Earthquake Weather (19 page)

“Fuck you,” sputtered the old man, thrashing his hands against the bushes as if to help free himself. “No, I’m not dead. Are
you
dead? If you know me, then I must have found the right place, so there’s a dead guy here
somewhere,
right?”

“Yeah, but inside, we don’t keep him out here in the shrubbery. Where’s Booger?”

The old man was panting but standing still now, letting Mavranos pull him free. “
She
died,” he said harshly. “She walked out into the desert, the day after your Easter of 1990. I went after her, calling—but I’m blind, and she was mute. Somebody found her body, after a while.”

“I’m truly sorry to hear that,” Mavranos said. He tugged the last filament free, and now old Joe was swaying on the driveway in the middle of his cluster of bobbing antennae, like, thought Kootie, a sea urchin left here by a high tide, or a big old dandelion seed carried here by the night wind.

From the dark street at Kootie’s back came a shrill whisper:
“You ask them.”

Kootie spun toward the voice, peripherally aware that Mavranos had quickly turned that way too.

A lanky, dark-haired man in a T-shirt was shuffling up the driveway, visibly shivering in the breeze. “Excuse me,” he said, “but—” His gaze fell on the old man, and he took a quick step backward. Then, after peering more closely, he exhaled hard, took another breath, and went on: “Sorry. Why not? ’Specially tonight, huh? We’re—” He barked a nervous, mirthless laugh and spread his hands. “—looking for a boy named Koot Hoomie Parganas. He lived here, at one time.”

A slim blond woman had sidled up behind the man, and was peering wide-eyed over his shoulder. Now she nodded.

“Kootie’s living in Pittsburgh these days—” began Mavranos, but Kootie interrupted.

“I’m Koot Hoomie Parganas,” he said.

Abruptly Kootie could feel the old man whom Mavranos had called Joe staring at him, and Kootie glanced sideways at him in surprise—and the old man
was
obviously blind, his eyelids horribly sunken in his dark, furrowed face—but nevertheless the old man was suddenly paying powerful attention to him.

Kootie looked back at the man and woman shivering on the driveway.

Kootie heard footsteps rapping down the steps from the kitchen door, and he sensed that it was Angelica.
“¿Tiene la máquina?”
he asked, without looking around:
Do you have the machine?

“Como siempre,”
came Angelica’s voice coldly in reply.
As always.

“No need for your
máquinas
,” said the blond woman, stepping out from behind her companion. Her tight jeans emphasized her long slim legs, and her flimsy white blouse was bunched up around her breasts as she hugged herself against the cold. “Sorry, I can’t have been listening. Did you all say Koot Hoomie Parganas is here, or not?” She laughed, rocking on the soles of her white sneakers. “Have we even
asked
yet?”

“
I’m
him,” Kootie said, irritated with himself for being distracted by her figure. “What did you want me for?”

“I—well, short form, kiddo, I need you to tell me how to find a dead king and restore him to life. Does this make any sense to you? Could we talk about it inside?”

“No,” said Angelica and Mavranos in unison; but a moment later Mavranos muttered, “Restore him to
life
?”

Kootie gave the woman a quizzical smile. “Why is it
your
job,” he asked quietly, “to restore this dead king to
life
?”

She tossed her head to throw her thatch of blond hair back from her face, and she stared at Kootie. “Amends,” she said in a flat voice. She raised her hands, palms out, as if surrendering. “These are the hands that killed him.”

Kootie’s heightened senses caught not only the rustle of Angelica’s hand sliding up under her blouse, but also the tiny
snick
of the .45’s safety being thumbed off.

Kootie glanced sideways and caught Mavranos’s eye, and nodded.

“You two don’t appear to be armed,” Mavranos said cheerfully, “but we are. I reckon you can all come in, but keep your hands in sight and move slow.”

Plumtree didn’t pull her injured hand away when Cochran gently took it, and the two of them followed the boy with the funny name across the dark lawn to the apartment building’s open front door. Cochran was walking slowly and keeping his free hand open and away from his body—he had glimpsed the black grip of the automatic under the blouse of the tall, dark-haired woman who had come out of the kitchen, and he was suddenly sober, and taking deep breaths of the cold night air to keep his head clear.

We’ve blundered into some kind of crazy cult, he thought, and Janis—or Cody, probably—has got them mad at us. Watch for a chance to grab her and sneak out, or find a phone and call 911.

His heart was pounding, and he wondered if he might actually have to try to prevent these people from injuring Janis, or even killing her.

“How did you find this place?” called the man with the graying mustache from behind them as they stepped up to the front door and began walking up a carpeted hall. The place smelled like some third-world soup kitchen.

Cochran decided to protect poor Strubie, who had paid them the hundred dollars to keep out of this. “A psychiatrist at Rosecrans Medical Center gave us the address—” he began.

The hall opened into a long room with a couch against the near wall and a desk with a TV set on it against the opposite wall. The TV set’s screen was glowing a brighter white than Cochran would have thought possible, and as the others crowded in behind him one of the two teenage boys on the couch leaped up and snatched the plug out of the wall socket.

“Thanks, Ollie,” said the man who had followed them in. “The ghost that was torqueing the TV is apparently the deceased wife of my old pal Spider Joe here, this old gent with the curb feelers on his belt.” He now stepped to the bookshelves behind the couch and reached down a stainless-steel revolver, which he held pointed at Cochran’s feet. “Everybody sit down, hm? Plenty of room on the floor, though the carpet’s wet in spots. And don’t move those pots, they’re catching leaks.”

The old man who was apparently called Spider Joe shambled across the threadbare carpet and slid down into a crouch beside the kitchen doorway, and the antennae standing out from his belt scraped the wall and knocked a calendar off a nail; and as Cochran sat down beside Plumtree in front of the desk he wondered if the ghost of the old man’s wife might be snagged on one of the metal filaments. The woman with the automatic and the boy with the funny name stood beside the couch.

“Let’s get acquainted,” said the man holding the revolver. “My name’s Archimedes Mavranos, and the lady in the kitchen is Diana, the guy beside her is Pete, and this lady with the
máquina
is Pete’s wife Angelica. The boys on the couch are Scat and Ollie. Kootie you know.” He raised his eyebrows politely.

Cochran had resolved to give false names, but before he could speak, Plumtree said, “I’m Janis Cordelia Plumtree, and this is Sid
Cochran.
” She pronounced his name so precisely that Cochran knew she had restrained herself from saying
Cockface
or something. For God’s sake behave yourself, Cody, he thought. The long room was hot and smelled of garlic and fish and Kahlua, and he could feel sweat beading on his forehead.

Water was thumping and splashing into a saucepan by his feet, and he looked up at the mottled, dented, dripping ceiling, wondering how heavy with water the old plaster was, and whether it might fall on them. “It’s, uh, not raining,” he said inanely. “Outside.”

“It’s raining in San Jose,” spoke up a heavy-set woman who had stepped up to an open door at the far side of the room. She spoke shyly, with a Spanish accent.

“Oh,” said Cochran blankly. San Jose was three hundred and fifty miles to the north, up by Daly City and San Francisco. “Okay.”

“And that’s Johanna,” said Mavranos, “our landlady. I wasn’t asking how you got this address,” he went on, “just now, but how you physically
got
here.”

“In a taxi,” said Plumtree. When Mavranos just stared at her, she added, “We were in Carson. We told the driver the address, and he … drove us here.”

“Dropped us at the corner,” put in Cochran. “He didn’t want to drive up to the building.”

“So much for our
protections
here,” said the pregnant woman in the kitchen doorway. Cochran focused past the bobbing antennae of Spider Joe to get a look at her, and was startled to see that she was completely bald.

“No,” said Kootie, “the space is still bent, around this building. The driver must have
been
somebody.” He stepped forward now, and leaned down to extend his right hand to Cochran. “Welcome to my house, Sid Cochran,” he said.

Cochran shook his hand, and the boy turned to Plumtree. “Welcome to my house, Janis Cordelia Plumtree.”

Plumtree gingerly reached up with her swollen right hand, and the boy clasped it firmly; but Plumtree’s cry was one of surprise rather than pain.

“It doesn’t hurt!” she said. She held up her right hand after the boy released it, and Cochran could see that the swelling was gone. She flexed the fingers and said, “It doesn’t hurt anymore!”

Cochran made himself remember the hard
crack
of her fist hitting the linoleum floor last night, and how this evening her knuckles had just been dimples in the hot, unnaturally padded flesh of her hand. He looked from Plumtree’s metacarpal bones, now visible again under the thin skin on the back of her hand as she bunched and straightened her fingers, to the face of the boy standing in front of him, and for a moment in the garlic-and-Kahlua reek the boy was taller, and the brown eyes under his curly hair seemed narrowed as if with Asian epicanthic folds, and the unregarded blur of his clothing had the loose drapery of robes. Cochran’s abdomen felt hollow, and he thought, This is a Magician. A real one.

“No,” said Kootie to him softly, once more just a teenage boy in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, “something different than that.”

Cochran closed his own right hand, still warm from the boy’s grip; and he relaxed a little, for he no longer believed that these people meant to harm him or Plumtree.

Kootie looked past him. “Ah, my dinner,” he said. “I hope you all don’t mind if I eat while we talk.” He patted the flannel shirt over his left ribs. “I’m bleeding, and I’ve got to keep up my strength.” He hiked himself up onto the desk and crossed his legs like a yogi. “If any of you are hungry, just holler—we’ve got lots.”

The bald woman was carrying in a steaming, golden bowl cast in the form of a deeply concave sunfish, and the rich smell of garlic and fish broth was intensified; Angelica followed her back into the kitchen, and reappeared with a bottle of Mondavi Chardonnay and a bowl of some sauce for Kootie, while Diana brought steaming ceramic bowls for the two teenage boys who were sitting on the far end of the couch. Kootie was pouring the wine into a gold goblet that was shaped like a wide-mouthed fish standing on its tail.

Had a gold haddock,
thought Cochran. “What is it?” he asked.

“Bouillabaisse,” Kootie answered, stirring some orange-colored sauce into his bowl. “According to old stories, a bunch of saints named Mary—Magdalen, Mary Jacob, Mary Salome, maybe the Virgin Mary too—fled the Holy Land after the crucifixion and were shipwrecked on the French Camargue shore, at a place that’s now called Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and the local fishermen served them pots of this. Ordinarily I just have grilled sole or tuna sandwiches or H. Salt or something, but—” He waved his spoon toward Diana and the two boys on the couch. “—it’s the traditional restorative dinner for fugitive holy families.”

“I heard you can’t make real bouillabaisse in this country,” said Plumtree. “There’s some fishes that it needs that you can only get in the Mediterranean.”

“Rascasse,” Kootie agreed, “and conger eel, and other things, yeah. But there don’t seem to be
any
kinds of loaves and fishes that can’t show up in the back of Arky’s old red truck after he’s driven it around town.”

“This lady,” Mavranos broke in, waving his revolver in the direction of Plumtree without quite pointing it at her, “says she’s the one who killed Scott Crane.”

In the silence that followed this statement Cochran stared down at the carpet, wishing he had a glass of Kootie’s wine. He could feel the shocked stares of the bald lady and the teenagers on the couch and the Mexican lady in the back doorway, and he knew they were directed at Plumtree and not at him; and he found himself thinking about the twenty dollars Plumtree had swindled from young “Karen” at the ice-cream place, and the purse she had stolen from the lady at the bar, and wishing he weren’t sitting next to Plumtree here.

“Benjamin, our four-year-old,” said bald Diana softly, “did say it was a woman, at first. He says it was a man that did it, but that it was a woman who walked up, and then changed into a man.”

“Benjamin’s my godson,” said Mavranos, “but he’s a … chip off the old block. Half of what he
sees
is more like stuff that’s going on in some astral plane than stuff going on in any actual zip code. Still, he did say that.
And,
” he went on, “Miss Plumtree claims that she’s come here
now
to … restore the king to
life
.”

“Is that possible
?” asked Diana quickly. Cochran suddenly guessed that Diana was this Scott Crane person’s widow, and in vicarious shame he kept his eyes on the carpet.

“Well, I want to listen to what she has to say,” said Mavranos, “but I’m pretty sure it’s not, no. Sorry. Scott’s gone on to India, we established that right away—obviously there’s no pulse or respiration, and there are no reflexes, and the pupils are way abnormally dilated and don’t respond at all to light. And he’s cold. And the spear is in his
spine.
We haven’t been able to do an EEG for brain-wave activity, but the electron brush-discharge in Pete’s carborundum bulb doesn’t flicker when the body is wheeled past it with nobody else in the room, and the Leucadia place isn’t sustained anymore, not even the rose garden—his
ashe
is completely gone. And he hasn’t risen on the third day or anything.”