Nervous sweat itching under his eyes, Cochran replied with a careful whistling sigh.
“Oh shit,” whispered Armentrout. “Janis?” he said then, strongly. “‘Cody? This is your doctor. Please tell me where you’re staying.”
Cochran saw Plumtree put her top teeth into her lower lip as though preparing to say a word that started with F, but instead she shook her head and stepped back to the phone to rattlingly hang up the receiver.
“Smart not to say anything,” Cochran said when the connection had been broken. “This way he can’t be sure it wasn’t…your father. I’m sorry I spooked him, there, at the end—”
“No,” she said, staring at the telephone as if she thought it might manifest some dire noise or light that would give them only seconds to flee the room, flee the house; “you had to make some response, and that first hmm got a couple of extra sentences out of him.” When she looked up at him her pupils were pinpricks and her jawmuscles were working. “Janis let him on. Damn her, it makes me sick to think of him—” She spread her fingers and then closed her hands into tight fists, “in here, in me.” Her mouth worked, and then she spat on the rug. “I need Listerine. At least he wasn’t on for long enough to give me a nosebleed or hurt my teeth much—and he didn’t tell Armentrout where we are.” She glanced at the black plastic ten-dollar watch she’d bought to replace the hospital zeitgeber watch. “How long ago was it that I called up my mother for you?”
“Oh—five minutes?”
Plumtree tossed her head in exasperation. “Five minutes at the end for some of them,” she said sternly, “but they’ve got to be sautéed too, and added in with the ones that have been cooking all along. You want onions that’re still toothsome, surely, but others should be nearly melting, they’ve been in there so long.”
You saved me from a reproach, Mammy, Cochran thought after his first instant of puzzlement. “Whatever you say, Mrs. Pleasant.” In fact the old-woman personality had unexpectedly proven to be a terrific cook, and during the past week had prepared a couple of black-roux jambalayas that had even drawn enthusiasm from the preoccupied Mavranos. Cochran now remembered smelling onions cooking when he had come into the house. “Are you talking about what you’ve got simmering in there now?”
“Yes, a beef bourguignonne, and eggplant pirogis,” she said. Plumtree’s eyes had a heavy-lidded, almost Asian cast when Mammy Pleasant was on. “You’ve got three pirogis,” she went on. “Do you know how they are to be filled?”
He knew she was no longer talking about dinner—and he was fairly, sure of what she meant. “I think I know how to fill one,” he said bleakly, “temporarily, at least. I hope somebody else suggests it—I hope she thinks of it, herself!—so I won’t have to.”
“Partly you’re here to think of things,” came the old woman’s strong voice out of Plumtree’s mouth; “yes, partly each of you has been chosen for your wits and cleverness. But each of you has a specific task as well. Each of you, like the three wise men, has brought a gift to your helpless king in this January season of Epiphany. Do you know what gift it is you’ve brought him, Scant Cochran? Do you know what it is that you’re to give away?”
Cochran thought about that. Nina’s ghost, his now objectless and always deceived love for her? Well, yes, the god did appear to want that, but that couldn’t be his purpose here. “Something to do,” he said, “with the mark on my hand.”
Plumtree’s blond head nodded. “If all goes well this time, if you all generously do what the god generously asks, King Crane will be alive at midsummer, and you will no longer have in hand the god’s marker.”
Cochran realized that his mouth was open; he closed it, and then said, “That’s why I’m here, involved in this? To give away the—” What had Angelica called it at the broken temple on the end of the yacht-harbor peninsula? “—the Dionysus badge?”
“Boy, it’s the only reason you were allowed to volunteer to get the mark in the first place.”
“Allowed to—?” Cochran could feel his face heating up. In the Mount Sabu bar in Bellflower, when Janis had asked him why he didn’t get the mark removed, he had told her, I’m kind of proud of it…it’s my winemaker’s merit badge, an honorable battle scar. And he remembered Nina’s ghost telling him that when he had put his hand out to injury to save the god, thirty-four years ago, he had been like Androcles daring to pull the thorn from the lion’s paw in the old story; the lion had thereafter owed Androcles a debt of gratitude. And Cochran was surprised now at the hurt of learning that in his own case he had apparently only been meant to hold the golden beast’s favor for someone else, someone more highly esteemed—that it had never been for him. Like my wife’s love, he thought.
“So all along the god meant,” he said, forcing his voice not to hitch ludicrously, “for me to just hold the obligation in trust for Scott Crane? Why didn’t the god let f—let precious Crane earn the obligation himself, get his own hand half cut off?”
“The god, and Scott Crane too, was yoked in the harness of another king then, a bad king. The god had to incur the debt outside the king’s control but still within his own—that is, in a remote vineyard. I think that, as much as anything, you were chosen because of the similarity of your name to that of the favored boy who would one day be king.” She smiled at him, with no evident malice or sympathy. “As if the god needed a sign even to remember you. And later, it was probably just so that you would get a name closer to Scott that he broke your leg under a cask of his wine.” She reached out and gently touched his marked hand. “To be used by him—yes, even to ignominious destruction—is to be loved by him. You should be honored to have been judged worthy of being deceived and cheated in this way.”
Cochran let the hurt run out of himself as his shoulders relaxed. Spider Joe brought the two coins, he thought, and an oracular reading of Angelica’s cards; and died to do it, and ended up buried under an old Chevy Nova in a Long Beach parking lot. “And Cody brought her father,” he said dully.
“Yes. The king had to die, so that he would no longer be a stranger to the dark earth.”
Cochran frowned into the blue eyes that seemed for the moment to be of two slightly different colors. “I meant for what we’ve got to do next: make him tell us what we did wrong, what we should have done differently, last week. I didn’t mean—my God, woman, are you saying that Dionysus not only wants Crane restored to life, but wanted him to die too?”
“He’s no real king, no real representative of the god, if he doesn’t spend the pruning season of each year in the kingdom of darkness. Few kings have been thorough enough in their observations of the office to do that—to actually die, each year but the god does love Scott Crane.”
“To Crane’s misfortune. To the misfortune of all of us.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “the god loves all of us, in spite of our rebellions and failures.” She blinked around the room then. “I’m too alert—I’ll draw attention. Where are my penance shoes?”