Earthquake Weather (55 page)

But her will had prevailed—she had
sold
the wine, for profane cash, to a local importer who had a lifetime of old crimes to forget.

A Hungarian emigrant called Agoston Haraszthy had arrived in America in that same year, 1840, and by 1848 had taken on the role of secret king of the American West in distant San Diego—the first of the New World kings—but Mary Ellen had already unfitted herself to be his destined queen, and his reign would now be unbalanced and obstructed.

For sheer concealment she went through the rituals of conversion to Roman Catholicism, and then married a man who owned a tobacco plantation in Charles Town, Virginia. She poisoned him with arsenic, and shortly after that married the plantation overseer in order to sacramentally take the man’s fortuitous last name:
Plaissance,
which derived from the French
plaisant:
—a jester, a joker. It was a name that was virtually a motley mask in itself.

She took her new husband back to New Orleans. Though ostensibly Catholic now, Mary Ellen bore little resemblance these days to the girl who had scampered through the halls of the Ursuline convent in muslin dresses and ribbon-tied sandals—she took up the bloody practice of real voodoo, under the tutelage of the infamous Marie Laveau, who got for Mary Ellen a high-paid position as cook for the household of a planter in nearby Bayou St. John.

Mary Ellen was a sincerely ardent abolitionist, and she used her privileged position to make contacts with negro slaves throughout the New Orleans area; and she managed to spirit away such a number of them to freedom through “the Underground” that the authorities began looking for the light-skinned negro woman who always seemed to attend somehow at the escapes—and this slave-stealing woman was too-accurately described as tall and thin, with mismatched eyes.

And so one night Mary Ellen had fled, leaving behind in her bed a bolster wrapped in her nightdress with a wig on it. Marie Laveau booked steamship passage for her to San Francisco, by way of Cape Horn.

Mary Ellen arrived in San Francisco on April 7, 1852—but Agoston Haraszthy himself came to the city only a few months later to establish his kingdom in nearby Sonoma; and of course he had brought with him cuttings of the god’s New World wine, which by this time had already reached the Bay Area and was known, properly at last, as
Zinfandel.

The god would still have forgiven her, on some basis—but she fought him.

She quickly got employment as a gourmet cook, serving Cajun
pirogis
and shrimp
remoulade
and exotic spicy
jambalaya
to the bankers and gold-dealers of San Francisco—and she made contact with escaped slaves and was able to find jobs for them in the households of affluent families; and then she used her beneficiaries as spies to gather valuable particulars of scandal … murders, illicit births, embezzlements, abortions. Soon she owned several laundries, but blackmail was her real business.

“My life,” she had told Kootie ruefully this morning at the kitchen table, “was based on the very
opposite
of any divine
pagadebiti
.”

In her voodoo procedures she didn’t hesitate to
use
the power of alcohol, and even of wine, but always in spitefully broken or vitiated forms. The founder of the mercantile firm F. W. Macondray & Company had erected a grapery, a greenhouse-chapel to the god’s holy vine, at the corner of Stockton and Washington—and so in 1866 Mary Ellen Pleasant, as she now called herself, bought the property and sacrilegiously converted it to the boardinghouse whose kitchen she and Kootie were now sitting in; and to the bankers and steamship owners who dined at her boardinghouse she served hot raspberry vinegar, and cowslip wine, and double-distilled elderberry brandies. When in 1892 she finally killed the man who had been her main benefactor in San Francisco, she first hobbled his ghost by serving him wine from which she had boiled off all the alcohol … and then after she had pushed him over a high spiral stair railing she hurried down to where his body lay on the parquet entry-hall floor and pulled the hot brains out of his split skull, so that the ghost would be sure to dissipate in confused fragments.

“A surer trick than those ashtrays with
Madam, I’m Adam
or some such nonsense written around them,” Mammy Pleasant had told Kootie this morning.

“I bet,” Kootie had said hoarsely.

“But at the turn of the century the god caught up with me,” she had said, taking Kootie’s empty plate to the sink, “and took everything away—my great house on Octavia Street, my servants, my money—until at the last I was a plain homeless charity case, shambling around the Fillmore district like … like a bolster with an old wig on it, in a nightdress. I had only one companion left by then, a negro giant who was actually my captor and guard, known to people as
Bacus
—” She spelled it out for Kootie. “—because people didn’t ever see it spelled right, which would have been B-A-C-C-H-U-S. He—it—was a sort of idiot fragment of the god’s attention. And finally, on January eleventh of 1904, in the spare room of a mere Good Samaritan acquaintance, I died.”

Kootie looked past her. He thought the strings of garlic and dried red peppers hung in the high corner of the ceiling had lost some of their color in the last few minutes, even become a bit transparent, but he wished forlornly that he could just forget his life and become one of the boarders here.

The old woman went on softly, perhaps talking to herself: “For a while after that I just drifted in the gray daguerreotype-plate ghost-world version of the city, lost, mostly on the beaches by Sutra’s Cliff House and Point Lobos and Land’s End. It was a time of cleansing exile for me, like Ariadne abandoned on Naxos by her false human lover Theseus. At last, three Easters and three days after I died, the god mercifully did come back for my ghost, and he knocked down Yerba Buena when he came.”

She looked up at Kootie, and her mismatched eyes were again sharp. “For me,” she said, “January eleventh is the open door of the revolving year, and on that day I was able to call out to you people, to try to tell you all what you had to do. And I was interceding for you all with the god—he broke your two friends out of the madhouse on that night, and allowed the king’s ghost to be called and drive them right to where you were, where his body was. You had every species of help.”

“I don’t know that we’ve done very well,” said Kootie.

“You’ve all done very badly,” she agreed, “and amassed huge debts.”

From a shelf stacked with old gray cookbooks and account ledgers she now pulled down a jarringly modern oversized paperback book with garish red and green swirls and the word
FRACTALS
in big red letters on the slick cover. She flipped it open to an inner page and showed Kootie a color picture of flames or ferns or octopus tentacles boiling away from a warty, globular black shape.

“Have you seen this silhouette before?” she asked gently, pointing to a clearer picture of the five-lobed silhouette, which resembled a fat person with a little round head and stumpy arms and round buttocks.

Kootie could only look away from the picture and nod and close his throat against sudden nausea. It was the silhouette that had appeared on the television screen in the motel this morning after Arky had poured beer into the set, and it was, too, the shape he had momentarily seen overlapping the pretty Chinese woman when he had first glimpsed her today in the Street of Gamblers.

Mammy Pleasant sighed and shook her head. “Oh, it’s death, child, the person of the god’s unholy trinity that’s retributive death, and you can testify yourself that it does love to have people enter into its terrible bargain.
It
was the person of the god that came for me
first,
on that cold January eleventh morning, demanding payment for chopping down the vine in Macondray’s grapery—dethroning the vine god, killing the vegetation king, beheading the Green Knight. In olden-days history it was called the Quinotaur, and it gave power to the Frankish king Merovee in the Dark Ages—it came to him in the form of a talking bear, and Merovee cut its head off—and it came back under the name of”—she tapped the page—“Pepin the Fat, to kill Merovee’s greatly-greatly-grandson Dagobert, and that ended the Merovingian line of kings in that long-ago time. And it’s been known as Bertilak of the High Desert, the Green Knight, who met Sir Gawain at the Green Chapel on New Year’s Day, a year after Gawain had cut off Bertilak’s head, to collect on that debt. Other folk, meaning to or not, have let the Quinotaur take over themselves to some degree, and always they come back to demand payment-in-kind for their murders.”

Mammy Pleasant seemed to relax, though she was still frowning. “You should go now, child. The New Year is close at hand. The Quinotaur doesn’t always
take
the life he’s owed—the Green Knight didn’t behead Gawain, just nicked his neck, because he showed courage. Show courage yourself.”

“Courage,” echoed Kootie, and the word reminded him of the Cowardly Lion of Oz. The memory of watching that innocent movie on television in Solville, in the contented days before the red truck had arrived, before Kootie was a murderer, brought tears to his eyes.

She tugged a bookmark out of the volume’s back pages, and handed it to Kootie. “You people should have come to me for this before. Your king is the suicide king now, you’ve got to keep him in your deck—he’s unconditionally surrendered, you see, and is waiting for his instructions, any orders at all. But the god is merciful sometimes—these commandments haven’t changed.” She handed Kootie the paper—he glanced at it, but it seemed to be poetry in Latin, which he couldn’t read. “You bring your people back here,” the old woman went on, “and take me away with you. The god still looks with favor on your king, and wants you all to succeed in restoring him to life: the god owes a good turn to one of your king’s company. But it will cost each of you much more, now, than it would have once. Child, it can’t any longer be your
king
who comes under your curly-haired roof—and your
king
will have to come somewhere else.”

Mammy Pleasant put down the book and then moved some jars away from a breadbox on the counter, scattering dust and tearing cobwebs. Kootie looked around and saw that the kitchen had deteriorated in the last few moments—the windows were blurred with greasy dirt now and blocked by vines clinging to the outside of the glass, and the paint was flaking off of the sagging shelves. The old woman tugged open the lid of the breadbox, breaking old rust deposits—and then she lifted out of it Diana’s yellow baby blanket. She reached across the warped table to hand it to him.

Kootie wordlessly took it and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans. He knew it must have fallen out of his pocket in the bedroom upstairs, not an hour ago; and he couldn’t even bring himself to wonder how it had wound up here.

Mammy Pleasant blinked around at the iron sinks and the cutting boards and the wire-mesh pantry doors, as if for the last time. “This place won’t stay visibly wedged into your electric new world much longer,” she said. “I’ll show you out.”

She led him out of the kitchen—into a huge shadowy Victorian hall, clearly once elegant but now dark and dusty and empty of furniture. A spiral stairway receded away up toward a dim skylight several floors above, and when Kootie looked down at his feet he saw a dark stain on the parquet floor.

“We’re in my house on Octavia Street now,” Pleasant told him as she led him to a tall, ornate door at the end of the passage, “not as it was in my arrogant days, and anyway
it
won’t last much longer here either. You all come back here and get me. Look to the trees, you’ll see how.” She twisted the knob and pushed open the door. “Go left,” she said from behind him, “up the street. Don’t look back for a few blocks.”

Kootie blinked in the sudden gray daylight. Splintery old wooden steps led down to a yard choked with brown weeds, and beyond a row of eucalyptus trees he could see a street, with a cable car trundling up the middle of the pavement and ringing its bell.

He remembered this cable-car bell from the first time they had got Pleasant on the television in Solville, and he recalled Thomas Edison’s ghost telling him once that streetcar tracks were a good masking measure—“the tracks make a nice set of mirrors.”
For a while,
Kootie thought now as he stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket.
Not forever.

Obediently he walked down the steps and across the overgrown yard to the sidewalk, where he turned left, kicking his way through the drifts of acorn-like seeds that had fallen from the eucalyptus trees.

He was sweating in the cold morning air, and he wasn’t tempted to look back as he walked away from the house; he didn’t even want to look around, for there were no traffic lights at all visible between the corniced buildings bracketing the narrow intersection ahead of him, and aside from the receding cable car all the vehicles on the street were horse-drawn carriages, and though he was aware of the clopping of the horses’ hooves and the voices of the quaintly dressed people that he passed, he was aware too of breezy
silence
in the background. The air smelled of grass and the sea and wood smoke and horse manure.

After he had walked two blocks, the noise of the modern world abruptly crashed back in upon him: car engines, and radio music, and the sheer roaring undertone of the modern city. His nostrils dilated at the aggressive odor of diesel fumes.

Oh, this is magic, he thought, for only the second time in that whole morning.

Between the traffic lights swung a metal street sign—he was at the intersection of Octavia and California, and Lombard Street and the Star Motel lay a dozen steep blocks ahead of him.

If my mom and dad are still alive, I’ll meet them there, he thought. If they’re not, if they’ve been killed because I ran away this morning—

Recoiling away from the thought, and from a suspense that could not possibly be resolved either way without grief, he began a loud chanting in his head to drown out all thoughts as he strode north on the Octavia Street sidewalk:
The Green Ripper, the Green Giant, the Green Knight. I owe him a beheading. The Green Ripper, the Green Giant, the Green Knight …