The lights and exit ramps of Ventura had swept past now, but Cochran hadn’t noticed a Mobil sign. Oh well, he thought, Santa Barbara is coming, up fast, and—he peered at the lighted dashboard—we’re only a little under a quarter tank. “Really?” he said, his voice quiet but not skeptical. “Good enough so they could actually sting?”
“Well, I don’t know if they could really sting. And it would be Valorie that did it, not actually this here me. But I think it was because that Mavranos guy asked you about the mark on your hand, and I—we—didn’t want him to find out about it. Is that a birthmark?”
“I—told Janis about it,” Cochran whispered hoarsely after another gulped sip.
“She and I don’t speak to each other much.”
Cochran sighed. “In 1961, when I was seven, I thought I saw a face, a whiskery little old head, in an old Zinfandel stump that was being pruned back for the winter, and, without thinking, I shoved my hand out to stop the shears from cutting the old man’s head off.” The steady green glow of the instrument-panel dials was a cozy contrast to the night and the fog and the rushing lane markers outside, and he took another sip of the cold beer, secure in the knowledge that there were twenty-three more full cans between his ankles. The coal of his cigarette glowed as he inhaled on it, and a moment later exhaled smoke curled against the windshield.
“Actually” he said slowly, then paused; “I think it’s old rust or bark dust, under the skin. Like a powder-burn. Anyway, it’s not a birthmark.”
Plumtree nodded and had another couple, of swallows from the vodka bottle. “Actually what?” she asked.
Her question forced a short, awkward laugh out of Cochran. It made him dizzy to realize that he was teetering on the brink of telling this Plumtree woman—this one!—a secret he had kept for thirty-three years; and to realize too that, in the warm nest-like secrecy of this anonymous car flying along in the middle of cold dark nowhere, he wanted to; so he choked down a big impulsive mouthful of beer and used the sudden dizziness to get himself over the hump.
He spoke rapidly: “Actually—as I remember it, anyway, maybe I’m confusing it with dreams I had later—the shears cut right through my hand, cut it most of the way off. No kidding—there was blood squirting everywhere, and the vineyard worker with the shears was in shock, looking like…like his face was carved out of bone, with a big bullet-hole for a mouth.” He tilted up the can to finish the beer in three deep gulps. “Then, about one full second later, there was an almighty bang—a, a crash like you dropped a Sherman tank from thirty thousand feet onto the roof of the Astrodome—and when I could think again, maybe another second or two later, my hand was fine, whole, not a scratch, and not a drop of blood anywhere—my hand didn’t even have this mark on it yet; that was there when I woke up one morning about exactly a year later—but the old vine was standing there in full, bushy, impossible summertime bloom.” Jerkily he leaned forward again to put the empty can onto the floor mat and tug another can free of the carton.
“Mobil station,” he said briskly when he had straightened up again and looked out through the windshield. “Next exit, it looks like,” he added, nodding and Squinting like a navigator. He popped the can open, but just held it. “And,” he went on gently, shaking his head, “it had ripe grape bunches hanging all over it, but also… pomegranates, and figs, and I don’t know what all else. This was in the dead of winter.” He took a deep breath and let it out, then glanced at Plumtree with a wry smile. “You’d better let me deal with pumping the gas, and paying for it. You’re gonna reek of liquor.”
“That’s Santa Barbara,” Plumtree said, switching on the turn-signal indicator and scuffing her tennis shoe from the gas pedal to the brake. “After this we turn inland at Gaviota. The fog’ll be worse then. Vodka doesn’t have half the smell that beer’s got. You probably stink like an old bar towel. What did the guy with the shears do, the vineyard worker?”
“He got very damn drunk.”
Plumtree nodded as she steered off the highway and rattled across an intersection on a green light. “That shows respect.”
The left-side tires bounced up over the curb when she swung the big old Ford into the white-lit Mobil station, but she managed to park it next to one of the pumps. Cochran had dropped his cigarette again, but he just stomped it out on the floorboards. Before he could remark on the way she’d handled the driveway, she said, “I gotta disconnect the coil to turn this off. That’s good, though—a modern car, with the ignition in the steering column, I’d have had to bust it out, and cops look for that, in parking lots, and then…they wait for whoever to come back to the car. Who’s driving it.”
She enunciated the syllables as carefully as if she were pushing silver dollars out of her mouth one at a time, and Cochran realized that she herself was very drunk; and when he levered open the passenger-side door and stood up and took several deep breaths of the icy air, he was so dizzy that he had to hang on to the door to keep his balance.
He swung his unwieldy gaze over the car’s roof, and watched Plumtree shuffle to the front bumper, frowning and holding on to the vibrating fender with both hands. When she had hoisted up the hood and pulled free the wire that connected the coil to the battery, the engine shook twice and then wheezed to a halt; and in the silence he said, “I think we should…let Janis drive.”
“She’d get lost,” said Plumtree shortly. “I’m gonna go give the man the card, sign for it—you pump the gas when I wave.” She wobbled across the damp asphalt toward the glass door, then halted and looked back at him. “On the Torinos the gasp cap is behind the rear licempse plate.”
Cochran squeaked the license plate down, unscrewed the gas cap, and shoved the nozzle of the premium pump into the filler hole, and then he leaned heavily on the trunk as he held the aluminum trigger squeezed and numbly watched the wheels behind the little gas pump window roll around to, finally, fifteen dollars and sixty cents. The aromatic reek of gasoline on the cold night air did nothing to sober him up He had hung up the nozzle but was still trying to get the cap threaded back on when Plumtree reattached the coil wire and jumped the solenoid again to start the engine. When he heard the hood slam down he just dropped the cap and let the license plate snap up over it, and then hurried to the passenger-side door and got in, glad of the interior warmth even if they were both about to die in a Driving-Under-the-Influence one-car crash in the foggy canyons beyond Gaviota.
She clanked the engine into gear and drove right over the curb onto Milpas Street, swinging wide in a chirruping left turn to get back to the 101.
“Oh, okay,” she said, and the engine missed for a moment, coming back strongly when she fluttered the gas pedal. “Whoops! When do I turn?”
“Take that on-ramp on the right,” said Cochran through clenched teeth, pulling the seat belt across himself. “101 north.”
She glanced at him after she had made the turn. “Scant! What day is it?”
He relaxed a little, and didn’t attach the seat belt. “It’s the morning of the twelfth by now,” he said cautiously, “of January. It’s been a couple of hours since we left Solville.”
“My father is alive,” she said. “I did catch him!”
“That’s…right, I guess. According to that Angelica woman.” He tried to remember when it had been that Janis had last been up.