Earthquake Weather (47 page)

Angelica had fetched her canvas knapsack from the truck while Mavranos and Pete and Cochran had been carrying Scott Crane’s body down the steps, and now she was spreading out on the damp stones her paltry-looking tools—there was, along with the assorted garage-sale litter he’d seen last night in the motel room, an empty H. Upmann cigar box, a can of Ronsonol lighter fluid, a pair of pliers, a Star Motel postcard … Cochran shook his head in bewilderment.

Mavranos cussed and slapped at his own neck. “No hippie druids this morning,” he said, “but we got flies up the butt.”

“Here, at this hour,” said Angelica in a strained voice, “those can’t be anything but ghost-flies;
las moscas,
little essences of dead people, either brought in on us or already here. Ordinarily they’d just be an implicit cloud, but they’re condensed to individuality this morning by the sudden low pressure of having the dead king right here.” She glanced up, frowning. “Try not to breathe them—and if any of you have got any bleeding cuts, cover them.”

She handed Mavranos the bottle of ’75 Kenwood Cabernet. “You hold this, Arky,” she told him; “open it when I tell you.”

“Go ahead and do this thing right,” Mavranos said, “but as much on fast-forward as you can, okay? Those guys in the boat will be back, or their friends.”

“Right, Arky,” Angelica said, “but it’s important for this procedure that all the minds present understand what’s going on, assent to it.” Speaking to all of them, she went on rapidly, “See, we’re gonna be doing a kind of ass-backward honoring-of-the-dead here. Usually the procedure is to have a heavily masked guy, a Lucumi
ogungun,
let himself be taken over by the ghost of the deceased; it’s to let the ghost see the funeral and mourners and flower displays and all, and everybody being sorry, so that the ghost can go away, can dissipate happily and not hang around and cause trouble.”

While she’d been talking she had laid the cigar box on the stones and draped it with a white linen handkerchief, and now she set on it a water glass from the motel. As she hoisted a plastic bottle of Evian water out of the knapsack and began twisting off the cap, she said, in a formal tone, “This is an altar, a
bóveda espiritual.
” It seemed to be a declaration, and she poured the glass half full of water as she spoke.

She looked up at Plumtree then, and her mirror glasses were lozenges of glowing gray sky. Cochran could see the butt of the slung carbine under her open raincoat. “The way it ordinarily works,” Angelica went on at her previous quick pace, “is you set out a glass of some nice kind of water, and everybody dabs some on their hands and temples, as a kind of cleansing, so the guest-of-honor ghost will have a transparent medium to focus on but won’t
fixate
on anybody.” She took the Wild Turkey bottle out of the canvas sack and twisted out the cork. “But,” she said hoarsely, “we don’t
want
his
ghost,
we want
him.
And we want to make sure that he
does
fixate, that retreat is not even an option for him.”

She poured the still-liquid red blood into the water, about three tablespoons, and then covered the glass with the Star Motel postcard to keep the ghost-flies out of it. “So you’re going to
drink
this.”

Plumtree was biting her lip, but she nodded. “This has to work,” she was whispering, “please let this work, this has to work …” The sunburn was spotty over her cheekbones, as if the skin was stretched tight, and Cochran guessed that her hands would have been trembling if she had not been clenching them tightly together, as if in prayer.

Cochran remembered the note Kootie had left, when he had run away last night.
I can’t do it again … me be out of my head … I’d go crazy.
This woman, Cochran thought, underwent electroconvulsive therapy six days ago this morning. She was knocked out of her own head, and has been evicted again several times since then by her terrible father … most recently for more than two whole days, and she got herself back just yesterday morning. Cochran remembered her saying yesterday, in a falsely, bravely cheerful voice,
The goat head was speaking, in a human language …
But she’s here, doing this, voluntarily.
Assenting,
and then some.

He stepped closer to her and reached out and squeezed her hand. Without glancing away from the glass of streaky red water on the draped cigar box, Plumtree shook her hand free of his.

“No offense,” she said faintly. “This is our flop.”

Cochran took a step back. Over the wavering drone of the flies he heard a faint pattering on the stones behind him, and when he turned he saw Mavranos brushing tiny cubes of truck-window glass out of his hair.

“I could drive back for coffee and doughnuts,” Mavranos said.

“We’re almost ready here,” said Angelica.

She now laid the myrtle branches on the stones and squirted them with the Ronsonol lighter fluid; and she laid out as well the gold Dunhill lighter and the two silver dollars that Spider Joe had brought to Solville.

At last Angelica straightened up, with a visible shudder, and elbowed the slung carbine back behind her hip. “Okay, Arky,” she said, “open that skeleton-label wine. We’re each going to take a sip of it, and then I’m going to light the myrtle. This stuff will get—God help us!—it’ll get the attention of Dionysus, his
remote
attention, I trust, and that will give us a line-of-sight link to the underworld.”

“And from the underworld right back to us, here,” said Mavranos stolidly as he twisted the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife into the cork. “Pogo?” he called loudly into the gray sky. He yanked the cork out with a frail pop. “That’s a sound you ought to recognize, old friend.”

He tipped the bottle up to his lips, and after a couple of bubbles had wobbled up inside it he lowered it and passed it to Pete Sullivan, who also drank from it.

“Plumtree last,” said Angelica, taking the bottle from her husband and handing it to Cochran. The harbor breeze was tossing her black hair around her face. “And out of the glass.”

Cochran raised the cold bottle and took several deep gulps, and he was so hungry for the blurring effect of alcohol on his empty stomach, on this terrible morning, that he had to force himself to hand it back without swallowing more.

“Thirsty boy,” said Angelica bleakly. “You’re not through yet, by the way.” She drank a token mouthful herself, then crouched again by her little altar and, flicking the postcard away, topped up the water glass with purple Cabernet. She clanked the bottle down on the stones and lifted the glass, and straightened up and handed it to Plumtree.

“Not quite yet,” Angelica said to her. “You,” she told Cochran, “hold up that right hand of yours, toward the water, with that birthmark facing out.”

Cochran’s ears were ringing, and he distinctly felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt. “Why?” he whispered. I won’t, he thought. He heard again what he had said in the self-esteem group at Rosecrans Medical Center, on that first day:
Reach out your hand, you get it cut off, sometimes.
And he remembered seeing the red blood jetting from his chopped wrist, when he had put his hand between the old Zinfandel stump and the pruning shears thirty-three years ago. He was about to say
I won’t
out loud, but Mavranos spoke before he could:

“I got no affection for your girlfriend,” Mavranos said gruffly, “but I gotta say that she’s bought a lot of … plain cold admiration, in my rating. Not that she cares, I’m sure. What she’s ready to do … I don’t think I
could
do. None of the rest of us can claim our part’s too hard, in this, compared to hers.”

“That mark on your hand is some kind of Dionysus badge,” Angelica said gently, “isn’t it?”

Le Visage dans la Vigne,
Cochran thought. The Face in the Vine Stump. “I suppose it is,” he said helplessly, and then in his mind he heard again the hard
crack
of Plumtree’s fist hitting the bloody madhouse linoleum floor, right after he had punched Long John Beach in the nose. His teeth ached now as he took a deep breath of the sea air and let it out in shaky segments. “I’m … with you. Okay.” Slowly he lifted his right arm, with the palm of his hand turned back.

“Okay,” echoed Angelica. To Plumtree she said, “Now when I get the myrtle burning, you call to—damn it, you brought this on yourself, you know, girl, I’m so sorry, but—call to Scott Crane; and then drink—” She shook her head quickly and waved at the glass of rusty-colored liquid in Plumtree’s hand, then whispered the last word, “—it.”

Cochran noticed that the peak of the alcove roof and the top of the marble stair were shining now in the cold pink light of dawn. Mavranos stood on tiptoe and looked back down the peninsula.

“Sun’s coming up,” he said, “over Fort Mason.”

“Get the pliers,” Angelica told him. “Pull the spear out of his throat.”

Mavranos swallowed visibly, but his face was impassive as he nodded. “Happy to.” He picked up the pliers and then knelt beside Scott Crane’s body, with his back to the others; Cochran saw his shoulders flex under the denim jacket, and then he was straightening up, holding the closed pliers out away from himself, and the red-stained three-pointed spearhead quivered between the pliers’ jaws.

“Can I pitch it into the ocean?” he asked hoarsely.

“You have to,” said Angelica, nodding and not looking at the thing.

Mavranos reached back over his shoulder and then snapped his hand forward, letting the pliers spring open at the last moment, as if he were casting a fishing fly. The little bloody metal fork spun away, glittering for a moment in the horizontal sunlight, and then disappeared behind a wave.

Cochran looked back at the body of Scott Crane. A spatter of fresh red blood stood out on the dark beard, but the pale, lined face was as composed and noble as before, and he reminded himself that at the moment Crane was incapable of feeling pain.

The two silver dollars were lying on the stones near Scott Crane’s bare feet. “Aren’t you gonna put the coins on his eyes?” Cochran asked.

“No,” snapped Angelica. “They’re his fare
over.
We want him to come
back
.”

Then why have them here at all? thought Cochran defensively. His raised arm was getting tired.

Angelica crouched to pick up the myrtle branches and the gold cigarette lighter, and she opened the lighter’s lid and flicked the striker; the myrtle caught and burned with an almost invisible flame, though Cochran could smell the incense-like smoke.

Angelica nodded to Plumtree.

Plumtree faced the now-glittering gray water, and when she had lifted the glass she paused. “Not even Valorie?” she asked in a quiet voice, clearly not addressing any of the others present. “This is
mine
?”

Standing to the side of her with his arm stiffly raised, Cochran could see wind-blown tears streaming back across her cheek.

“Scott Crane!”
she called strongly out toward the waves and the glowing fog.
“I know you can fucking hear me! Come into me, into this body of your murderer!”
And she tipped the glass up and drank it down in three convulsive swallows.

With a drumming roar like the sound of a forest fire, sudden solid rain thrashed down onto the peninsula, flinging up a haze of splash-spray over the stones and blurring the surface of the sea. The sudden haze of flying water was lit by two rapid white flares of lightning, and the sudden hard crash of close thunder battered at the marble walls and rocked Cochran back on his heels.

Plumtree’s hair was instantly soaked, and it flew out like snakes when she flung her head back and shouted out three syllables of harsh laughter.

“Four-and-twenty blackbrides baked in a pie!”
roared the voice of Omar Salvoy from her gaping mouth.
“When the pie was opened, the brides began to sing! Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king!”

Cochran had lost his footing, and he twisted as he fell so that his knees and elbows knocked against the wet stones.

He could see the remains of Scott Crane, only a couple of feet in front of his face. It was a bare gray skull that now lolled above the collar of the shirt, and the already-wet fabric was collapsed against stark ribs and no abdomen at all, and the hands that spilled from the cuffs were long-fingered gray bone.

Plumtree turned away from the sea, and even through the dimness and the retinal afterglare from the lightning Cochran could see the white of her bared teeth, and he knew this was Plumtree’s father, Omar Salvoy. He might have been looking straight at Cochran.

“Mother!”
Cochran yelled, and though he was only trying to induce the Follow-the-Queen effect in her, to his surprise the wail powerfully evoked his own dormant childhood fear of being heartbreakingly lost and monstrously found, and he was glad that the rain would hide the tears he felt springing from his eyes. For his self-respect more than from any particular hope of its efficacy, he shouted,
“Janis’s mom!”

Perhaps it had worked—at any rate the figure that was Plumtree was allowing itself to be hustled back up the stairs by Mavranos, and Angelica was now crouched on the other side of the dressed skeleton, hastily folding the stick-like arms and legs.

Angelica looked up at him over the arch of the cloth-draped breastbone. “Get the Wild Turkey bottle!” she said.

Cochran nodded, and crawled across the stones and snatched up the pint bottle in the moment before Pete Sullivan grabbed him under the arms and hauled him to his feet. Cochran had almost dropped the bottle in surprise—it was as hot as if scalding coffee had just been poured out of it, and he shoved it into the pocket of his windbreaker.

Another flare of lightning lit the weathered stones through the thick haze of rain, and the instant bomb-blast of thunder fluttered the wet hair on the back of Cochran’s head.

Things like beanbags were falling out of the sky and hitting the stones all around him—he squinted at a couple of them as Pete hurried him across the pavement, and he saw that they were dead seagulls. Over the roar of the rain battering the pavement he could hear bestial groans and howls shaking out of the mouths of the deeply moored pipes now.