“It is—like that,” panted Crane. “Who—are you?”
“Cody. Cody Plumtree.”
They were skirting the illuminated patch of asphalt under one of the park light poles, and Cochran looked back at the king. The man had refused any help from him or Pete, and he was striding along steadily, but the moisture on his bearded face was clearly as much sweat, and perhaps tears, as cold rain. Kootie and the black dog were running on ahead and then running back, staying in sight.
“Ch-ch-changes,” said Plumtree. “At least you’re not changing your sex.”
“I can imagine,” Crane said, nodding stiffly, “that that would be rough.”
Cochran could see the red truck under the overhanging elms ahead, still parked among the nondescript but gold-painted old sedans and station wagons. “Don’t be bothering him, Cody,” he whispered.
“I’m not bothering him. Am I bothering you?”
“The climb up the rocks,” said Crane, “took a lot out of me. I made hard use of a lot of—rearranged muscles that were still too shocked to register their initial pain yet.”
Pete had fumbled out Mavranos’s key ring with the Swiss Army knife on it, and was trying to find the key. Kootie and the black dog were already standing by the front bumper.
“Could you open the tailgate?” asked Crane. “I’d be more comfortable lying down in the back. I’ve travelled back there before, when the winter was a bad one.”
More recently than you know, thought Cochran, feeling his face stiffen at the idea of the living man riding back there where his corpse, and then his wrecked skeleton, had been carried around for a week. “Sure,” said Pete.
“Jeez, we should sweep it out,” said Plumtree in an awed voice. “There might still be bits—”
Cochran silenced her with a wide-eyed look behind Crane’s back. After Crane had sveatingly but without help climbed up into the truck bed and stretched out, Pete closed the tailgate and then got in behind the wheel next to Kootie and Angelica, while Cochran and Plumtree got into the back seat, with the dog sitting up panting on the seat between them. When the doors had all been chunked shut, Pete started the engine and backed the track around, then drove slowly down to the coast highway with the windshield wipers slapping aside the steady streams of rain, and turned right. Everyone seemed to be on the point of saying something, chin and eyebrows raised, but no one spoke as the truck swayed and grumbled through the landscape of gray woods and rock outcrops, looping around the curves of Point Lobos Avenue to the north and then straightening out onto Geary Boulevard, heading east.
The little restaurants and stucco houses on Geary were all dark behind the rain-veiled streetlights, and Cochran wondered what time it could be. If the impossibly full moon had been moving in real time, it might be nearly dawn now. At least the truck’s heater was on full, blowing out hot air that smelled of tobacco and stale beer and dispelled the dog’s odor of sea water and wet fur.
Plumtree had dozed off against the left side window, and though she whimpered and twitched in her uneasy sleep, Cochran had thought it kinder not to wake her; but as the truck was passing a gold-domed cathedral she abruptly hunched forward and spat. Cochran shifted to peer at her past the wakeful, whining dog.
“Just let me talk,” Plumtree whispered. “A condemned … person should get to make a last statement, especially when there’s gonna be no trial before the execution.”
“Cody!” said Cochran sharply, thinking she was still in the middle of a dream. “We’re in the truck, and the restoration-to-life worked this time, remember?”
Plumtree looked up at Kootie, who was peering back from the front seat; he looked startled, and might have been asleep a moment ago himself. “Then you’re not the king anymore,” she whispered, “but will you give me permission to talk, to be heard?”
“Uh,” said Kootie, clearly mystified, “sure.”
“Okay,” came the whisper; then Omar Salvoy’s voice said, “Plumtree is gonna have to die. A death is still owed in this math, and blood and shattered bone. Your Mavranos just died to provide the body. Somebody’s still gotta pay Dionysus for return of the king’s soul.” Salvoy smiled, and the face wasn’t Cody’s anymore. “‘For me, the ransom of my bold attempt shall be this cold corpse on the earth’s cold face,’ as the Valorie one would say. Ask the king if I’m making this up.” Plumtree’s body shifted over against the far window, as if Salvoy didn’t like contact with the dog.
I thought you were deaf, thought Cochran helplessly; then he remembered that Janis had taken on the deafness.
After a moment of silence except for the roaring of the engine and the rippling hiss of the tires on the pavement outside, Scott Crane said, wearily, “He’s right.” Behind them he sat up and shifted around in the bed of the truck. “Even if I—were to kill myself, Dionysus will demand a payment for the fact of this night’s resurrection.” He sighed. “I get the idea you people—didn’t know this?—before you undertook to call me back from Erebus.”
“It’ll be poor gallant Plumtree,” said Salvoy, shaking Plumtree’s head, “if nobody else volunteers.” Plumtree’s eyes darted warily to Angelica, who had opened her mouth. “The boy said I could talk!”
“I’ll volunteer,” Cochran found himself saying.
“Of course,” Salvoy went on, ignoring him, “I wonder if it really shouldn’t be somebody with a cold-blooded murder to atone for, somebody who is already owed a stroke from the Green Knight’s axe. Kootie? What did you do, that morning at Mammy Pleasant’s boardinghouse?”
“I—can’t remember,” said Kootie. “But I do remember saying—something?—about the Green—”
“It’ll be ‘poor gallant Plumtree;” interrupted Angelica loudly, “and you, mister. I like Cody, but all of you in there committed or abetted the murder of—” She waved at the bearded man sitting up in the back of the truck. “—of him, and if somebody’s got to die for it, take the fall for it, it’s the Plumtree crowd.”
“Dionysus will decide,” said Scott Crane. “It’s his show.”
“Scant here volunteered,” said Salvoy, speaking faster. “Let me talk, Kootie’s not a child! You could kill him, Kootie, just assist in his voluntary suicide, and become the king yourself—Crane is old, and doesn’t have his strength back yet—let him go home and tend to his rosebushes—and then you could forget that killing, and all your sins!—with the pagadebiti. The king can always score a bottle of that. Don’t talk, listen! Think of it—you must have experienced a taste of it while Crane was dead—the sensory-neural awareness of the whole American West: cracking your joints and stretching with the sun-warmed mountains and freeway bridges at dawn, drinking the snow-melt from the granite keeps in the Sierra Nevada through the Oroville dam, inhaling and exhaling all the millions of suffering births and deaths!” Salvoy’s voice was strained. “Work with me, boy!”
Cochran could see Kootie’s lower lip pulled away from the teeth, and could see the glitter of tears in the boy’s eyes; and he was suddenly afraid that Salvoy would abandon this dangerous gambit of dialogue and switch deaf Janis on at any moment.
Cochran silently drew a deep breath, but before he could speak, Kootie looked away from Plumtree to the dog and said, clearly, “Mom!”
The dog licked his face, and Angelica hugged him.
Plumtree’s face had started to kink into Janis’s puzzled frown even as the boy had spoken, and for several moments her face twitched with conflicting personalities-then it was recognizably the mother’s voice that said, triumphantly, “Hah! I am out in the world!” The eyes that seemed closer-set blinked at Cochran. “Are we going to the sea? Are you going to send her past India at last?”