Earthquake Weather (3 page)

“The Eleggua figure?” said Angelica, collapsing onto the couch. “He’s—what, he’s the Lord of the Crossroads, what can it mean that he’s
gone
? He must have weighed thirty pounds! Solid concrete! I didn’t forget to
propitiate
him last week—did I, Kootie?”

Kootie shook his head somberly. “You spit rum all over him, and I put the beef jerky and the Pez dispenser in his cabinet myself.”

Pete was sniffing the stale office air. “Why does everywhere smell like burning coffee this morning?”

“Kootie,”
said Angelica,
“what’s going on here today?”

Kootie had hiked himself up to sit on the desk next to the buzzing black-screened television set, and he pulled his shirt up out of his pants—the bandage taped to his side was blotted with red, and even as they looked at it a line of blood trickled down to his belt. “And my left hand’s numb,” he said, flexing his fingers, “and I had to rest twice, carrying the dead beasties, because I’ve got no strength in my legs.”

He looked up at his adopted mother. “We’re in the middle of winter,” he went on, in a tense but flat voice. “This is the season when I sometimes dream that I can … sense the American West Coast. This morning—” He paused to cock his head: “—
still,
in fact—I’ve got that sense while I’m awake. What I
dreamed
of was a crazy woman running through a vineyard, waving a bloody wand with ivy vines wrapped around it and a pinecone stuck on the end of it.” He pulled his shirt back down and tucked it in messily. “Some balance of power has shifted drastically somewhere—and somebody is
paying attention
to me; somebody’s going to be coming here. And I don’t think the Solville foxing measures are going to fool this person.”

“Nobody can see through them!” said Johanna loyally. Her late husband, Solomon “Sol” Shadroe, had bought the apartment building in 1974 because its architecture confused psychic tracking, and he had spent nearly twenty years adding rooms and wings onto the structure, and re-routing the water and electrical systems, and putting up dozens of extraneous old TV antennas with carob seed-pods and false teeth and old radio parts hung from them, to intensify the effect; the result was an eccentric stack and scatter of buildings and sheds and garages and conduit, and even now, more than two years after the old man’s death, the tenants still called the rambling old compound Solville.

Pete Sullivan was the manager and handyman for the place now, and he had dutifully kept up the idiosyncratic construction and maintenance programs; now his lean, tanned face was twisted in a squinting smile of apprehension. “So what is it that you sense, son?”

“There’s a—” Kootie said uncertainly, his unfocused gaze moving across the ceiling. “I can almost see it—a chariot—or a … a gold cup? Maybe it’s a tarot card from the Cups suit, paired with the Chariot card from the Major Arcana?—coming here.” He gave Johanna a mirthless smile. “I think
it
could find me, even here, and
somebody
might be riding in
it,
or carrying
it
.”

Angelica was nodding angrily. “This is the
thing,
isn’t it, Kootie, that was all along going to happen? The reason why we never moved away from here?”

“Why we stopped running,” ventured Pete. “Why we’ve been … standing our little ground.”

“Why Kootie is an
iyawo,
” said Johanna, sighing and nodding in the kitchen doorway. “Why this place was first built, from the earthquake wreck of that ghost house. And the—”

“Kootie is not an
iyawo
,” Angelica interrupted, pronouncing the feminine Yoruba noun as if it were an obscenity. “He hasn’t undergone the
kariocha
initiation. Tell her, Pete.”

Kootie looked at his adopted father and smiled. “Yeah,” he said softly, “tell her, Dad.”

Pete Sullivan pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and cleared his throat. “Uh, ‘it’s not a river in Egypt,’ ” he told his wife, quoting a bit of pop-psychology jargon that he knew she hated.

She laughed, though with obvious reluctance. “I know it’s not.
The Nile, denial
—I know the difference. How is this denial, what I’m saying?
Kariocha
is a very specific ritual—shave the head, cut the scalp, get three specially initiated drummers to play the consecrated
bata
drums!—and it just
has not been done
with Kootie.”

“Not to the letter of the law,” said Pete, shaking out a cigarette and flipping it over the backs of his fingers; “but in the … spirit?” He snapped a wooden match and inhaled smoke, then squeezed the lit match in his fist, which was empty when he opened it again. “Come on, Angie! All the formalities aside, basically a
kariocha
initiation is putting a thing like an alive-and-kicking ghost inside of somebody’s head, right? Call it a ‘ghost’ or call it an ‘orisha.’ It makes the person who hosts it … what,
different.
So—well,
you
tell
me
what state Kootie was in when we found him two years ago. I suppose he’s not still an
omo,
since the orisha left his head, voluntarily … but it did happen to the boy.”

“I saw him when he was
montado
,” agreed Johanna, “possessed, in this very kitchen, with that
yerba buena y tequila
telephone. He had great
ashe,
the boy’s orisha did, great luck and power, to make a telephone out of mint and tequila and a pencil sharpener, and then call up dead people on it.” She looked across at the boy and smiled sadly. “You’re not a virgin in the head anymore, are you, Kootie?”

“More truth than poetry in that, Johanna,” Kootie agreed, hopping down from the desk. “Yeah, Mom, this does feel like
it.
” His voice was unsteady, but he managed to look confident as he waved his blood-spotted hand in a gesture that took in the whole building and grounds. “It’s why we’re here, why I’m what I am.” He smiled wanly and added, “It’s why your Mexican wizard made you give a nasty name to this witchery shop you run here. And this
is
the best place for us to be standing when it meets us. Solville can’t
hide
us, but it’s a fortified position. We can … receive them, whoever they might be, give them an audience.”

Angelica was sitting on the couch, flipping through the pages of her battered copy of Kardec’s
Selected Prayers.
Among the other books she had tossed onto the couch were Reichenbach’s
Letters on Od and Magnetism,
and a spiral-bound notebook with a version of Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida
hand-copied into it, and a paperback copy of Guillermo Ceniza-Bendiga’s
Cunjuro del Tobaco.

“How far away are they?” she snapped, without looking up. “Like, are they coming from Los Angeles? New York? Tibet? Mars?”

“The … thing is … on the coast,” said Kootie with a visible shiver. “Sssouth? Yes, south of here, and coming north, like up the 5 Freeway or Pacific Coast Highway.”

Our doctors say this is no month to bleed

—William Shakespeare,

Richard II

T
HE CAGED CLOCK HIGH
on the green-painted wall indicated exactly eleven, and most of the patients were already filing out the door to the yard for their fifteen-minute smoking break, following the nurse who carried the Bic lighter, and Dr. Armentrout was glad to leave the television lounge in the care of the weekend charge nurse. The big, sunny room, with its institutional couches and wall-mounted TV sets, looked as though it should smell of floor wax and furniture polish, but in fact the air was always redolent with low-rent cooking smells; today he could still detect the garlic-and-oil reek of last night’s lasagna.

The common telephone was ringing behind him as he puffed down the hallway to his office; each of the patients apparently assumed that any call must be for someone else, and so no one ever seemed to answer the damned thing. Armentrout certainly wasn’t going to answer it; he was cautiously elated that he hadn’t got his usual terrible dawn wake-up call at home today—the phone had rung at his bedside as always, but for once there had been, blessedly, only vacuous silence at the other end—and for damn sure he wasn’t going to pick up any ringing telephones that he didn’t
have
to answer. Resolutely ignoring the diminishing noise, Armentrout peeked through the wire-reinforced glass of the narrow window in his office door before turning the key in the first of the two locks, though it was nearly impossible that a patient could have sneaked inside; and he saw no one, and of course when he had turned the key in the second lock and the red light in the lockplate came on and he pulled the door open, the little room was empty. On the weekends the intern with whom he shared the office didn’t come in, and Armentrout saw patients alone.

He preferred that.

He lowered his substantial bulk into his desk chair and picked up the file of admission notes on the newest patient, with whom he had an appointment in less than a quarter of an hour. She was an obese teenager with a dismal Global Assessment Score of 20, diagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder, Manic. Today he would give her a glass of water with four milligrams of yellow benzodiazepine powder dissolved into it; instantly soluble and completely tasteless, the drug would not only calm her down and make her suggestible but also block the neurotransmissions that permitted memorization—she would remember nothing of today’s session.

A teenager! he thought as he absently kneaded the crotch of his baggy slacks. Obese! Manic! Well, she’ll be going home in a few days, totally cured and with no manic episodes in her future; and I will have had a good time and added some depth-of-field and at least a few minutes to my lifespan. Everybody will be better off.

With his free hand he brushed some patient’s frightful crayon drawings away from the rank of instant-dial buttons alongside the telephone. When the girl arrived he would lift the receiver and punch the button to ring the telephone in the conference room, where he had left good old reliable Long John Beach jiggling and mumbling in a chair by the phone—though it was possible that Armentrout wouldn’t
need
Long John Beach’s help anymore, if this morning’s reprieve from the hideous wake-up call was a sign of the times, a magical gift of this new year.

The ringing of
this
telephone, the one on his desk, snapped him out of his optimistic reverie; and under his spray-stiffened white hair his forehead was suddenly chilly with a dew of sweat. Slowly, his lips silently forming the words
no, please, no,
he reached out and lifted the receiver.

“Dr. Armentrout,” he said slowly, hardly expelling any breath.

“Doc,” came a tinny voice out of the earpiece, “this is Taylor Hamilton? Desk sergeant at the San Marcos County Sheriff’s branch? I’m calling from a pay phone in the back hall.”

Armentrout’s chin sagged into his jowls with relief, and then he was smiling with fresh excitement as he picked up a pen. For the past several years he had been alerting police officers and paramedics and psych techs all over southern California to watch for certain kinds of 51-50, which was police code for involuntary-seventy-two-hour-hold psychiatric cases.

“Taylor Hamilton,” noted Armentrout, consciously keeping the eagerness out of his voice as he wrote down the man’s name on a Post-it slip. “Got it. You’ve got a good one?”

“This lady seems like just what the doctor ordered,” said Hamilton with a nervous laugh. “I bet you anything that she turns out to have gone AWOL from your place yesterday.”

Armentrout had already pulled down an escape-report form from the shelf over the desk, and he now wrote
12/31/94
in the date box.

“I’ll bet you,” Hamilton went on, “
one thousand dollars
that she’s a runaway of yours.”

Armentrout lifted the pen from the paper. “That’s a lot of money,” he said dubiously. A thousand dollars! And he hated it when his informants made the arrangement sound so nakedly mercenary. “What makes you think she’s … one of mine?”

“Well, she called nine-one-one saying that she’d just half an hour earlier killed a guy in a field above the beach in Leucadia this morning, like right at dawn, stabbed him with a
speargun spear,
if you can believe that—but when the officers had her take them to where it supposedly happened and show them, there was no body or blood at all, and no spear; in fact they reported that the field was full of blooming flowers and grapevines and it was obvious nobody had walked across it for at least the last twenty-four hours. She told them it was a
king
that she killed there, a
king
called
the Flying Nun
—that’s solid ding talk, isn’t it? The officers are convinced that her story is pure hallucination. She hasn’t stopped crying since she called nine-one-one, and her nose won’t stop bleeding, and she says some guy rearranged her teeth, though she doesn’t show any bruises or cuts. And listen, when they first tried to drive her back here, for questioning?—the black-and-white wouldn’t start, they needed a jump; and when we’ve been talking to her in here the lights keep dimming and my hearing aid doesn’t work.”

Armentrout was frowning thoughtfully. The electromagnetic disturbances indicated one of the dissociative disorders—psychogenic amnesia, fugue states, depersonalization. These were the tastiest maladies he could cure … short of curing somebody of their very
life,
of course, which was ethically problematic and in any case contributed too heavily to the—

He shied away from the memory of the morning telephone calls.

But
a thousand dollars!
This Hamilton fellow was a greedy pig. This wasn’t really supposed to be about
money.

“I don’t,” Armentrout began—

But she did go crazy on
this morning,
he thought. She might very well have been reacting to the same thing, whatever it might be, that saved me from my intolerable wake-up call. These poor suffering psych
os
are often psych
ic
, and a dissociative, having distanced herself from the ground state of her core personality, might be able to sense a wider spectrum of magical effects. By examining her I might be able to figure out what the hell
has
happened. I should call around, in fact, and tell all my sentries to watch especially for a psychosis that was triggered
this morning.