He had passed many empty lots. He could describe the typical one now—fenced in with chain-link, with a few shaggy palm trees and a derelict car, and lines of weeds tracing lightning-bolt patterns across the old asphalt. Maybe he could get into a lot, and be ready to wake up and run when he heard the one-armed bum climbing the fence.
AT THE intersection ahead of him a man in an old denim jacket was standing on the sidewalk with a dog beside him. The dog was some kind of black German-shepherd mix, and the man was holding a white cardboard sign. When Kootie limped up beside them the dog began wagging its tail, and Kootie stooped to catch his breath and pat the dog on the head.
“Bueno perro”, Kootie told the man. He could now see that the hand-lettered sign read, in big black letters, WILL WORK FOR FOOD—HOMELESS VIETNAM VET.
“Sí”, the man said. “Uh… cómo se dice…perro is dog, right?”
“Right,” Kootie said. “Nice dog. You speak English.”
“Yeah. You got no accent.”
“I’m Indian, not Mexican. India Indian. Anyway, I was born here.”
The man he was talking to could have been of any race at all, almost of any age at all. His short-cropped white hair was as curly as Kootie’s, and his skin was dark enough so that he might be Mexican or Indian or black or even just very tanned. His lean face was deeply lined around the mouth and the vaguely Asian eyes, but Kootie couldn’t tell if that was a result of age or just exposure to lots of weather.
“Where do you two live?” Kootie found himself asking.
“Nowhere, Jacko,” the man said absently, watching the traffic over Kootie’s head. “Why, where do you live?”
Kootie patted the dog’s head again and blinked back tears of exhaustion, glad of the sunglasses. “Same place.”
The man looked down again and focused on Kootie. “Really? Here?”
Kootie blinked up at him and tried to understand the question. “If it was here, how could it be nowhere?”
“Hah. You’d be surprised. Act cool, now, okay?”
The light had turned red, and a big battered blue Suburban truck had stopped at the crosswalk lines. The driver leaned across the seat and cranked down the passenger-side window. “Nice dog,” he said through a ragged mustache. “How you all doing?”
“Not so good,” said the white-haired man standing beside Kootie. “My son and I and the dog been standing out here all day waitin’ for someone who needs some kind of work done and we’d like to be able to stay in a motel, tomorrow being Sunday and us wantin’ to get a shower before church, you know? We’re just six bucks short right now.”
Kootie rolled his eyes anxiously behind the sunglasses. Tomorrow was Wednesday, not Sunday.
“Shit,” said the driver. Then, just as the light turned green, he tossed a balled-up bill out the window. “Make it count!” he yelled as he gunned away across the intersection.
The white-haired man had caught the bill and uncrumpled it—it was a five. He grinned down at Kootie, exposing uneven yellow teeth. “Good job. So whatta you, a runaway?”
Kootie glanced nervously back up the street to the west. “My parents are dead.”
“Some kind of foster home? Go back to wherever it is, Jacko.”
“There isn’t any place at all.”
“There isn’t, huh?” The man was watching traffic, but he glanced down at Kootie. “Well there was a place, I believe, a day or two ago. That’s a Stussy shirt, and those Reeboks are new. Where were you plannin’ to sleep? Any old where? You get fucked up bad around here, Jacko, trust me. Whole streets of chickenhawks looking for your sort. Nastiness, know what I mean?” He squinted around, then sighed. “You wanna move in with Fred and me for a couple of days?”
Kootie understood that Fred was the dog, and that helped; still he said quickly, “I don’t have any money at all.”
“Bullshit you don’t, you got two bucks just in the last couple of seconds. Fred takes twenty percent, okay? Let’s work this corner for another ten minutes, and then we can move up to Silver Lake.”
Kootie tried to figure where Silver Lake was from here. “That’s a long walk, isn’t it?”
“Fuck walk, and in fact fuck talk, we got a red light coming up again here. I got a car, and Fred and I keep moving. Trust me, you be doin' yourself a favor to ride along with us.”
Kootie looked desperately at the dog’s wide grin and brown eyes, and he thought about keep moving, and then he blurted, “Okay.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Kootie.”
The man clasped Kootie’s hand in his own dry, callused palm. “Kootie? No kidding. I’m Rightful Glory Mayo. Known as Raffle.” Then, more loudly, he said, “Can we wash your car windows, ma’am? My boy and I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”
Raffle didn’t even have a squirt bottle or a newspaper to wash windows with, but the woman in the Nissan gave them a dollar anyway.
“That’s another forty cents you got, Kootie,” said Raffle as the light turned green. “You know, we might do better if you ditched the shades—makes you look like a pint-size doper.”
Kootie took off the sunglasses and looked mutely up at Raffle. He had no idea what color his eye socket was, but it was swollen enough to perceptibly narrow his vision.
“Well now, little man,” Raffle said, “you’ve had a busy day or two, haven’t you? Yeah, keep the shades—people will think I gave you that, otherwise.”
Kootie nodded and put the glasses back on—but not before he had nervously looked westward again.
CHAPTER NINE
“I only took the regular course.”
“What was that?” inquired Alice.
“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Unification, and Derision.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
RAFFLE was obviously pleased with the money they made during the next ten minutes and he dug a laundry marking pen out of the pocket of his topmost shirt and, under the words HOMELESS VIETNAM VET, he added WITH MOTHERLESS SON.
“We gonna make booyah bucks on this,” ‘said Raffle with satisfaction. “We probably be sleepin’ in motels every night.”
Kootie thought of sleeping on wheels. “I don’t mind a car,” he said, struggling to keep the impatience out of his voice. He still hadn’t seen the one-armed man, but he could imagine him watching from behind some wall.
“Good attitude,” Raffle said. “Hey, we should be shifting locations—you want a beer?”
Kootie blinked. “I’m only eleven.”
“Well, I’ll drink it if you don’t want it. Come on.”
They walked across the street to a little liquor store, Fred following closely on their heels, and Raffle bought a bottle of Corona in a narrow paper bag.
“Let’s head for the car,” he said as they walked back out onto the sidewalk.
The car was a twenty-year-old mustard-colored Ford Maverick parked behind a nearby Laundromat, and the back seat was piled with clothes and Maxell floppy-disk boxes and at least a dozen gray plastic videocassette rewinders. Fred hopped up onto the clutter when Raffle unlocked the door, and Raffle and Kootie sat in the front seats.
Raffle levered the cap off the beer bottle against the underside of the dashboard. In an affectedly deep voice, he said, “What’s your name, boy?”