Cochran shook his head. “Janis is right about you. Did you know she escaped to save your life?”
“Well sure. She needs me a whole lot more than I need her.”
The door down the hall creaked open again, and the clown soon reappeared with a sheaf of crumpled bills in his hand.
“I’m paying not to see you people again,” he said.
“We’ll see you get your money’s worth,” Plumtree told him, standing up and taking the bills. She even counted them—Cochran could see that it wasn’t all twenties, that there were at least a couple of fives in the handful.
Strubie crouched with an effortful grunt, and picked the latex bald wig up off the green carpet; and when he had straightened up again he tugged it back over his hair, and retrieved the rubber nose from where he had set it down on the credenza and planted it firmly on his face again. “You’ve stirred old ghosts tonight,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll sleep in my full mask.”
“Let’s for Christ’s sake go,” said Cochran, struggling back up onto his feet.
Plumtree pushed the bills into the newly acquired purse and strode to the door.
When she and Cochran had stepped out onto the devastated dark porch, and then made their unsteady way down the driveway to the halo of streetlight radiance at the curb, Cochran squinted back at the house: and in spite of everything that had gone before he jumped in surprise to see five—or was it six?—thin little girls in tattered white dresses perched like sickly cockatoos on the street edge of the roof, their skinny arms clasped around their raised knees. They seemed to be staring toward Plumtree and him, but they didn’t nod or wave.
“Look at me!” said Plumtree in an urgent whisper. When Cochran had jerked his head around toward her, she went on, “Don’t look them in the eyes, you idiot. You want to be bringing a bunch of dead kids along with us? And you’re not even masked! You’d just flop down dead, right here. Those are Strubie’s concerns, whoever they might once have been, not ours.”
Cochran’s head was ringing in incredulous protest, but he didn’t look back at the girls on the roof.
Plumtree had started scuffling along the street in the direction of the gas-station and liquor-store lights of Bellflower Boulevard, and he followed, shivering and pushing his hands into the pockets of his corduroy pants.
Cochran forced himself to forget about the ragged little girls and to focus on Plumtree and himself. “We’ve got plenty enough money for a motel,” he said. “To sleep in,” he added.
“Maybe it’s a motel we’ll wind up at tonight,” Plumtree allowed, “but it’ll be in Long Beach, I think. We need to find another cab.”
Cochran sighed, but broadened his stride to keep up with her. Perhaps because of Long John Beach’s upsettingly wrong lyrics to “Puff the Magic Dragon,” misunderstood rock lyrics were now spinning through Cochran’s head, and it was all he could do not to sing out loud,
Had a gold haddock,
Seemed the thing to do,
Let that be a lesson,
Get a cockatoo,
Wooly bully….
Plumtree called for a taxi from a pay phone at an all-night Texaco station on Atlantic, and when the yellow sedan rocked and squeaked into the shadowed area of the lot where the phone was, out by the air and water hoses, Cochran and Plumtree shuffled across the asphalt and climbed into the back seat. The driver had shifted into neutral when he had stopped, but even so the car’s engine was laboring, and it stalled as Plumtree was pulling the door closed; the driver switched off the lights, cranked at the starter until the engine roared into tortured life again, and then snapped the lights back on and clanked it into gear and pulled out onto the boulevard before either of his passengers had even spoken.
“Long Beach,” said Plumtree flatly. “Ocean and Twenty-first Place.” She was gingerly rubbing the corners of her jaw with both hands.
“It’ll be costly,” observed the driver in a cheeful voice. Cochran saw that the man had a full, curly beard. “That’s a lo-o-ong way.”
“She can afford it,” muttered Cochran, feeling quarrelsome. He was breathing deeply; the interior of the car smelled strongly of roses, and he was afraid he might get sick again.
“Oh,” laughed the driver, “I wasn’t doubting your reserves. I was doubting mine.” The man’s voice was oddly hoarse and blurred, and over the reek of roses Cochran caught a whiff of the wet-streets-and-iodine smell of very dry red wine. Their driver was apparently drunk.
“What,” Cochran asked irritably, “are you low on gas?”
“What gas would that be?” the man asked in a rhetorical, philosophical tone. “Hydrogen, methane? Not nitrous oxide, at least. An alternative fuel? But this is an electric car—I’m running on a sort of induction coil, here.”
“Swell,” said Cochran. He looked at Plumtree, who was sitting directly behind the driver, but she was holding a paper napkin to her nose and staring out the window. She’s missing some scope for her sarcasm here, Cochran thought. “You can find Long Beach, though, right?”
“Easy as falling off a log, believe me.”
Plumtree was still sitting up rigidly on the seat and staring out at the dark palm trees and apartment buildings as if desperate to memorize the route, and Cochran slumped back in the seat and closed his eyes. The tires were thumping in an irregular drumming tempo, and he muttered sleepily, “Your tires are low on air.”
The driver laughed. “These are experimental tires, India rubber. Hard with hard vacuum. Has to be a very hard vacuum, or I’d combust.”
The driver’s nonsense reminded Cochran of Long John Beach’s remark this afternoon: Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl. Cochran frowned without opening his eyes, and didn’t make any further comments. In seconds he had fallen asleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“‘My credentials, entries, and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, ‘Recalled to Life;’”….
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
DOGS were howling out in the alleys and dark yards of Long Beach, and unless the ringing air was particularly distorted—which Koot Hoomie reflected that it might very well be—they were howling out on the beach sand too, possibly mistaking the electric glow of the Queen Mary’s million lights across the harbor for the moon, or a close-passing comet.
Kootie stepped out onto the front porch and pulled the door closed behind him. Or, he thought as the night breeze swept the echoes of amplified wailing around from the parking-lot side of the old apartment building, maybe the dogs are tired of our music. The tenants in the neighboring complexes would probably have come to complain about it a week ago if they could locate the source.
For ten days now, all day and all night, there had been some person or other dancing in the Solville parking lot; Elizalde’s clients had spontaneously conceived and taken on the eccentric task, and many of them had missed work to do their individual four-hour shifts, each successive businessman or tattooed cholo or portly matron dutifully hopping and scuffing to the music banging out of the portable stereo that was connected by extension cords to an outlet in the kitchen. On Sunday and Monday of last week it had been a randomly eclectic sequence of sixties rock, mariachi, rap, and Country-Western musics, but by this last weekend they had somehow found and settled on one song—a hoarse, haggardly persevering thing called either “Lay Down” or “Candles in the Wind,” by Melanie, recorded more than a decade before Kootie had been born—and Arky Mavranos had dubbed a cassette of nothing but that song, repeated over and over again, for the dancers to play endlessly.