Earthquake Weather (29 page)

One of the lane changes was a sharp enough swerve to press Cochran against the passenger-side door and make him drop his cigarette, and Plumtree only remembered to click on the turn signal after she was in the left lane and yanking the car back straight. The vodka bottle had rattled like a mariachi band’s percussion gourd. “You want me to drive?” Cochran asked, fumbling on the floor for his cigarette.

“You’re drunk,” said Plumtree. “And don’t …
point out to me …
that I’m drinking. Alcohol makes me a better driver, keeps me alert. We need an alert driver, for this fog.”

Cochran sat back in the passenger seat and hoped she was right. Certainly he wasn’t sober … and at least they both had their seat belts on. He didn’t want to have to stop and get out of the car, anyway—the car had a heater, and Plumtree had blessedly turned it up to full blast.

Past her silhouetted head he could faintly see the line of the surf glowing gray as it silently rose and fell out past the State Beach, under stars haloed by the incoming fog so that they looked like the stars in Van Gogh’s
Starry Night.

“I wonder if the dead king’s crowd has even got started yet,” he said.

“All the dead king’s horses and all the dead king’s men …” Plumtree said softly.

Couldn’t put Scott Crane together again,
Cochran mentally finished the rhyme.

“I think—” Plumtree began; then she went on quickly, “this car runs pretty smooth, doesn’t it? I’d like to have done a compression check before we took off on an eight-hour drive, but I don’t hear any bad lifters or rocker arms.”

Cochran bent over to reach into the bag between his feet, and he tore open the top of one of the beer cartons and lifted a can out. “
What
do you think?” he asked casually as he popped the top and took a leisurely sip.

“You may as well start working on those,” said Plumtree with a nod, “they’ll only warm up, sitting down there by the heater vent.” She hiked up the vodka bottle and took a hearty gulp. “I think
I
turned those moths into wasps.”

The lights and exit ramps of Ventura had swept past now, but Cochran hadn’t noticed a Mobil sign. Oh well, he thought, Santa Barbara is coming up fast, and—he peered at the lighted dashboard—we’re only a little under a quarter tank. “Really?” he said, his voice quiet but not skeptical. “Good enough so they could actually sting?”

“Well, I don’t know if they could really
sting.
And it would be Valorie that did it, not actually this here
me.
But I think it was because that Mavranos guy asked you about the mark on your hand, and I—we—didn’t want him to find out about it. Is that a birthmark?”

“I—told Janis about it,” Cochran whispered hoarsely after another gulped sip.

“She and I don’t speak to each other much.”

Cochran sighed. “In 1961, when I was seven, I thought I saw a face, a whiskery little old head, in an old Zinfandel stump that was being pruned back for the winter, and, without thinking, I shoved my hand out to stop the shears from cutting the old man’s head off.” The steady green glow of the instrument-panel dials was a cozy contrast to the night and the fog and the rushing lane markers outside, and he took another sip of the cold beer, secure in the knowledge that there were twenty-three more full cans between his ankles. The coal of his cigarette glowed as he inhaled on it, and a moment later exhaled smoke curled against the windshield.

“Actually,”
he said slowly, then paused; “I think it’s old rust or bark dust, under the skin. Like a powder-burn. Anyway, it’s not a birthmark.”

Plumtree nodded and had another couple of swallows from the vodka bottle. “Actually what?” she asked.

Her question forced a short, awkward laugh out of Cochran. It made him dizzy to realize that he was teetering on the brink of telling this Plumtree woman—
this
one!—a secret he had kept for thirty-three years; and to realize too that, in the warm nest-like secrecy of this anonymous car flying along in the middle of cold dark nowhere, he
wanted
to; so he choked down a big impulsive mouthful of beer and used the sudden dizziness to get himself over the hump.

He spoke rapidly: “Actually—as I remember it, anyway, maybe I’m confusing it with dreams I had later—the shears cut right through my hand, cut it most of the way
off.
No kidding—there was blood squirting everywhere, and the vineyard worker with the shears was in shock, looking like … like his face was carved out of bone, with a big bullet-hole for a mouth.” He tilted up the can to finish the beer in three deep gulps. “Then, about one full second later, there was an almighty bang—a, a crash like you dropped a Sherman tank from thirty thousand feet onto the roof of the Astrodome—and when I could
think
again, maybe another second or two later, my hand was fine, whole, not a scratch, and not a drop of blood anywhere—my hand didn’t even have this mark on it yet; that was there when I woke up one morning about exactly a year later—but the old vine was standing there in full, bushy,
impossible
summertime bloom.” Jerkily he leaned forward again to put the empty can onto the floor mat and tug another can free of the carton.

“Mobil station,” he said briskly when he had straightened up again and looked out through the windshield. “Next exit, it looks like,” he added, nodding and squinting like a navigator. He popped the can open, but just held it. “And,” he went on gently, shaking his head, “it had ripe grape bunches hanging all over it, but also … pomegranates, and figs, and I don’t know what all else. This was in the
dead
of winter.” He took a deep breath and let it out, then glanced at Plumtree with a wry smile. “You’d better let me deal with pumping the gas, and paying for it. You’re gonna reek of liquor.”

“That’s Santa Barbara,” Plumtree said, switching on the turn-signal indicator and scuffing her tennis shoe from the gas pedal to the brake. “After this we turn inland at Gaviota. The fog’ll be worse then. Vodka doesn’t have half the smell that beer’s got; You probably stink like an old bar towel. What did the guy with the shears do, the vineyard worker?”

“He got very damn drunk.”

Plumtree nodded as she steered off the highway and rattled across an intersection on a green light. “That shows respect.”

The left-side tires bounced up over the curb when she swung the big old Ford into the white-lit Mobil station, but she managed to park it next to one of the pumps. Cochran had dropped his cigarette again, but he just stomped it out on the floorboards. Before he could remark on the way she’d handled the driveway, she said, “I gotta disconnect the coil to turn this off. That’s good, though—a modern car, with the ignition in the steering column, I’d have had to bust it out, and cops look for that, in parking lots, and then … they wait for whoever to come back to the car. Who’s driving it.”

She enunciated the syllables as carefully as if she were pushing silver dollars out of her mouth one at a time, and Cochran realized that she herself was very drunk; and when he levered open the passenger-side door and stood up and took several deep breaths of the icy air, he was so dizzy that he had to hang on to the door to keep his balance.

He swung his unwieldy gaze over the car’s roof, and watched Plumtree shuffle to the front bumper, frowning and holding on to the vibrating fender with both hands. When she had hoisted up the hood and pulled free the wire that connected the coil to the battery, the engine shook twice and then wheezed to a halt; and in the silence he said, “I think we should … let Janis drive.”

“She’d get lost,” said Plumtree shortly. “I’m gonna go give the man the card, sign for it—you pump the gas when I wave.” She wobbled across the damp asphalt toward the glass door, then halted and looked back at him. “On the Torinos the gasp cap is behind the rear license plate.”

Cochran squeaked the license plate down, unscrewed the gas cap, and shoved the nozzle of the premium pump into the filler hole, and then he leaned heavily on the trunk as he held the aluminum trigger squeezed and numbly watched the wheels behind the little gas pump window roll around to, finally, fifteen dollars and sixty cents. The aromatic reek of gasoline on the cold night air did nothing to sober him up.

He had hung up the nozzle but was still trying to get the cap threaded back on when Plumtree reattached the coil wire and jumped the solenoid again to start the engine. When he heard the hood slam down he just dropped the cap and let the license plate snap up over it, and then hurried to the passenger-side door and got in, glad of the interior warmth even if they were both about to die in a Driving-Under-the-Influence one-car crash in the foggy canyons beyond Gaviota.

She clanked the engine into gear and drove right over the curb onto Milpas Street, swinging wide in a chirruping left turn to get back to the 101.

“Oh,
okay,
” she said, and the engine missed for a moment, coming back strongly when she fluttered the gas pedal. “Whoops! When do I turn?”

“Take that on-ramp on the right,” said Cochran through clenched teeth, pulling the seat belt across himself. “101 north.”

She glanced at him after she had made the turn. “Scant! What day is it?”

He relaxed a little, and didn’t attach the seatbelt. “It’s the morning of the twelfth by now,” he said cautiously, “of January. It’s been a couple of hours since we left Solville.”

“My father is alive,” she said. “I
did
catch him!”

“That’s … right, I guess. According to that Angelica woman.” He tried to remember when it had been that Janis had last been up.

She leaned back in the seat now, straightening her arms and flexing her fingers at the top of the wheel. “This is disorienting—I don’t have to watch for cues, I can just
ask
you! How did we get away from there? I don’t think they wanted us to just leave.”

“No—we snuck out. They were talking about—holding a gun on you. We’re still working with them, I guess, but at arm’s length.”

She was gingerly licking her lips and grimacing. “I’m glad to get away from that burnt-liquor stink. Nobody got hurt, I hope?”

“Oh no.” He let the seat belt reel back up into the slot above the door, and finally sat back and let himself exhale. “Well, not
hurt
—but that old man with the windshield wipers all over him died. But it was just, like, a heart attack, I guess. Nothing to do with us. And then in the confusion Cody just grabbed my hand and we walked out. And stole us this car.”

“My father spoke to me over the telephone.”

Cochran thought of someone who had to maintain a ’69 Torino, going out to work on a Thursday morning and finding the car gone; but at least Janis was a sober driver. She hadn’t had anything to drink since … what? A Manhattan or two at dinner, hours and hours ago. Of course it was the same bloodstream, really, but it did seem that Cody had taken the alcohol away with her.

“Yes,” he said. “I heard him.”

She was still smacking her lips, and now she said, “Did Cody get mouthwash?”

“As a matter of fact, she did. A big bottle of Listerine.”

“Could you pass it to me?”

Cochran did, and she unscrewed the cap and took a swig of the mouthwash; she swished it around audibly in her mouth for a few seconds, then rolled down the window to spit it outside.

“We’re going to San Francisco, aren’t we?” she said as she rolled the window back up.

“Yes.” Cochran blinked in the new Listerine fumes, trying to remember whether Janis had still been on when San Francisco had first been proposed. He was sure she had not, that Cody had already been in control then. “How did you know that?”

“That’s where he … fell off the building. And I caught him.”

“We’re going there because it’s where they all—you all—hell,
we
all, can get Scott Crane restored to life.” According to a crazy old dead black lady, at least, he thought.

“They’re bringing his body along, I hope?” It seemed to Cochran that she spoke anxiously.

He thought of the vague plan Cody had described for getting Crane back into his own undecayed body—or, failing that, into hers permanently; and he discarded the idea of asking her about it, for she would probably just lose time if he did ask, and leave the drunk Cody to drive.

“They said they were,” he told her. “We’re probably going to be meeting them at a place called the Cliff House Restaurant, on the northwest shore.”

“I’ll be hungry by then—Cody ate most of my dinner. Did she pick up any snacks?”

“Some Slim Jims,” said Cochran, trying to remember if he had been as unconcerned as this when he had learned that Spider Joe was dead; of course he had actually seen the body, and Janis had not.

“Could I have a pack?”

Cochran leaned down and dug a Slim Jims package out of the bag; and he got out too another beer for himself. He opened the can, and, before he took the first sip, he said, “Here’s to poor old Spider Joe. May he rest in peace.”

Plumtree nodded, staring ahead. “His wife died, though, right? Recently?”

“They did say that,” agreed Cochran. He took another, deeper sip.

At the gas-station-and-motel town of Gaviota the 101 curled sharply to the east, inland, and soon they were climbing through the dark canyons of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The fog was a blurry wall close ahead of them, glowing gray with the diffracted radiance of the headlights, and the short patch of pavement that was visible in front of the fog seemed to Cochran’s tired eyes to be stationary, so that the black lines of skid marks were standing waves shimmying in place, and the point-of-impact of a long-ago dropped can of white paint seemed to be the beak of a diving white bird. They passed big semi-trailer trucks that were stopped on the shoulder, visible through the fog only by yellow lights along their roofs; and the lights seemed to Cochran to trace the rigging of tanker ships more remote in the night than the trucks could possibly really be.

Cones of light, luminous triangular shapes in the darkness, resolved themselves into spotlit billboards, or steep hillside shoulders with headlights approaching from the other side, as he watched them gradually materialize out of the night; and rotating spoke-like fingers of light would turn overhead when an unseen car in the southbound lanes approached behind invisible tree branches. Sometimes Plumtree would change lanes to get around the ghostly red eyes of brake lights ahead of them, and in those transitional moments when the tires were thumping across the lane-divider bumps the turn-signal lights would strobe deeply into the fog on the shoulder, illuminating a bottle or a weed or a shoe for a brief, startled instant.