Earthquake Weather (60 page)

“Leave the suicide king in the deck,” said Plumtree.

Mavranos frowned at her, but nodded. “I think I tried to tell Scott that, when we went to Northridge after the earthquake a year ago. The subterranean phylloxera lice were a summons from … under sanctified ground.”

“He never could bear to cut back the grapevines, in the midwinter,” said Nardie’s voice from the speaker, “after that first year. Even when the babies started to get fevers and pulmonary infections in the winters, and he had to eat No-Doz all day long, and his fingernails bled.” There was a pause while she might have shrugged. “He was still strong in the summers.”

Cochran was remembering putting out his hand to keep the face in the stump from being beheaded. “What we do next,” he said, glancing at everyone but finally fixing his gaze on Angelica, “is what?”

Angelica gave him a tired smile. “Thank you for the ‘we,’ ” she said. “We won’t ask you for your gun again. What we do next,” she said, stepping away from the counter and stretching, “can’t be anything else but summon Kootie’s silly old black lady, I guess.” She dropped her arms and looked at Plumtree. “We’ve got to talk to her in person.”

“In
this
person, you mean,” said Plumtree, though only in a tone of tired resignation. “Jeez, if my own genetic
father,
imposed on me, gives me toothaches and nosebleeds, God knows what this strange old woman will be like.”

“No,” said Kootie, “your father never died, but Mammy Pleasant did. She’s a ghost. When Edison had possession of me, there was nothing like that afterward. Ghosts don’t have the, the
psychic DNA
of a body anymore, they’ve got no vital structure to impose on the living body that hosts them.”

“Cool,” sighed Plumtree. “Not really my idea of a fun date
anyway,
to tell you the truth, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.” She stood up from the table. “Tell me what I’ve got to do.”

“I’m Bernardette Dinh,” came the voice from the speaker, “at the king’s overthrown Camelot in Leucadia.”

“I’m Janis Cordelia Plumtree, and my
compadre
here is Sid Cochran. I hope we can all meet in person one day, in the presence of the king.”

“Back in Solville,” said Kootie hesitantly, “Mammy Pleasant told us, ‘eat the seeds of my trees.’ ”

Angelica now reached into the pocket of her denim jacket and pulled out a fistful of what looked like angular gray acorns. She dropped them onto the kitchen table, and their rattling was nothing like bar dice. “We picked these up this morning, at the foot—sorry, at the
waist
—of one of her suffering trees. Koala bears eat this stuff, so it’s probably not poison,” she said. “I figure we can make an infusion in wine with some of ’em, and grind up some others to mix with flour and make bread.”

The vine by nature is apt to fall, and unless supported drops down to the earth; yet in order to keep itself upright it embraces whatever it reaches with its tendrils as though they were hands.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero

“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.

“Of it? What?”

“I mean of him. Of my father.”

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

I
N THE SALINAS AND
Santa Clara and Livermore valleys, on the jade green slopes that stretched away from the highways up to where the Santa Cruz Mountains in the west and the Diablo Range in the east met the gray sky, the newly head-pruned grapevines stood in rows like gnarled crucifixes, as if a tortured god hung at endlessly reiterated sacrifice in the cold rain.

The work in the vineyard cellars in late January was racking the wines, pumping the new vintages from one cask to another to liberate them from the freshly thrown sediments of dead yeast cells, and fining them with egg whites to precipitate cloudiness out. In the Pace cellars on San Bruno Mountain the suspension-cloudiness in the casks was heavy this year, and bentonite clay as well as egg whites were both needed to bring the wine to clarity, and the
“goût de terroir,”
the flavor of earth, was especially pronounced. On the slopes outside, tractors dragged harrows and cultivators through the old-standard eight-foot aisles between the rows, and this year the blades and disks were soon blunted to uselessness by the rocky soil and had to be replaced after having served only half of their expected life spans.

During the long days Sid Cochran oversaw the washing out of the drained casks with soda ash and hot water so that the wines could be racked back into them, and in the evenings he was kept busy in the lab, chilling some samples of the adjusted new wines to test for tartaric acid stability and heating others to provoke any incipient protein hazing. After his twelve days off, which the payroll clerk had listed as compassionate leave following the death of a family member, Cochran had now worked for seven days straight, as much for relief from his five houseguests as for catching up on the uncompromising vineyard chores and getting in some justifiable overtime pay.

Six or seven
houseguests, he thought on Saturday afternoon as he steered the Granada up into his driveway and switched off the engine; at least. Though admittedly only five at any particular moment.

Mavranos’s truck was parked at the top of the driveway. The new pair of tan car covers, weighted down with bricks, concealed the truck’s red color, but did nothing to hide its boxy shape.

Cochran got out of the car and walked toward his 1960s ranch-style house across the lawn rather than on the stepping-stones, for Kootie had covered them with chalk detection-evasion patterns he’d apparently learned from Thomas Alva Edison two years ago; and up on the porch Cochran brushed aside Angelica’s wind chimes of chicken bones and old radio parts, avoided stepping in the smears of pork-fat-and-salt that Mammy Pleasant had carefully daubed onto the concrete, then ignored the brass keyhole plate below the doorknob and crouched to fit his housekey into the disguised lock Mavranos had installed at the base of the door.

The warm air in the entry hall smelled of WD-40 spray oil and stewing beef and onions, and Cochran could hear Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” from the
Subterranean Homesick Blues
album playing on the stereo in the living room. The music told him that Mavranos was in the house, and the pair of treebark-soled Ferragamo pumps by the door indicated that Mammy Pleasant was not currently occupying the Plumtree body.

“Cody?” he called as he shrugged out of his rain-damp windbreaker.

“She’s out working on the Torino,” came Pete Sullivan’s voice from the kitchen. “How goes the bottle?” He was sitting at the kitchen table, leaning over a couple of half-dismantled walkie-talkies with a screwdriver.

“Aging.” Yesterday Cochran had replied,
Cobwebby.
He stepped into the kitchen and tossed his windbreaker onto the counter and then opened the refrigerator to get one of Mavranos’s beers. Freshly scratched into the white enamel of the refrigerator door were the numbers
1-28-95;
during this week of frustrating waiting Plumtree had got into the habit of key-scratching the current day’s date on any surface that would show a gouge—wood tabletops, dry wall, book spines. When he had protested after finding the first few examples, last weekend, she had doggedly told him that she had to do it, that it was like the hospital surgery-ward policy of inking
NO
on limbs that were not to be “ectomied,” cut off. And she had been using a black laundry-marking pen to letter the name of each day on whatever blouse of Nina’s she was wearing. Probably she was doing the same to her underwear; Cochran was sleeping on the living-room couch these days, and didn’t know.

Cochran carried his beer out through the laundry room to the back door, the window of which was still broken from the morning two weeks ago when he and Plumtree had let themselves in by breaking the glass with a wine bottle. When he unlocked the door and pushed it open against the cold outdoor breeze, the woman standing by the raised hood of the ’69 Torino looked at him, and was clearly Cody.

“You’ve got to talk to Janis,” Cody said.

Cochran walked up to the old car. Cody had taken the carburetor and the distributor cap off of the engine, and had laid out wrenches and a timing-light gun on a towel draped over the fender.

“I’ve tried to,” he said.

Several times at their noisy buffet-style breakfasts he had noticed Plumtree eating poached or fried eggs, holding the fork in her right hand, and he had caught her eye—but each time her face had changed, and it had been Cody who had given him a blank, questioning look as she switched the fork to her left hand and reached for the bowl of scrambled eggs; and once Plumtree’s posture, as she had stood on tiptoe to reach a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay down from a high bookshelf, had clearly been Janis’s shoulders-back stance—but, when he had called to her, Cody had blinked impatiently at the book and paused only long enough to dig her set of car keys out of her pocket and scratch the date into the cover before putting it back.

“She’s avoiding me,” Cochran said.

“Well I wonder why.” Plumtree laid down a screwdriver she’d been twisting the idle screw with and held out her black-smeared left hand. “Can I have your beer? I’m too dirty to be touching your doorknobs and refrigerator handles.”

Cochran handed it to her, without even taking a last sip of it. “And I’ll get you another if you want, just to save you the walk,” he said, “but
mi casa es su casa,
Cody. Mess up anything you want.”

Plumtree took the beer with a grin. After a deep sip, she exhaled and said, “Thanks, but Mammy Pleasant will make me clean up any messes I make. Have you
seen
those lists of chores she leaves for me? Not just shopping and cleaning—sometimes she tells me to go buy or sell houses! But I called about a couple, they’re all pre-1906 addresses. It’s a good thing she doesn’t know the 1995 prices I’m paying for her groceries, she’d think I was embezzling. And in the notes she’s always calling me Teresa.”

Cochran nodded. Cody and Mammy Pleasant were both strong presences in the household, and managed to get on each other’s nerves in spite of the fact that they could never meet, taking turns as they did at occupying the same body. But Cochran had several times talked directly to the old-woman personality, and she seemed to be as senile as Kootie said most ghosts were. The Teresa person had evidently been a servant she’d had when she’d been alive.

The Mammy Pleasant ghost had first arrived upon Plumtree last Sunday, after Cody had consented to eat bread baked with ground Octavia Street eucalyptus seeds in it and drink wine in which the split seeds had sat soaking overnight. For an hour after taking the dubious sacrament, Plumtree had just sat on the living-room couch, flushing her mouth with vodka to kill the taste of the eucalyptus and watching the news—

And then she had blinked and reared back, staring with clear recognition into the faces of Kootie and Pete and Angelica and Cochran through eyes that momentarily seemed to Cochran to be mismatched in color. After a few seconds she had looked back at the television, and said in a strong, deep voice, “I was talking to you people through that thing, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Kootie, looking away from her.

“Courage, boy!” she said. “Remember Gawain.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Kootie again.

Angelica had begun asking the old woman questions, but Mammy Pleasant had immediately demanded to know if they had brought any eucalyptus bark from her tree; and, when she’d been assured that they had, that a pair of shoes be soled from the bark for her. And when Pete and Kootie had cut out bark soles and heels and Superglued them onto a pair of Nina’s low-heeled Ferragamo pumps—Pleasant had haughtily dismissed the notion of using a pair of Reeboks after getting a look at them—the old woman had put the shoes on and walked outside in the crackling, fragmenting footwear, straight to the greenhouse.

Scott Crane’s disordered skeleton was laid out in there on a shelf between Nina’s orchids and a crowd of potted fuchsias, and the Plumtree hands were shaky as they touched the broken skull. “He himself will lead you to the god’s wine,” she had said. “And by then you’ll have learned where to go with it, and what to do.”

She hadn’t said very much more about Crane’s restoration to life than that—then or in the six days since. She generally came on within an hour to either side of noon, though the sun was seldom visible through the overcast, and often she seemed absentminded, or senile, or even drunk—which, Mavranos noted, was only to be expected in a servant of Dionysus. She kept finding jobs around the house for “Teresa” to do, and had to leave notes because she could never find the girl; and Plumtree had begun leaving notes in return, suggesting that the old woman clean the floors and windows herself. When Kootie or Angelica stopped the old woman and try to get information about the procedure they were supposedly going to perform on the day of the Tet Festival, Pleasant’s drunkenness would seem to become more pronounced—and she would just insist that Crane would presently tell them what to do. Adding to the confusion was the fact that she generally slurred the name to
Cren,
and frequently pronounced it with a stutter,
C-cren,
so that she seemed to be referring to Cochran. Even her pronunciation of
Scott
sometimes seemed to slur nasally toward
Scant.

Cochran now watched Cody spraying the carburetor with some very flammable-smelling aerosol.

“Janis is avoiding me,” he said again.

“Don’t light a cigarette right now,” Cody said. “I don’t blame her. But I think she should talk to you.” She put down the spray can and squinted up at him, her face shadowed by the raised car hood. “I saw into her dream for a couple of seconds last night. You were in both of our dreams, and the … figure of you, your outline, must have sort of matched up and spun around at the partition between her mind and mine—like one of those secret bookshelf-walls in old movies, that rotate on a pivot when you pull on the right book.” Cody took another gulp of the beer. “Her dream was in color, but barely—it looked fake, like a black-and-white photo touched up with watercolors, and the backgrounds were plain gray. And there was music, the dwarf music from
Sleeping Beauty,
but I could hardly hear the melody because the drumming was so hard and loud. It sounded like soldiers marching fast on an iron deck.”