After the bum came to the end of the ghost’s trail.
And then Kootie would be put in…some kind of home, finally, with showers and bathrooms and beds and food. Eventually he’d be adopted, by some family. He’d be able to see any movies he wanted to see….
His teeth were still cold, but he was sobbing now, to his own horror and astonishment. I want my own family, he thought, I want my own house and my own mom and dad. Maybe they aren’t dead—(in those bloody chairs)—of course they aren’t dead, they were standing in the living room in formal clothes (ignoring me in such, a scary way) and probably they’re the ones that hired the billboards and posted the reward!
He needed to know, he needed to throw himself somewhere now, and he ran to the telephones even though the pain of running wrung whimpers through his clenched teeth.
When he had rolled the quarter into the slot, he punched in 911.
After two rings, a woman’s voice said, calmly, “Nine-one-one operator, is this an emergency?”
“I’m Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said Kootie quickly. “My parents were—were robbed and beaten up, real bad, night before last, and there’s billboards with my picture on ’em, and a reward—” Kootie was suddenly dizzy, and he actually had to clutch the receiver tightly to keep from falling. He swung around on the pivot of his good heel until his shoulder hit the phone’s aluminum cowl. When he had straightened up he had a quick impression that someone was behind him, wanting to use the phone, but he looked around and saw no one near him. “—A reward,” he went on, “that’s being offered for me. My mom and dad live on Loma Vista Street in Beverly Hills and there was—”
A man’s voice interrupted him. “Parganas?” the man said alertly.
“Yes.”
“Just a sec. Hey,” the man said away from the phone, “it’s the Parganas kid!” More loudly, he added, “It’s Koot Hoomie!”
The phone at the other end was put down with a clunk on something hard. In the background Kootie could hear a lot of people talking, and a clatter like a cafeteria. He heard glass break, and a voice mumble “Fuck.”
There was a rattling on the line as someone picked up the distant phone. “Koot Hoomie?”
It was his mother’s voice! She was alive! He was sobbing again, but he managed to say, clearly, “Mom, come and get me.”
There was a moment of relative silence, broken only by mumbling and clattering at the other end; then, “Kethoomba!” his mother exclaimed. (Was she drunk? Was everybody drinking there in the dispatcher’s office?) Kootie remembered that Kethoomba was the Tibetan pronunciation of the name of the mahatma his parents had named him after. She had never called Kootie that. “Gelugpa,” she went on, “yellow-hatted monk! Come and get me!”
“Gimme that phone,” said someone in the background. “Master!” came the quavering voice of Kootie’s father. “We’ll be out front!” Quietly, as if speaking off to the side of the receiver, Kootie’s father asked someone, “Where are we?”
“Fock you,” came a thick-voiced reply.
“Dad,” shouted Kootie. “It’s me, Kootie! I need you to come get me! I’m at—” He poked his head out into the breeze and tried to see a street sign. He couldn’t see one up or down the gray street. They trace these calls, ask the dispatcher where I’m calling from. Have ‘em send a cop car here quick.”
“Don’t go outside!” called his father to someone in the noisy room. “Cop cars!” Then, breathily, back into the mouthpiece: “Kootie?”
“Yes, Dad! Are you all drunk? Listen—”
“No, you listen, young man. You broke the Dante—don’ interrupt—you broke the, the Dante, let the light shine out before anything was prepared—well, it’s your son, if you mus’ know—”
Then Kootie’s mother was on the line again. “Kootie! Put the master back on!”
Kootie was crying harder now. Something was terribly wrong. “There’s nobody here but me, Mom. What’s the matter with you? I’m lost, and that guy—there’s bad guys following me—”
“We need the master to pick ‘s up!” his mother interrupted, her voice slurred but loud. “Put ’im on!”
“He’s not here!” wailed Kootie; his ear was wet with wind-driven tears or sweat, and chilly because he was now holding the phone several inches away from his head. “I called. My name is Koot Hoomie, remember? I’m alone!”
“You killed us!” his mother yelled. “You broke the Dante, you couldn’t wait, and then the…forces of darkness!… found us, and killed us! I’m dead, your fathers dead, because you disobeyed us! And now the master hasn’t called! You’re bad, Kootie, you’re ba-a-ad.”
“She’s right, son,” interjected Kootie’s father. “Iss your fault we’re dead and Kethoomba’s off somewhere. Get over here now.”
Kootie couldn’t imagine the room his parents were in—it sounded like some kind of bar—but he was suddenly certain of what they were wearing. The same formal wedding clothes.
In the background there, a little girl was reciting a poem about how some flower beds were too soft…and then a hoarse woman’s voice said, “Tell him to put Al on, will ya?”
Kootie hung up the phone. The wind was colder on this street now, and the sky’s gray glow, made opaque smoke of the windshields on the passing cars.
His quarter clattered into the coin-return slot. Apparently there was no charge on 911 calls.
AND TEN blocks east of Kootie, leaning against bamboo-pattern wallpaper at the back of a steamy Thai takeout restaurant, Sherman Oaks pressed another pay-telephone receiver to his ear.
At the other end of the line, a man answered, recited the number Oaks had called, and said, “What category?”
“I don’t know,” said Oaks, “Missing Persons? It’s about that kid, Koot Hoomie Parganas, the one on the billboards.”
“Koot Hoomie sightings, eh?” Oaks could hear the rippling clicking of a computer keyboard. “You speak English,” the operator noted.
The remark irritated Oaks. Probably he had always spoken English. “‘Most people don’t?”
“Been getting a lot of Kootie calls from illegal immigrants: ‘Tengo el nino, pew no estoy en el pais legalimente.’ Got the kid, but got no green card. Looking for a second party to pick up the reward. There must be fifty curly-haired stray kids locked in garages in L.A. right now. One of ’em might even be the right one, though he hasn’t been turned in yet, or this category would be closed out. Okay, what? You’ve got him, you know where he is? We’ve got a bonded outfit checking all reasonable claims, and a representative can be anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area within ten minutes.”
“What I’ve got,” Oaks said, “is a counter-offer.” He looked around at the other people in the tiny white-lit restaurant—they all seemed to be occupied with their takeout bags and cardboard cartons, and even the obtrusive smells of cilantro and chili peppers seemed to combine with the staccato voices and the sizzle of beef and shrimp on the griddle to provide a screen of privacy for the phone. “You know smoke? Cigar? The Maduro Man?”
“It’s a different category, but I can call it up.”
“Well, I can put up—” Oaks paused to pull his attention away from the bright agitation of the restaurant, and he ran a mental inventory of the three major caches he kept, hidden out there in corners of the dark city; he pictured the dusty boxes of empty-looking but tightly sealed jars and bottles and old crack vials—he even had a matched pair, an elderly matrimonial suicide pact, locked up in the two snap-lid receptacles of a clear plastic contact-lens case. “I can put up a thousand doses of L.A. cigar, in exchange for the kid. Even wholesale that’s a lot more than twenty grand.”