Earthquake Weather (37 page)

Mavranos had already shrugged and started slogging back down the tunnel; Kootie followed him, after shaking his head and saying, “Liquor, again.”

Cochran took Plumtree’s elbow and led her after them. And all he was thinking about now was the—admittedly warm—twelve-pack of Coors he had transferred from the stolen Torino to his Granada, parked now just up the hill.

O God! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,—

Weary of solid firmness,—melt itself

Into the sea! and, other times, to see

The beachy girdle of the ocean

Too wide for Neptune’s hips; how chances mock,

And changes fill the cup of alteration

With divers liquors! O! if this were seen,

The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,

What perils past, what crosses to ensue,

Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.

—William Shakespeare,

Henry IV, Part II

It was an inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them like a dropsical boy’s-Kite without a tail and wings. It hid in doorways too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up to its ears, as if it were laughing.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

F
OR FIVE DAYS NOW
the skirts of the storm clouds had swept across the fretted hills and smoky lowlands of San Francisco. At the northeast corner of the peninsula the intermittent downpours had saturated the precipitous eastern slope of Telegraph Hill, loosening wedges of mud that tumbled down onto the pavement of Sansomme Street, where old wooden cottages still stood from before the 1906 earthquake, having been saved from the subsequent fire by bucket brigades of Italians who had doused the encroaching flames with hundreds of gallons of homemade red wine; and the rain had swelled the waters of Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park, making a marsh of the playground to the south and completely submerging the strange old stones that edged the lake’s normal boundaries; and in the southeast corner of the city the rain had frequently driven customers out of the open-air Farmer’s Market on Alemany Boulevard, and kept the Mexican children from playing in the streets of the Mission District east of Dolores. In the blocks of run-down post-war housing in Hunter’s Point, east of the 101, gunfire from passing cars was more common than usual.

In fact, incidents of random gunfire had increased all over the city in the five days since a burst of semi-automatic weapons fire had startled tourists outside the Cliff House Restaurant on the northwest shore, on the morning of January 12th. Of less general concern, the wild monkeys that lived in the sycamore trees on Russian Hill had begun a fearsome screeching every evening at sunset, and in the sunless dawns vast flocks of crows wheeled silently over the old buildings at the south end of the Embarcadero by the China Basin. The
Chronicle
ran a brief human-interest article about the spontaneous street-dancing that had started in these South-of-Market streets and alleys around the French restaurant whose name translated as
I Am Starving;
the rain-soaked dancers were described as neo-Beatnik youths and unreconstructed old hippies, and the dance was supposed to be a revival of the French
carmagnole,
and the preferred dance music appeared to be the 1970 Melanie song “Candles in the Wind.”

The newspaper had noted that the
carmagnole
dancers liked to toss lit strings of firecrackers around their feet as they stamped and spun in the ferocious dance, but to Archimedes Mavranos, standing now on the second-floor balcony of the apartment he had rented on Lapu Lapu Street in the shadow of the elevated Bay Bridge Freeway, the staccato
pop-pop-pop
sounded like volleys of full-auto machine-gun fire.

He was tapping his current can of Coors on the wet iron balcony rail. “I don’t like it,” he said over his shoulder.

“Duh,”
said Kootie from the living room behind him.

After frowning for another moment down at the shiny car roofs trundling by on the wet pavement, Mavranos smiled and turned back to the room. “I guess I have made it clear that I don’t like it,” he allowed. “But dammit, it
is
the day the earthquake blew up L.A. The one-year anniversary.”

Kootie was sitting against the door of the unfurnished room, holding a red-blotted face-cloth to his side, and Pete and Angelica Sullivan stood over the old black-and-white television set they had brought along from Solville. It was sitting on top of another TV set, newer but non-functioning, that they had found in the street.

“We drove up there too, a day or so later, to Northridge,” said Pete, without taking his eyes from the images on the working screen, which were just a modern Ford ad at the moment, “to look at the wreckage. Kootie insisted.”

“Of
course
the seventeenth of January is a day to be scared of,” Kootie said to Mavranos. “I saw what happened to L.A. But that would be why the French people you told us about made such a big deal
of
it. How could Dionysus’s mid-winter deathday be anything
but
scary?” He smiled unhappily. “He’s the earthquake boy, right?”

“Our pendulum stuck over the thirty-first, too,” pointed out Angelica—wearily, for she had pointed it out many times already. “Tet.”

“Our
pendulum
,” said Mavranos in disgust as he drained his beer and strode in through the living room to the kitchen, which fortunately had come with a refrigerator. “Our
scientific apparatus
,” he called derisively as he took a fresh can from the refrigerator’s door-shelf.

Angelica had brought along several jars of pennies to shake at the TV, and over the last five days the old black woman had several times been induced to intrude on the TV screen here in San Francisco, though the reception of her inserts was scratchy here with some unimaginable kind of static. And she had spoken, too, though her opening words each time had been just an idiot repetition of the last phrases spoken on the real channel before her image had crowded out the normal programming.

At first the old woman had said that they must find her house, and “eat the seeds of my trees,” so that one of their party could be “indwelt,” which apparently meant inhabited by the old woman’s ghost. The disembodied image on the television had insisted that this was the only way she could properly guide the dead king’s company.

Angelica had vetoed that.
We have no hosts to spare,
she had said.
This
i
s just identity-greed, she wants a body again, and she probably would cling. She can
advise
us just fine from the TV screen, and do her interceding from there.

And the old black woman had had a lot to say, even just from the television speakers. She had babbled—uselessly, Mavranos thought—about being a penitential servant now of Dionysus, whose chapel she had apparently desecrated during her lifetime; she had said that they needed to call the god beside untamed water, and had talked uncertainly about some banker friend of hers who had drowned himself “near Meg’s Wharf.” Pete had gone to the library and established that her drowned friend had been William Ralston, who had founded the Bank of California, and who had drowned near
Meigg’s
Wharf in 1874 after his bank went broke. And she had said that a calendar would have to be consulted with “a plumb line” to determine a propitious date.

Angelica had called on her
bruja
skills and made a pendulum of hairs from Scott Crane’s beard, weighted with the gold Dunhill lighter a professional assassin had once given to Crane; and, after Mavranos had been sent out to buy a calendar, Kootie had dangled the makeshift pendulum over the January page.

The glittering brick-shaped lighter had looked like some kind of Fabergé Pez dispenser with its mouth open, for Angelica had had to open the lid to knot the hair around it—and the lighter had visibly been drawn to the square on the calendar that was the seventeenth, continuing to strain toward it, as if pulled magnetically, even after Kootie’s hand had moved an inch or so past it. And, as Angelica had noted, the swinging lighter had been tugged toward the thirty-first, too, which was the Vietnamese Tet festival and the Chinese New Year. The Year of the Dog was ending, the Year of the Pig due to start on the first of February—and
that
date was the first day of Ramadan, the Moslem holy month of fasting.

Mavranos drank the fresh beer in three very big swallows, then popped open another can to carry with him into the living room.

“The thirty-first would probably work,” he told Angelica stolidly. “I’m with you, I like it better; for one thing, we might be able to get more of a showing from this dead lady that’s supposed to be our
intercessor.
But the thirty-first is two weeks from now. The seventeenth is tomorrow. We’ve been in San Francisco five days today. Scott’s body is still in the back of the truck, and we’ll be getting warm weather eventually. And as Kootie says, if we’re going to ask Dionysus for a favor, it does make sense to do it on his own … terrible … day.”

He looked out the window at the gray concrete pillars of the elevated 101, and he remembered the newspaper photos of the collapsed double-deck 1-880 in Oakland, after the big quake in October of ’89; and he remembered too the flattened cars he and Scott Crane had viewed in Los Angeles a year ago. “Shit,” he said mildly. “I guess we do have to try it tomorrow, intercessor or no intercessor. You should have picked up a football helmet for each of us, along with your skeleton wine.”

“And some Halloween masks,” said Kootie quietly, with a somber glance at Marvranos. “Two or three apiece, ideally.”

Mavranos returned the boy’s look, and thought,
You’ve known all along how this will have to go, haven’t you, kid? And you came along anyway, to
s
ave your parents.
Aloud, he said, “Yeah, they’re probably real cheap this time of year.”

Angelica darted a suspicious look from her foster-son to Mavranos. “That Plumtree woman had
better
still be willing to go through with this,” she said. “Does Cochran say anything about her, what she’s been
doing
for four days? I don’t suppose he’ll bring her along today.”

“No chance of that,” said Mavranos. “Just like I haven’t, for example, been bringing Scott’s body along when I’ve met Cochran at the bar. They-all and us-all don’t trust each other; he thinks I’ll try to shoot Plumtree, and I think Plumtree’s dad will try to finish the job on Scott’s body.” He took a sip of the beer and licked foam off his graying mustache. “I bet Cochran takes as
circuitous
a route back to wherever he’s staying as I do when I come back here.”

“Wherever
he’s
staying?” spoke up Angelica. “Isn’t she staying with him?”

“Well, I assume,” Mavranos began; “he tells me that she is—” Then he exhaled and let himself sit down cross-legged on the wooden floor. “I think she ran away from him, actually,” he admitted in a level voice, “and he doesn’t want to tell me. I think Cochran doesn’t have any clue where she is. Sorry. I think her father came on sometime, and just … ran away with her body.”

Cochran had been visibly drunk at their last two noon meetings at the Li Po bar, and too hearty in his assurances that Plumtree was still eager to get the dead king restored to life; and Mavranos had got the uneasy impression that Cochran was hoping to hear that
Mavranos
had somehow heard from her.

Kootie winced as he got to his feet. “Consider phlebotomy,” he said.

“ ‘—Who was once as tall and handsome as you,’ ” added Mavranos, automatically making a pun on the line in T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
about Phlebas the drowned Phoenician sailor.

Angelica’s face was suddenly pale as she whirled to glare at Kootie, and her voice was low: “
I forbid it absolutely.
We’ve got money—we’re going home. Or somewhere. To hell with this king.”

Pete Sullivan was blinking at the woman and the boy in alarm. Clearly no one had got Mavranos’s pun, not that it mattered. “What?” said Pete. “Lobotomy? For who?”

“
Phle
-botomy,” said Angelica, still scowling at her foster son. “Venesection, bloodletting; from Crane’s body into a, a wine glass, I suppose. You are simply
not
going to let the, that
dead man who we don’t even know,
occupy your head, Kootie! You’re not going to let him have
your
body! Pete, tell him that we—”

“Mom,” said Kootie stonily. “
Angelica.
We’ve
all known,
we haven’t talked about it but we’ve all known—come on!—that the king would probably have to take
my
body to do this, not that woman’s.” His eyes glistened, but he seemed even angrier than Angelica. “Look at my qualifications—I’m a
male,
for one thing. I’m not a virgin, psychically; and I
am
a virgin, physically, which Plumtree probably is not; and I’ve been living the king’s discipline, fish and wine, and rituals, and visions! Call me fucking Fishmeal, excuse me. I’ve got to be … served to him.” His shoulders relaxed, and he rubbed the face-cloth across his eyes, leaving a brushstroke of fresh blood on his cheek. “And who knows, it might work out just the way the Plumtree woman said—he might just use my body to do the magical stuff that’ll let him get back into his own.”

“His own?” shouted Pete. “His own is over fifty years old! And two weeks dead! You’ve been
planning
this? Your mother’s right. Even if he
wanted
to, the Fisher King probably
couldn’t
shift back out of an adolescent body into an old one! Any more than water can run uphill! How would this ‘bloodletting’—”

“ ‘Even if—?” Mavranos interrupted harshly; then he took a deep breath and started again. “ ‘Even if he wanted to’? You—goddammit, you didn’t know the man, so I guess I got no right to take offense. But you know
me,
and I’m telling you now that he wouldn’t, ever, save his own life at the expense of somebody else.” He glared at the TV. “Hey, turn it up—our lady’s on again.”