Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  Kootie had not really stopped crying, and now he sobbed, “Me? Why? It’s cold—” Then he had suddenly bent forward at the waist, and had to put weight on his bad ankle to keep from falling. “Don’t!” He sat down on the concrete and then began defeatedly tugging at the shoelaces. “Okay! Don’t push!” His hand opened, dropping the firecrackers.

  Edison inhaled harshly, his breath hitching with sobs, and Kootie’s voice said, brokenly, “Sorry, son. It’s (sniff) important we get this done quick.” Kootie had pulled off both his shoes. The concrete was cold against his butt through his jeans. “Socks too,” wept Edison. “Quit crying, will you? This is … ludicrous.”

  Kootie let Edison work his numbing hands, stuffing the socks into the shoes and then tying the laces together and draping the shoes around his neck. He straightened carefully and leaned against the window of the TV repair shop. He half hoped the window would break, but even with Thomas Edison in his head he didn’t weigh enough.

  “Your furt’s hoot,” spoke Edison, interrupting Kootie’s breathing. “Excuse me. Your foot is hurt. I’ll let you get up by yourself. Grab the firecrackers.”

  Too tired to give a sarcastic reply, Kootie struggled to his feet, closing his fist on the firecrackers as he got up. Standing again, he shivered in his flimsy shirt.

  “Now,” said Edison, “we’re going to run up this street here to our left—we’re going to do that after you start to—no, I’d better do it—after I start dropping lit firecrackers on your feet.”

  At that, Kootie began hiccupping, and after a moment he realized that he was actually laughing. “I can’t go to the cops,” he said. “I got a one-armed murderer following me around—and a dope fiend cooking me dinner on a car engine, and my parents—and anyway, now Thomas Alva Edison is gonna chase me up a street barefoot throwing illegal explosives at my feet. And I’m eleven years old. But I can’t go to the cops, hunh.”

  “I liked that trick of cooking on the engine.” Edison had made Kootie’s hands cup around the matchbook and strike a flame. “I’m saving your life, son,” he said, “and my … my … soul? Something of mine.” He held one of the lit firecrackers until the sparking fuse had nearly disappeared into the tiny cardboard cylinder. Then, “Jump!” he said merrily as he let go of it.

  Kootie got his foot away from the thing, but when it went off with a sharp little bang his toes were stung by the exploded shreds of paper.

  He opened his mouth to protest, but Edison had lit two more. Kootie’s head jerked as Edison cried, “Run!” and then Kootie was bounding up the narrower street’s shadowed sidewalk, both feet stinging now.

  “Fucking—crazy man!” the boy gasped as another firecracker went off right in front of the toes that had already been peppered.

  The next one Edison didn’t let go of; he held it between his fingers, and the rap of its detonation banged Kootie’s fingers as painfully as if he’d hit them with a hammer. “What the damn hell—” Kootie yiped, still leaping and scampering.

  “Watch your language, boy! You’ll have the recording angels hopping to their typewriters! Keep a clean mouth!”

  “Sorreee!”

  In the back of his mind, Kootie was aware that Edison’s children had hated this, too, having their footsteps disattached from the ground; for an instant he caught an image of a girl and two boys hopping on a lawn as exploding firecrackers stippled their shins with green fragments of grass, and fleetingly he glimpsed how strenuous it had been to get Tommy Junior to shinny up a pole and grab the coins laid on the top—how Edison had finally had to rub rosin on the inside of the boy’s knees so that he could get traction. It had had to be done, though, the children needed to be insulated every so often, for their own good.

  He was hopping awkwardly, and the whoops of his breath burned his throat and nose. At least no one was out on this street at the moment; to his left, beyond a chain-link fence that he grabbed at again and again to keep his balance, dusty old hulks of cars sat in a closed bodywork lot, and the little houses on the opposite side of the street were dark.

  One of Kootie’s bouncing shoes had caught him a good clunk under the chin, and his ankle was flaring with pain, when Edison finally let him duck around a Dumpster in an empty parking lot and sit down on a fallen telephone pole to catch his breath. The nearest streetlight had gone out when Kootie had pranced past beneath it, and now as he sat and panted he watched the light’s glow on the nearest cinder-block wall fade through red toward black.

  Kootie’s mouth hissed and flapped as he and Edison both tried to use it at once. Kootie rolled his eyes and relaxed, then listened to Edison gasp out, quietly, “If I was your father—I’d wash out your mouth—with soap.”

  Kootie had heard the phrase before, but this time he got a clear impression of a father actually doing that to a son, and he shuddered at the picture. Kootie’s own father had not ever punished him physically, always instead discussing each error with him in a “helpful dialogue,” after which the transgression was respected as having contributed to a “learning experience” that would build his “self-esteem.”

  “Well; that’s plain bullshit,” Edison went on in a halting whisper, apparently having caught Kootie’s thought. “When I was six years old I burned down my father’s barn—I was trying to … ditch a playmate who’d been following me around for a year or so, of course at that age I didn’t know about tricks like blowing up your footprints with firecrackers!” He wheezed, apparently laughing. “Oh, no! Burned to the ground, my father’s barn did, and my little friend was still no more ditched than my shadow was. What was I saying? Oh—so I burned down the barn, and do you think my father discussed it with me, called it a—what was it?”

  “A learning experience,” said Kootie dully. “No, I suppose he didn’t.”

  “I’ll say. He invited all the neighbors and their children to come watch, and then he damn well whipped the daylights out of me, right there in the Milan town square!”

  Kootie sniffed, and from across all the subsequent years of the old man’s accumulated experiences, a trace of that long-ago boy’s remembered despair and fear and humiliation brushed Kootie’s mind.

  For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then Kootie whispered, “Can I put my shoes and socks back on now?”

  “Yes, son.” He sighed. “That was for your own good, you know. We’ll do better evasion tricks when we get the time, but the gunpowder cakewalk will probably have foxed your—what was it? one-armed murderer?—for a while. Slow him down, at least.” Kootie’s hand wavered out, palm down and fingers spread, and then just wobbled back to the splintery surface of the wooden pole. “You’re tired, aren’t you? We’ll find some place to sleep, after we’ve taken one or two more precautions. This looks like a big city, we’ll be able to do something. Before all this started up, I had the impression I was in Los Angeles—is that where we are?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Kootie. “Not in the best part of it.”

  “Better for our purposes, maybe. Let’s move east a couple of blocks here, and keep our eyes open.”

  “Which way’s east?”

  “Turn right at that light. Need directions, always ask a ghost.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “I have tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, why, then they’re a kind of serpent: that’s all I can say.”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  IN THE OFFICE ON the ground floor of his apartment building, Solomon Shadroe had finally stopped staring at the horizontal white line on the television screen, and had plodded to his desk to resume doing the month’s-end paperwork.

  He didn’t like the line being there on the screen at all, but at least it had stopped flaring and wiggling.

  At last he pushed his chair back from his desk; he had finished writing the October c
hecks and had then laboriously calculated the balance left in the account. As he stared at the worn blotter it occurred to him that pencil shavings looked like scraps of garlic and onion skins—his desk looked as though someone had been chopping together a battuto.

  Garlic and onions—he remembered liking them, though he couldn’t remember anymore what they had tasted like. Something like fresh sweat, he thought as he stood up, and a fast hot pulse.

  His cup of Eat-’Em-&-Weep tea was lukewarm, but he drank off the last inch of it, tilting the cup to get the last sticky red drops. He put the cup down on the cover of the old ledger-style checkbook and took a can of Goudie snuff out of the desk drawer.

  As he tapped out a pile of the brown powder onto his thumb-knuckle and raised it to his nose, he looked at the high built-in shelf on which sat three of his stuffed pigs. They had been burping away like bad boys during the half-minute when the line on the TV screen had been acting up, but—he looked again to make sure—the line was still motionless, and the pigs were quiet now. Johanna had the radio on, and the only noises in the office were the rolling urgencies of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”

  “Too loud?” asked Johanna from the couch where she lay reading a ladies’ magazine.

  Shadroe took a deep breath as he inhaled the snuff. “No. Just finished it up. Utility bills eating me alive. Gonna feed the beasties now.” He got to his feet and plodded to the shelves.

  “Oh good. Beasties!” she called to the screened window. “Din din din!”

  Shadroe pried two white paper plates out of a torn cellophane wrapper and laid them on the coffee table. Onto one he shook a handful of Happy Cat food pellets from a box on a chair. Then he dug a handful of smooth pebbles out of his shirt pocket and spread them on the other plate.

  He had taken Johanna to the Orange County fair this summer, and in one of the exhibit halls his attention had been caught by a display called the “Banquet of Rock Foods Collection.” The display had been an eclectic meal laid out on a lace tablecloth: on one plate sat a hamburger, pickles, french fries, olives, and what might have been a slice of pâté; on another sat a stack of pancakes with some jagged fragments of butter on top, with a sunny-side-up egg and two slices of underdone bacon alongside. There had been other things too, a narrow roast turkey with ruffled paper socks on the ends of the drumsticks, a thin slice of toast, a boiled egg in an egg cup. The thing was, they were all rocks. Somebody had scoured deserts all over the west to find pieces of rocks that looked like food items.

  He had wondered at the time if any raggedy old derelict had ever sat down at the table and tucked a napkin into his outermost grimy shirt. There had been a relish jar, Shadroe recalled, filled with tiny cubes of green glass—a spry old ghost could probably wolf down a spoonful of that before being hauled away.

  In the months since, he had been putting out two plates at night—one with catfood for the possums, as always, and one with delectable looking rocks for the poor hungry old wandering ghosts. The rocks were often gone when he came back from the boat in the morning. In a catalogue recently he had seen a set of Mikasa Parklane crystal candies for a sale price of eighteen bucks, and he meant to get some to dole out during the cold nights around Christmas.

  He had once read that Chinese people bury raw eggs in mud, and then dig them up years later and eat them. When he thought about that he was just glad that he couldn’t remember taste, but apparently Loretta deLarava was not so fastidious—she didn’t mind eating things that had long ago lost their freshness.

  In his head he made up a lyric for the pounding Springsteen song:

  Did your face catch fire once?

  Did they use a tire iron to put it out?

  It had been in 1962, on the set of Haunted House Party, that he had first met Loretta deLarava.

  He’d been trying to make the shift from being a teen TV star to getting young-adult movie roles, but couldn’t seem to shake the Spooky persona he’d acquired during the five years of “Ghost of a Chance.” (People would keep asking to see him do the Spooky Spin, the dancelike whirl that, on the show, had always preceded his disappearing into thin air.) This was the fourth movie he’d worked in since CBS had canceled the series, and like the first three it had been a low-budget tongue-in-cheek horror picture, filmed at a pace almost as fast as TV work.

  The novice production assistant had probably been about thirty years old, though it was hard to be sure—she was already overweight even then, and her jaw and nose were noticeably misshapen even after evident reconstructive surgery. (Did they use a tire iron to put it out?) Her name was deLarava—she claimed that it had originally been two words but had been inadvertently combined into one, like DeMille’s, by a careless ad-copy writer. She had quickly outgrown the modest PA chores—somebody else had had to be found to make the coffee and drive to fetch paper clips and saber-saw blades, for, within days of starting, deLarava was filling out time cards and writing the daily production reports. Her credentials were hazy, but clearly she had had experience on a movie set.

  “Sun’s down,” said Shadroe after putting the plates outside and coming back in and closing the door. “Draw me a bath, will you—” He paused to inhale. “—sweetie?”

  Johanna put down the magazine and sat up. She glanced at the television screen, but the line was still steady and motionless. “Not ice?”

  “Ice,” he said firmly. “A lot of it.” He looked at the TV too, and sighed. Can’t wait till my alma mater actually goes nova, he thought. “Ice every night,” he went on in his labored voice. “Until Halloween’s past. Anybody from the building,” he added. “Should come knocking. Tell ’em I walked to the store, unless. There’s actual blood or fire.”

  “ ‘Sol,’ “ said Johanna in a drawling imitation of a tenant they’d had for a while, “I heard a noise?—in the parking lot?—so I shoveled your mailbox full of dirt.’ ”

  The tenant had thought he’d smelled gas from a neighboring apartment, and, unable to reach Shadroe, had in a panic broken out all the windows in his own apartment. In the years since that tenant had left, Shadroe and Johanna had endlessly amplified on the man’s possible responses to emergencies.

  “Heh heh,” said Shadroe levelly.

  The couch springs twanged as Johanna levered herself up, and then the floorboards creaked as she padded barefoot to the next room; after a few seconds he heard water booming into the big old claw-footed cast-iron bathtub he had installed in there a couple of years ago. He used to take makeshift showers at dawn out behind the garages, holding a lawn sprinkler over his head, but a tenant had seen him one time and complained to the police—even though Shadroe had always been wearing jockey shorts when he did it—and anyhow he had had to stop.

  Now he was wondering if even cold baths would work for much longer. He didn’t speak to people face-on anymore, even if he’d just chewed up an Eat-’Em-&-Weep ball, because of the way they would flinch at his breath; and he knew that his ankle, onto which he had squarely dropped that refrigerator two days ago, couldn’t possibly ever heal. He had wrapped it up tight with an Ace bandage, but it still hurt, and he wondered if he would be around long enough to get so tired of it that he would just saw the whole foot off.

  He was only fifty-two years old … or would have been, if he had still had any right to birthdays. At least he wasn’t a ghost.

  Loretta deLarava obviously wanted to finish him off now—as she had smashed him seventeen years ago—after having taken aim at him all the way back in ’62, on the set of Haunted House Party.

  She had known who he was—Nicky Bradshaw, star of “Ghost of a Chance,” godson to Apie Sullivan—but he had not realized who she was until that summer night when unseasonable rain had actually put rushing water in the L.A. River bed all the way up by the Fourth Street bridge, and the shooting of some zombie scene had had to be postponed.

  Everybody had been sitting around in the big, chilly brick warehouse in which the indoor sets had been built, and deLarava had kept loo
king at her watch. That was natural enough, since by that time she was practically the second assistant director on the picture, but after a while she had lit up a corncob pipe full of some vanilla-scented tobacco and gone wandering out into the rain. He had heard her whistling old tunes out there, specifically “Stormy Weather,” and when she had come back in she had ditched the pipe and had seemed to be stoned. At the time he had assumed that she’d been hiding the smell of grass or hash under the vanilla …

  Though in fact she had seemed wired, as if on cocaine or an amphetamine. As soon as she’d got back inside and shaken back her wet hair she had started talking nonstop in her hoarse, fake British accent—rambling on about her genius-plus IQ, and telling fragments of anecdotes that clearly had no point except to illustrate how competent she was, equal to any challenges and a master of subtle revenge upon anyone who might foolishly dismiss her as unimportant.

  The monologue had sat awkwardly with the crew and the youthful actors, all of whom had until then thought pretty highly of her. Bradshaw had been napping in a nest of rags in the costuming room, but the change in the tone of the conversation woke him, and he had wandered sleepily out into the big room.

  “I was married once,” deLarava was saying airily. “He was a very powerful figure in … an industry I’m not at liberty to name. He gave me everything I asked for, we had a big estate in Brentwood and a whole fleet of classic cars! But he couldn’t give me the gift I demand of a man—that I be the most important person in his life. His two children … occupied that spot.” (One of the crew wearily asked her what she had done about that, and deLarava simpered.) “We went on a picnic,” she said, “and I fixed potato salad just the way he liked it, with olives and red onions and celery seed, but I used a jar of mayonnaise that had been sitting out opened for a few days. And he had an appointment later that afternoon. Oh yes,” she went on as though someone had asked, “the most important appointment of his life. His precious children pigged down a lot of the potato salad too.”