Earthquake Weather (21 page)

One of Spider Joe’s antennae popped up from the carpet with a musical twang, making Plumtree jump against Cochran’s shoulder. He put his arm around her, and in the moment before she shrugged it off he noticed that she was trembling. Well, he was too.

“Whatever,” said Pete, who had sat down on the couch. To Plumtree he went on, “You say he tried to eat some of your personalities. Was he masked, when he did this?” He absently tapped a Marlboro out of a pack and flipped the cigarette into the air; it disappeared, and then he reached behind his ear and pulled out what might have been the same cigarette, lit now, and began puffing smoke from it. “Like, did he have a … a
pair of twins
present, or a schizophrenic?”

“He had a crazy guy on the extension phone, listening in,” spoke up Cochran. To Plumtree he said, “The old one-armed guy, Long John Beach.”

For a moment no one spoke, and the only sound was the chaotic drumming of water splashing into the pots on the floor. Then, “A one-armed guy,” said Kootie steadily, looking hard at Pete Sullivan, “named after a local city.”

“I—I thought he died,” said Angelica, who was standing beside the desk. “You mean the one who called himself Sherman Oaks, who wanted to kill you so he could eat the Edison ghost out of your head?”

“Right, the smoke-fancier.” Kootie glanced at Plumtree. “Ghosts are known as ‘smokes’ to the addicts who eat them, and he used to eat a lot of them.”

“Shit, he still does,” put in Cochran. “Though he’s down to Marlboros these days.”

“I thought he was dead,” insisted Angelica. “I thought he blew up along with Nicky Bradshaw, when they both fell off the
Queen Mary
two years ago.”

“With ‘a local man called Neal Obstadt,’ right?” said Plumtree. “Who was looking for Scott Crane in 1990? Armentrout mentioned this. The explosion killed the Obstadt person, according to him, but just collapsed a lung of this Long John Beach, or Sherman Oaks.” She grinned, breathing rapidly between her teeth. “I wonder what other names he’s used. Wes Covina. Perry Mount.”

Cochran was embarrassed by her incongruous merriment, and nudged her. She nudged him back, hard, in the ribs.

“Or in drag, as Beverly Hills,” Pete agreed absently. Then he stood up abruptly and looked around the room. “Well, he’s been here before—he knows the way here, too. We’d better get ready for him, and for this psychiatrist.”

Angelica visibly shivered, and she touched the gun under her blouse. “We should just run, right now.”

“We need to know
where
to run, first,” Pete told her. He stepped to the television set and clanked the channel switch a couple of notches clockwise. “Could you plug this thing in again, Oliver? We need some readings, Angie. Pennies, I’d think, for a fine-grain closeup-type picture. What year was Crane born in?”

“Nineteen forty-three,” said Diana.

The tanned teenager hopped up off the couch and plugged the TV set’s cord into the wall while Angelica pulled open a desk drawer and bumped glass jars around in it. “Pennies,” she muttered. “Nineteen … forty … three, there we are.” She lifted one of the little jars out and sat down on the couch. The set’s screen had brightened, and a woman in a commercial was talking about some new Ford car. Cochran and Plumtree hiked themselves forward on the carpet to be able to see the screen.

Angelica shook the jar, and the half-dozen old pennies in it rattled and clinked—and the TV picture shifted to a newscaster reading the day’s winning lottery numbers. She shook the jar again, and now they were watching the portly, bearded figure of Orson Welles sitting at a restaurant table, waving a glass of wine and quoting the Paul Masson slogan about selling no wine before its time.

Pete Sullivan caught Cochran’s glance and smiled. “Plain physics so far,” Pete said. “This is an old set, from the days when the remote controls used ultrasound frequencies to change channels and turn the sets on and off. The remote was a tiny xylophone, in effect, too high in frequency for anybody but dogs and TVs to hear. Nowadays the signals need to carry more information, and they use infrared.”

“I get it,” said Cochran, a little defensively. He was still shaking, still enormously aware of the dead man on the table in the kitchen. He nodded. “The TV thinks her jingling pennies are a remote. Who are you, uh, hoping to consult, here?”

Pete shrugged. “Not who—what. Just … the moment; right now, right here. The pennies she’s shaking are a part of now with a link to Crane’s birth year, and the pictures they’ll tune the TV to will be representative bits of now in the same field of reference—just like a piece of a hologram contains the whole picture, or a drop of your blood contains the entire physical portrait of you. It’s what Jung called synchronicity.”

“Synchronicity!” sneered Angelica, who was shaking the jar again and staring at the screen. She stepped back and sat down on the couch, still shaking the pennies.

“Angie thinks there are actual, sentient entities behind this sort of thing,” said Pete. “A querulous old woman, in this case—the same party that’s behind the Chinese I Ching, according to her.”

“A straitlaced and disapproving old party,” said Angelica without looking away from the screen. “Sometimes I can almost smell her lavender sachet. Ah, we’re online.”

Cochran peered at the screen curiously, but it was just showing a grainy black-and-white film of a blond woman brushing her hair.

“It always starts with this,” said Pete, visibly tenser now. “That’s Mary Pickford, the old silent-movie star. A guy name Philo T. Farnsworth was the first guy in the American West to transmit images with a cathode-ray tube, in San Francisco in 1927, and he used this repeating loop of Mary Pickford as a demo.” He sighed shakily. “This isn’t a real-world, 1995 broadcast—we’re into supernatural effects now, sorry.”

“You were getting spook stuff even
before
,” said young Oliver nervously. “Paul Masson hasn’t aired that Orson Welles ad for
years
.”

“I think he’s right,” murmured Angelica from the couch.

Spider Joe had been sitting silently against the kitchen wall, but now he reared back, and half a dozen of his antennae sprang up from the carpet. “Who just came in?” he barked, the sunken eyelids twitching in his craggy brown face.

Cochran glanced fearfully at the open back door, but there was no one there; and Plumtree and Diana and Angelica had been craning their necks down the hall and toward the kitchen, but there was no sign or sound of any intruder.

Kootie had directed an unfocussed stare at the ceiling, and now he lowered his head. “There’s no one new on the whole block.”

Mavranos cleared his throat. “But, uh … your
Mary Pickford
has changed into a
negro
.”

“And she got older,” noted the teenager who had been introduced as Scat, and who hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen since they’d all trooped back in from the kitchen.

On the TV screen, the figure was in fact a thin old black woman in a high-necked dark dress now, sitting at a mirrored vanity table and brushing her hair—and though her jawline was strong and unsagging, her kinky hair now looked more white than blond.

As if in response to Angelica’s hard shaking of the penny jar, the grainy black-and-white picture sharpened in focus, and an open window with a row of eucalyptus trees beyond it was visible in the wall behind the old woman; and sounds were audible—a faint, crackling susurration as the old woman drew the brush through her hair, an insistent knocking of the raised window shade bar against the window frame, and a clanging bell from outside.

“The knocking, and the bell, those are to confuse ghosts,” said Plumtree.

Angelica was shaking the jar harder, as if trying to drive the image off the TV screen, and she seemed irritated that the pennies weren’t doing it, were instead just jangling in rhythmic counterpoint to the bell.

“It’s San Francisco, all right,” said Pete. “That’s a cable-car bell in the background.”

“This film clip is seventy years old,” panted Angelica. “Everyplace probably had streetcars then.”

“It isn’t the old clip anymore,” objected Pete. “This here has got sound.”

“Pete,” said Kootie loudly as he clanked his empty bowl down beside the television set, “dig out the Edison telephone and get it hooked up again. We’re in a new game now, with this restoration-to-life talk, and even an idiot shell of Scott Crane might have something to say worth hearing. And I reckon Janis Plumtree should be enough of a link for us to reach him, her being his own personal murderer.”

“And his wife,” said the bald Diana from the kitchen doorway. “You’ve got his wife here, too.”

“Right,” said Kootie hastily. “Sorry, Diana—I was thinking in terms of the new arrivals. I meant
murderer
now
too
.”

Angelica finally leaned forward and set the jar of 1943 pennies down on the carpet. “I’m not dealing with the I Ching old lady here,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans as she leaned back against the couch cushions. “And it’s not being run by just your
synchronicity
either, Pete. It’s … I sense some
other
old woman.”

Cochran saw Mavranos glance at Spider Joe. Clearly he was wondering if the crazy old blind man’s dead wife might be taking over the show here. Cochran wondered if Booger had been a black woman.

“If you say so, Kootie,” said Pete. “Scat, Ollie—you guys can help me carry some boxes in from the garage.”

After Diana’s two boys had followed Pete out the back door, Angelica Anthem Elizalde Sullivan stared resentfully at the Plumtree woman sitting in front of the desk with her drunk Connecticut pansy boyfriend. MPD, thought Angelica scornfully. I didn’t even think that was a hip diagnosis anymore, I thought everybody was busy uncovering suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse these days.

“Kootie,” Angelica called, “toss me my
Lotería
cards.”

Her adopted son twisted around on the desk and dug through a pile of utility bills and check stubs, then tossed over the heads of Cochran and Plumtree a little deck of cards held together with a rubber band.

Angelica caught the bundle and pulled the rubber band off the cards. “Miss Plumtree,” she said, having forgotten the woman’s first name, “come sit by me on the couch here and chat.”

Plumtree stared back at her. “Why should I answer your questions, lady?”

Angelica smiled at her as she deftly shuffled the cheap paper cards. “I know about …
making amends
to people you’ve allowed to die; people you’re linked with by chains of guilt, hm?
Real
guilt and shame, the kind you’ve got to go back
and fix,
not just ‘get past’ or ‘put behind you’ or get ‘okay with.’ You think you can do it without help, but that’s like thinking one hand can fix what it took two hands to break. If that dead man in the kitchen
can
be resurrected, it might be some thing you can tell us that’ll help us all to get the job done.” She looked around the room affectionately. “I wonder if we’ve got even one person here who doesn’t believe, with some validity, that he or she is directly responsible beyond any excuse for the death of someone.”

“Shee-it,” snarled Plumtree; but she struggled wearily to her feet and shambled over to the couch, which thumped the floor with an uneven leg when she dropped onto it beside Angelica. Her boyfriend, Cochran, got to his feet and leaned attentively on the corner of the desk.

Angelica scooted back and spread the cards messily facedown on the couch cushion between them; the blurry black-and-white plaid patterns on the backs of the cards blended together so that it seemed to be one puddle on the cushion. In Mexico these cards were used to play a gambling game similar to bingo, but Angelica had long ago found that the mundane pictures on the fronts of them were useful for eliciting free association from patients. “Pick me three of them,” Angelica said.

Pete and the boys came clomping back in, carrying cardboard boxes, as Plumtree carefully drew three of the cards out of the pile; and Angelica leaned forward to be heard over the clanking of telephone and radio parts being lifted out of the boxes and spread out on the desk. “Now flip one of them faceup,” she said.

With a trembling hand Plumtree turned over … card 51, El Pescado, a picture of a red fish upside down in smoky water, holding a tethered hook in its mouth.

“I guess you know what that one indicates,” Angelica said in a carefully confident and dismissive tone.

“ ‘I’ll bite’ is what it …
means
,” Plumtree said, nodding. “But if this is a reading of me, it’s wrong. I won’t bite. Maybe it’s a warning for me, huh? Don’t let yourself get pulled out into the air, get separated from the school—off the school bus!—get cooked and eaten and digested by somebody out there. ‘Full fathom five my father lies.’ ”

Angelica just nodded, but she was surprised—she had expected that this serendipitous picture would evoke some mention of the Fisher King, whom Plumtree claimed to have killed.

Angelica looked up and made a
ch-ch!
sound; Kootie had climbed down from the desk, but instantly looked around toward her.

“St. Michael the Archangel,” Angelica told him, “with High John the Conqueror ready.”

The boy nodded and pulled open one of the desk drawers; he lifted out two aerosol spray cans and handed the purple one across to his foster mother.

“Your father’s in the other direction, then,” Angelica said to Plumtree, hefting the can, “from whoever’s dangling the line into the water, is that right? Tell me about your father.”

“Well, he’s dead. Is that Scotchgard? I wasn’t going to piss on your couch, lady.” When Angelica didn’t reply or change her expression, Plumtree sighed and went on. “He died when I was two, but I was in the hospital, so they didn’t tell me about it right away, about him being dead. Janis doesn’t remember him any more than I do, but she claims to miss him real bad. All she knows about him is what she’s heard from Valorie.”

“Valerie’s older?”

“
Yes,”
said Plumtree tightly. “Valorie’s been—around from the beginning.”

“She remembers a lot of stuff?”

“She remembers everything. But all her memories,” Plumtree added, glancing at the TV set, “are in black and white, and always with some drumming or banging going on in the background.”