Angelica sighed and squared her shoulders. “What’s your name?” she said now, speaking to Mavranos. Her voice was clear in the still air.
“Ray-Joe Pogue,” Mavranos said quietly. “I’m not okay, am I? I remember now—I fell off of Hoover Dam. I was blind, and a man told me it was the water below me, Lake Mead, but he lied. It was the other side of the dam below me, the tailrace, the power station roof—way, way down, with a hard, hard landing.”
“It’s the water below you now, though,” Angelica said gently. “You can see it, can’t you?” She dipped her hand in the water, lifted a palmful and let it trickle back into the lake.
“I’m seeing two of everything,” said Mavranos. He looked at Angelica. “There are two bulls in your glasses! Did you have animals in your glasses before? You do now.” He was visibly shivering.
‘Now you’re seeing as you should be seeing,” said Angelica. “The pairs will get rather apart—like bars in a prison—until you can escape between them.” She smiled. But you should lose some weight! Tell me how your sister betrayed you.”
Cochran remembered Angelica’s description of a conventional honoring-of-the-dead ritual. Clearly she was trying now to lift the ghost away from Mavranos’s mind, over this giant cup of relatively transparent water so that the ghost wouldn’t…fixate. And, in asking the ghost to talk about itself, she was apparently trying to get it to relax its psychic claws out of Mavranos’s mind and memories. It probably helped that Mavranos’s mind was still concussed and disorganized—that must have been why he’d been in such a hurry to get here.
“Nardie Dinh,” came the high, nasal voice from Mavranos’s mouth. “Bernardette Dinh. She was my half-sister, our dad married a Vietnamese woman after he divorced my mom. I was supposed to become the king, at the succession in ‘90, and Nardie was supposed to be my queen. I kept her a virgin, until I should take the crown, the cown of the American West…but she rebelled against me, she was ungrateful for what I had made her into, with diet and discipline and exposure to the gods behind the Major Arcana tarot cards…she killed the woman I had placed her with, escaped me. Nardie threw in her lot with the Scott Crane faction—”
All at once, with a chill, Cochran remembered Mavranos saying back in Solville that he had once killed a man at Hoover Dam.
“—and she hit me in the nose, broke my nose, five days before Easter. Swole up, black eyes. I couldn’t become the king with the injury, and for sure there wasn’t time for it to heal. I drove out to the dam to stop the succession, use magic to throw it off for another twenty years…and she sent—this man!—” Mavranos’s hand touched his face “—to kill me.”
Mavranos’s head rocked back to stare into the overhanging alder branches against the sky. “It’s true,” he said in a harsher voice, “that I killed you. On purpose, knowing what I was doing—because you would have killed my friends, if I hadn’t. But Nardie didn’t want me to do it.”
He inhaled hitchingly, and when he spoke again it was in the nasal voice: “But she thanked you for doing it. I was aware of that.” And Mavranos’s natural voice said, It’s true.”
Angelica’s mouth was open and she was frowning, as if she wanted to convey a message to Mavranos without letting the Pogue ghost hear; and Cochran wondered of Mavranos had ruined Angelica’s plan by awakening now and conversing with the ghost; but Mavranos was speaking again in his own voice:
“Ray-Joe Pogue, the bars are nearly wide enough apart for you to leave, to jump, and it is water below you, this time. I’ve carried you, in guilt, for five years, nearly—and Nardie has too, I’ve seen it pinch her face when people talk about…family I bet we’ve both thought of you every day, your death has been a, like a bad smell that I can’t get rid of, that notice just when I’ve started to forget about it and have a nice time.” Mavranos yawned, or else Ray-Joe Pogue did. “Before you go free,” Mavranos said, ‘can you forgive us?”
“Do you want that?” came the other voice from his throat.
Angelica dipped her hand into the water again.
Mavranos inhaled to be able to reply. “Yes. We do both want that—very badly”
“Mess with the bull, you get the horns,” said the high voice. “It’s enough to know that you do want it.”
Mavranos sighed deeply, and his head rocked forward—and Angelica whipped her hand across and slapped him in the face with a handful of water.
“Now, Arky!” she, said urgently. “What’s my name? Where were you born? Who’s president of the United States?”
Mavranos was spitting. “Angelica Sullivan, goddammit. Muscoy, San Bernardino County, California, in 1955, okay? And William Jefferson Airplane Clinton.”
Both boats had stalled in the water.
“Get these boats moving out of here,” said Angelica sharply, “the ghost is off him but it’ll be a standing wave here for a while. Everybody lean out and paddle, if you have to.”
Cochran flipped the toggle switch on his boat off and on again, and the motor resumed its buzzing and his boat surged slowly ahead of Angelica’s until she copied his move and got hers running again too.
Pete Sullivan exhaled as though he’d been holding his breath. “Good work, Angie.”
Angelica pushed her hair back from her face, and Cochran saw that she was sweating. “He might have forgiven you, Arky,” she panted, “but I had to swat him off right then—he had let go of your mind for a moment, in something like real serenity, but he might have grinned on again at any moment, and clung. It would have killed you.” She looked around, and spun the steering wheel to avoid tangling the boat in the arching branches of an oak tree that had fallen from the island bank into the water. “Sorry, if I was too hasty.”
Mavranos cleared his throat and spat mightily out past the bow. “I’ll…get along without it,” he said hoarsely. “Damn, I can still taste his ghost. Motor oil and Brylcreem.”
Plumtree spoke up from beside Cochran. “You want people to forgive you?”
Cochran steered the boat ponderously out toward the middle of the water. “Some people want that, Cody.”
“I’m Janis. I’d rather buy a new tire than drive on one with a patch.”
The boats were trundling around the east end of the island in the middle of the lake. Seagulls wheeled above a waterfall that poured over tall stone shelves on the island, and closer at hand Cochran saw some kind of Chinese pavilion on the shore, among the green flax stalks that crowded right down into the water. At the-top of the island hill he could see the trees around the clearing where he and Nina had made love, so terribly long ago.
“We’re going to watch you closely, Arky,” said Angelica. “If your pupils start to act funny, or your pulse, or if your speech gets slurred or disconnected—’waxing and waning mentation’—then you are going into a hospital, and we can do our level best lo keep you masked in there. But you’ve—right now you’d be much better off out of such a pace.”
Mavranos nodded grimly, touching the cut in the back of his scalp. His hair was “spiky with bourbon as well as blood, for Angelica had sterilized it with a few hasty splashes from a pint bottle Mavranos had kept in his glove compartment, promising to put a proper bandage on it as soon as the wound had been “thoroughly aired out.” Presumably it had been, now.
“Nardie Dinh gave me that statue I had on the dashboard,” Mavranos said. “She probably did mean something by it, even after all these years, though she loves me like a—like a brother. Damn sure she didn’t mean it to be shot into my head.” He looked at Angelica. “But it was. And I think you mean ghosts would be attracted to me in a hospital…now.”