“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 Ami 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 jell 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.
“Fuckyou!” 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 under 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.