Earthquake Weather (59 page)

Cochran felt empty. “What’s your name?” he asked, in a voice that he tried to keep from being as flat as a dial-tone.

Slowly, he slid the little bottle-shaped magnet back and forth over the cassette.

“Nina Gestin Leon. Ariachne.” Plumtree’s blue eyes met his. “I see two of you, Scant. I
died
that morning, it seems to me now. Didn’t I?”

“Yes, Nina.” Fighting to conceal the aching bitterness in his throat, he said hoarsely, “You died that morning. I flew your ashes back to the Bas Medoc, to Queyrac, and I talked to your mother and father. We were all very sorry that you were gone, none sorrier than me. I loved you very much.” He pushed the erased tape away, until he felt it tap against the coffee cup.

She shivered visibly, and blinked away tears. “Where do I go now?”

Her peace is the important thing here, he told himself wonderingly, not your betrayed love, not your pride. Let her rest in what peace there is to be had. “To your real husband at last, not just to a symbol anymore.” He couldn’t tell if the quaver in his voice was from rage or grief. “I imagine you’ll find the god … in the garden.”

The frown unkinked from Plumtree’s forehead, leaving her sunburned face expressionless; and Cochran closed his eyes and slowly lowered his face into his hands. He was panting, his breath catching in his throat each time he inhaled, and when he felt hot tears in his palm he realized that he was weeping.

He heard the lifeless voice of Valorie: “O he is even in my mistress’ case, just in her case!” A cold finger touched his cheek. “Stand up, stand up! Stand an you be a man.”

He raised his head and dragged his shirtsleeve across his wet eyes. And then it was recognizably Cody who sat across from him now, blinking at him in bewildered sympathy.

“Sid,” she said. “There’s a car pulling into your driveway.”

He pushed his chair back and stood up. He had left his revolver in the bedroom, and he started down the hall—but then, in the moment before the engine in the driveway was switched off, he recognized the sound of the rumbling exhaust.

He padded barefoot to the front door and squinted through the peephole.

The old Suburban in his driveway was bright blood red. An aura like heat waves was shimmering around it for a distance of about a foot, and the green box hedge on the far side of the driveway shone a brighter green through the aura band.

Pete and Angelica Sullivan were climbing out on this side, and he could see Arky Mavranos getting out from the driver’s side. Kootie’s head was visible in the back seat, and there was no one else with them.

Cochran unlocked the door and pulled it open, and the ocean-scented breeze was chilly on his wet face.

Pete and Angelica were helping Kootie step down from the back seat, but Mavranos plodded around the front of the truck and up the cobblestone walkway.

“Congratulations,” Mavranos said from the bottom of the porch steps. “You’ve got four houseguests.” He looked over Cochran’s shoulder and smiled tightly, and Cochran realized that Cody must have followed him to the door. “It looks like the trick can still be done—somehow—on new terms that no one’s got a clue about.” His smile broadened, baring his white teeth. “I hope you’re still feeling up for it, girl.”

“Oh, shut up, Arky,” Cody said. She stepped past Cochran, out onto the porch. “Is Kootie hurt?”

“Somebody shot him,” said Mavranos. “Probably your psycho doctor. But the boy’s apparently gonna be okay.”

Cody gave a hiss of concern and hurried down the steps, past Mavranos, to help Pete and Angelica.

In Cochran’s living room Angelica stitched up Kootie’s wound with dental floss from a freshly opened box, Pete kneeling alongside to hand her scissors and cotton, while Mavranos paced back and forth at the front window with his revolver in his hand, watching the road. Cochran and Plumtree retreated into the kitchen, where they threw together in a stockpot a big stew of canned clam chowder, crabmeat, chopped green onions, cheap Fume Blanc and curry powder. When it was hot, the aroma apparently convinced everyone that the late breakfast at Seafood Bohemia hadn’t been adequate, and in half an hour all of them, even Mavranos, were sitting around Cochran’s dining-room table mopping the last of the makeshift chowder out of their soup bowls with stale sourdough bread. By unspoken common consent they were all drinking Pellegrino mineral water.

Cochran had to remind himself that these people had treated him rudely—and abused his credit card—and got him into the middle of an actual
gunfight,
in which people had probably been
killed
—for he found that he was unthinkingly warmed to have the Sullivans and Kootie and Mavranos come fussing and suffering into his life again, somehow especially after his humiliations with Plumtree and Nina’s ghost. Despite all their bickering and crisis, they always brought with them an urgent, sweaty sense of purpose.

“How long were you people planning to stay here?” Cochran asked now, forcing his voice to be flat and uncompromising. “Overnight?”

Mavranos gave him a bland stare and Pete and Angelica Sullivan looked uneasy, but it was Kootie who answered: “Until the end of the month,” the boy said diffidently. “Until the Vietnamese Tet festival, or maybe the start of the Moslem fast, Ramadan. That’s February the first. Our pendulum—”

“Two weeks?” protested Cochran. “I’ve got a job! I’ve got neighbors! I’ve got—furniture that I don’t need wrecked.”

“It’s not
quite
two weeks,” said Kootie. “Uh … eleven days.”

“I saw Scott Crane’s skeleton,” said Plumtree. “How is it supposed to work this time? He takes me forever?” She raised her eyebrows. “He takes
Kootie
forever?”

“Neither, I think,” said Kootie. Cochran noticed that the boy didn’t seem happy to be exempted—in fact he looked haunted and sick. “I don’t know—we have to ask Mammy Pleasant. She’s the old black lady from the TV.”

Angelica snorted. “She’s been no help up to now.”

“Maybe Crane will just …
materialize
a body,” ventured Plumtree.

“No,” said Pete, “where will he get
stuff
from? He’ll need protoplasm, like a hundred and sixty or so pounds of it!”

“Edison conjured up a sort of body,” said Kootie quietly, “a mask, at least, when he took me over, in ’92; he used the flesh of a dog I was friends with. I’ve dreamed of it, since. In one second, Fred—the dog—was suddenly just a bloody skeleton, and Edison had a flesh head and hands of his own, and even a furry black overcoat.” He gulped some of the mineral water. “But the flesh was killed in the rearrangement. I’m sure it just rotted, after we shed it.”

Jesus, thought Cochran.

Angelica nodded. “So he’ll not only need protoplasm, but
unkilled
protoplasm. Are we supposed to bring some homeless guy along? A bunch of dogs?”

“Pigs are supposed to be very like humans, physically,” said Plumtree. “Maybe we should bring a couple of good-size pigs.”

Mavranos was pale, and looked as though he wanted to spit. “Kootie
talked
to old Pleasant today. Her ghost, but in person, not on a TV. She’s apparently sort of an indentured servant, or prisoner serving out hard-labor time, of Dionysus, and she’s—and the god is too—trying to help us. Apparently. She gave Kootie a message for Crane, some kind of summons and commandment, and it’s in the form of a Latin palindrome. I don’t like that, ’cause it’s
ghosts
that are drawn to palindromes, and Crane’s
ghost
is a naked imbecile running around at the Sutro ruins.”

“Is it the Latin thing I burned up the matchbook with,” asked Cochran, “in the motel room? And there was another Latin bit that Cody and I saw, on an ashtray in L.A. I don’t remember what it was.”

Mavranos hiked his chair back to dig a car registration slip out of his jeans pocket. He unfolded it, and read:

“Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit Amor.

Si bene te tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis.

Sole, medere pede: ede, perede melos.”

“That first line is definitely the thing that was on the ashtray in L.A.,” said Plumtree.

Cochran could feel hairs stirring on the back of his neck. “After I read that line out loud, there, Crane’s ghost showed up as our taxi driver. And after I read out the second one, in the Sutro ruins, his crazy naked ghost appeared
there.
”

“Don’t speak the third one now,” said Mavranos. “A naked guy banging around in your kitchen would only upset the ladies. Wouldn’t do me any good, either, seeing a semblance of my old friend in that totally bankruptious state.” He sighed, then glared at Cochran. “Okay if I use your phone? I should see if Nardie’s got the damn thing translated.”

“There’s a speakerphone in the kitchen,” Cochran said. “Talk to her on that, so we can all hear it.”

In the sunny kitchen, Cochran and Plumtree resumed their seats at the table, while Pete and Angelica leaned on the counter by the sink. Kootie slumped into a third chair, but looked at the counter as if he’d have liked to climb up on it if he hadn’t had fresh stitches in his side. Cochran recalled that Kootie had sat up on a washing machine when they had tried to call Crane’s ghost in Solville, and he wondered why the boy wanted to be distanced from the ground when important calls were being made.

Mavranos had walked straight to the telephone on the wall and punched in the eleven digits of the long-distance number, and now tapped the speakerphone button.

“Hello?” came a young woman’s cautious voice out of the speaker; Cochran had seldom used the speakerphone function, and he now reflected ruefully that the sound wasn’t as good as what Kootie’s chalk-in-the-pencil-sharpener speaker had produced.

“Arky here, Nardie,” said Mavranos, “with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men listening in. Whaddaya got?”

“Okay, your three palindromes are a pentameter followed by a hexameter followed by a pentameter,” said the woman called Nardie. “That’s a natural alternation in Roman lyric verse, like in Horace and Catullus. This could be very damned old, you know? And the lines do seem to relate to your—our—situation. You got a pencil?”

Mavranos pulled open a drawer under the telephone and pawed through it. “Yes,” he said, fumbling out an eyeliner pencil and Cochran’s January gas bill.

“Okay,” said Nardie’s voice from the speaker, “
Roma,
with a comma after it, is in the vocative case, addressing Rome, which our context pretty clearly makes ‘spiritual power on Earth,’ like a rogue version of the Vatican, okay?
Tibi subito
is ‘to you, suddenly, abruptly.’
Motibus
is in the ablative case, indicating in what manner, so it means something like ‘with dancing motion,’ though Cicero uses it in the phrase
motus terrae,
which means an earthquake.”

“You told me
motibus
was ‘motor bus,’ ” Plumtree whispered to Cochran. She seemed relieved.

He nodded tightly and waved at her to be quiet.

“Ibit.”
Nardie was saying, “is the third-person future tense of ‘to go.’ Of course
amor
is ‘love,’ but the capital
A
makes me think it’s a person, like some god of love; and in this suddenness-and-earthquake context very likely a harsh one.”

Cochran was thinking of the god who had awakened him with an apparent earthquake in the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas nearly five years ago, and of Nina, who had preferred that god’s fatal love to his own.

“In the second line,” Nardie went on,
“taxat
is a first-declension verb,
taxo, taxare,
meaning ‘hold, value, esteem.’ Literally, it’s ‘if your praise values you well,’ but in English that’d be ‘if you value your praise well.’
Sua
is a possessive pronoun—it has to be in the nominative case, though I’d have liked
suam
better; anyway, it’s feminine, agreeing with the feminine
laus,
which is ‘praise’ or ‘fame.’ I think ‘your fame’ here is supposed to be actually, literally feminine in relation to this
Amor
person, who is fairly emphatically masculine.
Laute
is ‘gloriously.’
Tenebis
is a second-declension verb: ‘to hold, to arrive at.’ ”

Mavranos was impatiently waving the eyeliner pencil in front of his face. “Nardie, what does the goddamn thing
mean
?”

A shaky sigh buzzed out of the speaker. “I’m explaining why I think it means what I’m gonna tell you, Arky, okay? Now listen, the last line really does flicker between alternate readings; I just finished untangling this a few minutes ago.
Sole,
with a comma after it, is like
Roma
in the first line, it has to be the vocative of
sol,
direct address for ‘sun,’ as in ‘O Sun.’
Medere
is an infinitive or a gerund—or, as we’ve got here, an imperative—of ‘cure, remedy’; it’s not so much ‘to cure’ or ‘curing’ as it is an
order,
see—‘fix it!’ or ‘remedy it!’
Pede
is ‘louse,’ the singular noun, as in Pliny’s use of
pediculus
or the English word ‘pediculosis,’ which means an infestation of lice. Now the verb
Ede
is very interesting here; it’s either from
edo, edere, edi, esum,
which is the usual Latin verb for ‘devour, consume, eat away’—or else it’s another verb,
edo, edere, edidi, editum,
which means ‘breathe one’s last, bring to an end,’ or at the same time ‘give birth to,’ or ‘give forth from oneself.’ Either verb works here, though the long
e
imposed by the trochaic meter makes me favor the second one.
Perede
is emphasis, emphatic repetition of the previous verb, whichever that is. And
melos
is generally translated as ‘song,’ but it’s a Latinized Greek word—obviously, from the suffix, right?—and the Greek for
melos
can also be ‘limb.’ As a Latin word it could be either nominative or accusative here, but with the Greek form it’s got to be accusative, a direct object.”

“What,” said Mavranos, speaking with exaggerated clarity, “does—
the-damn-thing-mean
?”

“Okay. In my interpretation, it means: ‘O spiritual power on Earth, the god of love will come to you suddenly and abruptly,’ either ‘with dancing movements’ or ‘as an earthquake’—or as both, conceivably. ‘If you value your praise highly you will hold it’—or ‘arrive at it’—‘gloriously. O Sun, remedy the louse: give forth from yourself, and give forth from yourself again, your limb.’ And with the confusion of the two
edo
vebs, there’s the implication of ‘your
devoured
limb.’ ”