“Can I talk to Cody?” said Cochran, standing up from the table. He was aware now that his shirt was clinging to his back with sweat.
“Nobody can talk to anybody, please,” said Plumtree quickly. Her hands were fists. “Arky, get me out of this!”
Mavranos had stood up too, and was opening his lockback pocket-knife one-handed as he strode around the table to the chair. “Relax, Janis,” he was saying gruffly, “you’re gonna hurt yourself. Here.” He crouched in front of her iron chair to swipe the knife blade through the duct tape on her wrists and ankles, then got up and went around to the back of the chair to cut the strips that bound her waist. “Sorry about this imposition,” he said to her as he helped her struggle to her feet. “Inquisition, even. We can explain it whenever you want to hear about it.”
“I just want to get inside,” she muttered quickly, “away from him.”
Cochran wondered which him she meant as he watched her shakily peel cut flaps of duct tape from her wrists. She was limping past him toward the kitchen door, with one hand on Mavranos’s shoulder, and she looked at her wristwatch and then raised her elbow and tilted her head to hold the watch to her ear.
But of course it was a black Casio quartz watch, with a liquid-crystal display. Her gesture reminded Cochran of old black-and-white Timex ads on TV, and in his head he heard the old shampoo-ad song: You can always tell a Halo girl …
When, Cochran wondered, did I last see anybody with a watch that ticked?
Oh, Jesus, she’s still split-screen!
But her mismatched eyes had been watching him, and caught his instant comprehension, and as he opened his mouth now she was snatching the revolver from Mavranos’s belt and lunging, smashing the barrel and butt of the gun like brass knuckles into Cochran’s belly.
Then Plumtree had danced back away as Cochran folded and sat down jarringly hard on the concrete, and she slapped both hands to her face, her left palm covering her eyes and her right hand pointing the gun up at the patio roof.
And she pulled the trigger. The bang was a ringing impact in Cochran’s ears, and Plumtree’s head smacked the stucco wall at her back.
But an instant later the gun barrel was horizontal, the muzzle pointed at Mavranos’s chest. Mavranos stepped back, his hands open and out to the sides.
“Mom,” Cochran choked, not able to get air into his lungs. “Janis’s … mom.” Fragments of wood and tar paper spun down from the new hole in the roof.
Angelica understood what he was doing, and called “Janis’s mom! Mother!”—before visibly wilting with the realization that Plumtree was deaf now.
As Mavranos shuffled backward across the patio deck, the gun muzzle swung toward Angelica. To Cochran’s tear-filled eyes it seemed to leave a rippling wake in the air. “Koot Hoomie,” said Salvoy, much too loudly, “pick up the roll of duct tape and come here—or I put a big hole in your mom. Scant-boy—reach slow into your pants pocket and throw me the car keys.” Plumtree wasn’t looking at Kootie directly.
Cochran thought he could feel ruptured organs inside himself ripping further open as he dragged his legs up under his torso and crawled across the concrete to Plumtree; he even had to reach out and brace himself with one hand on Plumtree’s blue-jeaned thigh as he hitchingly got up onto his knees. His lungs were chugging in his rib cage, but he still wasn’t able to draw any breath down his throat, and his vision had narrowed to a tunnel.
Plumtree had her back against the house wall, so she couldn’t retreat; Cochran was looking up at her, and his dizzy focus shifted effortfully outward from the ring of the .38-caliber muzzle to her eyes. Both of her eyes were wide and staring at him, the tiny-pupilled one and the dilated one, and at the bottom of his vision he could still blurrily see down the rifled barrel of the gun.
“Troilus, farewell!” hissed Valerie as Plumtree’s body shook with internal conflict against the stucco wall. The finger lifted out of the trigger-guard ring. “One eye yet looks on thee, but with my heart the other eye doth see.” Then the Salvoy voice grated, “No,” and the finger wobbled back down onto the trigger, and whitened.
Abruptly a youthful brown right hand sprang into Cochran’s narrow field of vision and closed over the muzzle, and from above him Kootie’s voice said, “You want this to be your right hand one day, don’t you? Will you shoot it off?”
Plumtree couldn’t have heard what the boy had said, but her eyes lifted. And Kootie’s gaze must have caught hers, for she suddenly convulsed sideways across the wall onto the projecting hose faucet as Kootie crouched along with her and violently twisted the gun in her hand.
Cochran threw himself onto her back as she rolled off the faucet and thudded heavily to the concrete, and he too was grabbing for the gun—and when he saw the hammer jump back he got his thumb in under it as it came down.
At last Kootie yanked it away, tearing a gash in the base of Cochran’s thumb. Cochran was breathing at last, in abrading gasps.
With a solid boom Mavranos rebounded off the wall then and fell to his knees on Plumtree’s right arm, and the roll of duct tape shrilled as he tore a long strip free and wrapped it around her wrist; then he had grabbed her other arm and wrapped tape around that wrist too.
Her back was rising and falling as she panted, and after a moment she rolled her head so that she could squint up sideways at Cochran. “How’d it,” she gasped with a bloody rictus of a smile, “go?”
Her nose was bleeding, though Cochran couldn’t guess whether it was from the physical stresses of Salvoy’s visitation or from having collided with the concrete deck. “Can you hear me?” he managed to croak loudly.
Cochran’s heart ached to see how wrinkled her eyelids were as she closed her eyes.
“Yes, Sid, oh, shut up!” She was gasping for breath and her bloody upper lip was twitching away from her teeth. “God, Sid, I hurt! Did I fall off the roof? What the fuck happened?”
“Cut her loose, Arky,” choked Cochran, in horror, as he braced his hands on the concrete deck and carefully climbed off her legs.
“She may still be split-screen,” came Angelica’s voice from behind him.
“Not—Cody.” Cochran reached out his jigging, bleeding hand and gently touched Plumtree’s shoulder. “We can—trust Cody.”
And in fact Mavranos was already knifing the tape off of her wrists.
CHAPTER 27
Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl.
Between our Ilium and where she resides
Let it be called the wild and wand’ring flood,
Ourself the merchant, and this sailing Pandar
Our doubtful hope, our convoy, and our bark.
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
ANGELICA WANTED TO LOOK at Plumtree’s bashed ribs and possibly sprained hand, but when Cochran and Mavranos had helped Plumtree to her feet and walked her into the house, she shook them off.
“Leave me be,” she said irritably, leaning over the kitchen sink while blood dripped from her nose. “It’s just a spell of the spasmodics.” She grabbed a dishtowel and pressed it to her face. “Get Teresa to fetch me a cup of Balm Tea,” she said through the towel, “with some gin in it.” Then she blinked around at the low-ceilinged white kitchen she was standing in, with its blocky white refrigerator and the gleaming black box of the microwave oven. “I mean, a glass of Z-Zinfandel,” she amended querulously. “And my bark-soled penance shoes.”
“No,” said Cochran sharply, “not yet. Sit down, Mrs. Pleasant. Have some coffee. Arky, get her a cup of coffee. Listen, we’ve learned some things about Crane’s resurrection.”
He felt goose bumps tickle against the sleeves of his shirt then, for when the woman looked at him, her forehead and high cheekbones seemed for a moment to be patrician with age, and momentarily her blond hair appeared white in the shine of the overhead fluorescent lights; then it was Plumtree’s face, with both eyes the same shade of blue, though the eyelids were still full and vaguely Asian. She sat down in on
e of the kitchen chairs stiffly, dabbing at her nose with the bloody towel. Her nose wasn’t bleeding anymore, and the Mammy Pleasant personality didn’t appear to feel any pains in her ribs.
Raindrops began tapping against the window over the sink.
“I tried to tell you people everything,” said Mammy Pleasant’s cautious voice, “right from the first, well in time for you to have done it correctly on St. Sulpice’s Day. I was supposed to be your intercessor—I told you then that I would have to indwell one of you, but you thought I just wanted a body to take the fresh air in.”
“We’re listening now,” said Angelica. “And you’ve got the body now.”
“I’ll tell you nothing, now,” said Pleasant’s voice. “Your Chinaman holiday isn’t until the day after tomorrow. Ask me about it then, respectfully, and I might tell you what to do, and I might not. At any rate I can have wine for one more day, and my shoes.”
Kootie had started toward the hall, but Cochran said, “Don’t get the shoes, Kootie. They apparently work as a damper to keep her personality from being conspicuous, from being a beacon to this house—maybe she seems to be a tree, to psychic radar, when she’s wearing ’em—but I think they’re also a damper on her intelligence. I think they’re like dope.”
“Now I will assuredly tell you nothing.”
“But you’ve said that the god’s purpose is your purpose too,” said Angelica in a tone of sympathetic concern. She knelt beside Plumtree. “And that the god’s purpose is to bring Crane back, as king. We need to know what to do.” Cochran guessed that Angelica was already resolved to ditch this whole enterprise, and every person that resided in the Plumtree head, and simply wanted to find out as much as possible before fleeing; but he had to admit that she projected sincerity. Doctors are trained to do that, he thought.
“The god’s purpose,” said Pleasant, stubbornly shaking Plumtree’s tangled blond hair. “You’re to take two old women to the sea, and throw them in, because the god’s purpose doesn’t include poor frightened old ghosts trying to sleep in some frail shelter out of the rain.” She turned to Angelica, blinking rapidly. “What if we did fight him? Who won?”
Two old women? thought Cochran. She mentioned another old woman right at the first, on the Solville TV—Angelica said it sounded like a sewing circle. Who’s the other one? Plumtree’s phantom mother?
“Could I have insisted?” the old woman went on. Plumtree’s eyes were blinking rapidly. “I tried to insist! Through your, your ‘boob tube’! You could have accomplished it then, on St. Sulpice’s Day, if you had listened to me.”
“And if I hadn’t run away,” said Kootie
“We were well down the wrong track already, by that morning,” Mavranos told the boy gruffly. “Going to the wrong shore, with the wrong wine …” To Plumtree’s sunburned face, he said, “You could have told us more. We might not have listened, but …”
“I needed to be in a body! I told you that much! How could I think, without a brain?” Plumtree’s eyes were blinking rapidly.
Mavranos’s nostrils were flared and the corners of his mouth were drawn down. “You wanted a body to take the fresh air in,” he said flatly.
Rain was drumming now against the window over the sink, and Cochran could see the bobbing stems of Nina’s window-box basil outside. The back door was open, and the cold draft smelled of wet clay.
“I wanted some time to rest,” Mammy Pleasant said in a near-whisper, perhaps agreeing with him. “This little time, these little days sitting with the orchids in the greenhouse, and cooking for people again! I don’t see how anybody can describe total oblivion as rest—you couldn’t even call it losing yourself, because for losing to go on there has to be a loser, and there wouldn’t be even that. Oh, believe me, the god’s purpose has only been delayed.”
“And made … costlier,” said Mavranos, very quietly. His brown hands were clenched in fists against his thighs.
“Let me tell you about Omar Salvoy’s purpose,” Cochran said, leaning back against the refrigerator. “According to Plumtree’s mom, he wants to get into the right male body and become this Fisher King, and then get Plumtree pregnant—specifically, get Valorie pregnant. Valorie is evidently the core child inside Plumtree, and she’s apparently dead. Salvoy believes that if he can father a child by a dead woman—well, not a whole child; I gather it would be just a sort of deformed, unconnected head—that partial child will be a living, obligated piece of Dionysus.”
“Jesus!” exclaimed Angelica, looking away from Plumtree to gape up at him.
Kootie was hugging himself, grasping his elbows; and Cochran thought that this revelation had somehow stirred the boy’s memories of whatever devastating thing it was that he had done twelve days ago, after he had run away from the motel on Lombard Street before dawn.
For several seconds no one spoke.
Plumtree’s head was bowed. “Yes,” she whispered finally, “if he was the king, he could force that. If he had the body with the wounded side, and if he made a mother of Death, he could stand in loco parentis to the god. Other kings have sometimes achieved degrees of domination over the god, in other ways.”
“Loco parentis is right,” said Mavranos hollowly.
Plumtree’s head snapped back, throwing her blond locks back from her forehead. “The god, in that form,” she said, “and that king, would have uses for a couple of old ghost ladies.” Her face was impassive, but tears spilled down her cheeks. “Thank you, Scant Cochran, for making me understand that the oblivion in the sea is one of the god’s mercies. I do thank him for the offered gift of ceasing to exist. And I’m grateful, too, that it must be the last of his gifts to me.”
Cochran opened his mouth to speak, but Mammy Pleasant rapped Plumtree’s knuckles on the kitchen table. “I will speak, now, and you all will listen,” she said. “When your king’s castrated father was king, he ruled in Las Vegas. And your king ruled and may rule again in the place that rhymes with Arcadia. But there was a king who cultivated the miraculous Zinfandel vine in San Diego until 1852, and who then castled to Sonoma, north of San Francisco, where he grew the vines in the Valley of the Moon, between Sonoma Mountain and Bismark Knob. The god originally intended me to be queen to this king, but I had irretrievably rebelled against the god a dozen years earlier.”
“This was … Harass-thee,” said Kootie.
“Haraszthy,” said Plumtree, subtly correcting the boy’s pronunciation. “Agoston Haraszthy, who took the title of ‘Count’ for the grandeur in it. In 1855 he was made assayer and melter and refiner of gold at the United States Mint at Mission Street, south of Market; and the furnaces burned all day and all night, and after he quit, the roofs of the surrounding houses were all deeply stained with misted gold.” The reminiscent smile on Plumtree’s face somehow implied lines and creases that weren’t actually there. “That was a kingly thing, if you like! But, like most of the men who attain the throne, he refused to submit to real death in the winter. And so in the thirteenth year of his reign, 1861, the worst winter floods in the history of California devastated Haraszthy’s precious grapevines; and in 1863, the surviving vines withered in the worst drought in twenty-five years. I was happy to help in undermining this king’s power, and in 1868 I bought the Washington Street property that had housed the original greenhouse-shrine devoted to the Zinfandel in California, and I tore out the sacred old vines and converted the place to a boardinghouse.”
She stared curiously around at the kitchen, as if to fix the details of it in her memory. “After that sacrilege,” she went on, “Haraszthy was getting no spiritual power from the god at all, no psychic subsidy, and so he just abandoned his ordained throne and the American West altogether, and he fled south all the way to Nicaragua—to distill rum, from unsanctified sugarcanes!” She laughed gently and shook her head. “He was hiding from Dionysus, who was without a king now, and therefore not as close to human affairs. I decided to put them both out of my picture—and so on the night of June 24th of the nex
t year, on St. John’s Eve, I celebrated the very first voodoo ceremony to be held in the American West, and in the woods out along the San Jose Road my people danced and drummed and drank rum and worshipped Damballa the Great Serpent, and I conveyed my prayers to him. And twelve days later, down in Nicaragua, the Dionysus who was no longer very human found his faithless king—Haraszthy was eaten by an alligator, which was Sebek-Re, a very crude, early Egyptian personification of the fertility-and-death god.”
Cochran looked away from the ophidian eyes and the somehow distinctly Egyptian-seeming smile, and saw that his companions too were avoiding looking into Plumtree’s face. He thought of the broken skeleton out in the greenhouse in the rain, and he wished someone would close the back door.
“I did not know, at first,” Mammy Pleasant’s voice went on carefully, “that the kinghood had rebounded like a snapped rope when Haraszthy fled this continent in 1868. Dionysus,” she said, with a look that Cochran could feel on the skin of his face, “places great stock in names, in clues and similarities in names; and a weapons manufacturer back East who was known as ‘the rifle king,’ and who, among other fortuitous resemblances, had the middle name ‘Fisher,’ became the unintended and unknowing and unsanctified focus of the kinghood. A … measurable westward deflection! … of my magics, made me aware of the obstruction of him, and in 1880 I held another voodoo ceremony—this time in the basement of my grand house on Octavia Street. Again my people drummed and danced to the Great Serpent, and in the December of that year this poor misplaced king-apparent died. He had a middle-aged son, and in the following March the son died too, of consumption, leaving behind a childless forty-one-year-old widow. They had had one child, a daughter, who had perished of the marasmus back in ’66 at the age of a month-and-a-half.”