Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  Now he was sitting on a yellow fire hydrant out by the curb across Twenty-first Place, holding one of Houdini’s plaster hands and watching the corner of Ocean Boulevard. There was a bus stop at Cherry, just around the corner. Clouds like chunks of broken concrete were shifting across the sky, and the tone of his thoughts changed with the alternating light and shade.

  In shadow: They’ve been caught, Houdini’s thumb can’t deflect the attention the boy was drawing; they’re being tortured, disloyal Angelica is leading bad guys here, I should be farther away from the building so I can hide when I see the terrible Lincolns turn onto Twenty-first Place.

  In sunlight: Buses take forever, what with transfers and all, and Angelica is a godsend, how nice to have such challenging and intelligent company if you’ve got to be in a mess like this, even if this séance attempt doesn’t work; and even the kid, Shake Booty or whatever his name is, is probably going to turn out to be interesting.

  It’s been an hour just since I came to sit out here, he thought finally—and then he heard a deliberate scuffing on the sidewalk behind him.

  His first thought as he hopped off the hydrant and turned around was that he didn’t have his gun—but it was Elizalde and the boy who were walking toward him from the cul-de-sac at the seaward end of Twenty-first. The boy was carrying a big white bag with KFC in red on the side of it.

  “You stopped for food?” Sullivan demanded, glancing around even as he stepped forward; he had meant it to sound angry, but he found that he was laughing, and he hugged Elizalde. She returned the hug at first, but then pulled away.

  “Sorry,” he said, stepping back himself.

  “It’s not you,” she said. “Just use your left arm.”

  He clasped his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to himself, her head under his chin.

  When they turned to walk across the street to the old apartment building, she nodded toward the white plaster hand that Sullivan was holding in his right hand. “I just don’t like strangers’ hands on me,” she said.

  “I don’t like people with the wrong number of hands,” said the boy.

  Sullivan looked dubiously at the boy, and then at the Kentucky Fried Chicken bag the boy was carrying, and he tried to think of some pun about finger-lickin’ good; he couldn’t, and made do with saying, “Let’s get in out of the rain,” though of course it wasn’t raining.

  When they had got inside the apartment and dead-bolted the door and propped the Houdini hands against it, the boy set the bag on the painted wooden floor and said, “Has either of you two got any medical experience?”

  “I’m a doctor,” said Elizalde cautiously. “A real one, an M.D.”

  “Excellent.” The boy shrugged carefully out of his torn denim jacket and began stiffly pulling his filthy polo shirt off over his head.

  Sullivan raised his eyebrows and glanced at Elizalde. Under the shirt, against his skin, the boy was wearing some kind of belt made of wire cables, with a glowing light at the front.

  “What are your names?” came his voice from inside the shirt.

  Sullivan was grinning and frowning at the same time. “Peter Sullivan, Your Honor,” he said, sitting down in the corner beside his boxes. He had opened all the windows when he had carried the things in here earlier, but the heat was still turned on full, and the air above about shoulder height was willingly hot.

  “Angelica Elizalde.”

  “This kid is—I’m called Koot Hoomie Parganas.” The boy had got the shirt off, and Sullivan could see a bloodstained bandage taped over his ribs on the right side, just above the grotesque belt. “A man cut us with a knife yesterday afternoon. We treated it with high-proof rum, and it doesn’t seem to be infected, but the bleeding won’t quite stop.”

  Elizalde knelt in front of him and pulled back the edge of the bandage—the boy’s mouth tightened, but he stood still.

  “Well,” said Elizalde in a voice that sounded irritated, even embarrassed, “you ought to have had some stitches. Too late now, you’ll have a dueling scar. But it looks clean enough. We should use something besides liquor to prevent infection, though.”

  “Well, fix it right,” Koot Hoomie said. “This is a good little fellow, my boy is, and he’s been put through a lot.”

  “ ‘Fix it right,’ ” echoed Elizalde, still on her knees beside the boy. She sighed. “Fix it right.” After a pause she shot a hostile glance at Sullivan, and then said, “Peter, would you fetch me a—damn it, an unbroken egg from my grocery bag?”

  Wordlessly Sullivan leaned over from where he was sitting and hooked the bag closer to himself, dug around among the herb packets and oil bottles until he found the opened carton of eggs, and lifted one out. He got to his hands and knees to hand it across to her, then sat back down.

  “Thank you. Lie down on the floor, please, Kootie.”

  Kootie sat down on the wooden floor and then gingerly stretched out on his back. “Should I take off the belt?”

  “What’s it for?” asked Sullivan quietly.

  “Degaussing,” said Elizalde.

  “No,” said Sullivan. “Leave it on.”

  Elizalde leaned over the boy and rolled the egg gently over his stomach, around the wound and over the bandage, and in a soft voice she recited, “Sana, sana, cola de rana, tira un pedito para ahora y mañana.” She spoke the words with fastidious precision, like a society hostess picking up fouled ashtrays.

  Sullivan shifted uneasily and pushed away the bullet-dented field frequency modulator so that he could lean back against the wall. “You’re sure this isn’t a job for an emergency room?”

  Elizalde gave him an opaque stare. “La cura es peor que la enfermedad—the cure would be worse than the injury, he wouldn’t be safe half an hour in any kind of public hospital. Kootie is staying with us. Donde comen dos, comen tres.”

  Sullivan was able to work out that that one meant something like “Three can live as cheaply as two.” He thought it was a bad idea, but he shrugged and struggled to his feet, up into the hot air layer, and walked into the open kitchen.

  “There you go, Kootie,” he heard Elizalde say. “You can get up now. We’ll bury the egg outside, after the sun goes down.”

  Elizalde and the boy were both standing again, and Kootie was experimentally stretching his right arm and wincing.

  “Voodoo,” said the boy gruffly. “As useless as the hodgepodge of old radio parts Petey bought.”

  Sullivan turned away to open the refrigerator. “Kootie,” he said, pulling a Coors Light out of the depleted twelve-pack carton, “I notice that you refer to yourself in the first person singular, the third person, and the first person plural. Is there a—” He popped the tab and took a deep sip of the beer, raising his eyebrows at the boy over the top of the can. “—reason for that?”

  “That’s beer, isn’t it?” said Kootie, pressing his side and wincing. “Which costs a dollar a can? Aren’t you going to offer any to the lady and me?”

  “Angelica,” said Sullivan, “would you like a beer?”

  “Just a Coke, please,” she said.

  “A Coke for you too, sonny,” Sullivan told Kootie, turning back toward the refrigerator. “You’re too young for beer.”

  “I’ll start to answer your question,” said Kootie sternly, “by telling you that one of us is eighty-four years old.”

  Sullivan had put down his beer and taken out two cans of Coke. “Well it’s not me, and it’s not you, and I doubt if it’s Angelica. Anyway, you can’t divvy it up among people socialistically that way. You gotta accumulate the age yourself.”

  Kootie slapped his bare chest and grinned at him. “I meant one of us. First person plural.”

  A knock sounded at the door then, and all three of them jumped. Sullivan had dropped the cans and spun toward the door, but he looked back toward Elizalde when he heard the fast snap-clank of the .45 being chambered. An ejected bullet clicked off the wall, for she hadn’t needed to cock it, but it was ready to fire and her thu
mbs were out of the way of the slide.

  He sidled to the window, ready to drop to the floor to give her a clear field of fire, and pushed down one slat of the Venetian blinds.

  And he sighed, sagging with relief. “It’s just the landlord,” he whispered, for the window beyond the blinds was open. He wondered if Shadroe had heard the gun being chambered.

  Elizalde engaged the safety before shoving the gun back into the fanny-pack holster and zipping it shut.

  Sullivan unbolted the door and pulled it open. Gray-haired old Shadroe pushed his way inside even as Sullivan was saying, “Sorry, I’m having some friends over right now—”

  “I’m a friend,” Shadroe said grimly. He was wearing no shirt, and his vast suntanned belly overhung his stovepipe-legged shorts. His squinty eyes took in Elizalde and Kootie, and then fixed on Sullivan. “Your name’s Peter Sullivan,” he said, slowly, as if he meant to help Sullivan learn the syllables by heart. “It was on the … rental agreement.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a common enough name—” Shadroe paused to inhale. “Wouldn’t you have thought so yourself?”

  “Yes …?” said Sullivan, mystified.

  “Well, not today. I’m your godbrother.”

  Sullivan wondered how far away the nearest liquor store might be. “I suppose so, Mr. Shadroe, but you and I are going to have to discuss God and brotherhood later, okay? Right now I’m—”

  Shadroe pointed one grimy finger at the also-shirtless Kootie. “It’s him, isn’t it? My pigs were—starting to smoke. I had to pull the batteries out of ’em—and I sent my honey pie to my boat—to take the batteries out of the pigs aboard there. Burn the boat down, otherwise.” He turned an angrily earnest gaze on Sullivan. “I want you all,” he said. “To come to my office, and see. What your boy has done to my television set.”

  Sullivan was shaking his head, exhaustion and impatience propelling him toward something like panic. Shadroe reeked of cinnamon again, and his upper lip was dusted with brown powder, as if he’d been snorting Nestle’s Quik, and Sullivan wondered if the crazy old man would even hear anything he might say.

  “The boy hasn’t been out of this room,” Sullivan said loudly and with exaggerated patience. “Whatever’s wrong with your TV—”

  “Is it ‘godbrother’?” Shadroe interrupted. “What I mean is, your father.” Sullivan coughed in disgust and tried to think of the words to convince Shadroe that Sullivan was not his son, but the old man raised his hand for silence. “Was my godfather,” he went on, completing his sentence. “My real name is Nicholas Bradshaw. Loretta deLarava is after my. Ass.”

  Sullivan realized that he had been almost writhing with insulted impatience, and that he was now absolutely still. “Oh,” he said into the silence of the room. “Really?” He studied the old man’s battered, pouchy face, and with a chill realized that this could very well be Nicholas Bradshaw. “Jesus. Uh … how’ve you been?”

  “Not so good,” said Bradshaw heavily. “I died in 1975.”

  The statement rocked Sullivan, who had not even been completely convinced that the man was dead, and in any case had only been supposing that he’d been dead for a year or two at the most.

  “Amanita phalloides mushrooms,” Bradshaw said, “in a salad I ate. You have bad abdominal seizures twelve … hours after you eat it. Phalloidin, one of the several poisons. In the mushrooms. And then you feel fine for a week or two. deLarava called me during the week. Couldn’t help gloating. It was too late by then—for me to do anything. Alpha-amanitine already at work. So I got all my money in cash, and hid it. And then I got very drunk, on my boat. Very drunk. Tore up six telephones, ate the magnets—to keep my ghost in. And I climbed into the refrigerator.” His stressful breathing was filling the hot living room with the smell of cinnamon and old garbage. “A week later, I climbed out—dead, but still up and walking.”

  Elizalde walked to the kitchen counter, put down the egg, and picked up Sullivan’s beer. After she had tipped it to her lips and drained it, she dropped the can to clang on the floor, and held out her right hand. “I’m Angelica Anthem Elizalde,” she said. “The police are after my ass.”

  Shadroe shook her hand, grinning squintingly at Sullivan. “I’m gonna steal your señoriter, Peter,” he said, his solemnity apparently forgotten. “What are you people doing here? Hiding here? I won’t have that. You’ll lead deLarava and the police to me and my honey pie.” He was still smiling, still shaking Elizalde’s hand. “Your van is an eyesore, even under the parachute. I can’t understand people who have no pride at all.”

  Sullivan blinked at the man’s random-fire style, but gathered that he was on the verge of being evicted. He tried to remember Nicky Bradshaw, who had been a sort of remote older cousin when Pete and Elizabeth had been growing up. Their father had always seemed to like Nicky, and of course had got him the Spooky part in “Ghost of a Chance.”

  “Listen to me, Nicky, we’re going to try to build an apparatus, set up a séance, to talk to dead people, to ghosts,” he said quickly. “To get specific ones, clearly, not the whole jabbering crowd. I want to talk to my father, to warn him that deLarava is devoting all her resources to finding him and eating him, tomorrow, on Halloween.”

  And then an idea burst into Sullivan’s head, and suddenly he thought the séance scheme might work after all. ‘Tow should be the one to talk to him, Nicky, to warn him—he always liked you!” Sullivan’s heart was still pounding. I might need to buy another part or two, he thought excitedly. This changes everything.

  “You should talk to him yourself, Peter,” said Elizalde, who was standing beside him.

  “No no,” Sullivan said eagerly, “the main thing here isn’t what I’d prefer, it’s what will work! This is a huge stroke of luck! He’ll listen to Nicky more seriously than he’d listen to me, Nicky’s twelve years older than I am. Aren’t you, Nicky? He always took you seriously.”

  Bradshaw just stared at him, looking in fact a hundred years old these days. “I’d like to talk to him,” he said. “But you should be the one—to warn him. You’re his son.”

  “And he’s your father,” Elizalde said.

  Sullivan didn’t look at her. “That’s not the point here,” he snapped impatiently, “what matters—”

  “And,” Elizalde went on, almost gently, “Nicky presumably isn’t linked to your father by a consuming guilt, the way you clearly are.”

  “You’re the antenna,” agreed Kootie. “The variable capacitor that’s fused at the right frequency adjustment.”

  Sullivan clenched his fists, and he could feel his face getting red. “But the machinery won’t work if it’s—”

  For a moment no one spoke, and the only sound was a faint fizzing from one of the cans of Coke that he’d dropped when Bradshaw had knocked on the door. Sullivan’s forehead was misted with sweat. You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer, he thought, you won’t dissolve.

  “You weren’t going to do it,” said Elizalde, smiling. “You were going to go through the motions, set it all up so plausibly that nobody, certainly not yourself, could accuse you of not having done your best. But there was going to be some factor that you were going to forget, something no one could blame you for not having thought of.”

  Sullivan’s chest was hollow with dismayed wonderment. “A condensing lens,” he said softly.

  “A condensing lens?” said Kootie. “Like in a movie projector, between the carbon arc and the aperture?”

  Sullivan ignored him.

  Without a condensing lens set up between the Langmuir gauge and the brush discharge in the carborundum bulb, the signal couldn’t possibly be picked up by the quartz filament inside the gauge.

  But wouldn’t he have thought of that, as soon as he saw the weakness and dispersion of the flickering blue brush sparks in the bulb? Even if Elizalde hadn’t said what she had just said?

  In this moment of unprepared insight, while his bones shivered with an icy chill in spite of the hot air and the swe
at on his face, he was bleakly sure he would not have thought of it, or would at least have contrived to set the lens up incorrectly.

  He wouldn’t be able to do it wrong now, now that he was aware of the temptation.

  But maybe it still won’t work! The thought was almost a prayer.

  Kootie limped forward and held his right hand up to Bradshaw. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bradshaw,” he said. “I’m two people at the moment—one of ’em is known as Kootie—”

  “That’s an I-ON-A-CO belt you got on,” said Bradshaw, shaking the boy’s hand. “They don’t work. You got it from Wilshire?”

  “We were on Wilshire,” said the boy in a surprised tone, and it occurred to Sullivan that this was the first time the voice had really sounded like a little boy’s. “Right by MacArthur Park!”

  “I meant H. Gaylord Wilshire himself,” said Bradshaw. “That was his original tract. From Park View to Benton, and Sixth down to Seventh. My godfather bought one of those fool belts. From him, in the twenties. What’s old man Wilshire like, these days?”

  “Insubstantial,” said the boy, and his voice was controlled and hard again. “But I didn’t get to introduce my other self.” He looked around at the other three people in the room. “I’m Thomas Alva Edison,” he said, “and I promise you I can get your ghost telephone working, even if Petey here can’t.”

  Sullivan was relieved that everyone was staring at the boy now, and he went back to the refrigerator and took the second-last beer and popped it open. I shouldn’t have said condensing lens, he thought bitterly. I should have blinked at her in surprise, and then acted insulted. Edison. I’m sure. No doubt the kid is a ghost, or has one on him, but I’ll bet every ghost that knows anything about electricity claims to have been Thomas Edison.

  “Cart all your crap to my office,” said Bradshaw wearily. “You can set up your gizmo there. It’s the most masked room in this whole masked block. Electric every which way, water running uphill and roundabout—even hologram pictures in a saltwater aquarium under black light. And bring your bag of fried chicken, Mr. Edison—Johanna loves that stuff. Did you get Original Recipe—or the new crunchy stuff?”