“My mom will be back soon,” Kootie said automatically, “she had to go back home for the bedspreads.” He had said this many times during the night, when someone would shake him awake to ask him if he was okay, and they had always nodded and gone back to folding their clothes into their plastic baskets.
But it didn’t work this morning. “I should charge you rent,” said the black man gently. “Sun’s up, boy.”
Kootie slid down out of the seat and pulled his new sunglasses out of his jacket pocket. “Sorry, mister.”
“You wouldn’t know anything about some chalk drawings somebody did on the outside of the building, would you?”
Kootie put on the sunglasses before he looked up at the man. “No.”
The man stared at him for a moment, then crinkled his eyes in what might have been a smile. “Oh well. At least it wasn’t gang-marks from our Kompton Tray-Fifty-Seven Budlong Baby Dipshits or whoever they are today. And at least it was just chalk.”
Kootie’s head was stuffed and throbbing. “Are the chalk markings still there?”
“I hosed ’em off just now.” Again he gave Kootie the wry near-smile. “Figured I’d let you know.”
Kootie started to stretch, but he hitched and pulled his right arm back when the cut over his rib flared hotly in protest. “Okay, thanks.”
He limped across the white linoleum, around the wheeled hanger-carts, to the glass doors, and as soon as he had pushed them open and stepped outside, he missed the stale detergent-scented air of the laundromat, for the dawn breeze was chilly, and harsh with the damp old-coins smell of sticky trash-can bottoms.
A half-pint bottle of 151-proof Bacardi rum had cost him sixteen dollars yesterday afternoon—six for the bottle, and a ten-dollar fee for the woman who had gone in and bought it for him. By her gangly coltish figure Kootie had judged her to be only a few years older than himself, but her tanned face, under the lipstick and eyeliner and flatteringly acnelike sores, had been as seamed and lined as a patch of sunbaked mud. Edison had made Kootie tear the ten-dollar bill jaggedly into two pieces before giving one half of it to the woman prior to the purchase; he had laughingly said that this made her his indentured servant, but neither Kootie nor the woman had understood him. He had wordlessly given her the other half of the bill after she had delivered the bottle.
Edison had already had Kootie buy a roll of adhesive tape and a box each of butterfly bandages and “Sterile Non-Stick Pads,” and then in a patch of late-afternoon sunlight behind a hedge on a side street off Vermont, Edison had pulled up Kootie’s shirt to look at their wound, which had still been perceptibly leaking blood even though Kootie had been keeping his fist or his elbow pressed against it almost without a break since he had got away from the Southern California Edison truck half an hour earlier.
It was a V-shaped cut too big for him to be able to cover with his thumb, and Kootie had begun whimpering as soon as Edison started swabbing at it with a rum-soaked pad, so Edison had made Kootie swallow a mouthful of the rum. The taste was surprising—like what Kootie would have expected from film developer or antifreeze—but it did make his head seem to swell up and buzz, and it distracted him from the pain as Edison thoroughly cleaned the cut and then dried the edges, pulled them together, and fastened them shut with the I-shaped butterfly bandages.
Then, with a pad taped over the closed and cleaned cut, Edison had had a sip of the rum himself. When Kootie had floundered back over the hedge and started down the sidewalk, he had seemed to be walking on the deck of a boat, and Edison steered him into a taquería to eat some enchiladas and salsa and drink several cups of Coke. After that Kootie had been sober but sleepy, and they had found the laundromat, had furtively marked up the wall outside it, and finally had gone in to nap in one of the seats. The nap had continued, with interruptions, all night.
He shivered now in the morning breeze and shoved his hands into his pockets. He knew he must be sober, but the pavement still didn’t seem firmly moored.
He felt his mouth open involuntarily, and he wearily braced himself for forcing it shut against some crazy outburst, but Edison just used it to say, grumpily, “Where are we now?”
“Walking on Western,” said Kootie, quietly even though there were no other pedestrians on the sidewalk. “Looking for a bus to take us to a beach.”
“Final discorporation is on my agenda today, is that it? Why did we have to outside so early? It’s cold. It was warm back in that automat.”
Each spoken syllable was an effort, and Kootie wished Edison wouldn’t use so many of them. “They washed the chalk off the wall,” he said hoarsely. Cars were rumbling past at his left, and his voice wasn’t loud, but he knew hear him.
“Ah! Then you’re a clever lad, to have got away quickly.” Kootie’s mouth opened very wide then, so that the cold air got all the way in to his back teeth, and he was afraid Edison was going to bellow something that would be audible to early-morning workers who might already be in these shadowed tax offices and closed movie-rental shops—but it was just a jaw-creaking yawn. “I shouldn’t stay out here, in my excited state, like this. Compasses will be wagging. I’ll go back to sleep. Holler for me if you—mff!”
Kootie had stumbled on a high curb and fallen to his knees.
“What’s the matter?” said Edison too loudly. Kootie took the ending r sound and prolonged it into a groan that rose to a wail. “Don’t talk so much,” Kootie said despairingly. “I can’t breathe when you do.” He sniffed. “I bet we didn’t get one full or yelling at their kids or dropping baby bottles.” He tried to struggle back to his feet, and wound up resting his forehead on the sidewalk. “I can still taste those enchiladas,” he whispered to the faint trowel lines in the pavement “And the rum.”
“This won’t do,” came Edison’s voice out of Kootie’s raw throat Kootie’s arms and legs flexed and then acted in coordination, and he got his feet under himself and straightened all the way back up. Slanting morning sunlight lanced needles of reflected white glare off of car windshields into his watering eyes.
“You’re just not used to the catnap system,” said Edison kindly. “I can go for weeks on a couple of interrupted hours a night. You go to sleep, now—I’ll take the wheel for the next couple of miles.”
“Can we do that?” asked Kootie. He left his mouth loose for Edison’s reply, but had to closed had to close it when he felt himself starting to drool.
“Certainly. What you do is stand still for a moment here, and close your eyes—then in half a minute or so I’ll open your eyes but you’ll already have started to go to sleep, get it?” You’ll go ahead and relax and you won’t fall. I’ll hold us up, and walk and talk. Okay?” Kootie nodded. “Close your eyes, now, and relax.”
Kootie did, and he let himself fall away toward sleep, only peripherally aware of still being up in the air, and of the daylight when his eyes were eventually opened again. It was like falling asleep in a tree house over a busy street.
AND HIS confused memories and worries wandered outside the yard of his com I and began bickering among themselves, and assumed color and voices and became disjointed dreams.
His gray-haired father was at the front door of their Beverly Hills house, arguing with someone from the school district again. Sometimes Kootie’s parents would keen him home from school when science classes prompted him to ask difficult questions on topics like the actual properties of crystals and the literal meanings of words like energy and dimension.