“And hang a string from the radiator cap,” Raffle agreed, “so you could steam ess-cargo.” He patted the crumpled silvery bulge. “Think that’s gonna stay wedged in there?”
Kootie didn’t answer. He had just looked up into an enormous color photograph of his own face, and for a dizzy moment he couldn’t guess the distance or the size of the thing. He blinked and bobbed his head, and then the image fell into its proper scale.
Behind Raffle and way above his head, in a wide metal bracket on the second floor of the building they’d parked in front of, a billboard had been hung its bright and unfaded colors made it stand out from the weathered beer and cigarette signs around it.
The right third of it was a huge color blowup of Kootie’s own fifth-grade school photo. And the words on the billboard were in Spanish, but the meaning was clear:
RECOMPENSA DINERO POR ESTE NINO PERD1DO,
SE LLAMA CUT HUMI
LA ULTIMO VES QUE LO VI LUNES, 26 DE OCTUBRE,
EN BULEVA SUNSET
$20,000 LLAMA (213) JKL KOOT $20,000
NO PREGUNTAS
Kootie began whistling, and he shuffled to the driver s-side door and pulled it open, letting the thumb-button on the handle snap out loudly.
“Want me to drive?” he asked with a broad smile.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Alice thought to herself “I never should try to remember my name in the middle of an accident!…”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
RAFFLE was frowning at him in puzzlement over the top of the hood. “No, Jacko,” he” said, slamming it down. “Nor do I want Fred to drive. Get in on your own side.”
“I can scoot across.” Kootie got in the car and then hiked and dragged himself over the console into the passenger seat, so that Raffle’s attention would be drawn down at him rather than up toward the billboard. Kootie’s face was chilly with sweat, and his T-shirt was wet under the heavy flannel shirt. He was whistling again to hold the older man’s attention, whistling Raffle’s another pizza pie tune because he couldn’t think of anything else; he knew that with his bad ankle he wouldn’t be able to outrun Raffle, if it came to that.
But now Raffle had coaxed the dog into the back seat, and had got in himself and closed the door. “Are all little kids as crazy as you?”
Kootie was glad that his sunglasses were hiding the alarm that must still be shining in his eyes. “I’m not a little kid,” he said, hoping his heartbeat would slow down once the car got moving. “I’m an eighty-four-year-old…midget.”
“Mayor of the Munchkin City,” recited Raffle in a high, solemn voice as he cranked the starter, “in the county of the land of Oz.” The engine caught, and the car shook.
“Follow the yellow brick road,” quacked Kootie.
Raffle clanked the car into gear, nosed it forward, and steered it north again on Broadway. Kootie ruffled Fred’s fur and stole a glance back at the receding white rectangle that was the billboard, and he wondered who was offering the $20,000 “recompensa” One last quote from The Wizard of Oz occurred to him. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto,” he told Fred softly and self-consciously.
In the next two blocks they crossed over an invisible thermocline border, from hot, colorful third-world agitation into an area of tall, clean gray buildings, and streets with young trees planted along the sidewalks at measured intervals, and new cars and men in dark suits.
They turned left on Beverly and then parked in a broad pay lot off Hope Street. “We’ll make booyah more than the seven bucks it costs to park here,” said Raffle confidently as they piled out of the car and he opened the trunk to get his WILL WORK FOR FOOD—HOMELESS VIETNAM VET WITH MOTHERLESS SON sign; “so it’s no problem parking on credick.” (Kootie guessed that Raffle had derived his pronunciation of credit from the way people generally said credit cards.) The whoosh of trucks on the Hollywood Freeway, muffled by the tall hedge of the shoulder at the north end of the lot, was like low random surf on the lee side of a jetty
They had slept in the car last night, and Kootie had noticed that Raffle slept only a few hours between medication runs. He hoped that tonight they might crash for a while in a motel—the sight of the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, standing as imposing as foreign capitol buildings on the wide, elevated, tree-shaded plaza across the intersection of Temple and Hope, reminded him of the Los Angeles he used to live in, and he yearned for the gracious luxury of a shower.
Kootie limped across the asphalt of the parking lot, holding the end of the belt that was Fred’s leash. The dog lunged at a couple of prancing pigeons, and Kootie tried to hop after him but turned his bad ankle and went painfully to his knees on the pavement. For a moment the world went from color to black-and-white.
“You’re just gettin’ beat to bits, Jacko,” said Raffle sympathetically as he helped the boy back up to his feet. “Here, I’ll take Fred.”
Kootie wasn’t crying, though the pain in his ankle was like a razory-high violin note, and he was sure blood must be trickling down his shin under his pants. “Okay,” he managed to gasp, blindly handing Raffle the end of the belt.
As soon as Kootie was able to breathe smoothly he spoke, to show that he was okay.
“What ‘work’ do we do,” he asked, “for food?”
The people who had given them stray one-dollar bills and pocket-warmed handfuls of change yesterday and last night had clearly been just paying an urban toll, but here he could imagine getting a twenty or two, and being given some actual task.
They stopped at the Temple Street curb. “Well,” said Raffle, squinting around at the wide, clean streets, “you gotta anticipate. It’s no good saying ‘I gotta go buy my gardening tools back out of hock’ if the guy turns out to have gardening tools. The basic trick is ‘Gimme forty bucks right now and I’ll be at the address in a couple of hours,’ see? With you along it should be easy. ‘My boy’s sick, I just need thirty bucks to stash him in a motel bed, and then I’ll be right over.’ A cough or two from you, and the guy’s some kind of monster if he don’t cooperate.”
The light changed, and they crossed Temple, Fred tugging eagerly at the leash in Raffle’s knobby fist.
“So we don’t do any actual work at all,” Kootie said, relieved in spite of himself.
“Work is whatever you do that gets you a nice time, Jacko,” Raffle said, and you gotta figure out how to get the most for the least. Food, shelter, drink, dope. Some guys take a lot of R and R in jail, they don’t mind those orange jumpsuits, but that ain’t for me—my outstanding warrants are under different names, every one. In jail, speaking of your video rewinder, they start the movies at eight, but bedtime is nine, so you always miss the end of the movie. Could you live like that? And if you even smoke a cigarette—and one cigarette, in trade, costs you anywhere from four to eight items from the commissary, like soap or candy bars—a guy hiding in the air-conditioning vent or somewhere tells on you, and then on the loudspeaker, “Mayo, report to the front watch, and put out that cigarette.’ You get a write-up, and gotta spend four hours scrubbing the toilets or something. Get two or three write-ups and you get a major—you don’t get your early release date. The good life is this out here.*’