He remembered a joke his father had liked to telclass="underline"
What do you make your shoes out of?
Hide.
Hide? Why should I hide?
No, hide! Hide! The cow’s outside!
Well, let her in, I’m not afraid.
I’M AFRAID, Sullivan thought. Yo soy culero.
He had seen a pay telephone on the back wall by the restroom doors, and now he slid a couple of quarters from the scatter of change on the table and stood up. See if you can’t establish a solider home base, he thought as he walked steadily to the phone. Clausewitz’s first piano concerto.
Be there, Steve, he thought as he punched in the remembered number. Don’t have moved.
He heard only one ring before someone picked it up at the other end. “Hello?”
“Hi,” Sullivan said cautiously, “is Steve Lauter there please?”
“This is Steve. Hey, this sounds like Pete Sullivan! Is that you, man?”
“Or an unreasonable facsimile.” Steve had been working at some credit union in the eighties. Sullivan wondered if he was about to leave for work. “Listen, I’m in L.A. for a couple of days, I was thinking we should get together.”
“I can have a case of Classic Coke on the premises when you get here,” said Steve heartily. “Where are you staying?”
“Well,” said Sullivan, grateful that Steve had so readily provided a cue, “I’m sleeping in my van. It’s got a bed in it, and a stove—”
“No, you stay here. I insist. How soon can you be here?”
Sullivan recalled that Steve had been married, and he wanted to shave and shower before showing up at his old friend’s door. “Aren’t you working today?”
“I get Wednesdays off. I was just going to mow the lawn today.”
“Well, I’ve got a couple of errands to run,” Sullivan said, “people to see. This afternoon? I’ll give you a call first. Are you still off Washington and Crenshaw?”
“Naw, man, I moved west of the 405, in Sawtelle where the cops don’t pull you over if you’re in a decent car. Let me give you the address, I’m at—”
“I’ll get it when I call you back,” Sullivan interrupted. “And I’ll watch the speed limits on the way, I don’t think I’m in a decent car.”
“Make it soon, Pete.”
“You bet. I’ll bring some…Michelob, right?”
“It’s Amstel Light these days, but I’ve got plenty.”
“I’ll bring some anyway.”
“Are you drinking now? Old Teet himself?”
“Only when it’s sunny out.”
Steve laughed, a little nervously. “That’s every day, here, boy, you know that. I’ll be by the phone when you call.”
After he had hung up, Sullivan stood beside the phone in the dark hallway. His mouth tasted of menudo and beer, and he wished he hadn’t left his cigarettes out on the table, for there was another call to make. A siren wailed past outside, and he slid his other quarter into the slot. He remembered the studio number too.
After two rings, “Chapel Productions,” said a woman’s voice.
Good Lord, he thought, that’s new. “Could I talk to Loretta deLarava, please. This is Donahue at Raleigh.” He wondered if deLarava still used Raleigh for special postproduction work, and if Donahue was still there.
He had no intention of speaking to deLarava, and was ready to hang up if she came on the line, but the woman said, “Ms. DeLarava is at lunch—no, that’s right, she’s doing a timely in Venice. Might be a while.”
Sullivan’s face was chilly with sweat again, and he glanced at the men’s-room door, measuring the distance to it—but the surge of nausea passed. “Okay,” he said, breathing shallowly, “I’ll try later.”
He juggled the receiver back onto the hook and swayed back to his table. Sitting down, he lifted the bottle and drank the last of the beer.
Order another? he thought. No. Can’t A.O.P. in these narrow old streets, and you sure don’t need a drunk-driving arrest. What the hell is she doing in Venice today! Halloween’s three days off. At worst, this is just a reconnaissance scouting trip for what she’ll be doing then—and maybe something timely really is happening there. He thought about driving out there to see, and discovered that he could not.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I’m sure I didn’t mean—” Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted her impatiently.
“That’s just what I complain of! You should have meant! What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
SOMETIMES Kootie would be kind to the poor things, putting wooden croutons in the soup so that there would be something they could eat at the dinner table; but today, when he was trying to inoculate his children, he didn’t want the things around, so he was smoking a cigar made of paper and horsehair. It tasted horrible, but at least there were no indistinct forms hunching around the gate.
His children weren’t cooperating—Kootie had got them out on the lawn barefoot, and he was throwing little Chinese firecrackers to make the children dance away from their exploded footprints, but they were crying; and when he set up a pole with coins at the top, his son Tommy couldn’t climb it, and Kootie had to rub rosin on the boy’s knees and shout at him before he managed it.
It hadn’t been easy for Kootie to learn these tricks—he was deaf, and had to bite the telephone receiver in order to hear by bone conduction. Now in the dream he was biting one of the firecrackers, lighting it as if it was one of the awful cigars, and when it went off it jolted him awake.
His warm, furry pillow was awake too—Fred had scrambled up at the noise, and Kootie sat up on the pile of videocasette rewinders in the back seat of Raffle’s car. Outside, bright morning sun lit the tops of old office buildings. Kootie straightened the sunglasses an his nose.
“That roused the sleepyheads,” said Raffle from the driver’s seat. “Backfire, sorry.” He revved the engine, and the whole car shook. “You were both twitching in your sleep,” Raffle went on. Kootie watched the back of his gray head bob in time with the laboring engine. “I always wonder what city dogs dream about. Can’t be chasing rabbits, they’ve never seen a rabbit. Screwing, probably. I always used to want to do it with my wife doggie-style, but I could never get her to come out in the yard.”
Raffle was laughing now as he hefted the bottle of Corona beer he’d bought late last night, and he wedged it under the dashboard and popped off the cap.
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 LA. 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.