Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  He tapped a little pile of snuff out onto his knuckle and sniffed it up his nose. Almost he thought he could smell it.

  Johanna had tucked her head under his jaw, and her shoulders were shaking. “It’s all right if I cry now,” she whispered.

  He tossed the little can out onto the dark rug and draped his arm around her. “For a while,” he said.

  After a time he heard the crunch of the Nova’s tires on the broken pavement outside, and he kissed her and stood up. He knew it must have got cold outside by now, and he went to the closet to put on a shirt.

  CHAPTER 41

  “—then you don’t like all insects?” the Gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing had happened.

  “I like them when they can talk,” Alice said. “None of them ever talk, where I come from.”

  “What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?” the Gnat inquired.

  “I don’t rejoice in insects at all,” Alice explained, “because I’m rather afraid of them …”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  IN SPITE OF THEIR muddy clothes, Sullivan and Elizalde had stopped to buy a couple of pizzas and a package of paper plates and an armload of Coke and Coors six-packs, and when they had turned on the chandelier light in the apartment living room Sullivan carried the supplies to the open kitchen. He was glad of the heat being on so high in the apartment. “Wake up Kootie,” he called, “he’ll want some of this.”

  Elizalde crouched over the boy and shook him, then looked up blankly. “He’s passed out drunk, Pete. Tequila, by the smell.”

  Sullivan had unzipped his sodden leather jacket, and now paused before trying to pull his hands through the clinging sleeves. “How did he—? Could he be a drunk already, at his age?”

  “I suppose. Did you bring the bottle back here?”

  “No, didn’t think of it.” He worked his arms free and tossed the jacket into a corner, where it landed heavily.

  They had left the front door open, and now Nicky Bradshaw spoke from the doorstep. “I gave it to him,” he said. “He was Edison. We were talking, and he said he could have a couple.”

  Elizalde stood up, obviously furious. “That’s … criminal!” she said. “Edison should have had more sense. He’s in loco parentis here—I wonder if he let his own kids drink hard liquor.” She squinted at Bradshaw. “You should have known better too.”

  “I wasn’t watching him pour,” Bradshaw said. “Can I come in?”

  “Nicky!” buzzed the gnat in Sullivan’s ear, and then it was gone.

  “Yeah, come in,” Sullivan said. “Where’s Johanna?”

  “She’s fixing her makeup.” Bradshaw stepped ponderously in, creaking the floorboards. “Did you find—” His hand jerked up toward his head, then stopped, and suddenly his weathered face tensed and his eyes widened. “Uncle Art!” he said softly.

  Sullivan looked down at Elizalde, who was still crouched over Kootie. “My father flew over to him,” he explained. “How is Kootie?”

  “I think he’s waking up. You’ve got instant coffee in your van? Could you go get it?”

  “Sure.” She had carried in Houdini’s hands and laid them by the door, and he hefted one up as he stepped outside, but though the night breeze chilled him in his damp clothes he didn’t feel peril in it, here. He walked shivering across the lot to the van and lifted the parachute to get at the side doors with his key; in the total darkness inside, he groped like a blind man, finding the coffee jar and a spoon and a couple of cups by touch, with Houdini’s hand tucked under his arm.

  Before he climbed down out of the van, he stood beside the bed and sniffed the stale air. He could smell cigarette smoke, and the faintly vanilla aroma of pulp paperback books, and the machine-oil smells of the .45 and the electrical equipment he had bought today. It occurred to him that it was unlikely that the van would ever be driven again, and he wondered how long this frail olfactory diary would last. On the way out he carefully pulled the doors closed before lifting the parachute curtain to step away from the van.

  Kootie was awake and grumbling when Sullivan got back inside, and Bradshaw was sitting against the wall in the corner, muttering and laughing softly through pink tears. Sullivan pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, but didn’t go over to where Bradshaw and his father were talking, instead striding on to the kitchen. Elizalde stood up from beside Kootie to help Sullivan unpack the supplies.

  They took turns washing their hands in the sink, then opened the pizza boxes. “Edison says he doesn’t want any,” Elizalde said as she lifted a hot slice of pepperoni-and-onion pizza onto a paper plate, “but I think he will when he sees it.”

  Sullivan had measured a spoonful of powdered coffee into one of the cups, and now he turned to frown at the water he had left running in the sink. “I wonder if this is even connected to a hot pipe,” he said, putting a finger into the cold stream from the tap.

  “You could always make it from the back of the toilet,” she said. “That’s plenty hot. And it’s what Edison deserves.”

  “Kootie is still in there?” Sullivan asked quietly.

  “Yes. It was him that first woke up. Edison’s planning to ‘go into the sea’ tomorrow, and I think it’s doing Kootie good to have him run things in the meantime, so Kootie can get a lot of sleep.”

  “You’re the doctor.” The water was still running cold, so Sullivan put down the coffee cup, jacked a Coors out of one of the six-pack cartons, and popped the tab on top. “Do you figure you’ve laid Frank Rocha?” He stepped back before her sudden hot glare. What I mean is, you know, is the ghost laid. Is he R.I.P. now? Can we just … buy some kind of old car and leave California?”

  “You and me and Kootie?”

  “Kootie? Is he part of the family?”

  “Are we a family?” Her brown eyes were wide and serious.

  Sullivan looked away, down at the pizza. He lifted another triangle of it onto a paper plate. “I meant partnership. Is he part of the partnership?”

  “Is your father?”

  “Jesus, is this what you psychiatrists do? Take the night off, will you?” He looked across the room just as Johanna stepped up to the front door. “Here, Johanna, you want a piece of pizza?”

  “And a beer, please,” she said, walking in. Her blue eye shadow looked freshly applied, but her eyes were red, and she was wearing a yellow terry-cloth bathrobe.

  Sullivan pushed the paper plate across the counter to her and opened her a beer. He didn’t want to talk to Elizalde; he was uncomfortable to realize that he had meant the double entendre about laying Frank Rocha, though he had acted surprised and innocent when she had glared at him. Was he jealous of her? He knew he was jealous of Bradshaw’s easy conversation over in the corner with his father, though he didn’t want to take Bradshaw’s place.

  Then abruptly his ear tickled, and his father’s tiny voice said, “Nicky’s got to go to some other building here. Let’s you and me walk along. Your girl can talk to Nicky’s girl.”

  My girl, thought Sullivan. “That’s not how it is,” he said. He was sweating in spite of his clinging, wet clothes—for his father would want to talk seriously now—and he picked up the can of Coors.

  “Your sister went on to drink a lot, didn’t she?”

  Sullivan paused, with the beer halfway to his mouth. “Yes,” he said.

  “I could tell. Do you know why I came back, out of the sea? There goes Nicky, follow him.”

  Bradshaw was at the open doorway. “Nick,” said Sullivan, putting down the beer and stepping past Elizalde out of the kitchen area. “Wait up, I’ll—we’ll—walk you there.”

  “Thank you, Pete,” said Bradshaw. “I’d like that.”

  Bradshaw began clumping heavily across the dark lot toward the office, and Sullivan walked alongside, his hands in his pockets. “Nick,” he said. “What does ‘L.A. cigar—too tragical’ mean?”

  “Damn it,” said Bradshaw in his flat voice. “Did you burn
up the car?” He stepped up to his office door and pushed it open.

  “No, but I threw your cigarette lighter out onto Santa Monica Boulevard.” Sullivan followed him inside to the kitchen, where Bradshaw opened a cupboard to pry a finely painted china plate out of a dusty stack.

  “It’s a … mercy thing,” said Bradshaw, not looking at him. “That some people do. It’s a hippodrome, where it reads the same forwards as backwards. I don’t know who started it, or even who else does it. But you write it around … (gasp) … ashtrays, and lighters, and chimneys. I’ve seen little shops on Rosecrans, where you. Can buy frying pans with it written. Around the edge.” He had opened a drawer and lifted out a handful of shiny pebbles. “The hippodrome words attract new ghosts. They hang around—trying to figure it out how the end can be the same as the beginning. And then when the fire comes. They get burned up.” He spread the pebbles on the china plate, and then carried it back out through the dark office and right outside to the parking lot.

  “Beasties!” he called in a harsh whisper. “Din-din, beasties!” He put the plate down on the pavement. “It’s a mercy thing,” he said again. “They’re better off burned up and gone. If they hang around, they’re likely to get caught by people like Loretta deLarava. That’s Kelley Keith, Uncle Art, what she calls herself now. Caught, and digested, to fatten the parasite’s bloated, pirated personality. And if they don’t get caught by somebody …”

  He stepped back, almost into the doorway of the office, and Sullivan joined him in the shadows.

  From around behind an upright old car hood on the other side of the yard, a lumpy figure came tottering uncertainly into the glow of the parking-lot light. It was wearing a tan trench coat over its head, with apparently a broad-brimmed hat under that to hold the drapery of the coat out to the sides like a beekeeper’s veil. Its groping hands looked like multi-lobed sweet potatoes.

  And from the overgrown chain-link fence on the other side of the lot came a rattling and scuffling, and Sullivan saw more shapes rocking forward out of the darkness.

  Bradshaw turned and walked into the dark office, and when Sullivan had followed him inside he closed the door. “They’re shy,” Bradshaw said. “So’s your dad. I’ll be back at the party.”

  “Nicky, wait,” said Sullivan quickly. When the fat old man turned his impassive face toward him, he went on almost at random, “Have you got copies of the Alice books? Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass?"

  Bradshaw walked around to his desk and opened one of the drawers. After rummaging around, he looked up and called, “Catch,” and tossed a paperback toward Sullivan.

  Sullivan did catch it, and he tilted it toward the light from the kitchen; it was both of the Alice books published together. “Thanks,” he said, tucking it into his hip pocket.

  Bradshaw left the building through the kitchen so as not to disturb the timid ghosts at their pebble buffet, and Sullivan sank cautiously into the Naugahyde chair in the middle of the office floor.

  “You still got that brass plate from my gravestone?” said the tiny voice of his father.

  Sullivan slapped the front of his damp shirt, and felt the heavy angularity still there. “Huh! Yes.”

  “Don’t lose it, I’m tethered to it. It’s my night-light. If I stray far from it, I’ll get lost.”

  Sullivan took it out of his pocket, then began unbuttoning his shirt.

  “Do you know why I came back, out of the sea?” his father’s voice said.

  “Because Thomas Edison lit up the sky here Monday night.” Sullivan slipped the brass plate down inside the soaked front-side wallet of his scapular and buttoned his shirt up again.

  “That’s how I was able to find my way back. That’s not why.”

  Sullivan was shivering, and the cinnamon-and-rot smell of the office seemed to be infused with the smells of suntan lotion and mayonnaise. “Okay,” he whispered to the insect in his ear. “Why?”

  “Because I … abandoned you and Elizabeth. I was a white-haired old fool showing off like a high-school Lothario, trying to impress this thirty-three-year-old girl I had married! With three-score and ten, I would have had nine more years with the two of you, seen you reach sixteen. But I had to be Leander, swimming … a Hellespont that turned out to be … well, I only just this week got back to shore.”

  Sullivan’s eyes were closed, but tears were running down his cheeks. “Dad, you’re allowed to go swimming—”

  “And I hoped that … that it would have been okay, that Kelley would have taken care of you two, and that you’d have grown up to be happy people. I hoped I would come ashore and find you both with … normal lives, you know? Children and houses and pets. Then I could have relaxed and felt that I had not done you any real harm by dying a little sooner than I should have.”

  “I’m sorry we weren’t able to show you that.”

  Sullivan was thinking of Sukie, drunk and grinning wickedly behind dark sunglasses in a late-night bar, perhaps singing one of her garbled songs; he thought of the way the two of them had watched out for each other through the lonely foster-home years, each always able to finish the other’s interrupted sentence; and he thought of the two of them running away from the sight of their father’s intolerable wallet on the Venice pavement in ’86, running away separately to live as solitary shamed fugitives. And he imagined Sukie at forty years of age (he hadn’t even seen her since they’d both been thirty-four!) hanging up a telephone after having called Pete to warn him about deLarava’s pursuit—and then putting a gun to her head.

  “Kelley Keith was to have been our stepmother,” Sullivan said aimlessly. “And she did … adopt us, in a way, after we got out of college.” He wondered if he meant to hurt his father by saying it; then he knew that he did, and he wondered why.

  The gnat was just buzzing wordlessly. Finally it said, “What can I do, what can I do? I’ve come back, and Elizabeth’s killed herself she’s in the house of spirits with all the other restless dead, idiots jabbering over their pretend drinks and cigarettes. You’re a rootless bum. I gave you kids a mother that was—that was nothing more than a child herself, a greedy, mean, selfish child, and then I left you with her. And it’s wrecked you both. Why did I come back? What the hell can I do?”

  Sullivan stood up. “We’ve got to get back to the party.” He sighed. “What you can do …? Sukie and I let you down, even if you don’t see it that way, even if it plain is not that way. Tell us … that you don’t hold it against us; that there are no hard feelings. I bet Sukie will hear you too. Tell us that you … Move us anyway.”

  “I love you, Pete, and not ‘anyway.’ Don’t hold it against me, please, that I left you, that I abandoned you to that woman.”

  “We never did, Dad. And we always loved you. We still do.”

  The thing in his ear was buzzing indistinctly again, but after a moment it said, “One last favor for your old man?”

  Sullivan had crossed to the door, and paused with his hand on the knob. “Yes. Anything.”

  “See that I get back in the ocean tomorrow, on Halloween. Say goodbye to me willingly and at peace, and I’ll do the same. That’s the way we’ll do it this time. And then—Lord, boy, you’re forty years old! Stop running, stand your little ground.”

  “I will, Dad,” Sullivan said. “Thanks.”

  He opened the door. The humped ghosts were crouched around the plate, clumsily picking up pebbles, and they shifted but didn’t flee as Sullivan stepped around them and strode back toward the apartment. “You asked why you came back,” he said, “remember? I think you came back so that we could finally get this done.”

  When they got back to the apartment, the pepperoni pizza was gone and everyone had started on the sausage-and-bell-pepper one. Sullivan took a piece of it with good enough grace, and he retrieved his beer.

  Bradshaw and Johanna were standing by the window. Elizalde was sitting with Kootie and they were talking amiably; either it was Kootie animating the boy’s body now, or she had got
finished yelling at Edison for getting the boy drunk.

  “Join you two?” said Sullivan shyly, standing behind her with his beer and his paper plate. His father had flown away when they had reentered the hot apartment; Sullivan had seen the flicker of the gnat looping away toward Bradshaw, but he was no longer jealous.

  “The electrical engineer!” said Kootie. Apparently he was still Edison.

  Elizalde looked up at Sullivan with a rueful smile. “Sit down, Pete,” she said. “I’m sorry I got into my psych mode there.”

  “I asked for it,” he said, folding his legs and sitting next to her. “And your questions were good. I’ve got answers to ’em, too.”

  “I’d like to hear them later.”

  “You will, trust me.”

  Sullivan guessed that Edison was still a bit drunk; the old man in the boy’s body resumed telling some interrupted story about restoring communications across a fogged, ice-jammed river by driving a locomotive down to the docks and using the steam whistle to toot Morse code across the ice to the far shore, where somebody finally figured out what he was up to and drew up a locomotive of their own so that messages could be sent back and forth across the gap. “Truly wireless,” Edison said, slurring his words. “Even electricless. We’re like the people on the opposite banks, aren’t we? The gulf is torn across all our precious math, and it calls for a very wireless sort of communication to get our emotional accounts settled.” He blinked belligerently at Sullivan. “Isn’t that right, electrical engineer? Or did I drop a decimal place somewhere?”

  “No, it sounds valid to me,” Sullivan said. “We’re … lucky, I guess, that you were there with a whistle that could be heard … across the gap.”