Earthquake Weather (33 page)

At her back she could often hear the cars of the crazy local teenagers racing up the street, and she heard at least one screeching past now, and heard too the
pop-pop-pop
of automatic weapons fire. In this last week and a half she had sensed a kind of vigilant protection in their constant racket, but an impatience too. Absently, Nardie touched the angular weight in her sweater pocket that was her ten-ounce Beretta .25 automatic.

The dry leaves on the peach-tree branches rattled in the chilly wind from the sea, and Nardie caught the familiar wild strains of the music from the beach. Arky had telephoned the Leucadia estate several times from pay phones, and he had laughed once—dryly—when she had described the music to him, and he had told her the name of the constantly repeated song: “Candles in the Wind,” by somebody called Melanie. Apparently the disattached people near where the killed king was were spontaneously playing the same song as were the disattached people near the king’s broken castle. Nardie wondered if the ones near wherever the killed king was had covered themselves with white mud, too.

Definitely there was more than one person in the meadow—Nardie could hear excited voices.

The white-clay dancers had never spoken.

Silently Nardie swung down from the branch, and her tennis shoes crackled only faintly in the dry grass as she landed and then stole to the top of the steps and looked down.

At the edge of the new wilderness of dead vines in the meadow, by the top of the stairs that led down to the beach, four figures stood silhouetted against the vast gray sea. Three stood together with their arms around each other, though the effect was more as if they were handcuffed that way than comradely; the fourth figure, standing apart, was an old man who had only one arm.

The middle figure of the trio, whose styled hair was white, reached out toward a dead pomegranate bush—and when his two dark-haired companions twisted their heads up toward her and clumsily grabbed their crotches in perfect unison Nardie shivered and bared her teeth, for she understood abruptly that only the middle figure was a real person, and that the outer two were some kind of mobile manikins.

As if following the gaze of the two artificial heads, the one-armed old man looked up the slope at Nardie.

“Heads up, Doc, all three,” the old man said, loudly enough for Nardie to hear. “The homegrown Persephone yonder don’t want you triflin’ with her
seed pods
.”

Nardie realized that she had drawn her tiny gun, so she lifted it and pointed it down the steps toward the two living men and the two dummies, though she kept her finger outside the trigger guard.

The one-armed man turned his shoulder stump to her, as if hiding behind the upraised, missing arm; and the trio shifted position, so that one of the dark-haired manikins was blocking her view of the white-haired man in the middle—who now shakily reached out and plucked the dried gourd of a dead pomegranate from the bush.

Then, in a crackling of trodden dry leaves, all four of the figures in the meadow were lurching away back toward the stairs that led down to the beach, the two manikins waving their free arms in perfect synchronization, like, Nardie thought giddily, a couple of Gladys Knight’s Pips.

Her teeth stung as she sucked in the cold sea air. Should I shoot at him? she wondered. What, she thought then, for stealing a
pomegranate
? A
dead
one? And at this range with this stubby barrel, I’d be doing well to put the bullet in the meadow at all, never mind hitting a head-size target. And she remembered Arky’s assessment of her weapon:
A .25’s a good thing to have in a fight, if you can’t get hold of a gun.

The four figures tottered away down the beach stairs, the manikin arms waving in spastic unison over the two fake heads.

Nardie straightened up when they had descended out of her sight, and she smiled derisively at herself when she noticed that she was standing hunched, and looking around for cover between nervous glances at the sky. The rockets fell a
week and a half ago,
she told herself; and you’re
living
in the dry, coinless fountain.

She pocketed her little gun and turned to trudge back uphill toward the house. She’d have to tell Arky about these intruders, whenever he next called from wherever he was.

She really did hope Arky was safe.

Tan Tai be with you,
she thought blankly.

The dozen white dancers who appeared to be made out of clay had been high-stepping around in a solemn ring on the flat sand a hundred yards to the south when Dr. Armentrout and Long John Beach had originally walked up the beach to the Crane estate’s stairs, but now they were skipping and hand-clapping back this way. The dawn wind was cold, but Armentrout felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt as he scuffed down from the last cement step onto the sand.

“Keep walking,” Armentrout whispered to Long John Beach as he began plodding away north under the weight of the two-manikin appliance, “back to the stairway that’ll take us up to the Neptune Avenue parking lot, and don’t look back at those … those white people.”

The one-armed old man immediately turned to gape at the figures following, and his eyes and mouth were so wide that Armentrout turned around to look himself, fearing that the dancers might be silently running at them, perhaps armed with some of the smooth black stones that studded the marbled black-and-gray sand.

But the white figures, though closer, were just walking purposefully after Armentrout and Long John Beach now, and staring at them with eyes that seemed yellow and bloodshot against the crusted white faces. The clay plastered onto their swimsuit-clad bodies made them seem to be naked sexless creatures animated out of the wet cliffs.

Armentrout let go of the lever that controlled the manikins’ heads, in order to reach into his jacket pocket and grip the butt of the .45 derringer. The Styrofoam heads now nodded and rolled loosely with every jouncing step toward the cement pilings of the wooden municipal stairway that led up to the parking lot, and to the car, and away from this desolate shoreline.

But Long John Beach stopped and pointed back at the advancing mud-people. “No outrageous thing,” he cried, his voice flat and unechoing in the open air, “from vassal actors can be wiped away; then kings’ misdeeds cannot be hid in clay.”

For a moment Armentrout considered just leaving the crazy old man standing here, as a cast-off distraction to occupy the dancers while he himself trotted away to the car; but he knew now that he needed to find Koot Hoomie Parganas, and he would need every scrap of mask for that.

So Armentrout stopped too, and he turned to face the advancing animated statues; and with deliberate slowness he tugged the fist-sized gun free and let them see it. He gripped the ball-butt tightly, for he remembered that the little derringer tended to rotate in his hand when he pulled the hammer back against the tight spring, and now he cocked it with a crisp, ratcheting click.

“What business,” Armentrout said, “
exactly,
do you have with us?”

One of the figures, breastless and so probably a young man, stepped forward. “You took something,” came a high voice, “from up the stairs.”

“I did? What did I take?”

The figure’s blue eyes blinked. “You tell me.”

“Answer my question first. I asked you what
exactly
your business is here.”

The stony figures shuffled uneasily on the wet black-veined sand, and Armentrout suppressed a smile; for these were young people whose random propensities for music and dancing and the beach had happened to constitute a compelling resemblance to an older, mythic role in this season of insistent definition—but they
were
just San Diego County teenagers of the 1990s, and when they were challenged to
explain
their presence here, the archaic hum of the inarticulate purpose was lost beneath the grammar of reason.

“No law against dancing,” the figure said defensively.

“There
is
a law about concealed weapons,” another piped up.

The modern phrases had dispelled the mythic cast—they were now thoroughly just modern kids on a beach, with mud all over them.

“Scram,” said Armentrout.

The white figures began to amble away south with exaggerated nonchalance. Armentrout put the gun away and turned toward the stairs. A blue sign on the railing said,

WARNING

Stay Safe Distance

Away From Bluff Bottom

FREQUENT BLUFF FAILURE

Not today, Armentrout thought with satisfaction as he shooed Long John Beach ahead of him up the stairs.

In the parking lot between landscaped modern apartment buildings, Armentrout unstrapped the two-manikin appliance and stowed it in the back seat of his teal-blue BMW.

Then he opened the passenger-side door and pushed Long John Beach inside. “Belt up,” he said breathlessly to the old man.

“ ‘The purest treasure mortal times afford,’ ” the one-armed old man wailed, the strange and eerily flat voice echoing now between the white stucco walls, “ ‘is spotless reputation; that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.’ ”

“I said
belt up
,” hissed Armentrout between clenched teeth as he hurried around to the driver’s side and got in. “Anyway,” he added in shrill embarrassment as he started the engine, “there’s no
hope
anymore for our reputations in
this
town.”

As he drove back down Neptune Avenue, in the southbound lane this time, Armentrout could see a plywood sign attached to a pine tree beside the gates of the fieldstone wall on his right. Black plastic letters had been attached to it once, but weather or something had caused most of them to fall away; what remained was accidental Latin:

E T IN

ARC

ADIA

EGO

Et in Arcadia ego.

And I am in Arcadia,
he thought, tentatively translating the words; or,
I am in Arcadia, too;
or,
Even in Arcadia, I am.

Armentrout reflected uneasily that the word Arcadia—with its resonances of pastoral Greek poetry and balmy, quiet gardens—probably had applied to this place, before Our Miss Figleaf had come here and killed the king; but who was the
Ego
that was speaking?

Even when he had got back on the 5 Freeway, heading north through the misty morning-lit hills below the Santa Ana Mountains, Armentrout found himself still noticing and being bothered by signs on the shoulder. The frequent
GAS-FOOD-LODGING 1 MI AHEAD
signs had stark icons stenciled on them for the benefit of people who couldn’t read, and though the stylized images of a gas pump and a knife-and-plate-and-fork were plain enough, the dot-dash figure of a person on a long-H bed looked to him this morning disturbingly like a dead body laid out in state; and while he was still south of Oceanside he saw several postings of a sign warning illegal Mexican immigrants against trying to sprint across the freeway to bypass the border checkpoint—the diamond-shaped yellow sign showed a silhouetted man and woman and girl-child running hand-in-hand so full-tilt fast that the little girl’s feet were off the ground, and under the figures was the word
PROHIBIDO.
Armentrout thought it seemed to be a prohibition of all fugitive families.

And when he became aware that his heartbeat was accelerated, he recognized that he was responding with defiance, as if the signs were reproaches aimed at him personally.
I
didn’t kill any king, he thought;
I
haven’t uprooted any families. I’m a
doctor,
I—

Abruptly he remembered the voice of the obese suicide-girl as he had heard it over the telephone a few hours ago:
Doctor? I walk all crooked now
—
where’s the rest of me?

But I certainly didn’t mean
that
to happen, he thought, her
killing
herself. I don’t give anyone a treatment I haven’t undergone and benefited from myself; and from my own experience I know that cutting the problem right out of the soul, rather than laboring to assimilate it, really does effect a cure. And even when these misfortunes do result—goddammit—aren’t I allowed some sustenance? I genuinely do a lot of good for people—is it wrong for me to sometimes take something besides money for my payment? Does this make me a, a
sicko
? He smiled confidently—
Not … at … all.
The whole notion of intrinsic consequences of “sin” is just infantile solipsism, anyway: imagining that in some sense you are everybody and everybody’s you. Guilt and shame are just the unproductive, negative opposites of self-esteem, and I feel healthily good about everything I do. That’s
okay
today.

Then he thought of what it was he now planned for his patient Janis Cordelia Plumtree, whenever he might catch up with her, and for Koot Hoomie Parganas, if the boy was still alive—and he heard again the flat howl that had burst from Long John Beach’s throat:
gilded loam or painted clay.

It occurred to him, with unwelcome clarity, that the idealistic dancers on the beach had carried the rainbow of living flesh on the
inside,
and dry, cracked clay on the
outside.

And so he was nearly driven to pull out his derringer and fire it at the sign on the tailgate of the sixteen-wheel trailer rig that cut him off near San Onofre, after Long John Beach pointed at the sign and said, “Hyuck hyuck—that’s addressed to you, Doc.” The sign read:
INSIDE HEIGHT 10’—NOSE TO REAR 110’.

Armentrout’s forehead was suddenly chilly at the thought that his hand had actually brushed the derringer’s grip in his unthinking reflexive rage—but still!—
“nose to rear”? How was
he supposed to take that?

His cellular telephone buzzed, and he fumbled it up from between the seats and flipped open the cover. “Yes?” he said furiously after he had switched it on.

“Get your
toes
aft of the
white line,
please,” drawled a man’s humorous voice, “and sit your ass down in one of the seats! I’m in control of this bus, and you’re upsetting the children!”