Angelica scooted back and spread the cards messily facedown on the couch cushion between them; the blurry black-and-white plaid patterns on the backs of the cards blended together so that it seemed to be one puddle on the cushion. In Mexico these cards were used to play a gambling game similar to bingo, but Angelica had long ago found that the mundane pictures on the fronts of them were useful for eliciting free association from patients. “Pick me three of them,” Angelica said.
Pete and the boys came clomping back in, carrying cardboard boxes, as Plumtree carefully drew three of the cards out of the pile; and Angelica leaned forward to be heard over the clanking of telephone and radio parts being lifted out of the boxes and spread out on the desk. “Now flip one of them face up,” she said.
With a trembling hand Plumtree turned over…card 51, El Pescado, a picture of a red fish upside down in smoky water, holding a tethered hook in its mouth.
“I guess you know what that one indicates,” Angelica said in a carefully confident and dismissive tone.
“‘I’ll bite’ is what it…means” Plumtree said, nodding. “But if this is a reading of me, it’s wrong. I won’t bite. Maybe it’s a warning for me, huh? Don’t let yourself get pulled out into the air, get separated from the school—Off the school bus!—get cooked and eaten and digested by somebody out there. ‘Full fathom five my father lies.’”
Angelica just nodded, but she was surprised—she had expected that this serendipitous picture would evoke some mention of the Fisher King, whom Plumtree claimed to have killed.
Angelica looked up and made a ch-ch! sound; Kootie had climbed down from the desk, but instantly looked around toward her.
“St. Michael the Archangel,” Angelica told him, “with High John the Conqueror ready.”
The boy nodded and pulled open one of the desk drawers; he lifted out two aerosol spray cans and handed the purple one across to his foster mother.
“Your father’s in the other direction, then,” Angelica said to Plumtree, hefting the can, “from whoever’s dangling the line into the water, is that right? Tell me about your father.”
“Well, he’s dead. Is that Scotchgard? I wasn’t going to piss on your couch, lady.” When Angelica didn’t reply or change her expression, Plumtree sighed and went on. “He died when I was two, but I was in the hospital, so they didn’t tell me about it right away, about him being dead. Janis doesn’t remember him any more than I do, but she claims to miss him real bad. All she knows about him is what she’s heard from Valorie.”
“Valorie’s older?”
“Yes” said Plumtree tightly. “Valorie’s been—around from the beginning.”
“She remembers a lot of stuff?”
“She remembers everything. But all her memories,” Plumtree added, glancing at the TV set, “are in black and white, and always with some drumming or banging going on in the background.”
“Can I talk to Valorie?”
Plumtree shifted uncomfortably and shot a nervous glance toward Cochran. “Not unless she wants to talk to you.”
“What were you in the hospital for? When you were two?”
“I don’t remember. Measles? Stress? Some kid thing.”
Pete had unplugged the TV set and was lifting it down off the desk to make room for the Ford coil box and the battered old field frequency modulator. “I hope mice haven’t got into all this stuff in these two years,” he muttered to Kootie.
“It’d be ghosts of mice that’d be attracted to it,” said Kootie, who was still holding the other spray can.
“How did he die?” Angelica asked Plumtree. “Your father.”
“Jesus, lady!” said Plumtree tightly. “You’re just asking to have me lose time here.”
Angelica held up the purple spray can and let Plumtree look at the picture on the label, a crude drawing of a winged, sword-wielding angel kicking a bat-winged devil into a fiery pit. The directions advised, Spray all areas of your surroundings. Make the sign of the Cross. “This is just air-freshener, really,” Angelica said, “but the chlorofluorocarbons in it, and this groovy label, repel ghosts. After I spray it around us, you can talk freely.”
Angelica held the can over Plumtree’s head and pushed the button on the top of it; a mist that smelled like bus-station rest rooms hissed out, drifting over Plumtree and Angelica both.
Plumtree took a deep breath and let it out. “Well!” she said when Angelica had lowered the can. “He fell off a building, is what happened, in San Francisco, one of the old wino buildings south of Market. Soma, they used to call that area, from south of Market, get it? In Soma’s realm are many herbs, and knowledge a hundredfold have they. That’s from the Rig-Veda. I hope you’re right about that spray stuff. He was the chief of a hippie commune, like the Diggers, you know? A group that fed homeless runaways. My father’s commune was called the Lever Blank, they’re mentioned in a couple of the books about the Manson family. I suppose the name meant vote-for-nobody or something. My mom left the commune a couple of years after he died, and she always said that they killed him, because it was the summer solstice and he had failed to become this king of the west at Easter. ‘69 was a competition year for it, just like ‘90 was.”
Pete had sent Ollie back outside to fetch a car battery from one of the Solville vehicles, and was now brushing the dust off the pencil lines and screw holes still in the wood surface of the desk from the time they had set up this telephone in October of 1992.
“Okay,” Angelica said cautiously. She pointed at the two cards that were still face down. “Hit me again.”
Plumtree turned over the second card, and it was the unnumbered El Borracho card, The Drunk—a picture of a man in laborer’s white clothing walking bent-legged and carrying a bottle, with a dog snapping at his heels.
“That was you, tonight,” Plumtree said to Cochran, picking up the card and showing it to him.
Cochran peered at the picture on it, then jerked his head back, frowning. “I may have been drunk,” he said, “but I wasn’t bestial That there is more like who Long John Beach was singing about.” He rubbed his hand clumsily over his face, and Angelica noticed a leaf-shaped birthmark on his knuckles. “And who was it that drank the Manhattans,” he went on, “and all the Budweisers?”
“We’re talking about you, here,” Angelica told Plumtree. “How do you feel about this picture?”
“I hate drunks,” said Plumtree. “I’d never let Janis get involved with one.” Apparently to end discussion of the Borracho card, she reached down and flipped over the third card.
It was number 46, El Sol, a drawing of a bodiless round red face encircled by a jagged gold corona.
Plumtree’s eves slammed shut and she flung herself back hard against the couch cushions, with her fingers clawed into the disordered thatch of her blond hair; her nostrils were tensely white as she whistlingly inhaled a deep breath, but her face was reddening visibly even under her sunburn—and fleetingly Angelica wondered how a patient in a mental hospital could acquire a sunburn. Plumtree was whispering some rapid-cadenced phrase over and over again.
From long practice Angelica resisted the impulse to participate in her patient’s panic. “I think we’d better titrate up our St. Michael dosage,” she said calmly, raising the purple can and spraying two more long bursts of the stuff over their heads.