Angelica had begun asking the old woman questions, but Mammy Pleasant had immediately demanded to know if they had brought any eucalyptus bark from her tree; and, when she’d been assured that they had, that a pair of shoes be soled from the bark for her. And when Pete and Kootie had cut out bark soles and heels and Superglued them onto a pair of Nina’s low-heeled Ferragamo pumps—Pleasant had haughtily dismissed the notion of using a pair of Reeboks after getting a look at them—the old woman had put the shoes on and walked outside in the crackling, fragmenting footwear, straight to the greenhouse.
Scott Crane’s disordered skeleton was laid out in there on a shelf between Nina’s orchids and a crowd of potted fuchsias, and the Plumtree hands were shaky as they touched the broken skull. “He himself will lead you to the god’s wine,” she had said. “And by then you’ll have learned where to go with it, and what to do.”
She hadn’t said very much more about Crane’s restoration to life than that—then or in the six days since. She generally came on within an hour to either side of noon, though the sun was seldom visible through the overcast, and often she seemed absent-minded, or senile, or even drunk—which, Mavranos noted, was only to be expected in a servant of Dionysus. She kept finding jobs around the house for “Teresa” to do, and had to leave notes because she could never find the girl; and Plumtree had begun leaving notes in return, buggesting that the old woman clean the floors and windows herself. When Kootie or Angelica would stop the old woman and try to get information about the procedure they were supposedly going to perform on the day of the Tet Festival, Pleasant’s drunkenness would seem to become more pronounced—and she would just insist that Crane would presently tell them what to do. Adding to the confusion was the fact that she generally slurred the name to Cren, and frequently pronounced it with a stutter, C-cren, so that she seemed to be referring to Cochran. Even her pronunciation of Scott sometimes seemed to slur nasally toward Scant.
Cochran now watched Cody spraying the carburetor with some very flammable-smelling aerosol.
“Janis is avoiding me,” he said again.
“Don’t light a cigarette right now,” Cody said. “I don’t blame her. But I think she should talk to you.” She put down the spray can and squinted up at him, her face shadowed by the raised car hood. “I saw into her dream for a couple of seconds last night. You were in both of our dreams, and the…figure of you, your outline, must have sort of matched up and spun around at the partition between her mind and mine—like one of those secret bookshelf-walls in old movies, that rotate on a pivot when you pull on the right book.” Cody took another gulp of the beer. “Her dream was in color, but barely—it looked fake, like a black-and-white photo touched up with watercolors, and the backgrounds were plain gray. And there was music, the dwarf music from Sleeping Beauty, but I could hardly hear the melody because the drumming was so hard and loud. It sounded like soldiers marching fast on an iron deck.”
Cochran bared his teeth unhappily. He couldn’t forget the image of Janis valiantly punching the linoleum floor at the Rosecrans Medical Center nearly three weeks ago; nor her look of despairing hurt in his bed last Tuesday, when he had last spoken to her. “What does that mean?” he asked Cody.
“Valorie’s memories are in black-and-white, and always have drumming going on. I think Janis is draining away into Valorie.”
But Valorie’s dead! he almost said. “Can…that happen?”
“As far as we’re concerned, Sid, anything can happen. We went to a funeral once when we were twelve, and by the time the minister was done talking it was somebody else’s funeral and we were fourteen; and what we thought was the emotion of rage turns out to be our male parent, who’s alive and crouching inside our head; and I have to look at whatever I last scratched the date on to be sure—” She glanced at fresh scratches in the greasy curve of the manifold valve cover. “—to be sure that the goddamn Edison Medicine that broke us all into separate pieces, all finally aware of each other, happened only seventeen days ago!”
Cochran smiled with half of his face. “I see what you mean. The word ‘impossible’ isn’t what it used to be, for any of us.” Cody was holding out the beer can toward him; he took it to throw away for her, but it was still more than half full, so he gratefully Hired it up for a sip and then handed it back to her. “What can I say to Janis besides that I’m sorry? Besides that I know I was the bad guy and that she deserved better from even a total stranger, never mind from somebody she had got herself into bad trouble to protect?”
Cody laughed. “Besides those things?” Then she sobered. “I honestly don’t know, but it might save her if you told her you love her.” She shook her head. “My…it’s not sister; my other half?…seems to be evaporating, dying.”
“I could tell her that, I suppose, if it would help,” he said cautiously. He glanced back at the kitchen door. “But if it did help, and she came back, even though I’d—I mean, she’d be able to tell—”
Cody raised an eyebrow. “You don’t love her?”
“No.”
“Huh. She seems to me like the ideal woman, everything I’m not. So do you love anybody?” She coughed. “I mean, anybody who’s alive?”
At first Cochran thought he wouldn’t be able to look at her. Then he did meet her eyes, though his voice was incongruously light when he answered, “Yes.”
It was Cody that looked away. “I don’t think that’s very smart.” She coughed again, rackingly. “Well, go ahead and lie to her, and we can worry about the consequences once she’s herself again. Better a car that’s gonna let you down halfway home than one that won’t run at all.”
Cochran considered, then rejected, the idea of drinking a couple of beers first. “I don’t know what I’ll say. But go ahead—call her up.”
“I can’t, she won’t come voluntarily. You’ve got to call her up.”
“How am I supposed to—oh. Follow-the-Queen.”
“Right. Wait right here, I’ll…get my stupid parentess.” Plumtree closed her eyes. “Mother!” she called.
Instantly her eyes sprang open, and she stepped back away from Cochran after grabbing up a screwdriver from the fender. “You tell him,” she said, “that if he comes out of that house I’ll drive this straight into my own heart. He’ll know I mean it.” The skin of her neck was suddenly looser, and her eyes seemed closer together.
“He’s nowhere around here, Mrs….Plumtree,” said Cochran awkwardly. Why was he talking to this personality? According to Angelica it wasn’t her real mother, nor even a real ghost, just an internalized version of her parent patched together from memories and overheard conversations. “I do know who you mean,” Cochran went on. “We’re hiding from him.” He felt as though he had dialed six digits of Janis’s number, and was afraid to dial the last one. “We’re protecting your daughter from him.”
“You can’t hide, you can’t protect anyone, from Omar Salvoy,” said the querulous voice, though her fist relaxed around the screwdriver handle. But Cochran’s stomach was cold, and he wished she had not mentioned Salvoy’s name. “Especially you can’t protect her. He wants to have a child by a dead woman. I was nearly dead when he had intercourse with me, I was—unconscious’—in a coma!—after a head injury!”