“Don’t blame me for this pigpen,” said Plumtree, “I been away.”
“Witchy supplies,” put in Cochran in a carefully neutral tone. He gave Plumtree a resentful glance, very aware of the cassette tape in his shirt pocket and the French-language missal in the bedside table drawer. Kootie had ducked under the curtains and was noisily yanking at the aluminum-framed window.
Mavranos had his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket as he stared at Cochran. “I got to ask you to give me your gun,” he said. “I almost apologize, since we’re all really on the same side here and my crowd is taking over your place this way, for tonight—but Miss Plumtree said herself that her dad came on three days ago and she just this morning came back to herself; and you appear to have a…loyalty to her. I can’t justify—”
“Sure,” said Cochran, speaking levelly to conceal his reflexive anger. Slowly, he reached around to the back of his belt and tugged the holster clip free. Then he tossed the suede-sheathed gun onto the bathroom-side bed.
Mavranos leaned forward to pick it up with his left hand, keeping his right in his jacket pocket. “Thanks,” he said gruffly. “If we run into outside trouble, I’ll give it back to you.”
Cochran just nodded. I can see his point, he insisted to himself. I’d do the same, in his place.
Angelica came tromping back upstairs lugging a green canvas knapsack, and Cochran had to move his NADA sign and papers as she began unpacking its contents onto the bedspread.
She lifted out some springy shrub branches that smelled vaguely of eucalyptus, held together by a rubber band. “Myrtle,” she said. “Sacred to Dionysus, the books say. And a bottle of wine for us all to drink from, to show him respect.”
With shaky fingers Cochran took from her the bottle she had dug out of the knapsack. It was, he saw, a Kenwood Vineyards 1975 Cabernet Sauvignon, and the stylized picture at the top of the label was of a skeleton reclining on a grassy hillside.
Cochran’s ears seemed to be ringing with a wail that he was afraid he might actually give voice to, and for the moment he had forgotten the dead king and his confiscated gun. “This—was never released,” he said, making himself speak slowly. “This label, I mean, with this picture on it. I remember hearing about it. David Goines originally did one of a nude woman on the hill, and the BATF rejected it because they said it was indecent, so he did this one of the same woman as a skeleton; and they rejected it because of fetal alcohol syndrome or something. Finally Goines did one of just the hillside, and that got okayed, and Kenwood printed it.” He looked up into Angelica’s concerned gaze, and let himself relax a little. “But this was never released, this label was never even printed!—except, I guess, for this one. Where the hell did you find it? And why did you get it? I mean, it’s a twenty-year-old Cab! There must have been cheaper ones.”
Angelica opened her mouth, then closed it. “I,” she said finally, “don’t remember what it cost. But I got change back from a twenty, and we got ice and some canned green beans in the same purchase, I remember. This was the only fancy wine they had, at this little place called Liquor Heaven in the Soma neighborhood—Arky, you drove us there and waited in the truck, remember?—the only other wine was one of those bum’s-rush specials, Hair-of-the-Dog or some name like that.”
Mavranos had been watching Plumtree and Cochran, but now he slowly turned to Angelica. “…Bitin Dog?” he asked.
Cochran sat down on the bed heedlessly crushing Angelica’s myrtle branches and he was remembering the Mondard figure in the mirror in the vision he’d had last week in Solville. “That’s how it looks in a reflection,” he said dizzily. “You must have been in Looking-Glass Land. The right-way name is something like pagadebiti”
“Get your butt off the boughs of holly,” Plumtree told him.
“No,” said Mavranos, “stay where you are, Dionysus probably likes it a bit crushed, like cats do catnip. Miss Plumtree, you sit beside him. You got your maquina, Angelica?”
Angelica touched the untucked tail of her blouse. “Yes, Arky,” she sighed.
“Stand over here and keep your hand on it, and watch those two. Pete and I gotta go to the truck, drag up some of our scientific apparatus, more of our high-tech defensive hardware.”
KOOTIE SNIFFED the air after Arky and his foster-dad had shuffled outside and pulled the door closed behind them. He sensed at least a couple of fragmentary personalities buzzing clumsily around the room.
“The king’s body is drawing ghosts,” he told his foster-mom. “A couple got in when Arky opened the door just now.” He sniffed again. “Just little broken-off bits, probably shells thrown off of somebody who didn’t even die of it.”
Kootie knew that people, especially very neurotic people whose personalities spun in wide and perturbed orbits, often threw ghost-shells in moments of stressfully strong emotion. Kootie could feel the insistent one-note resonance of these, and his hands were shaky and he wasn’t able to take a deep breath.
He found himself staring at Janis Plumtree’s loose blouse and tight jeans, and he snorted and shook his head to dispel the induced lust. Easy to guess what the unknown source-person was up to, he thought, when he shed these…psychic snake-skins! And the man must have been left bewildered and abruptly out-of-the-mood after they’d broken away.
The vibrations of the ghost fragments did have a strongly male cast; Kootie wondered what his own response would have been if the source-person had been a woman—would he have found himself looking at…at Cochran?—or would he have been so out-of-phase with them that he wouldn’t have sensed their presence at all?
“I’m okay,” he told Angelica, who had taken her eyes off Cochran and Plumtree long enough to give Kootie a raised eyebrow. “I hope Arky’s bringing up the St. Michael and High John the Conqueror sprays.”
“I packed ’em,” she said.
In spite of himself, Kootie was staring at Plumtree again. She was clearly nervously excited—she had pulled a little order pad out of her pocket and was flipping through the pages, nodding and mumbling to herself.
She looked up and caught his gaze, and her sudden smile made his heart thump. “Tomorrow,” she said through her teeth, “no matter what it may cost me, I won’t be a murderer anymore!”
Her companion seemed less happy about the idea—Cochran was frowning as he shook a cigarette out of a pack and flipped open a book of matches. Probably he’s worried that this attempt tomorrow will work the way she thinks it will, Kootie thought, and his girlfriend’s body will suddenly have a fifty-two-year-old man in it. Talk about out-of-phase!
Kootie wasn’t aware of the ghost fragments now—probably his lustful response had blunted his latent Fisher King ability to sense them. As if I took a long sniff of a rare hamburger that was cooked in an iron pan, he thought ruefully, or spent the day at the top of a modern high-rise building, far up away from the ground, or gargled with whiskey on a Friday in Lent.
Cochran struck a match—and the matchbook flared in a gout of flame, and Cochran had dropped it and was stamping it out on the carpet.
Cochran and Plumtree both exclaimed “Son of a bitch!” and Plumtree went on to add, “You clumsy stupid shit!”
But Kootie had caught a whiff of cooked bacon on the stale, humid air, and he said “I think you burned up the ghosts, Mr. Cochran. Toss me the matches, would you?”