The bay trees in our country are all withered,
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven,
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth,
And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war.
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
BERNARDETTE DINH, KNOWN AS Nardie to her few close friends, was perched crouched on a dead peach-tree limb, staring down the flagstone steps that led away between rows of dead grapevines to the beach and the dawn-gray sea. Five years ago she had got into the habit of climbing a tree when she was very scared or disoriented, and during these last eleven days she must have spent nearly a full day’s worth of hours up in the branches of this or that dead carob or apple or avocado tree in different corners of the Fisher King’s Leucadia estate, in the periods when she could get Wendy to keep an eye on the kids.
Twenty years ago, when Nardie had arrived at Clark Air Base in Manila on the rainy morning of April 29 in 1975, airport personnel and travellers alike had exclaimed over her and the other passengers that got off the plane with her: Oh, thank God you’re safe! She had then learned that the Saigon airport had been heavily shelled at 5 A.M., just four hours after her plane had taken off; but rockets had been shelling Saigon for two months before her American father had got her a ticket, and for the whole ten years of her life to that point, as she recalled it now, there had always been the background noise of planes and bombings. Her luggage had been mailed ahead, but never did show up anywhere—when she finally arrived at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, all she had had was the clothes she’d been wearing and the cellophane-thin sheets of gold leaf her father had managed to stuff into her pockets.
California had been bewildering, even with the help of other immigrant Vietnamese; Here the poor eat beef every day, she had been told, and the rich people are all vegetarians. And when her new American half-brother had taken her to a modern shopping center in Costa Mesa, the thing that had most struck her had been the pennies and nickels and even quarters scattered in the pool around an indoor fountain; she had struggled with the two ideas of it: that people had tossed the coins in there, and that other people didn’t climb in to get them out.
Nardie was thirty now—but since the first of this month, when Scott’s dead body had been found in the canted meadow down here between the house and the beach, she had been dreaming of those days again. But the fountains in her dreams were dry and bare, and the rockets came plummeting out of the night sky before the airliner she was in could take off.
The last time Nardie had seen Scott Crane alive, he had been trudging away barefoot down these flagstone steps to rescue his four-year-old son, Benjamin; Scott had got some kind of formal threatening challenge over the telephone only ten minutes earlier, and when he had hastily awakened and summoned to the atrium everybody that lived here at the compound—Arky and Wendy and their two teenage daughters, and Diana’s two teenage sons by her first marriage, and Nardie herself, and Diana and the four young children she and Scott had had together—Benjamin had proved to be missing, and the three-year-old girl had said that a black crow had flapped down onto Benjamin’s bedroom windowsill and told the boy that a magical woman in the meadow needed to see him right away.
It was a woman, on the phone just now, Scott had told Nardie and Arky and Diana in the kitchen as he’d pulled off his shoes and tugged his still-dark-brown hair out of the rubber-banded ponytail and let it fall loose onto his shoulders; she claimed to have spoken to the ghost of my first wife, Susan, who was the embodiment of Death in the Las Vegas desert five years ago; and she knows I was called the Flying Nun in the big game on Lake Mead, and she said she was going to “assume the Flamingo,” which must mean that she’s some “jack,” some rival, from the game five years ago, when the Flamingo Hotel was still the king’s bunker-castle. I told her that it had been torn down, but I guess she’s got a piece of the physical building—and that would be a potent … charm, talisman. She must have a lot of other things, too, protections and masks and even maybe a tethered ghost or two, to have got in here past our wards without showing up as a consistent, solid intruder. And we have to assume that she’s got Benjamin now. I’ve got to go meet her alone, or it’s too likely that she’ll kill him.
Arky Mavranos had tried to insist that it was his own clear duty to go and rescue the child—I’m Benjamin’s godfather, Scott, he had said forcefully, and I’m not wounded.
Scott Crane had refused to let Arky go, and had then had to flatly forbid the man’s offers of “armed back-up support, at least.”
And so Scott had gone padding down that set of steps alone, to the tilted meadow below the house … and a few minutes later Benjamin had come running back, sobbing about a woman who had knocked him down and held a spear to his throat, and who had changed into a man. Daddy stayed to talk to the man, the boy had said. It’s a very bad man.
At that moment the pans had begun rattling in the cupboards, and the overhead light had begun swinging on its chain.
Arky Mavranos and Diana had simply bolted outside then, and skipped and hopped down the shaking steps after Scott … and by the time they had got to the slanting meadow, the earthquake had stopped, leaving only smokelike clouds of raised dust hanging over the cliffs to mark its passage, and they had found Scott’s supine body on the grass, speared through the throat.
They had half-carried and half-dragged the body back across the meadow to the steps before going to get Nardie to help carry, and apparently blood had fallen copiously from Scott’s torn throat, like holy water shaken from a Catholic priest’s aspergillum—
—And, from every point where the blood drops had hit the grass, a spreading network of flowers and vines had violently erupted up out of the soil in a ripping spray of fragmenting dirt clods, as if in some kind of horticultural aftershocks—so that Arky and Diana had in effect been shuffling along at the advancing, upthrusting edge of a dense thicket of vibrant grape and ivy and pomegranate. An hour later Nardie had seen a couple of uniformed police officers escorting a blond woman around the edge of the newly overgrown meadow, but they had gone away again without even ringing the bell at the outer gate.
Mavranos had lifted Crane’s body into the back of the—tragically, prematurely!—red truck, in preparation for driving away with Diana to search in the north for another man who would have an unhealing wound in his side: the man whom they would acknowledge and bless as the next Fisher King.
Nardie had given Mavranos a baseball-sized white stone statue of Tan Tai, the Vietnamese god of prosperity, to put on the truck’s dashboard; and only after the truck had gone creaking and rattling away down Neptune Avenue did she recall that her half-brother had given her one very like it, back in the brightly familial days before he had tried to break her spirit and mind to further his own bitter Fisher Kinghood ambitions. Arky Mavranos had had to kill her half-brother eventually, at Hoover Dam during the terrible Holy Week in 1990—Nardie hoped now that her gift had not been an unwitting expression of some lingering subconscious resentment. She had never … blamed poor, staunch Arky for the death of her only blood sibling.
All the magical new plants had wilted and withered during the following week, along with all the other plantings on the whole sprawling estate; and now the grounds were drifted with dry leaves—among which, if she looked closely, she could discern husks of perished bees and the stiffened, lifeless forms of the million earthworms that had come corkscrewing up out of the ground on that morning—and Nardie could only hope that a new good king would somehow be appointed before the Tet celebration at the end of the month.
Crane had kept a rose garden near the house, and when all the red petals had fallen to the brick pavement last week, they had looked to Nardie like the exploded scraps of firecracker paper that used to litter the Saigon pavements on Tet Nguyen Dan, the festival of the first day of the Vietnamese New Year. She had put a photograph of Scott Crane on her Tet altar, and now she whispered a prayer to the Kitchen God, a humble entreaty for, somehow, prosperity and health for her friends during this disastrous new year.
All she could see ahead of her, in the notch between the brown grapevines, was a triangle of the distant gray sea … but now she heard the scuffle of someone, possibly several people, climbing the cement stairs that led up the sloping cliff from the beach sand to the slanting meadow. Nardie watched the flagstone steps, but the visitors were probably just more of the white-clay dancers, come to solemnly jump rope with trimmed lengths of kelp for a while in the blighted meadow below the steps—though generally the unspeaking white figures kept that softly drumming vigil at the end of the day, when the red sun was disappearing below the remote western horizon.
At her back she could often hear the cars of the crazy local teenagers racing up the street, and she heard at least one screeching past now, and heard too the pop-pop-pop of automatic weapons fire. In this last week and a half she had sensed a kind of vigilant protection in their constant racket, but an impatience too. Absently, Nardie touched the angular weight in her sweater pocket that was her ten-ounce Beretta .25 automatic.
The dry leaves on the peach-tree branches rattled in the chilly wind from the sea, and Nardie caught the familiar wild strains of the music from the beach. Arky had telephoned the Leucadia estate several times from pay phones, and he had laughed once—dryly—when she had described the music to him, and he had told her the name of the constantly repeated song: “Candles in the Wind,” by somebody called Melanie. Apparently the disattached people near where the killed king was were spontaneously playing the same song as were the disattached people near the king’s broken castle. Nardie wondered if the ones near wherever the killed king was had covered themselves with white mud, too.
Definitely there was more than one person in the meadow—Nardie could hear excited voices.
The white-clay dancers had never spoken.
Silently Nardie swung down from the branch, and her tennis shoes crackled only faintly in the dry grass as she landed and then stole to the top of the steps and looked down.
At the edge of the new wilderness of dead vines in the meadow, by the top of the stairs that led down to the beach, four figures stood silhouetted against the vast gray sea. Three stood together with their arms around each other, though the effect was more as if they were handcuffed that way than comradely; the fourth figure, standing apart, was an old man who had only one arm.
The middle figure of the trio, whose styled hair was white, reached out toward a dead pomegranate bush—and when his two dark-haired companions twisted their heads up toward her and clumsily grabbed their crotches in perfect unison Nardie shivered and bared her teeth, for she understood abruptly that only the middle figure was a real person, and that the outer two were some kind of mobile manikins.
As if following the gaze of the two artificial heads, the one-armed old man looked up the slope at Nardie.
“Heads up, Doc, all three,” the old man said, loudly enough for Nardie to hear. “The homegrown Persephone yonder don’t want you triflin’ with her seed pods.”
Nardie realized that she had drawn her tiny gun, so she lifted it and pointed it down the steps toward the two living men and the two dummies, though she kept her finger outside the trigger guard.
The one-armed man turned his shoulder stump to her, as if hiding behind the upraised, missing arm; and the trio shifted position, so that one of the dark-haired manikins was blocking her view of the white-haired man in the middle—who now shakily reached out and plucked the dried gourd of a dead pomegranate from the bush.
Then, in a crackling of trodden dry leaves, all four of the figures in the meadow were lurching away back toward the stairs that led down to the beach, the two manikins waving their free arms in perfect synchronization, like, Nardie thought giddily, a couple of Gladys Knight’s Pips.
Her teeth stung as she sucked in the cold sea air. Should I shoot at him? she wondered. What, she thought then, for stealing a pomegranate? A dead one? And at this range with this stubby barrel, I’d be doing well to put the bullet in the meadow at all, never mind hitting a head-size target. And she remembered Arky’s assessment of her weapon: A .25’s a good thing to have in a fight, if you can’t get hold of a gun.
The four figures tottered away down the beach stairs, the manikin arms waving in spastic unison over the two fake heads.
Nardie straightened up when they had descended out of her sight, and she smiled derisively at herself when she noticed that she was standing hunched, and looking around for cover between nervous glances at the sky. The rockets fell a week and a half ago, she told herself; and you’re living in the dry, coinless fountain.
She pocketed her little gun and turned to trudge back uphill toward the house. She’d have to tell Arky about these intruders, whenever he next called from wherever he was.
She really did hope Arky was safe.
Tan Tai be with you, she thought blankly.
The dozen white dancers who appeared to be made out of clay had been high-stepping around in a solemn ring on the flat sand a hundred yards to the south when Dr. Armentrout and Long John Beach had originally walked up the beach to the Crane estate’s stairs, but now they were skipping and hand-clapping back this way. The dawn wind was cold, but Armentrout felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt as he scuffed down from the last cement step onto the sand.
“Keep walking,” Armentrout whispered to Long John Beach as he began plodding away north under the weight of the two-manikin appliance, “back to the stairway that’ll take us up to the Neptune Avenue parking lot, and don’t look back at those … those white people.”
The one-armed old man immediately turned to gape at the figures following, and his eyes and mouth were so wide that Armentrout turned around to look himself, fearing that the dancers might be silently running at them, perhaps armed with some of the smooth black stones that studded the marbled black-and-gray sand.
But the white figures, though closer, were just walking purposefully after Armentrout and Long John Beach now, and staring at them with eyes that seemed yellow and bloodshot against the crusted white faces. The clay plastered onto their swimsuit-clad bodies made them seem to be naked sexless creatures animated out of the wet cliffs.
Armentrout let go of the lever that controlled the manikins’ heads, in order to reach into his jacket pocket and grip the butt of the .45 derringer. The Styrofoam heads now nodded and rolled loosely with every jouncing step toward the cement pilings of the wooden municipal stairway that led up to the parking lot, and to the car, and away from this desolate shoreline.
But Long John Beach stopped and pointed back at the advancing mud-people. “No outrageous thing,” he cried, his voice flat and unechoing in the open air, “from vassal actors can be wiped away; then kings’ misdeeds cannot be hid in clay.”
For a moment Armentrout considered just leaving the crazy old man standing here, as a cast-off distraction to occupy the dancers while he himself trotted away to the car; but he knew now that he needed to find Koot Hoomie Parganas, and he would need every scrap of mask for that.
So Armentrout stopped too, and he turned to face the advancing animated statues; and with deliberate slowness he tugged the fist-sized gun free and let them see it. He gripped the ball-butt tightly, for he remembered that the little derringer tended to rotate in his hand when he pulled the hammer back against the tight spring, and now he cocked it with a crisp, ratcheting click.
“What business,” Armentrout said, “exactly, do you have with us?”
One of the figures, breastless and so probably a young man, stepped forward. “You took something,” came a high voice, “from up the stairs.”
“I did? What did I take?”
The figure’s blue eyes blinked. “You tell me.”
“Answer my question first. I asked you what exactly your business is here.”
The stony figures shuffled uneasily on the wet black-veined sand, and Armentrout suppressed a smile; for these were young people whose random propensities for music and dancing and the beach had happened to constitute a compelling resemblance to an older, mythic role in this season of insistent definition—but they were just San Diego County teenagers of the 1990s, and when they were challenged to explain their presence here, the archaic hum of the inarticulate purpose was lost beneath the grammar of reason.
“No law against dancing,” the figure said defensively.
“There is a law about concealed weapons,” another piped up.
The modern phrases had dispelled the mythic cast—they were now thoroughly just modern kids on a beach, with mud all over them.
“Scram,” said Armentrout.
The white figures began to amble away south with exaggerated nonchalance. Armentrout put the gun away and turned toward the stairs. A blue sign on the railing said,
WARNING
Stay Safe Distance
Away From Bluff Bottom
FREQUENT BLUFF FAILURE
Not today, Armentrout thought with satisfaction as he shooed Long John Beach ahead of him up the stairs.
In the parking lot between landscaped modern apartment buildings, Armentrout unstrapped the two-manikin appliance and stowed it in the back seat of his teal-blue BMW.
Then he opened the passenger-side door and pushed Long John Beach inside. “Belt up,” he said breathlessly to the old man.
“ ‘The purest treasure mortal times afford,’ ” the one-armed old man wailed, the strange and eerily flat voice echoing now between the white stucco walls, “ ‘is spotless reputation; that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.’ ”
“I said belt up,” hissed Armentrout between clenched teeth as he hurried around to the driver’s side and got in. “Anyway,” he added in shrill embarrassment as he started the engine, “there’s no hope anymore for our reputations in this town.”
As he drove back down Neptune Avenue, in the southbound lane this time, Armentrout could see a plywood sign attached to a pine tree beside the gates of the fieldstone wall on his right. Black plastic letters had been attached to it once, but weather or something had caused most of them to fall away; what remained was accidental Latin:
E T IN
ARC
ADIA
EGO
Et in Arcadia ego.
And I am in Arcadia, he thought, tentatively translating the words; or, I am in Arcadia, too; or, Even in Arcadia, I am.
Armentrout reflected uneasily that the word Arcadia—with its resonances of pastoral Greek poetry and balmy, quiet gardens—probably had applied to this place, before Our Miss Figleaf had come here and killed the king; but who was the Ego that was speaking?
Even when he had got back on the 5 Freeway, heading north through the misty morning-lit hills below the Santa Ana Mountains, Armentrout found himself still noticing and being bothered by signs on the shoulder. The frequent GAS-FOOD-LODGING 1 MI AHEAD signs had stark icons stenciled on them for the benefit of people who couldn’t read, and though the stylized images of a gas pump and a knife-and-plate-and-fork were plain enough, the dot-dash figure of a person on a long-H bed looked to him this morning disturbingly like a dead body laid out in state; and while he was still south of Oceanside he saw several postings of a sign warning illegal Mexican immigrants against trying to sprint across the freeway to bypass the border checkpoint—the diamond-shaped yellow sign showed a silhouetted man and woman and girl-child running hand-in-hand so full-tilt fast that the little girl’s feet were off the ground, and under the figures was the word PROHIBIDO. Armentrout thought it seemed to be a prohibition of all fugitive families.
And when he became aware that his heartbeat was accelerated, he recognized that he was responding with defiance, as if the signs were reproaches aimed at him personally. I didn’t kill any king, he thought; I haven’t uprooted any families. I’m a doctor, I—
Abruptly he remembered the voice of the obese suicide-girl as he had heard it over the telephone a few hours ago: Doctor? I walk all crooked now—where’s the rest of me?
But I certainly didn’t mean that to happen, he thought, her killing herself. I don’t give anyone a treatment I haven’t undergone and benefited from myself; and from my own experience I know that cutting the problem right out of the soul, rather than laboring to assimilate it, really does effect a cure. And even when these misfortunes do result—goddammit—aren’t I allowed some sustenance? I genuinely do a lot of good for people—is it wrong for me to sometimes take something besides money for my payment? Does this make me a, a sicko? He smiled confidently—Not … at … all. The whole notion of intrinsic consequences of “sin” is just infantile solipsism, anyway: imagining that in some sense you are everybody and everybody’s you. Guilt and shame are just the unproductive, negative opposites of self-esteem, and I feel healthily good about everything I do. That’s okay today.
Then he thought of what it was he now planned for his patient Janis Cordelia Plumtree, whenever he might catch up with her, and for Koot Hoomie Parganas, if the boy was still alive—and he heard again the flat howl that had burst from Long John Beach’s throat: gilded loam or painted clay.
It occurred to him, with unwelcome clarity, that the idealistic dancers on the beach had carried the rainbow of living flesh on the inside, and dry, cracked clay on the outside.
And so he was nearly driven to pull out his derringer and fire it at the sign on the tailgate of the sixteen-wheel trailer rig that cut him off near San Onofre, after Long John Beach pointed at the sign and said, “Hyuck hyuck—that’s addressed to you, Doc.” The sign read: INSIDE HEIGHT 10’—NOSE TO REAR 110’.
Armentrout’s forehead was suddenly chilly at the thought that his hand had actually brushed the derringer’s grip in his unthinking reflexive rage—but still!—“nose to rear”? How was he supposed to take that?
His cellular telephone buzzed, and he fumbled it up from between the seats and flipped open the cover. “Yes?” he said furiously after he had switched it on.
“Get your toes aft of the white line, please,” drawled a man’s humorous voice, “and sit your ass down in one of the seats! I’m in control of this bus, and you’re upsetting the children!”
In his first seconds of confusion Armentrout knew he recognized the voice, but he seemed to remember it as disembodied—a ghost?—and this was clearly not a ghost call. The voice and the background breeze-hiss were real, unlike the eternal clattering busy-ness of the group-projected ghost-bar.
“You was comin’ on to my daughter, man,” the voice said now; “you can’t blame me for having got a bit testy, now can you?” Before Armentrout could stammer out anything, the voice went on: “This is Omar Salvoy, and I can’t talk for long. Listen, you and I each got a gun pointed at the other, haven’t we? Mexican standoff. I think we can work together, both eat off the same plate. Here’s the thing—you’d like to get Koot Hoomie Parganas locked up in your clinic, wouldn’t you, in a coma and brain-dead, on perpetual life-support? Or haven’t you thought it through that far?”
It made Armentrout dizzy to hear this voice on the phone speaking his recent, somewhat shameful, thought aloud. “Y-yes,” he said, glancing sideways at Long John Beach and then in the rear-view mirror at the two placid Styrofoam heads. “What you describe is … it could, I guess you’ve figured out that it could, benefit you and me both. But not yet—it would have to be after he had been induced to, uh, officially … take the crown, if you know what I mean. I was just at the Fisher King’s castle, this morning, and it’s very evident from the look of things there that no new king has been consecrated yet. But after that’s occurred, I could set things up so that you and I could both benefit. As you know, I’m uniquely able to set up that scenario, just as you describe it.”
“Ipse dipshit. Now the girls have got some cockamamie idea about restoring the dead king, the old one, to life—I gotta monkeywrench that scheme, that guy is really old, he’s hardened in his thought-paths and likely to be resistant, not like the kid would be.”
“All ROM and no RAM,” agreed Armentrout, though he didn’t see how any of this would matter in a brain-dead body.
“Rom? Ram? Gypsies, sheep? Easy on the mystical, there, Doctor, I want you for science. You do know about how the spirit-transfer thing works, knocking a personality out of somebody’s head?”
“Uh.” Armentrout wiped his forehead and blinked sweat out of his eyes to be able to watch the freeway lanes. “Yes.” I wasn’t being mystical, he thought—doesn’t Salvoy know anything about computers? Oh well, give him the science. “The force that, that holds them in, works the opposite of forces like gravity and electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force, which all get weaker as the, the satellite, say, moves further away from the primary; ghost personalities are more strongly restrained, the further they get out, especially in sane people, but feel no clumping-together force at all if they stay within the mind’s confines. It’s much the same situation as is theorized for the quarks that make up subatomic particles—if they stay close together, they experience what’s called asymptotic freedom—”
“Speaking of which, I’m gonna have to pick up my ass and tote it out of here. I’m at a pay phone—we’ve stopped for gas in King City, and her boyfriend has just ducked off to visit the gents’ and pump the gas. You’d better get up here, right now; and then on to San Fran, apparently—this thing will go a lot smoother if we’ve got a real licensed psychiatrist along, for authority-figuring in case any locals should object to anything. Wave the stethoscope, flourish the prescription pad. I’ll make a point of getting out here again and calling you with more specific directions as we proceed, so take your telephone with you, you can do that, can’t you?”
“King City? San Francisco? Certainly, I’ve got the phone with me now. Obviously. But the P—the boy—he’s alive, I gather? Is he in San Francisco? We need—”
“He’s alive, and on his way there. Gotta go—stay by the phone.”
The line was dead, and Armentrout clicked the phone off, closed the cover, and wedged it carefully between the seat and the console. He would have to dig out of the trunk the phone-battery recharger that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter.
His lips were twitching in a brittle, almost frightened grin. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t work, he thought. When the king died eleven days ago, his death opened a temporary drain in the psychic floor locally, so that all my vengeful old California ghosts, at least, were sucked away, leaving me with their abandoned memories and strengths intact and harmless. I was fifty miles away, and my ghosts were banished! That drain has since closed up—but imagine if I could be in the same building with a flatline Fisher King! If we can get the new king on perpetual brain-dead life-support, the drain could be held propped open for … for decades. I’ll be able to outright terminate patients, consume their whole lives, without fear of being hassled by their outraged ghost personalities afterward. And Omar Salvoy will be able to—what? I suppose to evict all the girls from Plumtree’s head, so that he’ll have that youthful body all to himself, to live in.
It’ll be the best of both worlds, Armentrout thought, nodding and smiling twitchily. All the forgiveness that Dionysus’s pagadebiti wine offers, but with the profit from the sin retained intact too!
He glanced again at Long John Beach and the two heads in the backseat. I may be able to outright ditch the three of you in San Francisco, he thought.
Who were you calling?” asked Cochran, frowning.
They hadn’t found a Mobil station here in King City, and so they were using some of the Jenkins woman’s cash at this Shell station, and apparently the Torino’s tank hadn’t had room for a whole twenty’s worth of gas—Cochran was stuffing a couple of ones into the pocket of his corduroy bell-bottoms. He must have bought the cheapest gas.
Plumtree blinked at him around the aluminum cowl of the pay telephone. There was only a dial tone to be heard from the thoroughly warmed earpiece of the receiver she held in her hand. Cochran looked tired and bedraggled, she noted, in the cold morning sunlight, and she could see strands of white hair among the disordered brown locks tangled over his forehead.
“It was ringing,” she said, in the old reflexive dismissal of a patch of lost time. “Nobody on when I picked it up.” She reflected that this might be the literal truth; but she wasn’t happy to find herself reverting to the helpless shuck-and-jive evasions, the poker-table calls that were bluffs because she didn’t know what her hole cards were, so she went on spontaneously, “Let’s get breakfast now, there’s a Denny’s a block back—we can just have coffee with the others at the Cliff House place—and maybe a dessert, if they have some kind of sweetrolls there. And listen, if there’s a Sav-On or someplace open in this town, I’d like to buy some fresh underwear—these panties I’ve got on still say Tuesday on ’em—and Tiffany’s been wearing them.”
“… Okay.”
They got back into the beer-reeking warmth of the car and drove around, but didn’t find any open store at all in the whole town, and so eventually she had to go into the ladies’ room in Denny’s, pull off her jeans, and wash the panties in the sink—with hand soap, wringing them halfway dry in a sheaf of paper towels after she’d rinsed them out—and then shiveringly pull them back on.
Now she was eating scrambled eggs and shifting uncomfortably on the vinyl booth seat, bleakly sure that the dampness must be visibly soaking through the seat of her jeans, and remembering reading On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in another restaurant booth eleven days ago. She had had the aluminum spear taped to her thigh during that breakfast, the points of it cutting her skin.
“I can’t ever sit comfortably in restaurants,” she complained. She remembered that a telephone had started ringing then, too, on that morning, right in the restaurant; it was Janis’s job to answer telephones, and Cody recalled flipping her lit cigarette into the open paperback book, intending to slam the cover firmly closed and extinguish the coal, since there had been no ashtray on the table and Janis didn’t smoke. But Janis had come on more quickly than usual, apparently, and hadn’t known about the lit Marlboro between the pages.
Cody grinned sourly now. Excu-u-se me!
At least my teeth don’t hurt much right now—not any worse than usual, anyway. And I certainly don’t have a nose-bleed! If Flibbertigibbet was on, it wasn’t for very long.
She looked up. Across the table, Cochran was smiling at her gently, out of his tired, red eyes. “Who were you calling?” he asked again.
Okay—perhaps the gas-station pay phone had not already been ringing when she had picked it up, and Cochran knew it. Okay. “I call time,” she said, “a lot. That’s UL3-1212 everywhere. In England they call it ‘the speaking clock,’ which always makes me picture Grandfather Clock, from the ‘Captain Kangaroo’ TV show, remember? Wake up, Grandfather! Even when I have a watch on. Those liquid-crystal displays, you can’t ever be—”
He was still smiling tiredly at her.
“I—” She exhaled and threw down her fork with a clatter. “Oh, fuck it. I don’t know, Sid. The receiver was warm, we must have been talking to somebody. My teeth are hurting, but we do call time a lot.”
“Not for extended conversations, though, I bet.” He took a sip from his glass of V-8, into which he’d shaken several splashes of Tabasco. “In this hippie commune you grew up in,” he said; “what was it called?”
“The Lever Blank. My mom and I lived at their farm commune outside of Danville for another couple of years after my father died.”
“Did they let you watch a lot of TV?”
Plumtree stared at him. “This was mandala yin-yang hippies, Sid! Organic vegetables and goat’s milk. Old mobile homes sitting crooked on dirt, with no electric. My father was the only one that even read newspapers.”
“So how did you ever see ‘Captain Kangaroo’? And Halo Shampoo ads? And I’m not sure, but it seems to me that neither one of those was still being aired in ’71. I’m an easy ten years older than you, and I hardly remember them.”
Plumtree calmly picked up her fork and shoveled a lump of scrambled egg into her mouth. “That’s a, a terrible point you make, Sid,” she remarked after she had swallowed and taken a sip of coffee. “And I don’t seem to be losing time over it, either, do I? This must be my flop. Do you think I’m an alcoholic? Janis thinks so.”
“Of course not,” he said, with a laugh. “No more than I am.”
“Oh, that’s good, that’s reassuring. Jesus! The reason I ask is, I need a drink to assimilate this thought with. Let’s pay up and get out of here.”
“Fine,” Cochran said, a little stiffly.
Oh, sorree, Plumtree thought, restraining herself from rolling her eyes.
As Cochran took their bill to the cashier, Plumtree walked out of the yellow-lit restaurant to the muddy parking lot. The sky had lightened to an empty blue-gray vault, but she felt as though there were the close-arching ceiling of a bus overhead, and that the battered madman who had hijacked the bus and cowed the driver had now turned and begun to advance on the hostage children, all the brave little girls.
The chilly dawn wind was throwing all sounds away to the south, and she was able to hum “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” until Cochran had come out of the restaurant and shuffled up to within a yard of her, before she had to stop humming for fear he might hear.
North of King City they were driving up through the wide Salinas Valley, with green fields of broccoli receding out to the far off Coast Range foothills. Long flat layers of fog, ragged at the top, hung over the ruler-straight dirt roads and solitary farmhouses in the middle distance, and Cochran began to notice signs for the Soledad Correctional Institute. Don’t want to be picking up any hitch-hikers around there, he thought. We’ve got enough of them aboard right now. Neither he nor Plumtree had spoken since getting back into the car in the parking lot of the Denny’s in King City, though she had taken a quick, bracing gulp of the vodka after she had started the engine, and, after a moment of resentful hesitation, he had shrugged and opened one of the warm beers. The sky had still been dark enough then for her to turn on the headlights, but she reached out now and punched the knob to turn them off.
“Smart thinking,” he said, venturing to break the long silence. “We’d only forget to turn them off, once the sun’s well up.”
“And it’s cover,” she said, speaking indistinctly through a yawn. “You can tell which cars have been driving all night, because they’ve still got their lights on. Everybody with their lights out is a local.” She yawned again, and it occurred to Cochran that these were from tension as much as weariness. “But we can’t hide—I can’t, anyway—from my father. Those are his memories, those TV things. Captain Kangaroo, that shampoo. He was born in ’44.” A third yawn was so wide that it squeezed tears from the corner of her eye. “If we’re compartmentalized, in this little head, then he’s leaking into my compartment. I wonder if he’s leaking into the other girls’ seats too.”
Seats? Cochran thought.
“Like in a bus,” she said. “You could step off, you know, Sid. Like the driver in that movie, Speed, who got shot, remember? The bad guy let him get off the bus, because he was wounded. When we stop at your house. I could drop you off at some nearby corner, in fact, so Flibbertigibbet won’t even know where you live.”
After a long pause, while he finished the can of warm beer and reached down to fetch up another, “No,” Cochran said in an almost wondering tone; “no, I reckon I’m … along for the ride.”
Plumtree laughed happily, and began drunkenly singing the kid’s song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” After she had finished the trite lyric and started it up again, frowning now and waving at him, his face heated in embarrassment as he gave up and joined in, singing the lyric in the proper kindergarten counterpoint. And until he put out his hand to stop her, the vodka bottle between her knees was rhythmically rattled as she swung the wheel back and forth, swerving the big old car from one side of the brightening highway lane to the other in time to their frail duet.