Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  “She’s avoiding me,” Cochran said.

  “Well I wonder why.” Plumtree laid down a screwdriver she’d been twisting the idle screw with and held out her black-smeared left hand. “Can I have your beer? I’m too dirty to be touching your doorknobs and refrigerator handles.”

  Cochran handed it to her, without even taking a last sip of it. “And I’ll get you another if you want, just to save you the walk,” he said, “but mi casa es su casa, Cody. Mess up anything you want.”

  Plumtree took the beer with a grin. After a deep sip, she exhaled and said, “Thanks, but Mammy Pleasant will make me clean up any messes I make. Have you seen those lists of chores she leaves for me? Not just shopping and cleaning—sometimes she tells me to go buy or sell houses! But I called about a couple, they’re all pre-1906 addresses. It’s a good thing she doesn’t know the 1995 prices I’m paying for her groceries, she’d think I was embezzling. And in the notes she’s always calling me Teresa.”

  Cochran nodded. Cody and Mammy Pleasant were both strong presences in the household, and managed to get on each other’s nerves in spite of the fact that they could never meet, taking turns as they did at occupying the same body. But Cochran had several times talked directly to the old-woman personality, and she seemed to be as senile as Kootie said most ghosts were. The Teresa person had evidently been a servant she’d had when she’d been alive.

  The Mammy Pleasant ghost had first arrived upon Plumtree last Sunday, after Cody had consented to eat bread baked with ground Octavia Street eucalyptus seeds in it and drink wine in which the split seeds had sat soaking overnight. For an hour after taking the dubious sacrament, Plumtree had just sat on the living-room couch, flushing her mouth with vodka to kill the taste of the eucalyptus and watching the news—

  And then she had blinked and reared back, staring with clear recognition into the faces of Kootie and Pete and Angelica and Cochran through eyes that momentarily seemed to Cochran to be mismatched in color. After a few seconds she had looked back at the television, and said in a strong, deep voice, “I was talking to you people through that thing, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Kootie, looking away from her.

  “Courage, boy!” she said. “Remember Gawain.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Kootie again.

  Angelica had begun asking the old woman questions, but Mammy Pleasant had immediately demanded to know if they had brought any eucalyptus bark from her tree; and, when she’d been assured that they had, that a pair of shoes be soled from the bark for her. And when Pete and Kootie had cut out bark soles and heels and Superglued them onto a pair of Nina’s low-heeled Ferragamo pumps—Pleasant had haughtily dismissed the notion of using a pair of Reeboks after getting a look at them—the old woman had put the shoes on and walked outside in the crackling, fragmenting footwear, straight to the greenhouse.

  Scott Crane’s disordered skeleton was laid out in there on a shelf between Nina’s orchids and a crowd of potted fuchsias, and the Plumtree hands were shaky as they touched the broken skull. “He himself will lead you to the god’s wine,” she had said. “And by then you’ll have learned where to go with it, and what to do.”

  She hadn’t said very much more about Crane’s restoration to life than that—then or in the six days since. She generally came on within an hour to either side of noon, though the sun was seldom visible through the overcast, and often she seemed absentminded, or senile, or even drunk—which, Mavranos noted, was only to be expected in a servant of Dionysus. She kept finding jobs around the house for “Teresa” to do, and had to leave notes because she could never find the girl; and Plumtree had begun leaving notes in return, suggesting that the old woman clean the floors and windows herself. When Kootie or Angelica stopped the old woman and try to get information about the procedure they were supposedly going to perform on the day of the Tet Festival, Pleasant’s drunkenness would seem to become more pronounced—and she would just insist that Crane would presently tell them what to do. Adding to the confusion was the fact that she generally slurred the name to Cren, and frequently pronounced it with a stutter, C-cren, so that she seemed to be referring to Cochran. Even her pronunciation of Scott sometimes seemed to slur nasally toward Scant.

  Cochran now watched Cody spraying the carburetor with some very flammable-smelling aerosol.

  “Janis is avoiding me,” he said again.

  “Don’t light a cigarette right now,” Cody said. “I don’t blame her. But I think she should talk to you.” She put down the spray can and squinted up at him, her face shadowed by the raised car hood. “I saw into her dream for a couple of seconds last night. You were in both of our dreams, and the … figure of you, your outline, must have sort of matched up and spun around at the partition between her mind and mine—like one of those secret bookshelf-walls in old movies, that rotate on a pivot when you pull on the right book.” Cody took another gulp of the beer. “Her dream was in color, but barely—it looked fake, like a black-and-white photo touched up with watercolors, and the backgrounds were plain gray. And there was music, the dwarf music from Sleeping Beauty, but I could hardly hear the melody because the drumming was so hard and loud. It sounded like soldiers marching fast on an iron deck.”

  Cochran bared his teeth unhappily. He couldn’t forget the image of Janis valiantly punching the linoleum floor at the Rosecrans Medical Center nearly three weeks ago; nor her look of despairing hurt in his bed last Tuesday, when he had last spoken to her. “What does that mean?” he asked Cody.

  “Valorie’s memories are in black-and-white, and always have drumming going on. I think Janis is draining away into Valorie.”

  But Valorie’s dead! he almost said. “Can … that happen?”

  “As far as we’re concerned, Sid, anything can happen. We went to a funeral once when we were twelve, and by the time the minister was done talking it was somebody else’s funeral and we were fourteen; and what we thought was the emotion of rage turns out to be our male parent, who’s alive and crouching inside our head; and I have to look at whatever I last scratched the date on to be sure—” She glanced at fresh scratches in the greasy curve of the manifold valve cover. “—to be sure that the goddamn Edison Medicine that broke us all into separate pieces, all finally aware of each other, happened only seventeen days ago!”

  Cochran smiled with half of his face. “I see what you mean. The word ‘impossible’ isn’t what it used to be, for any of us.” Cody was holding out the beer can toward him; he took it to throw away for her, but it was still more than half full, so he gratefully tilted it up for a sip and then handed it back to her. “What can I say to Janis besides that I’m sorry? Besides that I know I was the bad guy and that she deserved better from even a total stranger, never mind from somebody she had got herself into bad trouble to protect?”

  Cody laughed. “Besides those things?” Then she sobered. “I honestly don’t know, but it might save her if you told her you love her.” She shook her head. “My … it’s not sister; my other half? … seems to be evaporating, dying.”

  “I could tell her that, I suppose, if it would help,” he said cautiously. He glanced back at the kitchen door. “But if it did help, and she came back, even though I’d—I mean, she’d be able to tell—”

  Cody raised an eyebrow. “You don’t love her?”

  “No.”

  “Huh. She seems to me like the ideal woman, everything I’m not. So do you love anybody?” She coughed. “I mean, anybody who’s alive?”

  At first Cochran thought he wouldn’t be able to look at her. Then he did meet her eyes, though his voice was incongruously light when he answered, “Yes.”

  It was Cody that looked away. “I don’t think that’s very smart.” She coughed again, rackingly. “Well, go ahead and lie to her, and we can worry about the consequences once she’s herself again. Better a car that’s gonna let you down halfway home than one that won’t run at all.”

  Cochran considered, then rejected, the idea of drink
ing a couple of beers first. “I don’t know what I’ll say. But go ahead—call her up.”

  “I can’t, she won’t come voluntarily. You’ve got to call her up.”

  “How am I supposed to—oh. Follow-the-Queen.”

  “Right. Wait right here, I’ll … get my stupid parentess.” Plumtree closed her eyes. “Mother!” she called.

  Instantly her eyes sprang open, and she stepped back away from Cochran after grabbing up a screwdriver from the fender. “You tell him,” she said, “that if he comes out of that house I’ll drive this straight into my own heart. He’ll know I mean it.” The skin of her neck was suddenly looser, and her eyes seemed closer together.

  “He’s nowhere around here, Mrs. … Plumtree,” said Cochran awkwardly. Why was he talking to this personality? According to Angelica it wasn’t her real mother, nor even a real ghost, just an internalized version of her parent patched together from memories and overheard conversations. “I do know who you mean,” Cochran went on. “We’re hiding from him.” He felt as though he had dialed six digits of Janis’s number, and was afraid to dial the last one. “We’re protecting your daughter from him.”

  “You can’t hide, you can’t protect anyone, from Omar Salvoy,” said the querulous voice, though her fist relaxed around the screwdriver handle. But Cochran’s stomach was cold, and he wished she had not mentioned Salvoy’s name. “Especially you can’t protect her. He wants to have a child by a dead woman. I was nearly dead when he had intercourse with me, I was—unconscious!—in a coma!—after a head injury!”

  Cochran thought of his afternoon with Tiffany, then drove the horrifying parallel out of his mind.

  The mother personality almost put Plumtree’s eye out as she reached up to rub her eyes with the hand holding the screwdriver. “Listen to me,” she went on. “He studied the old books of the Order of the Knights Templar, and one of their secret mystery-initiation stories was about a man who dug up a dead woman out of her grave and had intercourse with her cold body; and after he had raped the corpse and buried it again, a voice from the earth told him to return in nine months and he would find a divine son. He came back then, and when he dug her up this time he found a, a blinking, grimacing little black head lying on her thigh-bones. And the voice from the earth told him to guard it well, for it would be the source of all forgiveness. And so he took it away, and guarded it jealously, and he prospered with impunity.” There were tears in her eyes as she glared at Cochran. “My baby died when he fell on her. There’s some kind of … kaleidoscope girl that’s grown up in there, in her head, but my baby died that day in Soma.” She was shaking her head violently and drawing the screwdriver blade across her chest. “But she can still, my dead daughter can still become pregnant, if Omar is in a male body. He can become the father of the god.”

  Cochran knew that it was his vision, and not the sky, that had darkened; but with a shaking hand he reached out and then suddenly, firmly, gripped the blade of the screwdriver.

  “Don’t kill her,” he whispered. Was this the same god? he wondered; was the horrible little homunculus she’d described the same person as the deity of groves and grapevines that offered the pagadebiti? The mondard that had spoken to him in Paris with such fatherly affection, before turning into a bull-headed thing and then into a tumbled straw effigy? The god that had made the Agave woman in Mavranos’s Euripides play cut off her son’s head? What kind of primordial proto-deity could be all these things?

  He thought of the endless rows of gnarled crucifixes dripping out on the surrounding hills in the rain.

  “Don’t kill her,” he repeated. “I’ll protect her, I’ll save her from him. I love her.” I love the real one, he thought, even if you don’t know which that is.

  Plumtree shook her head in evident pity. “She’ll come to the point where she’ll tear you to pieces just for the honor of being able to bring your head to him. Who are you to the god?”

  Cochran abruptly pulled the screwdriver out of her hands. Then, slowly, he turned his hand around to show her the mark below his knuckles. “When I was a boy,” he said, “I put out my hand to save him from the pruner’s shears.”

  Plumtree had gasped, and now nodded slowly. “Send her away into the sea,” she said. “She belongs in India, not here, not being the mother of the god. The god himself couldn’t want that, to have an incarnate aspect of himself in filial obligation to a monster.” The smile she gave him was one he had not seen before on Plumtree’s face, but it was brave. “I love her too.”

  “I’ll do what’s right,” he said, “for her.” Then he took a deep breath and said, gently, “Janis.”

  Plumtree’s features pinched in anxiety. “Oh, it’s Scant,” she said; then her voice quickened: “Was he here? I can feel his name still on my tongue! Daddy!” she called, glancing around at the yard and the greenhouse. “I’ll never ditch you, Daddy! I’ll always catch you! Listen to me! Where I go, you go, I swear on my life!”

  “Shut up, Janis, please!” Cochran hissed, spinally aware of the vineyards and of the skeleton in the greenhouse. “He wasn’t here. I have to talk to you, Janis. You don’t have to forgive me, but you do have to know that, that I know I was totally in the wrong, and I’m terribly sorry and ashamed of myself.” He smacked his fist against his thigh, angry with himself for saying this badly. “All my excuses were lies, Janis. You were right about me, but I want to make it up to you, to whatever extent I can. Will you come back to us, please? Cody needs you. I need you. I—”

  “To be or not to be, that is the question,” said Plumtree.

  Cochran faltered. “Valorie?”

  “No … no, I’m Janis, still.”

  I should have known, Cochran thought, that it wouldn’t be Valorie quoting the only Shakespeare line that everyone in the world knows. “Janis, I—”

  “Don’t, Scant mustn’t, I’ll make myself deaf to him—we can do that. Leave me alone, if he wants to do something for me, he can leave me alone!” She hurried away across the concrete patio deck to the kitchen door, yanked it open, and slammed it behind her.

  Cochran thought seriously for a moment about pursuing her. Then he sighed, picked up Cody’s abandoned beer, and leaned against the car fender. Maybe, he thought, I should tell it all to dead Valorie, and let her explain it to Janis.

  What damn good is this person that’s me? he thought, glancing from the kitchen door to the mark on the back of his hand. How in hell am I supposed to play this flop, when I’m gambling with so many people’s bankrolls? And he remembered Kootie telling him, at the Sutro ruins two weeks ago, You’ll be taking all our chances.

  Omar Salvoy found himself in a bedroom with a telephone in it.

  He knew he would have to be careful in what he said to Dr. Richard Paul Armentrout, and he crossed his arms under his daughter’s breasts—A divine offspring for you to nurse during this thirteen-moon year, baby, I promise, he thought—and paced up and down the rag rug in front of the bedside table. Bye, baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, gone to get a leopard-skin to bury baby bunting in.

  In his youth Salvoy had only wanted to find a king to serve. He had been a theater major at Stanford University, specializing in Shakespeare and finding startling clues in some of the obscurer plays, and living in a shabby little apartment in Menlo Park.

  In May of 1964, when he had been nineteen, Salvoy had gone with a friend to the La Honda house of Ken Kesey, out in the redwood forests at the south end of State Highway 84. Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been published only two years earlier.

  And, in Kesey, Salvoy thought he had found his king. The burly, balding Oregonian had gathered a whole tribe together at his remote hillside ranch in the canyon, and he spoke of the new drug LSD as the almost sacramental key to “worlds that have always existed.” Hi-fi speakers boomed and yowled on the roof of the house, shattering the silence of the ancient redwood forest, and weird wind chimes and crazy paintings were hung on all the trees. Omar Salvoy had begun visiting the p
lace on his own, driving his old Karmann Ghia down the 84 over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the La Honda ranch every weekend.

  One day out in the woods someone had found a dozen oversized wooden chessmen, weathered and cracked, and Kesey’s tribe had spontaneously begun improvising a dialogue among the figures—it had had to do with a king threatened with castration, and a girl with “electric eel tits that ionized King Arthur’s sword under swamp water”—and though the impromptu play was just a cheerful stoned rap from a bunch of distracted proto-hippies, Salvoy had believed he had heard mythic, archetypal powers manifesting themselves in the lines. When Kesey had set his people to painting random patterns in Day-Glo paint all over the 1939 International Harvester school bus he had just bought, Salvoy had climbed up to the destination sign over the windshield and painted on it the name ARTHUR.

  That night he had managed to catch Kesey for a few minutes away from his followers, and he had told him about the magical kingdom of the American West, and how the current king—a castrated transplanted Frenchman!—could surely be overthrown when that cycle came around again, at Easter in ’69, five years hence. And he had told Kesey about the supernatural power he would have if he took the throne, how he would be able to shackle and control the god of earthquakes and wine as the present king was doing, and raise ghosts to do his errands, and live forever. Omar Salvoy would be King Kesey’s advisor.

  But Kesey had just laughed and, as Salvoy recalled, had said something like, “And if I jump off a cliff, angels will bear me up lest I dash my foot against a stone, right?”—and he had walked away. Salvoy believed it had been a quote from the New Testament, when Jesus was refusing to be tempted by Satan. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had been full of Christ-figure imagery. Salvoy had driven home over the mountains in a humiliated rage, and never returned. Later he had seen a photograph of Kesey’s bus in Life magazine—someone had painted FU over his A on the destination sign, so that it now just read, idiotically, FURTHUR.