by Tim Powers
“I’ll come back tomorrow and make sure,” said Plumtree, pocketing the fresh twenty and hurrying away from the counter. She took Cochran’s elbow and turned him toward the door. “Thanks again!”
Cochran was dully amazed that she could maintain her cheery tone. When they were outside again, he tried to speak, but she shook his arm, and so he just pressed his lips together. His foolish shirt was clammy with sweat now, and he was shivering in the chilly breeze.
At last she spoke, when they had scuffled away out of the radiance of the Frost Giant. “Now we’ve got a clear twenty for food and drink.” Her breathing was labored, and she was sagging against him, as if the conversation in the ice-cream place had exhausted her.
“The kid’s right,” he said tightly. “You did seem nice. He’ll probably lose his job.”
“He might lose his job,” she said flatly, apparently agreeing with him. “I’ll understand—I’ll respect it!—if you decide you don’t want anything to eat, anything that’s bought with this money.” She frowned at him. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. Now that it’s done—”
“I could go back.” She straightened and stepped away from Cochran, though she still seemed sick and wobbly on her feet. “Do you want me to give it back to him?”
Cochran shivered, and as he shoved his cold hands into his pants pockets he wondered how energetically the police might be looking for Plumtree and himself, and how easy or difficult it might actually be to get money “wired” to him from the Bay Area at this hour. Where would he go to pick it up? Wouldn’t he need a driver’s license or something? And he was very hungry, and he desperately wanted the warm relaxation and comfortable perspective that a couple of shots of bourbon would bestow. “Well—no. I mean, now that it is done—”
“Right,” she interrupted dryly. “You’re just like Janis.”
“I hear you’re not really a security guard,” he said—absently, for he had noticed a red neon sign ahead of them, on the same side of Rosecrans, that read MOUNT SABU—COCKTAILS. “I hear what you really do is burglaries.”
“She just tells you every damn thing, doesn’t she?”
A mirror-studded disco ball was turning under the ceiling over the dance floor in Mount Sabu, but none of the people in the bar was dancing—possibly because the stone dance floor was strewn with sand as if for a soft-shoe exhibition. Even over here on this side of the long room, by the street door, Cochran could feel grit under his shoe soles as he led Plumtree to an empty booth under a lamp in the corner. The warm air smelled of candle wax and mutton.
“Hi, Scant,” Plumtree said when they had sat down. “Are we going to have a drink? What—” She paused, staring at his T-shirt. “Stand up for a minute, will you?”
He slid back out of the booth and stood up, and she started laughing.
“A Connecticut pansy in … King Arthur’s shorts!” she gasped. “I love it! By Marky ‘Choo-Choo’ Twain, I suppose.”
Cochran managed a sour grin as he sat back down, but her obviously spontaneous reaction to the shirt had shaken him. He had to ask: “Do you, uh, happen to feel like dancing?”
“Sure!” she said brightly. “Is that why we came in here?”
“No.” He sighed. “No, and I don’t want to dance, actually. A shot of Wild Turkey, please, and a Coors chaser,” he said to the dark-haired woman who had walked up to the booth with a tray. “And …?” he added, turning to Plumtree.
“A Manhattan, please,” Plumtree said.
“And a couple of menus,” put in Cochran.
The waitress nodded and clunked down a fresh ashtray with some slogan printed around the edge of it before striding back toward the bar, her long skirt swishing over the sandy floor. Two men in rumpled business suits were playing bar dice for the price of drinks, banging the leather cup on the wet, polished wood.
“What does Cody drink,” asked Cochran, “besides vodka?”
“Budweiser.” She smiled at him. “This is fun! She’s letting me sit and talk to you. Usually I just get to go to the bathroom—over and over again, throwing up there sometimes, while Cody gets to sit and talk to the man, and she never has to get up and leave him at all.”
“Well, she doesn’t like me, you said. And,” he added, still shaken by the realization, “she seemed exhausted, a few moments ago. She wouldn’t have wanted to dance.”
Plumtree nodded. “That treatment this morning hit her hard. She might appreciate a drink or two herself, before we leave here.”
Cochran thought of mentioning how they would be paying for the drinks and eventual food, but decided he didn’t want to break Janis’s cheerful mood.
A frail electronic beeping started up, and he remembered that her watch had made a noise like that when she had been talking the 7-Eleven clerk into giving her all the ones and change for her original twenty-dollar bill. “What do you have that set for?” he asked.
“Oh, this silly thing. You have a watch, don’t you? I think I’ll just leave this one here. One of the doctors gave it to me—it’s supposed to keep me in now, and not in the past … or future, I suppose.” She had unstrapped the watch as she’d been speaking, and now held it up by one end, as if it were a dead mouse. “It’s my last link with that stupid hospital. If I leave it behind, I’ll bet I can leave all of their depressive-obsessive doo-dah with it. They want you to be sick, in hospitals. I bet I won’t even have my old nightmare as much, away from that place.”
In spite of himself, Cochran said, “About the sun falling out of the sky?”
“Right onto me, yeah.” She shook her head sharply. “Filling up the sky and then punching me flat onto the sidewalk. I was in the hospital when I was two, and I guess there was no window in my room, ’cause I somehow got the idea that the sun had died. My father died right around that time, and I was too young to grasp what exactly had happened.” She frowned at her fingernails. “I still miss him—a lot—even though I was only two when he died.”
The waitress had returned, and she set their drinks down on the tablecloth and then handed Cochran and Plumtree each a leather-bound menu. “Could I borrow a pen?” Cochran asked her. When he raised his hand and made doodling motions in the air the woman smiled and handed him a Bic from her tray. Cochran just nodded his thanks as the woman turned away and strode back toward the bar.
“Prassopita,” said Plumtree, reading from the menu. “Domatosoupa. This is a Greek restaurant.” She took a sip of her drink and audibly swished it around in her mouth before swallowing.
“Oh.” Cochran thought of Long John Beach singing frolicked in the Attic mists …, and then remembered that Janis hadn’t experienced that part of the evening. “I guess that’s all right.” He opened his own menu and stared at the unfamiliar names as he took a sip of the warmly vaporous bourbon. Finally he looked squarely at her. “I believe you, by the way,” he began.
“We’re not talking about the menu now, are we?”
“That’s right, we’re not. I mean I believe you about you being a genuine multiple personality.” He took several long gulps of the cold beer. “Whew! You obviously hadn’t noticed my dumb shirt before a minute ago, and Cody saw it back at the hospital; and she didn’t get that it was a joke about a Mark Twain book title.”
“You should believe it, it’s true. I don’t think Cody’s much of a reader. I am—and I love books about King Arthur, though I’ve never been able to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re taking a whole crowd of girls out to dinner!”
Cochran decided not to ask what she thought One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had to do with King Arthur. A slip of paper with daily specials on it was clipped to the inside of the menu, and he tugged it free and poised the pen over the blank back side of it. “Who all are you? Just so I’ll … know what names to write on the thank-you card.”
“Oh, Cody’s paying for dinner, eh? I don’t want to hear about it. Well, you know me and her … and there’s Tiffany …” She pau
sed while Cochran wrote it down. “And Valerie …” she added.
He wrote it down the way it was generally spelled, but she leaned over and tapped the paper with her finger. “It’s spelled with an O—Valorie.”
Cochran smiled at the idiosyncrasy. “Like calorie. If you had an overeater in there, you could call her Calorie, and they could be twins.”
Plumtree bared her teeth in a cheerless grin. “Valorie isn’t a twin of anybody.” She stared at the names on the paper. “Then there’s him. Just write ‘him,’ okay? I don’t like his name being out, even on paper.”
As he wrote the three letters, it occurred to Cochran that this Flibbertigibbet character was probably as real as Cody and Janis … and might very well actually have killed a man in Oakland, a little more than five years ago.
And then he wondered about the king that Plumtree claimed to have killed ten days ago.
“That’s a birthmark,” Plumtree said, “not a tattoo—right?”
Cochran put down the pen and flexed his right hand, and the ivy-leaf-shaped dark patch below his knuckles rippled. “Neither one. It’s … like a powder-burn, or a scar. Rust under the skin, I suppose, or even stump-bark dust. I was seven years old, and I got my hand between a big set of pruning shears and a stump-face. I guess I thought it was an actual, live face, and I tried to block this field worker from cutting the old man’s head off.”
Plumtree was frowning over the rim of her glass. “What?” she said when she’d swallowed and put it down.
Cochran smiled. “Sorry—but you obviously didn’t grow up in the wine country. It’s as old as ‘Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,’ or the Man in the Moon. Le Visage dans la Vigne, Froissart called it. The Face in the Vine Stump. See, in the winter, when it’s time to prune back the grape vines, sometimes the lumpy budwells in the bowl of an old head-trained vine look like an old man’s face—forehead, cheekbones, nose, chin. People used to be real superstitious about it, like in France in the Middle Ages—they’d uproot the one that looked most like a real face, and take it out on a mountaintop somewhere and burn it. In the middle of winter, so spring would come. The old man had to die.” Throw out the suicide king, he thought.
“ ‘As long as you do not die and live again, you are a stranger to the dark earth,’ ” Plumtree said, obviously quoting something. “Don’t ask me what that’s from, I don’t even know which of us read it. Have you ever thought of having the mark removed? Doctors could do that now, I bet.”
“No,” said Cochran, making a fist of the hand to show the mark more clearly, “I’m kind of proud of it, actually—it’s my winemaker’s merit badge, an honorable battle scar.”
Plumtree smiled and shook her head. “I think I’ll get this Arni Kapama thing, if I can chew it.”
Cochran looked at the menu. “Lamb cooked with sugar and cinnamon? Yuck. I guess I’ll go with the Moskhari Psito. At least that’s beef, according to this. I wish they had plain old cheeseburgers.”
“Well, yeah. We don’t have all night. Are you still set on calling your lawyer? What is it you’d be wanting him to do?”
The waitress came back then, and they placed their orders; Cochran ordered another bourbon and beer chaser, too, and Plumtree ordered another Manhattan.
“I’d want the lawyer,” he said when the woman had gone sweeping away, “to … wire me some money … so that I could get back home. And I”—he looked straight into her tiny-pupilled eyes—“I hope you’d be willing to come with me, Janis. The lawyer would be able to work for you better if you were up there, and you’d be that much farther away from Armentrout.”
Plumtree sang, “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen …” and then sighed. “What’s the hurry? About you getting back home?”
Cochran blinked at her. “Isn’t that song about a girl who’s going to die?”
“I forget. So what is the hurry?”
Cochran spread his hands. “Oh … a paycheck.”
“What’s the work, in January, in a vineyard?”
He barked out two syllables of a laugh, and flexed his right hand again. “Well—pruning. It’s winter. Get our guys to cut each vine back to two canes, with two buds per cane, and save what they call a goat-spur, a water-sprout replacement spur, closer to the stump for fruit a year or two from now—and then drive around to the vineyards we buy off-premises grapes from, and see how they’re pruning their vines. If they’re leaving three or four canes, and a lot of buds, for a water-fat cash crop, I’ll make a note not to buy from them come harvest.” He looked at the gray ivy-leaf mark on the back of his otherwise unscarred hand, and he remembered the vivid shock-hallucination that had accompanied the childhood injury, and it occurred to him that he didn’t want to be there for the pruning—not this year. Grape leaves fell like rain … “Why, what’s on your agenda?”
Plumtree eyed her cola-colored drink as the electric light over their heads flickered, and then she waved at the waitress. “Could I get a Budweiser here?” she called. “Two Budweisers, that is?”
Cochran heard no reply, just the continuing thump and rattle of the bar dice.
After a few moments he spoke. “Janis mentioned that you might want a couple of drinks,” he said, levelly enough. He was annoyed to see that his hand trembled as he lifted his beer glass. He made himself look squarely at her, and the skin of his forearms tingled as he realized that he could see the difference, now that he knew to look for it; the mouth was wider now, the eyes narrower.
“My agenda,” said Cody. “I’ve got a lawyer of my own to look up. His name is Strube. He’ll be able to lead me to a boy who’s about fifteen now, a boy-who-would-be-king, apparently, named something like Boogie-Woogie Bananas.”
Cochran raised his eyebrows as he swallowed a mouthful of beer and put his glass down. “Uhh …?”
“This boy apparently knows how to restore a dead king to life. What’s that you’re drinking?”
“Wild Turkey and Coors.”
“Coors. Like screwing in a canoe. Oh well.” She reached across the tablecloth and lifted his glass and drained it in one long swallow. “And two more Coorses too,” she called without looking away from Cochran.
“You can afford it,” he said.
“Fuck you!” yelled a woman in the booth by the door; and for a second Cochran was so sure that she had been yelling at him that his face went cold. But now a man in the same booth was protesting in shrill, injured tones, and when Cochran looked over his shoulder he saw the blond woman who had shouted shaking her head and crying.
“ ’Nuff said,” remarked Plumtree.
If Long John Beach’s crazy lyrics for “Puff the Magic Dragon” had not still been jangling in his head, if Beach had not clasped Cochran’s hand tonight with a hand that he didn’t have, if the bang and rattle of the dice-players at the bar hadn’t been emphasizing the fact that nobody in this bar had seemed to speak above whispers until the woman had shouted, Cochran would never have thought of what he said next; and if he hadn’t downed the bourbon on a nearly empty stomach he would not have spoken it aloud; but,
“You throw it, don’t you?” he said wonderingly to Plumtree. “Anger. Like, it can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be shifted.” Over the aromas of lamb and mint and liquor, the humid air was sharp with the smell of wilted, chopped vegetation, like a macheted clearing in a jungle. “Is that part of your dissociative disorder, that you can stay calm by actually throwing your anger off onto somebody nearby? The lady who kept breaking her spoon in the ice-cream place, and cussing, when the kid wouldn’t give you a twenty … and Mr. Regushi jumping up to strangle Muir yesterday, when Armentrout pissed you off.” He was dizzy, and wished the waitress would hurry up with the beer.
“What gives you the right—!” choked the blond woman by the door.
Cochran exhaled, and gave Plumtree a frail, apologetic smile. “Nothing, I guess,” he said.
“You still got any quarters?” asked Plumtree calmly.
Cochran squeezed his thigh und
er the table. “At least one.”
“Let’s go make a call.”
They stood up out of the booth and crossed the sandy floor to the pay telephone by the rest rooms in the far corner, and after Plumtree had hoisted the white-pages telephone book up from a shelf under the phone and flipped through the thin leaves of it, she said, “No Strube listed. Not in L.A.”
Cochran was peering over her shoulder at the STR page. “There’s a … ‘Strubie the Clown,’ ” he noted. “He’s listed twice, also as ‘Strubie the Children’s Entertainer.’ ”
She nodded. “It’s a good enough flop for a call. Gimme your quarter.”
Cochran dug it out for her, and she thumbed it into the slot and punched in the number. After a few seconds of standing with the receiver to her ear, she said, “It’s a recording—listen.”
She leaned her head back and tilted the receiver, and Cochran pressed his chin to her cheek to hear the message with her. His heart was pounding, and he let himself lay his hand on her shoulder as if for balance.
“… and I can’t come to the phone right now,” piped a merry voice from the earpiece. “But leave your name and number, and Strubie will right back to you be!” A beep followed, and Plumtree hung up the phone and shook off Cochran’s arm.
“He’s, uh, not home, I guess,” said Cochran to cover his embarrassment as they scuffed back to the booth. Their dinners had been served—two plates sat on the tablecloth, the meat and vegetables piled on them steaming with smells of garlic and lamb and onion and cinnamon, along with another Manhattan and a fresh shot glass of bourbon and five fresh glasses of beer.
“Where would we be without you to figure these things out?” Plumtree said acidly as she slid into the booth.
Cochran sat down without replying, and as he began hungrily forking up the mess of onions and tomatoes and veal on his plate he looked around at the bar and the other patrons rather than at Plumtree. He hoped she’d be Janis again soon; and he resolved to catch her if she got up to go to the ladies’ room.