Cody bared her teeth and nodded. “And we might need her.”
Cochran knew she meant Valorie, and he wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts.
“My wife and I bought a pair of plots,” Cochran said, loudly enough for Pete and Angelica to hear too; “further uphill somewhere, across this road. That would be the place where I should drink it.”
On the lawn to their left, isolated stone angels and Corinthian pillars stood on pedestals above clustered ranks of upright black marble slabs with gold Chinese ideographs and inset color photo-portraits on their faces, while the lawns stretching away to the right were dotted with rows of flat markers like, thought Cochran, keys on a vast green keyboard. The gray weight of the spilling sky seemed to be held back by the brave yellow and red spots of flower bouquets around many of the headstones, and in the children’s section behind them, silver helium balloons and brightly colored pinwheels had made an agitated confetti glitter against the carpet of wet grass.
They stepped up to the curb, over cement water-valve covers that looked at first glance like particularly humble little graves, and plodded out across the grass.
Far up the hill they came upon a scene almost of ruin. To the right, the grass had been stripped away from a broad area, leaving puddles and hillocks of mud around the stranded stone markers; an iron sign on a pole indicated that the grounds were being renovated for installation of a new sprinkler system and would be reseeded, and warned passersby that WOODLAWN WATERS ITS LAWNS WITH NONPOTABLE WELL WATER. And to the left, farther away across the grass, a gigantic oak tree had fallen over in the direction away from them, probably during the storms that had ravaged the California coast on New Year’s Day; where the base of the tree had erupted out of the ground, the uplifted knotty face of dirt-caked roots was a monument taller than any of the carved marble ones, an abrupt black section of natural wall whose bent topmost crown-spikes stiffly clawed the sky far higher up than a man could reach. As he and Plumtree walked hand-in-hand around the fallen giant, he saw a thick carpet of fresh green grass still flourishing on the once-horizontal surface far overhead, as if in defiance of the piles of orange sawdust and the vertical saw-cuts visible farther along the trunk, evidences of toiling attempts to dispose of the gigantic thing.
And sheets of rain-darkened plywood had been laid across the grass to form a wheelbarrow’s road toward an open freshly dug grave; the mound of mud beside the hole was the same orange color as the sawdust. For a moment Cochran thought the grave had been dug in one of the plots he and Nina had bought, and he quailed at the thought of standing on the grass verge and staring down into the hole; then he noted the position of two nearby palm trees relative to the road and realized that his plots were on the far side of the open grave.
“Over here,” he said, stepping up onto the plywood walk and striding along it. Plumtree was beside him, and he could hear the drumming of Pete’s and Angelica’s footsteps behind.
Nina’s ghost was gone, exorcised over a coffee cup full of tap water in his kitchen two weeks ago. Today he was going to relinquish whatever might be left of his love for her, of his possession of her.
I caught you in a wine cellar, he thought bewilderedly as cold water ran down his heated face, and now I’m going to drop you out of my heart, beside an open grave, with a swallow of wine. I really only interrupted your fall, didn’t I—delayed your impact by four-and-something years.
And, he thought, fathered a companion for you to take with you. Was that death a part of your plan, of the god’s plan? How can I be giving to the god someone I was never allowed to know?
He didn’t know or care if tears were mingling with the rain water on his face.
“This will do,” he said harshly, stepping around a winch-equipped trailer with a big rectangular concrete grave-liner sitting on the bed of it. There were of course no markers to indicate which patches of grass were his plots, so he just stood on the grass with the open grave at his back and clasped the bottle under his arm as he pulled Mavranos’s key ring out of his pocket and pried out the corkscrew attachment.
Rain thumped on his scalp and ran in streams from his bent elbows as he twisted the corkscrew right through the frail old lead foil on the bottle; and when the corkscrew was firmly embedded in the cork, he paused and looked at Plumtree.
“I don’t want to love her anymore,” he said breathlessly; “and I was never permitted to love the child.”
Plumtree might not have heard him over the thrash of the rain; at any rate she nodded.
He tugged at the red plastic knife handle, and with no audible pop the cork came out all in one piece in spite of its age.
Abruptly the wind sighed to a halt, and the last drops of rain whispered to the grass, and even the drops of water hanging from the cypress branches seemed to cling for an extra moment to the wet leaves so as not to fall and make a sound. In that sudden enormous silence Cochran would have tapped the knife handle against the glass of the bottle to see if his ears could still hear, except that he knew he was not deaf, and except that he didn’t dare violate the holy stasis of the air.
He tipped the bottle up, and took a mouthful of the pagadebiti.
At first it seemed to be cool water, so balanced were the tannins and the acids, the fruit so subtle as to be indistinguishable from the smells of grass and fresh-turned earth in his nostrils. Then he swallowed it, and like an organ note rising from total silence, that starts as a subsonic vibration too low even to feel and mounts mercilessly to a brazen chorus in which the very earth seems to take part, bringing tears to the listeners eyes and standing the hairs up on his arms, the wine filled his head with the surge of the spring bud-break on the burgeoning vines, the bursting slaughter of ripe grapes in the autumn crush, the hot turbulent fermentation in the oaken casks as the soul of the god awoke in the crucible of fructose and malic acid and multiplying yeast. And Cochran was able to see as if from a high promontory the track of the god’s endlessly repeated deaths and resurrections, through the betrayed vineyards of the Gironde and Loire valleys, back to sacred Falernum on the very slopes of slumbering Vesuvius, and the trellised vine gardens at Nebesheh and below the White Wall of Memphis on the Nile, eastward through Arabia, Media, Phrygia and Lydia, and the terraced temple vineyards on the ziggurats of the Babylonians and Sumerians, dimly all the way back to the primeval vitis vinifera sylvestris vines of lost Nysa in the mountains above Nineveh at the source of the Tigris River.
And then he was looking out through a crudely cut earthen doorway at the gray sky; no, he was lying on his back, and the ringing in his head and the jolt throughout his frame was from having fallen backward into the opened grave. The breath had been knocked out of him, and until his lungs began to heave and snatch at the cold air it seemed that his identity had been knocked out of him too.
Now three faces appeared around the edges of the grave, peering down at him; Plumtree was standing closest, leaning over, and he could see that she was holding the bottle of pagadebiti, apparently having taken it from him in the first transported moments.
“He’s killed,” said Angelica.
“No, he’s not,” said Plumtree angrily. “Sid, get out of there.” The voices of both of them were oddly muffled and ringing, as if the women were embedded in crystal.