Mavranos drank the fresh beer in three very big swallows, then popped open another can to carry with him into the living room.
“The thirty-first would probably work,” he told Angelica stolidly. “I’m with you, I like it better; for one thing, we might be able to get more of a showing from this dead lady that’s supposed to be our intercessor. But the thirty-first is two weeks from now. The seventeenth is tomorrow. We’ve been in San Francisco five days today. Scott’s body is still in the back of the truck, and we’ll be getting warm weather eventually. And as Kootie says, if we’re going to ask Dionysus for a favor, it does make sense to do it on his own … terrible … day.”
He looked out the window at the gray concrete pillars of the elevated 101, and he remembered the newspaper photos of the collapsed double-deck 1-880 in Oakland, after the big quake in October of ‘89; and he remembered too the flattened cars he and Scott Crane had viewed in Los Angeles a year ago. “Shit,” he said mildly. “I guess we do have to try it tomorrow, intercessor or no intercessor. You should have picked up a football helmet for each of us, along with your skeleton wine.”
“And some Halloween masks,” said Kootie quietly, with a somber glance at Marvranos. “Two or three apiece, ideally.”
Mavranos returned the boy’s look, and thought, You’ve known all along how this will have to go, haven’t you, kid? And you came along anyway, to save your parents. Aloud, he said, “Yeah, they’re probably real cheap this time of year.”
Angelica darted a suspicious look from her foster-son to Mavranos. “That Plumtree woman had better still be willing to go through with this,” she said. “Does Cochran say anything about her, what she’s been doing for four days? I don’t suppose he’ll bring her along today.”
“No chance of that,” said Mavranos. “Just like I haven’t, for example, been bringing Scott’s body along when I’ve met Cochran at the bar. They-all and us-all don’t trust each other; he thinks I’ll try to shoot Plumtree, and I think Plumtree’s dad will try to finish the job on Scott’s body.” He took a sip of the beer and licked foam off his graying mustache. “I bet Cochran takes as circuitous a route back to wherever he’s staying as I do when I come back here.”
“Wherever he’s staying?” spoke up Angelica. “Isn’t she staying with him?”
“Well, I assume,” Mavranos began; “he tells me that she is—” Then he exhaled and let himself sit down cross-legged on the wooden floor. “I think she ran away from him, actually,” he admitted in a level voice, “and he doesn’t want to tell me. I think Cochran doesn’t have any clue where she is. Sorry. I think her father came on sometime, and just … ran away with her body.”
Cochran had been visibly drunk at their last two noon meetings at the Li Po bar, and too hearty in his assurances that Plumtree was still eager to get the dead king restored to life; and Mavranos had got the uneasy impression that Cochran was hoping to hear that Mavranos had somehow heard from her.
Kootie winced as he got to his feet. “Consider phlebotomy,” he said.
“‘—Who was once as tall and handsome as you,’” added Mavranos, automatically making a pun on the line in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land about Phlebas the drowned Phoenician sailor.
Angelica’s face was suddenly pale as she, whirled to glare at Kootie, and her voice was low: “I forbid it absolutely. We’ve got money—We’re going home. Or somewhere. To hell with this king.”
Pete Sullivan was blinking at the woman and the boy in alarm. Clearly no one had got Mavranos’s pun, not that it mattered. “What?” said Pete. “Lobotomy? For who?”
“Phle-botomy,” said Angelica, still scowling at her foster son. “Venesection, bloodletting; from Crane’s body into a, a wine glass, I suppose. You are simply not going to let the, that dead man who we don’t even know, occupy your head, Kootie! You’re not going to let him have your body! Pete, tell him that we—”
“Mom,” said Kootie stonily. “Angelica. We’ve all known, we haven’t talked about it but we’ve all known—come on!—that the king would probably have to take my body to do this, not that woman’s.” His eyes glistened, but he seemed even angrier than Angelica. “Look at my qualifications—I’m a male, for one thing. I’m not a virgin, psychically; and I am a virgin, physically, which Plumtree probably is not; and I’ve been living the king’s discipline, fish and wine, and rituals, and visions! Call me fucking Fishmeal, excuse me. I’ve got to be…served to him.” His shoulders relaxed, and he rubbed the face-cloth across his eyes, leaving a brushstroke of fresh blood on his cheek. “And who knows, it might work out just the way the Plumtree woman said—he might just use my body to do the magical stuff that’ll let him get back into his own.”
“His own?” shouted Pete. “His own is over fifty years old! And two weeks dead! You’ve been planning this? Your mother’s right. Even if he wanted to, the Fisher King probably couldn’t shift back out of an adolescent body into an old one! Any more than water can run uphill! How would this ‘bloodletting’—”
“‘Even if—?” Mavranos interrupted harshly; then he took a deep breath and started again. “‘Even if he wanted to’? You—goddammit, you didn’t know the man, so I guess I got no right to take offense. But you know me, and I’m telling you now that he wouldn’t, ever, save his own life at the expense of somebody else.” He glared at the TV. “Hey, turn it up—our lady’s on again.”
Angelica gave the screen a startled look, then twisted the volume knob.
In the grainy black-and-white picture, the old black woman was standing beside her chair now, and staring directly out of the screen. “Gotta get the bugs out of your house” she quavered, apparently reciting the tail end of some exterminator commercial she had interrupted. Mavranos hoped she wouldn’t, this time, go on for several minutes with the parroted recitation.
“But I didn’t—I wasn’t even shaking the pennies,” said Angelica softly.
A crackling had started up inside the dead TV set that they were using as a table for the working one.
“The bugs that work six feet under,” said Kootie in a tense voice.
Mavranos couldn’t tell if the boy was responding to what the old woman had said, or was sensing something nearby, or was speculating on the source of the noise in the dead TV; and he realized that his heart was pounding.
“Too late!” said the old black woman. “The bugs win this round! You get out.”
It’s not an exterminator ad, thought Mavranos.
Black smoke abruptly began billowing up from the back of the bottom television set; but its speakers came to booming life, croaking right along with the top TV set’s, when the old woman shouted, “Boy-king, witch, escape artist and family retainer, I am speaking to you all! Get out now. They’re coming up the stairs, the ones who hate the California vines! You four go out the window—I will distract the intruders with conversation and difficult questions.”