Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  Salvoy had abandoned college, though he’d kept studying the plays of Shakespeare, and he began to sample the strange cults that were springing up in the Bay Area in the mid-sixties. From a splinter group of the Order of the Knights Templar he learned about the uses of the Eye of Horus symbol, the udjat eye that looked like a profile falcon, in countering the influences of the feminine Moon Goddess; and that it was possible actually to become the human father of a living, absolving fragment of the god who died with the grapevines every winter and was reborn in them every spring, by impregnating a dead woman; and for a few months he traveled up and down the coast on Highway 1, from Big Sur to the state beaches between Santa Barbara and Ventura, with the agricultural human-sacrifice cult that was then still calling itself the Camino Hayseeds, not for two decades yet to be internally reorganized and have its name changed to the Amino Acids.

  And then toward the end of the year he had found the Danville-area commune known as the Lever Blank, whose secret and very old real name was L’Ordre du Levrier Blanc, which meant The Order of the White Greyhound. The name had apparently been chosen as long ago as the thirteenth century as a repudiation of the dog that appeared on the Fool card in the tarot deck, which was always a mongrel and generally black. The Lever Blank grew vegetables and marijuana on part of its land, and dispensed food to indigent street people, and talked a lot about harmony with nature and celebrations of life; but the Levrier Blanc was concerned with the grapes that grew on the rest of the commune land, and with re-establishing the carefully preserved old pre-phylloxera vines that had borne Dionysus’s sacramental wine before the French Revolution, and with the supernatural kingdom of the American west which Salvoy had already perceived. Salvoy had decided to join them and become the king, the earthly personification of the sun-god, himself. And, based on what he had learned from the Order of the Templars, he had resolved too to father an incarnate piece of the earthbound, annually dying vegetation god.

  He had failed at all that, then. This year he would do it.

  But it would be a risky and probably one-shot procedure. He would have to learn from Armentrout how to exit a body without hurting it—he wanted to leave the Plumtree body alive, healthy, and fertile. The Koot Hoomie boy would have to be comatose, flat-line brain-dead; Salvoy would take the ventilator out of his throat and then lean over the boy and jump across the gap in a moment when Koot was, ideally, inhaling. At that point, with no tenant-mind to overcome, Salvoy would simply have Koot Hoomie’s body.

  And Salvoy would quickly have to kill Armentrout, whose goal in all this was to have a perpetually flatline brain-dead king. If Armentrout were actually present, Salvoy would have to remember to put a gun or a knife into the boy’s limp hand before throwing himself out of the Plumtree body into Koot Hoomie.

  He punched the doctor’s number into the telephone, and when the querulous voice said, hoarsely, “Hello?” Salvoy forgot diplomacy and just said, “You tried to kill Koot Hoomie, you fat freak!” He did remember to keep his voice down.

  “But I failed,” said the doctor quickly. “My mother—Muir—my ghosts are still around, they haven’t been banished! The boy must still be alive—healthy, even!—I’ve been searching for him with the shadow of a pomegranate, but there’s been so little sun—”

  “Yeah, he’s alive. He’s with us, still. I’m in the same house with him right now! But I ain’t tellin’ you dick if you’re just gonna try and kill him again.” He bared the Plumtree teeth and spat out, “You fucking block, you stone, you worse than goddamn senseless thing!”

  “No, I won’t, I was desperate that day—of course I want to, we both want to, get him onto the perpetual life-support arrangement, brain-dead—but, try to understand this, my mother’s ghost had found me! I was desperate—I was only thinking about—if I killed him outright it would at least get rid of her.”

  “You fucking dumb—didn’t you think Koot Hoomie’s ghost would come after you?”

  “It would have been a reprieve—and he’s the king, and I think the king’s ghost would have bigger concerns than to go after his murderer. Crane didn’t come after your girls, did he? Anyway, I didn’t kill the boy.”

  “Well, you’re on my shit-list, ipso fatso. The good news is that they did the restoration-to-life trick all wrong, and this Koot Hoomie boy is the king if anyone is. Anyway, nobody else is. Look, I’ll cut the boy out of the pack here, but before I let you anywhere near him, you’re gonna have to tell me everything you know about transferring a person from one body to another.”

  “Why would you need to know that? All you need to know is that a dead Fisher King is a heat-sink.” Armentrout giggled breathlessly. “He takes the heat.”

  “Tell you what, why don’t I just go find another doctor? There’s gotta be more than one psychiatrist in this country who’d like to have in his clinic an engine for … for eliminating the spiritual consequences of sin.” Salvoy clunked the receiver against the wall as if about to hang up—and then he heard a knock at the bedroom door.

  It was recognizably Cody who pulled open the bedroom door after Cochran’s knock, and she was holding the telephone receiver to her ear against the spring-tension of the stretched-out cord. Her face was spotty, and she touched a finger to her tight bloodless lips as she held the receiver out toward him.

  Cochran twisted his head to listen, with her—and he heard Dr. Armentrout’s unmistakable fruity voice coming out of the earpiece: “—can hear you breathing! You need me, Salvoy, don’t kid yourself! What other psychiatrist is going to know that mind-shifting trick you want? Hah? Asymptotic freedom, remember? How to pick up your ass and tote it out of there? I’ll tell you how to do it—I’ll help you do it, I was just curious why you wanted to, that’s all. And I’m her physician-of-record!” Armentrout was panting over the phone. “You’re listening, right? So tell me where you are, where he is.”

  Cochran ventured to make a gravelly “Hmm,” sound.

  “You say they did the restoration-to-life trick all wrong,” said Armentrout, catching his breath. “Are you afraid they might do it again, and do it right this time? I don’t know why you should care about that, but if you want to screw them up, I can certainly help you, you know. You could use the physician-of-record being present. Is that Cochran guy there too?”

  Nervous sweat itching under his eyes, Cochran replied with a careful whistling sigh.

  “Oh shit,” whispered Armentrout. “Janis?” he said then, strongly. “Cody? This is your doctor. Please tell me where you’re staying.”

  Cochran saw Plumtree put her top teeth into her lower lip as though preparing to say a word that started with F, but instead she shook her head and stepped back to the phone to rattlingly hang up the receiver.

  “Smart not to say anything,” Cochran said when the connection had been broken. “This way he can’t be sure it wasn’t … your father. I’m sorry I spooked him, there, at the end—”

  “No,” she said, staring at the telephone as if she thought it might manifest some dire noise or light that would give them only seconds to flee the room, flee the house; “you had to make some response, and that first hmm got a couple of extra sentences out of him.” When she looked up at him her pupils were pinpricks and her jawmuscles were working. “Janis let him on. Damn her, it makes me sick to think of him—” She spread her fingers and then closed her hands into tight fists, “in here, in me.” Her mouth worked, and then she spat on the rug. “I need Listerine. At least he wasn’t on for long enough to give me a nosebleed or hurt my teeth much—and he didn’t tell Armentrout where we are.” She glanced at the black plastic ten-dollar watch she’d bought to replace the hospital zeitgeber watch. “How long ago was it that I called up my mother for you?”

  “Oh—five minutes?”

  Plumtree tossed her head in exasperation. “Five minutes at the end for some of them,” she said sternly, “but they’ve got to be sautéed too, and added in with the ones that have been cooking all along. You want onions that’re s
till toothsome, surely, but others should be nearly melting, they’ve been in there so long.”

  You saved me from a reproach, Mammy, Cochran thought after his first instant of puzzlement. “Whatever you say, Mrs. Pleasant.” In fact the old-woman personality had unexpectedly proven to be a terrific cook, and during the past week had prepared a couple of black-roux jambalayas that had even drawn enthusiasm from the preoccupied Mavranos. Cochran now remembered smelling onions cooking when he had come into the house. “Are you talking about what you’ve got simmering in there now?”

  “Yes, a beef bourguignonne, and eggplant pirogis,” she said. Plumtree’s eyes had a heavy-lidded, almost Asian cast when Mammy Pleasant was on. “You’ve got three pirogis,” she went on. “Do you know how they are to be filled?”

  He knew she was no longer talking about dinner—and he was fairly sure of what she meant. “I think I know how to fill one,” he said bleakly, “temporarily, at least. I hope somebody else suggests it—I hope she thinks of it, herself!—so I won’t have to.”

  “Partly you’re here to think of things,” came the old woman’s strong voice out of Plumtree’s mouth; “yes, partly each of you has been chosen for your wits and cleverness. But each of you has a specific task as well. Each of you, like the three wise men, has brought a gift to your helpless king in this January season of Epiphany. Do you know what gift it is you’ve brought him, Scant Cochran? Do you know what it is that you’re to give away?”

  Cochran thought about that. Nina’s ghost, his now objectless and always deceived love for her? Well, yes, the god did appear to want that, but that couldn’t be his purpose here. “Something to do,” he said, “with the mark on my hand.”

  Plumtree’s blond head nodded. “If all goes well this time, if you all generously do what the god generously asks, King Crane will be alive at midsummer, and you will no longer have in hand the god’s marker.”

  Cochran realized that his mouth was open; he closed it, and then said, “That’s why I’m here, involved in this? To give away the—” What had Angelica called it at the broken temple on the end of the yacht-harbor peninsula? “—the Dionysus badge?”

  “Boy, it’s the only reason you were allowed to volunteer to get the mark in the first place.”

  “Allowed to—?” Cochran could feel his face heating up. In the Mount Sabu bar in Bellflower, when Janis had asked him why he didn’t get the mark removed, he had told her, I’m kind of proud of it … it’s my winemaker’s merit badge, an honorable battle scar. And he remembered Nina’s ghost telling him that when he had put his hand out to injury to save the god, thirty-four years ago, he had been like Androcles daring to pull the thorn from the lion’s paw in the old story; the lion had thereafter owed Androcles a debt of gratitude. And Cochran was surprised now at the hurt of learning that in his own case he had apparently only been meant to hold the golden beast’s favor for someone else, someone more highly esteemed—that it had never been for him. Like my wife’s love, he thought.

  “So all along the god meant,” he said, forcing his voice not to hitch ludicrously, “for me to just hold the obligation in trust for Scott Crane? Why didn’t the god let f—let precious Crane earn the obligation himself, get his own hand half cut off?”

  “The god, and Scott Crane too, was yoked in the harness of another king then, a bad king. The god had to incur the debt outside the king’s control but still within his own—that is, in a remote vineyard. I think that, as much as anything, you were chosen because of the similarity of your name to that of the favored boy who would one day be king.” She smiled at him, with no evident malice or sympathy. “As if the god needed a sign even to remember you. And later, it was probably just so that you would get a name closer to Scott that he broke your leg under a cask of his wine.” She reached out and gently touched his marked hand. “To be used by him—yes, even to ignominious destruction—is to be loved by him. You should be honored to have been judged worthy of being deceived and cheated in this way.”

  Cochran let the hurt run out of himself as his shoulders relaxed. Spider Joe brought the two coins, he thought, and an oracular reading of Angelica’s cards; and died to do it, and ended up buried under an old Chevy Nova in a Long Beach parking lot. “And Cody brought her father,” he said dully.

  “Yes. The king had to die, so that he would no longer be a stranger to the dark earth.”

  Cochran frowned into the blue eyes that seemed for the moment to be of two slightly different colors. “I meant for what we’ve got to do next: make him tell us what we did wrong, what we should have done differently, last week. I didn’t mean—my God, woman, are you saying that Dionysus not only wants Crane restored to life, but wanted him to die too?”

  “He’s no real king, no real representative of the god, if he doesn’t spend the pruning season of each year in the kingdom of darkness. Few kings have been thorough enough in their observations of the office to do that—to actually die, each year—but the god does love Scott Crane.”

  “To Crane’s misfortune. To the misfortune of all of us.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “the god loves all of us, in spite of our rebellions and failures.” She blinked around the room then. “I’m too alert—I’ll draw attention. Where are my penance shoes?”

  “By the front door where you left ’em.”

  She nodded and shuffled past him, her shoulders, too, slumped in unsought humility. “I’ll probably forget, once I’ve got them on—but the dinner will be ready to serve at sundown.”

  And I’ll have something to serve to poor Cody, Cochran thought as he followed the old woman out of the bedroom. A flop that even Valorie might quail at. It makes me sick to think of him in here, in me.

  Angelica had taken a bus into the city early that morning, and had spent the day consulting magos and santeros in the run-down Mission and Hunter’s Point districts south of Market Street. She came plodding back up the driveway just at sundown, and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and slumped on the couch in the living room while the others ate Mammy Pleasant’s beef bourguignonne. Angelica had had a late lunch of pork tamales and menudo and Tecate beer, and couldn’t now face a plate of steaming, vinous beef stew and a glass of room-temperature Zinfandel.

  My poor people, she thought as she sipped the beer and stared out through the back window at the darkening greenhouse, who have nothing.

  When Kootie and Pete had begun clanking the emptied dishes together and carrying them out to the kitchen sink, Angelica got to her feet and walked into the dining room.

  She hadn’t looked behind the door when she had come in, to see if the eucalyptus-soled shoes were leaned against the wall, but by now she could recognize Cody Plumtree.

  “Our supernatural escrow is about to close,” Angelica said, loudly enough for Pete and Kootie to hear in the kitchen. “Tet is only three days off, and we have no clue about what we’re supposed to do, this time. My people in the barrios and ghettos are getting signs of something big cooking, but for all their painted bells and chicken blood they don’t know what or where. Our crazy old lady keeps saying that Crane or C-cren will direct us when the time comes—but the old lady’s just a ghost.”

  “Sid,” said Cody Plumtree, “speak up.”

  Sid Cochran pushed his chair back. “C-cren has got a, a horrible proposal,” he said, “which as far as I’m concerned anybody here can veto—especially Cody.”

  Angelica glanced at Cody, who was sitting across from Cochran in the corner against the kitchen-side wall and had just lit a cigarette—and she got the feeling that Cody knew what Cochran was going to say, and hated it, but was not going to interrupt now, nor veto later.

  “Omar Salvoy,” said Cochran, “that’s Cody and Janis’s dad, who killed Scott Crane, came on today, here—he was talking on the phone to our Dr. Armentrout.”

  Armentrout! thought Angelica. That’s the man who shot Kootie! She darted a fearful glance toward the front door as she touched the .45 automatic at her belt and opened her m
outh to speak.

  But Cochran had held up his hand. “Wait. Salvoy faded off while they were speaking, and Cody and I heard Armentrout going on talking; Salvoy had not told the doctor where we are. But—” Cochran paused and shook his head. “But, from what Armentrout was saying, it was pretty clear that Salvoy knows what we did wrong, when we tried to bring Crane back to life last week.” He glanced at Cody, who just stared straight back at him. “I think,” Cochran went on stolidly, “we’ve got to do the Follow-the-Queen trick to talk to Omar Salvoy.”

  Angelica whistled a descending note.

  “Why should he tell us anything?” interrupted Pete from the kitchen doorway.

  “Valorie can make him, I bet,” said Cody. “She could be on with him, if you call her, like a second file showing in split-screen on a computer monitor.” Once again Angelica found herself admiring the woman. “It’s a—goddammit, it’s a good idea. My father probably would know. He knew enough to nearly become the king, twenty-five years ago, and from the day he exited his smashed body he’s had one foot in India.”

  “And I think I could effectively threaten him,” said Kootie quietly from behind Pete.

  Angelica stared at her adopted son warily. “With what, hijo mío?”

  Ever since the seventeenth, when he had run away from the Star Motel before dawn and reappeared in the afternoon, having spent some part of the morning talking with Mammy Pleasant in her boardinghouse kitchen, Angelica thought Kootie seemed somehow far older than his fourteen years. All he had told Pete and herself about that morning was that he had killed someone, but Angelica had known that much when she had simply met his eyes as he’d lain shot and bleeding in the planter outside the Star Motel office—behind the physical shock that had paled his face and constricted his pupils, independent of that injury, dwarfing it, the new horror and guilt had been clearly evident to her.