Pavement was rushing past down there beyond the toes of his Reeboks, and he was squinting out at the windshields of oncoming cars; a low office building and a red-roofed Pizza Hut were swinging past off to his left. The people in the cars might be gaping, pointing at him, but their windshields were just blank patches of reflected blue sky.
Kootie glanced behind him, into the dimness of the truck’s interior, and he could see the one-armed man crawling down out of the minivan headfirst, onto the truck floor. Breathe slower! Kootie reminded himself.
“What do I do. Mr. Edison?” Kootie cried, his voice not echoing now but breezing away in the open air.
He sensed no answer; and when he tried to let the ghost take control of his body again, he had to grab the bottom edge of the half-raised door, for his knees had simply buckled and he would have fallen out of the truck.
He had to step back then, for the truck was slowing down.
Kootie freed his bloody hand from his side and waved it broadly at the cars following the truck, mouthing Slow down, I’m getting out! Don’t run over me! and pointing down at the street. He glanced down past his shoes—the street was still moving by awfully fast, and his belly and an instant later his neck quailed like shaken ice water.
You’ll tumble, he thought; even if he slows a lot more than this, you won’t be able to land running fast enough, and you’ll tumble like a Raggedy Andy doll. He imagined his skull socking the pavement, his elbows snapping backward, shinbones split and telescoped…
He couldn’t do it. But if he waited another couple of seconds, the one-armed man would be on him again.
Then, with an abrupt hallucinatory burst of glaring red and blue flashes on his retinas, a gleaming black-and-white police car had surged into the gap between the truck’s bumper and the car behind. A half-second segment of siren shocked his ears, and Kootie swayed backward again as the truck slowed still more, and Kootie saw the front end of the police car dip as it braked to avoid hitting the truck.
And Kootie jumped.
His kneecaps banged the hood of the police car, and his palms and forehead smacked the windshield, cracking it with a muffled creak; in nearly the same instant, with a boom that shook the very air, the windshield crystallized into an opaque white honeycomb as a hole was punched through it next to Kootie’s bloody right hand.
Kootie’s right hip and shoulder hit the windshield then, and the glass gave beneath him like starched white canvas. And another boom rocked the world as a hole was punched through the wrecked webwork of glass near his upraised left knee; the windshield dissolved into a spray of little green cubes, and he was sitting on the dashboard.
He whipped his head around to squint ahead at the truck. The one-armed man’s face was right above the truck-bed floor, and in his one hand wobbled the silver muzzle of a gun. As Kootie stared, a hammer-stroke of glare eclipsed the gun, and he felt a jolt in the police car as the boom of the gunshot rolled over him.
The police car was screeching to a halt now, slewing sideways, but Kootie was able to hang on to the rounded inside edges of the dashboard, and though he was rocked back and forth he was not thrown off; even when the car behind rear-ended the police car with a squeal and bang and tinkle of broken glass, he just lifted his shoulders and dug in with his butt and let his chin roll down and up.
The police car was stopped at last. The orange-and-black Southern California Edison truck was wobbling to the curb against further braking and honking horns from behind, and Kootie scrambled to the fender and hopped down to the asphalt. The pavement under his feet was so steady, and he was so torqued, that he had to take several hopping steps to keep from falling over.
A couple of people had got out of stopped cars and were hurrying up. “Has someone got…change for a telephone call?” Kootie shouted, to his own surprise.
“Here you go, kid,” said a woman absently, handing him a quarter. She was staring past him, at whatever was going on with the police and the one-armed man.
“Thank you,” Kootie said. He was wobbling dizzily as he stepped up the curb, and a man in a business suit called something to him. “Man back there,” Kootie yelled, “bleeding bad. Where’s a telephone?”
The man pointed at a liquor store and said, “Dial nine-one-one!”
Sure, thought Kootie wildly as he wobbled onward through the cold sunlight. Nine-one-one. I’d get to talk to my mom and dad again, drunk as fig beetles by now; Edison could shoot the breeze with the fat lady from the supermarket parking lot. At least I’d get my quarter back.
He glanced back, but the doors of the police car hadn’t opened, and, blinking against the silvery glare of the sunlight, Kootie couldn’t see the one-armed man. He wished he hadn’t lost the sunglasses.
“Where are we going?” he whispered, with timid hope, when he had limped around the corner of the liquor store and was lacing a long alley with Dumpsters and old mattresses shored up against the graffiti-fouled walls.
“Anywhere relatively private,” Edison said, and Kootie exhaled and began sweating with relief—the old man was not only back, but seemed to be sensible again, and would now Lake care of everything. Keep pressing your hand hard against the cut, it’ll slow the bleeding. I need to get a look at this wound, and then we’ll go buy whatever sort of stuff we need to get you repaired. And some liquor. I really don’t think we can get by, here, without some liquor.”
“Shit, no,” said Kootie, stumbling forward down the alley.
His face was cold and sweaty, but he smiled, for Edison apparently wasn’t going to scold him for his language this time.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
“…How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I wonder?”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
DIOS te guarde tan linda” said Angelica Elizalde softly into the sea breeze. She had taken off her sneakers in order to wade out in the low, breakwater-tamed surf of Los Angeles Harbor. The lights of the Queen Mary rippled across the dark water, and Elizalde shivered now when she looked at the vast old ship out there by San Pedro.
She had walked down to this narrow stretch of beach from the bus stop at Cherry and Seventh, and she was still putting off the decision of whether or not to meet the Peter Sullivan person up in the parking lot on the bluff. She glanced at her watch and saw that she still had half an hour in which to decide.
She paused and looked back up the shore. A hundred yards west of hen the Mexican women’s fire still fluttered and threw sparks on the breeze. She might just plod back there and talk to them some more. The bruises on her knees and hip were aching in the cold, and it would be nice to sit by the fire, among people who could hear her secrets and not consider her insane.
Elizalde had walked up to the fire when the sun was still a flattened red coal in the molten western sky, and in her exhaustion her Spanish had effortlessly come back to her, so that she was able to return the greetings of the women and make small talk.
She had smiled at the toddler daughter of one, and the woman had touched the girl’s forehead and quickly said, “Dios te guarde tan linda”—God keep you pretty baby. Elizalde had remembered her grandmother doing the same whenever a stranger looked at one of the children. It was to deflect mal ojo, the evil eye. But Elizalde also remembered that it was a routine precaution, and she smiled at the mother too, and crossed herself. Only after the mother had smiled back, and Elizalde had accepted the gestured offer of a seat on the sand beside the fire, had she felt hypocritical.