They could have left me a light, he thought. He was clinging to the sense of the words, for his breathing and his heartbeat were very fast, and (even more than starting to thrash and scream with not any particle of control at all) he was afraid he would wet his pants. A flashlight left on, I could have paid for the batteries. The van’s headlights, they could have jumped the van battery later from the truck battery. A fucking Zippo lighter!—left flaming and wedged in the console somewhere.
Usually Kootie was uncomfortable using bad words, but today in this total darkness he clung to it. One fucking Zippo lighter, he thought again. Above the tape, the skin over his cheekbones was cold and stiff with tears.
He waited for Edison to yell at him…but he caught nothing from the old man. Perhaps he had deserted Kootie too. Maybe now these men would let him go, if Edison had gone…? Kid-stuff nonsense.
The truck’s engine started up now—it was louder than the minivan’s had been. Through the padded seat under him Kootie felt the jar as the truck was put into gear, and then the whole mobile room was moving forward, with the minivan rocking inside it.
And a moment later Kootie jumped, for suddenly, silently, there was a dim light in one corner of the truck—outside the minivan, up by the right front bumper, a moving yellow glow. Then he could hear dragging footsteps—heavy, an adult—on the metal floor.
The minivan door was pulled open on that side, and a face leaned in, waveringly lit from below by a flashlight strung to swing around the person’s neck. The glittering little eyes were like spitty sunflower seeds stuck onto the white skin under the eyebrows.
“Let me tell you a parable,” said the voice Kootie remembered. “A man walking down the road saw another man in a field, holding a live pig upside-down over his head under the branches of an apple tree. ‘What are you doing?’ asked the first man. ‘Feeding apples to my pig,’ said the second man. ‘Doesn’t it take a long time, doing it that way?’ asked the first man. And the man in the field said, ‘What’s time to a pig?’”
Kootie’s eyes were wide and he was just moaning into the clotted tape between his jaws. The whole truck seemed to be dropping away into some dark abyss, hopelessly far below the lost sunlit streets of L.A.
Mindlessly, Kootie shouted against the duct tape gag—
“All Help me, Ai!”
SHERMAN OAKS had called the exchange again at 4 P.M., and at last the operator had had something to say besides Nothing yet, dude. The man had given Oaks a telephone number and had suggested that he call it at his earliest possible convenience. Oaks used his last quarter to call the number.
“Where are you?” some man asked as soon as Oaks had identified himself. “We got a van and a truck circling each other down in Inglewood, and if they have to drive around much longer, the man says your tithe goes up to fifteen percent.”
“I’m at Slauson and Central, by the trainyards,” Oaks said.
“Truck’ll be there in…six or seven minutes. It’s an Edison truck, black and orange—”
“What?”
“SCE—what we could get quick. Is that a problem? The truck’s not stolen; the driver’s real Edison, but he’s on the network barter, and he was right in the area where they picked up the van. After we talked to him he just called in Code Seven or something.”
Oaks groped to find a reason for his inordinate dismay, and found one. “I need a big boxy truck, with ramps, that you can drive a car into! I’ve got no use for some damn boom or crane thing—” He was working up genuine outrage now. This was wrong. “I’ll pay no tithe at all for some damn—”
“Jeez, man, this is the kind you want. Edison’s got all kinds of vehicles, not just those repair things.”
“…Oh,” said Oaks, feeling like a cloud chamber in which the vacuum had just been violated, so that rain was condensing inside. “Okay. It’s just that…”
“Sure. Now listen, there’s a gun in the back of the truck, along with the stuff you asked for. The driver insisted that this scenario be set up so it could look like a hijacking if anything goes wrong, okay? Don’t touch the gun, it’s got smeary untraceable fingerprints on it right now.”
“But there is a knife there, too? I need a knife—” I can’t kill the boy with a noisy gun, Oaks thought.
“Your knife’s there too. Try to relax, will you? Get in touch with your Inner Child.” The line went dead, and Oaks hung up.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying not to hear the shrill voices in the exhalation.
Outer child you mean, he thought—it’s the Inner Old Man I want to…get in touch with.
In an Edison truck! The shudder that accompanied the thought bewildered him.
He bent and with his one hand picked up the cardboard box at his feet, then stepped away from the pay telephone to let one of the impatient crack-cocaine dealers get to it.
The box rattled in his hand. Tithe, he thought bitterly. It’s like taxing waitresses’ tips—the man taking the cut can be trusted to overestimate the actual take. In the box Oaks had packed ten little glass vials, which was supposed to represent a tenth of the garden-fresh ghosts he would collect during the upcoming month. He had brought it along in advance this way to “show humble.”
He had stuck each vial into a condom. Obstadt had probably never seen the raw product before, and he would doubtless imagine that this eccentric packaging was standard in the trade. Nine of the vials were in Ramses condoms, but one was in a Trojan.
Safe sexorcism. The Trojan hearse. Oaks had no intention of paying any more tithe. If Obstadt was still just a dilettante, well, he could take up an interest in fine wines or something; if by this time he was actually riding piggyback on the Maduro Man, though, he would be in the same jam that Oaks had been in in 1929.
(This morning Oaks had begun to remember events from before 1989; and he had concluded that he was a good deal older than he had thought.)
After hurriedly gathering up the thousand smokes and handing them over to one of Obstadt’s men, and then packing up these ten, he had had only four unlabeled ones left to inhale himself: four miserable, vicious, short-lived gang boys, as luck would have it, the sort of bottled lives he ordinarily disdained as pieces-a-shit. They hadn’t done much to hold back the tumultuous army of the Bony Express, clamoring and shouting in Oaks’s head.
In the turbulence, old memories were being shaken free of the riverbed of his mind, and wobbling up to the surface (like the unsavory old corpse that had bobbed up in the Yarra River in Melbourne in 1910, right after the manacled Harry Houdini had been dropped into the river for one of his celebrated escapes; and it had been a natural, if distasteful, mistake to pounce on the ragged old thing, imagining that it was Houdini freshly dead at last).
He remembered living in Los Angeles in the 1920s, when neon lighting was so new and exotic that its ethereal colored glow was mainly used to decorate innovative churches—the “Mighty I AM” cathedral, and Aimee Semple MacPherson’s giant-flying-saucer-shaped Angelus Temple on Glendale Boulevard. Under some other name, Oaks had been a follower of all kinds of spiritualist leaders, even joining William Dudley Pelley’s pro-Nazi “Legion of Silver Shirts”—though when, as required in the Silver Shirts, he had been asked to give the exact date and time of his birth, he had given false ones. Actually, he had not known what his real birth date might be; and so, lest he might give the correct date and time unconsciously, he had been careful to give the published birth figures of a randomly chosen movie star.