise on his part too. Then, “Apples, sandwiches, newspapers!” he called, resuming his walk up the aisle. The train car smelled of new shoes fresh out of the box.

  The man got to his feet, bracing himself on the back of the seat in front of him against the train’s motion. “Well enough, I’ll blow down your straw barricades. Uh … papers?” he said, smiling and holding out his two arms.

  The boy lifted out a pile of newspapers and laid them in the man’s hands. The man turned to the open window and tossed the stack out into the windy blackness outside.

  When he straightened up, he said, “Pay this boy, Nicoti
nus.”

  The black man handed the boy some coins.

  “Magazines,” the man said then. He took the stack of magazines that the boy lifted out of the basket, and threw them too out the window. “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”

  Kootie sat on his wooden seat, his wrists moored in the stocks of the anachronistic woven-nylon seat belt, and watched as all the wares in the boy’s basket were dealt with in the same way, item by item, sandwich by bag of peanuts.

  Through it all the black man was staring intently at the man who kept repeating, “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”

  When the basket was empty, it too went out the window in exchange for a handful of clinking coins. The boy put his filled hand into his pocket, then took it out and put his fist to his mouth for just a moment, as if eating one of the coins.

  For a moment the boy stood empty-handed, facing away from Kootie, while the train rattled through the night and the glassed-in lamp-flames flared. Then he took off his shoes and coat and hat, and, barefoot, lifted them up and laid them in the man’s hands.

  The man’s round face smiled, though his tiny eyes didn’t narrow at all. He turned and pitched the clothes out the window, and then he said, “Pay the boy, Nicotinus.”

  The boy held out his hand one more time—and the black man seized it and threw the boy to the wooden floor.

  Kootie was slammed sideways across the back seat of the minivan with a man’s weight on top of him crushing his ribs, and he was choking and gagging on a bulky plastic cylinder that had somehow got into his mouth; the flashlight was jammed between their bodies somewhere, and he could see nothing in the darkness. He knew the man’s face was right above his own because of the harsh hot breaths battering at his right ear and eyelashes.

  Something was repeatedly punching him in the side over the steel-cable belt, audibly tearing the denim jacket. He knew it must be the blade of the knife, being stopped by the metal coils of the I-ON-A-CO belt; but the stabs were wild, and he was sure that the next one wouldn’t be another blunted impact but a cold plunge into his guts.

  He shoved his tongue against the flat bottom of the plastic cylinder in his mouth, but before he could spit it out to scream and bite, his jaws involuntarily clamped tight around the thing.

  At the same moment, No, Kootie! shouted a voice in his head; it was Edison—and the boy train-vendor in the hallucinations had been Edison too. I’ll do this!

  At that moment the knife blade grated off of the top edge of the belt cable and the point of it stabbed against the bone of one of his ribs. Kootie sagged in ringing shock.

  But an instant later he had inhaled deeply through his whistling nostrils, and then his head was whipped around to face the man who was killing him, and his lower teeth popped the lid off the plastic cylinder.

  And he blew a hard exhalation straight up into the man’s wide-open mouth.

  The man drove a knee solidly into Kootie’s stomach, so that Kootie’s long exhalation ended in a sharp, yelping wheeze—but the man had jackknifed off the seat, boomed hard against the sliding door as the flashlight whirled around his tumbling body like a crazy firefly, and then he had bounced onto his belly across the console, kicking his legs in the empty air so that Kootie heard popping tendons rather than impacts. A moment later Kootie cringed to hear him vomiting so hard and loud that the terrified boy thought the man must be splitting open his face, popgunning his eyeballs, his sinus and nose bones cracking out to fall onto the carpeted floorboards.

  Kootie’s left hand was gently slapping his ribs, and when his fingers found the knife grip they held on and then carefully pulled the blade out of the hole it had punched in the denim. Kootie winced and whimpered to feel the point pull out of his flesh and the edge violin across the coils of the belt, but he just held still, knowing it was Edison that was working his hand.

  Kootie lay half on his side across the seat, and he could feel hot blood roll wet down across his stomach from his cut right rib. He nearly jumped when he felt wet steel slide past his right wrist, and then that hand had twisted and was free, and had snatched the knife.

  At last he spat out the emptied cylinder, and he was sobbing with urgent claustrophobic fright. “Get me out of here, mister!” he whimpered. “Oh, please, mister, get me out of here!”

  He was anxious to be just a cooperative passenger in his own body now—gratefully he felt his right hand cut free his left wrist, and then he was sitting up and bending over to cut the tape around his ankles.

  The one-armed man had heaved himself forward with each abdomen-abrading retch, and now his feet boomed against the van’s ceiling as he toppled over the console to the floor. “Edison!” he said loudly, grating out the syllables like cinder blocks. “Wast—thee—agayn?”

  Kootie didn’t know whether it was himself or Edison that worked the door handle and pulled back the minivan’s sliding side door. He stepped out, down to the floor of the truck, rocking as if he were aboard a boat, and he groped his way in darkness to the rippling, sectional metal wall that was the truck’s door.

  The cut in his side was just a point of tingling chill, but he could feel blood weighing down the folds of his shirt over his belt, and a hot trickle ran down the inside of his leg.

  “Kootie!” he gasped. “Breathe slower! You’re going to make us faint.”

  Kootie’s mouth snapped shut, and he made himself count four heartbeats for every inhalation, and four for every exhalation.

  Without his volition his right hand went to his side and pressed against the cut.

  Behind him he heard feet thumping and scraping—inside the minivan, the one-armed man was up.

  With his left hand Kootie slapped hurriedly at the ribbed inner surface of the truck’s door until he found a blocky steel lever, and he braced himself on his good foot and heaved the lever upward.

  Dazzling sunlight flooded the truck’s interior as the door clattered upward, folding along its track overhead. Without his sunglasses, the day outside seemed terribly bright.

  Pavement was rushing past down there beyond the toes of his Reeboks, and he was squinting out at the windshields of oncoming cars; a low office building and a red-roofed Pizza Hut were swinging past off to his left. The people in the cars might be gaping, pointing at him, but their windshields were just blank patches of reflected blue sky.

  Kootie glanced behind him, into the dimness of the truck’s interior, and he could see the one-armed man crawling down out of the minivan headfirst, onto the truck floor. Breathe slower! Kootie reminded himself.

  “What do I do, Mr. Edison?” Kootie cried, his voice not echoing now but breezing away in the open air.

  He sensed no answer; and when he tried to let the ghost take control of his body again, he had to grab the bottom edge of the half-raised door, for his knees had simply buckled and he would have fallen out of the truck.

  He had to step back then, for the truck was slowing down.

  Kootie freed his bloody hand from his side and waved it broadly at the cars following the truck, mouthing Slow down, I’m getting out! Don’t run over me! and pointing down at the street. He glanced down past his shoes—the street was still moving by awfully fast, and his belly and an instant later his neck quailed like shaken ice water.

  You’ll tumble, he thought; even if he slows a lot more than this, you won’t be able to land running fast enough, and you’ll tumble like a Raggedy Andy doll. He imagined his skull socking the pavement, his elbows snapping backward, shinbones split and telescoped …

  He couldn’t do it. But if he waited another couple of seconds, the one-armed man would be on him again.

  Then, with an abrupt hallucinatory burst of glaring red and blue flashes on his retinas, a gleaming black-and-white police car had surged into the gap between the truck’s bumper and the car behind. A half-second segment of siren shocked his ears, and Kootie swayed backward again as the truck slowed still more, and Kootie saw the front end of the police car dip as it braked to avoid hitting the truck.

  An
d Kootie jumped.

  His kneecaps banged the hood of the police car, and his palms and forehead smacked the windshield, cracking it with a muffled creak; in nearly the same instant, with a boom that shook the very air, the windshield crystallized into an opaque white honeycomb as a hole was punched through it next to Kootie’s bloody right hand.

  Kootie’s right hip and shoulder hit the windshield then, and the glass gave beneath him like starched white canvas. And another boom rocked the world as a hole was punched through the wrecked webwork of glass near his upraised left knee; the windshield dissolved into a spray of little green cubes, and he was sitting on the dashboard.

  He whipped his head around to squint ahead at the truck. The one-armed man’s face was right above the truck-bed floor, and in his one hand wobbled the silver muzzle of a gun. As Kootie stared, a hammer-stroke of glare eclipsed the gun, and he felt a jolt in the police car as the boom of the gunshot rolled over him.

  The police car was screeching to a halt now, slewing sideways, but Kootie was able to hang on to the rounded inside edges of the dashboard, and though he was rocked back and forth he was not thrown off; even when the car behind rear-ended the police car with a squeal and bang and tinkle of broken glass, he just lifted his shoulders and dug in with his butt and let his chin roll down and up.

  The police car was stopped at last. The orange-and-black Southern California Edison truck was wobbling to the curb against further braking and honking horns from behind, and Kootie scrambled to the fender and hopped down to the asphalt. The pavement under his feet was so steady, and he was so torqued, that he had to take several hopping steps to keep from falling over.

  A couple of people had got out of stopped cars and were hurrying up. “Has someone got … change for a telephone call?” Kootie shouted, to his own surprise.

  “Here you go, kid,” said a woman absently, handing him a quarter. She was staring past him, at whatever was going on with the police and the one-armed man.