Earthquake Weather (74 page)

Plumtree took a quarter from Pete, and then she and Cochran walked hand-in-hand across the pavement to the cone of rain-streaked and ghost-curdled light around the telephone.

The ghosts were whispering and giggling in Cochran’s ears, and though he tried not to listen he heard faint, buzzing sexual propositions, pleas for rides to other states, demands for money, offers to wash his car windows for a dollar.

Cochran kept his eyes on Plumtree. Her face was shifting in response to it all, like a fencer parrying in different lines, and once Cochran got a broad wink that he thought must have been from Tiffany. She reached through the contorting forms as if through cobwebs to drop the quarter into the slot, and punched his home number into the keypad as if emphasizing points by poking someone repeatedly in the chest.

After a few moments she tensed and said, “Hi. It’s me, the girl-of-a-thousand-faces. Use the old king’s eye as a scrambler to call me back at this number.” And she read off the number of the pay phone and hung up the receiver.

“Good thinking,” said Cochran through slitted lips.

“Don’t talk!—they could get down your throat. They do but jest, poison in their jest; no offense i’ the world.”

At last the telephone rang, and Plumtree snatched up the receiver. “Hello?
Hello
?” She took the receiver from her ear and knocked it against the aluminum cowl around the phone. “I’m deaf!” she said loudly. Into the phone she said, “Kootie, Arky, I hope you can hear me. I’m deaf, so just listen!” Her voice softened. “Arky, you’ve got the cutest butt.
Out
!” Cody yelled, apparently at Tiffany. “Listen, you’ve both got to get
out
of there, right now—take the—”

She looked at Cochran in panic, and he knew that it had just occurred to her that
Janis was listening,
and could relay their plans to Omar Salvoy, in her mental Snow White cottage. “The way Sid told Arky this morning,
exactly
that way, are you following me?”

She flipped the receiver around in her hand and
bit
the earpiece—and Cochran realized that she was hearing by bone conduction. She fumbled the receiver back to her ear. “Good, don’t say anything more, we’re being overheard here in spite of your scrambler, it’s enough that I know I’m not just talking to somebody who likes calling pay phones. Listen, we’re going,
right now,
to—to George Washington’s head.”

Cochran nodded. Janis hadn’t been on when they had hiked through the tunnel at the Sutro Bath ruins and seen the boulder that Kootie had said looked like Washington; and Cody wasn’t saying that this was
the big event,
happening today instead of tomorrow as they had all expected. Janis could relate all of this to her father without his knowing where Kootie and Mavranos would be going.

“Tell me you understand,” Cody said, and again bit the receiver. Then she said into the mouthpiece, “Good. Oh, and Kootie better bring that … that little yellow blanket that the bald lady gave him, if he’s still got it.” She sighed. “Go,” she added, and she hung up the chewed and spitty receiver. Cochran faintly heard one of the ghosts say that the telephone was for calling room service to order food, that one didn’t eat the telephone.

Plumtree took Cochran’s elbow and led him out of the swarm of idiot ghosts, and neither of them inhaled until they had got back to the truck.

“That was Kootie,” Plumtree panted, “and then Arky. They understood, and I didn’t hear either of ’em say anything that would clue anybody. They’ll meet us there.” She looked nervously at Cochran. “I can hear the rain, now, but I don’t know about voices. You say something.”

He smiled at her.
“Vous êtes très magnifique,”
he said, and he was sure that it had been his own deliberate decision to speak in French.

She laughed tiredly. “Thank you very kindly, sir, now I hear you clearly.”

“Back in the truck,” said Pete, “everybody. I don’t want Kootie to get there before we do. Sid, you got a ten for gas?”

Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had driven him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was drawing him to itself, and he must go.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

T
HE SECRET SWITCHBOARDS OF
the city logged dozens of calls in the ordinarily slow witchery-and-wonders categories, as reports of supernatural happenings were phoned in from Daly City south of town up to the Sunset area around Ocean Beach and the Richmond district north of Golden Gate Park—accounts of brake-drums singing in human voices, root beers and colas turning into red wine in the cans, and voices of dead people intruding on radio receptions in unwelcome, clumsy karaoke. In Chinatown, under the street-spanning banners and the red-neon-bordered balconies and the white-underlit pagoda roofs, hundreds of nests of firecrackers were set hopping on the puddled sidewalks, clattering like machine-gun fire and throwing clouds of smoke through the rain, and the lean young men noisily celebrating the new year frequently paused below the murals of dragons and stylized clouds to listen to the storefront radio speakers, out of which echoed an Asian woman’s voice predicting earthquakes and inversions and a sudden high-pressure area locally.

Old Volkswagens and Chevrolets and Fords, painted gold and hung with wreaths at the front and back bumpers, roared with horns honking north through the hospital glare of the Stockton tunnel, to emerge in Chinatown at Sacramento Street still honking, the passengers firing handguns out the windows into the low sky. Police and paramedics’ sirens added to the din, and under the gunpowder banging and the electric howls was the constant hiss of the night rain, and the unending echoing rattle of the cables snaking at their steady nine-miles-an-hour through the street-pavement slots.

On the Bay Bridge, from remote Danville in the hills over on the east side of the bay, three white Saturns passed over the Coast Guard Reservation on Yerba Buena Island on their way in to the China Basin area of the Soma district; and two more were moving west up Ocean Avenue toward the Great Highway and Ocean Beach.

Dr. Armentrout had had to insist, almost tearfully, that the driver of the lead car get off the 280 at Ocean instead of continuing toward Chinatown.

Armentrout was sitting in the back beside Long John Beach and the two-figure manikin appliance, but the Lever Blank man in the front passenger seat shifted and said, “It’s the pomegranate.” He turned around. “What does it do, point?” When Armentrout just gripped the dry gourd and stared belligerently, the man added, “We won’t take it from you, if you tell us where we can get another one.”

“I picked it from a bush in the meadow where Scott Crane was killed,” Armentrout muttered finally, “at his compound in Leucadia.” He held the thing up and shook it, and dry seeds rattled inside. “In daylight, even such daylight as you get up here, its shadow is perceptibly displaced toward the king, which is the Koot Hoomie boy, I think. I’ve been—
shadowing
him.” He choked back a frightened giggle, and sniffed; he was still shaking, and his shirt was more clammy from sweat than from rain. “And,” he added, “tonight it … even
tugs
a little.” He nodded toward the windshield. “That way.”

Armentrout had hysterically demanded that the two-figure manikin appliance be brought along in this car too, and now it was sitting ludicrously in Long John Beach’s lap beside him. Armentrout wondered if Long John Beach too found the two figures
heavier
lately than they used to be.

“The royal tree,” said Long John Beach from behind the two Styrofoam heads, in what Armentrout had come to think of as the Valerie-voice, “hath left us royal fruit.”

“It led us to the red truck,” said the driver, “back there in Colma where we had to switch cars. Was the boy in the truck?”

“I don’t know,” said Armentrout. “I don’t think so.”
Sid Cochran and Janis Plumtree
were in the truck, he thought. And Sid Cochran, who I heedlessly let slip through my net back at Rosecrans Medical, shot a
gun
at me! “I think they were all staying somewhere in the area, and we just ran across the truck before we found the boy. But they must have gone to him after they evaded you people, or else they called him.” He shook the pomegranate again, and felt its inertial northward pull. “The primary is certainly northwest of us now. I can’t imagine why Salvoy didn’t
call
me—we could have been waiting for the boy right now, at whatever place they’re going to, instead of just chasing him this way.”

The radio on the dashboard clicked, and then an amplified voice said, “I thought we were going to where the Macondray chapel used to be.”

The driver unhooked a microphone from the console. “The—” He smiled at Armentrout in the rear-view mirror. “—
dousing rod
is apparently indicating the west coast,” he said. “Tell the brothers coming in from Danville not to waste time circling the Washington and Stockton site. Straight west on Turk to Balboa, tell them, and link up with us probably somewhere below the Cliff House.”

“Aye aye,” said the man in the following car, and clicked off; and Armentrout thought
eye-eye,
and remembered the tiny pupils of Plumtree’s eyes.

“The woman who pulled … the gunman back into the truck,” Armentrout said, “was Janis Plumtree, the one with your man Salvoy in her head. I’d like to …
have
her, after Salvoy has moved on.” Moved on to his eternal reward, ideally, he thought.

“Everybody except the king has got to be retired, sorry,” said the man in the front passenger seat. “But we do have to wait until we figure out who the king
is,
and what body he’s in.” He reached out and unhooked the microphone. “Andre,” he said, “tell the field men not to go shooting anybody until the subjects are out of the vehicles, and even then no women or boys. Got it?”

The driver was shaking his head. “Crisis of faith!” he said quietly.

“Nix,” came the voice from the radio. “The field men understand that the true king can’t be hit with a casual bullet.”

“But he might not be in his chosen body yet!” protested the man in the front seat. “You can tell ’em that, can’t you? It’s nothing but the truth.”

“Better we don’t introduce the complication,” insisted the voice from the radio; “and hope for the best.”

The man replaced the microphone and fogged the window with a sigh.
“Field men,”
he said. “Manson-family rejects.”

“Knuckleheads, panheads, and shovelheads,” agreed the driver. “Look, the Koot Hoomie body
is
the
king,
and it’ll deflect bullets. All we stand to lose is old Salvoy in the Plumtree, and that might not be altogether a bad thing.”

Armentrout touched the little lump in his jacket pocket that was the derringer. No casual bullet, he thought. But nothing fired from this gun is casual, and I’ve got a couple of very serious .410 shot-shells in it. That’s the way this has got to work out—these Lever Blank boys kill the Plumtree body and everybody in it, and I kill the Parganas boy.

And then stay well clear of the zealot field men.

On the long straight stretch of the Great Highway with the black-iron sea to the west, a relayed spot of darkness moved up the coast as each of the sodium-vapor streetlights went out for a moment when the red truck sped past on the pavement below.

Pete Sullivan was driving, and beside him Angelica was irritably drying off the .45 carbine with a handful of paper towels. The knapsack with the spare magazines had been under the seat too, and was also soaked by the rain water that had puddled on the floorboards.

She laid the gun down on the seat, then snapped open the glove compartment; and when she shifted around to look back at Cochran and Plumtree, she was holding the
pagadebiti
in her hands. “I never brought the … the hardware into your house,” she said to Cochran. “I think the Wild Turkey bottle that had Crane’s blood in it is behind you, in the hub of Arky’s spare tire.”

Cochran winced, for he’d been able to feel Plumtree shivering beside him, even through the soaked leather jacket she was wearing, ever since they’d stopped to call Mavranos and Kootie, and this reminder of the stressful failure two weeks ago wasn’t likely to cheer her up. But he rocked his head back to peer into the truck bed. “Voilà,” he said. “Still there,” he added shortly.

He had been mentally reciting the multiplication tables to monitor his own alertness, and now he had forgotten his place.

“Here,” said Angelica, handing the wine bottle over the back of the front seat. “Pour some of this
pagadebiti
wine into it, and swish it around and then pour it back.” When he just stared at her, she added, “I say that in my capacity as the king’s ad hoc
bruja primera
.”

Cochran took it from her. “O-
kay
.” He hiked one knee up onto the seat to be able to reach back with his free hand to the Wild Turkey bottle. Sitting back down again, he gripped the wine bottle and the pint bourbon bottle between his thighs, and pulled the corks out.

“When I close my eyes,” said Plumtree in a voice that was shaky but recognizably Cody, “I’m in a bus seat, and the crazy smashed-up man is standing at the front and holding a gun on the driver.
Row, row, row your boat.
”

Cochran carefully lifted the wine bottle and tilted it over the pint bottle and poured a good four ounces of dark wine into it. He re-corked the little bottle and shook it up, then uncorked it and poured its foaming contents back into the bottle of
pagadebiti.

“
So
far,” said Angelica to Plumtree judiciously, “you’re better off keeping your eyes open, then. But, any time now, that vision might be preferable to what’s actually going on outside your eyelids.”

“Oh,
that’s
helpful,” snapped Cochran as he shoved the corks back into the bottles and reached around to drop the Wild Turkey bottle onto the wet truck-bed floor behind his seat. He wiped his hands on his damp jeans, glad that he had taken his own sip of the wine before this adulteration.

The truck was moving up a grade now, and angling to the left. Cochran peered out through the rain-streaked window and saw concrete barriers on the right shoulder, with yellow earth-moving machines and black cliffs beyond it.