While she’d been talking she had laid the cigar box on the stones and draped it with a white linen handkerchief, and now she set on it a water glass from the motel. As she hoisted a plastic bottle of Evian water out of the knapsack and began twisting off the cap, she said, in a formal tone, “This is an altar, a bóveda espiritual.” It seemed to be a declaration, and she poured the glass half full of water as she spoke.
She looked up at Plumtree then, and her mirror glasses were lozenges of glowing argy sky. Cochran could see the butt of the slung carbine under her open raincoat. “The way it ordinarily works,” Angelica went on at her previous quick pace, “is you set out a glass of some nice kind of water, and everybody dabs some on their hands and temples, as a kind of cleansing, so the guest-of-honor ghost will have a transparent medium to focus on but wont fixate on anybody.” She took the Wild Turkey bottle out of the canvas sack and twisted out the cork. “But,” she said hoarsely, “we don’t want his ghost, we want him. And we want to make sure that he does fixate, that retreat is not even an option for him.”
She poured the still-liquid red blood into the water, about three tablespoons, and then covered the glass with the Star Motel postcard to keep the ghost-flies out of it. “So you’re going to drink this.”
Plumtree was biting her lip, but she nodded. “This has to work,” she was whispering, “please let this work, this has to work…” The sunburn was spotty over her cheekbones, as if the skin was stretched tight, and Cochran guessed that her hands would have been trembling if she had not been clenching them tightly together, as if in prayer.
Cochran remembered the note Kootie had left, when he had run away last night. I cant do it again…me be out of my head…I’d go crazy. This woman, Cochran thought, underwent electroconvulsive therapy six days ago this morning. She was knocked out of her own head, and has been evicted again several times since then by her terrible father…most recently for more than two whole days, and she got herself back just yesterday morning. Cochran remembered her saying yesterday, in a falsely bravely cheerful voice, The goat head was speaking, in a human language…But she’s here doing this, voluntarily. Assenting, and then some.
He stepped closer to her and reached out and squeezed her hand. Without glancing away from the glass of streaky red water on the draped cigar box, Plumtree shook her hand free of his.
“No offense,” she said faintly. “This is our flop.”
Cochran took a step back. Over the wavering drone of the flies he heard a faint pattering on the stones behind him, and when he turned he saw Mavranos brushing tiny cubes of truck-window glass out of his hair.
“I could drive back for coffee and doughnuts,” Mavranos said.
“We’re almost ready here,” said Angelica.
She now laid the myrtle branches on the stones and squirted them with the Ronsonol lighter fluid; and she laid out as well the gold Dunhill lighter and the two silver dollars that Spider Joe had brought to Solville.
At last Angelica straightened up, with a visible shudder, and elbowed the slung carbine back behind her hip. “Okay, Arky,” she said, “open that skeleton-label wine. We’re each going to take a sip of it, and then I’m going to light the myrtle. This stuff will get—God help us!—it’ll get the attention of Dionysus, his remote attention, I trust, and that will give us a line-of-sight link to the underworld.”
“And from the underworld right back to us, here,” said mavranos stolidly as he twisted the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife into the cork. “Pogo?” he called loudly into the gray sky. He yanked the cork out with a frail pop. “That’s a sound you ought to recognize, old friend.”
He tipped the bottle up to his lips, and after a couple of bubbles had wobbled up inside it he lowered it and passed it to Pete Sullivan, who also drank from it.
“Plumtree last,” said Angelica, taking the bottle from her husband and handing it to Cochran. The harbor breeze was tossing her black hair around her face. “And out of the glass.”
Cochran raised the cold bottle and took several deep gulps, and he was so hungry for the blurring effect of alcohol on his empty stomach, on this terrible morning, that he had to force himself to hand it back without swallowing more.
“Thirsty boy,” said Angelica bleakly. “You’re not through yet, by the way.” She drank a token mouthful herself, then crouched again by her little altar and, flicking the postcard away, topped up the water glass with purple Cabernet. She clanked the bottle down on the stones and lifted the glass, and straightened up and handed it to Plumtree.
“Not quite yet,” Angelica said to her. “You,” she told Cochran, “hold up that right hand of yours, toward the water, with that birthmark facing out.”
Cochran’s ears were ringing, and he distinctly felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt. “Why?” he whispered. I won’t, he thought. He heard again what he had said in the self-esteem group at Rosecrans Medical Center, on that first day: Reach out your hand, you get it cut off, sometimes. And he remembered seeing the red blood jetting from his chopped wrist, when he had put his hand between the old Zinfandel stump and the pruning shears thirty-three years ago. He was about to say I wont out loud, but Mavranos spoke before he could:
“I got no affection for your girlfriend,” Mavranos said gruffly, “but I gotta say that she’s bought a lot of…plain cold admiration in my rating. Not that she cares, I’m sure. What she’s ready to do…I don’t think I could do. None of the rest of us can claim our part’s too hard in this, compared to hers.”
“That mark on your hand is some kind of Dionysus badge,” Angelica said gently, “isn’t it?”
Le Visage dans la Vigne, Cochran thought. The Face in the Vine Stump. “I suppose it is,” he said helplessly, and then in his mind he heard again the hard crack of Plumtree’s fist hitting the bloody madhouse linoleum floor, right after he had punched Long John Beach in the nose. His teeth ached now as he took a deep breath of the sea air and let it out in shaky segments. “I’m…with you. Okay.” Slowly he lifted his right arm, with the palm of his hand turned back.
“Okay,” echoed Angelica. To Plumtree she said, “Now when I get the myrtle burning, you call to—damn it, you brought this on yourself, you know, girl, I’m so sorry, but—call to Scott Crane; and then drink—” She shook her head quickly and waved at the glass of rusty-colored liquid in Plumtree’s hand, then whispered the last word, “—it.”
Cochran noticed that the peak of the alcove roof and the top of the marble stair were shining now in the cold pink light of dawn. Mavranos stood on tiptoe and looked back down the peninsula.
“Sun’s coming up,” he said, “over Fort Mason.”
“Get the pliers,” Angelica told him. “Pull the spear out of his throat.”
Mavranos swallowed visibly, but his face was impassive as he nodded. “Happy to.” He picked up the pliers and then knelt beside Scott Crane’s body, with his back to the others; Cochran saw his shoulders flex under the denim jacket, and then he was straightening up, holding the closed pliers out away from himself, and the red-stained three-pointed spearhead quivered between the pliers’ jaws.