“…Okay.”
They got back into the beer-reeking warmth of the car and drove around, but didn’t find any open store at all in the whole town, and so eventually she had to go into the ladies’ room in Denny’s, pull off her jeans, and wash the panties in the sink—with hand soap, wringing them halfway dry in a sheaf of paper towels after she’d rinsed them out—and then shiveringly pull them back on.
Now she was eating scrambled eggs and shifting uncomfortably on the vinyl booth seat, bleakly sure that the dampness must be visibly soaking through the seat of her jeans, and remembering reading On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in another restaurant booth eleven days ago. She had had the aluminum spear taped to her thigh during that breakfast, the points of it cutting her skin.
“I can’t ever sit comfortably in restaurants,” she complained. She remembered that v a telephone had started ringing then, too, on that morning, right in the restaurant; it was Janis’s job to answer telephones, and Cody recalled flipping her lit cigarette into the open paperback book, intending to slam the cover firmly closed and extinguish the coal, since there had been no ashtray on the table and Janis didn’t smoke. But Janis had come on more quickly than usual, apparently, and hadn’t known about the lit Marlboro between the pages.
Cody grinned sourly now. Excu-u-se me!
At least my teeth don’t hurt much right now—not any worse than usual, anyway. And I certainly don’t have a nose-bleed! If Flibbertigibbet was on, it wasn’t for very long.
She looked up. Across the table, Cochran was, smiling at her gently, out of his tired, red eyes. “Who were you calling?” he asked again.
Okay—perhaps the gas-station pay phone had not already been ringing when she had picked it up, and Cochran knew it. Okay. “I call time,” she said, “a lot. That’s UL3-1212 everywhere. In England they call it ‘the speaking clock,’ which always makes me picture Grandfather Clock, from the ‘Captain Kangaroo’ TV show, remember? Wake up, Grandfather! Even when I have a watch on. Those liquid-crystal displays, you can’t ever be—”
He was still smiling tiredly at her.
“I—” She exhaled and threw down her fork with a clatter. “Oh, fuck it. I don’t know, Sid. The receiver was warm, we must have been talking to somebody. My teeth are hurting, but we do call time a lot.”
“Not for extended conversations, though, I bet.” He took a sip from his glass of V-8, into which he’d shaken several splashes of Tabasco. “In this hippie commune you grew up in,” he said; “what was it called?”
“The Lever Blank. My mom and I lived at their farm commune outside of Danville for another couple of years after my lather died.”
“Did they let you watch a lot of TV?”
Plumtree stared at him. “This was mandala yin-yang hippies, Sid! Organic vegetables and goat’s milk. Old mobile homes sitting crooked on dirt, with no electric. My father was the only one that even read newspapers.”
“So how did you ever see ‘Captain Kangaroo’? And Halo Shampoo ads? And I’m not sure, but it seems to me that neither one of those was still being aired in ‘71. I’m an easy ten years older than you, and J hardly remember them.”
Plumtree calmly picked up her fork and shovelled a lump of scrambled egg into her mouth. “That’s a, a terrible point you make, Sid,” she remarked after she had swallowed and taken a sip of coffee. “And I don’t seem to be losing time over it, either, do I? This must be my flop. Do you think I’m an alcoholic? Janis thinks so.”
“Of course not,” he said, with a laugh. “No more than I am.”
“Oh, that’s good, that’s reassuring. Jesus! The reason I ask is, I need a drink to assimilate this thought with. Let’s pay up and get out of here.”
“Fine,” Cochran said, a little stiffly.
Oh, sorree, Plumtree thought, restraining herself from rolling her eyes.
As Cochran took their bill to the cashier, Plumtree walked out of the yellow-lit restaurant to the muddy parking lot. The sky bad lightened to an empty blue-gray vault, but she felt as though there were the close-arching ceiling of a bus overhead, and that the battered madman who had hijacked the bus and cowed the driver had now turned and begun to advance on the hostage children, all the brave little girls.
The chilly dawn wind was throwing all sounds away to the south, and she was able to hum “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” until Cochran had come out of the restaurant and shuffled up to within a yard of her, before she had to stop humming for fear he might hear.
NORTH OF King City they were driving up through the wide Salinas Valley, with green fields of broccoli receding out to the far off Coast Range foothills. Long flat layers of fog, ragged at the top, hung over the ruler-straight dirt roads and solitary farmhouses in the middle distance, and Cochran began to notice signs for the Soledad Correctional Institute. Don’t want to be picking up any hitch-hikers around there, he thought. We’ve got enough of them aboard right now. Neither he nor Plumtree had spoken since getting back into the car in the parking lot of the Denny’s in King City, though she had taken a quick, bracing gulp of the vodka after she had started the engine, and, after a moment of resentful hesitation, he had shrugged and opened one of the warm beers. The sky had still been dark enough then for her to turn on the headlights, but she reached out now and punched the knob to turn them off.
“Smart thinking,” he said, venturing to break the long silence. “We’d only forget to turn them off, once the sun’s well up.”
“And it’s cover,” she said, speaking indistinctly through a yawn. “You can tell which cars have been driving all night, because they’ve still got their lights on. Everybody with their lights out is a local.” She yawned again, and it occurred to Cochran that these were from tension as much as weariness. “But we can’t hide—I can’t, anyway—from my father. Those are his memories, those TV things. Captain Kangaroo, that shampoo. He was born in ‘44.” A third yawn was so wide that it squeezed tears from the corner of her eye. “If we’re compartmentalized, in this little head, then he’s leaking into my compartment. I wonder if he’s leaking into the other girls’ seats too.”
Seats? Cochran thought.
“Like in a bus,” she said. “You could step off, you know, Sid. Like the driver in that movie, Speed, who got shot, remember? The bad guy let him get off the bus, because he was wounded. When we stop at your house. I could drop you off at some nearby corner, in fact, so Flibbertigibbet won’t even know where you live.”
After a long pause, while he finished the can of warm beer and reached down to fetch up another, “No,” Cochran said in an almost wondering tone; “no, I reckon I’m…along for the ride.”
Plumtree laughed happily, and began drunkenly singing the kid’s song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” After she had finished the trite lyric and started it up again, frowning now and waving at him, his face heated in embarrassment as he gave up and joined in, singing the lyric in the proper kindergarten counterpoint. And until he put out his hand to stop her, the vodka bottle between her knees was rhythmically rattled as she swung the wheel back and forth, swerving the big old car from one side of the brightening highway lane to the other in time to their frail duet.