Earthquake Weather

  “Fine,” Cochran said as they left the car unlocked and hobbled to the bar door, “we can have bohemian seafood for lunch, if they take plastic here.”

  The dusty blue Suburban was out in the center divider lane of Masonic Avenue, its left blinker light flashing.

  Cochran plodded up the wooden steps, hiking himself along with his hand on the wet wrought-iron rail, and he held the bar door open for Plumtree.

  She took one step into the dim interior, and then stopped and looked back over her shoulder at him. “Sid,” she said blankly, “this place—”

  He put one hand on her shoulder and stepped in past her.

  The mirror-studded disco ball was turning over the sand-strewn dance floor, but again there was no one dancing. The air still smelled of candle wax, but with a strong accompaniment of fish-reek this time instead of mutton. Two men in rumpled business suits, conceivably the same men as before, stood at the bar and banged the cup of bar dice on the wet, polished wood.

  The dark-haired waitress in the long skirt smiled at them and waved toward a booth near the door.

  “We shouldn’t stay,” whispered Cochran. He was still holding the door open, and he glanced nervously back out at the car and the parking lot and the Suburban, which was now turning into the lot.

  “You think if you go in and shut the door, we’ll walk out and be on Rosecrans again?” asked Plumtree. “Down in Bellflower?”

  “It’s possible,” he said, his voice unsteady. “If it’s possible for this place to be here at all.”

  “Wait in the car, if you like.” She stepped away from his hand, into the dimness of the bar. “I’ll try to sneak you out a beer from time to time. I need a drink.” She was shaking, but clearly not because of the weird bar.

  “—No,” he said. “I’m with you.”

  They both stepped inside, and as the door squeaked shut behind them they scuffed across the sandy wooden floor to the indicated booth and sat down, with Plumtree facing the front door. Cochran noticed two aluminum crutches propped on the seat of the booth beyond theirs, but neither he nor Plumtree were inclined to be peering around at their surroundings, and they just humbly took the two leather-bound menus the waitress handed them.

  “Two Budweisers,” said Plumtree. She was breathing deeply, like someone hoping not to be sick.

  “And I’ll have two Coorses, please,” said Cochran. “Oh, and there are three more in our party,” he added, holding up three fingers. The waitress nodded, perhaps understanding, and strode away back to the bar, her long skirt swirling the patterns of sand on the floor.

  Plumtree had opened her menu, and now pried a slip of paper from a clip on the inside cover. She frowned. “Do you remember if the specials were all fish things, before?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Cochran. “I ordered off the printed menu that time.”

  “I didn’t look at the specials either, then.” She read, “Barbunya, Morina, Levrek—mullet, cod, bass—this is all fish. And it seems more Middle Eastern now, than Greek. If it was Greek before.”

  “Then maybe this isn’t the same place, because I do remember you saying it was—” he began; then he paused, for she had flipped the specials sheet over and then pushed it across the table toward him.

  On the back of the sheet, in his own handwriting in ballpoint ink, was written: CODY, JANIS, TIFFANY, VALERIE, HIM. The E in VALERIE had been crossed out, with an O written in above.

  “Do you remember writing that?” she asked.

  In spite of everything that had happened to him during this last two and a half weeks, Cochran’s first impulse was to look around at the other people in the bar, to see who had set up this hoax; then he sagged, remembering how random and unconsidered had been their route to this place today.

  “Sure,” he said dejectedly. “It was only a week ago, and I wasn’t that drunk.” His heart was thudding in his chest, and he stared at the paper and wondered if he was more angry or scared. “I guess this is more … magic, huh.”

  Plumtree tapped the word HIM. “I can’t,” she said, “ever have him come on again.” She touched her face and her throat. “Do you see these cuts? Razor nicks! I think he was shaving.” Behind Cochran the front door squeaked.

  He opened his mouth, but Plumtree had looked past him, toward the front door, and now held up her hand to cut him off. “The rest of the losers have arrived,” she said loudly; then she leaned toward him and whispered quickly, “I think he had to!”

  Mavranos and Pete and Angelica slid into the booth from Cochran’s side, so that Pete Sullivan was now crowding him against Plumtree.

  “Scott’s skeleton is all busted to shit,” said Mavranos.

  “Valorie says Pete jumped on it,” said Plumtree.

  “Somebody should bury it,” said Mavranos, “back at the Leucadia compound.”

  “You can do that yourself, Arky,” said Angelica. “Oh hell—a tequila añejo, neat, with a Corona chaser,” she said to the waitress, who had walked up with a tray and begun to shift full beer glasses onto the table, “and a—Coors Light, Pete?—for this gentleman, please. Arky? Dr. Angelica Elizalde says you can have one beer.”

  Mavranos heaved a windy sigh. “A club soda for me,” he said. “ ‘That which I greatly feared hath come upon me.’ ”

  “What, sobriety?” said Pete Sullivan. “I don’t think that’s a decision you should make right after a concussion.”

  “At Spider Joe’s trailer, out in the desert north of Las Vegas in 1990,” Arky said, “the Fool archetype took possession of everybody in the room, except me. I knocked the tarot cards onto the floor, broke the spell. I couldn’t … have a personality in my head that wasn’t me.”

  Angelica touched his scarred brown hand. “He’s gone, Arky,” she said. “I’d tell you he was inhabiting one of those ducks on that lake now, if I wasn’t sure he went right on past India.”

  Mavranos nodded, though Cochran got the feeling that Angelica hadn’t addressed the man’s real concern. “I’ll stick with water,” Mavranos said. “It probably should be salt water, for the leaching properties.”

  “Carthage cocktail,” came a gravelly voice from the table behind Cochran, away from the front door. “In the winter and spring, surfers taste fresh water in the San Francisco Bay sometimes, from the Sacramento River.”

  Cochran shifted around to see the speaker, and at this point he was only a little surprised to recognize the black dwarf who had made his way on crutches out of the Mount Sabu bar down in the Bellflower district of Los Angeles, when Cochran and Plumtree had been … had been here, there; and Cochran recalled now that when the dwarf had opened the door then the draft from outside had smelled of the sea.

  The little man’s aluminum crutches stood on the seat next to him, the cushioned ends leaning against the electric light sconce over his gleaming bald head. An iron wok sat incongruously on the table in front of him, red-brown with rust and filled to near the rim with a translucent reddish liquid that seemed to be wine.

  Cochran had braced his right hand behind Plumtree’s shoulders, and now the black man was staring at the back of Cochran’s hand. He met Cochran’s eyes and exposed uneven teeth in a smile, then rang the rim of the wok with an oversized spoon. Ripples fretted the surface of the wine, for that’s what it was—Cochran could smell it now, a dry domestic Pinot Noir or Zinfandel.

  Plumtree on his right and Pete on his left were leaning forward, leaving Cochran to talk to the stranger.

  “My name is Thutmose?” said the black man. “Known as Thutmose the Utmos’? This year the surfers haven’t tasted fresh water yet.” He ladled some of the wine into a glass with the spoon. “Do you think they will?”

  Cochran had already gulped down half of one of his beers, and he could feel the dizzying pressure of it in his head. “No,” he said, thinking of the failure at dawn. “I reckon they won’t, this year.”

  “That’s the wrong attitude,” said Thutmose. “Will you drink some of my wine? It’s decent store-bought
Zinfandel right now, and it could be … sacra-mento.’ ”

  “No, I’ve—I’m working on beer,” said Cochran. His neck was aching from being twisted around toward the dwarf, and he was irritably aware that the others at his table were now talking among themselves.

  Thutmose seemed disconcerted. “Do you know where Zinfandel came from?” he snapped. The whites of his glittering eyes were as red as the wine.

  “What, originally?” Cochran closed his tired, stinging eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Sure, a guy named Count Haraszthy brought it to California from Hungary in the 1850s.” He was trying to keep track of both conversations—behind him he heard Angelica say, “I picked up the lighter, but the two silver dollars were just gone.” And Plumtree helpfully said, “Well, the lighter’s worth a lot more than two bucks.”

  “It showed up in the eastern Mediterranean in 1793,” declared Thutmose, “right after the revolutionaries up in Paris desecrated Notre Dame cathedral—they deliberately stored grain there, in the place that had already been holy to the vine for thousands of years before any Romans laid eyes on the Seine River—and then they—filled the gutters of Paris!—with the blood of the aristocrats who had been using the holy wine’s debt-payer properties too freely. ‘It is not for kings and princes to drink wine, lest they drink, and forget the law.’ Proverbs 13. So the Zinfandel grape all at once appeared and started growing wild in all the god’s old places, in Thebes, and Smyrna, and Thrace, and Magnesia. The Yugoslavian Plavac Mali grape is a strayed cousin of it. And the disrespected vine took its new Zinfandel castle right across the water to America, tossing the bad root-lice behind it like the Romans sowed salt in Carthage. A mondard of the new world now.”

  Halfway through the little man’s speech, long before even the word mondard, Cochran had nervously realized that Thutmose was somehow involved in the season’s Fisher King contentions, and that he must be here at the Loser’s Bar for reasons related to those of Cochran’s party; clearly too the dwarf had at least guessed that Cochran and his friends had been concerned in it.

  As if confirming Cochran’s thought, Thutmose said, “You’re the people who had the red truck, and the undead king.”

  But it’s all over now, Baby Blue, Cochran thought helplessly. The red truck’s blue now, and the undead king is deader than a mackerel. Kootie will be king now, and Kootie isn’t here.

  “Do you know what sin-fan-dayl means, in classical Greek?” Thutmose went on, in a wheedling tone now. “ ‘A sieve, washed clean and bright and joyous in the noonday sun.’ Drink the sacramental Zinfandel and become the sieve—all your loves fall right through you to the god, and you’re cleansed and cheered in the process—you’re refreshed, even under the harsh eye of the sun. ‘Give wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.’ ” The little man was practically declaiming now, and Cochran hoped Plumtree hadn’t heard the bit about the eye of the sun.

  Again the dwarf rang the wok with his spoon, and it dawned on Cochran that Thutmose wanted him to acknowledge the rusty bowl, refer to it.

  It’s a half-ass Grail, Cochran thought suddenly; and Thutmose is some sort of near-miss, fugitive, underworld Fisher King—crippled by God-knows-what unhealing injury, and clearly hoping for some kind of vindication, some salvific Wedding-at-Cana miracle, from Dionysus. This terrible New Year has probably brought hundreds like him to San Francisco. And now he’s seen the “Dionysus badge” on my hand—maybe he even saw it when we were in this place back in L.A., and he’s somehow found me again.

  At the Li Po bar on Sunday, Mavranos had told Cochran how Kootie had asked the wrong question when first confronted with the red Suburban truck—Why is it the color of blood? instead of Who does it serve?

  “Why,” asked Cochran gently now, “is your bowl the color of blood?”

  Thutmose the Utmos’ sighed, and seemed to shrink still further. “When he was a baby-god, Dionysus was laid in a winnowing fan. You’re being a dog in the manger.” He shook his head, and there were tears in his red eyes and the word dog seemed to hang in the air. “It’s rust, what did you think? Goddammit, I’m an ex-junkie, trying to turn my life around! I used wine to get off the smack, and now I just want to find the god’s own forgiveness wine.” He tapped the wok with the spoon again, miserably. “A heroin dealer used it to mix up batches, step on the product. When it got too rusty for him to use, he gave it to me. I scraped some of the red crust off and cooked it up in a spoon, and I slammed it, even though I was sure I’d get lockjaw. It did do something bad to my legs—but I didn’t die, and this red bowl kept me well for months.”

  “None of us here can do anything for each other,” interjected Plumtree. Cochran saw that she had shifted around and was listening in. “If we could, we’d be in a place called the Glad Boys Bar, or something, not here.” She slid out of the booth now and stood up. “Come talk to me over by the phones,” she told Cochran.

  Glad to get away from the unhappy dwarf, Cochran got up and followed her across the sandy floor.

  Cochran hadn’t heard the front door squeak while he’d been listening to Thutmose, but there were a lot of people in the long barroom now, though they were all talking in low whispers. Cochran thought they looked like people tumbled together at random in an emergency shelter—he saw men in dinner jackets or denim or muddy camouflage, women in worn jogging suits and women in inappropriately gay sundresses—and none of them looked youthful and they all looked as if they’d been up all night. Cochran reflected that he and his friends must look the same way.

  As he and Plumtree passed the bar, Cochran saw a man pay for a drink by shaking yellow powder out of a little cloth bag—and before the lady bartender carefully swept the powder up, Cochran was able to see that it was some kind of grain, perhaps barley.

  We walked in here through a door in Los Angeles once, he thought, and now through a door in San Francisco—how old is this place, and from what other places has that door opened, perhaps on leather hinges, over the centuries and even millennia? Boston, London? Rome, Babylon, Ur?

  Cochran was relieved to see that the pay telephones were the same modern push-button machines he and Plumtree had used to call Strubie the Clown.

  “Listen,” said Plumtree hoarsely. “What we’ve got to do? Is escape.”

  “Okay,” said Cochran. “From what? To where?”

  “You remember,” said Plumtree in a near-whisper, “who the he on the menu-specials paper referred to, right? After he was on in ’89, I ached in all my joints, and had nosebleeds. And in Holy Week of ’90, when he tried to win the kinghood in that poker game on Lake Mead, he was on for a day and a half, and I had a nervous breakdown so I can’t remember what I felt like. But this time, ending yesterday morning, he had me for almost three full days, and I could hardly even walk, yesterday and today.” She touched her jaw and the corner of her mouth. “And I swear he shaved while he was in this body!”

  Cochran winced, and nodded. “Probably meaning—like you said—that he had to.”

  “Right. He’s not a ghost, he’s not dead—he imposes his natural form on this body when he’s in it for any length of time, so it’s … like I’m taking steroids. I grow fucking whiskers, and I’m sure he screws up my period.” She was blinking back tears, and Cochran realized that she was frightened, and possibly struggling to stay on for this flop. “I think if he was to occupy me for too long—” She slapped her chest. “—this would turn all the way into a man’s body—a clone of his body, the one that got smashed when it fell partly on me, on the Soma pavement in 1969.”

  Cochran spread his hands. “What can you do?”

  “God, I don’t know. Figure out a way to kill him, don’t tell Janis. Hide out, in the meantime, and stay away from that Kootie kid—he is very interested in that Kootie kid.”

  “We can go to my house,” Cochran said. “You remember it, you were on when we were there last week.”

  She pushed back her ragged blond bangs and stared at him. “You don’t mind living with a murderess?
Or even maybe one day a murderer?”

  Cochran stared into Cody’s frightened, squinting eyes—and admitted to himself that in these last eight nightmare days this rough-edged young woman had become, for better or worse, a part of his life. The jumpy infatuation he had initially felt for Janis was gone, but at this moment he couldn’t imagine a life for himself that didn’t abrasively and surprisingly include Janis Cordelia Plumtree.

  “I think,” he said with a weary grin, “we’re partners, by now.”

  “Shake on it.”

  He shook her cold hand.

  “Let’s hit the road,” she said.

  “Okay. But let’s have lunch first.” He smiled. “And then you can help me get rid of a stolen car in my back yard, when we get there.”

  “I can deal with that,” she said. “I hadn’t forgotten it.”

  Thutmose didn’t look up from his bowl when Cochran and Plumtree returned to the booth. The waitress was just taking orders for food, and Cochran quickly asked for carp in wine while Plumtree frowned over the menu and grumpily settled for stuffed mussels.

  By the time the food arrived, Cochran had finished both his beers and ordered two more. The fish tasted like pier pilings and the wine sauce was featureless acid and he hadn’t realized the dish would have raisins in it.

  All the people in the bar were still talking in whispers, and after his fourth beer Cochran noticed that the whispering was in counterpoint unison—a fast, shaking chant that took in the bang-and-rattle of the bar dice as punctuation. The exhausted-looking men and women were all jerkily walking back and forth and between each other, and after staring in befuddled puzzlement for a few moments Cochran saw that their spastic restlessness was a dance. The dancers didn’t appear to be enjoying it, perhaps weren’t even doing it voluntarily. Beneath the rapid shaking whispers and the noise of the dice there was a deep, slow rolling, like a millwheel.