by Tim Powers
Kootie took off the sunglasses and looked mutely up at Raffle. He had no idea what color his eye socket was, but it was swollen enough to perceptibly narrow his vision.
“Well now, little man,” Raffle said, “you’ve had a busy day or two, haven’t you? Yeah, keep the shades—people will think I gave you that, otherwise.”
Kootie nodded and put the glasses back on—but not before he had nervously looked westward again.
CHAPTER 9
“I only took the regular course.”
“What was that?” inquired Alice.
“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
RAFFLE WAS OBVIOUSLY pleased with the money they made during the next ten minutes, and he dug a laundry marking pen out of the pocket of his topmost shirt and, under the words HOMELESS VIETNAM VET, he added WITH MOTHERLESS SON.
“We gonna make booyah bucks on this,” said Raffle with satisfaction. “We probably be sleepin’ in motels every night.”
Kootie thought of sleeping on wheels. “I don’t mind a car,” he said, struggling to keep the impatience out of his voice. He still hadn’t seen the one-armed man, but he could imagine him watching from behind some wall.
“Good attitude,” Raffle said. “Hey, we should be shifting locations—you want a beer?”
Kootie blinked. “I’m only eleven.”
“Well, I’ll drink it if you don’t want it. Come on.”
They walked across the street to a little liquor store, Fred following closely on their heels, and Raffle bought a bottle of Corona in a narrow paper bag.
“Let’s head for the car,” he said as they walked back out onto the sidewalk.
The car was a twenty-year-old mustard-colored Ford Maverick parked behind a nearby laundromat, and the back seat was piled with clothes and Maxell floppy-disk boxes and at least a dozen gray plastic videocassette rewinders. Fred hopped up onto the clutter when Raffle unlocked the door, and he and Kootie sat in the front seats.
Raffle levered the cap off the beer bottle against the underside of the dashboard. In an affectedly deep voice, he said, “What’s your name, boy?”
Catching on that Raffle was pretending to be someone else, Kootie said, “Mayo. Uh, Jacko Mayo.”
“Very good.” Raffle took a long sip of the beer. “We used to live in La Mirada, that’s forty-five minutes south of here on the 5, okay? Four-bedroom house, only place you ever lived. I used to be a car mechanic, but your mom was a legal secretary and she made the real money, but she didn’t have health insurance and when she got cancer we lost everything, and then she died. Nobody’s likely to ask you for anything more than that, but if it ever comes up, just start crying. Can you cry if you have to?”
Kootie thought about it. “Easy.”
“Great. Now are we black or white or Mexican or Indian or what?”
“To work for both of us? I’d just say—” He shrugged. “—we’re Angelenos. We just … grew up out of the sidewalks.”
“Good. Don’t remember no old days at all.” Raffle tilted up the bottle and drained the last of the beer. “Now, there’s some … things you’re gonna have to just get used to seeing, okay? Like if you suddenly moved to … Borneo or Australia or somewhere, they might do stuff that you were always taught was bad, but it’s okay there, right? I mean, as long as they don’t say you’ve got to do ’em. You just consider it higher education.”
“Right,” said Kootie cautiously.
“Okay. There’s a little nail in the ashtray, lemme have it, hm?”
Kootie found the nail and handed it to the man.
Raffle put the point of the nail into a little dimple in the base of the glass beer bottle, and then he picked up an old shoe from between the seats and whacked the head of the nail with it; the point was now inside the bottle, though the bottle hadn’t broken, and Raffle twisted it back out, then blew through the hole.
“All us good Dagwood-type dads smoke pipes,” he said. Then he reached under the seat and dragged up a box of Chore Boy scrubbing pads and prized a little cushion of steel wool out of the box. He tore off a bristly shred of the stuff and tucked it like a little bird’s nest into the neck of the bottle, and then replaced the rest of the pad and pushed the box back under the seat.
“If you see a one-time,” Raffle said, “don’t change your expression or look around, but slap me on the leg.”
Kootie remembered reading in the newspaper that one-time was a street term for policeman. “Is this,” he faltered, “some kind of—no offense—dope thing?”
“Just say yo,” Raffle agreed. Out of a hole in the double thickness of his shirt cuff he dug a tiny fragment of what seemed to be white stone, like a piece off one of the ones Kootie’s father had spread around the plants in the atrium pots, and Raffle carefully laid it in the nest of steel wool at the top of the empty beer bottle.
Raffle slouched down in the seat and held the bottle up to the textured plastic head liner, which Kootie now noticed was dotted with scorch marks, and the man put his mouth to the little hole he’d punched in the bottle’s base; then he flicked a long orange-plastic Cricket lighter and held the flame to the piece of rock as he sucked.
Kootie looked away as the bottle began to fill with pale smoke. His heart was pounding, but he didn’t see any “one-times,” and in just a couple of seconds Raffle had opened the door and rolled the bottle away across the parking lot.
Raffle exhaled, and Kootie smelled burned steel wool and a faint chemical tang. “Never hang on to a pipe,” Raffle told him hoarsely as he began grinding the starter motor. “There’s always another at the next liquor store.”
“Dagwood probably saved ’em,” said Kootie bravely.
Raffle laughed as the engine finally caught and he clanked the transmission into reverse. “Yeah,” he said, still hoarse. “He probably had all kinds of oak pipe racks, full of cans and bottles. Blondie would dust ’em, and sometimes break one of the bottles and make him real mad—I had that Corona broke in perfect, you bitch!”
Kootie laughed nervously. Raffle made a left turn onto Fourth Street and angled into the far right lane to get on the southbound 110 Freeway.
“I thought we were going to Silver Lake,” said Kootie. “Isn’t that north?”
“Detour for medical supplies.”
They got off three miles south at the Vernon Avenue exit, and Raffle parked in the empty lot of a burned-out gas station.
“The plan’s this,” he said as he rolled up the driver’s-side window. “Me and Fred will be gone for twenty minutes or so. You keep the doors locked, and if anybody tries to mess with you, just lean on the horn until they go away, right? A one-time, roll the window down and smile and say you’re waitin’ for your dad. When we get back, it’s dinnertime.”
Kootie nodded, and Raffle grinned and got out of the car. He folded the seat forward so that Fred could scramble out onto the pavement, and then the door was shut and locked and the two of them had gone loping away down the sidewalk and around a corner.
Kootie realized that Raffle was going to go spend some of the afternoon’s income on more drugs, but he never even considered getting out of the car and walking away. He remembered watching the riots on TV six months ago, and he imagined that the people around here would break his face off with bricks if they so much as saw him on the sidewalk.
He wondered what kind of food Raffle generally ate. Kootie was ready to eat just about anything at all.
He hiked up on the car seat and looked around. Dimly in the bay of the ruined gas station he could see the brown shell of a burned-up car, still raised up off the floor on the hydraulic lift; Kootie wondered if the owner had ever come by to see if any progress was being made on whatever repairs he’d brought the car in for. The tall palm trees along the sidewalks were black silhouet
tes against the darkening sky, and lights had begun to come on in shop windows up and down the street. Raffle’s car smelled like unbathed dog, and Kootie wished he were allowed to roll down the windows. Big speakers were playing music somewhere not too far away, but all Kootie could hear was the pounding bass and a lot of angry, rhythmic shouting.
He sat back down. The one-armed bum would no doubt show up here, tracing the smell or warped refraction or abraded air or whatever effect it was that the glass-brick thing left as a track, but Kootie and his new friend—friends, plural, counting the dog—would be long gone.
He flipped the straps of the knapsack off of his shoulders and dragged it around onto his lap and unknotted the straps. Then he dug around among the clothes until he found the glass brick.
He lifted it out and turned it against the windshield, trying to see the fading daylight through the murky glass depths. The brick still clicked faintly when he turned it, as though there was something hard and transparent inside. He rocked it in time to the incomprehensible music from outside. Tick, tick, tick.
He was pretty sure he should just pitch it—toss it into the wrecked gas station and let the wrecked bum find it. Or the lady he’d seen in the Jaguar last night—“a hundred dollars for your cigar”—she could come and get it, and have her tires rotated and burned up, as long as she was here.
He gripped the glass thing in his palms the way he had on the Fairfax sidewalk this morning; again he could feel the halves of it shift when he pulled at it, and he looked nervously at the street, but none of the cars driving by stalled.
Prying hard and rocking the halves away from each other, he soon had them almost completely separated. One more tug, and the thing would be opened.
He thought again of the Robert Louis Stevenson story, the one about the demon in the bottle. Here by the burned-out gas station, though, in Raffle’s car full of Raffle’s litter, on this alien street, it no longer seemed likely that some kind of old-world monster would erupt out of the little glass box.
He lifted off the top half.
And nothing happened. Inside it, laid into a fitted cavity in the glass was … a test tube? A glass vial, with a tapered black-rubber stopper. He put the halves of the glass brick down on his lap and lifted out the vial.
He could see that it was empty. He found that he was disappointed, and he wondered what the vial might once have contained. Somebody’s blood, mummy dust, gold nuggets with a curse on them?
He twisted out the stopper and sniffed the vial.
CHAPTER 10
Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a star-fish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
AS IF HE HAD plugged in the wires for the second of a pair of stereo speakers—as if he’d attached the wires when the second stereo channel was not only working but had its volume cranked up high—Kootie’s head was abruptly doubly hit by the ongoing music from outside now; and he found himself somehow jolted, shocked, by the mere fact of being able to hear.
Dropping the vial, he grabbed the steering wheel and gripped it hard, gritting his teeth, cold with sudden sweat, for he was falling with terrible speed through some kind of gulf—his eyes were wide open and he was aware that he was seeing the dashboard and the motionless windshield wipers and the shadowed sidewalk beyond the glass, but in his head things clanged and flashed as they hurtled incomprehensibly past, voices shouted, and his heart thudded with love and terror and triumph and mirth and rage and shame all mixed together so finely that they seemed to constitute life itself, the way rainbow colors on a fast-spinning disk all blur into white.
It wasn’t stopping. It was getting faster.
Blood burst out of his nose and he pitched sideways across the passenger seat onto his right shoulder, twitching and whimpering, his eyes wide open but rolled so far back into his head that he couldn’t see anything outside the boundaries of his own skull.
Pete Sullivan jackknifed up out of the little bed and scrambled for the front seat—but when he yanked the curtain back from the windshield he saw that the van was not careering down some hill. He almost shouted with relief; still, he tumbled himself into the driver’s seat and tromped hard on the emergency brake.
Ahead of him, beyond a motionless curb, half a dozen boys in baggy shorts and T-shirts were strolling aimlessly across a broad lawn. Their shadows were long, and the grass glowed a golden green in the last rays of sunlight.
Sullivan’s heart was pounding, and he made himself wait nearly a full minute before lighting a cigarette, because he knew his hands were shaking too badly to hang on to one.
At last he was able to get one lit and suck in a lungful of smoke. He’d had a bad dream—hardly surprising!—something about … trains? Electricity? Sudden noise after a long silence …
Machinery. His work at the nuclear power plant, at the other utilities? The whole Edison network—Con Ed, Southern California Edison …
He took another long drag on the cigarette and then stubbed it out. The van was in shadow now, definitely not moving, and the sky was darkening toward evening. He breathed slowly and evenly until his heartbeat had slowed down to normal. Should he go find something to eat, or try to get some more sleep?
He had driven the van back down Laurel Canyon Boulevard and parked it here in the La Cienega Park lot, south of Wilshire. He had pulled the curtains over the little windows in the back and dragged the rings of the long shade across the curtain rod over the windshield and behind the rearview mirror, and had then locked up and crawled into the bed. He had apparently slept for several hours.
The boys in the park were at the top of a low green hill now, their laughing faces lit in chiaroscuro by the departing sun. Griffith’s hour, Sullivan thought.
He fumbled in his pocket now for his keys. No way sleep, after that jolt. Dinner, then—but a drink somewhere first.
On the Greyhound bus, Angelica Anthem Elizalde had been dreaming of the ranch in Norco where she had spent her childhood.
Her family had raised chickens, and it had been Angelica’s job to scatter chicken scratch in the yard for the birds. Wild chickens that a neighbor had abandoned used to roost in the trees at night, and bustle around with the domesticated birds during the day. All of the chickens, and a dozen cats and a couple of goats as well, had liked to congregate around the trail of dry dog food Angelica’s mother would spread by the driveway every morning. The half-dozen dogs had never seemed to mind.
It had always been her grandfather whose job it was to kill the chickens—he would grab a chicken by the neck and then give it a hard overhand whirl as if he had meant to see how far he could throw it but forgot to let go, and the bird’s neck would be broken. Angelica’s mother had tried it one time when the old man had been in jail, and the creature hadn’t died. The chicken had done everything but die. It was screaming, and flapping and clawing, and feathers flew everywhere as her mother tried lashing it around again—and again. All the kids were crying. Finally they had got an axe from the shed, a very dull old axe, and her mother had managed to kill the chicken by smashing its skull. The meat had been tough.
For the occasional turkey they would cut a hole in a gunny sack—her mother always called them guinea sacks—and hang the bird in it upside down from a tree limb, and then cut the bird’s throat, standing well back. The sack was to keep its wings restrained—a turkey could hurt you if it hit you with a wing.
One Easter her father had trucked home a live pig, and they had killed it and butchered it and cooked it in a pit the men dug in the yard—the giant vat of carnitas had lasted for days, even with all the neighbors helping to eat it. For weeks before that, her mother
had saved eggshells whole by pricking the ends with a hatpin and blowing the egg out; she had painted the eggshells and filled them with confetti, and the kids ran around all morning breaking them over each other’s heads, until their hair and their church clothes looked like abstract pointillist paintings.
One of them had finally been for real—late in the afternoon her brother had broken a real, ripe, fertilized egg over Angelica’s head, and when she had felt warm wetness on her scalp, and had reached up to wipe it off, she had found herself holding a spasming little naked red monster, its eyes closed and its embryonic beak opening and shutting.
Her dream had violently shifted gears then—suddenly there was clanging and lights, and train whistles howling in fog, and someone was nearly insane with terror.
With a jolt she was awake, sitting up stiffly in the padded bus seat, biting her lip and tasting the iron of her own blood.
It’s … 1992, she told herself harshly. You’re on a bus to Los Angeles and the bus is not out of control. Look out the window—the bus is staying in its lane and not going more than sixty.
You’re not dead.
She looked up, beyond the rushing darkening lanes, to the flat desert that was shifting by so much more slowly. Probably the bus was somewhere around Victorville by now, still an easy sixty miles out of L.A.
On her panicked late-afternoon drive out of Los Angeles two years ago she had seen a Highway Patrol car behind her, just south of Victorville, and she had meticulously pulled off and let him go on by, and had had a hamburger at a Burger King alongside the freeway. Then she had driven the next dozen miles northeast on a side road paralleling the freeway, to let the cop get far ahead. Even on the side road she had stopped for a while, at a weird roadside lot among the Joshua trees where a white-bearded old man had assembled a collection of old casino signs, and big plywood caricatures of a cowboy and a hula dancer, and assortments of empty bottles hung on the bare limbs of scrawny sycamores, out here in the middle of the desert. Out of sympathy for another outcast, she had bought from him a book of poems he’d written and had published locally.