Earthquake Weather (30 page)

From time to time Cochran glimpsed moonlit forests off to the side, and the sterile extents of deserts, but it wasn’t until he twice saw a vast castle in the remote distance, with rows of yellow- and green-lit windows, and then saw that it was only a reflection of the instrument panel lights in the close window glass, that he realized that nothing he saw beyond a distance of about six feet could be genuine. The realization didn’t stop his weary, smoke-stung eyes from registering new wonders; in fact it seemed to free his optic nerves to present him with wilder things, ships and towering siege engines and dirigibles.

The old Ford’s engine had begun to cough when they were driving past the isolated lights of the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, but began to run smoothly again after that—and Plumtree, who for some miles had been folding her left leg and straightening it again and scooting forward and back in her seat as if trying to stay awake, reached out to the side and squeezed Cochran’s leg just above the knee.

“Do we have any more cigarettes?” she asked.

“A—whole carton,” Cochran said, suddenly very aware of the close flex of her legs in the tight jeans. He gripped his current beer between his thighs and bent forward to grope by his feet for a fresh pack of Marlboros.

But when he straightened up she glanced at it and shook her head. “I meant More, the brand name. I suppose Cody just thought of herself, and got just the Marlboros.” Her fingers were curled around his leg now, palpably brushing against the dashboard-facing side of the beer can, and her thumb was absently rubbing the top of his thigh. “And I don’t suppose she bought any Southern Comfort.”

“No,” said Cochran. “Just beer and vodka.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and then, as if for a sip of beer, lifted away the impeding can. Her hand slid halfway up his thigh, her fingers kneading the worn secondhand corduroy.

“All alone in the middle of nighttime nowhere,” she said, barely loud enough for him to hear. “Some people would consider this a highly lucrative situation.”

Cochran didn’t see how some people would, but he shifted closer to her and put his arm around her shoulder to stroke her coarsely cut blond hair. She rolled her head back against his forearm, and her right hand slid up his leg until her little finger was brushing the tight fabric over his crotch.

“We should,” he said hoarsely, “probably pull over and park on the shoulder for a while. Till the fog clears a bit.” His heart was thudding in his chest, and he wished there was somewhere he could put down the beer he was holding in his right hand. And I should try to get a slug of that mouthwash, he thought.

Her kneading hand was fully on his crotch now, and he simply let go of the beer can; it thudded to the carpeted floorboard as he reached across to cup the unfamiliar hot softness of her left breast through the thin fabric of her blouse.

“Nobody can interrupt us out here,” she whispered, and snapped the turn signal lever up to indicate a lane change. “Nobody knows where we are.” The right tires were rumbling on the shoulder, and Plumtree’s leg flexed as she pressed the brake pedal. “There’s no phone here, so nobody can say we should have taken the time to call anyone.”

“You’re a big girl,” Cochran agreed dizzily. “You don’t have to call your mother and let her know where you are.”

“Ah!” she said, and her voice sounded sad; then she had whipped her right hand up so hard that it struck the head liner and nearly broke his elbow. Her foot slammed onto the gas pedal, and the back tires screeched and burned rubber as she steered the bucking old Ford back out into the slow lane.

“Fog, take it easy!” Cochran yelled, clasping his elbow.

She hit the brake hard enough to throw him forward against the padded black dashboard. He could hear his dropped beer can rolling on the floor.

“I will drive this car straight into a wall if you try to touch me, Omar!” Plumtree said loudly. “In arousing ways! Jesus will not blame me—He will take me into His bosom, and throw
you
into the fires of Gehenna! You know I will, and you know He will!”

“Fine!” Cochran gasped. “Drive normal! What’s the matter with you, Janis?”

She straightened the wheel, and though the engine was coughing again she quickly accelerated the car to a steady twenty miles an hour, glancing harriedly from the road to the rear-view mirror and back. “I’m sorry, Scant!” she said. “I must have dozed off! God, I might have got us killed! Okay, fog still, okay. Did I hit anything? God, my arms are shaking! Are you all right?”

“Well you nearly broke
my
arm,” he said harshly. “Jesus, girl!” He could see that there had been at least one personality shift, and that the erotic moment was long gone. “No, you didn’t hit anything.” He leaned down and yanked a fresh beer out of the box. The floorboard carpeting was marshy under the soles of his tennis shoes, and the hot air was fetid with the smell of the spilled beer. “Who’s Omar?”

“That’s my father’s name! Be careful now, Scant, I don’t want to lose time with you—but—was
he
here?”

“No,” Cochran said. Thank God, he added mentally. He popped the tab on the beer can. “Another woman—did I …? Do you, uh, recall putting your hand on my leg?”

“Oh, God, Tiffany,” she said ruefully. “That would be Tiffany, I bet. She made a pass at you, right? And you thought it was me! Poor Scant!”

He had been panting, but now began to relax. “I wouldn’t mind,” he said cautiously, “if it was you.”

“It will be, Scant, I promise you, soon, and not in the back of an old car, either.” She patted at the seat around her legs. “Did she eat my Slim Jim? God, that woke me up, at least—I could feel that I was slipping in and out, back there. I guess Tiffany was slipping out and in.”

Her guileless last couple of lines were echoing in his head, and he tilted up his fresh can of beer for a distancing, objectivity-inducing mouthful.

“If you get sleepy again,” he said, “just pull over. You can catch a nap on the front seat, and I’ll do the same in the trunk.”

“Did Cody get a key to the trunk?”

He sighed. “I was kidding. And no, she didn’t—she hot-wired the car somehow.”

“She is mechanically inclined,” Plumtree allowed, diligently watching the road. Her mouth was working, and she rolled down the window; cold night air blew into the car and twitched Cochran’s sweaty hair. “My mouth’s full of Tiffany’s spit,” Plumtree said, her voice frailer with the open window beyond her. “Could I have the mouthwash?”

Cochran passed it to her, and again she swished a sip of the sharp-smelling stuff and spat it out the window. He was glad when she rolled the window up again, though the sudden scents of diesel exhaust and spicy clay and the dry-white-wine smell of the fog had been a relief from the warm-beer fumes.

“You okay to drive?” he asked.

“Oh, sure. I kind of did catch a nap there, I guess, while she was on. Besides, you’re a little—you’re more than point-oh-eight blood alcohol, I’d guess.”

“Technically, I suppose, yeah,” he said. “We’d better,” Cochran went on steadily, “take the 280, to the city, rather than follow the 101 all the way up. We can stop at my house, and I can pick up some clothes and money.” And think all this over, soberly, he thought. And check the phone messages, and take in the mail. And clip the holstered .357 onto the back of my belt, if I decide we should indeed go on and meet the others.

“Tell me when to turn,” Plumtree said.

“Oh, it won’t be for hours yet.”

“Won’t it … bother you, seeing the place where you lived with your wife?”

Cochran took a long drag on his cigarette. “I suppose so. Sure it will. Gotta be done, though. Faced.”

Plumtree shivered. “It must be scary, not having anyone you can turn the wheel over to, in bad situations.”

Cochran smiled bleakly. “I never—”

Both of them jumped when for an instant a big brown owl swooped into the flickering headlight glow and then disappeared over the roof.

Cochran forced a laugh, embarrassed to have been so startled but pleased that he had not dropped his cigarette. “I wonder what owls think of this highway of lights running through the middle of their mountains.”

“They’re hoping for a crash, a fire that’ll drive the mice and rabbits out of hiding.”

After a moment, he said, “A plausible answer, Cody, but I was talking to Janis.”

She exhaled as if trying to whistle. “Listerine! Who else was on?”

“Somebody called Tiffany. And then—”

“You pig.” She rocked on the seat and then brushed the fingers of one hand from the buttons of her blouse to the fly of her jeans. “What did you two
do
with me?”

“Nothing.” He tried to say it as though he had resisted Tiffany’s advances. This was a disorienting basis for conversation, and it occurred to him that it might be difficult to manage any intimacy even with Janis, without Cody objecting and interfering in humiliating ways. “Anyway, she was interrupted by somebody else, a woman who cussed me out—called me Omar.” He wondered how much Cody might have sobered up in the time she was gone, and he half-hoped something he said might drive her away and let Janis back on.

“Follow the Queen, you were playing,” said Plumtree. “You must have mentioned our … female parent, right? She comes up sometimes when somebody even just mentions her, and
always
when somebody
asks
for her. You ever play Follow the Queen?”

“The poker game? Sure—seven-card stud, where the next card dealt faceup, after a faceup queen, is wild.”

“Wild, right—that is, it’s
whatever you declare it to be.
And when our parent-of-the-fair-sex is up, the next girl is whoever you ask for. Who did you ask for? Not me, Mom doesn’t do the mouthwash bit.”

“I guess I called for Janis.”

“Not Tiffany? That was noble of you. Of course you didn’t understand the rules yet. Do you
swear
you two didn’t do anything with me?”

Cochran realized, to his surprise, that he didn’t want to swear to a lie. “I swear there was no kiss,” he said, “and not a button was undone or a zipper unzipped.”

“Oh, you pig. I bet you groped me. I bet you were ready to go all-in on that flop.”

“Flop,” said Cochran, thinking in poker terms now, and remembering that she had used the word several times before this. “That’s what the three communal cards are called, in Hold-’Em: the flop. You hope they make some good hand, combined with your two personal down-cards. Sometimes you just pass even if you’ve got ace-king down, if the flop is all the wrong suit, ’cause
somebody’s
surely got two of the flop’s suit, for a flush.”

“When it’s …
real life …
you can’t pass,” she said grimly, “it’s like you’re the perpetual Big Blind, gotta make the bet whether you want to or not.”

Cochran remembered Janis telling him, just a few moments ago, that he must find it “scary” not to be able to turn a bad situation over to another personality; and he laughed softly with dawning comprehension. “You girls are like a … squad, a relay-team, at the big Poker Table of Life, though, aren’t you? If a flop comes that’s no good to Cody’s hole-cards, Janis or Tiffany or somebody will be holding two different cards, ones that’ll make a flush or a full boat or something. And so the girl with the playable cards steps in.”

“It still calls for some hard bluffing sometimes. But so far they haven’t dealt us a flop
one
of us couldn’t play.”

Cochran tilted up his beer to get the last swallow, and sleepily wondered whether to bother opening another. And he thought again about Janis’s remark:
Won’t it bother you, seeing the place where you lived with your wife?

“Must be convenient, though,” he said now, “nevertheless. ‘Somebody yelling at me? I got a headache? I’ll split, and be back when it’s been taken care of.’ ”

Plumtree’s vodka bottle was on the seat between them, and he impulsively picked it up and unscrewed the cap. “
I
—
I
had to go identify my wife’s run-over pregnant body,” he said, suddenly speaking loudly, “in the morgue. She was
pregnant.
We bought stuff for the kid-to-be—the stuff’s in that house now, that I’m gonna be breaking a window to get into in a few hours—a crib, goddammit, teddy-bear wallpaper. And Nina and I had adjoining plots, in a cemetery there, we picked out a spot we liked and paid for it—but I had to have her cremated and take her ashes to France, so I’ll be buried there alone.” He gulped a mouthful of the warm, scorching liquor and burningly exhaled through his nose. “
I
haven’t had the option of
going away
during
any
of this.
I’ve
got to
pay
for what I take, sometimes as much as all I’ve got. I’ve got to, like
most
people, I’ve got to take the wounds and then just keep playing, wounded, shoving all my chips out with one hand while I—hold my burst guts in with the other.” The fumes in his nose were making his eyes water. “My hole cards are two dead people, and the, the
flop
I’m facing is—is those three merciless ladies in Greek mythology who measure out life and fucking cut it off.”

“Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropine,” said Plumtree blandly, watching the road. “Let’s play a game—I’ll name a paper product, and you guess what it is.”

Cochran’s heart was hammering, and his mouth was dry and hot in spite of the vodka, but he didn’t go on shouting. “What?” he said, his voice cracking. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why don’t you take a nap, then, champ? It might sober you up, and I’ll be ready to be spelled off, come dawn.” She glanced at him and smiled. “Little man, you’ve had a busy day.”

“… Maybe I will.” His anger had evaporated as quickly as it had come, leaving him deflated. Slowly he screwed the cap back on the bottle. “You want some of this?”

“I’m fine for now. Leave it on the seat there, in case of emergencies.”

Cochran stretched his feet out and leaned his head against the cool, damp window glass. “You did that trick just now, didn’t you?” he said emptily, closing his eyes. “What I said made you mad, and you threw the anger over onto me. I—I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.” Though as I recall, he thought, everything I said was true.