“Watch your language, boy! You’ll have the recording angels hopping to their typewriters! Keep a clean mouth!”
“Sorr-eee!”
In the back of his mind, Kootie was aware that Edison’s children had hated this, too, having their footsteps disattached from the ground; for an instant he caught an image of a girl and two boys hopping on a lawn as exploding firecrackers stippled their shins with green fragments of grass, and fleetingly he glimpsed how strenuous it had been to get Tommy Junior to shinny up a pole and grab the coins laid on the top—how Edison had finally had to rub rosin on the inside of the boy’s knees so that he could get traction. It had had to be done, though, the children needed to be insulated every so often, for their own good.
He was hopping awkwardly, and the whoops of his breath burned his throat and nose. At least no one was out on this street at the moment; to his left, beyond a chain-link fence that he grabbed at again and again to keep his balance, dusty old hulks of cars sat in a closed bodywork lot, and the little houses on the opposite side of the street were dark.
One of Kootie’s bouncing shoes had caught him a good clunk under the chin, and his ankle was flaring with pain, when Edison finally let him duck around a Dumpster in an empty parking lot and sit down on a fallen telephone pole to catch his breath. The nearest streetlight had gone out when Kootie had pranced past beneath it, and now as he sat and panted he watched the light’s glow on the nearest cinder-block wall fade through red toward black.
Kootie’s mouth hissed and flapped as he and Edison both tried to use it at once. Kootie rolled his eyes and relaxed, then listened to Edison gasp out, quietly, “If I was your father—I’d wash out your mouth—with soap.”
Kootie had heard the phrase before, but this time he got a clear impression of a father actually doing that to a son, and he shuddered at the picture. Kootie’s own father had not ever punished him physically, always instead discussing each error with him in a “helpful dialogue,” after which the transgression was respected as having contributed to a “learning experience” that would build his “self-esteem.”
“Well, that’s plain bullshit,” Edison went on in a halting whisper, apparently having caught Kootie’s thought. “When I was six years old I burned down my father’s barn—I was trying to…ditch a playmate who’d been following me around for a year or so, of course at that age I didn’t know about tricks like blowing up your footprints with firecrackers!” He wheezed, apparently laughing. “Oh, no! Burned to the ground, my father’s barn did, and my little friend was still no more ditched than my shadow was. What was I saying? Oh—so I burned down the barn, and do you think my father discussed it with me, called it a—what was it?”
“A learning experience,” said Kootie dully. “No, I suppose he didn’t.”
“I’ll say. He invited all the neighbors and their children to come watch, and then he damn well whipped the daylights out of me, right there in the Milan town square!”
Kootie sniffed, and from across all the subsequent years of the old man’s accumulated experiences, a trace of that long-ago boy’s remembered despair and fear and humiliation brushed Kootie’s mind.
For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then Kootie whispered, “Can I put my shoes and socks back on now?”
“Yes, son.” He sighed. “That was for your own good, you know. We’ll do better evasion tricks when we get the time; but the gunpowder cakewalk will probably have foxed your—what was it? one-armed murderer?—for a while. Slow him down, at least.” Kootie’s hand wavered out, palm down and fingers spread, and then just wobbled back to the splintery surface of the wooden pole. “You’re tired, aren’t you? We’ll find some place to sleep, after we’ve taken one or two more precautions. This looks like a big city, we’ll be able to do something. Before all this started up, I had the impression I was in Los Angeles—is that where we are?”
“Yes, sir,” said Kootie. “Not in the best part of it.”
“Better for our purposes, maybe. Let’s move east a couple of blocks here, and keep our eyes open.”
“Which way’s east?”
“Turn right at that light. Need directions, always ask a ghost.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
“I have tasted eggs, certainly,” said Alice, who was a very truthful child; “but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.”
“I don’t believe it,” said the Pigeon; “but if they do, why, then they’re a kind of serpent: that’s all I can say.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
IN the office on the ground floor of his apartment building, Solomon Shadroe had finally stopped staring at the horizontal white line on the television screen, and had plodded to his desk to resume doing the month’s-end paperwork.
He didn’t like the line being there on the screen at all, but at least it had stopped flaring and wiggling.
At last he pushed his chair back from his desk; he had finished writing the October checks and had then laboriously calculated the balance left in the account. As he stared at the worn blotter it occurred to him that pencil shavings looked like scraps of garlic and onion skins—his desk looked as though someone had been chopping together a battuto.
Garlic and onions—he remembered liking them, though he couldn’t remember anymore what they had tasted like. Something like fresh sweat, he thought as he stood up, and a fast hot pulse.
His cup of Eat-’Em-&-Weep tea was lukewarm, but he drank off the last inch of it, tilting the cup to get the last sticky red drops. He put the cup down on the cover of the old ledger-style checkbook and took a can of Goudie snuff out of the desk drawer.
As he tapped out a pile of the brown powder onto his thumb-knuckle and raised it to his nose, he looked at the high built-in shelf on which sat three of his stuffed pigs. They had been burping away like bad boys during the half-minute when the line on the TV screen had been acting up, but—he looked again to make sure—the line was still motionless, and the pigs were quiet now. Johanna had the radio on, and the only noises in the office were the rolling urgencies of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”
“Too loud?” asked Johanna from the couch where she lay reading a ladies’ magazine.
Shadroe took a deep breath as he inhaled the snuff. “No. Just finished it up. Utility bills eating me alive. Gonna feed the beasties now.” He got to his feet and plodded to the shelves.
“Oh good. Beasties!” she called to the screened window. “Din din din!”
Shadroe pried two white paper plates out of a torn cellophane wrapper and laid them on the coffee table. Onto one he shook a handful of Happy Cat food pellets from a box on a chair. Then he dug a handful of smooth pebbles out of his shirt pocket and spread them on the other plate.
He had taken Johanna to the Orange County fair this summer, and in one of the exhibit halls his attention had been caught by a display called the “Banquet of Rock Foods Collection.” The display had been an eclectic meal laid out on a lace tablecloth: on one plate sat a hamburger, pickles, french fries, olives, and what might have been a slice of pate; on another sat a stack of pancakes with some jagged fragments of butter on top, with a sunny-side-up egg and two slices of underdone bacon alongside. There had been other things too, a narrow roast turkey with ruffled paper socks on the ends of the drumsticks, a thin slice of toast, a boiled egg in an egg cup. The thing was, they were all rocks. Somebody had scoured deserts all over the west to find pieces of rocks that looked like food items.