Earthquake Weather (51 page)

Kootie followed her into the room, and quickly stepped across onto a knitted rug so as not to drip rain water onto the polished wood floor. There were no windows in the room, but flames in oil lamps on the walls threw a soft illumination across dark old tapestries and a battered white make-up table and a huge, canopied bed. A black-brick fireplace took up most of the far wall, and though there were no logs on the grate, a tiny brass brazier stood on the broad hearthstone, with coals glowing under a grill draped with strips of sizzling, aromatic meat. A basket of thick black bread slices stood on a carpet nearby.

“The Loser’s Bar is surely out there somewhere today,” the woman said as she tossed her head back, freeing her long black hair from the linen hood, “serving pointless seafood today—though they might as well be serving cooked sandals and baseball caps, for all the good it can do anyone on a day like this.”

Her hair was lustrously dry now, and Kootie wondered how she could have dried it, and changed her clothes, and prepared this food, in the few minutes since he had seen her in the long alley off the Street of Gamblers. And he remembered how her silhouette had seemed for a moment to be the knobby round figure that had shown up briefly on the motel television.

I don’t care,
he thought. I can take care of myself. He saw a bottle of dark wine by the mirror on the make-up table, and he was able to cross to it and pick it up without stepping on bare floor.

The label just said,
BITIN DOG.

“I shouldn’t,” he said uncertainly, “be eating … meat.” Or drinking alcohol, he thought.

“Here’s a dry robe for you,” she said. “You don’t want to meet the lord of this house in those clothes anyway. Take them off and get warm.” She looked at the bottle in his hand and smiled at him. “You can have a drink of that … after. It’s the wine of forgetfulness, you know. And it’s all right—
it
you can swallow with impunity, as much as you like, the whole bottle.” She knelt in front of him and began prising loose the knots in his soaked sneaker laces. She looked up at him. “You’d like some of that, wouldn’t you? Impunity?”

“God,” said Kootie softly, “yes.”
After,
he thought. After what?

“The peppered venison is still raw in the middle,” she said. “We can eat it, too, after.”

“Okay,” he said, and began unbuttoning his shirt with shaking fingers. He hoped the cut over his ribs wasn’t bleeding through the bandage.

Fleetingly to his mind came an image of himself buttoning his shirt as he stumbled sleepily out of his Solville bedroom, sniffing onions and eggs and coffee on jasmine-scented morning air, yawning and replying
As a bedbug!
to Angelica’s cheery
Are you hungry?

Goodbye to all that, he thought despairingly.

The boathouse in Golden Gate Park was locked up and the boats were inert and chained to the dock when the five bedraggled figures trudged across the lake lawn to the shuttered rental window, but the two teenaged park employees who’d been banging around inside agreed to open early after Angelica made Cochran offer them a hundred dollars; and by the time the sun was coming up over the cypresses, two electric boats were buzzing slowly out across the glassy surface of Lake Stow—Pete and Angelica and the distracted Mavranos in one, and Cochran and Plumtree closely pacing them in the other.

The boats were small, with not quite enough room on the padded benches for three people to sit comfortably. A toggle switch on the right side by the steering wheel turned the electric motor of each boat on and off, and with no windshield the long flat hood was a sort of table. Cochran wished they could have stopped to get beer—in addition to his hundred dollars, he had paid twenty-six dollars for the minimum full hour for two boats, and it looked as though it would take the tiny engines the whole hour to coax the boats all the way around the wooded island in the middle of the lake. The unrippled water ahead was studded with ducks and seagulls who all might have been asleep. Cochran remembered the dead birds that had fallen out of the sky after Crane had turned into a skeleton, and so he was relieved when a couple of these ducks awoke and went flapping away across the lake, their wing tips slapping rings in the water like skipped stones.

The boat with Angelica and Pete and Mavranos in it buzzed along at a dog-paddle pace only two yards to the right of Cochran’s elbow, which hung out over the low gunwale of the boat he shared with Plumtree.

“Angie, shouldn’t we be going the other way around?” asked Pete Sullivan in a near-whisper. “This is clockwise, not … windshield.”

“I wish we could,” Angelica muttered. “But that’s an evasion measure, we don’t dare—we might wind up losing the wrong one.” She shook her head. “God, this is slow! The motor on this boat sounds like a
sewing machine.
”

Cochran thought of the woman who had been called Ariachne in the version of
A Tale of Two Cities
that he had read on the plane home from Paris a week and a half ago—the woman who sewed into her fabrics the names of people who were to be beheaded on the guillotine.

Angelica sighed and squared her shoulders. “What’s your name?” she said now, speaking to Mavranos. Her voice was clear in the still air.

“Ray-Joe Pogue,” Mavranos said quietly. “I’m not okay, am I? I remember now—I fell off of Hoover Dam. I was blind, and a man told me it was the
water
below me, Lake Mead, but he lied. It was the
other
side of the dam below me, the tailrace, the power station roof—way, way down, with a hard, hard landing.”

“It’s the water below you now, though,” Angelica said gently. “You can see it, can’t you?” She dipped her hand in the water, lifted a palmful and let it trickle back into the lake.

“I’m seeing two of everything,” said Mavranos. He looked at Angelica. “There are two bulls in your glasses! Did you have animals in your glasses before? You do now.” He was visibly shivering.

“Now you’re seeing as you should be seeing,” said Angelica. “The pairs will get farther apart—like bars in a prison—until you can escape between them.” She smiled. “But you should lose some weight! Tell me how your sister betrayed you.”

Cochran remembered Angelica’s description of a conventional honoring-of-the-dead ritual. Clearly she was trying now to lift the ghost away from Mavranos’s mind, over this giant cup of relatively transparent water so that the ghost wouldn’t …
fixate.
And, in asking the ghost to talk about itself, she was apparently trying to get it to relax its psychic claws out of
Mavranos’s
mind and memories. It probably helped that Mavranos’s mind was still concussed and disorganized—that must have been why she’d been in such a hurry to get here.

“Nardie Dinh,” came the high, nasal voice from Mavranos’s mouth.
“Bernardette
Dinh. She was my half-sister, our dad married a Vietnamese woman after he divorced my mom. I was supposed to become the king, at the succession in ’90, and Nardie was supposed to be my queen. I kept her a virgin, until I should take the crown, the crown of the American West … but she rebelled against me, she was ungrateful for what I had made her into, with diet and discipline and exposure to the gods behind the Major Arcana tarot cards … she
killed
the woman I had placed her with,
escaped
me. Nardie threw in her lot with the Scott Crane faction—”

All at once, with a chill, Cochran remembered Mavranos saying back in Solville that he had once killed a man at Hoover Dam.

“—and she hit me in the nose, broke my nose, five days before Easter. Swole up, black eyes. I couldn’t become the king with the injury, and for sure there wasn’t time for it to heal. I drove out to the dam to stop the succession, use magic to throw it off for another twenty years … and she sent—this man!—” Mavranos’s hand touched his face. “—to kill me.”

Mavranos’s head rocked back to stare into the overhanging alder branches against the sky. “It’s true,” he said in a harsher voice, “that I killed you. On purpose, knowing what I was doing—because you would have killed my friends, if I hadn’t. But Nardie didn’t want me to do it.”

He inhaled hitchingly, and when he spoke again it was in the nasal voice: “But she thanked you for doing it. I was aware of that.” And Mavranos’s natural voice said, “It’s true.”

Angelica’s mouth was open and she was frowning, as if she wanted to convey a message to Mavranos without letting the Pogue ghost hear; and Cochran wondered if Mavranos had ruined Angelica’s plan by awakening now and conversing with the ghost; but Mavranos was speaking again in his own voice:

“Ray-Joe Pogue, the bars are nearly wide enough apart for you to leave, to jump, and it
is
water below you, this time. I’ve carried you, in guilt, for five years, nearly—and Nardie has too, I’ve seen it pinch her face when people talk about …
family.
I bet we’ve both thought of you every day, your death has been a, like a bad smell that I can’t get rid of, that I notice just when I’ve started to forget about it and have a nice time.” Mavranos yawned, or else Ray-Joe Pogue did. “Before you go free,” Mavranos said, “can you forgive us?”

“Do you want that?” came the other voice from his throat.

Angelica dipped her hand into the water again.

Mavranos inhaled to be able to reply. “Yes. We do both want that—very badly.”

“Mess with the bull, you get the horns,” said the high voice. “It’s enough to know that you do want it.”

Mavranos sighed deeply, and his head rocked forward—and Angelica whipped her hand across and slapped him in the face with a handful of water.

“
Now,
Arky!” she said urgently. “What’s my name? Where were you born? Who’s president of the United States?”

Mavranos was spitting. “Angelica Sullivan, goddammit. Muscoy, San Bernardino County, California, in 1955, okay? And William Jefferson Airplane Clinton.”

Both boats had stalled in the water.

“Get these boats moving out of here,” said Angelica sharply, “the ghost is off him, but it’ll be a standing wave here for a while. Everybody lean out and paddle, if you have to.”

Cochran flipped the toggle switch on his boat off and on again, and the motor resumed its buzzing and his boat surged slowly ahead of Angelica’s until she copied his move and got hers running again too.

Pete Sullivan exhaled as though he’d been holding his breath. “Good work, Angie.”

Angelica pushed her hair back from her face, and Cochran saw that she was sweating. “He might have forgiven you, Arky,” she panted, “but I had to swat him off right then—he had let go of your mind for a moment, in something like real serenity, but he might have gripped on again at any moment, and clung. It would have killed you.” She looked around, and spun the steering wheel to avoid tangling the boat in the arching branches of an oak tree that had fallen from the island bank into the water. “Sorry, if I was too hasty.”

Mavranos cleared his throat and spat mightily out past the bow. “I’ll … get along without it,” he said hoarsely. “Damn, I can still taste his ghost. Motor oil and
Brylcreem.
”

Plumtree spoke up from beside Cochran. “You want people to
forgive
you?”

Cochran steered the boat ponderously out toward the middle of the water. “Some people want that, Cody.”

“I’m Janis. I’d rather buy a new tire than drive on one with a patch.”

The boats were trundling around the east end of the island in the middle of the lake. Seagulls wheeled above a waterfall that poured over tall stone shelves on the island, and closer at hand Cochran saw some kind of Chinese pavilion on the shore, among the green flax stalks that crowded right down into the water. At the top of the island hill he could see the trees around the clearing where he and Nina had made love, so terribly long ago.

“We’re going to watch you closely, Arky,” said Angelica. “If your pupils start to act funny, or your pulse, or if your speech gets slurred or disconnected—‘waxing and waning mentation’—then you
are
going into a hospital, and we can do our level best to keep you masked in there. But you’ve—right now you’d be much better off out of such a place.”

Mavranos nodded grimly, touching the cut in the back of his scalp. His hair was spiky with bourbon as well as blood, for Angelica had sterilized it with a few hasty splashes from a pint bottle Mavranos had kept in his glove compartment, promising to put a proper bandage on it as soon as the wound had been “thoroughly aired out.” Presumably it had been, now.

“Nardie Dinh gave me that statue I had on the dashboard,” Mavranos said. “She probably did mean something by it, even after all these years, though she loves me like a—like a brother. Damn sure she didn’t mean it to be shot into my head.” He looked at Angelica. “But it was. And I think you mean ghosts would be attracted to me in a hospital … now.”

“There are a lot of scared, lonely, hungry ghosts hanging around in hospitals,” Angelica said, staring ahead. The boats had rounded the eastern end of the island, and were now buzzing irresolutely in the direction of a double-arched stone bridge.

Mavranos laughed weakly. “Keep your eyes on the course, by all means,” he said. “Lose control of this torpedo and we’re liable to plow right up onto the bank. What I mean is, I’m
particularly
vulnerable right now, aren’t I?”

“Yes,”
said Angelica. She gave Plumtree a haggard stare. “What did you mean, Janis, about a new tire?”

“Oh, I meant like a … relationship that’s been … fractured,” Plumtree said. “I wouldn’t try to patch it up, I’d just move on and meet somebody new, somebody who didn’t yet have any disappointments with me.”

“Or cobble up a new personality out of some of the unused lumber of your soul,” Cochran said tiredly, “one that hasn’t even met the other person yet. Fresh start all around.”

Plumtree nodded. “My father hath a power; inquire of him, and learn to make a body of a limb.”

That had sounded like Shakespeare. “Valorie?” Cochran asked.

“Janis,” Plumtree said, glancing at him impatiently. “I told you that, Sid.”

A lot of the tall oaks had fallen into the water on this side of the island, and the interior wood at the split stumps was raw and pale, and the leaves on the water-spanning branches were still green; clearly these trees had been felled in the storms that had battered the whole California coast two weeks ago, at dawn on New Year’s Day … when Scott Crane had been killed.