I’m a, a citizen of the ground state,” said Plumtree. “And our—community hall—is a bar. I need a drink like a Minnie needs a Mickey.”
“The truck can go where it likes,” Cochran declared. ‘The Ford is going to the first bar we find.”
“I’d be interested in finding something to chase that cabernet with,” ventured Pete.
“I don’t think” said Angelica judiciously, “that I can stay sane for very long, right now, without a drink, myself.” She sighed and clasped her elbows. “Arky, I guess you can have one, but you’d better stay sober. Doctor’s orders.”
Mavranos didn’t seem to have heard any of the discussion. “But can we really imagine,” he went on quietly, “that He’d give you anything less than ninety-nine-point-nine?”
Angelica frowned at Mavranos’s disjointed rambling, probably thinking about waxing and waning mentation. “If Kootie’s at the motel,” she said again, absently, “he’ll wait for us. And he’ll be safe. He’s the king now.”
WHEN HE had tugged off his shirt and jeans and kicked his soaked sneakers heedlessly away across the gleaming floor, the woman had kissed Kootie, her arms around his neck and her robe open on nothing but bare, hot skin against his cold chest. Her tongue had slid across his teeth like an electric shock.
They had fallen across the quilt on the huge, canopied bed, and Kootie had been feverishly trying to free his hands to pull the robe off of her and tug his own damp jockey shorts off as she kissed his neck and chest—when he’d heard what she had been whispering.
“Give me you,” she’d been saying hoarsely, “you’re not a virgin—fill me up—you’re so big—you can spare more than I can take—and not near die.”
Die? he had thought—and then her teeth had begun gently scoring the skin over the taut muscle at the side of his neck.
If she had been drawing any blood at all it had been from no more than a scratch, and the sensation had been only pleasurable…
But he had suddenly been aware that his psychic attention and self was wide open and strainingly extended, and that with all the strength of her own mind she was trying to gnaw off apiece of his soul.
—In an instant’s flash of intolerable memory he was again duct-taped into a seat in a minivan that had been driven up inside a moving truck in Los Angeles—“a boat in a boat”—while a crazy one-armed man with a hunting knife was stabbing at his ribs, trying to cut out his soul, and consume it—
Abruptly the room seemed to tilt, and grow suddenly darker and hotter, and he was unreasoningly sure that he was about to fall bodily into her furnace mouth, which in this moment of virtiginous nightmare panic seemed to have become the gaping black fireplace below his feet.
He felt himself sliding—
And with all the psychic strength that the events of this terrible morning had bequeathed to him, he lashed out, with such force that he was sure he must have burst a blood vessel in his head.
He hadn’t moved at all, physically, and only a second had passed, when he realized that her skin was impossibly cold and that her bare breasts were still—she was not breathing.
He tugged his arms out from under her chilly weight and scrambled off the bed. Sobbing and shaking, he clumsily pulled his jeans and shirt on, and he was thrusting his feet back into his sodden sneakers, when the hallway door was snatched open.
An old woman was standing silhouetted in the doorway.
“Call nine-one-one,” Kootie blubbered, “I think she’s—”
“She’s dead, child,” the old woman said sternly. “Both the telephones downstairs are still ringing themselves off their hooks with their poor magnets shaking, and the god’s big mirror has got a crack right across it. She’s dead and flung bodily right over the spires of India like a cannonball. What-all did the poor woman want, one little bit of the real you, and you couldn’t spare it? Child, you don’t know your own strength.” She shook her head. “He can’t meet you now, with or without the humble-pie breakfast, the wine and the venison. Later, and probably not affording to be as polite as it would have been now. You’ve clouded yourself beyond his sight here today.”
Kootie cuffed the tears from his eyes and blinked up at her—and then clenched his teeth against a wail of pure dismay. The figure scowling down at him was the old woman he and his parents had seen so many times on the magically tuned black-and-white television. Now he could see that her eyes were of different colors, one brown and one blue.
“I’m Mary Ellen Pleasant,” she told him. “You may as well call me Mammy Pleasant, like everybody else. Now, boy, don’t you fret about what you’ve done here, bad though it damn well is—hers won’t be the first dead body I’ve disposed of in secret. Right now you get your clothes in order, and come down and talk to me in the kitchen.”
She stepped back out into the hall, mercifully leaving the door open. As her footsteps receded away along the wooden floor outside, Kootie stood up. Without looking toward the nearly naked body on the bed, he crossed to the make-up table and picked up the bottle of Bitin Dog wine.
Youd like some of that, wouldn’t you? he remembered the woman saying. Impunity?
The humble-pie breakfast…
COCHRAN HAD said, “Couldn’t have asked for a better place,” and swung the Granada across momentarily empty oncoming lanes into the uneven parking lot of a bar-and-restaurant that seemed to be a renovated cannery from the turn of the century, the walls all gray wood and rusty corrugated iron. Over the door nearest where he parked was a sign that read THE LOSER’S BAR, but Plumtree pointed out a sign over the main building: SEAFOOD BOHEMIA.
“Fine,” Cochran said as they left the car unlocked and hobbled to the bar door “we can have bohemian seafood for lunch, if they take plastic here.”
The dusty blue Suburban was out in the center divider lane of Masonic Avenue, its left blinker light flashing.
Cochran plodded up the wooden steps, hiking himself along with his hand on the wet wrought-iron rail, and he held the bar door open for Plumtree.
She took one step into the dim interior, and then stopped and looked back over her shoulder at him. “Sid,” she said blankly, “this place—”
He put one hand on her shoulder and stepped in past her.
The mirror-studded disco ball was turning over the sand-strewn dance floor, but again there was no one dancing. The air still smelled of candle wax, but with a strong accompaniment of fish-reek this time instead of mutton. Two men in rumpled business suits, conceivably the same men as before, stood at the bar and banged the cup of bar dice on the wet, polished wood.
The dark-haired waitress in the long skirt smiled at them and waved toward a booth near the door.
“We shouldn’t stay,” whispered Cochran. He was still holding the door open, and he glanced nervously back out at the car and the parking lot and the Suburban, which was now turning into the lot.