“You think if you go in and shut the door, we’ll walk out and be on Rosecrans again?” asked Plumtree. “Down in Bellflower?”
“It’s possible,” he said, his voice unsteady. “If it’s possible for this place to be here at all.”
“Wait in the car, if you like.” She stepped away from his hand, into the dimness of the bar. “I’ll try to sneak you out a beer from time to time. I need a drink.” She was shaking, but clearly not because of the weird bar.
“—No,” he said. “I’m with you.”
They both stepped inside, and as the door squeaked shut behind them they scuffed across the sandy wooden floor to the indicated booth and sat down, with Plumtree facing the front door. Cochran noticed two aluminum crutches propped on the seat of the booth beyond theirs, but neither he nor Plumtree were inclined to be peering around at their surroundings, and they just humbly took the two leather-bound menus the waitress handed them.
“Two Budweisers,” said Plumtree. She was breathing deeply, like someone hoping not to be sick.
“And I’ll have two Coorses, please,” said Cochran. “Oh, and there are three more in our party,” he added, holding up three fingers. The waitress nodded, perhaps understanding, and strode away back to the bar, her long skirt swirling the patterns I of sand on the floor.
Plumtree had opened her menu, and now pried a slip of paper from a clip on | the inside cover. She frowned. “Do you remember if the specials were all fish things, before?”
“No, I don’t,” skid Cochran. “I ordered off the printed menu that time.”
“I didn’t look at the specials either, then.” She read, “Barbunya, Morina, Levrek—mullet, cod, bass—this is all fish. And it seems more Middle Eastern now, than Greek. If it was Greek before.”
“Then maybe this isn’t the same place, because I do remember you saying it was—” he began; then he paused, for she had flipped the specials sheet over and then pushed it across the table toward him.
On the back of the sheet, in his own handwriting in ballpoint ink was written: CODY, JANIS, TIFFANY, VALERIE, HIM. The E in VALERIE had been crossed out, with an O written in above.
“Do you remember writing that?” she asked.
In spite of everything that had happened to him during this last two and a half weeks, Cochran’s first impulse was to look around at the other people in the bar, to see who had set up this hoax; then he sagged, remembering how random and unconsidered had been their route to this place today.
“Sure,” he said dejectedly. “It was only a week ago, and I wasn’t that drunk.” His heart was thudding in his chest, and he stared at the paper and wondered if he was more angry or scared. “I guess this is more…magic, huh.”
Plumtree tapped the word HIM. “I can’t,” she said, “ever have kirn come on again.” She touched her face and her throat. “Do you see these cuts? Razor nicks! I think he was skaving.” Behind Cochran the front door squeaked.
He opened his mouth, but Plumtree had looked past him, toward the front door, and now held up her hand to cut him off. “The rest of the losers have arrived,” she said loudly; then she leaned toward him and whispered quickly, “I think he had to!”
Mavranos and Pete and Angelica slid into the booth from Cochran’s side, so that Pete Sullivan was now crowding him against Plumtree.
“Scott’s skeleton is all busted to shit,” said Mavranos.
“Valorie says Pete jumped on it,” said Plumtree.
“Somebody should bury it,” said Mavranos, “back at the Leucadia compound.”
“You can do that yourself, Arky,” said Angelica. “Oh hell—a tequila añejo, neat, with a Corona chaser,” she said to the waitress who had walked up with a tray and begun to shift full beer glasses onto the table, “and a—Coors Light, Pete?—for this gentleman, please. Arky? Dr. Angelica Elizalde says you can have one beer.”
Mavranos heaved a windy sigh. “A club soda for me,” he said. “That which I greatly feared hath come upon me.”
“What, sobriety?” said Pete Sullivan. “I don’t think that’s a decision you should make right after a concussion.”
“At Spider Joe’s trailer, out in the desert north of Las Vegas in 1990,” Arky said “the Fool archetype took possession of everybody in the room, except me. J knocked the tarot cards onto the floor, broke the spell. I couldn’t…have a personality in my head that wasn’t me.”
Angelica touched his scarred brown hand. “He’s gone, Arky,” she said. “I’d tell you he was inhabiting one of those ducks on that lake now, if I wasn’t sure he went right on past India.”
Mavranos nodded, though Cochran got the feeling that Angelica hadn’t addressed the man’s real concern. “I’ll stick with water,” Mavranos said. “It probably should be salt water, for the leaching properties.”
“Carthage cocktail,” came a gravelly voice from the table behind Cochran, away from the front door. “In the winter and spring, surfers taste fresh water in the San Francisco Bay sometimes, from the Sacramento River.”
Cochran shifted around to see the speaker, and at this point he was only a little surprised to recognize the black dwarf who had made his way on crutches out of the Mount Sabu bar down in the Bellflower district of Los Angeles, when Cochran and Plumtree had been…had been here, there; and Cochran recalled now that when the dwarf had opened the door then the draft from outside had smelled of the sea.
The little man’s aluminum crutches stood on the seat next to him, the cushioned ends leaning against the electric light sconce over his gleaming bald head. An iron wok sat incongruously on the table in front of him, red-brown with rust and filled to near the rim with a translucent reddish liquid that seemed to be wine.
Cochran had braced his right hand behind Plumtree’s shoulders, and now the black man was staring at the back of Cochran’s hand. He met Cochran’s eyes and exposed uneven teeth in a smile, then rang the rim of the wok with an oversized spoon. Ripples fretted the surface of the wine, for that’s what it was—Cochran could smell it now, a dry domestic Pinot Noir or Zinfandel.
Plumtree on his right and Pete on his left were leaning forward, leaving Cochran to talk to the stranger.
“My name is Thutmose?” said the black man. “Known as Thutmose the Utmos’? This year the surfers haven’t tasted freshwater yet.” He ladled some of the wine into a glass with the spoon. “Do you think they will?”
Cochran had already gulped down half of one of his beers, and he could feel the dizzying pressure of it in his head. “No,” he said, thinking of the failure at dawn. “I reckon they won’t, this year.”
“That’s the wrong attitude,” said Thutmose. “Will you drink some of my wine? It’s decent store-bought Zinfandel right now, and it could be…sacramento”
“No, I’ve—I’m working on beer,” said Cochran. His neck was aching from being twisted around toward the dwarf, and he was irritably aware that the others at his table were now talking among themselves.
Thutmose seemed disconcerted. “Do you know where Zinfandel came from?” he snapped. The whites of his glittering eyes were as red as the wine.
“What, originally?” Cochran closed his tired, stinging eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Sure, a guy named Count Haraszthy brought it to California from I Hungary in the 1850s.” He was trying to keep track of both conversations—behind him he heard Angelica say, “I picked up the lighter, but the two silver dollars were just gone.” And Plumtree helpfully said, “Well, the lighter’s worth a lot more than two bucks.”