He wanted to explain, but…
“Little man, you might be more trouble than you’re worth.”
A dog was licking the boy’s face—and abruptly, as if across a vast gulf, the boy remembered that the dog’s name was Fred; and then he remembered that his own name was Koot Hootie Parganas, not…Al?
His own memories flooded back, reclaiming his mind. He remembered that this was 1992, and that he was eleven years old, and until last night had lived in Beverly Hills—briefly he saw again the one-armed bum in his parents’ living room, and his parents’ blood-streaked bodies taped into chairs—and he knew that he was sitting in the car that belonged to his new friend, Raffle; and finally he remembered that he had opened his parents’ secret glass vial, and had sniffed whatever had been in it right up into his nose.
His forehead was icy with sudden sweat, and he grabbed the handle of the passenger-side window crank, thinking he was about to throw up; then Fred clambered into the back seat, and leaned between the two front seats to lick Kootie’s cheek again. Oddly, that made the boy feel better. He just breathed deeply, and alternately clenched and opened his hands. Whatever had happened to him was slowing down, tapering off.
“I’m okay,” he said carefully. “Nightmare. Hi, Fred.”
“Hello, Kootie,” said Raffle in a falsetto voice, and after a moment Kootie realized that the man was speaking for the dog. “Fred don’t know to call you Jacko,” explained Raffle in his own voice.
The boy managed a fragile smile.
Memories from a past life? he wondered. Visions? Maybe there was LSD in that vial!
But these were just forlorn, wishful notions. He knew with intimate immediacy what had happened.
He had inhaled some kind of ghost, the ghost of an old man who had lived a long time ago, and Kootie had briefly lost his own consciousness in the sudden onslaught of all the piled-up memories as the old man’s whole life had flashed before Kootie’s eyes. Kootie had not ever watched a playmate drown—that had been one of the earliest of the old man’s memories.
A shout of “Gee-haw!” and the snap of a whip as the driver kept the six-horse team moving, tugging a barge along the Milan canal, and the warm summer breeze up from the busy canal basin reeked of tanning hides and fresh-brewing beer…
Kootie forced the vision down. Milan was the name of a place in Italy, but this had been in…Ohio?
and a caravan of covered wagons, which he knew were about to head west, to find gold in California…
Kootie coughed harshly, spraying blood onto the dashboard.
“Oh, dammit, Jacko. You sick? I don’t need a sick kid…”
“No,” said Kootie, suddenly afraid that the man might order him out of the car right here. “I’m fine.” He leaned forward and swiped at the blood, drops with his sleeve. “Like I said, it was just a nightmare.” He closed his eyes carefully, but the intrusive memories seemed to have trickled to a stop. Only the last few, the chronologically earliest ones, had hit him slowly enough to be comprehensible. “Are we gonna do some more business tonight?”
After a few moments Raffle gave him a doubtful smile. “Well, okay, yeah, I believe we will. After dark, and until ten o’clock, at least, a homeless dad-and-son tableau has gotta be worth booyah, out west of the 405 where the guilty rich folks live. You want to eat?”
Kootie realized that in fact he was very hungry. “Oh, yes, please,” he said.
“Great.” Rattle got out of the car, walked around to the front and lifted the hood. “I trust you like Mexican cuisine,” he called.
“Love it!” Kootie called back, hoping nothing was wrong with the car. His parents had often taken him to Mexican restaurants, though of course they had made sure he ordered only vegetarian things like chiles rellenos, not cooked in lard. He was picturing bowls of corn chips and chunky red salsa on a table, and he wanted to get there very soon.
Now Raffle was coming back and getting inside, but he had not closed the hood, and he was carrying a foil-wrapped package which, Kootie realized when the man sat down and began gingerly unwrapping it, was hot and smelled like chili and cilantro.
“Burritos,” Raffle said. “I buy these cold in the morning and drive around all day with ’em wedged in between the manifold and the carb. Plenty hot by dinnertime.”
Newspapers from underfoot turned out to be informal place mats, and silverware was a couple of plastic forks from the console tray; unlike Raffle’s “pipes,” the forks had obviously not ever been considered disposable.
Kootie made himself stop imagining a hot plate with a couple of enchiladas swimming in red sauce and melted cheese. This burrito was hot, at least; and the spices nearly concealed the faint taste of motor oil and exhaust fumes.
He wondered if the ghostly intruder in his head was aware of the events happening out here in Kootie’s world; and for just a moment he had the impression of…of someone profoundly horrified in a long-feared hell. Kootie found himself picturing walking quickly past a cemetery at night, and being afraid to sleep for more than an hour at a time, and, somehow, sitting crouched on the cowcatcher of an old locomotive racing through a cold night.
Kootie shuddered, and after that he just concentrated on the burrito, and on thwarting the dog’s cheerful interest in the food, and on the shadows on the dark street outside the car windows.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“You may not have lived much under the sea—” (“I haven’t” said Alice)—“and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—” (Alice began to say “I once tasted—” but checked herself hastily, and said, “No, never”)—“so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster-Quadrille is!”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
IN Wilmington the glow of dawn was held back by the yellow flares of the Naval Fuel Reserve burn, huge flames gouting out of towering pipes at the top of a futuristic structure of white metal scaffolding and glaring sodium-vapor lights; below it and inland, on the residential streets around Avalon and B Street, shaggy palm trees screened the old Spanish-style houses from some of the all-night glare.
Pete Sullivan tilted a pan of boiling water over his McDonald’s cup and watched the instant-coffee crystals foam brown when the water hit them. When the cup was nearly full he put the pan back on the tiny propane stove and turned off the burner.
As he sipped the coffee, he switched off the overhead light and then pulled back the curtain and looked out through the vans side window at this Los Angeles morning.
The money-scapular was pasted to his sweaty chest, for he hadn’t known this area well enough to sleep comfortably with a window open.
Last night he had driven aimlessly south from his early-evening nap stop at La Cienega Park, and only after he’d found himself getting off the 405 at Long Beach Boulevard did he consciously realize that he must have come down here to look at the Queen Mary.
To put that off, he had resolved to have something good for dinner first, and then had been shocked to find that the Joe Jost’s bar and restaurant on Third Street was gone. He’d made do with a pitcher of beer and a cold ham sandwich at some pizza parlor, disconsolately thinking of the Polish sausage sandwiches and the pickled eggs and the pretzels-with-peppers that Joe Jost’s used to have.