Cochran had to remind himself that these people had treated him rudely—and abused his credit card—and got him into the middle of an actual gunfight, in which people had probably been killed—for he found that he was unthinkingly warmed to have the Sullivans and Kootie and Mavranos come fussing and suffering into his life again, somehow especially after his humiliations with Plumtree and Nina’s ghost. Despite all their bickering and crisis, they always brought with them an urgent, sweaty sense of purpose.
“How long were you people planning to stay here?” Cochran asked now, forcing his voice to be flat and uncompromising. “Overnight?”
Mavranos gave him a bland stare and Pete and Angelica Sullivan looked uneasy, but it was Kootie who answered: “Until the end of the month,” the boy said diffidently. “Until the Vietnamese Tet festival, or maybe the start of the Moslem fast, Ramadan. That’s February the first. Our pendulum—”
“Two weeks?” protested Cochran. “I’ve got a job! I’ve got neighbors! I’ve got—furniture that I don’t need wrecked.”
“It’s not quite two weeks,” said Kootie. “Uh … eleven days.”
“I saw Scott Crane’s skeleton,” said Plumtree. “How is it supposed to work this time? He takes me forever?” She raised her eyebrows. “He takes Kootie forever?”
“Neither, I think,” said Kootie. Cochran noticed that the boy didn’t seem happy to be exempted—in fact he looked haunted and sick. “I don’t know—we have to ask Mammy Pleasant. She’s the old black lady from the TV.”
Angelica snorted. “She’s been no help up to now.”
“Maybe Crane will just … materialize a body,” ventured Plumtree.
“No,” said Pete, “where will he get stuff from? He’ll need protoplasm, like a hundred and sixty or so pounds of it!”
“Edison conjured up a sort of body,” said Kootie quietly, “a mask, at least, when he took me over, in ’92; he used the flesh of a dog I was friends with. I’ve dreamed of it, since. In one second, Fred—the dog—was suddenly just a bloody skeleton, and Edison had a flesh head and hands of his own, and even a furry black overcoat.” He gulped some of the mineral water. “But the flesh was killed in the rearrangement. I’m sure it just rotted, after we shed it.”
Jesus, thought Cochran.
Angelica nodded. “So he’ll not only need protoplasm, but unkilled protoplasm. Are we supposed to bring some homeless guy along? A bunch of dogs?”
“Pigs are supposed to be very like humans, physically,” said Plumtree. “Maybe we should bring a couple of good-size pigs.”
Mavranos was pale, and looked as though he wanted to spit. “Kootie talked to old Pleasant today. Her ghost, but in person, not on a TV. She’s apparently sort of an indentured servant, or prisoner serving out hard-labor time, of Dionysus, and she’s—and the god is too—trying to help us. Apparently. She gave Kootie a message for Crane, some kind of summons and commandment, and it’s in the form of a Latin palindrome. I don’t like that, ’cause it’s ghosts that are drawn to palindromes, and Crane’s ghost is a naked imbecile running around at the Sutro ruins.”
“Is it the Latin thing I burned up the matchbook with,” asked Cochran, “in the motel room? And there was another Latin bit that Cody and I saw, on an ashtray in L.A. I don’t remember what it was.”
Mavranos hiked his chair back to dig a car registration slip out of his jeans pocket. He unfolded it, and read:
“Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit Amor.
Si bene te tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis.
Sole, medere pede: ede, perede melos.”
“That first line is definitely the thing that was on the ashtray in L.A.,” said Plumtree.
Cochran could feel hairs stirring on the back of his neck. “After I read that line out loud, there, Crane’s ghost showed up as our taxi driver. And after I read out the second one, in the Sutro ruins, his crazy naked ghost appeared there.”
“Don’t speak the third one now,” said Mavranos. “A naked guy banging around in your kitchen would only upset the ladies. Wouldn’t do me any good, either, seeing a semblance of my old friend in that totally bankruptious state.” He sighed, then glared at Cochran. “Okay if I use your phone? I should see if Nardie’s got the damn thing translated.”
“There’s a speakerphone in the kitchen,” Cochran said. “Talk to her on that, so we can all hear it.”
In the sunny kitchen, Cochran and Plumtree resumed their seats at the table, while Pete and Angelica leaned on the counter by the sink. Kootie slumped into a third chair, but looked at the counter as if he’d have liked to climb up on it if he hadn’t had fresh stitches in his side. Cochran recalled that Kootie had sat up on a washing machine when they had tried to call Crane’s ghost in Solville, and he wondered why the boy wanted to be distanced from the ground when important calls were being made.
Mavranos had walked straight to the telephone on the wall and punched in the eleven digits of the long-distance number, and now tapped the speakerphone button.
“Hello?” came a young woman’s cautious voice out of the speaker; Cochran had seldom used the speakerphone function, and he now reflected ruefully that the sound wasn’t as good as what Kootie’s chalk-in-the-pencil-sharpener speaker had produced.
“Arky here, Nardie,” said Mavranos, “with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men listening in. Whaddaya got?”
“Okay, your three palindromes are a pentameter followed by a hexameter followed by a pentameter,” said the woman called Nardie. “That’s a natural alternation in Roman lyric verse, like in Horace and Catullus. This could be very damned old, you know? And the lines do seem to relate to your—our—situation. You got a pencil?”
Mavranos pulled open a drawer under the telephone and pawed through it. “Yes,” he said, fumbling out an eyeliner pencil and Cochran’s January gas bill.
“Okay,” said Nardie’s voice from the speaker, “Roma, with a comma after it, is in the vocative case, addressing Rome, which our context pretty clearly makes ‘spiritual power on Earth,’ like a rogue version of the Vatican, okay? Tibi subito is ‘to you, suddenly, abruptly.’ Motibus is in the ablative case, indicating in what manner, so it means something like ‘with dancing motion,’ though Cicero uses it in the phrase motus terrae, which means an earthquake.”
“You told me motibus was ‘motor bus,’ ” Plumtree whispered to Cochran. She seemed relieved.
He nodded tightly and waved at her to be quiet.
“Ibit.” Nardie was saying, “is the third-person future tense of ‘to go.’ Of course amor is ‘love,’ but the capital A makes me think it’s a person, like some god of love; and in this suddenness-and-earthquake context very likely a harsh one.”
Cochran was thinking of the god who had awakened him with an apparent earthquake in the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas nearly five years ago, and of Nina, who had preferred that god’s fatal love to his own.
“In the second line,” Nardie went on, “taxat is a first-declension verb, taxo, taxare, meaning ‘hold, value, esteem.’ Literally, it’s ‘if your praise values you well,’ but in English that’d be ‘if you value your praise well.’ Sua is a possessive pronoun—it has to be in the nominative case, though I’d have liked suam better; anyway, it’s feminine, agreeing with the feminine laus, which is ‘praise’ or ‘fame.’ I think ‘your fame’ here is supposed to be actually, literally feminine in relation to this Amor person, who is fairly emphatically masculine. Laute is ‘gloriously.’ Tenebis is a second-declension verb: ‘to hold, to arrive at.’ ”
Mavranos was impatiently waving the eyeliner pencil in front of his face. “Nardie, what does the goddamn thing mean?”
A shaky sigh buzzed out of the speaker. “I’m explaining why I think it means what I’m gonna tell you, Arky, okay? Now listen, the last line really does flicker between alternate readings; I just finished untangling this a few minutes ago. Sole, with a comma after it, is like Roma in the first line, it has to be the vocative of sol, direc
t address for ‘sun,’ as in ‘O Sun.’ Medere is an infinitive or a gerund—or, as we’ve got here, an imperative—of ‘cure, remedy’; it’s not so much ‘to cure’ or ‘curing’ as it is an order, see—‘fix it!’ or ‘remedy it!’ Pede is ‘louse,’ the singular noun, as in Pliny’s use of pediculus or the English word ‘pediculosis,’ which means an infestation of lice. Now the verb Ede is very interesting here; it’s either from edo, edere, edi, esum, which is the usual Latin verb for ‘devour, consume, eat away’—or else it’s another verb, edo, edere, edidi, editum, which means ‘breathe one’s last, bring to an end,’ or at the same time ‘give birth to,’ or ‘give forth from oneself.’ Either verb works here, though the long e imposed by the trochaic meter makes me favor the second one. Perede is emphasis, emphatic repetition of the previous verb, whichever that is. And melos is generally translated as ‘song,’ but it’s a Latinized Greek word—obviously, from the suffix, right?—and the Greek for melos can also be ‘limb.’ As a Latin word it could be either nominative or accusative here, but with the Greek form it’s got to be accusative, a direct object.”
“What,” said Mavranos, speaking with exaggerated clarity, “does—the-damn-thing-mean?”
“Okay. In my interpretation, it means: ‘O spiritual power on Earth, the god of love will come to you suddenly and abruptly,’ either ‘with dancing movements’ or ‘as an earthquake’—or as both, conceivably. ‘If you value your praise highly you will hold it’—or ‘arrive at it’—‘gloriously. O Sun, remedy the louse: give forth from yourself, and give forth from yourself again, your limb.’ And with the confusion of the two edo vebs, there’s the implication of ‘your devoured limb.’ ”
“Leave the suicide king in the deck,” said Plumtree.
Mavranos frowned at her, but nodded. “I think I tried to tell Scott that, when we went to Northridge after the earthquake a year ago. The subterranean phylloxera lice were a summons from … under sanctified ground.”
“He never could bear to cut back the grapevines, in the midwinter,” said Nardie’s voice from the speaker, “after that first year. Even when the babies started to get fevers and pulmonary infections in the winters, and he had to eat No-Doz all day long, and his fingernails bled.” There was a pause while she might have shrugged. “He was still strong in the summers.”
Cochran was remembering putting out his hand to keep the face in the stump from being beheaded. “What we do next,” he said, glancing at everyone but finally fixing his gaze on Angelica, “is what?”
Angelica gave him a tired smile. “Thank you for the ‘we,’ ” she said. “We won’t ask you for your gun again. What we do next,” she said, stepping away from the counter and stretching, “can’t be anything else but summon Kootie’s silly old black lady, I guess.” She dropped her arms and looked at Plumtree. “We’ve got to talk to her in person.”
“In this person, you mean,” said Plumtree, though only in a tone of tired resignation. “Jeez, if my own genetic father, imposed on me, gives me toothaches and nosebleeds, God knows what this strange old woman will be like.”
“No,” said Kootie, “your father never died, but Mammy Pleasant did. She’s a ghost. When Edison had possession of me, there was nothing like that afterward. Ghosts don’t have the, the psychic DNA of a body anymore, they’ve got no vital structure to impose on the living body that hosts them.”
“Cool,” sighed Plumtree. “Not really my idea of a fun date anyway, to tell you the truth, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.” She stood up from the table. “Tell me what I’ve got to do.”
“I’m Bernardette Dinh,” came the voice from the speaker, “at the king’s overthrown Camelot in Leucadia.”
“I’m Janis Cordelia Plumtree, and my compadre here is Sid Cochran. I hope we can all meet in person one day, in the presence of the king.”
“Back in Solville,” said Kootie hesitantly, “Mammy Pleasant told us, ‘eat the seeds of my trees.’ ”
Angelica now reached into the pocket of her denim jacket and pulled out a fistful of what looked like angular gray acorns. She dropped them onto the kitchen table, and their rattling was nothing like bar dice. “We picked these up this morning, at the foot—sorry, at the waist—of one of her suffering trees. Koala bears eat this stuff, so it’s probably not poison,” she said. “I figure we can make an infusion in wine with some of ’em, and grind up some others to mix with flour and make bread.”
BOOK THREE
GOUT DE TERROIR
The vine by nature is apt to fall, and unless supported drops down to the earth; yet in order to keep itself upright it embraces whatever it reaches with its tendrils as though they were hands.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
CHAPTER 25
“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.
“Of it? What?”
“I mean of him. Of my father.”
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
IN THE SALINAS AND Santa Clara and Livermore valleys, on the jade green slopes that stretched away from the highways up to where the Santa Cruz Mountains in the west and the Diablo Range in the east met the gray sky, the newly head-pruned grapevines stood in rows like gnarled crucifixes, as if a tortured god hung at endlessly reiterated sacrifice in the cold rain.
The work in the vineyard cellars in late January was racking the wines, pumping the new vintages from one cask to another to liberate them from the freshly thrown sediments of dead yeast cells, and fining them with egg whites to precipitate cloudiness out. In the Pace cellars on San Bruno Mountain the suspension-cloudiness in the casks was heavy this year, and bentonite clay as well as egg whites were both needed to bring the wine to clarity, and the “goût de terroir,” the flavor of earth, was especially pronounced. On the slopes outside, tractors dragged harrows and cultivators through the old-standard eight-foot aisles between the rows, and this year the blades and disks were soon blunted to uselessness by the rocky soil and had to be replaced after having served only half of their expected life spans.
During the long days Sid Cochran oversaw the washing out of the drained casks with soda ash and hot water so that the wines could be racked back into them, and in the evenings he was kept busy in the lab, chilling some samples of the adjusted new wines to test for tartaric acid stability and heating others to provoke any incipient protein hazing. After his twelve days off, which the payroll clerk had listed as compassionate leave following the death of a family member, Cochran had now worked for seven days straight, as much for relief from his five houseguests as for catching up on the uncompromising vineyard chores and getting in some justifiable overtime pay.
Six or seven houseguests, he thought on Saturday afternoon as he steered the Granada up into his driveway and switched off the engine; at least. Though admittedly only five at any particular moment.
Mavranos’s truck was parked at the top of the driveway. The new pair of tan car covers, weighted down with bricks, concealed the truck’s red color, but did nothing to hide its boxy shape.
Cochran got out of the car and walked toward his 1960s ranch-style house across the lawn rather than on the stepping-stones, for Kootie had covered them with chalk detection-evasion patterns he’d apparently learned from Thomas Alva Edison two years ago; and up on the porch Cochran brushed aside Angelica’s wind chimes of chicken bones and old radio parts, avoided stepping in the smears of pork-fat-and-salt that Mammy Pleasant had carefully daubed onto the concrete, then ignored the brass keyhole plate below the doorknob and crouched to fit his housekey into the disguised lock Mavranos had installed at the base of the door.
The warm air in the entry hall smelled of WD-40 spray oil and stewing beef and onions, and Cochran could hear Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” from the Subterranean Homesick Blues album playing on the stereo in the living room. The music told him that Mavranos was in the house, and the pair of treebark-soled Ferragamo pumps by the door indicated that Mammy Pleasant was not currently oc
cupying the Plumtree body.
“Cody?” he called as he shrugged out of his rain-damp windbreaker.
“She’s out working on the Torino,” came Pete Sullivan’s voice from the kitchen. “How goes the bottle?” He was sitting at the kitchen table, leaning over a couple of half-dismantled walkie-talkies with a screwdriver.
“Aging.” Yesterday Cochran had replied, Cobwebby. He stepped into the kitchen and tossed his windbreaker onto the counter and then opened the refrigerator to get one of Mavranos’s beers. Freshly scratched into the white enamel of the refrigerator door were the numbers 1-28-95; during this week of frustrating waiting Plumtree had got into the habit of key-scratching the current day’s date on any surface that would show a gouge—wood tabletops, dry wall, book spines. When he had protested after finding the first few examples, last weekend, she had doggedly told him that she had to do it, that it was like the hospital surgery-ward policy of inking NO on limbs that were not to be “ectomied,” cut off. And she had been using a black laundry-marking pen to letter the name of each day on whatever blouse of Nina’s she was wearing. Probably she was doing the same to her underwear; Cochran was sleeping on the living-room couch these days, and didn’t know.
Cochran carried his beer out through the laundry room to the back door, the window of which was still broken from the morning two weeks ago when he and Plumtree had let themselves in by breaking the glass with a wine bottle. When he unlocked the door and pushed it open against the cold outdoor breeze, the woman standing by the raised hood of the ’69 Torino looked at him, and was clearly Cody.
“You’ve got to talk to Janis,” Cody said.
Cochran walked up to the old car. Cody had taken the carburetor and the distributor cap off of the engine, and had laid out wrenches and a timing-light gun on a towel draped over the fender.
“I’ve tried to,” he said.
Several times at their noisy buffet-style breakfasts he had noticed Plumtree eating poached or fried eggs, holding the fork in her right hand, and he had caught her eye—but each time her face had changed, and it had been Cody who had given him a blank, questioning look as she switched the fork to her left hand and reached for the bowl of scrambled eggs; and once Plumtree’s posture, as she had stood on tiptoe to reach a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay down from a high bookshelf, had clearly been Janis’s shoulders-back stance—but, when he had called to her, Cody had blinked impatiently at the book and paused only long enough to dig her set of car keys out of her pocket and scratch the date into the cover before putting it back.