Kootie’s head snapped forward, and then he couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not when he drooled some Coke into the empty plastic film container.
“Get to the cigar lighter before he does,” Edison whispered. “Go, or I’ll motivate for you, this is too lucky a chance to waste.”
His legs already twitching impatiently, Kootie pushed back the bench, got to his feet and wobbled over to the wooden box on the counter. How does it work? he thought.
Edison whispered, “Don’t work it—act like you just came over here to get a mint.”
Kootie started to say Okay, but had got no further than the “Oke—” when the ceiling lights dimmed and the air was suddenly cold; and he was distantly grateful when he felt his knees lock, for sudden dizziness had made the field of his vision dwindle like a receding movie screen. He thought he sensed someone big standing behind him, but he couldn’t turn around.
‘“Kay,” he managed to whisper.
Kootie watched his own hands. His left hand picked up one of the mints, and he could feel its powdery dry surface, like a big aspirin, even though he wasn’t controlling the fingers—(It’s like the opposite of when your hand’s asleep, he thought)—and his right hand brought up the plastic container to catch the mint deftly when his left hand dropped it. Then his right hand slowly scraped the edge of the container up the metal rod at the front of the cigar-lighter box, as if trying to scratch off the taped-on paper.
Then the ceiling lights brightened again and all three of the cash registers began clicking and buzzing. Edison had capped the little container as quickly as if he had caught a bee in it. “Grab a mint,” he made Kootie whisper. “Grab a whole handful, like you’re just a greedy boy.”
Kootie dizzily obeyed, and walked back to his table when his left fool began to slide in that direction. As he sat down, heavily, he heard one of the countermen demanding to know why all the registers were going through their cash-out cycles.
“Let’s go before they figure it out,” Edison said softly. “Leave a tip?” put in Kootie. “They didn’t bring it to the table,” Edison pointed out impatiently.
As he rode his scissoring legs out of the restaurant, Kootie managed to wave one shaky hand at the counterman.
THE NIGHT outside was colder now, and the headlights of the faceless cars seemed to glow more hotly as they swept past. Edison, forgetful of Kootie’s hurt ankle, was making him hurry, and the result was a bobbing, prancing gait. He had stuffed the plastic container into his front jeans pocket, but his left hand still clutched the mints.
“Did you—” began Kootie, but Edison clamped his teeth shut, then said, “Don’t speak of it. I lit up the whole area—we’ve got to get clear of it.”
Kootie was hurrying west on Wilshire, away from the spot where Edison had drawn the chalk patterns on the park sidewalk by the statue, and he caught a thought that might or might not have been his own: A stupid use for chalk—that was just stupid—a ghost’s idea of a ghost trap. Apparently the “flypaper” on the cigar lighter had been better.
Edison made Kootie glance up at a streetlight as he shuffled past under it, and Kootie understood that the old man was glad to see that the light didn’t go out to mark their passage.
Ionic. From nowhere the word had come into Kootie’s mind, and at first he thought of marble pillars with curled scroll-like tops. (Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Doric columns had just a flat brick at the top, and Corinthian ones had lots of carved grapes and leaves.) Then the notion of pillars disappeared and he pictured a clump of little balls, with much tinier balls orbiting rapidly around the clump; when the tiny balls were stripped away, the clump—the nucleus—had a powerful electric charge. If it was moving, it threw electromagnetic waves.
These were not Kootie’s thoughts, and they didn’t feel like Edison’s either. “Ionaco,” Kootie said out loud.
And suddenly the gleam of moonlight shining on the fender of a parked car ahead of them was not just a reflection, but an angular white shape, a thing; and Kootie’s perception of scale was gone—the white shape seemed to be much farther away than the car.
The shape was rotating, growing against the suddenly flat backdrop of the city night, and it was…an open Greek E, a white spider lying sideways, a white hand with fragmenting fingers…
It was moving upward and growing larger, or closer.
It was a side-lit white face, an older man’s lace—with a white ascot knotted under the chin; and as Kootie stared, gaping and disoriented, the lines of a formal old claw hammer coat coalesced out of the shadows under the face, and an unregarded background shadow that might have been a building was now a top hat. Cars on the street were just blurs of darkness, moving past as slowly as moon shadows.
Kootie thought the image was some kind of black-and-white still projection—the light on it didn’t correspond to the direction of the moon or the nearest streetlight—until the white mouth opened and moved, and Kootie heard the words, “I only have one left.” The voice was low, and reverberated as if speaking in a room instead of out here on the street, and the lips didn’t move in synch with the sounds.
The figure still seemed to be some kind of black-and-white hologram.
Neither Kootie nor Edison had kept the boy’s body moving. Halted, Kootie was aware of sweat on his forehead chilly in the night breeze. “One what?” asked Edison wearily.
“Belt.” The ghost, for Kootie was sure that’s what this thing was, opened its coat, and Kootie saw that the figure wore, as a sort of bulky cummerbund, a belt made of bundled wire. A little flashlight bulb glowed over the buckle. “Fifty-eight dollars and fifty cents, even now.”
“We don’t need a belt,” Edison said; but, “What does it do?” asked Kootie. It was heady for the boy to realize that, on this night, he would believe nearly any answer the ghost might give.
“Well,” said the ghost in its oddly contained and unsynchronized voice, “it could have cured Bright’s disease and intestinal cancer. But it banishes paralysis and restores lost hair color and stops attacks of homicide. It’s called the I-ON-A-CO, like the boy said. It’s a degaussing device—you can sleep safely, if you’re wearing it.”
“I don’t have fifty-eight dollars,” Kootie said. For the first time since hurrying out of Jumbo’s whatever-it-had-been, he opened his hand. “I’ve got mints, though.”
The ghost came into clearer focus, and a tinge of color touched its white face. “Out of respect for Thomas Alva Edison,” it said, and its words matched its lip movements now, “I’ll take the mints in lieu of the money.”
“He’d rather have had the mints in any case,” said Edison grumpily. “And you never thought that I might want ’em.”
“Is it okay,” said Kootie before Edison could go on, “if I hold a couple out for Mr. Edison?”
“Well…a couple,” allowed the ghost.
Edison again took over Kootie’s tongue. “You have the advantage of me, sir. Your name was—?”
“Call me Gaylord.” Pink-tinged hands appeared in front of the coat, and the two-dimensional fingers managed to unfasten the buckle—but when the ghost tried to pull the belt from around itself, the heavy cables fell through its insubstantial flesh, and clattered on the pavement; one of the hands wobbled forward, though, palm-up, and Kootie poured the mints into the hand, which was able to hold them. Kootie was careful to hold back two of them.