“While you’re in the kitchen,” spoke up Cochran, trying not to speak with passion, “could you get me one of those beers?”
Behind him Plumtree snickered. Pete looked at Kootie, who shrugged and nodded.
“Okay,” Pete said.
Young Oliver was leaning against the couch, and now he hesitantly spoke. “You’re gonna call our father’s ghost, now? Not him, himself, but his ghost?” The boy’s face was stiff, but Cochran could see the redness in his eyes.
“That’s right, Oliver,” said Mavranos. “You’re the man of your family now, you can be there for it, if you like.”
Oliver shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “It’d—”
“It’d just be him dead in that room too,” said his brother Scat solemnly. “Like it is the kitchen.” He looked at Oliver and then said, “We’ll wait in the back yard.” Their mother, Diana, just bit her knuckle and nodded.
COCHRAN FOLLOWED Plumtree and Angelica and Diana into the flower-wallpapered little laundry room, and he sat down beside Plumtree at the foot of a sink in the corner. Kootie had climbed up on top of the washing machine, which was one of the heavy-duty commercial kind that had a push-in slot for quarters; the pencil sharpener sat on a shelf beside his shoulder, attached now to the frame of a disassembled pasta machine with a spring and a paper loudspeaker cone attached to it.
Pete had set up a TV table and a lawn chair in the middle of the linoleum floor, and almost ceremoniously had placed on the table an old black Bakelite rotary-dial telephone that was connected with phone cords trailing one way to the pencil sharpener and strung along the linoleum floor the other way to the assembly on the table out in the office. Johanna had stayed in the present-day kitchen to keep an eye on the pan of mint-and-tequila, though the astringent smoke from it was making Cochran’s eyes water. Probably she just forgot about it, he thought, and went outside to listen to the music some more, and the pan’s on fire. He sipped his freshly opened beer cautiously, not having any idea how long this procedure fight take; crazy old Spider Joe had elected to join the boys outside in the yard, where the music was, and Cochran was wishing he had gone along with the old blind man.
“Can I have the…eye?” Pete asked Mavranos, who was standing by the washer and puffing on a Camel cigarette as if to drive away the burning mint smell. With the hand that wasn’t holding the gun, Mavranos dug a wad of tissue paper out of his shirt pocket and passed it across to him. “And,” Pete said as he carefully unwrapped it, “we’ve got Crane’s…murderer, and his wife, here, which should one way or another work as a homing beacon. Kootie, start up the speaker; and Angie, would you do the honors in the next room?” He looked at Cochran as Angelica sidled past the TV table out into the office. “We’re out past physics again,” he said. “She’s got to light some candles, and pronounce certain Spanish rhymes and splash,Vete de Aqui oil over the door lintel.” He looked at Diana, who was standing beside Mavranos. “I need Crane’s full name, and his birthdate. I realize it seems like bad security, to be dealing in his real psychic locators, but we can’t have any masks at all in the way, for this.”
“Scott Henri Poincaré Leon Crane,” said Diana—who, even in the harsh electric light from the single naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, looked to Cochran’s befuddled gaze like a luminous preliminary Boticelli painting of Venus, before the hair was brushed in. “February 28, 1943.”
The pencil sharpener was spinning the wet chalk cylinder now, and a featureless hiss was rasping out of the paper speaker. Angelica hurried back into the little laundry room, wiping her hands on her blouse and exposing for a moment the grip of the automatic pistol in her waistband.
Pete grimaced as he lifted out of the tissue paper an angular black lump like an oversized raisin; but he sat down in the lawn chair and started to dial.
But even before he had carefully pulled the 7 hole of the dial around to the stop, a buzzing sounded from the speaker; it stopped, then started up again.
“Uh…that’s an incoming call,” Angelica said helplessly. “You may as well answer it.”
Pete picked up the receiver. “Umm…hello?”
The frail voice of an old woman came shaking out of the paper speaker cone: “Pirogi,” it said. “That’s a bayou boat, barely big enough for a body to kneel in. It’s a thing you can cook, too, looks like a boat—stuff an eggplant with seafood once you’ve gouged away the…the core of the vegetable like a dugout canoe. If he hollers, don’t let him go, right? You all need to come here, I can guide your boats. I betrayed the god, I desecrated his temple, but this is my day of atonement. Today is January the eleventh, isn’t it?”
For several seconds nobody spoke, then Kootie said, “Yes, ma’am.” “Ninety-one years ago today,” rasped the old woman’s disembodied voice, “I died. Three Easters and three days later he came for me, out of the sea, and he knocked down all the buildings and took all the other ghosts to himself, burned them up. Yerba buena, burning.”
The telephone speaker hissed blankly for nearly half a minute, and at last Angelica said, “Well, she’s right, the yerba buena does smell like it’s burning. Johanna,” she called through the doorway, “atenda a lo fuego!” Then she looked at Pete. “You’re getting the party-line effect Hang up and try again.”
“You are to come and fetch me,” insisted the old woman’s amplified voice, “and another dead lady, too, who is hiding in a tight little box.”
“I—I think it’s the old black lady,” ventured Kootie. “Who was on the TV.” “I think it is too,” said Angelica. “Will you hang up, Pete? We don’t need help from stray ghosts drawn by the electromagnetic field here, wanting to celebrate their deathdays. Fetch two old women ghosts!—it sounds like a sewing circle. Hang up, and dial Crane’s number.”
“Rightie-o,” said Pete flatly, hanging up the receiver. He leaned forward again with the dark lump—which was apparently someone’s eye!—and used it to rotate the dial. “And I’m enough of a mathematician to know how to spell Poincaré.”
Altogether, for Crane’s name and birth date, Pete dialled thirty-four numbers into the phone. “It’s very long distance,” muttered Kootie, which got a smothered laugh from Plumtree.
Again from the speaker sounded the measured buzz that apparently indicated Ringing, and then a click sounded. Pregnant Diana’s hands clenched into fists against the tight fabric of her jeans.
“Hello,” came a man’s baritone voice from the pencil-sharpener apparatus, you’ve reached Scott Crane, and I’m not able to come to the phone right now. But if you leave your name and number and the time that you called, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“The woman who killed you,” said Diana loudly, “says she can restore you to life.
Cooperate in this, Scott! And do give us a call, if you can.”
At the first syllables of the man’s voice, Plumtree’s elbow had bumped Cochran’s knee; he glanced at her now and saw that though she was still sitting slumped against the pipes below the sink she had gone limp, her hands open and palms-up on the linoleum floor and her head bowed forward so that her blond hair had fallen over her face. He didn’t bother to try to rouse her.