He must have been afraid, still, of facing the police and deciding which sort of crazy story to tell them.
And then the shop manager had yelled at him, demanded to know what the boy was doing there, and in his feverish embarrassment Kootie had bought a bagful of stuff he hadn’t wanted, just to placate the man: a box of Miraculous Insecticide Chalk, a blister-pack roll of 35-millimeter film, and a Hershey bar with almonds. They were all things displayed right at the checkout counter. The bag was crumpled up now, jammed inside his lightweight shirt.
When he had finally left the store and resumed limping east, away from the fading light, he had pretended that the imaginary ghost of Edison took the blame for Kootie having hidden from the police car. Duh, sorry, he had had the ghost say, but I can’t let the cops catch me—I’ve got library books that have been overdue since 1931!
Now Kootie forced himself to push away from the wall and walk toward the bar’s front door. He was chilly in the smoky evening breeze with just the polo shirt on, and he hoped the bar’s interior would be warm.
(A glass lamp-chimney, blackened with smoke. When the black stuff, which was carbon, was scraped off, it could be pressed into the shape of a little button, and that button could be attached to the metal disk. In another room you could bite the instrument it was connected to, and, through your teeth and the bones of your skull,, hear the clearer, louder tones.)
Kootie pulled open the door with his left hand, for the fingers of his right were still rapidly thumping the quarter into the tight skin of his palm. Tap…tap…tap…tap-tap-tap…tap…tap…tap…
An outward-bursting pressure of warm air ruffled his curly hair—stale air, scented with beer and cigarette smoke and sweaty shirts, and shaking with recorded mariachi guitar and the click and rattle of pool balls breaking across bald green felt. Yellow light shone in the linoleum under his Reeboks’ soles as he shuffled to the nearest of the two empty barstools. The bartender was squinting impassively down at him over a bushy mustache.
“Do you have a telephone?” Kootie asked, grateful that his voice was steady. “I’d like to have someone make a call for me.”
The man just stared. The men on the barstools around him were probably staring too, but Kootie was afraid to look any of them in the face. They’ll recognize me from those billboards, he thought, and turn me in. But isn’t that what I want?
“Teléfono,” he said, and in desperate pantomime he raised his left hand in front of his chin as if holding an empty Coke bottle to blow hoots on, while he held his right hand up beside his head, the fingers extended toward his ear. “Hel-lo?” he said, speaking into the space above his left hand. “Hel-lo-o?”
His left hand was still twitching with the coin, and belatedly he realized that the rhythm it had been beating against his palm was the Morse code for SOS; and at the same time he noticed that he was miming using one of those old candlestick-and-hook telephones, like in a Laurel and Hardy movie.
SOS? he thought to himself—and then, instinctively and inward, he thought: What is it, what’s wrong?
An instant later he had to grab the padded vinyl seat of the barstool to keep from falling over.
Kootie’s mouth opened, and for several whole seconds a series of wordless but conversational-tone cat warbles yowled and yipped out of his throat; finally, after his forehead was hot and wet with the effort of resisting it and he had inadvertently blown his nose on his chin, he just stopped fighting the phenomenon and let his whole chest and face relax into passivity.
“Duh,” came his voice then, clear at last. “Du-u-h,” it said again, prolonging the syllable, indignantly quoting it. Then he was looking up at the bartender. “Thanks, boys,” said Kootie’s voice, “but never mind. All a mistake, sorry to have wasted your time. Here, have a round of beers on me.” After a pause, Kootie’s voice went on, “Kid, put some money on the bar.”
Catching on that he was being addressed—by his own throat!—Kootie hastily dug into the pocket of his jeans and, without taking out his roll of bills, peeled one off and pulled it out. It was a five; probably not enough for very many beers, but the next bill might be a twenty. He reached up and laid it on the surface of the bar, then ducked his head and wiped his chin on his shoulder.
“Lord, boy, a fiver?” said his mouth. “I bet they don’t get many orangutans in here. Who are these fellas, anyway, son? Mexicans? Tell ’em in Mexican that this was a misunderstanding, and we’re leaving.”
“Uhhh,” said Kootie, testing his own control of his voice. “Lo siento, pew no yo soy aqui. Eso dinero es para cervezas. Salud. Y ahora, adios.”
“Oh,” he heard himself add, “and get matches, will you?”
“Uh, y para mi, fosforos, por favor? Mechas? Como para cigarros?”
After another long several seconds, the bartender reached out and pushed a book of matches forward to the edge of the bar.
Kootie reached up and took it. “Gracias.”
Then he could almost feel a hand grab his collar and yank him away from the bar, toward the door.
(But even with the pressed carbon disk, if you were relying on just the current set up in the wire, there was clarity but no reach; all you had was a little standing system. To fix that, the changing current in the wire had to be just the cue for changes that would be mirrored big-scale in an induction coil Then the signal could be carried just about anywhere.)
“Trolley-car lines,” Kootie heard himself say as he pushed open the door and stepped out into the cold evening again. Standing on the curb, he waited for the headlights of the cars in the eastbound lanes to sweep past, and then he limped out across the asphalt to stand on the double yellow painted lines in the middle of the street. His head bent forward to look at the pavement under his feet. His mouth opened again, and “Find us a set of streetcar lines,” he said.
“There aren’t any,” he answered—hoarsely, for he had forgotten to inhale after the involuntary remark. He took a deep breath and then went on, “There haven’t been streetcars in L.A. for years.”
“Damn. The tracks make a nice house of mirrors.”
Trucks were roaring past only inches from Kootie’s toes, and the glaring headlights against the dark backdrop of the neighborhood made him feel like a dog crouching on the center divider of a freeway; and briefly he wondered how Fred was.
His attention was roughly shoved away from the thought. “After this next juggernaut, go,” said his own voice as he watched the oncoming westbound traffic. “Have they always been this loud?”
“Sure,” Kootie answered as he skipped and hopped across the lanes after a big-wheel pickup had ripplingly growled past.
On the north sidewalk at last, Kootie limped east, his back to the blurred smear of red over the western hills under the clouds. Of course he knew now that he had not lost Edison’s ghost after all, and he suspected that he had known it ever since he had involuntarily hidden from the slow-moving police car two hours ago; but the old man’s ghost was not shoving Kootie out of his body now, and so the boy wasn’t experiencing the soul-vertigo that had so shattered him at the Music Center.