Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  Plumtree stared back at her. “Why should I answer your questions, lady?”

  Angelica smiled at her as she deftly shuffled the cheap paper cards. “I know about … making amends to people you’ve allowed to die; people you’re linked with by chains of guilt, hm? Real guilt and shame, the kind you’ve got to go back and fix, not just ‘get past’ or ‘put behind you’ or get ‘okay with.’ You think you can do it without help, but that’s like thinking one hand can fix what it took two hands to break. If that dead man in the kitchen can be resurrected, it might be some thing you can tell us that’ll help us all to get the job done.” She looked around the room affectionately. “I wonder if we’ve got even one person here who doesn’t believe, with some validity, that he or she is directly responsible beyond any excuse for the death of someone.”

  “Shee-it,” snarled Plumtree; but she struggled wearily to her feet and shambled over to the couch, which thumped the floor with an uneven leg when she dropped onto it beside Angelica. Her boyfriend, Cochran, got to his feet and leaned attentively on the corner of the desk.

  Angelica scooted back and spread the cards messily facedown on the couch cushion between them; the blurry black-and-white plaid patterns on the backs of the cards blended together so that it seemed to be one puddle on the cushion. In Mexico these cards were used to play a gambling game similar to bingo, but Angelica had long ago found that the mundane pictures on the fronts of them were useful for eliciting free association from patients. “Pick me three of them,” Angelica said.

  Pete and the boys came clomping back in, carrying cardboard boxes, as Plumtree carefully drew three of the cards out of the pile; and Angelica leaned forward to be heard over the clanking of telephone and radio parts being lifted out of the boxes and spread out on the desk. “Now flip one of them faceup,” she said.

  With a trembling hand Plumtree turned over … card 51, El Pescado, a picture of a red fish upside down in smoky water, holding a tethered hook in its mouth.

  “I guess you know what that one indicates,” Angelica said in a carefully confident and dismissive tone.

  “ ‘I’ll bite’ is what it … means,” Plumtree said, nodding. “But if this is a reading of me, it’s wrong. I won’t bite. Maybe it’s a warning for me, huh? Don’t let yourself get pulled out into the air, get separated from the school—off the school bus!—get cooked and eaten and digested by somebody out there. ‘Full fathom five my father lies.’ ”

  Angelica just nodded, but she was surprised—she had expected that this serendipitous picture would evoke some mention of the Fisher King, whom Plumtree claimed to have killed.

  Angelica looked up and made a ch-ch! sound; Kootie had climbed down from the desk, but instantly looked around toward her.

  “St. Michael the Archangel,” Angelica told him, “with High John the Conqueror ready.”

  The boy nodded and pulled open one of the desk drawers; he lifted out two aerosol spray cans and handed the purple one across to his foster mother.

  “Your father’s in the other direction, then,” Angelica said to Plumtree, hefting the can, “from whoever’s dangling the line into the water, is that right? Tell me about your father.”

  “Well, he’s dead. Is that Scotchgard? I wasn’t going to piss on your couch, lady.” When Angelica didn’t reply or change her expression, Plumtree sighed and went on. “He died when I was two, but I was in the hospital, so they didn’t tell me about it right away, about him being dead. Janis doesn’t remember him any more than I do, but she claims to miss him real bad. All she knows about him is what she’s heard from Valorie.”

  “Valerie’s older?”

  “Yes,” said Plumtree tightly. “Valorie’s been—around from the beginning.”

  “She remembers a lot of stuff?”

  “She remembers everything. But all her memories,” Plumtree added, glancing at the TV set, “are in black and white, and always with some drumming or banging going on in the background.”

  “Can I talk to Valorie?”

  Plumtree shifted uncomfortably and shot a nervous glance toward Cochran. “Not unless she wants to talk to you.”

  “What were you in the hospital for? When you were two?”

  “I don’t remember. Measles? Stress? Some kid thing.”

  Pete had unplugged the TV set and was lifting it down off the desk to make room for the Ford coil box and the battered old field frequency modulator. “I hope mice haven’t got into all this stuff in these two years,” he muttered to Kootie.

  “It’d be ghosts of mice that’d be attracted to it,” said Kootie, who was still holding the other spray can.

  “How did he die?” Angelica asked Plumtree. “Your father.”

  “Jesus, lady!” said Plumtree tightly. “You’re just asking to have me lose time here.”

  Angelica held up the purple spray can and let Plumtree look at the picture on the label, a crude drawing of a winged, sword-wielding angel kicking a bat-winged devil into a fiery pit. The directions advised, Spray all areas of your surroundings. Make the sign of the Cross. “This is just air-freshener, really,” Angelica said, “but the chlorofluorocarbons in it, and this groovy label, repel ghosts. After I spray it around us, you can talk freely.”

  Angelica held the can over Plumtree’s head and pushed the button on the top of it; a mist that smelled like bus-station rest rooms hissed out, drifting over Plumtree and Angelica both.

  Plumtree took a deep breath and let it out. “Well!” she said when Angelica had lowered the can. “He fell off a building, is what happened, in San Francisco, one of the old wino buildings south of Market. Soma, they used to call that area, from south of Market, get it? In Soma’s realm are many herbs, and knowledge a hundredfold have they. That’s from the Rig-Veda. I hope you’re right about that spray stuff. He was the chief of a hippie commune, like the Diggers, you know? A group that fed homeless runaways. My father’s commune was called the Lever Blank, they’re mentioned in a couple of the books about the Manson family. I suppose the name meant vote-for-nobody or something. My mom left the commune a couple of years after he died, and she always said that they killed him, because it was the summer solstice and he had failed to become this king of the west at Easter. ’69 was a competition year for it, just like ’90 was.”

  Pete had sent Ollie back outside to fetch a car battery from one of the Solville vehicles, and was now brushing the dust off the pencil lines and screw holes still in the wood surface of the desk from the time they had set up this telephone in October of 1992.

  “Okay,” Angelica said cautiously. She pointed at the two cards that were still facedown. “Hit me again.”

  Plumtree turned over the second card, and it was the unnumbered El Borracho card, The Drunk—a picture of a man in laborer’s white clothing walking bent-legged and carrying a bottle, with a dog snapping at his heels.

  “That was you, tonight,” Plumtree said to Cochran, picking up the card and showing it to him.

  Cochran peered at the picture on it, then jerked his head back, frowning. “I may have been drunk,” he said, “but I wasn’t bestial. That there is more like who Long John Beach was singing about.” He rubbed his hand clumsily over his face, and Angelica noticed a leaf-shaped birthmark on his knuckles. “And who was it that drank the Manhattans,” he went on, “and all the Budweisers?”

  “We’re talking about you, here,” Angelica told Plumtree. “How do you feel about this picture?”

  “I hate drunks,” said Plumtree. “I’d never let Janis get involved with one.” Apparently to end discussion of the Borracho card, she reached down and flipped over the third card.

  It was number 46, El Sol, a drawing of a bodiless round red face encircled by a jagged gold corona.

  Plumtree’s eyes slammed shut and she flung herself back hard against the couch cushions, with her fingers clawed into the disordered thatch of her blond hair; her nostrils were tensely white as she whistlingly inhaled a deep breath, but her face was reddening visibly even unde
r her sunburn—and fleetingly Angelica wondered how a patient in a mental hospital could acquire a sunburn. Plumtree was whispering some rapid-cadenced phrase over and over again.

  From long practice Angelica resisted the impulse to participate in her patient’s panic. “I think we’d better titrate up our St. Michael dosage,” she said calmly, raising the purple can and spraying two more long bursts of the stuff over their heads.

  Pete and Kootie had paused in their phone-assembly work to stare at Plumtree, and Mavranos was frowning and tapping the revolver barrel against his thigh.

  Now Angelica could hear what Plumtree was whispering: “—Ghost! In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost! In the name of—”

  “What is it that this reminded you of?” Angelica asked the woman in a voice just loud enough to override the frantic whispering. “Whatever it is, it’s not here. Only this little drawing is here.”

  “Let me,” said Cochran. He stepped forward and knelt beside the stiff, shaking Plumtree. “Janis,” he said to her, “this is 1995, the eleventh of January, Wednesday, probably getting on for midnight. You’re in Long Beach, and you’re twenty-eight years old.” He looked at the Sol card that was still faceup on the couch cushion; he turned it face down, and then he glanced up at Angelica. “She has a recurrent nightmare, of the sun falling out of the sky onto her, knocking her flat.”

  Plumtree’s eyes opened and she lowered her hands, and she blinked around at everyone staring at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was I yelling?”

  Angelica smiled at her. This, she thought, must be one of her other personalities. How I do love the histrionics and theatricalities of dissociatives. “No,” Angelica said patiently. “The gentlemen were wanting help with their telephone.” Plumtree’s mention of herbs a few moments ago actually had reminded her of a crucial part of the telephone; she looked over at Johanna and said, “You remember the mix we cooked on the stove, two years ago? You’d better get a pot of it going—Pete would have forgotten it, being all wrapped up in his hardware. The mint—the yerba buena leaves—you can pick out back by the garage, and there’s tequila in the cupboard, unless Arky’s drunk it all up.”

  “It’s your bourbon I drank up,” Mavranos said defensively. “I don’t touch tequila.”

  Angelica clasped her hands and turned back to Plumtree. As casually as she could, she asked, “Do you remember much about the hospital you were in, when you were two? Did it have … lawns, playrooms, a cafeteria? Try to picture it.”

  “I only remember the room I was in,” Plumtree said. “There were get-well cards on the table by the bed,” she added helpfully.

  “Close your eyes again, but this time relax.” When Plumtree complied, Angelica went on, “you’ll find you can remember details very clearly, especially from when you were young, if you clear your mind of every distraction and just relax. And you’re safe here with us, so you can relax, can’t you?”

  Without opening her eyes, Plumtree said, “You’re right here, Scant?”

  Cochran clasped her shoulder. “Right here.”

  “Then I can relax.”

  “So … remember the hospital room,” said Angelica. “What did it smell like?”

  “… Fresh-peeled adhesive tape,” Plumtree said dreamily, “and laundry baskets, and the woody taste of Fudgsicle sticks once you’ve sucked all the ice cream off, and shampoo.”

  “And what did the room look like?”

  “There was a window—there was a window!—with metal Venetian blinds to my left, but I could only see part of a tree branch through it; the wallpaper was lime green, and there were dots, little holes, in the white tiles on the ceiling—”

  Plumtree’s eyes were still closed, and Angelica permitted herself a faint nod and a tiny mild smile of triumph. “Why,” she asked in a voice she forced to sound careless, “couldn’t you see anything more out the window?”

  “I didn’t go over to it, to look out.”

  “Were you … afraid to?”

  “No, it was on the ground floor. I just didn’t get out of bed at all, even to go to the bathroom. I had to use a bedpan, though I was certainly not wearing diapers anymore, by then.”

  “Can you see the room? All the details?”

  “Sure.”

  “Look at yourself, then, at your arms and legs. Why didn’t you get out of bed?”

  “I—I couldn’t!—not with a cast on my leg and my arm in a sling—!”

  Plumtree’s eyes sprang open, and it was all Angelica could do to maintain her gentle smile—for she was abruptly, viscerally certain that it was an entirely different person now behind the Plumtree woman’s eyes. Angelica made herself go on to note the physical indications—the tightened cast of the woman’s mouth and jaw, the wider eyes, the newly squared shoulders—but the conviction had come, indomitably, first.

  Plumtree turned her head to look at Cochran, who flinched slightly but kept his hand on her shoulder.

  “How’re you taking all this?” he asked her nervously.

  “Upon my back,” Plumtree said in a flat voice, “to defend my belly; upon my wit, to defend my wiles; upon my secrecy, to defend mine honesty; my mask, to defend my beauty; and you, to defend all these. And at all these wards I lie, at a thousand watches.”

  “Now who just left?” demanded Spider Joe from the corner.

  “Wow,” said Angelica humbly.

  Plumtree had lowered her face into her hands, and now she looked up, squinting. “Wha’d I miss?” she asked irritably. “Do you people have such a thing as a beer around here?”

  The woman has shifted again, Angelica thought. I may talk myself out of it eventually, but right now I’m a believer in MPD.

  “Yes,” she said, just to get away from this woman who was such an affront to her professional convictions. “Right. A beer. I’ll get one of Arky’s for you.” But she was still too shaken by what she had deduced about Plumtree’s condition to stand up right away; and she was wondering if the telephone call would even be possible with Plumtree here on the premises.

  “Coors, that means,” sighed Plumtree.

  “This stuff on the desk here is the antenna,” Pete was telling Scat and Oliver, “but we can’t be in the room with it, or the carborundum bulb and the rectifying lens will just pick up on our living auras. Let’s set up the actual telephone receiver in the laundry room. That used to be the kitchen, before one of our remodeling campaigns, and it’s where we did it before.”

  And you don’t want to do it in the current kitchen, right in the presence of the dead king, Angelica thought as she finally stood up, dizzily, from the couch. Well, neither do I.

  She paused in the kitchen doorway, standing back against the doorframe to avoid getting tangled in Spider Joe’s arching antennae. “How are you planning to scramble the call?” she asked Pete. “Even if Sherman Oaks and this bad psychiatrist already know where we are, there’s no use in lighting a beacon for every other smoke-fancier in the L.A. area, if we can help it.”

  Pete held up his hands and made dialing motions with his forefingers. “I’ve still got antique hands.”

  “Yeah,” said Angelica uncertainly, “but they’re yours now.”

  Pete lowered his hands. “I guess you’re right. I’ve even put a few new scars on ’em in the last two years.”

  “You do hand transplants, lady?” Plumtree asked Angelica. “You sound more like Dr. Frankenstein than Dr. Freud.”

  “Yeah,” said Mavranos, frowning like someone having health-insurance billing explained to them, “what’s all this Beast-With-Five-Fingers talk?”

  “Sorry,” said Pete. “The magician Houdini had a customized mask made in the twenties, see, sort of a decoy with a magical spell on it, to make it look like he was where he wasn’t. It was plaster casts of his hands, and his actual cut-off dried thumb, and if you were carrying the lot when bad magicians focused on you, you’d suddenly take on the physical appearance of Houdini—short stature, dinner jacket with breakaway sleeves, cur
ly hair, the whole outfit. And—”

  Plumtree’s boyfriend made a suppressed snorting sound.

  “I wish we did still have that magical string from Mexico,” Angelica told him scornfully; “I’d love to see you suddenly notice that your goddamn shoes were on fire, or you suddenly had a live bat in your hair, when you tried to snap it.”

  “On Halloween day of ’92,” Pete went on, “we were dragged out of our apartment here at gunpoint by the people who wanted the Edison ghost that was in Kootie’s head then—you got any problems with that, mister?—and the dried thumb was somewhere else, the bad guys found that; but I grabbed the plaster hands—and they disappeared—and suddenly I had Houdini’s hands.” He held his hands up and wiggled the short, strong fingers. “And I’ve had ’em ever since. They won’t hold a weapon—I guess Houdini didn’t want his decoy hurting anyone—and I’m more comfortable now writing with a fountain pen, and shaving with a straight razor; but at least I can do lots of parlor-magic stunts.” He clenched the hands into fists. “Angie’s right, though—they are mine now. They wouldn’t disguise the source of the call.”

  For a moment no one spoke, and the drumming of water falling from the leaky ceiling into the pots and pans was the only sound.

  Then, “Arky has the dried eyeball of a dead Fisher King,” said Kootie. “That would be a fine scrambler.”

  “Make it two beers,” called Plumtree, “if I gotta sit here and listen to all this creepy shit.” Angelica could hear the tremor of fear under the woman’s bravado.

  Angelica decided that she would have a beer herself; and maybe some of the tequila, which she could now smell heating up in the kitchen, if there was any still left in the bottle. She rocked her head back against the doorway frame with a firm knock. “I suppose you really do have that,” she said wearily to Mavranos. “And I suppose a one-time Fisher King’s ghost might not have been banished by the current Fisher King’s death, because of standing behind the shotgun, as it were.” She sighed. “An eyeball. So is it activated at all, in any sense? I mean, is there any ashe in it, any vitality? How far away is the rest of this … dead Fisher King? If his body is real far away, or under water, then your … dried eyeball … won’t be a whole lot of use.”