by Tim Powers
“Mom!” Kootie wailed. “I thought you were all dead!”
“Check it out as a doctor, Angie,” said Pete breathlessly.
“Hit him?” she panted. “We’re fine, Kootie, we’re—all just fine.” To Pete she snapped, “It can’t have hit him.” Gently but irresistibly she pushed Kootie down on his back in the snapping geranium branches and pulled his shirt up, and the familiar old unhealed knife cut over his left ribs was now a raw long gash with blood tunneling down his side and pattering onto the green leaves.
Angelica’s peripheral vision cringed inward so that all she could see was this gleaming red rip in Kootie’s white skin; but she replayed what Pete had said and forced herself to look at it professionally. “You’re right, Arky—it’s shallow, no damage at all to the muscle layer and hardly even scored the corium, the deeper skin layer—not life-threatening.” She grinned at the boy as confidently as she could, and gasped out, “Welcome back, kiddo,” but she knew the look she then gave Mavranos must have been stark. “Get the truck here right now. I don’t want my boy in a hospital like this.”
“Right.” Mavranos scuffled to his feet and sprinted heavily away.
“Let’s get you moving, Kootie,” Angelica said, grunting as she and Pete helped the boy stand up. Bright drops of blood spilled down the left leg of his jeans, and she mentally rehearsed grabbing the first-aid kit that Mavranos kept in a box beside the back seat. “That must have been a magical gun—” she began. Then she looked into his eyes. “You’re not hurt anywhere else, are you? Physically?”
“No.” But Kootie was crying, and Angelica knew it was about something that had happened before this shooting … and after he had run away in the pre-dawn darkness this morning.
“Tell your dad and me about it when we get clear of this,” she said gently.
“And I thought,” the boy sniffled, “that I got you killed, by running away. I just ran away from you! I’d give anything if I could go back and do that different.”
“We’re just fine, son,” said Pete, hugging the boy against himself. “It’s okay. And now you’re back. We’re all alive for our … reconciliation here, and that’s a very big thing.”
Angelica remembered Pete making a very similar apology to his father’s ghost, on the night before Halloween in ’92—Pete too had run away once, when it counted—and she winced in sympathy and opened her mouth to say something; but the shrill whine of the truck engine starting up stopped her.
The truck came grinding up behind her and squealed to a halt, and Angelica helped Pete hustle Kootie around the front bumper to the back door. As soon as they had boosted him in onto the back seat and clambered aboard themselves, Pete in the front seat and Angelica in the back seat with Kootie, Mavranos gunned the dusty blue truck out of the parking lot; Kootie sprawled across the seat, and Angelica, crouched on the floorboards beside him, had to lean out over the rushing pavement to catch the swinging door handle and pull the door shut.
Then she hiked the first-aid kit down with one hand while she raised her other hand over the back of the front seat; and Pete had already opened the glove compartment, and now slapped into her palm Mavranos’s nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s bourbon.
Kootie was lying on his back, and Angelica knelt over him and popped open the first-aid kit. “This’ll hurt,” she told him as she tore open a gauze pad envelope and spilled bourbon onto the cotton.
“Good,” said Kootie. Then he said, “The old guy in the passenger seat of that BMW—it was Sherman Oaks, the one-armed guy who killed my natural mom and dad. I recognized him. And he recognized me.”
Angelica suppressed a worried frown, and just pressed the wet bandage onto his wound. “Drive right out of the city, Arky,” she called over her shoulder, “in whatever direction you’re heading. To hell with whatever we left in that motel room. When we’re—”
“No,” said Kootie through clenched teeth. “First we’ve got to go to Octavia Street—uh, two blocks south of California Street.”
“Tell me which,” growled Mavranos from the driver’s seat.
“Why, Kootie?” asked Pete, hunching around to look back at the boy. “If that Sherman Oaks guy is here in town—”
“We’ve got to do it right this time,” said Kootie hoarsely. “We’ve got to fetch Mammy Pleasant. She’s the old black lady from the TV, and her house is on Octavia there.”
“Oh, honey, that—didn’t work out,” Angelica said as she peeled adhesive tape off a roll. She restrained herself from glancing over his head toward the bed of the truck. “That’s all over.”
“It’s not,” Kootie said, closing his eyes as Angelica pressed the strip of tape tightly over the bandage. “He can still come back. To life. Dionysus wants him to.”
“South on Van Ness,” announced Mavranos as the truck leaned into a right-hand turn. “I’m going straight on down to the 101 south unless somebody convinces me to do different.”
“Arky,” Kootie wailed, “get over to Octavia! We won’t ever be okay until we’ve paid this thing off. Does it look like we’re done, here? Does it look like I’m the king now? He can still be restored to life.”
“You don’t know the whole story, Kootie,” said Pete. “We do. Trust me, there’s no way—” He paused, for Mavranos had swung the truck into another hard right turn at Filbert, and the battering exhaust was echoing back from the close garage doors alongside the narrow, steep street. “Arky—? The 101 is—”
“Talk to me, Kootie,” said Mavranos. “If he can still come back, it can’t be into his own body anymore. That turned into a skeleton, and got all busted up.”
“And it won’t be into yours,” said Angelica, peeling off another strip of tape. “I will sabotage any effort at that, I promise. So don’t even—”
“No,” said Kootie, “it would have been that way, if we’d done it right, and then he would have shifted back into his own. Arky and the Plumtree woman were right about that. But we were doing it wrong, we didn’t get Mammy Pleasant to guide us like she told us to, and then I ran away—” He sniffed. “Mammy Pleasant gave me a message for Crane, some Latin poetry on a piece of paper, from Dionysus.”
Angelica felt a thump through the front seat at her back, and she looked up—Mavranos had thrown his injured head back, though he was still squinting furiously ahead. “So how will it work out?” he asked in a gravelly voice. “Now?”
“I don’t know at all,” said Kootie. His eyes were wide and he was staring up at the rust-spotted bare metal roof. “I think we might all die, if it works out right this time.”
“Let’s see this message,” said Pete.
Luckily Kootie had stuffed it into his right-hand pocket; he was able to dig it out without putting any strain on his bandaged side. “Here,” he said, handing it to Angelica, who passed it over the seat to Pete.
Pete read it aloud, slowly:
“Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit Amor,
Si bene te tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis,
Sole, medere pede: ede, perede melos.”
He handed it back to Angelica, who returned it to Kootie. “It’s a palindrome,” Pete said thoughtfully, rocking in his seat as the truck continued to climb the narrow street. “Three palindromes, that is. Latin, and I don’t read Latin.” He yawned. “Palindromes draw ghosts.”
“I’d like to know what it means,” said Angelica defiantly.
“I think we better go pick up the old lady’s ghost in the meantime,” sighed Mavranos. “I’ll stop at a pay phone on the way and read Kootie’s note to Nardie Dinh; she’ll be able to puzzle it out for us, if we give her time to go through her books—and she owes me one.”
At a tiny corner liquor store on the corner of Gough and Filbert, Mavranos found a parking space and then copied the text of Kootie’s note onto the back of his car registration. Finally he got out of the truck, leaving it in park with the engine running.
After he closed the driver’s door he leaned in the open window to say, “Pete, if
you see a blue-green BMW, you just ram it and then drive away, and meet me at Li Po at sunset.”
He trudged across the tiny lot into the liquor store, slapping his pockets for coins for the pay phone by the beer cooler.
He strode up to the phone and dropped a quarter into the coin slot, and then punched in the well-remembered Leucadia number; and after a recorded voice asked him to deposit another dollar and thirty cents, and he impatiently rolled six more quarters into the slot, he heard ringing, and then Nardie’s voice saying, cautiously, “Hello?”
“Nardie,” he said, “this is Arky, still up in San Fran, with—apparently!—still no conclusions.” His forehead was damp; he had almost said concussions. He wanted to touch the back of his head, and to ask her about the dashboard statue she had given him. But, She didn’t do it, he told himself, and he only said, “I got some Latin for you to translate, if you got a pencil—”
“It means, ‘And in Arcadia, I—’ ” came Nardie Dinh’s voice. “It’s an unfinished sentence, like the story’s not over, okay? I think the speaker is supposed to be Death, so it’s like Death hasn’t made up his mind yet what he’ll do, here. Where have you seen it?”
Mavranos blinked, and discovered that the telephone cord was long enough for him to open the beer cooler and pull out a can of Coors. “What?” he said. “But it’s longer than that. And where did you find it?”
Nardie Dinh paused. “This is something that’s lettered on a sign somebody put up on the big pine tree out front, by the driveway. Et in Arcadia ego. What Latin have you got?”
“Jeez. Well, mine’s longer. Have you got a pencil?”
“Shoot,” she said.
He winced, and his finger hovered over the tab on the beer can, but he knew the owner was watching him and would throw him out if he opened it in the store.
He read her the three palindromes slowly, spelling the words out.
“I’ll have a translation for you in an hour,” she said. “I suppose you’re not at a phone I’ll be able to call you at?”
“No,” he told her, “I’ll call you.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and he wished he could open the beer, for his mouth was dry. “Nardie, your brother—”
“Oh, Arky!” Her voice was startled and not happy. “Do let it lie, please!”
“I—well, I discover I can’t. Anymore. I know he doesn’t forgive me, but I do have to ask you—ask you—” He was sweating. “I have to tell you that I’m—sorry, for it.” He coughed, and though his eyes were squeezed tightly shut, his voice was almost casual: “Always have been.”
“I know you are, Arky. Don’t still trouble yourself about it—whatever my feelings were for my brother, or are now, I love you—” She laughed awkwardly. “I was going to say ‘I love you anyway,’ but there’s no ‘anyway’ to it; you did what you had to do, for all of us. So I’ll just say, I love you.”
Mavranos discovered that he hadn’t been inhaling or exhaling, and he let his breath out now in a long sigh. “Thank you, Nardie. I love you too. Call you back in an hour or so.”
He remembered to pay for the can of beer before he walked out of the store, and he popped it open as he walked across the asphalt to the truck, which was still idling where he’d left it. In spite of his undiminished dreads of what was to come, his step was lighter, and after he had got back in and taken a deep sip of the beer, he wedged the can between his thighs and said, with a fair imitation of hearty cheer, “Now we’re off to pick up Kootie’s old lady.”
In the rear-view mirror he saw the boy close his eyes.
Mavranos drove right by the place, because Kootie wasn’t sure whether it had been two or three blocks he had walked up to get to California Street, and none of these office and apartment buildings looked familiar to him—and it was only after they had driven past the Bush Street intersection that he realized that the six huge, shaggy eucalyptus trees they had just passed must be all that was left of the long row of trees he had seen when he had walked out of Mammy Pleasant’s run-down Victorian mansion an hour ago.
“Back,” he said. “Her house is gone, but those six eucalyptuses are where it was.”
“She say meet you by the trees?” asked Mavranos as he signaled for a right turn to go around the block.
“She said ‘Look to the trees, you’ll see how.’ To pick her up. And last week on the TV she said ‘Eat the seeds of my trees.’ ” He shifted uncomfortably. “She’s just a ghost, remember—I don’t think we’ll have to make much room for her in here.”
Mavranos looped around Sutter and Laguna to Bush, and then turned right onto Octavia again and parked at the curb, putting the truck into park but leaving the engine running. Where Pleasant’s dry-brush yard had been was now a walkway-transected green lawn out in front of a Roman-looking two-story gray stone building.
“It’s a … a pregnancy counseling center,” said Angelica, staring at the big white sign out front as she opened the door and climbed down to the sidewalk. “That’s a … pleasant … use for the property.” Pete got out of the passenger side and stood beside her as she shaded her eyes to look up and down the street. Finally she stared down at the pavement and scuffed some leaves aside. “There’s a stone plaque inset in the sidewalk here—it says something about—” She frowned as she puzzled out the letters. “Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park,” she read aloud. “… mother of civil rights in California … supported the western terminus of the underground railway for fugitive slaves … legendary pioneer once lived on this site and planted these six trees.” Angelica looked up. “And it says she died in 1904. You were—here today, Kootie?”
Kootie was half sitting up in the back seat, staring out through the open back door.
“Her old house was still standing when I was here,” called Kootie, “an hour ago, by my clock. There were more trees then, and they weren’t so big and shaggy.”
“I should have had more respect for her ghost,” said Angelica. “She sounds like she was a fine woman.”
“She had her faults,” said Kootie shakily. “Like us all, I—” he let the sentence hang unfinished. “Do any of the trees … look funny?”
“Funny,” echoed Angelica out on the sidewalk. “Well, they’ve all got strips of bark hanging off ’em … and got bright green moss around their feet.”
“Around their roots,” Pete corrected her, standing by the truck bumper. “Their feet are way up in the air.” He was standing by the second one from the corner, looking up at its thick, bifurcated trunk. “This one looks like somebody buried head-down up to the waist, with their legs sticking up. Wasn’t there a place in Dante’s Inferno, where the damned souls were stuck head-downward?”
“In the Eighth Circle,” called Mavranos from the driver’s seat. He was looking down, fumbling with both hands among the papers on the front seat, and Kootie heard a faint metallic rattle. “The Simoniacs, who sold ecclesiastical offices and indulgences and forgivenesses. Sold is the key word there. But in the book they were stuck head-down in baptismal fonts.” Kootie heard the cylinder of the revolver click closed. “Hurry up,” Mavranos said loudly. “I haven’t reloaded since this morning.” He sat back, not looking at Kootie. “I’ve been … distracted,” he said quietly.
Though she gave a deprecating laugh, Angelica had taken a step back from the gnarled old tree with its two bulky, skyward-stretching limbs. “For what god is a hole in the ground a baptismal font?”
“The god of woods,” said Kootie, though probably only Mavranos could have heard him. He was remembering Mammy Pleasant’s confession of having sold a fabulous cache of the pagadebiti Zinfandel for money, way back in her youth on Nantucket Island. More loudly, he called, “Gather up some of those acorns or chestnuts or whatever they are, from around that tree. And peel off some strips of the bark; she can’t go barefoot.”
A minute later Pete and Angelica climbed back into the truck, Angelica with two pockets full of the seeds and Pete with an armload of musty-smelling damp bark strips
.
Mavranos clanked the engine into gear and steered out away from the curb. “Out of town, now?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Angelica, “but not by the 101.” She smiled. “Take the 280 south.”
CHAPTER 24
TROILUS: O, let my lady apprehend no fear; in all Cupid’s pageant there is presented no monster.
CRESSIDA: Nor nothing monstrous neither?
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
AFTER HE GOT OUT of the hot shower Cochran wiped the steam off the medicine-cabinet mirror and thoroughly brushed his teeth, and as he stared at the reflection of his haunted face he kept thinking about Nina’s green toothbrush hanging in its slot only inches behind the hinged mirror; and he decided not to open the medicine-cabinet door again to get out his razor. When he had fumbled out his own toothbrush he hadn’t thought to note how dry Nina’s must be, and he didn’t want to now.
Plumtree had been asleep under the sheet when he had got out of bed to come in here. The shower, and now the shock of a mouthful of Doctor Tichenor’s mouthwash, had sobered him up, and he was profoundly disoriented to realize that a naked blond woman whom he had met one week ago was at this moment inertly compressing the springs of the bed he and Nina slept in.
He was remotely glad that the cassette from the phone-answering machine was in the pocket of his shirt on the back of the dressing-table chair—he didn’t want to know what his response would be if someone were to call now, and Nina’s recorded voice were to speak from the machine.
Plumtree would certainly sleep for at least a couple of hours. Cochran hadn’t been watching the bottle of Southern Comfort, but she must have refilled her glass half a dozen times, before, between, and after. His thoughts just slid away from memories of the details of their lovemaking; all he could really bring himself to remember right now—and even that shakily—was Plumtree’s hot, panting breath, flavored with More cigarette smoke and the peach-liqueur-and-bourbon taste of Southern Comfort.
