Earthquake Weather

  Cochran realized, to his surprise, that he didn’t want to swear to a lie. “I swear there was no kiss,” he said, “and not a button was undone or a zipper unzipped.”

  “Oh, you pig. I bet you groped me. I bet you were ready to go all-in on that flop.”

  “Flop,” said Cochran, thinking in poker terms now, and remembering that she had used the word several times before this. “That’s what the three communal cards are called, in Hold-’Em: the flop. You hope they make some good hand, combined with your two personal down-cards. Sometimes you just pass even if you’ve got ace-king down, if the flop is all the wrong suit, ’cause somebody’s surely got two of the flop’s suit, for a flush.”

  “When it’s … real life … you can’t pass,” she said grimly, “it’s like you’re the perpetual Big Blind, gotta make the bet whether you want to or not.”

  Cochran remembered Janis telling him, just a few moments ago, that he must find it “scary” not to be able to turn a bad situation over to another personality; and he laughed softly with dawning comprehension. “You girls are like a … squad, a relay-team, at the big Poker Table of Life, though, aren’t you? If a flop comes that’s no good to Cody’s hole-cards, Janis or Tiffany or somebody will be holding two different cards, ones that’ll make a flush or a full boat or something. And so the girl with the playable cards steps in.”

  “It still calls for some hard bluffing sometimes. But so far they haven’t dealt us a flop one of us couldn’t play.”

  Cochran tilted up his beer to get the last swallow, and sleepily wondered whether to bother opening another. And he thought again about Janis’s remark: Won’t it bother you, seeing the place where you lived with your wife?

  “Must be convenient, though,” he said now, “nevertheless. ‘Somebody yelling at me? I got a headache? I’ll split, and be back when it’s been taken care of.’ ”

  Plumtree’s vodka bottle was on the seat between them, and he impulsively picked it up and unscrewed the cap. “I—I had to go identify my wife’s run-over pregnant body,” he said, suddenly speaking loudly, “in the morgue. She was pregnant. We bought stuff for the kid-to-be—the stuff’s in that house now, that I’m gonna be breaking a window to get into in a few hours—a crib, goddammit, teddy-bear wallpaper. And Nina and I had adjoining plots, in a cemetery there, we picked out a spot we liked and paid for it—but I had to have her cremated and take her ashes to France, so I’ll be buried there alone.” He gulped a mouthful of the warm, scorching liquor and burningly exhaled through his nose. “I haven’t had the option of going away during any of this. I’ve got to pay for what I take, sometimes as much as all I’ve got. I’ve got to, like most people, I’ve got to take the wounds and then just keep playing, wounded, shoving all my chips out with one hand while I—hold my burst guts in with the other.” The fumes in his nose were making his eyes water. “My hole cards are two dead people, and the, the flop I’m facing is—is those three merciless ladies in Greek mythology who measure out life and fucking cut it off.”

  “Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropine,” said Plumtree blandly, watching the road. “Let’s play a game—I’ll name a paper product, and you guess what it is.”

  Cochran’s heart was hammering, and his mouth was dry and hot in spite of the vodka, but he didn’t go on shouting. “What?” he said, his voice cracking. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Why don’t you take a nap, then, champ? It might sober you up, and I’ll be ready to be spelled off, come dawn.” She glanced at him and smiled. “Little man, you’ve had a busy day.”

  “… Maybe I will.” His anger had evaporated as quickly as it had come, leaving him deflated. Slowly he screwed the cap back on the bottle. “You want some of this?”

  “I’m fine for now. Leave it on the seat there, in case of emergencies.”

  Cochran stretched his feet out and leaned his head against the cool, damp window glass. “You did that trick just now, didn’t you?” he said emptily, closing his eyes. “What I said made you mad, and you threw the anger over onto me. I—I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.” Though as I recall, he thought, everything I said was true.

  “Go to sleep. You can say anything you want, and yeah, if it pisses me off I’ll just throw it back at you. ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.’ All I care about is looking out for Number One.” She laughed softly. “I’m just trying to figure out who that is.”

  Cochran’s last thought before he went to sleep or passed out was that her remarks about his interval with Tiffany must not, after all, have represented real anger.

  Mad as a March herring,” observed Kootie, agreeing with Mavranos’s assessment of Janis Cordelia Plumtree. They were sitting in the front seat of Mavranos’s truck, barreling along at a steady seventy miles per hour north on the 101 out past Oxnard, with the surf a rippling line far away in the darkness on their left. Mavranos’s view of the right lane was partly blocked by a new Buddha-like stone statue on the dashboard, but he was getting used to that.

  “That would be the technical term, yes,” said Angelica Sullivan from the back seat, where she was loading a stack of extended-round .45 ACP magazines—pressing each Eldorado Starfire hollow-point bullet down against the spring pressure with the forefinger of her left hand while she tucked the next into the cleared top of the magazine with the fingers of her right.

  Mavranos could see her working in the rear-view mirror. She must have loaded a dozen of those illegal twelve-round magazines by now, he thought. Even with her .45 Marlin carbine, handily built to take the same size magazine, that’s a whole lot of back-up ammo.

  She looked up, and in the mirror he could see a glint of highway light reflect from her eye. “You think I’m over-preparing?” she asked.

  Mavranos shrugged. “Better than under.”

  Pete Sullivan lifted three of the loaded magazines and tucked them into the canvas knapsack at his side. “And these bullets have each got a drop of a rust-based omiero soup in the tip,” he said, “—my pacifist Houdini hands have been capable of that much work, at least—so these’ll stop a ghost as readily as a live human.”

  “Good thing,” said Mavranos, watching the traffic ahead and wondering what sort of vehicle Plumtree and Cochran might be driving in. “For the Plumtree woman you’d want both functions. I know, Angelica, you already said her murderer father’s actually not a ghost—but I swear there’s a ghost in that blond head too.” He glanced at the dashboard. “We’re gonna need gas again, next chance—maybe switch in one of the fresh batteries too.”

  “We should have taken one of the Solville cars,” said Pete Sullivan; saying it in fact for about the sixth time since they’d buried Spider Joe in the parking lot behind the Solville buildings.

  “We need this truck,” said Kootie.

  “Why, exactly?” asked Pete.

  “It’s—” Kootie sighed, and Mavranos caught the boy’s brief, frail grin out of the corner of his eye. “Because when I sensed it coming north to us, Sunday before last, I sensed it as a cup, a chalice. And when Arky takes it to town, it always comes back full of as much food as we’re needing—all this last week and a half, there’s been enough tortillas and bananas and fishes and ground beef and cheese and beer and all, when we unload it, for all the people who’ve been coming over, even though we don’t know in advance how many there’ll be.”

  “And it turns red during Holy Week, or any local equivalents,” said Mavranos. “And,” he added ruefully, “so many ghosts are drawn to it and sucked into the air cleaner and burned up in the carburetor that their cast-off charges screw up the electrical system.”

  “And it’s used to serve the king,” said Kootie quietly, as if that settled it.

  Right now, thought Mavranos as he glanced in the rearview mirror at the draped tarpaulin in the back, it’s being used to carry the king.

  Mavranos remembered another time Scott Crane had lain stretched out in the back of the truck while Mavranos drove. It
had been very nearly a year ago, on January 19th of last year.

  Scott had been wearing sweatpants for that painful mid-morning trip up the 405 to Northridge, with not even a bit of twine for a belt, but still his legs had been as weak and racked with cramps as if he’d been wearing a Möbius-twisted belt during a solar eclipse; and he had been as sick—vomiting blood, seeing double, hearing voices—as if he had eaten a rare steak cooked in an iron pan on a Friday in Lent.

  He had been that way for two days—ever since 4:31 in the pre-dawn morning of January 17th, when the Northridge earthquake had struck Los Angeles with a force of 6.4 on the Richter scale and 6.7 on the more modern moment-magnitude scale. It had been one of the newly recognized “blind thrust faults,” punching the land upward from a previously unsuspected subterranean fault line.

  Mavranos had even noticed several white strands in the coppery bushiness of Scott’s beard.

  Scott had been too weak to talk loudly enough for Mavranos to hear him up in the front seat of the rackety truck, and the intercom set they had brought along for the purpose was drowned in the static-fields of thousands of ghosts awakened to idiot panic by the quake, and so they had stopped at a Carl’s Junior hamburger place on the way and put together a string-and-paper-cup “telephone.”

  Mavranos had specially “stealth-equipped” the truck for the trip, with sea water in the windshield-washer reservoir and clumps of anonymous hair from a barbershop floor taped onto the radio antenna supplementing the usual tangle of ultrasonic deer-repelling whistles glued in conflicted patterns on the roof and hood, and he was sure they couldn’t be traced while they were in the moving vehicle; but he was uneasy about Scott’s determination to struggle out of the truck and walk around among the fractured and concussed buildings.

  “It’s the date, Pogo,” Mavranos had finally said, turning his head to speak into the paper cup while keeping the string taut, “that makes me nervous about this. It seems like a … almost a warning.” Mavranos had routinely addressed Scott by the name of the possum character in the Walt Kelly comic strip.

  “Today is the 19th,” had come Scott’s faint, buzzing answer through the cup.

  “Sure it is,” Mavranos had replied impatiently, “but the earthquake was on the 17th. St. Sulpice and all that.”

  Scott hadn’t answered right away, but even through the unvibrating string Mavranos had been able to feel the ill king’s irritation. Mavranos still believed that his point had been relevant, though.

  A Vietnamese woman who lived at the Leucadia estate had been given the job of tracing historical events having to do with the secret history of the Fisher Kings and their rivals, and she had discovered a peculiar reactionary vegetation-king cult that had appeared in Paris in 1885, four years after a special congress in Bordeaux had, reluctantly but officially, advised grafting all French grapevines onto imported American rootstocks, which were resistant to the phylloxera louse that looked likely otherwise to obliterate all the vineyards of Europe. The dissenting cult had centered around the seminary and cathedral of St. Sulpice in the St. Germaine district of Paris, and had included among its members the writers Maurice Maeterlinck and Stéphane Mallarmé, the composer Claude Debussy, and eventually the writer and film-maker Jean Cocteau—but it appeared to have been started by a village priest from a parish in the rural Languedoc Valley south of Carcassonne. The priest, Berenger Sauniere, had in 1885 uncovered some documents hidden in the foundation stones of his church, which stood on the site of an ancient Visigoth winery dating back at least to the sixth century, and of a Roman mysteries-temple before that; Sauniere’s discoveries had led somehow to his getting substantial payments from the French government and a Hapsburg archduke; and Sauniere had suffered a stroke on January 17th of 1917, and died five days later, after an attending priest had found it impossible to give the dying man the sacraments of confession and Extreme Unction. January 17th was the feast day of St. Sulpice.

  The Vietnamese woman, a one-time cabdriver and casino night manager called Bernardette Dinh, had flagged this particular cult because it had shown signs of continuing well into the twentieth century in several splintered branches. In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris she had traced a network of obscure items published from the late 1950s through the 1970s—pamphlets, and issues of a rare magazine called Circuit, and a privately printed booklet called Le Serpent Rouge, which had been published on January 17th of 1967 and whose three authors were found hanged at separate locations less than two months later. All of these publications mentioned the cathedral of St. Sulpice and contained cryptical essays on the science of multi-generational, almost genealogical, viticulture and vine-grafting. Some researchers had evidently considered that Le Serpent Rouge dealt with a long-preserved bloodline, but Dinh had speculated that it referred to a secretly cultivated varietal, snaking its way in concealment down through the centuries, of red wine.

  One branch of the cult survived in the village of Queyrac in the Bas Medoc, and another had taken the name of a fifteenth-century Dionysiac cult called L’Ordre du Levrier Blanc and appeared to have relocated to the American west. In all the branches—and in fact in many other cultures, from the Estonians on the Baltic Sea who sacrificed sheep and oxen on that date, to the Egyptian Copts who observed the day as the anniversary of the death of the tormented visionary St. Anthony—January 17 was a date to be both celebrated and feared.

  “At least,” Scott had said finally, his voice humming in the paper cup linked to where he had lain in the back of the truck on that day, “if I have a stroke, I won’t have any trouble remembering some sins to tell the priest.”

  “I can help you out there,” Mavranos had agreed; and the tense moment had passed, but they had still been driving north toward the wounded city.

  Traffic on the 405 had slowed to a stop near the intersection with the Ventura Freeway, northwest of Los Angeles, and Mavranos had got off onto the crowded surface streets; plywood covered many shop windows along these sunlit blocks, and hasty curtains of chain-link fencing had been hung across the breezeways of several of the apartment buildings they passed, and finally on a side street off Reseda and Roscoe he had simply let the truck engine’s idle-speed drift them to a parking space at the curb, where he stepped on the brake and, almost as an afterthought, switched off the ignition.

  His attention sprang out to the surroundings when the clatter of the engine subsided into silence, and he heard Crane hiking himself up to look out too.

  The opposite curb was crowded with empty cars parked bumper-to-bumper, glittering in the bright midwinter sunlight; and the roof of every one of the cars was crushed in, the windshields twisted and white with crazed cracking, the side windows just gone. Beyond the block-long line of Bronco and Jetta and Eldorado hulks, across a lot somehow already brown with dead grass, stood the ruptured apartment complex from whose collapsed carports these cars had been extricated—the outer walls had sheared away, exposing interior rooms and doors, and when Mavranos cranked down the driver’s-side window he could smell the faint strawberry tang of garbage on the breeze.

  Mavranos had got out and swung open the back of the truck to help Scott down, uneasily noting the fresh blood blotting Scott’s shirt from the unhealing wound in his side, and though Mavranos had been afraid that they’d be arrested as looters, Scott had insisted on hobbling across the empty street and inspecting the damage.

  They had climbed in among the apartments, picking their way over the dry-wall and joist beams and aluminum window frames that had fallen across beds and couches, and shuffled carefully across springy, uneven floors, and stared at the body counts spray-painted by rescue workers on the pictureless walls.

  When they had clambered outside again, Scott had sat down on the metal box of a fallen air-conditioning unit. Harsh, shouting rap music echoed from some open window on the other side of the street. “My lands are in disorder,” Crane said. “Broken.”

  “From underneath,” said Mavranos stolidly. He had agreed with Dinh that the
resurgent phylloxera plague in the north California wine country was a bad sign for Scott’s reign, a message of discontent “from six feet under.”

  Scott squinted toward the far side of the empty street. “Sitting on a, an air-conditioning unit, weeping again the king my father’s wreck, this music gibbered by me upon the pavement.” He laid his bare wrist on a torn edge of metal. “So what am I not doing? Just five weeks ago the old Flamingo building in Las Vegas was torn down—that was my father’s castle, when he was king, before I killed him—wasn’t that a victory? Las Vegas is turning into a family place now, a kid’s place. And Diana and I have had four children, and we … get three crops a year at the Leucadia place. …”

  “Why don’t you ever prune back the grapevines, in the winter?”

  “They don’t need it. …” He looked up at Mavranos and gave him a wasted grin through his disordered beard. “Well, they don’t, you know. But okay, that’s not the reason. I did prune ’em back, in that first winter after Las Vegas, but later I—I dreamed about it. In the dreams, the branches bled where they were cut; and I dreamed about Ozzie, turned to dust at the touch of Death and blowing away across the desert.”

  Mavranos just nodded, and wished he’d brought along one of the beers from the truck. Scott and Diana weren’t related, but they had both been informally adopted by the same man, an old-time poker player named Oliver Crane but known in the poker world as Ozzie Smith. He had disappeared in the desert outside Las Vegas during the tumultuous Holy Week of 1990, and Scott had always maintained that the old man had died in saving Scott from a murderous embodiment of Dionysus and Death that had taken the physical form of Scott’s dead wife Susan.

  “Maybe you’re s’posed to dream about Death, Pogo,” Mavranos said. “It’s one of the Major Arcana in the tarot deck, and I get the idea that in your dreams you practically go bar-hopping with the rest of that crowd.”

  “I humanize them,” Scott said. “A perfect Fisher King wouldn’t just have a wounded side, he’d have no left arm or leg or eye, like the santería orisha called Osain—his other half was the land itself. I take the archetypes into myself, and they stop being just savage outside influences like rain or fire, and start to be allies—family, blood relations—a little.”