ANGELICA wanted to look at Plumtree’s bashed ribs and possibly sprained hand, but when Cochran and Mavranos had helped Plumtree to her feet and walked her into the house, she shook them off.
“Leave me be,” she said irritably, leaning over the kitchen sink while blood dripped from her nose. “It’s just a spell of the spasmodics.” She grabbed a dishtowel and pressed it to her face. “Get Teresa to fetch me a cup of Balm Tea,” she said through the rowel, “with some gin in it.” Then she blinked around at the low-ceilinged white kitchen she was standing in, with its blocky white refrigerator and the gleaming black box of the microwave oven. “I mean, a glass of Z-Zinfandel,” she amended querulously. “And my bark-soled penance shoes.”
“No,” said Cochran sharply, “not yet. Sit down, Mrs. Pleasant. Have some coffee. Arky, get her a cup of coffee. Listen, we’ve learned some things about Crane’s resurrection.”
He felt goose bumps tickle against the sleeves of his shirt then, for when the woman looked at him, her forehead and high cheekbones seemed for a moment to be patrician with age, and momentarily her blond hair appeared white in the shine of the overhead fluorescent lights; then it was Plumtree’s face, with both eyes the same shade of blue, though the eyelids were still full and vaguely Asian. She sat down in one of the kitchen chairs stiffly, dabbing at her nose with the bloody towel. Her nose wasn’t bleeding anymore, and the Mammy Pleasant personality didn’t appear to feel any pains in her ribs.
Raindrops began tapping against the window over the sink.
“I tried to tell you people everything,” said Mammy Pleasants cautious voice, “right from the first, well in time for you to have done it correctly on St. Sulpice’s Day. I was supposed to be your intercessor—I told you then that I would have to indwell one of you, but you thought I just wanted a body to take the fresh air in.”
“We’re listening now,” said Angelica. “And you’ve got the body now.”
“I’ll tell you nothing, now,” said Pleasant’s voice. “Your Chinaman holiday isn’t until the day after tomorrow. Ask me about it then, respectfully, and I might tell you what to do, and I might not. At any rate I can have wine for one more day, and my shoes”
Kootie had started toward the hall, but Cochran said, “Don’t get the shoes, Kootie They apparently work as a damper to keep her personality from being conspicuous from being a beacon to this house—maybe she seems to be a tree, to psychic radar when she’s wearing ’em—but I think they’re also a damper on her intelligence I think they’re like dope.”
“Now I will assuredly tell you nothing.”
“But you’ve said that the god’s purpose is your purpose too,” said Angelica in a tone of sympathetic concern. She knelt, beside Plumtree. “And that the god’s purpose is to bring Crane back, as king. We need to know what to do.” Cochran guessed that Angelica was already resolved to ditch this whole enterprise, and every person that resided in the Plumtree head, and simply wanted to find out as much as possible before fleeing; but he had to admit that she projected sincerity. Doctors are trained to do that, he thought.
“The god’s purpose,” said Pleasant, stubbornly shaking Plumtree’s tangled blond hair. “You’re to take two old women to the sea, and throw them in, because the god’s purpose doesn’t include poor frightened old ghosts trying to sleep in some frail shelter out of the rain.” She turned to Angelica, blinking rapidly. “What if we did fight him? Who won?”
Two old women? thought Cochran. She mentioned another old woman right at the first, on the Solville TV—Angelica said it sounded like a sewing circle Who’s the other one? Plumtree’s phantom mother?
“Could I have insisted?” the old woman went on. Plumtree’s eyes were blinking rapidly. “I tried to insist! Through your, your ‘boob tube’! You could have accomplished it then, on St. Sulpice’s Day, if you had listened to me.”
“And if I hadn’t run away,” said Kootie
“We were well down the wrong track already, by that morning,” Mavranos told the boy gruffly. “Going to the wrong shore, with the wrong wine….” To Plumtree’s sunburned face, he said, “You could have told us more. We might not have listened, but…”
“I needed to be in a body! I told you that much! How could I think, without a brain?” Plumtree’s eyes were blinking rapidly.
Mavranos’s nostrils were flared and the corners of his mouth were drawn down. “You wanted a body to take the fresh air in,” he said flatly.
Rain was drumming now against the window over the sink, and Cochran could see the bobbing stems of Nina’s window-box basil outside. The back door was open, and the cold draft smelled of wet clay.
“I wanted some time to rest,” Mammy Pleasant said in a near-whisper, perhaps agreeing with him. “This little time, these little days sitting with the orchids in the greenhouse, and cooking for people again! I don’t see how anybody can describe total oblivion as rest—you couldn’t even call it losing yourself, because for losing to go on there has to be a loser, and there wouldn’t be even that. Oh, believe me, the god’s purpose has only been delayed.”
“And made…costlier,” said Mavranos, very quietly. His brown hands were clenched in fists against his thighs.
“Let me tell you about Omar Salvoy’s purpose,” Cochran said, leaning back against the refrigerator. “According to Plumtree’s mom, he wants to get into the right male body and become this Fisher King, and then get Plumtree pregnant—specifically, get Valorie pregnant. Valorie is evidently the core child inside Plumtree, and she’s apparently dead. I’m sure Cody and Janis don’t know that. Salvoy believes that if he can father a child by a dead woman—well, not a whole child; I gather it would be just a sort of deformed, unconnected head—that partial child will be a living, obligated piece of Dionysus.”
“Jesus!” exclaimed Angelica, looking away from Plumtree to gape up at him.
Kootie was hugging himself, grasping his elbows; and Cochran thought that this revelation had somehow stirred the boy’s memories of whatever devastating thing it was that he had done twelve days ago, after he had run away from the motel on Lombard Street before dawn.
For several seconds no one spoke.
Plumtree’s head was bowed. “Yes,” Mammy Pleasant whispered finally, “if he was the king, he could force that. If he had the body with the wounded side, and if he made a mother of Death, he could stand in loco parentis to the god. Other kings have sometimes achieved degrees of domination over the god, in other ways.”
“Loco parentis is right,” said Mavranos hollowly.
Plumtree’s head snapped back, throwing her blond locks back from her forehead. “The god, in that form,” she said, “and that king, would have uses for a couple of old ghost ladies.” Her face was impassive, but tears spilled down her cheeks. “Thank you, Scant Cochran, for making me understand that the oblivion in the sea is one of the god’s mercies. I do thank him for the offered gift of ceasing to exist. And I’m grateful, too, that it must be the last of his gifts to me.”
Cochran opened his mouth to speak, but Mammy Pleasant rapped Plumtree’s knuckles on the kitchen table. “I will speak, now, and you all will listen,” she said. “When your king’s castrated father was king, he ruled in Las Vegas. And your king ruled and may rule again in the place that rhymes with Arcadia. But there was a king who cultivated the miraculous Zinfandel vine in San Diego until 1852, and who then castled to Sonoma, north of San Francisco, where he grew the vines in the Valley of the Moon, between Sonoma Mountain and Bismark Knob. The god originally intended me to be queen to this king, but I had irretrievably rebelled against the god a dozen years earlier.”