Cochran thought of his afternoon with Tiffany, then drove the horrifying parallel out of his mind.
The mother personality almost put Plumtree’s eye out as she reached up to rub her eyes with the hand holding the screwdriver. “Listen to me,” she went on. “He studied the old books of the Order of the Knights Templar, and one of their secret mystery-initiation stories was about a man who dug up a dead woman out of her grave and had intercourse with her cold body; and after he had raped the corpse and buried it again, a voice from the earth told him to return in nine months and he would find a divine son. He came back then, and when he dug her up this time he found a, a blinking, grimacing little black head lying on her thigh-bones. And the voice from the earth told him to guard it well, for it would be the source of all forgiveness. And so he took it away, and guarded it jealously, and he prospered with impunity.” There were tears in her eyes as she glared at Cochran. “My baby died when he fell on her. There’s some kind of…kaleidoscope girl that’s grown up in there, in her head, but my baby died that day in Soma.” She was shaking her head violently and drawing the screwdriver blade across her chest. “But she can still, my dead daughter can still become pregnant, if Omar is in a male body. He can become the father of the god.”
Cochran knew that it was his vision, and not the sky, that had darkened; but with a shaking hand he reached out and then suddenly, firmly, gripped the blade of the screwdriver.
“Don’t kill her,” he whispered. Was this the same god? he wondered; was the horrible little homunculus she’d described the same person as the deity of groves and grapevines that offered the pagadebitil The mondard that had spoken to him in Paris with such fatherly affection, before turning into a bull-headed thing and then into a tumbled straw effigy? The god that had made the Agave woman in Mavranos’s Euripides play cut off her son’s head? What kind of primordial proto-deity could be all these things?
He thought of the endless rows of gnarled crucifixes dripping out on the surrounding hills in the rain.
“Don’t kill her,” he repeated. “I’ll protect her, I’ll save her from him. I love her.” I love the real one, he thought, even if you don’t know which that is.
Plumtree shook her head in evident pity. “She’ll come to the point where she’ll tear you to pieces just for the honor of being able to bring your head to him. Who are you to the god?”
Cochran abruptly pulled the screwdriver out of her hands. Then, slowly, he turned his hand around to show her the mark below his knuckles. “When I was a boy,” he said, “I put out my hand to save him from the pruner’s shears.”
Plumtree had gasped, and now nodded slowly. “Send her away into the sea,” she said. “She belongs in India, not here, not being the mother of the god. The god himself couldn’t want that, to have an incarnate aspect of himself in filial obligation to a monster.” The smile she gave him was one he had not seen before on Plumtree’s face, but it was brave. “I love her too.”
“I’ll do what’s right,” he said, “for her.” Then he took a deep breath and said, gently, “Janis.”
Plumtree’s features pinched in anxiety. “Oh, it’s Scant,” she said; then her voice quickened: “Was he here? I can feel his name still on my tongue! Daddy?” she called, glancing around at the yard and the greenhouse. “I’ll never ditch you, Daddy! I’ll always catch you! Listen to me! Where I go, you go, I swear on my life!”
“Shut up, Janis, please!” Cochran hissed, spinally aware of the vineyards and of the skeleton in the greenhouse. “He wasn’t here. I have to talk to you, Janis. You don’t have to forgive me, but you do have to know that, that I know I was totally in the wrong, and I’m terribly sorry and ashamed of myself.” He smacked his fist against his thigh, angry with himself for saying this badly. “All my excuses were lies, Janis. You were right about me, but I want to make it up to you, to whatever extent I can. Will you come back to us, please? Cody needs you. I need you. I—”
“To be or not to be, that is the question,” said Plumtree.
Cochran faltered. “Valorie?”
“No…no, I’m Janis, still.”
I should have known, Cochran thought, that it wouldn’t be Valorie quoting the only Shakespeare line that everyone in the world knows. “Janis, I—”
“Don’t, Scant mustn’t, I’ll make myself deaf to him—we can do that. Leave me alone, if he wants to do something for me, he can leave me alone!” She hurried away across the concrete patio deck to the kitchen door, yanked it open, and slammed it behind her.
Cochran thought seriously for a moment about pursuing her. Then he sighed picked up Cody’s abandoned beer, and leaned against the car fender. Maybe, he thought, I should tell it all to dead Valorie, and let her explain it to Janis.
What damn good is this person that’s me? he thought, glancing from the kitchen door to the mark on the back of his hand. How in hell am I supposed to play this flop, when I’m gambling with so many people’s bankrolls? And he remembered Kootie telling him, at the Sutro ruins two weeks ago, You’ll be taking all our chances.
OMAR SALVOY found himself in a bedroom with a telephone in it.
He knew he would have to be careful in what he said to Dr. Richard Paul Armentrout, and he crossed his arms under his daughter’s breasts—A divine offspring for you to nurse during this thirteen-moon year, baby, I promise, he thought—and paced up and down the rag rug in front of the bedside table. Bye, baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, gone to get a leopard-skin to bury baby bunting in.
In his youth Salvoy had only wanted to find a king to serve. He had been a theater major at Stanford University, specializing in Shakespeare and finding star tling clues in some of the obscurer plays, and living in a shabby little apartment in Menlo Park.
In May of 1964, when he had been nineteen, Salvoy had gone with a friend to the La Honda house of Ken Kesey, put in the redwood forests at the south end of State Highway 84. Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been published only two years earlier.
And, in Kesey, Salvoy thought he had found his king. The burly, balding Oregonian had gathered a whole tribe together at his remote hillside ranch in the canyon, and he spoke of the new drug LSD as the almost sacramental key to “worlds that have always existed.” Hi-fi speakers boomed and yowled on the roof of the house, shattering the silence of the ancient redwood forest, and weird wind chimes and crazy paintings were hung on all the trees. Omar Salvoy had begun visiting the place on his own, driving his old Karmann Ghia down the 84 over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the La Honda ranch every weekend.
One day out in the woods someone had found a dozen oversized wooden chessmen, weathered and cracked, and Kesey’s tribe had spontaneously begun improvising a dialogue among the figures—it had had to do with a king threatened with castration, and a girl with “electric eel tits that ionized King Arthur’s sword under swamp water”—and though the impromptu play was just a cheerful stoned rap from a bunch of distracted proto-hippies, Salvoy had believed he had heard mythic, archetypal powers manifesting themselves in the lines. When Kesey had set his people to painting random patterns in Day-Glo paint all over the 1939 International Harvester school bus he had just bought, Salvoy had climbed up to the destination sign over the windshield and painted on it the name ARTHUR.