Cinnamon tears were still running down his slack cheeks, and his hands were still trembling, but, when he had plodded back into the office, he crouched and picked up Kootie’s limp, breathing body and straightened up again with no sense of effort. He even stood on his bad right ankle long enough to hook the outside door open with the left, and felt no twinge of pain.
Shutting down, he thought.
The boy whined in his sleep as the chilly evening air ruffled his sweat-damp hair. Every step Bradshaw took across the shadowed asphalt seemed to be the snap of a television being turned off, the slam of a door in an emptied building, the thump of a yellowed copy of Spooked being tossed out of a vacated apartment onto a ruptured vinyl beanbag chair in an alley. I am unmaking myself, he thought. I am looking at a menu and pointing past the flowing script on the vellum page, past the margin and the deckle edge, right off the cover of the menu, at, finally, the crushed cigarette butts in the ashtray.
“I believe I feel like Death Warmed Over this evening,” he said out loud.
Aside from a remote sadness that was almost nostalgia, he had no feelings about his decision not to kill Kootie and inhale the Edison ghost: not guilt at having considered doing it, nor satisfaction at having decided not to. He had held the knife beside the boy’s ear for several minutes, knowing that he could hide the body in one of the several freezers in the garages, and that Pete Sullivah and the Angelica woman would believe him when he told them that the boy must have run away; knowing too that he would be able thereafter to sleep again, and dream.
Had it been the thought of the sort of dreams he might have had, that had made him finally pull back the knife? He didn’t think so. Even if the dreams had proved to be uniformly horrible—of the day he learned of his stepfather’s death, for example, or the summer-of-’75 week he had spent drunk and freshly dead inside the refrigerator on the Alaskan trawler in the Downtown Long Beach Marina, or whatever detail-memories the murdering of Kootie would have given him—he still thought he could have lived with them.
In the end he just hadn’t been able to justify extending the mile-markers of his personal highway by reducing this living boy to one of them.
At the apartment door now, he set the boy upright against the wall, and held him in place with one hand while he opened the door with the other. Then he got his arms under the boy’s arms and knees again and carried him inside.
Bradshaw knelt to lay Kootie on the floor where he had been napping earlier. The boy began snoring, and Bradshaw got to his feet and left the apartment, being sure that the door was locked behind him.
Back in his office he sat down on the couch without bothering to turn on any lights. The desk was bare—the components of the telephone had been disassembled and laid in a cardboard box, and Bradshaw had not brought the television set back in. His charred pigs, relieved of their malignant batteries, lay in a heap in the corner. Distantly he wondered if he would ever again marshal his warning systems.
He reached around behind the arm of the couch and pulled free the broom, then clutched the straw end and boomed the top of the stick twice against the ceiling.
Tomorrow, he thought, I’d like to drive to the Hollywood Cemetery myself, and lie down on one of those green slopes and just sleep. But I’ve been dead for seventeen years—God knows how bad it might be. The explosion might knock half the mausoleums off their foundations.
He heard Johanna’s door slam upstairs, and then in the quiet night he could hear the faint ringing of the metal stairs. There was silence when she had got down to the asphalt, and then came a knock at the door.
“Come in,” he said. “It’s not locked.”
Johanna pushed the door open and stepped inside. “Not by accident?” she said in a concerned voice. “Always you lock it. And won’t you get your pigs and TV back up?”
“I don’t think, so,” he said. Sweetie-pie.” He inhaled, and then made words of the sigh: “Bring me a can of snuff, would you please? (Gasp) And then sit here by me.”
The couch shifted when she sat down. “And no lights,” she said.
“No.” He took the snuff can from her extended hand and twisted the lid. “Tomorrow is Halloween,” he said. “All these things we’ve had up through this night—will be broken up and lost. Like a rung bell finally stopping ringing—but. When dawn comes. Find it a sweet day, Johanna. Find it a blessed day. Live in the living world. While it lasts for you. I hope it may see you happy, and not hungry. Not hurt, not crying. Every one of me will be watching over you. To help, with all of whatever I’m worth then.”
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 FORTY ONE
“—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.