Earthquake Weather (52 page)

“Don’t say anything specific,” Plumtree said hastily, “about why we’re here, or you
will
have Valorie in the boat with you. But even in what we were trying to do, I—I wanted
him
to be
alive
again, but I didn’t want his
forgiveness.
I didn’t want one bit more of his attention on me than would have been necessary! And even that, Valorie would have taken.” There were tears in her eyes, and she let Cochran put his arm around her.

“Not your flop,” he said.

She buried her face in the shoulder of his damp windbreaker, and when his hand slid down to her waist his palm was on her bare, cool skin where Nina’s sweater had hiked up away from her jeans; and he found himself remembering Tiffany’s hand caressing him half an hour earlier—and the steamy sweater smelled of Nina’s rose-scented perfume, blended once again here with the wild odors of pine sap and lake water, and for just a reflexive moment, before instant shame actually pulled his lips back from his teeth, he wondered if the rain had ruined the cassette in his shirt pocket.

None of them spoke as the boats buzzed quietly under the island-side arch of the old stone bridge. Cochran noticed one, then several, then dozens of black turtles perched motionless on the unnaturally horizontal branches of the felled trees—but as soon as he started to watch for them, all the dark ovals he focused on proved to be pinecones.

He lifted his left arm from around Plumtree so that he could steer the boat with that hand; his right hand, with the ivy-leaf mark on the back of it, he stuffed into the pocket of his windbreaker.

To the left, beside the park road, a particularly big redwood tree had fallen this way across the lakeside footpath, and a segment as broad as the path had been sawed out of the six-foot-thick log so that strollers and bicyclists could pass unimpeded. Perhaps the tree was too heavy to move, and would stay there forever as a randomly placed wall, while its water-arching branches would eventually be overgrown by ivy and form a sort of new, hollow bank. After a while, like the cemetery construction on the yacht-club peninsula, it might look like part of the original plan.

With that thought Cochran looked ahead—and at last saw the carved stones of the Spanish monastery.

They were set low into the lakeside mud as an irregular segmented coping between the park grass and the water, each placed so that a broken-stone face was turned upward; only from this vantage point, low and out on the water, could the fretted and fluted carved sides be seen.

“Nina and I didn’t search from out in a boat,” he said wonderingly. When Angelica gave him a weary, questioning look, he went on, “There’s the stones from the old monastery—from here you can see what they are.”

Mavranos blinked ahead uncomprehendingly. “What are they?” He had still been unconscious when Cochran had mentioned them before.

“William Randolph Hearst bought a medieval Spanish monastery,” Cochran said, quoting what Nina had told him, “and he had it dismantled and shipped to America to reassemble over here—but the crates and plans burned up, and nobody knew how to put the building back together again. And after a while the park maintenance guys began using the stones for … odd little landscaping projects, like
that.
” He pointed ahead, at the half-submerged bits of forgotten pillars and porticoes.

“And you said there are druid stones on the island,” said Pete Sullivan. “Maybe the monastery stones
counter
those, balance ’em—net zero.”

“A monastery building would have been formally blessed,” Mavranos muttered, nodding. “Sanctified.”

“I’m glad you were along,” Angelica told Cochran. “This lake
was
a perfectly balanced place to shake off the ghost.”

“Not the job those stones thought they’d have,” Mavranos went on, “when they were carved up so pretty, I bet—just sitting here in the water, not even looking different from plain old fieldstones to anybody walking by ’em. But there’s this purpose they can serve. Even broken.
Because
they’re broken.”

Again Cochran thought of walls made of chance-fallen trees, and stairs and benches and pavements made of scavenged pieces of derelict cemetery marble.

“There’s the dock,” said Pete, pointing ahead and to the right. “Our tour’s up. Where to now? Back to the Star Motel, see if Kootie’s waiting for us there?”

“Not yet,” said Angelica. “And not in the truck with Crane’s skeleton in it. We—”

Plumtree jumped in the seat beside Cochran. “His
skeleton’s
in the truck? How did he—” She blinked around. “What? What scared Janis?”

Cochran turned to her, wondering if he was about to summon Tiffany here, and if so, what he’d tell
her.
“Crane’s skeleton is in the truck, Cody.”

She blinked at him. Then, “Fuck me!” she said, and in spite of himself Cochran smiled at the idea that he might take the exclamation as evidence of Tiffany’s presence; but in fact he could see that this was still Cody. “I’m still o
n
?” she said angrily. “How come
I’m
the one that gets to stay with all the horrible flops lately? His
skeleton
? Goddammit, Valorie’s supposed to take the intolerable stuff!”

“I guess you can tolerate more than you imagine,” said Cochran gently.

“They say that God won’t hit you with more than you can handle,” said Mavranos in a faint, shaky voice, possibly to himself. “Like, if He made you so you can just take a hundred pounds per square inch, He won’t give you a hundred and one.”

“We’re still too hot,” Angelica went on. “Magically, I mean. There’s been a lot of fresh—” Her breath caught in her throat. “—fresh blood spilled, this morning. I think plain
compasses
will point at us for a while after all this stuff—and we can’t be certain we haven’t been followed, either. On the drive down here, we were all looking ahead at the truck, not back. If Kootie
is
at the motel, he’ll wait for us, he’s got a key. And I guess he’s …
the king,
now. He’ll have the protections that come with the office.” She looked around among the trees at the anonymous pastel Hondas and Nissans that had begun to drive slowly past on the park road. “We should drive somewhere, aimless, watching behind, and just sit for an hour or so. Give ourselves time to fall back to our ground states.”

“I’m a, a
citizen
of the ground state,” said Plumtree. “And our—
community hall
—is a bar. I need a drink like a Minnie needs a Mickey.”

“The truck can go where it likes,” Cochran declared. “The Ford is going to the first bar we find.”

“I’d be interested in finding something to chase that cabernet with,” ventured Pete.

“I
don’t think,
” said Angelica judiciously, “that I can stay sane for very long, right now, without a drink, myself.” She sighed and clasped her elbows. “Arky, I guess you can have one, but you’d better stay sober. Doctor’s orders.”

Mavranos didn’t seem to have heard any of the discussion. “But can we really imagine,” he went on quietly, “that He’d give you anything less than ninety-nine-point-nine?”

Angelica frowned at Mavranos’s disjointed rambling, probably thinking about
waxing and waning mentation.
“If Kootie’s at the motel,” she said again, absently, “he’ll wait for us. And he’ll be safe. He’s the king now.”

When he had tugged off his shirt and jeans and kicked his soaked sneakers heedlessly away across the gleaming floor, the woman had kissed Kootie, her arms around his neck and her robe open on nothing but bare, hot skin against his cold chest. Her tongue had slid across his teeth like an electric shock.

They had fallen across the quilt on the huge, canopied bed, and Kootie had been feverishly trying to free his hands to pull the robe off of her and tug his own damp jockey shorts off as she kissed his neck and chest—when he’d heard what she had been whispering.

“Give me you,” she’d been saying hoarsely, “you’re not a virgin—fill me up—you’re so big—you can spare more than I can take—and not near die.”

Die?
he had thought—and then her teeth had begun gently scoring the skin over the taut muscle at the side of his neck.

If she had been drawing any blood at all it had been from no more than a scratch, and the sensation had been only pleasurable …

But he had suddenly been aware that his psychic attention and self was wide open and strainingly extended, and that with all the strength of her own mind she was trying to
gnaw off a piece of his soul.

—
In an instant’s flash of intolerable memory he was again duct-taped into a seat in a minivan that had been driven up inside a moving truck in Los Angeles
—“
a boat in a boat”
—
while a crazy one-armed man with a hunting knife was stabbing at his ribs, trying to cut out his soul, and consume it
—

Abruptly the room seemed to tilt, and grow suddenly darker and hotter, and he was unreasoningly sure that he was about to fall bodily into her furnace mouth, which in this moment of vertiginous nightmare panic seemed to have become the gaping black fireplace below his feet.

He felt himself sliding—

And with all the psychic strength that the events of this terrible morning had bequeathed to him, he lashed out, with such force that he was sure he must have burst a blood vessel in his head.

He hadn’t moved at all, physically, and only a second had passed, when he realized that her skin was impossibly cold and that her bare breasts were still—she was not breathing.

He tugged his arms out from under her chilly weight and scrambled off the bed. Sobbing and shaking, he clumsily pulled his jeans and shirt on, and he was thrusting his feet back into his sodden sneakers, when the hallway door was snatched open.

An old woman was standing silhouetted in the doorway.

“Call nine-one-one,” Kootie blubbered, “I think she’s—”

“She’s dead, child,” the old woman said sternly. “Both the telephones downstairs are still ringing themselves off their hooks with their poor magnets shaking, and the god’s big mirror has got a crack right across it. She’s dead and flung bodily right over the spires of India like a cannonball. What-all did the poor woman want, one little bit of the real you, and you couldn’t spare it? Child, you don’t know your own strength.” She shook her head. “He can’t meet you now, with or without the humble-pie breakfast, the wine and the venison. Later, and probably not affording to be as polite as it would have been now. You’ve clouded yourself beyond his sight here today.”

Kootie cuffed the tears from his eyes and blinked up at her—and then clenched his teeth against a wail of pure dismay. The figure scowling down at him was the old woman he and his parents had seen so many times on the magically tuned black-and-white television. Now he could see that her eyes were of different colors, one brown and one blue.

“I’m Mary Ellen Pleasant,” she told him. “You may as well call me Mammy Pleasant, like everybody else. Now, boy, don’t you fret about what you’ve done here, bad though it damn well is—hers won’t be the first dead body I’ve disposed of in secret. Right now you get your clothes in order, and come down and talk to me in the kitchen.”

She stepped back out into the hall, mercifully leaving the door open. As her footsteps receded away along the wooden floor outside, Kootie stood up. Without looking toward the nearly naked body on the bed, he crossed to the make-up table and picked up the bottle of Bitin Dog wine.

You’d like some of that, wouldn’t you?
he remembered the woman saying.
Impunity?

The humble-pie breakfast …

Cochran had said, “Couldn’t have asked for a better place,” and swung the Granada across momentarily empty oncoming lanes into the uneven parking lot of a bar-and-restaurant that seemed to be a renovated cannery from the turn of the century, the walls all gray wood and rusty corrugated iron. Over the door nearest where he parked was a sign that read
THE LOSER’S BAR,
but Plumtree pointed out a sign over the main building:
SEAFOOD BOHEMIA.

“Fine,” Cochran said as they left the car unlocked and hobbled to the bar door, “we can have bohemian seafood for lunch, if they take plastic here.”

The dusty blue Suburban was out in the center divider lane of Masonic Avenue, its left blinker light flashing.

Cochran plodded up the wooden steps, hiking himself along with his hand on the wet wrought-iron rail, and he held the bar door open for Plumtree.

She took one step into the dim interior, and then stopped and looked back over her shoulder at him. “Sid,” she said blankly, “this place—”

He put one hand on her shoulder and stepped in past her.

The mirror-studded disco ball was turning over the sand-strewn dance floor, but again there was no one dancing. The air still smelled of candle wax, but with a strong accompaniment of fish-reek this time instead of mutton. Two men in rumpled business suits, conceivably the same men as before, stood at the bar and banged the cup of bar dice on the wet, polished wood.

The dark-haired waitress in the long skirt smiled at them and waved toward a booth near the door.

“We shouldn’t stay,” whispered Cochran. He was still holding the door open, and he glanced nervously back out at the car and the parking lot and the Suburban, which was now turning into the lot.

“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.