Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  He knew he’d have to prove himself here, in spite of being virtually broke and so terribly young—here in Boston, his first big city—

  Boston?

  He reached a hand out from under the drop cloth and opened the door. It squeaked out on its rusty hinges and let in a gust of fresh morning air that smelled distantly of what he knew must be coal smoke and horse manure—and then Kootie was glad he was sitting down, for he was suddenly so dizzy that he grabbed the edge of the seat.

  “You’re,” croaked his own voice, “don’t tell me—Kootie.” After a moment he said, voluntarily, “Right.” Then his voice went on, thickly, “I was dreaming. This isn’t Boston, is it? Nor New Jersey yet. It’s … Los Angeles.” His eyes closed and his hands came up and rubbed his eye sockets. “Sorry,” said his voice as his right hand sprang away from the painful swelling around his right eye.

  When he looked around again, it was typical backstreet Los Angeles that he saw and smelled around him: low stuccoed buildings and palm trees, and the smells of diesel exhaust and gardenias; above a three-story building a couple of blocks away, crows were diving over the condenser fans of a big rooftop air-conditioner shed and then lofting up on the hot air drafts, over and over again. Only a few wires drooped overhead from the telephone poles.

  The night air had been cold, and Kootie’s nose was stuffed—after he sniffed, his jammed-up sinuses emitted an almost ultrasonic wheee, like the flash attachment on a camera recharging.

  “All this running around is doing you no good at all, son,” Edison had croaked then. “And I’m not getting any fresher out here. To hell with New Jersey. Let’s get to the sea. I’ll be able to just go into the seawater, safely, and be gone; and you’ll be free of me, free to go be a normal boy.”

  Kootie had not said anything then, as he climbed stiffly out of the car, stretched as well as he could with the heavy I-ON-A-CO cable belt constricting his waist, and limped toward the lot fence; but he thought the old Edison ghost could probably tell that Kootie didn’t want to lose him.

  Where will I go?” asked Kootie softly now as he clambered painfully down the steps of the bus exit and hopped to the Manchester sidewalk. “I’ll need money.”

  All at once, into the muted early-afternoon air, “You’re young!” shouted Edison with Kootie’s shrill voice. “You’re still alive! You can send and receive as fast as any of them!” Kootie was hobbling away from the bus stop as quickly as he could, not looking at any of the faces around him, his own face burning with embarrassed horror and all feelings of maturity completely blown away.

  He caught a breath and choked out, “Shut up!”—but Edison used the rest of the breath to yell, “Skedaddle to the Boston office of Western Union! I’ve got to get to New Jersey anyway, to pick up my diploma!” Kootie was sweating now in the chilly breeze, and he had clenched his teeth against his own squawking voice, but Edison kept yelling anyway: “The usual job! Napping during night work, with the ghost repellers popping and the gizmo sending your sixing signals on the hour!”

  Kootie tried to shout Be quiet! but Edison was trying to say something more, and the resulting scream was something like “Baklava!” (which was a kind of pastry Kootie’s parents had sometimes brought home for him).

  Kootie was just crying and running blindly in despair now, blundering against pedestrians and light poles, and he wasn’t aware of slapping footsteps behind him until a pair of hands clasped his shoulders and yanked him back to a stop.

  “Kid,” said a man’s concerned voice, “what’s the matter? Was somebody bothering you? Where do you live? My wife and I can drive you home.”

  Kootie turned into the man’s arms and sobbed against a wool sweater. “The beach,” he hiccupped; “the police—I don’t know where I’ve got to go. I’m lost, mister.” Blessedly, Edison seemed to have withdrawn.

  “Well, you’re okay now, I promise. I hopped out of our car at the light when I saw you running—my wife is driving around the block. Let’s go back and catch her at the corner, away from all these people here.”

  Kootie was happy to do as the man said. Several of the people behind him on the corner were laughing, and somebody called out a filthy suggestion about what he should do once he had skedaddled to New Jersey and picked up his “dipshit diploma.” It horrified Kootie to think that adults could be the same as kids; and now even Edison was drunk or had gone crazy or something.

  As he walked along quickly beside the man who had stopped him, Kootie looked up at his rescuer. The man had short blond hair and round, wire-rim glasses, and he looked tanned and fit, as if he played tennis. He still had one hand on Kootie’s right shoulder, and Kootie reached up and clasped the man’s wrist.

  “Here she is, kid,” the man said kindly as a shiny new teal-blue minivan came nosing up to the Manchester curb. “Are you hungry? We can stop for a bite to eat if you like.”

  The passenger door had swung open, and a dark-haired young woman in shorts had one knee up and was leaning across the seat and smiling uncertainly. “Well, hi there, kiddo,” she said as Kootie let go of the man’s wrist and hurried to the minivan.

  “Hi, ma’am,” Kootie said, pausing humbly on the curb. “Your husband said you could give me a ride.”

  She laughed. “Hop in then.”

  Kootie hiked himself up, and then climbed around the console to crouch behind the passenger seat as the man got in and closed the door. The interior of the minivan smelled like a new pair of dress shoes straight out of the Buster Brown box.

  “Let’s head toward the 405, Eleanor,” the man said, “just to get moving. And if you see a Denny’s—did you want something to eat, uh, young man?” The minivan started forward, and Kootie sat down on the blue-carpeted floor.

  “My name’s Koot Hoomie,” he said breathlessly, having decided to trust these people. “I’m called Kootie. Yes, please, about eating—but some kind of takeout would be better. I get screaming fits sometimes. You saw. It’s not like I’m crazy, or anything.” He tried to remember the name of the ailment that made some people yell terrible things, but couldn’t. All he could think of was Failure to Thrive, which an infant cousin of his had reportedly died of. Kootie probably had that too. “It’s that syndrome,” he finished lamely.

  “Tourette’s, probably,” the man said. “I’m Bill Fussel, and this is my wife, Eleanor. Have you had any sleep, Kootie? There are blankets back there.”

  “No thanks,” said Kootie absently, “I slept in an old car last night.” Get to the beach, he thought; let crazy Edison jump into the sea, and then these nice people can adopt me. “Can we go to the beach? Any beach. I want to … wade out in the water, I guess.” He tried to think of a plausible reason for it, and decided that anything he came up with would sound like a kid lie. Then, “My parents died Monday night,” he found himself saying to the back of Mr. Fussel’s head. “In our religion it’s a purifying ritual. We’re Hindus.”

  He had no idea whether it had been Edison or himself that had said it, nor if any of it was true. I suppose we might have been Hindus, he thought. In school I always just put down Protestant.

  “A beach?” said Mr. Fussel. “I guess we could go out to Hermosa or Redondo. Elly, why don’t we stop somewhere and you can call your mom and let her know we’ll be a little late.”

  For a moment no one spoke, and the quiet burr of the engine was the only sound inside the minivan.

  “Okay,” said Mrs. Fussel.

  “Where does your mom live?” asked Kootie, again not sure it was himself who had spoken.

  “Riverside,” said Mrs. Fussel quickly.

  “Where in Riverside? I used to live there.”

  “Lamppost and Riverside Drive,” Mrs. Fussel said, and Kootie saw her dart a harried glance at her husband.

  Now Kootie knew it was Edison speaking for him, for with no intention at all he found himself saying, “There are no such streets in Riverside.” Kootie didn’t know if there were or not, and certainly Edison didn’t either. Why are you be
ing rude? he thought hard at the Edison ghost in his mind.

  “I guess she knows where her mother lives,” Mr. Fussel began in a stern voice, but Kootie was interrupting:

  “Very well, name for me any five big streets in Riverside.”

  “We don’t go there a lot—” said Mrs. Fussel weakly.

  Mr. Fussel turned around in his seat and faced Kootie. He was frowning. “What’s the matter, Kootie? Do you want us to drive you back to that corner and let you out?”

  “Yes,” Kootie’s voice said firmly, and then Edison kept Kootie’s jaw clamped shut so that his No! came out as just a prolonged “Nnnnn!”

  “That’s a dangerous neighborhood,” Mr. Fussel said.

  “Then let me out—dammit!—right—here! Kootie, let me talk! It’s kidnapping if you people keep me in this vehicle!”

  Mrs. Fussel spoke up. “Let’s let him out and forget the whole thing.”

  “Eleanor, he’s sick, listen to him! It would be the same as murder if we left him out on these streets. It’s our duty to call the police.” The man had got up out of the passenger seat and turned swayingly to face Kootie. “And even if we have to call in the police, we’ll still get the twenty thousand dollars.”

  Kootie spun toward the sliding door in the side of the van, but before he could grab the handle the man had lunged at him and whacked him hard in the chest with his open palm, and Kootie jackknifed sideways onto the back seat; he was gasping, trying to suck air into his lungs and get his legs onto the floor so that he could spring toward Mrs. Fussel and perhaps wrench at the steering wheel, but Mr. Fussel gave him a stunning slap across the face and then strapped the seat belt across him, and pulled the strap tight through the buckle, with Kootie’s arms under the woven fabric. The boy could thrash back and forth, but his arms were pinioned. He was squinting in the new brightness, for the man had knocked his sunglasses off.

  “If you,” Kootie gasped, his heart hammering, “let me go—I won’t tell the police—that you hit me—and tied me up.”

  Mr. Fussel had to duck his head to stand in the back of the minivan, and now he rocked on his feet and slapped the ceiling to keep his balance. “Drive carefully!” he shouted at his wife. “If a cop pulls us over right now we’re fucked!”

  Kootie could hear Mrs. Fussel crying. “Don’t talk like that in front of the boy! I’m pulling over, and you’re going to let him out!”

  “Do as she says,” Edison grated, “or I’ll say you gave me the shiner, too. Kept me for days.”

  Mr. Fussel was pale. For a moment he looked as though he might hit Kootie again; then he disappeared behind the rear seat and began clanking around among some metal objects. When he reappeared he was peeling a strip off a silvery roll of duct tape.

  A sudden intrusive vision: two stark figures strapped into chairs with duct tape, eye sockets bloody and empty …

  Edison was blown aside in Kootie’s mind as the boy screamed with all the force of his aching lungs, clenching his fists and his eyes and whipping his head back and forth, dimly aware of the minivan slewing as the noise battered the carpeted interior—but the strip of tape scraped in between Kootie’s jaws and then more tape was being wound roughly around the back of his head, over his chin, around his bucking head again and over his upper lip.

  Kootie was breathing whistlingly, messily, through his nose. He heard tape rip, and then Mr. Fussel was taping Kootie’s elbows and forearms to the seat belt.

  Against the tape that his teeth were grinding at, Kootie was grunting and huffing, and after two or three blind, impacted seconds he realized that his lips and tongue were trying to form words; they couldn’t, around the tape, but he could feel what his mouth was trying to say:

  Stop it! Stop it! Listen to me, boy! You might die even if you calm down and stay alert, watch for a chance to run, but you’ll certainly die if you keep thrashing and screaming like a big baby! Come on, son, be a man!

  Kootie let the mania carry him for one more second, howling out of him to swamp Edison’s words in a torrent of unreasoning noise; finally the muffled scream wobbled away to silence, leaving his lungs empty and aching. He raised his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, held it for a moment, and then let them slump back down—and the panic fell away from him, leaving him almost calm, though the pounding of his heart was visibly twitching his shirt collar.

  Kootie was motionless now, but as tense as a flexed fencing foil. He told himself that Edison was right; he had to stay alert. Nobody was going to kill him right here in these people’s minivan; eventually someone would have to cut him free of this seat, and he could pretend to be asleep when they did, and then jump for freedom in the instant that the tape was cut.

  He was in control of himself again, coldly and deeply angry at the Fussels and already ashamed at having gone to pieces in front of them.

  And so he was surprised when he began weeping. His head jerked down and he was wailing “Hoo-hoo-hoo” behind the tape, on and on, even though he could feel drool moving toward the corner of his distended mouth.

  “For … God’s sake, William,” said Mrs. Fussel in a shrill monotone. “Have you gone crazy? You can’t—”

  “Pull over,” the man said, blundering back up toward the front of the van. “I’ll drive. This is the kid, El, it’s Koot Hoomie Parganas and he’s obviously an escaped nut! They’ll put him back in restraints as soon as we turn him over to them! I’ll… bite my arm, and say he did it. Or better, we’ll buy a cheap knife, and I’ll cut myself. He’s dangerous, we had to tape him up. And it’s twenty thousand goddamn dollars.”

  Kootie kept up his hoo-hooing, and did it louder when Mrs. Fussel turned the wheel to the right to pull over; and then he felt his drooling mouth try to grin around the tape as the three of them were jolted by the right front tire going up over the curb. Edison’s enjoying this, Kootie thought.

  Mr. Fussel slapped him across the face—it didn’t sting much this time, through the tape. “Shut up or I’ll run a loop of tape over your nose,” the man whispered.

  Edison winked Kootie’s good eye at Mr. Fussel. Kootie hoped Edison knew what he was doing here.

  The Fussels found a place to park in a lot somewhere—the windshield faced a close cinder-block wall so that no passersby would see the bound and gagged boy in the back of the minivan—and then Mr. Fussel picked some quarters out of a dish on the console and climbed out, locking the passenger door behind him.

  After several seconds of no sound but the quiet burr of the idling engine, Mrs. Fussel turned around in the driver’s seat.

  “He’s a nice man,” she said. Kootie could almost believe she was talking to herself. “We want to have children ourselves.”

  Kootie stared at the floor, afraid Edison would give her a sardonic look.

  “Neither of us knows how to deal with … a child with problems,” she went, on, “a runaway, a violent runaway. We don’t believe in hitting children. This was like when you have to hit someone who’s drowning, if you want to save them. Can you understand? If you tell the people from the hospital—or wherever it is that you live—if you tell them Bill hit you, we’ll have to tell them why he hit you, won’t we? Trying to bite, and yelling obscenities. That means nasty words,” she explained earnestly.

  Kootie forgot not to stare at her.

  “Your parents were murdered,” she said.

  He nodded expressionlessly.

  “Oh, good! That you knew it, I mean, that I wasn’t breaking the news to you. And I guess someone hit you in the eye. You’ve had a bad time, but I want you to realize that today really is the first day of your, of the rest of your—wait, you were living at home, weren’t you? The story in the paper said that. You weren’t in a hospital. Who’s put up this reward for you?”

  Kootie widened his eyes at her.

  “Relatives?”

  Kootie shook his head, slowly.

  “You don’t think it was the people that murdered your parents, do you?”

  Kootie nodded furiously
. “Mm-hmmm,” he grunted.

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.”

  Kootie rolled his eyes and then stared hard at her.

  After a moment her expression of concern wilted into dismay. “Oh, shit. Oh shit. Twenty thousand dollars? You were a witness!”

  Close enough. Rocking his head back and humming loudly was as close as Kootie could come to conveying congratulations.

  She was saying “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” as she got out of the seat and stepped over the console, and then she was prying with her fingernails at the tape edges around his wrists.

  The tape wasn’t peeling up at all, and Kootie didn’t waste hope imagining that she’d free him. He wasn’t surprised when keys rattled against the outside of the passenger door and the lock clunked and then Mr. Fussel was leaning in.

  “What are you doing, El? Get away from—”

  “He’s a witness, Bill! The people that killed his parents are—are the ones you just called! Did you tell them where we are? Let’s get out of here right now!” She hurried back up front to the driver’s seat and grabbed the gearshift lever.

  Mr. Fussel gripped her hand. “Where’d you get all that, El? He can’t even talk. These people sounded okay.”

  “Then let’s drive somewhere and let Goaty talk to us, and you can call them back if we’re sure it’s all right.”

  “Mm-hmm!” put in Kootie as loudly as he could.

  “El, they’ll be here in ten minutes. We can talk to them right here, this is a public place, he’ll be safe. It’s his safety I’m concerned with; what if we have an accident driving? We’re both upset—”

  “An accident? I won’t have an accident. They can—”

  “They’re bringing cash, El! We can’t expect them to be driving all over L.A. with that kind of cash, in these kinds of neighborhoods!”

  “You’re worried about them? They killed his—”