She leaned back in the seat now, straightening her arms and flexing her fingers at the top of the wheel. “This is disorienting—I don’t have to watch for cues, I can just ask you! How did we get away from there? I don’t think they wanted us to just leave.”
“No—we snuck out. They were talking about—holding a gun on you. We’re still working with them, I guess, but at arm’s length.”
She was gingerly licking her lips and grimacing. “I’m glad to get away from that burnt-liquor stink…Nobody got hurt, I hope?”
“Oh no.” He let the seat belt reel back up into the slot above the door, and finally sat back and let himself exhale. “Well, not hurt—but that old man with the windshield wipers all over him died. But it—was just, like, a heart attack, I guess. Nothing to do with us. And then in the confusion Cody just grabbed my hand and we walked out. And stole us this car.”
“My father spoke to me over the telephone.”
Cochran thought of someone who had to maintain a ‘69 Torino, going out to work on a Thursday morning and finding the car gone; but at least Janis was a sober driver. She hadn’t had anything to drink since…what? A Manhattan or two at dinner, hours and hours ago. Of course it was the same bloodstream, really, but it did seem that Cody had taken the alcohol away with her. “Yes,” he said. “I heard him.”
She was still smacking her lips, and now she said, “Did Cody get mouthwash?” As a matter of fact, she did. A big bottle of Listerine.”
“Could you pass it to me?”
Cochran did, and she unscrewed the cap and took a swig of the mouthwash; she swished it around audibly in her mouth for a few seconds, then rolled down the window to spit it outside.
“We’re going to San Francisco, aren’t we?” she said as she rolled the window back up.
“Yes.” Cochran blinked in the new Listerine fumes, trying to remember whether Janis had still been on when San Francisco had first been proposed. He was sure she had not, that Cody had already been in control then. “How did you know that?” “That’s where he…fell off the building. And I caught him.”
“We’re going there because it’s where they all—you all—hell, we all, can get Scott Crane restored to life.” According to a crazy old dead black lady, at least, he thought.
“They’re bringing his body along, I hope?” It seemed to Cochran that she spoke anxiously.
He thought of the vague plan Cody had described for getting Crane back into his own undecayed body—or, failing that, into hers permanently; and he discarded the idea of asking her about it, for she would probably just lose time if he did ask, and leave the drunk Cody to drive.
“They said they were,” he told her. “We’re probably going to be meeting them at a place called the Cliff House Restaurant, on the northwest shore.”
“I’ll be hungry by then—Cody ate most of my dinner. Did she pick up any snacks?”
“Some Slim Jims,” said Cochran, trying to remember if he had been as unconcerned as this when he had learned that Spider Joe was dead; of course he had actually seen the body, and Janis had not.
“Could I have a pack?”
Cochran leaned down and dug a Slim Jims package out of the bag; and he got out too another beer for himself. He opened the can, and, before he took the first sip, he said, “Here’s to poor old Spider Joe. May he rest in peace.”
Plumtree nodded, staring ahead. “His wife died, though, right? Recently?”
“They did say that,” agreed Cochran. He took another, deeper sip.
AT THE gas-station-and-motel town of Gaviota the 101 curled sharply to the east, inland, and soon they were climbing through the dark canyons of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The fog was a blurry wall close ahead of them, glowing gray with the diffracted radiance of the headlights, and the short patch of pavement that was visible in front of the fog seemed to Cochran’s tired eyes to be stationary, so that the black lines of skid marks were standing waves shimmying in place, and the point-of-impact of a long-ago dropped can of white paint seemed to be the beak of a diving white bird. They passed big semi-trailer trucks that were stopped on the shoulder, visible through the fog only by yellow light seemed to Cochran to trace the rigging of tanker ships more remote in the night than the trucks could possibly really be.
Cones of light, luminous triangular shapes in the darkness, resolved themselves into spotlit billboards, or steep hillside shoulders with headlights approaching from the other side, as he watched them gradually materialize out of the night; and rotating spoke-like fingers of light would turn overhead when an unseen car in the southbound lanes approached behind invisible tree branches. Sometimes Plumtree would change lanes to get around the ghostly red eyes of brake lights ahead of them, and in those transitional moments when the tires were thumping across the lane-divider bumps the turn-signal lights would strobe deeply into the fog on the shoulder, illuminating a bottle or a weed or a shoe for a brief, startled instant.
From time to time Cochran glimpsed moonlit forests off to the side, and the sterile extents of deserts, but it wasn’t until he twice saw a vast castle in the remote distance, with rows of yellow and green-lit windows, and then saw that it was only a reflection of the instrument panel lights in the close window glass, that he realized that nothing he saw beyond a distance of about six feet could be genuine. The realization didn’t stop his weary, smoke-stung eyes from registering new wonders; in fact it seemed to free his optic nerves to present him with wilder things, ships and towering siege engines and dirigibles.
The old Ford’s engine had begun to cough when they were driving past the isolated lights of the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, but began to run smoothly again after that—and Plumtree, who for some miles had been folding her left leg and straightening it again and scooting forward and back in her seat as if trying to stay awake, reached out to the side and squeezed Cochran’s leg just above the knee.
“Do we have any more cigarettes?” she asked.
“A—whole carton,” Cochran said, suddenly very aware of the close flex of her legs in the tight jeans. He gripped his current beer between his thighs and bent forward to grope by his feet for a fresh pack of Marlboros.
But when he straightened up she glanced at it and shook her head. “I meant More, the brand name. I suppose Cody just thought of herself, and got just the Marlboros.” Her fingers were curled around his leg now, palpably brushing against the dashboard-facing side of the beer can, and her thumb was absently rubbing the top of his thigh. “And I don’t suppose she bought any Southern Comfort.”
“No,” said Cochran. “Just beer and vodka.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and then, as if for a sip of beer, lifted away the impeding can. Her hand slid halfway up his thigh, her fingers kneading the worn secondhand corduroy.
“All alone in the middle of nighttime nowhere,” she said, barely loud enough for him to hear. “Some people would consider this a highly lucrative situation.”
Cochran didn’t see how some people would, but he shifted closer to her and put his arm around her shoulder to stroke her coarsely cut blond hair. She rolled her head back against his forearm and her right hand slid up his leg until her little finger was brushing the tight fabric over his crotch.
“We should,” he said hoarsely, “probably pull over and park on the shoulder for a while. Till the fog clears a bit.” His heart was thudding in his chest, and he wished there was somewhere he could put down the beer he was holding in his right hand. And I should try to get a slug of that mouthwash, he thought.
Her kneading hand was fully on his crotch now, and he simply let go of the beer can; it thudded to the carpeted floorboard as he reached across to cup the unfamiliar hot softness of her left breast through the thin fabric of her blouse.