Earthquake Weather (61 page)

Cochran bared his teeth unhappily. He couldn’t forget the image of Janis valiantly punching the linoleum floor at the Rosecrans Medical Center nearly three weeks ago; nor her look of despairing hurt in his bed last Tuesday, when he had last spoken to her. “What does that mean?” he asked Cody.

“
Valorie’s
memories are in black-and-white, and always have drumming going on. I think Janis is draining away into Valorie.”

But Valorie’s dead!
he almost said. “Can … that happen?”

“As far as we’re concerned, Sid,
anything
can happen. We went to a funeral once when we were twelve, and by the time the minister was done talking it was somebody else’s funeral and we were fourteen; and what we thought was the emotion of rage turns out to be our male parent, who’s alive and crouching inside our head; and I have to look at whatever I last scratched the date on to be sure—” She glanced at fresh scratches in the greasy curve of the manifold valve cover. “—to be sure that the goddamn Edison Medicine that broke us all into separate pieces, all finally
aware
of each other, happened only seventeen days ago!”

Cochran smiled with half of his face. “I see what you mean. The word ‘impossible’ isn’t what it used to be, for any of us.” Cody was holding out the beer can toward him; he took it to throw away for her, but it was still more than half full, so he gratefully tilted it up for a sip and then handed it back to her. “What can I say to Janis besides that I’m sorry? Besides that I know I was the bad guy and that she deserved better from even a total stranger, never mind from somebody she had got herself into bad trouble to protect?”

Cody laughed. “Besides those things?” Then she sobered. “I honestly don’t
know,
but it might save her if you told her you love her.” She shook her head. “My … it’s not sister; my
other half
? … seems to be evaporating,
dying.
”

“I
could
tell her that, I suppose, if it would help,” he said cautiously. He glanced back at the kitchen door. “But if it did help, and she came back, even though I’d—I mean, she’d be able to tell—”

Cody raised an eyebrow. “You don’t love her?”

“No.”

“Huh. She seems to me like the ideal woman, everything I’m not. So do you love
anybody
?” She coughed. “I mean, anybody who’s alive?”

At first Cochran thought he wouldn’t be able to look at her. Then he did meet her eyes, though his voice was incongruously light when he answered, “Yes.”

It was Cody that looked away. “I don’t think that’s very smart.” She coughed again, rackingly. “Well, go ahead and lie to her, and we can worry about the consequences once she’s herself again. Better a car that’s gonna let you down halfway home than one that won’t run at all.”

Cochran considered, then rejected, the idea of drinking a couple of beers first. “I don’t know what I’ll say. But go ahead—call her up.”

“I can’t, she won’t come voluntarily.
You’ve
got to call her up.”

“How am I supposed to—oh. Follow-the-Queen.”

“Right. Wait right here, I’ll … get my stupid parentess.” Plumtree closed her eyes. “Mother!” she called.

Instantly her eyes sprang open, and she stepped back away from Cochran after grabbing up a screwdriver from the fender. “You tell him,” she said, “that if he comes out of that house I’ll drive this straight into my own heart. He’ll know I mean it.” The skin of her neck was suddenly looser, and her eyes seemed closer together.

“He’s nowhere around here, Mrs. … Plumtree,” said Cochran awkwardly. Why was he talking to this personality? According to Angelica it wasn’t her real mother, nor even a real ghost, just an internalized version of her parent patched together from memories and overheard conversations. “I do know who you mean,” Cochran went on. “We’re hiding from him.” He felt as though he had dialed six digits of Janis’s number, and was afraid to dial the last one. “We’re protecting your daughter from him.”

“You can’t
hide,
you can’t
protect
anyone, from Omar Salvoy,” said the querulous voice, though her fist relaxed around the screwdriver handle. But Cochran’s stomach was cold, and he wished she had not mentioned Salvoy’s name. “
Especially
you can’t protect
her.
He wants to have a child by a dead woman. I was nearly dead when he had intercourse with me, I was—unconscious!—in a coma!—after a head injury!”

Cochran thought of his afternoon with Tiffany, then drove the horrifying parallel out of his mind.

The mother personality almost put Plumtree’s eye out as she reached up to rub her eyes with the hand holding the screwdriver. “Listen to me,” she went on. “He studied the old books of the Order of the Knights Templar, and one of their secret mystery-initiation stories was about a man who dug up a dead woman out of her grave and had intercourse with her cold body; and after he had raped the corpse and buried it again, a voice from the earth told him to return in nine months and he would find a divine son. He came back then, and when he dug her up this time he found a, a blinking, grimacing little black
head
lying on her thigh-bones. And the voice from the earth told him to guard it well, for it would be the source of all forgiveness. And so he took it away, and guarded it jealously, and he prospered with impunity.” There were tears in her eyes as she glared at Cochran. “My baby died when he fell on her. There’s some kind of …
kaleidoscope
girl that’s grown up in there, in her head, but my
baby
died that day in Soma.” She was shaking her head violently and drawing the screwdriver blade across her chest. “But she can still, my
dead daughter
can still become pregnant, if Omar is in a male body. He can become the father of the god.”

Cochran knew that it was his vision, and not the sky, that had darkened; but with a shaking hand he reached out and then suddenly, firmly, gripped the blade of the screwdriver.

“Don’t kill her,” he whispered. Was this the same god? he wondered; was the horrible little homunculus she’d described the same person as the deity of groves and grapevines that offered the
pagadebiti
? The
mondard
that had spoken to him in Paris with such fatherly affection, before turning into a bull-headed thing and then into a tumbled straw effigy? The god that had made the Agave woman in Mavranos’s Euripides play cut off her son’s head? What kind of primordial proto-deity could be all these things?

He thought of the endless rows of gnarled crucifixes dripping out on the surrounding hills in the rain.

“Don’t kill her,” he repeated. “I’ll protect her, I’ll save her from him. I love her.” I love the
real
one, he thought, even if you don’t know which that is.

Plumtree shook her head in evident pity. “She’ll come to the point where she’ll tear you to pieces just for the honor of being able to bring your head to him. Who are
you
to the
god
?”

Cochran abruptly pulled the screwdriver out of her hands. Then, slowly, he turned his hand around to show her the mark below his knuckles. “When I was a boy,” he said, “I put out my hand to save him from the pruner’s shears.”

Plumtree had gasped, and now nodded slowly. “Send her away into the sea,” she said. “She belongs in India, not here, not being the mother of the god. The god himself couldn’t want that, to have an incarnate aspect of himself in filial obligation to a monster.” The smile she gave him was one he had not seen before on Plumtree’s face, but it was brave. “I love her too.”

“I’ll do what’s right,” he said, “for her.” Then he took a deep breath and said, gently, “Janis.”

Plumtree’s features pinched in anxiety. “Oh, it’s Scant,” she said; then her voice quickened: “Was
he
here? I can feel his name still on my tongue!
Daddy
!” she called, glancing around at the yard and the greenhouse. “I’ll never ditch you, Daddy! I’ll always catch you! Listen to me! Where I go, you go, I swear on my life!”

“Shut up, Janis, please!” Cochran hissed, spinally aware of the vineyards and of the skeleton in the greenhouse. “He wasn’t here. I have to talk to you, Janis. You don’t have to forgive me, but you do have to know that, that
I
know I was totally in the wrong, and I’m terribly sorry and ashamed of myself.” He smacked his fist against his thigh, angry with himself for saying this badly. “All my excuses were lies, Janis. You were right about me, but I want to make it up to you, to whatever extent I can. Will you come back to us, please? Cody needs you.
I
need you. I—”

“To be or not to be, that is the question,” said Plumtree.

Cochran faltered. “Valorie?”

“No … no, I’m Janis, still.”

I should have known, Cochran thought, that it wouldn’t be Valorie quoting the only Shakespeare line that everyone in the world knows. “Janis, I—”

“Don’t, Scant mustn’t, I’ll make myself deaf to him—we can do that. Leave me alone, if he wants to do something for me, he can leave me alone!” She hurried away across the concrete patio deck to the kitchen door, yanked it open, and slammed it behind her.

Cochran thought seriously for a moment about pursuing her. Then he sighed, picked up Cody’s abandoned beer, and leaned against the car fender. Maybe, he thought, I should tell it all to dead
Valorie,
and let
her
explain it to Janis.

What damn good is this person that’s me? he thought, glancing from the kitchen door to the mark on the back of his hand. How in hell am I supposed to play this flop, when I’m gambling with so many people’s bankrolls? And he remembered Kootie telling him, at the Sutro ruins two weeks ago,
You’ll be taking all our chances.

Omar Salvoy found himself in a bedroom with a telephone in it.

He knew he would have to be careful in what he said to Dr. Richard Paul Armentrout, and he crossed his arms under his daughter’s breasts—
A divine offspring for you to nurse during this thirteen-moon year, baby, I promise,
he thought—and paced up and down the rag rug in front of the bedside table.
Bye, baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, gone to get a leopard-skin to bury baby bunting in.

In his youth Salvoy had only wanted to find a king to serve. He had been a theater major at Stanford University, specializing in Shakespeare and finding startling clues in some of the obscurer plays, and living in a shabby little apartment in Menlo Park.

In May of 1964, when he had been nineteen, Salvoy had gone with a friend to the La Honda house of Ken Kesey, out in the redwood forests at the south end of State Highway 84. Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
had been published only two years earlier.

And, in Kesey, Salvoy thought he had found his king. The burly, balding Oregonian had gathered a whole tribe together at his remote hillside ranch in the canyon, and he spoke of the new drug LSD as the almost sacramental key to “worlds that have always existed.” Hi-fi speakers boomed and yowled on the roof of the house, shattering the silence of the ancient redwood forest, and weird wind chimes and crazy paintings were hung on all the trees. Omar Salvoy had begun visiting the place on his own, driving his old Karmann Ghia down the 84 over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the La Honda ranch every weekend.

One day out in the woods someone had found a dozen oversized wooden chessmen, weathered and cracked, and Kesey’s tribe had spontaneously begun improvising a dialogue among the figures—it had had to do with a king threatened with castration, and a girl with “electric eel tits that ionized King Arthur’s sword under swamp water”—and though the impromptu play was just a cheerful stoned rap from a bunch of distracted proto-hippies, Salvoy had believed he had heard mythic, archetypal powers manifesting themselves in the lines. When Kesey had set his people to painting random patterns in Day-Glo paint all over the 1939 International Harvester school bus he had just bought, Salvoy had climbed up to the destination sign over the windshield and painted on it the name
ARTHUR.

That night he had managed to catch Kesey for a few minutes away from his followers, and he had told him about the magical kingdom of the American West, and how the current king—a castrated transplanted Frenchman!—could surely be overthrown when that cycle came around again, at Easter in ’69, five years hence. And he had told Kesey about the supernatural power he would have if he took the throne, how he would be able to shackle and control the god of earthquakes and wine as the present king was doing, and raise ghosts to do his errands, and live forever. Omar Salvoy would be King Kesey’s advisor.

But Kesey had just laughed and, as Salvoy recalled, had said something like, “And if I jump off a cliff, angels will bear me up lest I dash my foot against a stone, right?”—and he had walked away. Salvoy believed it had been a quote from the New Testament, when Jesus was refusing to be tempted by Satan.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
had been full of Christ-figure imagery. Salvoy had driven home over the mountains in a humiliated rage, and never returned. Later he had seen a photograph of Kesey’s bus in
Life
magazine—someone had painted
FU
over his
A
on the destination sign, so that it now just read, idiotically,
FURTHUR.

Salvoy had abandoned college, though he’d kept studying the plays of Shakespeare, and he began to sample the strange cults that were springing up in the Bay Area in the mid-sixties. From a splinter group of the Order of the Knights Templar he learned about the uses of the Eye of Horus symbol, the
udjat
eye that looked like a profile falcon, in countering the influences of the feminine Moon Goddess; and that it was possible actually to become the human father of a living, absolving fragment of the god who died with the grapevines every winter and was reborn in them every spring, by impregnating a dead woman; and for a few months he traveled up and down the coast on Highway 1, from Big Sur to the state beaches between Santa Barbara and Ventura, with the agricultural human-sacrifice cult that was then still calling itself the Camino Hayseeds, not for two decades yet to be internally reorganized and have its name changed to the Amino Acids.