Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply. “Kahlua,” she said, “burning.”

  Cochran too had caught a whiff of hot-coffee-and-alcohol on the cold sea breeze. “Just like down in Solville.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I guess that means something is gonna happen.”

  He looked at her again, but the humble and subdued voice had still been Cody’s.

  The battering exhaust of Mavranos’s truck rolling along at idle speed in reverse behind them set the pace of their walk.

  “Don’t fall over the chain here, Pete,” called Cochran over his shoulder.

  After Plumtree and Cochran stepped over the chain with the rusty NO ADMITTANCE sign hanging from it, their shoes were crunching in sandy red dirt, and they could see a cluster of low, rectangular stone structures and an iron light pole a hundred yards ahead of them at the end of the narrow spit of land; and a few seconds later they heard the chain creak and snap and then thrash into the dry wild-anise bushes that fringed the road.

  “What chain?” came Pete Sullivan’s voice from behind them, speaking loudly to be heard over the indomitable drumming of the truck’s exhaust.

  Cochran and Plumtree kept walking along the dirt path, their hands in their pockets now because of the chill. Puddles in the road reflected the gray sky, and the red dirt was peppered with fragments of brick and marble.

  They were close enough to see the structures ahead now—Cochran and Plumtree were already walking past ornate broad capitals of long-gone Corninthian columns that sat upside-down on the dirt like heroic ashtrays, and spare blocks of carved and routed granite that lay at random among the weeds; but though the low walls and stairs and tomb-like alcoves ahead had been cobbled together out of mismatched scavenged brick and marble, the site had a unified look, as if all these at-odds components had come to this weathered, settled state together, right here, over hundreds of years.

  A motorboat had been crossing the choppy water of the yacht harbor to their right, between the peninsula and the distant white house-fronts on Marina Boulevard; it had rounded the tip of the peninsula and was coming back along the north side, several hundred feet out, and now Cochran heard a rapid hollow knocking roll across the waves.

  And behind him, much closer, he heard the rattling pop of car-window glass shattering. Brick fragments exploded away from a stairway head in front of them even as he had grabbed Plumtree’s forearm and yanked her forward into a sliding crouch behind a low marble wall.

  He looked back—Pete was running back toward Angelica, who had flung open her raincoat and raised the short pistol-grip rifle, and the open back end of the red truck was jumping on its old shock absorbers as it picked up speed.

  Angelica fired three fast shots, then quickly unfolded the stock and had it to her shoulder and fired two more even as the ejected brass shells of the first three were bouncing on the red dirt. Out here under the open sky the shots sounded like sharp hammer blows on a wooden picnic table.

  The truck ground to a halt with its back bumper rocking only a couple of yards from where Cochran and Plumtree were crouched, and two more hard gunshots impacted the air—Cochran realized that Mavranos was now shooting at the boat through the hole where his passenger-side window had been.

  The motorboat had paused, out on the gray water; but now its engine roared, and its bow kicked up spray as it turned north and began curving away from the peninsula, showing them nothing but wake and a bobbing transom.

  Pete and Angelica came sprinting up as Mavranos hopped down out of the truck.

  “Let’s get him out,” Angelica gasped, “and down these stairs to that cobblestone lower level there. I should have had hardball rounds first up. You all carry him, I’ll fetch the bruja stuff.”

  Cochran stood up, and realized that he had drawn his revolver at some point during the confrontation, and that it was cocked; and after he had carefully lowered the hammer he had to touch the cold barrel to be sure he hadn’t fired it. His right hand was shaking as he reached around behind him and stuffed the gun back into its holster. He brushed a buzzing fly away from his ear, and then, with huge reluctance, stepped toward the truck.

  Robed and whole and in some sense still barefoot, the spirit of Scott Crane stood beside the lapping gray water. It wasn’t precisely where Mavranos and the Plumtree woman and the two silver coins were—he was just as immediately aware of the capering naked ghost of himself that was flickering like a hummingbird at the ruins by the sea, where the foghorn moan came for two seconds every fifteen seconds—but what confronted him either way was the water, the obligation to cross the cold, unimaginable water.

  Obligation but not inevitability. He could with only moderate difficulty blunt and truncate himself enough to animate the ghost, become no more than the ghost but at least be wholly that, and stay here, with real physical mass; free to shamble around in the familiarity of noisy human streets, and bask in the earthly sun, and pour the coarsening common short-dog wine down his shabbily restored throat. He would be a poisoned and diminished quantity, but still a real quantity.

  Or he could take the two silver dollars that Spider Joe had brought back to him, at such cost, and spend them on the oblivion that the Greeks had represented as Charon’s ferry over the River Styx—and then drink from what the Greeks had called Lethe, the river of forgetfulness and surrender.

  No guarantees of anything there, that way, not even of nothing. Total abject and unconditional surrender, to whoever or whatever it might ultimately be behind the busy, clustering gods and archetypes that humanity had tried to hold up to it for size. He could hope for mercy, but there would certainly be justice, a justice older and more implacable than the forces that kept the suns shining and the galaxies wheeling in the nighttime sky.

  Sitting in the steamy BMW idling in the Star Motel parking lot, Long John Beach turned to the two-manikin appliance in the back seat. “Let me tell you a parable,” he said.

  “Talk to me, goddammit,” said Armentrout hoarsely, gripping the sweat-slick steering wheel. They were here during the Marina 3.2 earthquake last night, one of the motel guests had told him. They were all yelling at each other, and yelling, “Where’s Kootie?” They carried a guy down the stairs to a truck, and drove away, some of ’em in the truck and some in a beat old brown Ford.

  “I’ll tell you all,” Long John said equably. “A man’s car drove over a cliff, and in midair he jumped out, and caught hold of a tree stump halfway down the cliff. Below him is only fog, and he can’t climb up or down. He looks into the sky and says, ‘Is there anybody up there? Tell me what to do!’ And a big voice says, ‘Let go of the tree.’ So after a few seconds the guy says, ‘Is there anybody else up there?’ ”

  Armentrout nodded impatiently, and finally turned to Long John. “So? What did he do?”

  The one-armed man shrugged. “That’s the end of the story.”

  Down a set of mismatched brick-and-marble stairs, under the shadow of a scrollwork-roofed marble alcove that looked as if it should shelter the carved effigy of a dead king, a broad cobblestone-paved crescent with a raised stone edge-coping projected out over the sea like an ancient dock.

  At the moment the only dead king present was laid out on the pavement below the alcove, his jeans and white shirt blotting up moisture and grime from the puddles between the uneven paving stones; and all that was on the broad table-like slab under the alcove roof was a couple of sheets of corrugated cardboard, bedding for some absent transient.

  In the direction of the peninsula point and the iron light pole another set of steps led back up to road level from this stone floor, flanked against the open gray sky by a bench that was a marble slab laid across two broken granite half-moons. Cochran realized that he badly wanted to feel that this shelter was an enduring, solid edifice—but it was too obvious that what distinguished this place from a real, old ruin was the fact that all the stone edges here, even the ones fitted up against each other as part of some wall or seat, were broken and uneven. A line from
some poem was tolling in his head: These fragments I have shored against my ruins …

  Plumbing pipes projected up out of the muddy ground at every shelf and wall-top, their open-mouthed ends bent horizontal to project the echoing sound of sea water rising and falling in their buried shafts, a deep twanging like slow-fingered ascending and descending slides on slack bass-guitar strings. Cochran’s thudding heartbeat and his shallow panting seemed to provide a counterpoint, and it was only Plumtree’s evident, valiant desperation to accomplish the task at hand, and his own queasy shame at having called for Nina’s ghost during the Follow-the-Queen episode, that kept him from wading out into the cold sea on the Marina side and trying to swim to shore.

  His face was chilly with sweat, and not just because of having had to help carry the cold dead body a few moments ago. In his mind he was again seeing the carbine jolting in Angelica’s fists and flinging out ejected shell casings, and the brick stairway-top exploding into dust and high-speed fragments, and he was shaking with a new, visceral comprehension of velocity and bullets and human mercilessness. He couldn’t help but be glad that he hadn’t fired his own gun.

  Angelica had fetched her canvas knapsack from the truck while Mavranos and Pete and Cochran had been carrying Scott Crane’s body down the steps, and now she was spreading out on the damp stones her paltry-looking tools—there was, along with the assorted garage-sale litter he’d seen last night in the motel room, an empty H. Upmann cigar box, a can of Ronsonol lighter fluid, a pair of pliers, a Star Motel postcard … Cochran shook his head in bewilderment.

  Mavranos cussed and slapped at his own neck. “No hippie druids this morning,” he said, “but we got flies up the butt.”

  “Here, at this hour,” said Angelica in a strained voice, “those can’t be anything but ghost-flies; las moscas, little essences of dead people, either brought in on us or already here. Ordinarily they’d just be an implicit cloud, but they’re condensed to individuality this morning by the sudden low pressure of having the dead king right here.” She glanced up, frowning. “Try not to breathe them—and if any of you have got any bleeding cuts, cover them.”

  She handed Mavranos the bottle of ’75 Kenwood Cabernet. “You hold this, Arky,” she told him; “open it when I tell you.”

  “Go ahead and do this thing right,” Mavranos said, “but as much on fast-forward as you can, okay? Those guys in the boat will be back, or their friends.”

  “Right, Arky,” Angelica said, “but it’s important for this procedure that all the minds present understand what’s going on, assent to it.” Speaking to all of them, she went on rapidly, “See, we’re gonna be doing a kind of ass-backward honoring-of-the-dead here. Usually the procedure is to have a heavily masked guy, a Lucumi ogungun, let himself be taken over by the ghost of the deceased; it’s to let the ghost see the funeral and mourners and flower displays and all, and everybody being sorry, so that the ghost can go away, can dissipate happily and not hang around and cause trouble.”

  While she’d been talking she had laid the cigar box on the stones and draped it with a white linen handkerchief, and now she set on it a water glass from the motel. As she hoisted a plastic bottle of Evian water out of the knapsack and began twisting off the cap, she said, in a formal tone, “This is an altar, a bóveda espiritual.” It seemed to be a declaration, and she poured the glass half full of water as she spoke.

  She looked up at Plumtree then, and her mirror glasses were lozenges of glowing gray sky. Cochran could see the butt of the slung carbine under her open raincoat. “The way it ordinarily works,” Angelica went on at her previous quick pace, “is you set out a glass of some nice kind of water, and everybody dabs some on their hands and temples, as a kind of cleansing, so the guest-of-honor ghost will have a transparent medium to focus on but won’t fixate on anybody.” She took the Wild Turkey bottle out of the canvas sack and twisted out the cork. “But,” she said hoarsely, “we don’t want his ghost, we want him. And we want to make sure that he does fixate, that retreat is not even an option for him.”

  She poured the still-liquid red blood into the water, about three tablespoons, and then covered the glass with the Star Motel postcard to keep the ghost-flies out of it. “So you’re going to drink this.”

  Plumtree was biting her lip, but she nodded. “This has to work,” she was whispering, “please let this work, this has to work …” The sunburn was spotty over her cheekbones, as if the skin was stretched tight, and Cochran guessed that her hands would have been trembling if she had not been clenching them tightly together, as if in prayer.

  Cochran remembered the note Kootie had left, when he had run away last night. I can’t do it again … me be out of my head … I’d go crazy. This woman, Cochran thought, underwent electroconvulsive therapy six days ago this morning. She was knocked out of her own head, and has been evicted again several times since then by her terrible father … most recently for more than two whole days, and she got herself back just yesterday morning. Cochran remembered her saying yesterday, in a falsely, bravely cheerful voice, The goat head was speaking, in a human language … But she’s here, doing this, voluntarily. Assenting, and then some.

  He stepped closer to her and reached out and squeezed her hand. Without glancing away from the glass of streaky red water on the draped cigar box, Plumtree shook her hand free of his.

  “No offense,” she said faintly. “This is our flop.”

  Cochran took a step back. Over the wavering drone of the flies he heard a faint pattering on the stones behind him, and when he turned he saw Mavranos brushing tiny cubes of truck-window glass out of his hair.

  “I could drive back for coffee and doughnuts,” Mavranos said.

  “We’re almost ready here,” said Angelica.

  She now laid the myrtle branches on the stones and squirted them with the Ronsonol lighter fluid; and she laid out as well the gold Dunhill lighter and the two silver dollars that Spider Joe had brought to Solville.

  At last Angelica straightened up, with a visible shudder, and elbowed the slung carbine back behind her hip. “Okay, Arky,” she said, “open that skeleton-label wine. We’re each going to take a sip of it, and then I’m going to light the myrtle. This stuff will get—God help us!—it’ll get the attention of Dionysus, his remote attention, I trust, and that will give us a line-of-sight link to the underworld.”

  “And from the underworld right back to us, here,” said Mavranos stolidly as he twisted the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife into the cork. “Pogo?” he called loudly into the gray sky. He yanked the cork out with a frail pop. “That’s a sound you ought to recognize, old friend.”

  He tipped the bottle up to his lips, and after a couple of bubbles had wobbled up inside it he lowered it and passed it to Pete Sullivan, who also drank from it.

  “Plumtree last,” said Angelica, taking the bottle from her husband and handing it to Cochran. The harbor breeze was tossing her black hair around her face. “And out of the glass.”

  Cochran raised the cold bottle and took several deep gulps, and he was so hungry for the blurring effect of alcohol on his empty stomach, on this terrible morning, that he had to force himself to hand it back without swallowing more.

  “Thirsty boy,” said Angelica bleakly. “You’re not through yet, by the way.” She drank a token mouthful herself, then crouched again by her little altar and, flicking the postcard away, topped up the water glass with purple Cabernet. She clanked the bottle down on the stones and lifted the glass, and straightened up and handed it to Plumtree.

  “Not quite yet,” Angelica said to her. “You,” she told Cochran, “hold up that right hand of yours, toward the water, with that birthmark facing out.”

  Cochran’s ears were ringing, and he distinctly felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt. “Why?” he whispered. I won’t, he thought. He heard again what he had said in the self-esteem group at Rosecrans Medical Center, on that first day: Reach out your hand, you get it cut off, sometimes. And he
remembered seeing the red blood jetting from his chopped wrist, when he had put his hand between the old Zinfandel stump and the pruning shears thirty-three years ago. He was about to say I won’t out loud, but Mavranos spoke before he could:

  “I got no affection for your girlfriend,” Mavranos said gruffly, “but I gotta say that she’s bought a lot of … plain cold admiration, in my rating. Not that she cares, I’m sure. What she’s ready to do … I don’t think I could do. None of the rest of us can claim our part’s too hard, in this, compared to hers.”

  “That mark on your hand is some kind of Dionysus badge,” Angelica said gently, “isn’t it?”

  Le Visage dans la Vigne, Cochran thought. The Face in the Vine Stump. “I suppose it is,” he said helplessly, and then in his mind he heard again the hard crack of Plumtree’s fist hitting the bloody madhouse linoleum floor, right after he had punched Long John Beach in the nose. His teeth ached now as he took a deep breath of the sea air and let it out in shaky segments. “I’m … with you. Okay.” Slowly he lifted his right arm, with the palm of his hand turned back.

  “Okay,” echoed Angelica. To Plumtree she said, “Now when I get the myrtle burning, you call to—damn it, you brought this on yourself, you know, girl, I’m so sorry, but—call to Scott Crane; and then drink—” She shook her head quickly and waved at the glass of rusty-colored liquid in Plumtree’s hand, then whispered the last word, “—it.”

  Cochran noticed that the peak of the alcove roof and the top of the marble stair were shining now in the cold pink light of dawn. Mavranos stood on tiptoe and looked back down the peninsula.

  “Sun’s coming up,” he said, “over Fort Mason.”

  “Get the pliers,” Angelica told him. “Pull the spear out of his throat.”

  Mavranos swallowed visibly, but his face was impassive as he nodded. “Happy to.” He picked up the pliers and then knelt beside Scott Crane’s body, with his back to the others; Cochran saw his shoulders flex under the denim jacket, and then he was straightening up, holding the closed pliers out away from himself, and the red-stained three-pointed spearhead quivered between the pliers’ jaws.