Earthquake Weather (75 page)

“Cliff House coming up on the left,” said Pete. “I’ll go on past and park in the Sutro Heights lot, up the hill. Rainy walk back down, but I guess we can’t get any wetter than we are.”

“Sorry,” Angelica told Cochran. Then she said brightly to Plumtree, “Of course nothing bad will happen to any of us. As soon as we’re done with this, we could all take Scott Crane to dinner at the Cliff House Restaurant, even.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, except that we’re drenched in black mud!”

Plumtree gave a hitching laugh. “And Crane’ll p-probably be wearing that garlic banner again,” she said. “And some restaurants,” she added quietly, “don’t like you bringing your own wine.”

Pete turned in to the Sutro Heights Park driveway, and drove slowly up the hill with the headlights off and parked the truck against a dark grassy bank with overhanging elms. The nearest parking lot light dimmed but didn’t go out—and Cochran was glad of it as he climbed out of the truck carrying the wine bottle, for the overcast sky was already winter-night-time dark. There were many other cars in the lot, and they all seemed to have wreaths hung on them, but Cochran didn’t see any other people.

The wind sweeping up the cliffs from the sea was cold, and his wet clothing was no protection at all. He was glad that Plumtree at least had the leather jacket.

Angelica had stepped out onto the wet pavement, but now she leaned back in and tore the woven blue seat cover off the front seat, yanking on it to break the strings that tied it to the struts, and when she had dragged it out and shaken dust and cigarette butts out of it she wrapped up her short rifle in it; the stock was folded forward, and the bundle was no more than a yard long, with the ends flapping loose over the pistol grip. She laid it on the truck hood while she shouldered on the sopping knapsack.

“You’ve got what, three rounds left?” she asked Cochran as she picked up the bundled rifle.

Taking the question as a fresh test of his mental acuity, Cochran called up the details of his shooting at the Saturn. “That’s right,” he told her firmly.

“I’ve got seventy rounds of mixed hardball and hollow-point, but the magazines have been sitting in greasy water for a couple of days. Oh well—I’ve heard .45s will even fire underwater.”

“I hope the
omiero
hasn’t washed off of the hollow-points,” said Pete as he slammed the door on his side and walked around the back of the truck.

“I imagine the ghosts will all be gone, at least,” said Plumtree, “after what’s-his-name shows up, old Dickweed McStump.”

“What?” said Angelica. “Who?”

“This famous Greek god. What’s his name?”

“Dionysus,”
said Cochran with an apprehensive glance at the bottle in his left hand. “This isn’t the night to be dissing him, Cody.”

“Whatever,”
said Plumtree. “It sounds like he takes ghosts away with him. The big trick,” she added, “will be seeing to it that he doesn’t wind up taking any of
us
along in that crowd.”

“Well,
that’s
cleared it up,” said Cochran. “You’ve put-your finger on it, all right.”

“I’ll put my finger in your
eye,
if you don’t shut up,” she told him; but she linked her shivering arm through his as they began trudging down the park driveway. Cochran was holding the
pagadebiti
bottle with both hands.

When they got to Point Lobos Avenue, they had to walk south along the shoulder for a couple of hundred feet, and almost didn’t dare to cross at all, for cars with no headlights on were hurling their dark bulks around the corners from north and south, so fast that the tires yiped, and their passengers were leaning out of the windows and firing guns into the air as they swooped past. But finally there was a quiet gap, and Cochran and his companions sprinted wildly across the lanes and sprang over the far curb onto the sidewalk.

Leaning on the wet iron railing on the seaward side of the highway, they could see, through the marching curtains of rain, patches of bright flame on the dark plain below them. Dots of yellow fire that must have been torches bobbed and whirled on the line between the vast rectangular pool of water and the open sea beyond, and Cochran realized that people must be out dancing along that narrow concrete wall. And even way up here on the highway ridge he could hear distant drumming over the roar of the rain.

“Damballa!” said Plumtree huskily; then, “The sounds of hammering and sawing must not cease.”

“It’s good, the drumming’s good,” agreed Angelica nervously.

“Scott Crane is down there somewhere,” whispered Plumtree. “Tonight I’ll face
him,
not his ghost.”

The statement seemed to click a switch in her head, and at long last Valorie had no choice but to remember New Year’s Day. After dawn, first:

Trucks and cars on the road behind the gas-station telephone booth had been drumming their tires over a step in the asphalt, and Plumtree had had to hold her free hand over her ear to hear the 911 operator. “You killed him with a spear gun?” the voice said.

“No,” said Plumtree in a harsh voice. Cody had been the one who had taken this flop, this early-morning telephone call, and an emotion had been interfering with her speech. “A spear from one. I stabbed him in the throat. He was stabbed with it before, in 1990.”

“You stabbed him in 1990?”

“No, this morning, an hour ago.”

“He was known as … the Flying Nun?”

“I don’t know. That’s how I was thinking of him.”

Valorie had been aware of Cody’s guess that the 911 operator was just keeping her talking, keeping her on the line …

And a police car had soon come chirruping up behind her, and policemen with drawn guns had shouted at her: “Drop the phone! Let us see your hands!” One had wanted to shoot her; then he’d wanted to mace her. “Take it easy.” another had said, “She’s just a ding.”

They had handcuffed her with her hands in front. “Let’s go. Show us where you killed him.”

But when they had driven her to the slanting meadow above the beach, and got out of the car, the field was silvery bright with fresh vines and grasses and fruit; and since there had been only the cries of wild parrots in the meadow on that morning, Valorie’s memory now had to make the birdcalls loud and harsh and poundingly rhythmic.

The policemen said it was obvious that no one had stepped across the grass in the last day, and so they had marched her back into the car, and driven here to the jail and put her into a cell with mattresses looped over the white-painted steel bars and steady clanging from one of the other cells. Lunch had been hot dogs and sauerkraut, and when they had offered to let her make a call, Cody had declined, but asked if she could have the twenty cents anyway, or a cigarette.

And then, finally, Valorie let herself remember the actual dawn:

In her father’s voice, Plumtree’s body had called to the bearded man who had stepped barefoot into the meadow: “Get over here, Sonny Boy.”

But when the man had walked closer, her father had abruptly receded, and it had been Cody who found herself standing over the little boy who was lying on his back on the dirt. Plumtree was holding the spear with the points at the little boy’s throat.

She looked up at the tall bearded king, and her vision was blurry with tears as she said, “There’s nothing in this flop for me.”

“Then pass,” said the king in a quiet voice. “Let it pass by us.” After a moment he nodded at her, almost smiling, and said. “In the midsummer of this year, you and I will be standing in happy sunlight on the hill in the lake.”

“I don’t think so,” said the reintruded father, breathing in a choked way while the little boy shivered at his feet, “I’ll call
—
I called you this morning!
—
and I raise you the kid.” Plumtree’s eyes darted down to the pale child under the spearpoints. “That’s a raise you don’t dare call, right?” Tight laughter shook Plumtree’s throat. “This flop … finally! … gives me a king-high flush in spades. It’s the first day of the new year, and you’ve got to face the Death card—the suicide king.”

The bearded man stepped back. “I’ve
—
seen you before.” he said. “Where?”

“I’m
—
I’m putting the clock on you, here, no more time
—
and I won’t give you any psychic locators on me
—
”

“You’re shaking,” said the living king. “Throw the spear away. Don’t tell me anything, I’ll let you take back your bet.”

“You think I’m afraid of you? Now? It was in a poker game on Lake Mead, almost five years ago. You were disguised as a woman, and the other players called you ‘the Flying Nun.’ ”

The king was frowning. “And you failed then, didn’t you? You failed to assume the hand, assume the Flamingo, take the throne. You’ll fail this time, too, I swear to you, even if you ruin everyone in trying. You flinched away just now, when I approached you. Let it pass.” He raised one hand toward the road. “Go away now, in peace.”

“Lest you dash your foot against a stone. Don’t patronize me, you, you
kings.”
Plumtree’s hands gripped the spear shaft more tightly. “Do you call?”

Through clenched teeth, the king said, “No, I do not.”

“Then step closer,” hissed the father in Plumtree. And when the king had walked up beside them, her father said, “See you in the funny papers,” and snatched the spear away from the child and drove it into the king’s throat.

Plumtree let go of the iron railing as if it, might collapse, and clung to Cochran’s arm so tightly that he nearly dropped the bottle. Cochran thought it must have been Janis, or even Tiffany, but the sharp profile was clearly Cody, and she was staring down at the fires on the plain.

“What?” he snapped, his knees shaking at the thought of dropping the
pagadebiti
now.

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Just remembering why I’m here. Let’s get it over with.”

Angelica seemed to agree. “Let’s get down there before Kootie does,” she said.

They found the gate in the chain-link fence and started down the path that led between high dark hedges and ivy-covered mounds, and after the first few steps Cochran felt as if they had left the highway and all of San Francisco, even the twentieth century, far behind. The night wind in the bending cypresses, the monotonous distant drumming weaving in and out of the boom of the surf, the bonfires and waving torches, and the smells of ocean and wet leaves on the cold wind, all made him think of some pre-Christian Mediterranean island, with mad, half-human gods demanding worship and sacrifice.

He was looking to the left, out across the broad dark slope of the basin, when the whole quarter-mile from the Cliff House to remote Point Lobos was lit in glaring white, halting raindrops as shotgun patterns of dark stippling against the marble undersides of the clouds; and when the instant explosion of thunder threw the raindrops against his face and extinguished the light, he carried on his retinas a vision of the slope as a ruined amphitheater, the collapsed walls and sagging foundations undisguised beneath the froth of wild vegetation.

By the yellow glitter of flame reflected in the lake-like puddles, he could see that the path leveled and broadened out ahead of them, and he could make out the low stone building in which he and Plumtree had first met up with Mavranos and Kootie again after fleeing Solville. The uneven windows and the top of the roofless wall were silhouetted by fires on the sand floor within, and he could see apparently naked figures dancing on the wall rim.

Half a dozen torch flames were bobbing toward Cochran and his party now across the mud-flats, and he reached around with his right hand to touch the grip of his revolver as he squinted at the approaching forms.

He was able to see that they were people by the bronze glare of the torches many of them were waving, but their bodies and staring-eyed faces were plastered with wet pale mud, so that they seemed to be figures of animated earth, naked and sexless. There were more of them than there were torches, and many carried fist-sized stones. Two or three even had pistols.

Angelica had raised her seat-cover bundle, and Cochran drew his revolver and held it out away from him, pointed at the ground for now. His ears were ringing and his breath was short with the thought of raising the gun, of firing it at these people.

He opened his mouth to speak, but the mud-figures had halted a dozen feet away; and now the torches dipped as they all got down on their bare knees in the mud.

A hot wave of relief rippled up from Cochran’s abdomen—but when he glanced at his right hand he saw that it wasn’t the gun, or even the bottle of wine in his left hand, that had cowed them.

The night seemed suddenly less dark—variations of grays—in contrast to the ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand; it shone with such an intense, absolute blackness that his first, spinal impulse was to somehow instantly cut it off.

Far out in the rainy basin, out among the ruined buildings and crumbled pool copings and the ledge where the tunnel mouth gaped against the firelight, the drumming became louder, and faster.

“We knew you’d come,” called one of the figures hoarsely.

“From Phrygia,” wailed one of them in a woman’s voice, “from Lydia, from
India
!”

To his horror, Cochran’s right hand twitched and clenched and
raised;
he was able to push it up still further in the instant before it fired the gun, so that the bullet flew away over the top crags of Point Lobos, but the sound and flash of the shot were lost in another simultaneous blast of white light and ground-jolting thunder, and as the echoes rolled away to shake the trees on the slopes he hastily fumbled the gun back into its holster.

The mud-people might not even have been aware of the gunshot; or they might have
expected
their god to greet his worshippers by trying to murder one of them out of sheer love; they bowed their heads, and began doing a fast, counterpoint hand-clapping that jangled Cochran’s thoughts the way drumming was supposed to confuse ghosts.