Actually, he was glad that the old man was with him.
“Well now,” said his voice gruffly, “did you get the firecrackers?”
Kootie’s face went cold. Had those firecrackers been important? Surely he had lost them along with everything else that had been in the knapsack or in the pockets of his heavy shirt—but then he slapped the hip pocket of his jeans, and felt the flat square package.
“Yes, sir!”
“Good boy. Haul ’em out and we’ll squelch pursuit.”
Kootie hooked out the package and began peeling off the thin waxed paper. The things were illegal, so he looked around furtively, but the TV repair shop they were stopped in front of was closed, and none of the gleaming car roofs moving past in the street had police light bars. “Why would an orangutan go into a bar?” he asked absently.
“Sounds like a riddle. You know why the skeleton didn’t go to the dance?” Kootie realized that his mouth was smiling.
“No, sir.”
“He had no body to go with. Hardy-har-har. How much is a beer these days?” Kootie’s hands had peeled off the paper, and now his fingers were gently prizing the firecracker fuses apart. Kootie didn’t believe he was doing it himself.
“I don’t know. A dollar.”
“Whoa! I’d make my own. The joke is, you see, an orangutan goes into a bar and orders a beer, and he gives the bartender a five-dollar bill. The bartender figures, shoot, what do orangutans know about money, so he gives the ape a nickel in change. So the creature’s sitting there drinking its beer, kind of moody, and the bartender’s polishing glasses, and after a while the bartender says, just making conversation, you know, ‘We don’t get many orangutans in here.’ And the orangutan says, At four-ninety-five a beer, I’m not surprised.”‘
Kootie’s laugh was short because he was out of breath, but he tried to make it sound sincere.
“Don’t like jokes, hey,” said the Edison ghost grumpily with Kootie’s mouth and throat. “Maybe you think it’s funny having to pay four-ninety-five for a beer. Or whatever you said it was. Maybe you think it’s funny that somebody could be trying for an hour to tell you what you got to do, but your intellectual grippers ain’t capable of grasping any Morse except plain old SOS! Both times I proposed marriage, I did it by tapping in Morse on the girl’s hand, so as not to alert anyone around. Where would we be, if the ladies had thought I was just…testing their reflexes? I knew Morse when I was fifteen! Damn me! How old are you?”
Kootie managed to pronounce the word “Eleven.” Then, momentarily holding on to control of his throat, he went on, defiantly, “How old are you?” What with being unfairly yelled at, on top of exhaustion and everything else, Kootie was, to his humiliation, starting to cry.
“No business of yours, sonny.” Edison sniffed with Kootie’s nose. “But I was a year short of seventy when I bet Henry Ford I could kick a globe off a chandelier in a New York hotel, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Quit that crying! A chandelier on the ceiling! Did it, too. Did you see me kick that guy back there? What the hell have we got here?” Kootie’s hands shook the nest of firecrackers.
“F-fire—” Kootie began, and then Edison finished the word for him: “Firecrackers. That’s right. Good boy. Sorry I was rude—I shouldn’t put on airs, I didn’t get my B.S. until I was well past eighty-four. Eighty-four. Four-ninety-five! Oh well, we’ll make our own, once we’ve got some breathing time. Breathing time. Hah.”
Two black people were striding along the sidewalk toward where Kootie stood, a man in black jeans and a black shirt and a woman wearing what seemed to be a lot of blankets, and Kootie hoped Edison would stop talking until the couple had passed.
But he didn’t. “You like graveyards, son?” Kootie shook his head. “I got no fondness for ‘em either, but you can learn things there.” Air was sucked haltingly into Kootie’s lungs. “From the restless ghosts—in case the bad day comes, in spite of all your precautions, and you’re one yourself.”
The black couple stared at him as they passed, clearly imagining that this was a crazy boy.
“Leave no tracks, that’s the ticket. I did all my early research in a lab on a train. Take your shoes off. Daily train between Port Huron and Detroit; in ’61 I got a job as newsboy on board of it, so I could have a laboratory that couldn’t be located.” He sniffed. “Not easily, anyway. One fellow did find me, even though I was motivating fast on steel rails, but I gave him the slip, sold him my masks instead of myself. Take off your shoes, damn it!”
Kootie had not really stopped crying, and now he sobbed, “Me? Why? It’s cold—” Then he had suddenly bent forward at the waist, and had to put weight on his bad ankle to keep from falling. “Don’t!” He sat down on the concrete and then began defeatedly tugging at the shoelaces. “Okay! Don’t push!” His hand opened, dropping the firecrackers.
Edison inhaled harshly, his breath hitching with sobs, and Kootie’s voice said, brokenly, “Sorry, son. It’s (sniff) important we get this done quick.” Kootie had pulled off both his shoes. The concrete was cold against his butt through his jeans. “Socks too,” wept Edison. “Quit crying, will you? This is…ludicrous.”
Kootie let Edison work his numbing hands, stuffing the socks into the shoes and then tying the laces together and draping the shoes around his neck. He straightened carefully, still sitting, and leaned back against the window of the TV repair shop. He half hoped the window would break, but even with Thomas Edison in his head he didn’t weigh enough.
“Your furt’s hoot,” spoke Edison, interrupting Kootie’s breathing. “Excuse me. Your foot is hurt. I’ll let you get up by yourself. Grab the firecrackers.”
Too tired to give a sarcastic reply, Kootie struggled to his feet, closing his fist on the firecrackers as he got up. Standing again, he shivered in his flimsy shirt…
“Now,” said Edison, “we’re going to run up this street here to our left—we’re going to do that after you start to—no, I’d better do it—after I start dropping lit firecrackers on your feet.”
At that, Kootie began hiccuping, and after a moment he realized that he was actually laughing. “I cant go to the cops,” he said. “I got a one-armed murderer following me around—and a dope fiend cooking me dinner on a car engine, and my parents—and anyway, now Thomas Alva Edison is gonna chase me up a street barefoot throwing illegal explosives at my feet. And I’m eleven years old. But I can’t go to the cops, hunh.”
“I liked that trick of cooking on the engine.” Edison had made Kootie’s hands cup around the matchbook and strike a flame. “I’m saving your life, son,” he said, “and my…my…soul? Something of mine.” He held one of the lit firecrackers until the sparking fuse had nearly disappeared into the tiny cardboard cylinder. Then, “Jump!” he said merrily as he let go of it.
Kootie got his foot away from the thing, but when it went off with a sharp little bang his toes were stung by the exploded shreds of paper.
He opened his mouth to protest, but Edison had lit two more. Kootie’s head jerked as Edison cried, “Run!,” and then Kootie was bounding up the narrower street’s shadowed sidewalk, both feet stinging now.
“Fucking—crazy man!” the boy gasped as another firecracker went off right in front of the toes that had already been peppered.
The next one Edison didn’t let go of; he held it between his fingers, and the rap of its detonation banged Kootie’s fingers as painfully as if he’d hit them with a hammer. “What the damn hell—” Kootie yiped, still leaping and scampering.