Long John Beach gathered back the shreds of his mind and pushed himself away from the big inhuman personality—and he got a quick impression of a young man in patchwork clothes, with a bundle over his shoulder, dancing at the edge of a cliff. He recognized the image—it was one of the pictures in the doctor’s set of oversized tarot cards, the one the doctor called The Fool.
The doctor was afraid of that one. And Long John Beach was not ready to surrender himself to The Fool. The one-armed old man’s identity was nothing more than a limp threadbare sack, angular at the bottom with the fragments of broken poisonous memories and short, rotted lengths of intelligence, but it was all he had.
In spite of his uneasiness with the memories of the Koot Hoomie Parganas boy, he was not ready to surrender himself to The Fool.
KOOTIE WAS sobbing and trying to get up when Angelica tumbled to her hands and knees in the muddy planter beside him; Pete slid to an abrading stop against the cement coping beside her.
Mavranos was kneeling on the other side of the boy, and holding him down with hands that were red with fresh blood. “Let your ma look at you, first,” Mavranos said irritably, and then he squinted up into Angelica’s face. “He was rolling over when the bullet hit him—I don’t think it was a direct hit.”
“Mom!” Kootie wailed. “I thought you were all dead!”
“Check it out as a doctor, Angie,” said Pete breathlessly.
“Hit him?” she panted. “We’re fine, Kootie, we’re—all just fine.” To Pete she snapped, “It can’t have hit him.” Gently but irresistibly she pushed Kootie down on his back in the snapping geranium branches and pulled his shirt up, and the familiar old unhealed knife cut over his left ribs was now a raw long gash with blood runneling down his side and pattering onto the green leaves.
Angelica’s peripheral vision cringed inward so that all she could see was this gleaming red rip in Kootie’s white skin; but she replayed what Pete had said and forced herself to look at it professionally. “You’re right, Arky—it’s shallow, no damage at all to the muscle layer and hardly even scored the corium, the deeper skin layer—not life-threatening.” She grinned at the boy as confidently as she could, and gasped out, “Welcome back, kiddo,” but she knew the look she then gave Mavranos must have been stark. “Get the truck here right now. I don’t want my boy in a hospital like this.”
“Right.” Mavranos scuffled to his feet and sprinted heavily away.
“Let’s get you moving, Kootie,” Angelica said, grunting as she and Pete helped the boy stand up. Bright drops of blood spilled down the left leg of his jeans, and she mentally rehearsed grabbing the first-aid kit that Mavranos kept in a box beside the back seat. “That must have been a magical gun—” she began. Then she looked into his eyes. “You’re not hurt anywhere else, are you? Physically?”
“No.” But Kootie was crying, and Angelica knew it was about something that had happened before this shooting…and after he had run away in the pre-dawn darkness this morning.
“Tell your dad and me about it when we get clear of this,” she said gently.
“And I thought,” the boy sniffled, “that I got you killed, by running away. I just ran away from you! I’d give anything if I could go back and do that different.”
“We’re just fine, son,” said Pete, hugging the boy against himself. “It’s okay. And now you’re back. We’re all alive for our…reconciliation here, and that’s a very big thing.”
Angelica remembered Pete making a very similar apology to his father’s ghost, on the night before Halloween in ’92—Pete too had run away once, when it counted—and she winced in sympathy and opened her mouth to say something; but the shrill whine of the truck engine starting up stopped her.
The truck came grinding up behind her and squealed to a halt, and Angelica helped Pete hustle Kootie around the front bumper to the back door. As soon as they had boosted him in onto the back seat and clambered aboard themselves, Pete in the front seat and Angelica in the back seat with Kootie, Mavranos gunned the dusty blue truck out of the parking lot; Kootie sprawled across the seat, and Angelica, crouched on the floorboards beside him, had to lean out over the rushing pavement to catch the swinging door handle and pull the door shut.
Then she hiked the first-aid kit down with one hand while she raised her other hand over the back of the front seat; and Pete had already opened the glove compartment, and now slapped into her palm Mavranos’s nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniels bourbon.
Kootie was lying on his back, and Angelica knelt over him and popped open the first-aid kit. “This’ll hurt,” she told him as she tore open a gauze pad envelope and spilled bourbon onto the cotton.
“Good,” said Kootie. Then he said, “The old guy in the passenger seat of that BMW—it was Sherman Oaks, the one-armed guy who killed my natural mom and dad. I recognized him. And he recognized me.”
Angelica suppressed a worried frown, and just pressed the wet bandage onto his wound. “Drive right out of the city, Arky,” she called over her shoulder, “in whatever direction you’re heading. To hell with whatever we left in that motel room. When we’re—”
“No,” said Kootie through clenched teeth. “First we’ve got to go to Octavia Street—uh, two blocks south of California Street.”
“Tell me which,” growled Mavranos from the driver’s seat.
“Why, Kootie?” asked Pete, hunching around to look back at the boy. “If that Sherman Oaks guy is here in town—”
“We’ve got to do it right this time,” said Kootie hoarsely. “We’ve got to fetch Mammy Pleasant. She’s the old black lady from the TV, and her house is on Octavia there.”
“Oh, honey, that—didn’t work out,” Angelica said as she peeled adhesive tape off a roll. She restrained herself from glancing over his head toward the bed of the truck. “That’s all over.”
It’s not,” Kootie said, closing his eyes as Angelica pressed the strip of tape tightly over the bandage “He can still come back. To life. Dionysus wants him to.”
“South on Van Ness,” announced Mavranos as the truck leaned into a right-hand turn. “I’m going straight on down to the 101 south unless somebody convinces me to do different.”
“Arky,” Kootie wailed, “get over to Octavia! We won’t ever be okay until we’ve paid this thing off. Does it look like we’re done, here? Does it look like I’m the king now? He can still he restored to life.”
“You don’t know the whole story, Kootie,” said Pete. “We do. Trust me, there’s no way—” He paused, for Mavranos had swung the truck into another hard right turn at Filbert, and the battering exhaust was echoing back from the close garage doors alongside the narrow, steep street. “Arky—? The 101 is—”
“Talk to me, Kootie,” said Mavranos. “If he can still come back, it can’t be into his own body anymore. That turned into a skeleton, and got all busted up.”
“And it won’t be into yours,” said Angelica, peeling off another strip of tape. “I will sabotage any effort at that, I promise. So don’t even—”
“No,” said Kootie, “it would have been that way, if we’d done it right, and then he would have shifted back into his own. Arky and the Plumtree woman were right about that. But we were doing it wrong, we didn’t get Mammy Pleasant to guide us like she told us to, and then I ran away—” He sniffed. “Mammy Pleasant gave me a message for Crane, some Latin poetry on a piece of paper, from Dionysus.”