Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  Kootie pulled one of the rewinders out from under himself, and as he dug in his pocket for a dime he peered out through the dusty back window and tried to remember what part of L.A. they were in now. He saw narrow shops with battered black iron accordion gates across their doors, drifts of litter in the gutters and against the buildings, and ragged black men wrapped in blankets sitting against the grimy brick and stucco walls.

  He nervously pulled a dime out of his pocket and remembered that Raffle had called this area “the Nickel”—Fifth Street, skid row, just a block away from the lights and multilingual crowds of Broadway.

  Raffle was chugging the warm beer, and Kootie was nauseated by the smell of it first thing in the morning, on top of the smells of Fred and last night’s burritos. He bent over the gray plastic box of the rewinder and began using the dime to twist out the screws in the base of it. By the time Raffle had used the empty bottle as a pipe—needling the stuffy air with the astringent tang of crack cocaine and hot steel wool—and opened the car door to spin it out into the street, Kootie had worked the back off the machine and was trying to jam the blunt dime edge into the screw heads of the electric motor inside.

  Raffle glanced back at him before putting the car in gear. “What you been snortin’, Koot me boy?” he asked cheerfully as he steered out away from the curb. “A little crank up the nose to wake you up?”

  “Nothing,” said Kootie quickly, thinking of the ghost he’d inhaled at twilight yesterday. The ghost had surely been responsible for his peculiar dreams. Kootie certainly didn’t have any children.

  “Huh. Regular speed freak you are.” The engine was popping and coughing, but Raffle was goosing the car forward down the curbside lane, tapping his foot rapidly on the gas pedal. “A speed freak, you leave him alone with a screwdriver and come back and find your stereo all over the apartment in pieces. This crack now, it’s nothin’ for kids, you understand, but it’s harmless compared to speed.” The light was green at Broadway, but he had to wait for pedestrians to wobble past before turning north. “Thing about speed, a guy cooks it up in a secret factory out in Twentynine Palms or somewhere, in the desert, you know? And if he’s paranoid, which he usually is, with good reason, the paranoia gets in the speed, and when you snort it you wind up feeling what he felt when he was cooking it. You get his personality. They should have those priests make it, up here at St. Vibiana Cathedral on Second Street—spike the stuff with some sanka-titty.”

  For a moment Kootie pictured a breast that was heavy with decaf coffee, then realized that Raffle must have meant sanctity. Outside the car, the Broadway sidewalk was already crowded with bums and businessmen of, apparently, every nationality the world had to offer; all of them seemed busy, with concerns that Kootie couldn’t imagine. How long, the boy thought unhappily, can I live out here on the streets like this?

  The narrow ground-floor shops were all shoestores and Asian restaurants and—of all things—travel agencies, but above the restless heads of the crowd stood antique iron lampposts with frosted glass globes, and fire-escape balconies zigzagging up the dignified brick faces of the smog-darkened buildings.

  He looked down at the machine in his lap—and suddenly he didn’t know what it was. Without deciding to, he found himself asking, “What does this thing do?”

  Raffle glanced into the back seat. “Nothing, anymore, I guess. It’s a video rewinder, was. To rewind movies, so you don’t have to wear out your VCR.”

  “Movies?” Kootie stared at the plastic box and tried to imagine reels of cellulose nitrate film small enough to fit inside it. Then, “VCR,” he repeated thoughtfully. Video-something, apparently. Video-cathode-rectifier, video-camera-receiver?

  “Where did you grow up, boy?” said Raffle. “It hooks up to your TV set, and you rent movies to watch on it.”

  Kootie’s heart was pounding, and he took off his sunglasses and ducked his head to peer out ahead, through the windshield, at the remote glass towers that intersected the yellow sky to the north. “What,” he asked shakily, “has been the greatest invention since—” He caught himself. “—oh, say, in the twentieth century?” he finished.

  He could see Raffle scratch the gray stubble on his brown chin. “Oh, I reckon … the thermos.”

  Kootie blinked. “The thermos? You mean like thermos bottles?”

  “Sure,” said Raffle expansively. “Hot things, it keeps hot. And cold things, them it keeps cold.”

  “Well,” said Kootie helplessly, “yes …”

  Raffle lifted his hands from the steering wheel for a moment to spread them in mystification. “So how does it know?”

  Raffle was laughing again, and when Fred whined and licked his right ear he rolled down the driver’s-side window so the dog could poke his head out from the backseat. Kootie leaned forward and took deep breaths of the chilly diesel-and-fish-oil-scented breeze.

  “Where are we headed?” he asked.

  “Civic Center, I think, wander around Spring and Grand and all, catch some of the effluent citizens who’re on a break from jury duty or waiting in line for the matinee of Phantom of the Opera. Good guilt either way. And first a stop at the Market up here, get some good fresh tamales to put under the hood for dinner. There’s Chinese too, but it don’t last so good on the manifold.”

  “Tamales sound fine,” said Kootie. “Uh … can I buy some firecrackers?”

  “Firecrackers?” exclaimed Raffle. “On top of my felonies you want to … purchase illegal explosives?” Kootie had started to stammer an apology, but Raffle went on, “Sure, the boy can have firecrackers. And for breakfast, how about a slice of pepperoni pizza? Let’s have another cup of coffeee,” he sang raucously, “let’s have another pizza pie.”

  Kootie smiled uncertainly and nodded as Fred’s tail thumped repeatedly against his cheek. Between two of the thumps he managed to get his sunglasses back on.

  The first part of the morning was heady, nervous fun. Raffle parked the car on Third Street, and with Fred tagging right along they walked in the open front of the Grand Central Market, past the shoeshine stands on the sidewalk to the wide dim interior, where big live fish slapped on butchers’ blocks and gray-haired little old women wolfed noodles from paper bowls with chopsticks and haggled over vegetables the like of which Kootie had never seen before. Raffle handled his party’s purchases, joking in broken Spanish with the Hispanic fellow at the tamale counter and pausing for mumbled exchanges with a couple of overly made-up women who seemed to be just wandering around and whom Kootie took for hostesses.

  Back out on the sunny sidewalk, Kootie and Raffle nibbled slices of hot pizza wrapped in waxed paper as they walked back to the car, while Fred trotted alongside carrying the bag of tamales in his mouth. Raffle had tucked a little flat square package into Kootie’s shirt pocket in the market, and when they got to the car and Raffle bent over the hood, Kootie dug the package out and saw the Chinese dragon printed on the wrapper and realized it was his firecrackers. He tucked it into the hip pocket of his jeans.

  Firecrackers, he thought bewilderedly. What do I want firecrackers for?

  Kootie wondered if his dream was still clinging to him; all morning he had been flinching at voices and car horns and the whacks of the butchers’ cleavers in the market, and until Raffle hoisted up the car hood Kootie was blankly staring at the low, sharp-edged cars that blundered incongruously through the lanes on this floor of the echoing valley between the buildings; the cars looked as though they’d been built to fly.

  But when the hood had creaked up, Kootie leaned in over the fender and peered at the black engine. He could recognize the radiator, and vaguely the block, but he wondered why there were so many fan belts.

  “Gimme the daily bread, Fred,” muttered Raffle to the dog, who relinquished the bag he’d been carrying.

  Beside the left wheel well a roll of aluminum foil was tucked in behind some square translucent box that appeared to have green water in it, and Raffle unrolled a yard of foil and wrapped the tamales ti
ghtly, then tucked them in under the air filter.

  Kootie was delighted with the notion. “Automotive cuisine,” he said. “They should design the engine with a box there, for baking.”

  “And hang a string from the radiator cap,” Raffle agreed, “so you could steam ess-cargo.” He patted the crumpled silvery bulge. “Think that’s gonna stay wedged in there?”

  Kootie didn’t answer. He had just looked up into an enormous color photograph of his own face, and for a dizzy moment he couldn’t guess the distance or the size of the thing. He blinked and bobbed his head, and then the image fell into its proper scale,

  Behind Raffle and way above his head, in a wide metal bracket on the second floor of the building they’d parked in front of, a billboard had been hung—its bright and unfaded colors made it stand out from the weathered beer and cigarette signs around it.

  The right third of it was a huge color blowup of Kootie’s own fifth-grade school photo. And the words on the billboard were in Spanish, but the meaning was clear:

  RECOMPENSA DINERO POR ESTE NINO PERDIDO,

  SE LLAMA CUT HUMI

  LA ULTIMO VES QUE LO VI LUNES, 26 DE OCTUBRE, EN BULEVA SUNSET

  $20,000 LLAMA (213) JKL KOOT $20,000

  NO PREGUNTAS

  Kootie began whistling, and he shuffled to the driver’s-side door and pulled it open, letting the thumb-button on the handle snap out loudly.

  “Want me to drive?” he asked with a broad smile.

  CHAPTER 17

  Alice thought to herself “I never should try to remember my name in the middle of an accident! …”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass,

  RAFFLE WAS FROWNING AT him in puzzlement over the top of the hood. “No, Jacko,” he said, slamming it down. “Nor do I want Fred to drive. Get in on your own side.”

  “I can scoot across.” Kootie got in the car and then hiked and dragged himself over the console into the passenger seat, so that Raffle’s attention would be drawn down at him rather than up toward the billboard. Kootie’s face was chilly with sweat, and his T-shirt was wet under the heavy flannel shirt. He was whistling again to hold the older man’s attention, whistling Raffle’s another pizza pie tune because he couldn’t think of anything else; he knew that with his bad ankle he wouldn’t be able to outrun Raffle, if it came to that.

  But now Raffle had coaxed the dog into the backseat, and had got in himself and closed the door. “Are all little kids as crazy as you?”

  Kootie was glad that his sunglasses were hiding the alarm that must still be shining in his eyes. “I’m not a little kid,” he said, hoping his heartbeat would slow down once the car got moving. “I’m an eighty-four-year-old … midget.”

  “Mayor of the Munchkin City,” recited Raffle in a high, solemn voice as he cranked the starter, “in the county of the land of Oz.” The engine caught, and the car shook.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” quacked Kootie.

  Raffle clanked the car into gear, nosed it forward, and steered it north again on Broadway. Kootie ruffled Fred’s fur and stole a glance back at the receding white rectangle that was the billboard, and he wondered who was offering the $20,000 “recompensa.” One last quote from The Wizard of Oz occurred to him. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto,” he told Fred softly and self-consciously.

  In the next two blocks they crossed over an invisible thermocline border, from hot, colorful third-world agitation into an area of tall, clean gray buildings, and streets with young trees planted along the sidewalks at measured intervals, and new cars and men in dark suits.

  They turned left on Beverly and then parked in a broad pay lot off Hope Street. “We’ll make booyah more than the seven bucks it costs to park here,” said Raffle confidently as they piled out of the car and he opened the trunk to get his WILL WORK FOR FOOD—HOMELESS VIETNAM VET WITH MOTHERLESS SON sign; “so it’s no problem parking on credick.” (Kootie guessed that Raffle had derived his pronunciation of credit from the way people generally said credit cards.) The whoosh of trucks on the Hollywood Freeway, muffled by the tall hedge of the shoulder at the north end of the lot, was like low random surf on the lee side of a jetty.

  They had slept in the car last night, and Kootie had noticed that Raffle slept only a few hours between medication runs. He hoped that tonight they might crash for a while in a motel—the sight of the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, standing as imposing as foreign capitol buildings on the wide, elevated, tree-shaded plaza across the intersection of Temple and Hope, reminded him of the Los Angeles he used to live in, and he yearned for the gracious luxury of a shower.

  Kootie limped across the asphalt of the parking lot, holding the end of the belt that was Fred’s leash. The dog lunged at a couple of prancing pigeons, and Kootie tried to hop after him but turned his bad ankle and went painfully to his knees on the pavement. For a moment the world went from color to black-and-white.

  “You’re just gettin’ beat to bits, Jacko,” said Raffle sympathetically as he helped the boy back up to his feet. “Here, I’ll take Fred.”

  Kootie wasn’t crying, though the pain in his ankle was like a razory-high violin note, and he was sure blood must be trickling down his shin under his pants. “Okay,” he managed to gasp, blindly handing Raffle the end of the belt.

  As soon as Kootie was able to breathe smoothly he spoke, to show that he was okay.

  “What ‘work’ do we do,” he asked, “for food?”

  The people who had given them stray one-dollar bills and pocket-warmed handfuls of change yesterday and last night had clearly been just paying an urban toll, but here he could imagine getting a twenty or two, and being given some actual task.

  They stopped at the Temple Street curb. “Well,” said Raffle, squinting around at the wide, clean streets, “you gotta anticipate. It’s no good saying ‘I gotta go buy my gardening tools back out of hock’ if the guy turns out to have gardening tools. The basic trick is ‘Gimme forty bucks right now and I’ll be at the address in a couple of hours,’ see? With you along it should be easy. ‘My boy’s sick, I just need thirty bucks to stash him in a motel bed, and then I’ll be right over.’ A cough or two from you, and the guy’s some kind of monster if he don’t cooperate.”

  The light changed, and they crossed Temple, Fred tugging eagerly at the leash in Raffle’s knobby fist.

  “So we don’t do any actual work at all,” Kootie said, relieved in spite of himself.

  “Work is whatever you do that gets you a nice time, Jacko,” Raffle said, “and you gotta figure out how to get the most for the least. Food, shelter, drink, dope. Some guys take a lot of R and R in jail, they don’t mind those orange jumpsuits, but that ain’t for me—my outstanding warrants are under different names, every one. In jail, speaking of your video rewinder, they start the movies at eight, but bedtime is nine, so you always miss the end of the movie. Could you live like that? And if you even smoke a cigarette—and one cigarette, in trade, costs you anywhere from four to eight items from the commissary, like soap or candy bars—a guy hiding in the air-conditioning vent or somewhere tells on you, and then on the loudspeaker, ‘Mayo, report to the front watch, and put out that cigarette.’ You get a write-up, and gotta spend four hours scrubbing the toilets or something. Get two or three write-ups and you get a major—you don’t get your early release date. The good life is this out here.”

  Kootie shrugged bewilderedly. “I’m sold,” he said.

  They were stopped now at the Hope Street corner curb, waiting for the east-west light to change, and several men in suits and a woman in a coffee-colored dress had drifted up beside them, chattering about whoever was singing the Phantom role today.

  The words I’m sold went on ringing in Kootie’s head as he stared to his right, back north across Temple.

  The sky and the houses on the Echo Park hills and the greenery of the Hollywood Freeway shoulder all faded into a blurry two-dim
ensional frame surrounding the white, white billboard with the black lettering and the livid color photograph.

  Kootie was icy cold inside his heavy flannel shirt. His ears were ringing as if with the explosions of the dreamed firecrackers, and he wondered if he would be able to run, able to work his muscles at all. It had not occurred to him that there might be more than one of the billboards—this affront had the disorienting dreamlike intrusiveness of supernatural pursuit.

  The billboard was in English here, three blocks north of the first one:

  CASH REWARD FOR THIS MISSING BOY:

  NAMED KOOT HOOMIE

  LAST SEEN MONDAY, OCTOBER THE 26TH, ON SUNSET

  BOULEVARD

  $20,000 CALL (213) JKL-KOOT $20,000

  NO QUESTIONS ASKED

  Kootie swung his head around to blink up at Raffle.

  Raffle was staring at the billboard, and now looked down at Kootie with no expression on his weathered brown face.

  The little green figure was glowing now in the screened box below the traffic signal across Hope, and the people beside Kootie stepped out into the crosswalk. Kootie found himself following them, staring at the crude silhouette in the box and hearing Raffle’s step and Fred’s jangling chain coming right along behind him.

  “You’d get eight thousand,” said Raffle quietly. “After my cut and Fred’s.”

  “Damn Ford,” said Kootie helplessly.

  “We can get a Cadillac,” said Raffle. “Hell, we can get a Winnebago with two bathrooms.”

  “I can’t … go to them,” Kootie said, involuntarily. Why not? he asked himself—I surely can’t live in a damn car forever. Then he heard himself saying, “They’ll eat me and kill you.”

  Kootie stepped up the curb, helplessly letting the theater goers hurry on ahead, and turned to face Raffle.

  Raffle was frowning in puzzlement. “Eat you?” he said. “And kill me?”

  “Not you,” Kootie said, speaking voluntarily now. “He was talking to me—he meant kill me.”