Earthquake Weather (72 page)

“I guess,” Pete said through clenched teeth as he gunned the engine and then clanked it into gear, “we could draw straws—”

“It’s me,” said Cochran, “it’s me.” His heart was pounding, but like Mrs. Winchester he somehow didn’t seem able to find the prospect of cooperating with the god totally repellent. “Dionysus led me by the hand into the wine cellar, so I guess I should be the one to lead him by the hand to the Sutro ruins. And I do have to … finish giving somebody over to him; I know which cemetery. It’s right on the way, just off the”—the monstrous, he thought, the merciless—“the 280.” I might as well have taken the drink of forgetfulness when Mondard first offered it to me, he thought defeatedly, in the courtyard of the Hotel de l’Abbaye in Paris.

He remembered what Nina’s ghost had told him, in the kitchen of their house two weeks ago, when he had said he wanted to have the mark removed from his hand:
I would never have
—
I would not have your child, if its father were not marked by
him.
I was married to him, through you.

“It’s me,” he repeated. But he remembered too the vision he’d had in the Solville hallway, of the Mondard in the mirror, and he remembered his apprehension then that the fatally loving god would next ask him to give over his memories of a deceased Plumtree. “But he will take only one woman from me.”

“He’ll welcome into his kingdom whomever you love,” flatly said the old woman out of Plumtree’s lips, “unless he so loves you that he welcomes you first.”

As Pete steered the truck away from the tall theater sign, Cochran noticed the titles of the movies that were showing in the three theaters:
Legends of the Fall, Murder in the First,
and
Little Women.

Cochran’s South Daly City house was just on the other side of the 280 from Colma, but the little town was in the area he always thought of as “north of south and south of north”—when he was travelling to or from Pace Vineyards or San Francisco he used the John Daly Boulevard exit north of the town, and when he had business in Redwood City or San Jose he used the Serramonte Boulevard exit south of it; and so, though he knew the rest of the peninsula cities well, the peculiar little town that he could see across the highway lanes from his back yard was almost totally unfamiliar to him.

The last time he had visited the place had been two years ago, when he and Nina had driven straight across the highway to pick out adjoining plots at the Woodlawn Cemetery. And now Nina and their unborn baby had been cremated, and he had acceded to her parents’ wishes and taken the urn to France, where it would stand forever on the mantle in their house in Queyrac in the Bas Médoc; and the grass grew undisturbed on the plot in Colma.

Colma was the town to which all the graves of San Francisco had been transplanted; until 1938, nearly a third of the Richmond district of San Francisco, from Golden Gate Park north to Geary and from Park Presidio east to Masonic Avenue, was still occupied by cemeteries, as the whole of the district had been before 1900. Colma, six miles to the south, had taken the evicted dead, and on the day Cochran and Nina had gone to buy the plots, Nina had remarked that the town’s dead residents outnumbered the living ones seven hundred to one.

Cochran had Pete steer the truck off the 280 at Serramonte Boulevard, but had him turn east, away from his house, to El Camino Real; and as they drove up the weaving, rain-hazy road, past roadside “monument” shops and misty rolling green hills studded with white grave markers, Cochran tried not to remember the sunny, gaily mock-morbid drive he and Nina had taken along this same road.

Following Cochran’s directions, Pete turned left up the sloping driveway of Woodlawn and parked at the curb, in front of the grim stone tower that stood between the two stone arches opening onto the grounds. The four disheveled travellers pushed open the truck doors and climbed out, and walked through the south arch and then trudged uphill along the gravel lane that led to the graves.

Cochran was carrying the bottle of
pagadebiti,
and in his pocket he now had Mavranos’s bulky key ring with its attached Swiss Army knife. The tall palm trees and twisted cypresses that stood at measured intervals across the green hills gave him no clues as to what spot he and Nina had chosen on that long-ago sunny day, and the gray roads curved around with no evident pattern.

He had kept glancing at Plumtree during the drive up from San Jose, but the woman who had looked apprehensively back at him each time had clearly been Mrs. Winchester, blinking and shivering in the unfamiliar body in the big leather jacket; and so he was profoundly glad when Plumtree took his hand now and he looked at the face under the wet blond bangs and recognized Cody.

“I see by our outfits that it’s the same day-o,” she said quietly, glancing back at Pete and Angelica; “but what are we doing in a cemetery?”

“I—” he began; but she had gasped and squeezed his hand.

She was staring at the grassy area to their left, and he followed her gaze.

They were next to what he recalled now was the children’s section of the cemetery, and on a pebble-studded slab of concrete on the grass stood eight painted plaster statues, one of them two feet tall and the others half that. They were the Disney-images of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves; and behind them, on a truncated section of decoratively carved and pierced marble, stood a verdigrised brass plaque on which he could make out the raised letters,

SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME

“ ‘Suffer, little children,’ ” Plumtree read aloud, in a panicky voice. “Sid,
who are we here to bury
?”

“My dead wife,” he told her hastily, knowing that she was thinking of Janis. “Or not
bury,
so much as
disown.
Give to the god.” He waved the bottle of antique wine, idiotically wondering if he was stirring up sentiment in it. “I’ve got to drink some of the
pagadebiti,
to summon Dionysus.”

Her hand had relaxed only a little in his. “Oh, Sid, don’t—your wife—I’ll do it, I’ll drink it.”

“You—” he said, then paused.
You would probably lose Valorie,
he thought;
and we might need her.
“You don’t have to,” he finished. “I can do it—she’s dead, and her ghost is gone, and—actually, my wife was, was more married to the god than to me, even when she was alive.” Only after he’d begun speaking had he decided to tell her that, and he was remotely surprised now at how difficult it had been to say.

Cody bared her teeth and nodded. “And we
might
need
her
.”

Cochran knew she meant Valorie, and he wondered if she had actually read his mind or simply knew him well enough to guess his thoughts.

“My wife and I bought a pair of plots,” Cochran said, loudly enough for Pete and Angelica to hear too; “further uphill somewhere, across this road. That would be the place where I should drink it.”

On the lawn to their left, isolated stone angels and Corinthian pillars stood on pedestals above clustered ranks of upright black marble slabs with gold Chinese ideographs and inset color photo-portraits on their faces, while the lawns stretching away to the right were dotted with rows of flat markers like, thought Cochran, keys on a vast green keyboard. The gray weight of the spilling sky seemed to be held back by the brave yellow and red spots of flower bouquets around many of the headstones; and in the children’s section behind them, silver helium balloons and brightly colored pinwheels had made an agitated confetti glitter against the carpet of wet grass.

They stepped up to the curb, over cement water-valve covers that looked at first glance like particularly humble little graves, and plodded out across the grass.

Far up the hill they came upon a scene almost of ruin. To the right, the grass had been stripped away from a broad area, leaving puddles and hillocks of mud around the stranded stone markers; an iron sign on a pole indicated that the grounds were being renovated for installation of a new sprinkler system and would be reseeded, and warned passersby that
WOODLAWN WATERS ITS LAWNS WITH NONPOTABLE WELL WATER.
And to the left, farther away across the marble-studded grass, a gigantic oak tree had fallen over in the direction away from them, probably during the storms that had ravaged the California coast on New Year’s Day; where the base of the tree had erupted out of the ground, the uplifted knotty face of dirt-caked roots was a monument taller than any of the carved marble ones, an abrupt black section of natural wall whose bent topmost crown-spikes stiffly clawed the sky far higher up than a man could reach. As he and Plumtree walked hand-in-hand around the fallen giant, he saw a thick carpet of fresh green grass still flourishing on the once-horizontal surface far overhead, as if in defiance of the piles of orange sawdust and the vertical saw-cuts visible farther along the trunk, evidences of toiling attempts to dispose of the gigantic thing.

And sheets of rain-darkened plywood had been laid across the grass to form a wheelbarrow’s road toward an open freshly dug grave; the mound of mud beside the hole was the same orange color as the sawdust. For a moment Cochran thought the grave had been dug in one of the plots he and Nina had bought, and he quailed at the thought of standing on the grass verge and staring down into the hole; then he noted the position of two nearby palm trees relative to the road and realized that his plots were on the far side of the open grave.

“Over here,” he said, stepping up onto the plywood walk and striding along it. Plumtree was beside him, and he could hear the drumming of Pete’s and Angelica’s footsteps behind.

Nina’s ghost was gone, exorcised over a coffee cup full of tap water in his kitchen two weeks ago. Today he was going to relinquish whatever might be left of his love for her, of his possession of her.

I caught you in a wine cellar, he thought bewilderedly as cold water ran down his heated face, and now I’m going to drop you out of my heart, beside an open grave, with a swallow of wine. I really only interrupted your fall, didn’t I—delayed your impact by four-and-something years.

And, he thought, fathered a companion for you to take with you. Was that death a part of your plan, of the god’s plan? How can I be giving to the god someone I was never allowed to know?

He didn’t know or care if tears were mingling with the rain water on his face.

“This will do,” he said harshly, stepping around a winch-equipped trailer with a big rectangular concrete grave-liner sitting on the bed of it. There were of course no markers to indicate which patches of grass were his plots, so he just stood on the grass with the open grave at his back and clasped the bottle under his arm as he pulled Mavranos’s key ring out of his pocket and pried out the corkscrew attachment.

Rain thumped on his scalp and ran in streams from his bent elbows as he twisted the corkscrew right through the frail old lead foil on the bottle; and when the corkscrew was firmly embedded in the cork, he paused and looked at Plumtree.

“I don’t want to love her anymore,” he said breathlessly; “and I was never permitted to love the child.”

Plumtree might not have heard him over the thrash of the rain; at any rate she nodded.

He tugged at the red plastic knife handle, and with no audible pop the cork came out all in one piece in spite of its age.

Abruptly the wind sighed to a halt, and the last drops of rain whispered to the grass, and even the drops of water hanging from the cypress branches seemed to cling for an extra moment to the wet leaves so as not to fall and make a sound. In that sudden enormous silence Cochran would have tapped the knife handle against the glass of the bottle to see if his ears could still hear, except that he knew he was not deaf, and except that he didn’t dare violate the holy stasis of the air.

He tipped the bottle up, and took a mouthful of the
pagadebiti.

At first it seemed to be cool water, so balanced were the tannins and the acids, the fruit so subtle as to be indistinguishable from the smells of grass and fresh-turned earth in his nostrils. Then he swallowed it, and like an organ note rising from total silence, that starts as a subsonic vibration too low even to feel and mounts mercilessly to a brazen chorus in which the very earth seems to take part, bringing tears to the listener’s eyes and standing the hairs up on his arms, the wine filled his head with the surge of the spring bud-break on the burgeoning vines, the bursting slaughter of ripe grapes in the autumn crush, the hot turbulent fermentation in the oaken casks as the soul of the god awoke in the crucible of fructose and malic acid and multiplying yeast. And Cochran was able to see as if from a high promontory the track of the god’s endlessly repeated deaths and resurrections, through the betrayed vineyards of the Gironde and Loire valleys, back to sacred Falernum on the very slopes of slumbering Vesuvius, and the trellised vine gardens at Nebesheh and below the White Wall of Memphis on the Nile, eastward through Arabia, Media, Phrygia and Lydia, and the terraced temple vineyards on the ziggurats of the Babylonians and Sumerians, dimly all the way back to the primeval
vitis vinifera sylvestris
vines of lost Nysa in the mountains above Nineveh at the source of the Tigris River.

And then he was looking out through a crudely cut earthen doorway at the gray sky; no, he was lying on his back, and the ringing in his head and the jolt throughout his frame was from having fallen backward into the opened grave. The breath had been knocked out of him, and until his lungs began to heave and snatch at the cold air it seemed that his identity had been knocked out of him too.

Now three faces appeared around the edges of the grave, peering down at him; Plumtree was standing closest, leaning over, and he could see that she was holding the bottle of
pagadebiti,
apparently having taken it from him in the first transported moments.

“He’s killed,” said Angelica.

“No, he’s not,” said Plumtree angrily. “Sid, get out of there.” The voices of both of them were oddly muffled and ringing, as if the women were embedded in crystal.

“I’m … not killed,” Cochran said. He rolled over and got to his hands and knees, and then, hitchingly, straightened all the way up to a standing posture, bracing his hands on the back-hoed clay walls; and the color of the exposed dirt darkened from orange clay toward black topsoil as he painfully hiked himself erect. “Pete,” he said, trying to pitch his voice so that it would carry in the changed air, “give me a hand.” He tossed the Swiss Army knife up onto the grass by Plumtree’s feet.