My father hath a power; inquire of him,
And learn to make a body of a limb.
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
“WATCH FOR A MOBIL station,” said Plumtree, leaning back in the driver’s seat and squinting through cigarette smoke at the onrushing dark pavement of Highway 101.
Cochran nodded and peered through a wiped-clean patch of the steamy windshield, though there was nothing at the moment to see but the endless ellipsis of reflective orange lane-marker dots and the perilously close nighttime fog hanging on the road shoulder. They were north of Oxnard, out of L.A. County, and had just driven past the exit for something called Lost Hills Road. Why would anyone take that exit? Plumtree had wondered aloud. If hills get lost out there, they’d certainly lose you.
“The Jenkins woman’s not gonna be cancelling her credit cards till ten,” Plumtree went on now, “at the earliest. Hell, the way she was knocking back the margaritas, she probably won’t get up before noon.”
Jenkins had proven to be the name of the woman whose purse Plumtree had stolen at the Mount Sabu bar. After searching the Belmont Shore area for an older-model car, and then finding and quickly hot-wiring a ’69 Ford Torino that had been parked off Redondo Avenue, Plumtree had used the Jenkins woman’s Visa card in an all-night Ralph’s market to buy a carton of cigarettes and a dozen cans of soup and a can opener and a fistful of Slim Jim packages and two twelve-packs of Coors and two bottles of Listerine and three 750-milliliter bottles of Popov vodka. A vodka bottle was opened now, wedged between her thighs and occasionally rattled by the bumps on the steering wheel when she changed lanes.
One of the lane changes was a sharp enough swerve to press Cochran against the passenger-side door and make him drop his cigarette, and Plumtree only remembered to click on the turn signal after she was in the left lane and yanking the car back straight. The vodka bottle had rattled like a mariachi band’s percussion gourd. “You want me to drive?” Cochran asked, fumbling on the floor for his cigarette.
“You’re drunk,” said Plumtree. “And don’t … point out to me … that I’m drinking. Alcohol makes me a better driver, keeps me alert. We need an alert driver, for this fog.”
Cochran sat back in the passenger seat and hoped she was right. Certainly he wasn’t sober … and at least they both had their seat belts on. He didn’t want to have to stop and get out of the car, anyway—the car had a heater, and Plumtree had blessedly turned it up to full blast.
Past her silhouetted head he could faintly see the line of the surf glowing gray as it silently rose and fell out past the State Beach, under stars haloed by the incoming fog so that they looked like the stars in Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
“I wonder if the dead king’s crowd has even got started yet,” he said.
“All the dead king’s horses and all the dead king’s men …” Plumtree said softly.
Couldn’t put Scott Crane together again, Cochran mentally finished the rhyme.
“I think—” Plumtree began; then she went on quickly, “this car runs pretty smooth, doesn’t it? I’d like to have done a compression check before we took off on an eight-hour drive, but I don’t hear any bad lifters or rocker arms.”
Cochran bent over to reach into the bag between his feet, and he tore open the top of one of the beer cartons and lifted a can out. “What do you think?” he asked casually as he popped the top and took a leisurely sip.
“You may as well start working on those,” said Plumtree with a nod, “they’ll only warm up, sitting down there by the heater vent.” She hiked up the vodka bottle and took a hearty gulp. “I think I turned those moths into wasps.”
The lights and exit ramps of Ventura had swept past now, but Cochran hadn’t noticed a Mobil sign. Oh well, he thought, Santa Barbara is coming up fast, and—he peered at the lighted dashboard—we’re only a little under a quarter tank. “Really?” he said, his voice quiet but not skeptical. “Good enough so they could actually sting?”
“Well, I don’t know if they could really sting. And it would be Valorie that did it, not actually this here me. But I think it was because that Mavranos guy asked you about the mark on your hand, and I—we—didn’t want him to find out about it. Is that a birthmark?”
“I—told Janis about it,” Cochran whispered hoarsely after another gulped sip.
“She and I don’t speak to each other much.”
Cochran sighed. “In 1961, when I was seven, I thought I saw a face, a whiskery little old head, in an old Zinfandel stump that was being pruned back for the winter, and, without thinking, I shoved my hand out to stop the shears from cutting the old man’s head off.” The steady green glow of the instrument-panel dials was a cozy contrast to the night and the fog and the rushing lane markers outside, and he took another sip of the cold beer, secure in the knowledge that there were twenty-three more full cans between his ankles. The coal of his cigarette glowed as he inhaled on it, and a moment later exhaled smoke curled against the windshield.
“Actually,” he said slowly, then paused; “I think it’s old rust or bark dust, under the skin. Like a powder-burn. Anyway, it’s not a birthmark.”
Plumtree nodded and had another couple of swallows from the vodka bottle. “Actually what?” she asked.
Her question forced a short, awkward laugh out of Cochran. It made him dizzy to realize that he was teetering on the brink of telling this Plumtree woman—this one!—a secret he had kept for thirty-three years; and to realize too that, in the warm nest-like secrecy of this anonymous car flying along in the middle of cold dark nowhere, he wanted to; so he choked down a big impulsive mouthful of beer and used the sudden dizziness to get himself over the hump.
He spoke rapidly: “Actually—as I remember it, anyway, maybe I’m confusing it with dreams I had later—the shears cut right through my hand, cut it most of the way off. No kidding—there was blood squirting everywhere, and the vineyard worker with the shears was in shock, looking like … like his face was carved out of bone, with a big bullet-hole for a mouth.” He tilted up the can to finish the beer in three deep gulps. “Then, about one full second later, there was an almighty bang—a, a crash like you dropped a Sherman tank from thirty thousand feet onto the roof of the Astrodome—and when I could think again, maybe another second or two later, my hand was fine, whole, not a scratch, and not a drop of blood anywhere—my hand didn’t even have this mark on it yet; that was there when I woke up one morning about exactly a year later—but the old vine was standing there in full, bushy, impossible summertime bloom.” Jerkily he leaned forward again to put the empty can onto the floor mat and tug another can free of the carton.
“Mobil station,” he said briskly when he had straightened up again and looked out through the windshield. “Next exit, it looks like,” he added, nodding and squinting like a navigator. He popped the can open, but just held it. “And,” he went on gently, shaking his head, “it had ripe grape bunches hanging all over it, but also … pomegranates, and figs, and I don’t know what all else. This was in the dead of winter.” He took a deep breath and let it out, then glanced at Plumtree with a wry smile. “You’d better let me deal with pumping the gas, and paying for it. You’re gonna reek of liquor.”
“That’s Santa Barbara,” Plumtree said, switching on the turn-signal indicator and scuffing her tennis shoe from the gas pedal to the brake. “After this we turn inland at Gaviota. The fog’ll be worse then. Vodka doesn’t have half the smell that beer’s got; You probably stink like an old bar towel. What did the guy with the shears do, the vineyard worker?”
“He got very damn drunk.”
Plumtree nodded as she steered off the highway and rattled across an intersection on a green light. “That shows respect.”
The left-side tires bounced up over the curb when she swung the big old Ford into the white-lit Mobil station, but she managed to park it next to one of the pumps. Cochran had dropped his cigarette again, but he just stomped it out on the floorboards. Before he could remark on the way she’d handled the driveway, she said, “I gotta disconnect the coil to turn this off. That’s good, though—a modern car, with the ignition in the steering column, I’d have had to bust it out, and cops look for that, in parking lots, and then … they wait for whoever to come back to the car. Who’s driving it.”
She enunciated the syllables as carefully as if she were pushing silver dollars out of her mouth one at a time, and Cochran realized that she herself was very drunk; and when he levered open the passenger-side door and stood up and took several deep breaths of the icy air, he was so dizzy that he had to hang on to the door to keep his balance.
He swung his unwieldy gaze over the car’s roof, and watched Plumtree shuffle to the front bumper, frowning and holding on to the vibrating fender with both hands. When she had hoisted up the hood and pulled free the wire that connected the coil to the battery, the engine shook twice and then wheezed to a halt; and in the silence he said, “I think we should … let Janis drive.”
“She’d get lost,” said Plumtree shortly. “I’m gonna go give the man the card, sign for it—you pump the gas when I wave.” She wobbled across the damp asphalt toward the glass door, then halted and looked back at him. “On the Torinos the gasp cap is behind the rear license plate.”
Cochran squeaked the license plate down, unscrewed the gas cap, and shoved the nozzle of the premium pump into the filler hole, and then he leaned heavily on the trunk as he held the aluminum trigger squeezed and numbly watched the wheels behind the little gas pump window roll around to, finally, fifteen dollars and sixty cents. The aromatic reek of gasoline on the cold night air did nothing to sober him up.
He had hung up the nozzle but was still trying to get the cap threaded back on when Plumtree reattached the coil wire and jumped the solenoid again to start the engine. When he heard the hood slam down he just dropped the cap and let the license plate snap up over it, and then hurried to the passenger-side door and got in, glad of the interior warmth even if they were both about to die in a Driving-Under-the-Influence one-car crash in the foggy canyons beyond Gaviota.
She clanked the engine into gear and drove right over the curb onto Milpas Street, swinging wide in a chirruping left turn to get back to the 101.
“Oh, okay,” she said, and the engine missed for a moment, coming back strongly when she fluttered the gas pedal. “Whoops! When do I turn?”
“Take that on-ramp on the right,” said Cochran through clenched teeth, pulling the seat belt across himself. “101 north.”
She glanced at him after she had made the turn. “Scant! What day is it?”
He relaxed a little, and didn’t attach the seatbelt. “It’s the morning of the twelfth by now,” he said cautiously, “of January. It’s been a couple of hours since we left Solville.”
“My father is alive,” she said. “I did catch him!”
“That’s … right, I guess. According to that Angelica woman.” He tried to remember when it had been that Janis had last been up.
She leaned back in the seat now, straightening her arms and flexing her fingers at the top of the wheel. “This is disorienting—I don’t have to watch for cues, I can just ask you! How did we get away from there? I don’t think they wanted us to just leave.”
“No—we snuck out. They were talking about—holding a gun on you. We’re still working with them, I guess, but at arm’s length.”
She was gingerly licking her lips and grimacing. “I’m glad to get away from that burnt-liquor stink. Nobody got hurt, I hope?”
“Oh no.” He let the seat belt reel back up into the slot above the door, and finally sat back and let himself exhale. “Well, not hurt—but that old man with the windshield wipers all over him died. But it was just, like, a heart attack, I guess. Nothing to do with us. And then in the confusion Cody just grabbed my hand and we walked out. And stole us this car.”
“My father spoke to me over the telephone.”
Cochran thought of someone who had to maintain a ’69 Torino, going out to work on a Thursday morning and finding the car gone; but at least Janis was a sober driver. She hadn’t had anything to drink since … what? A Manhattan or two at dinner, hours and hours ago. Of course it was the same bloodstream, really, but it did seem that Cody had taken the alcohol away with her.
“Yes,” he said. “I heard him.”
She was still smacking her lips, and now she said, “Did Cody get mouthwash?”
“As a matter of fact, she did. A big bottle of Listerine.”
“Could you pass it to me?”
Cochran did, and she unscrewed the cap and took a swig of the mouthwash; she swished it around audibly in her mouth for a few seconds, then rolled down the window to spit it outside.
“We’re going to San Francisco, aren’t we?” she said as she rolled the window back up.
“Yes.” Cochran blinked in the new Listerine fumes, trying to remember whether Janis had still been on when San Francisco had first been proposed. He was sure she had not, that Cody had already been in control then. “How did you know that?”
“That’s where he … fell off the building. And I caught him.”
“We’re going there because it’s where they all—you all—hell, we all, can get Scott Crane restored to life.” According to a crazy old dead black lady, at least, he thought.
“They’re bringing his body along, I hope?” It seemed to Cochran that she spoke anxiously.
He thought of the vague plan Cody had described for getting Crane back into his own undecayed body—or, failing that, into hers permanently; and he discarded the idea of asking her about it, for she would probably just lose time if he did ask, and leave the drunk Cody to drive.
“They said they were,” he told her. “We’re probably going to be meeting them at a place called the Cliff House Restaurant, on the northwest shore.”
“I’ll be hungry by then—Cody ate most of my dinner. Did she pick up any snacks?”
“Some Slim Jims,” said Cochran, trying to remember if he had been as unconcerned as this when he had learned that Spider Joe was dead; of course he had actually seen the body, and Janis had not.
“Could I have a pack?”
Cochran leaned down and dug a Slim Jims package out of the bag; and he got out too another beer for himself. He opened the can, and, before he took the first sip, he said, “Here’s to poor old Spider Joe. May he rest in peace.”
Plumtree nodded, staring ahead. “His wife died, though, right? Recently?”
“They did say that,” agreed Cochran. He took another, deeper sip.
At the gas-station-and-motel town of Gaviota the 101 curled sharply to the east, inland, and soon they were climbing through the dark canyons of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The fog was a blurry wall close ahead of them, glowing gray with the diffracted radiance of the headlights, and the short patch of pavement that was visible in front of the fog seemed to Cochran’s tired eyes to be stationary, so that the black lines of skid marks were standing waves shimmying in place, and the point-of-impact of a long-ago dropped can of white paint seemed to be the beak of a diving white bird. They passed big semi-trailer trucks that were stopped on the shoulder, visible through the fog only by yellow lights along their roofs; and the lights seemed to Cochran to trace the rigging of tanker ships more remote in the night than the trucks could possibly really be.
Cones of light, luminous triangular shapes in the darkness, resolved themselves into spotlit billboards, or steep hillside shoulders with headlights approaching from the other side, as he watched them gradually materialize out of the night; and rotating spoke-like fingers of light would turn overhead when an unseen car in the southbound lanes approached behind invisible tree branches. Sometimes Plumtree would change lanes to get around the ghostly red eyes of brake lights ahead of them, and in those transitional moments when the tires were thumping across the lane-divider bumps the turn-signal lights would strobe deeply into the fog on the shoulder, illuminating a bottle or a weed or a shoe for a brief, startled instant.
From time to time Cochran glimpsed moonlit forests off to the side, and the sterile extents of deserts, but it wasn’t until he twice saw a vast castle in the remote distance, with rows of yellow- and green-lit windows, and then saw that it was only a reflection of the instrument panel lights in the close window glass, that he realized that nothing he saw beyond a distance of about six feet could be genuine. The realization didn’t stop his weary, smoke-stung eyes from registering new wonders; in fact it seemed to free his optic nerves to present him with wilder things, ships and towering siege engines and dirigibles.
The old Ford’s engine had begun to cough when they were driving past the isolated lights of the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, but began to run smoothly again after that—and Plumtree, who for some miles had been folding her left leg and straightening it again and scooting forward and back in her seat as if trying to stay awake, reached out to the side and squeezed Cochran’s leg just above the knee.
“Do we have any more cigarettes?” she asked.
“A—whole carton,” Cochran said, suddenly very aware of the close flex of her legs in the tight jeans. He gripped his current beer between his thighs and bent forward to grope by his feet for a fresh pack of Marlboros.
But when he straightened up she glanced at it and shook her head. “I meant More, the brand name. I suppose Cody just thought of herself, and got just the Marlboros.” Her fingers were curled around his leg now, palpably brushing against the dashboard-facing side of the beer can, and her thumb was absently rubbing the top of his thigh. “And I don’t suppose she bought any Southern Comfort.”
“No,” said Cochran. “Just beer and vodka.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and then, as if for a sip of beer, lifted away the impeding can. Her hand slid halfway up his thigh, her fingers kneading the worn secondhand corduroy.
“All alone in the middle of nighttime nowhere,” she said, barely loud enough for him to hear. “Some people would consider this a highly lucrative situation.”
Cochran didn’t see how some people would, but he shifted closer to her and put his arm around her shoulder to stroke her coarsely cut blond hair. She rolled her head back against his forearm, and her right hand slid up his leg until her little finger was brushing the tight fabric over his crotch.
“We should,” he said hoarsely, “probably pull over and park on the shoulder for a while. Till the fog clears a bit.” His heart was thudding in his chest, and he wished there was somewhere he could put down the beer he was holding in his right hand. And I should try to get a slug of that mouthwash, he thought.
Her kneading hand was fully on his crotch now, and he simply let go of the beer can; it thudded to the carpeted floorboard as he reached across to cup the unfamiliar hot softness of her left breast through the thin fabric of her blouse.
“Nobody can interrupt us out here,” she whispered, and snapped the turn signal lever up to indicate a lane change. “Nobody knows where we are.” The right tires were rumbling on the shoulder, and Plumtree’s leg flexed as she pressed the brake pedal. “There’s no phone here, so nobody can say we should have taken the time to call anyone.”
“You’re a big girl,” Cochran agreed dizzily. “You don’t have to call your mother and let her know where you are.”
“Ah!” she said, and her voice sounded sad; then she had whipped her right hand up so hard that it struck the head liner and nearly broke his elbow. Her foot slammed onto the gas pedal, and the back tires screeched and burned rubber as she steered the bucking old Ford back out into the slow lane.
“Fog, take it easy!” Cochran yelled, clasping his elbow.
She hit the brake hard enough to throw him forward against the padded black dashboard. He could hear his dropped beer can rolling on the floor.
“I will drive this car straight into a wall if you try to touch me, Omar!” Plumtree said loudly. “In arousing ways! Jesus will not blame me—He will take me into His bosom, and throw you into the fires of Gehenna! You know I will, and you know He will!”
“Fine!” Cochran gasped. “Drive normal! What’s the matter with you, Janis?”
She straightened the wheel, and though the engine was coughing again she quickly accelerated the car to a steady twenty miles an hour, glancing harriedly from the road to the rear-view mirror and back. “I’m sorry, Scant!” she said. “I must have dozed off! God, I might have got us killed! Okay, fog still, okay. Did I hit anything? God, my arms are shaking! Are you all right?”
“Well you nearly broke my arm,” he said harshly. “Jesus, girl!” He could see that there had been at least one personality shift, and that the erotic moment was long gone. “No, you didn’t hit anything.” He leaned down and yanked a fresh beer out of the box. The floorboard carpeting was marshy under the soles of his tennis shoes, and the hot air was fetid with the smell of the spilled beer. “Who’s Omar?”
“That’s my father’s name! Be careful now, Scant, I don’t want to lose time with you—but—was he here?”
“No,” Cochran said. Thank God, he added mentally. He popped the tab on the beer can. “Another woman—did I …? Do you, uh, recall putting your hand on my leg?”
“Oh, God, Tiffany,” she said ruefully. “That would be Tiffany, I bet. She made a pass at you, right? And you thought it was me! Poor Scant!”
He had been panting, but now began to relax. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said cautiously, “if it was you.”
“It will be, Scant, I promise you, soon, and not in the back of an old car, either.” She patted at the seat around her legs. “Did she eat my Slim Jim? God, that woke me up, at least—I could feel that I was slipping in and out, back there. I guess Tiffany was slipping out and in.”
Her guileless last couple of lines were echoing in his head, and he tilted up his fresh can of beer for a distancing, objectivity-inducing mouthful.
“If you get sleepy again,” he said, “just pull over. You can catch a nap on the front seat, and I’ll do the same in the trunk.”
“Did Cody get a key to the trunk?”
He sighed. “I was kidding. And no, she didn’t—she hot-wired the car somehow.”
“She is mechanically inclined,” Plumtree allowed, diligently watching the road. Her mouth was working, and she rolled down the window; cold night air blew into the car and twitched Cochran’s sweaty hair. “My mouth’s full of Tiffany’s spit,” Plumtree said, her voice frailer with the open window beyond her. “Could I have the mouthwash?”
Cochran passed it to her, and again she swished a sip of the sharp-smelling stuff and spat it out the window. He was glad when she rolled the window up again, though the sudden scents of diesel exhaust and spicy clay and the dry-white-wine smell of the fog had been a relief from the warm-beer fumes.
“You okay to drive?” he asked.
“Oh, sure. I kind of did catch a nap there, I guess, while she was on. Besides, you’re a little—you’re more than point-oh-eight blood alcohol, I’d guess.”
“Technically, I suppose, yeah,” he said. “We’d better,” Cochran went on steadily, “take the 280, to the city, rather than follow the 101 all the way up. We can stop at my house, and I can pick up some clothes and money.” And think all this over, soberly, he thought. And check the phone messages, and take in the mail. And clip the holstered .357 onto the back of my belt, if I decide we should indeed go on and meet the others.
“Tell me when to turn,” Plumtree said.
“Oh, it won’t be for hours yet.”
“Won’t it … bother you, seeing the place where you lived with your wife?”
Cochran took a long drag on his cigarette. “I suppose so. Sure it will. Gotta be done, though. Faced.”
Plumtree shivered. “It must be scary, not having anyone you can turn the wheel over to, in bad situations.”
Cochran smiled bleakly. “I never—”
Both of them jumped when for an instant a big brown owl swooped into the flickering headlight glow and then disappeared over the roof.
Cochran forced a laugh, embarrassed to have been so startled but pleased that he had not dropped his cigarette. “I wonder what owls think of this highway of lights running through the middle of their mountains.”
“They’re hoping for a crash, a fire that’ll drive the mice and rabbits out of hiding.”
After a moment, he said, “A plausible answer, Cody, but I was talking to Janis.”
She exhaled as if trying to whistle. “Listerine! Who else was on?”
“Somebody called Tiffany. And then—”
“You pig.” She rocked on the seat and then brushed the fingers of one hand from the buttons of her blouse to the fly of her jeans. “What did you two do with me?”
“Nothing.” He tried to say it as though he had resisted Tiffany’s advances. This was a disorienting basis for conversation, and it occurred to him that it might be difficult to manage any intimacy even with Janis, without Cody objecting and interfering in humiliating ways. “Anyway, she was interrupted by somebody else, a woman who cussed me out—called me Omar.” He wondered how much Cody might have sobered up in the time she was gone, and he half-hoped something he said might drive her away and let Janis back on.
“Follow the Queen, you were playing,” said Plumtree. “You must have mentioned our … female parent, right? She comes up sometimes when somebody even just mentions her, and always when somebody asks for her. You ever play Follow the Queen?”
“The poker game? Sure—seven-card stud, where the next card dealt faceup, after a faceup queen, is wild.”
“Wild, right—that is, it’s whatever you declare it to be. And when our parent-of-the-fair-sex is up, the next girl is whoever you ask for. Who did you ask for? Not me, Mom doesn’t do the mouthwash bit.”
“I guess I called for Janis.”
“Not Tiffany? That was noble of you. Of course you didn’t understand the rules yet. Do you swear you two didn’t do anything with me?”
Cochran realized, to his surprise, that he didn’t want to swear to a lie. “I swear there was no kiss,” he said, “and not a button was undone or a zipper unzipped.”
“Oh, you pig. I bet you groped me. I bet you were ready to go all-in on that flop.”
“Flop,” said Cochran, thinking in poker terms now, and remembering that she had used the word several times before this. “That’s what the three communal cards are called, in Hold-’Em: the flop. You hope they make some good hand, combined with your two personal down-cards. Sometimes you just pass even if you’ve got ace-king down, if the flop is all the wrong suit, ’cause somebody’s surely got two of the flop’s suit, for a flush.”
“When it’s … real life … you can’t pass,” she said grimly, “it’s like you’re the perpetual Big Blind, gotta make the bet whether you want to or not.”
Cochran remembered Janis telling him, just a few moments ago, that he must find it “scary” not to be able to turn a bad situation over to another personality; and he laughed softly with dawning comprehension. “You girls are like a … squad, a relay-team, at the big Poker Table of Life, though, aren’t you? If a flop comes that’s no good to Cody’s hole-cards, Janis or Tiffany or somebody will be holding two different cards, ones that’ll make a flush or a full boat or something. And so the girl with the playable cards steps in.”
“It still calls for some hard bluffing sometimes. But so far they haven’t dealt us a flop one of us couldn’t play.”
Cochran tilted up his beer to get the last swallow, and sleepily wondered whether to bother opening another. And he thought again about Janis’s remark: Won’t it bother you, seeing the place where you lived with your wife?
“Must be convenient, though,” he said now, “nevertheless. ‘Somebody yelling at me? I got a headache? I’ll split, and be back when it’s been taken care of.’ ”
Plumtree’s vodka bottle was on the seat between them, and he impulsively picked it up and unscrewed the cap. “I—I had to go identify my wife’s run-over pregnant body,” he said, suddenly speaking loudly, “in the morgue. She was pregnant. We bought stuff for the kid-to-be—the stuff’s in that house now, that I’m gonna be breaking a window to get into in a few hours—a crib, goddammit, teddy-bear wallpaper. And Nina and I had adjoining plots, in a cemetery there, we picked out a spot we liked and paid for it—but I had to have her cremated and take her ashes to France, so I’ll be buried there alone.” He gulped a mouthful of the warm, scorching liquor and burningly exhaled through his nose. “I haven’t had the option of going away during any of this. I’ve got to pay for what I take, sometimes as much as all I’ve got. I’ve got to, like most people, I’ve got to take the wounds and then just keep playing, wounded, shoving all my chips out with one hand while I—hold my burst guts in with the other.” The fumes in his nose were making his eyes water. “My hole cards are two dead people, and the, the flop I’m facing is—is those three merciless ladies in Greek mythology who measure out life and fucking cut it off.”
“Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropine,” said Plumtree blandly, watching the road. “Let’s play a game—I’ll name a paper product, and you guess what it is.”
Cochran’s heart was hammering, and his mouth was dry and hot in spite of the vodka, but he didn’t go on shouting. “What?” he said, his voice cracking. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why don’t you take a nap, then, champ? It might sober you up, and I’ll be ready to be spelled off, come dawn.” She glanced at him and smiled. “Little man, you’ve had a busy day.”
“… Maybe I will.” His anger had evaporated as quickly as it had come, leaving him deflated. Slowly he screwed the cap back on the bottle. “You want some of this?”
“I’m fine for now. Leave it on the seat there, in case of emergencies.”
Cochran stretched his feet out and leaned his head against the cool, damp window glass. “You did that trick just now, didn’t you?” he said emptily, closing his eyes. “What I said made you mad, and you threw the anger over onto me. I—I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.” Though as I recall, he thought, everything I said was true.
“Go to sleep. You can say anything you want, and yeah, if it pisses me off I’ll just throw it back at you. ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.’ All I care about is looking out for Number One.” She laughed softly. “I’m just trying to figure out who that is.”
Cochran’s last thought before he went to sleep or passed out was that her remarks about his interval with Tiffany must not, after all, have represented real anger.
Mad as a March herring,” observed Kootie, agreeing with Mavranos’s assessment of Janis Cordelia Plumtree. They were sitting in the front seat of Mavranos’s truck, barreling along at a steady seventy miles per hour north on the 101 out past Oxnard, with the surf a rippling line far away in the darkness on their left. Mavranos’s view of the right lane was partly blocked by a new Buddha-like stone statue on the dashboard, but he was getting used to that.
“That would be the technical term, yes,” said Angelica Sullivan from the back seat, where she was loading a stack of extended-round .45 ACP magazines—pressing each Eldorado Starfire hollow-point bullet down against the spring pressure with the forefinger of her left hand while she tucked the next into the cleared top of the magazine with the fingers of her right.
Mavranos could see her working in the rear-view mirror. She must have loaded a dozen of those illegal twelve-round magazines by now, he thought. Even with her .45 Marlin carbine, handily built to take the same size magazine, that’s a whole lot of back-up ammo.
She looked up, and in the mirror he could see a glint of highway light reflect from her eye. “You think I’m over-preparing?” she asked.
Mavranos shrugged. “Better than under.”
Pete Sullivan lifted three of the loaded magazines and tucked them into the canvas knapsack at his side. “And these bullets have each got a drop of a rust-based omiero soup in the tip,” he said, “—my pacifist Houdini hands have been capable of that much work, at least—so these’ll stop a ghost as readily as a live human.”
“Good thing,” said Mavranos, watching the traffic ahead and wondering what sort of vehicle Plumtree and Cochran might be driving in. “For the Plumtree woman you’d want both functions. I know, Angelica, you already said her murderer father’s actually not a ghost—but I swear there’s a ghost in that blond head too.” He glanced at the dashboard. “We’re gonna need gas again, next chance—maybe switch in one of the fresh batteries too.”
“We should have taken one of the Solville cars,” said Pete Sullivan; saying it in fact for about the sixth time since they’d buried Spider Joe in the parking lot behind the Solville buildings.
“We need this truck,” said Kootie.
“Why, exactly?” asked Pete.
“It’s—” Kootie sighed, and Mavranos caught the boy’s brief, frail grin out of the corner of his eye. “Because when I sensed it coming north to us, Sunday before last, I sensed it as a cup, a chalice. And when Arky takes it to town, it always comes back full of as much food as we’re needing—all this last week and a half, there’s been enough tortillas and bananas and fishes and ground beef and cheese and beer and all, when we unload it, for all the people who’ve been coming over, even though we don’t know in advance how many there’ll be.”
“And it turns red during Holy Week, or any local equivalents,” said Mavranos. “And,” he added ruefully, “so many ghosts are drawn to it and sucked into the air cleaner and burned up in the carburetor that their cast-off charges screw up the electrical system.”
“And it’s used to serve the king,” said Kootie quietly, as if that settled it.
Right now, thought Mavranos as he glanced in the rearview mirror at the draped tarpaulin in the back, it’s being used to carry the king.
Mavranos remembered another time Scott Crane had lain stretched out in the back of the truck while Mavranos drove. It had been very nearly a year ago, on January 19th of last year.
Scott had been wearing sweatpants for that painful mid-morning trip up the 405 to Northridge, with not even a bit of twine for a belt, but still his legs had been as weak and racked with cramps as if he’d been wearing a Möbius-twisted belt during a solar eclipse; and he had been as sick—vomiting blood, seeing double, hearing voices—as if he had eaten a rare steak cooked in an iron pan on a Friday in Lent.
He had been that way for two days—ever since 4:31 in the pre-dawn morning of January 17th, when the Northridge earthquake had struck Los Angeles with a force of 6.4 on the Richter scale and 6.7 on the more modern moment-magnitude scale. It had been one of the newly recognized “blind thrust faults,” punching the land upward from a previously unsuspected subterranean fault line.
Mavranos had even noticed several white strands in the coppery bushiness of Scott’s beard.
Scott had been too weak to talk loudly enough for Mavranos to hear him up in the front seat of the rackety truck, and the intercom set they had brought along for the purpose was drowned in the static-fields of thousands of ghosts awakened to idiot panic by the quake, and so they had stopped at a Carl’s Junior hamburger place on the way and put together a string-and-paper-cup “telephone.”
Mavranos had specially “stealth-equipped” the truck for the trip, with sea water in the windshield-washer reservoir and clumps of anonymous hair from a barbershop floor taped onto the radio antenna supplementing the usual tangle of ultrasonic deer-repelling whistles glued in conflicted patterns on the roof and hood, and he was sure they couldn’t be traced while they were in the moving vehicle; but he was uneasy about Scott’s determination to struggle out of the truck and walk around among the fractured and concussed buildings.
“It’s the date, Pogo,” Mavranos had finally said, turning his head to speak into the paper cup while keeping the string taut, “that makes me nervous about this. It seems like a … almost a warning.” Mavranos had routinely addressed Scott by the name of the possum character in the Walt Kelly comic strip.
“Today is the 19th,” had come Scott’s faint, buzzing answer through the cup.
“Sure it is,” Mavranos had replied impatiently, “but the earthquake was on the 17th. St. Sulpice and all that.”
Scott hadn’t answered right away, but even through the unvibrating string Mavranos had been able to feel the ill king’s irritation. Mavranos still believed that his point had been relevant, though.
A Vietnamese woman who lived at the Leucadia estate had been given the job of tracing historical events having to do with the secret history of the Fisher Kings and their rivals, and she had discovered a peculiar reactionary vegetation-king cult that had appeared in Paris in 1885, four years after a special congress in Bordeaux had, reluctantly but officially, advised grafting all French grapevines onto imported American rootstocks, which were resistant to the phylloxera louse that looked likely otherwise to obliterate all the vineyards of Europe. The dissenting cult had centered around the seminary and cathedral of St. Sulpice in the St. Germaine district of Paris, and had included among its members the writers Maurice Maeterlinck and Stéphane Mallarmé, the composer Claude Debussy, and eventually the writer and film-maker Jean Cocteau—but it appeared to have been started by a village priest from a parish in the rural Languedoc Valley south of Carcassonne. The priest, Berenger Sauniere, had in 1885 uncovered some documents hidden in the foundation stones of his church, which stood on the site of an ancient Visigoth winery dating back at least to the sixth century, and of a Roman mysteries-temple before that; Sauniere’s discoveries had led somehow to his getting substantial payments from the French government and a Hapsburg archduke; and Sauniere had suffered a stroke on January 17th of 1917, and died five days later, after an attending priest had found it impossible to give the dying man the sacraments of confession and Extreme Unction. January 17th was the feast day of St. Sulpice.
The Vietnamese woman, a one-time cabdriver and casino night manager called Bernardette Dinh, had flagged this particular cult because it had shown signs of continuing well into the twentieth century in several splintered branches. In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris she had traced a network of obscure items published from the late 1950s through the 1970s—pamphlets, and issues of a rare magazine called Circuit, and a privately printed booklet called Le Serpent Rouge, which had been published on January 17th of 1967 and whose three authors were found hanged at separate locations less than two months later. All of these publications mentioned the cathedral of St. Sulpice and contained cryptical essays on the science of multi-generational, almost genealogical, viticulture and vine-grafting. Some researchers had evidently considered that Le Serpent Rouge dealt with a long-preserved bloodline, but Dinh had speculated that it referred to a secretly cultivated varietal, snaking its way in concealment down through the centuries, of red wine.
One branch of the cult survived in the village of Queyrac in the Bas Medoc, and another had taken the name of a fifteenth-century Dionysiac cult called L’Ordre du Levrier Blanc and appeared to have relocated to the American west. In all the branches—and in fact in many other cultures, from the Estonians on the Baltic Sea who sacrificed sheep and oxen on that date, to the Egyptian Copts who observed the day as the anniversary of the death of the tormented visionary St. Anthony—January 17 was a date to be both celebrated and feared.
“At least,” Scott had said finally, his voice humming in the paper cup linked to where he had lain in the back of the truck on that day, “if I have a stroke, I won’t have any trouble remembering some sins to tell the priest.”
“I can help you out there,” Mavranos had agreed; and the tense moment had passed, but they had still been driving north toward the wounded city.
Traffic on the 405 had slowed to a stop near the intersection with the Ventura Freeway, northwest of Los Angeles, and Mavranos had got off onto the crowded surface streets; plywood covered many shop windows along these sunlit blocks, and hasty curtains of chain-link fencing had been hung across the breezeways of several of the apartment buildings they passed, and finally on a side street off Reseda and Roscoe he had simply let the truck engine’s idle-speed drift them to a parking space at the curb, where he stepped on the brake and, almost as an afterthought, switched off the ignition.
His attention sprang out to the surroundings when the clatter of the engine subsided into silence, and he heard Crane hiking himself up to look out too.
The opposite curb was crowded with empty cars parked bumper-to-bumper, glittering in the bright midwinter sunlight; and the roof of every one of the cars was crushed in, the windshields twisted and white with crazed cracking, the side windows just gone. Beyond the block-long line of Bronco and Jetta and Eldorado hulks, across a lot somehow already brown with dead grass, stood the ruptured apartment complex from whose collapsed carports these cars had been extricated—the outer walls had sheared away, exposing interior rooms and doors, and when Mavranos cranked down the driver’s-side window he could smell the faint strawberry tang of garbage on the breeze.
Mavranos had got out and swung open the back of the truck to help Scott down, uneasily noting the fresh blood blotting Scott’s shirt from the unhealing wound in his side, and though Mavranos had been afraid that they’d be arrested as looters, Scott had insisted on hobbling across the empty street and inspecting the damage.
They had climbed in among the apartments, picking their way over the dry-wall and joist beams and aluminum window frames that had fallen across beds and couches, and shuffled carefully across springy, uneven floors, and stared at the body counts spray-painted by rescue workers on the pictureless walls.
When they had clambered outside again, Scott had sat down on the metal box of a fallen air-conditioning unit. Harsh, shouting rap music echoed from some open window on the other side of the street. “My lands are in disorder,” Crane said. “Broken.”
“From underneath,” said Mavranos stolidly. He had agreed with Dinh that the resurgent phylloxera plague in the north California wine country was a bad sign for Scott’s reign, a message of discontent “from six feet under.”
Scott squinted toward the far side of the empty street. “Sitting on a, an air-conditioning unit, weeping again the king my father’s wreck, this music gibbered by me upon the pavement.” He laid his bare wrist on a torn edge of metal. “So what am I not doing? Just five weeks ago the old Flamingo building in Las Vegas was torn down—that was my father’s castle, when he was king, before I killed him—wasn’t that a victory? Las Vegas is turning into a family place now, a kid’s place. And Diana and I have had four children, and we … get three crops a year at the Leucadia place. …”
“Why don’t you ever prune back the grapevines, in the winter?”
“They don’t need it. …” He looked up at Mavranos and gave him a wasted grin through his disordered beard. “Well, they don’t, you know. But okay, that’s not the reason. I did prune ’em back, in that first winter after Las Vegas, but later I—I dreamed about it. In the dreams, the branches bled where they were cut; and I dreamed about Ozzie, turned to dust at the touch of Death and blowing away across the desert.”
Mavranos just nodded, and wished he’d brought along one of the beers from the truck. Scott and Diana weren’t related, but they had both been informally adopted by the same man, an old-time poker player named Oliver Crane but known in the poker world as Ozzie Smith. He had disappeared in the desert outside Las Vegas during the tumultuous Holy Week of 1990, and Scott had always maintained that the old man had died in saving Scott from a murderous embodiment of Dionysus and Death that had taken the physical form of Scott’s dead wife Susan.
“Maybe you’re s’posed to dream about Death, Pogo,” Mavranos said. “It’s one of the Major Arcana in the tarot deck, and I get the idea that in your dreams you practically go bar-hopping with the rest of that crowd.”
“I humanize them,” Scott said. “A perfect Fisher King wouldn’t just have a wounded side, he’d have no left arm or leg or eye, like the santería orisha called Osain—his other half was the land itself. I take the archetypes into myself, and they stop being just savage outside influences like rain or fire, and start to be allies—family, blood relations—a little.”
“Poor old Death sounds like the bad witch in Sleeping Beauty,” said Mavranos. “Pissed off because she was the only one not invited to the christening.”
“You haven’t … been there, Arky. Death isn’t a … it doesn’t embody a characteristic that shows up in humans, the way the others do, so you can’t relate to it at all. There’s no common ground. It has no face—and I can’t just arbitrarily assign the face of, say, poor Susan to it, ’cause that was just my own personal closest death mirrored back at me; anybody else there would have seen some face from their past.” He coughed weakly and shook his head. “In the court of the tarot archetypes, Death’s just a blobby black hole in the floor.”
Mavranos had taken a deep breath then—and he wondered if he could bring himself to say what he thought he had to say here, for Scott Crane was his closest friend, and Mavranos was godfather of Scott and Diana’s first child—but he made himself say it: “Seems to me there is … one face you could put on Death.”
Crane sat there on the air conditioner and stared at the dead grass and didn’t speak, and Mavranos wondered if he had heard him. Then Crane shifted, and coughed again. “You mean the fat man in the desert,” he said softly. “My father’s bodyguard, my father’s emotionless hired assassin. And I killed him, in cold blood—the first shot was in self-defense, to save you as much as me, but he was still alive after that. The last five shots, when he was lying in the gully below the road, were to make sure he didn’t wind up recovering in a hospital.”
Mavranos nodded, though Crane couldn’t see the gesture. The fat man had at some time become a localized embodiment of one of the oldest, possibly pre-human archetypes, a cold figure of almost Newtonian retribution which showed up spontaneously in desert swap-meet legendry and country-western songs and insane-asylum artwork and even, as a repeating obese silhouette, in certain iterative mathematical equations on the complex number plane. Diana’s mother had been an avatar of the Moon Goddess, and the fat man had killed her outside the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas—“shot the moon in the face”—when Diana had been an infant, in 1960. Mavranos had not been sorry when Crane had killed the fat man, but that homicide was surely Crane’s letter of introduction, his indenture, to the kingdom of death.
“No,” said Crane finally. “It can’t be done. It doesn’t need to be done.”
Mavranos had thought of reminding him of the phylloxera, had considered mentioning the many species of tropical fish that had recently stopped being born with any distinct sexes, and the rapid decline in the sperm count of modern male humans—even the slow, progressive collapse of Hollywood Boulevard down into the catacombs being dug for the MTA Metro Rail—but at that point an unkempt middle-aged couple and their two blank-eyed children had come shuffling up through the brown grass to where the bearded king sat, and had hesitantly asked Scott if everything was going to be okay. They were living in their car, they told him, and had hung curtains in the windows, and were wondering if they shouldn’t simply keep living in those cozy quarters forever, even after the houses had been put back up again.
Scott had wearily told them that he would do what he could; and they had showed no surprise, only sympathetic gratitude, when Scott had pushed his own wrist down onto the jagged piece of metal and then held out his hand so that his blood dripped rapidly onto the dry dirt.
Mavranos had muttered a panicky curse and sprinted to the nearby truck for the first-aid kit. And he had noted bleakly, after he had tied a bandage around Scott’s wrist and helped him up for the walk back to the truck, that no flowers had sprung up from where the king’s blood had fallen.
It’s what Nardie Dinh calls the Law of Imperative Resemblance,” said Mavranos to Angelica and Pete now.
Fog was beginning to roll in off the ocean, and Mavranos knew that it would be getting worse as the night wore on toward dawn and their route led them inland at Gaviota; maybe he’d get Pete to drive for a while. “There are eternal potent forms out there,” Mavranos went on, “idiosyncratic outlines, and if you take on enough characteristics of one of the forms, if you come to resemble it closely enough, knowingly or not, you find that you’re wearing the whole damned outfit—you’ve become the thing. It arrives upon you.”
“Like critical mass,” said Kootie sleepily, rocking on the passenger seat.
“Well, hijo mío,” said Angelica sternly to the boy as she went on loading her .45 magazines, “you’re not going to be taking communion at this Mass.”