Mammy Pleasant seemed to relax, though she was still frowning. “You should go now, child. The New Year is close at hand. The Quinotaur doesn’t always take the life he’s owed—the Green Knight didn’t behead Gawain, just nicked his neck, because he showed courage. Show courage yourself.”
“Courage,” echoed Kootie, and the word reminded him of the Cowardly Lion of Oz. The memory of watching that innocent movie on television in Solville, in the contented days before the red truck had arrived, before Kootie was a murderer, brought tears to his eyes.
She tugged a bookmark out of the volume’s back pages and handed it to Kootie. “You people should have come to me for this before. Your king is the suicide king now, you’ve got to keep him in your deck—he’s unconditionally surrendered, you see, and is waiting for his instructions, any orders at all. But the god is merciful sometimes—these commandments haven’t changed.” She handed Kootie the paper—he glanced at it, but it seemed to be poetry in Latin, which he couldn’t read. “You bring your people back here,” the old woman went on, “and take me away with you. The god still looks with favor on your king, and wants you all to succeed in restoring him to life: the god owes a good turn to one of your king’s company. But it will cost each of you much more, now, than it would have once. Child, it can’t any longer be your king who comes under your curly-haired roof—and your king will have to come somewhere else.”
Mammy Pleasant put down the book and then moved some jars away from a breadbox on the counter, scattering dust and tearing cobwebs. Kootie looked around and saw that the kitchen had deteriorated in the last few moments—the windows were blurred with greasy dirt now and blocked by vines clinging to the outside of the glass, and the paint was flaking off of the sagging shelves. The old woman tugged open the lid of the breadbox, breaking old rust deposits—and then she lifted out of it Diana’s yellow baby blanket. She reached across the warped table to hand it to him.
Kootie wordlessly took it and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans. He knew it must have fallen out of his pocket in the bedroom upstairs, not an hour ago; and he couldn’t even bring himself to wonder how it had wound up here.
Mammy Pleasant blinked around at the iron sinks and the cutting boards and the wire-mesh pantry doors, as if for the last time. “This place won’t stay visibly wedged into your electric new world much longer,” she said. “I’ll show you out.”
She led him out of the kitchen—into a huge shadowy Victorian hall, clearly once elegant but now dark and dusty and empty of furniture. A spiral stairway receded away up toward a dim skylight several floors above, and when Kootie looked down at his feet he saw a dark stain on the parquet floor.
“We’re in my house on Octavia Street now,” Pleasant told him as she led him to a tall, ornate door at the end of the passage, “not as it was in my arrogant days, and anyway it won’t last much longer here either. You all come back here and get me. Look to the trees, you’ll see how.” She twisted the knob and pushed open the door. “Go left,” she said from behind him, “up the street. Don’t look back for a few blocks.”
Kootie blinked in the sudden gray daylight. Splintery old wooden steps led down to a yard choked with brown weeds, and beyond a row of eucalyptus trees he could see a street, with a cable car trundling up the middle of the pavement and ringing its bell.
He remembered this cable-car bell from the first time they had got Pleasant on the television in Solville, and he recalled Thomas Edison’s ghost telling him once that streetcar tracks were a good masking measure—“the tracks make a nice set of mirrors.” For a while, Kootie thought now as he stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket. Not forever.
Obediently he walked down the steps and across the overgrown yard to the sidewalk, where he turned left, kicking his way through the drifts of acorn-like seeds that had fallen from the eucalyptus trees.
He was sweating in the cold morning air, and he wasn’t tempted to look back as he walked away from the house; he didn’t even want to look around, for there were no traffic lights at all visible between the corniced buildings bracketing the narrow intersection ahead of him, and aside from the receding cable car all the vehicles on the street were horse-drawn carriages, and though he was aware of the clopping of the horses’ hooves and the voices of the quaintly dressed people that he passed, he was aware too of breezy silence in the background. The air smelled of grass and the sea and wood smoke and horse manure.
After he had walked two blocks, the noise of the modern world abruptly crashed back in upon him: car engines, and radio music, and the sheer roaring undertone of the modern city. His nostrils dilated at the aggressive odor of diesel fumes.
Oh, this is magic, he thought, for only the second time in that whole morning.
Between the traffic lights swung a metal street sign—he was at the intersection of Octavia and California, and Lombard Street and the Star Motel lay a dozen steep blocks ahead of him.
If my mom and dad are still alive, I’ll meet them there, he thought. If they’re not, if they’ve been killed because I ran away this morning—
Recoiling away from the thought, and from a suspense that could not possibly be resolved either way without grief, he began a loud chanting in his head to drown out all thoughts as he strode north on the Octavia Street sidewalk: The Green Ripper, the Green Giant, the Green Knight. I owe him a beheading. The Green Ripper, the Green Giant, the Green Knight…
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Gawain, stand ready to ride, as you bargained;
Seek in the wilderness faithfully for me,
As these knights have heard you to solemnly promise.
Find the Green Chapel, the same blow take bravely
You’ve given today—gladly will it be given
On New Year’s Day.
—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
lines 448-453
ANGELICA glanced jerkily back over her shoulder—the bumper of the turquoise BMW was scooping fast across the motel parking lot pavement toward her—no, it would miss her—it was accelerating straight at Kootie.
She tried to run faster toward the boy, and she managed to suck enough air into her lungs to yell to him, “Get out of the way!”
Kootie just stood and stared; but Mavranos was ahead of her now his arms and knees pumping and his dark hair flying as he lashed himself across the lot. As the low MW roared past her, painfully clipping her left elbow with the passenger-side mirror and nearly spinning her off her feet, she saw Mavranos bodyblock Kootie right off his feet to a driveway-side planter as the car screeched to a halt where Kootie had been standing. The two heads in the rear seat flopped forward and back as if yanked by one string. Mavranos had rolled over Kootie and was struggling to his hands and knees the sidewalk past the planter, and Angelica saw a clenched hand poke out of the BMW’s driver’s-side window. A stubby silver cylinder was squeezed in the fist, and it “as pointed toward where Kootie lay thrashing weakly among the flowers.
The icy recognition of It’s a gun shrilled in Angelica’s head, but as she sprang forward again she also thought, imperatively, but he’s!—the king now!—he’s got protections against plain guns!