Earthquake Weather (13 page)

Armentrout’s heart was hammering in his chest like a jackhammer in an airplane hangar, and he wondered if this was capture, death. No, he thought as he remembered to breathe. No, she can’t have—got a
fix
on me—in that brief moment, with Long John Beach diffracting my hot signal.

After a moment, Armentrout let go of the derringer and closed the box. Had he been planning to shoot Plumtree, or himself?

“And I’ll bet this button right
he-ere,
” Plumtree went on, her arm under the desktop, “is the alarm, right?”

An instant later the close air was shaken by a harsh metallic
braaang
that didn’t stop.

Still too shaken to speak, Armentrout stood up from the desk and fished his keys out of his pocket to unlock the door and swing it open. Security guards were already sprinting down the hall toward the office, and he waved his bleeding hand at them and stood aside.

No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

“H
IS LITTLE BOY MAY
have
watched
me kill him,” said Janis Plumtree in a quiet, strained voice.

A waterproof Gumby-and-Pokey tablecloth had been spread on the big table in the TV lounge, and she and Cochran were standing in line, each of them holding a glossy little cardboard bowl and a napkin that was rubber-banded around a plastic spoon.

“
You
didn’t kill him,” whispered Cochran earnestly. “Cody did.” He looked nervously at the patients on either side of them, but the old woman ahead of Plumtree and the morose teenager behind Cochran were just staring ahead, anxiously watching the ice cream being doled out.

Plumtree had been escorted to the Quiet Room again, directly after her conference with Dr. Armentrout this afternoon, and confined there for an hour, and when she had found Cochran afterward she had told him about the morning’s costly discovery of her multiple personalities, the “dwarves in Snow White’s cottage.” He had listened with unhappy sympathy, withholding judgment but taking the story as at least a touching apology for her occasional rudenesses, which supposedly had all been the doing of the ill-natured “Cody personality.” Apparently there was no Cody-the-roommate, really.

The appalling thing, the stark fact that still misted his forehead every time he thought of it, was that she had actually undergone shock therapy this morning; he was clinging to her insistence that it had been scheduled for her even before Long John Beach had been hit, and he was happy to be talking about topics that had nothing to do with the hospital, for he had not yet found a chance to tell Armentrout what had really happened last night.

“Well,” Plumtree said now, “Cody didn’t kill him either, directly. But we all knew we were going to that Leucadia estate to do somebody harm. Old Flibbertigibbet kept saying that we were just going to stab somebody in the leg. But we all knew what he could do, what he probably
would
do, and we all cooperated. We didn’t care.” She sighed shakily. “We do what he wants, ever since we got him to …
kill
a man in ’89.”

Cochran was inclined to doubt that; and he was fairly sure that she hadn’t killed anybody on this last New Year’s Day, either, for she’d surely be in a prison ward somewhere right now if the police or the doctors had found any reason to take her story seriously.

But
she
clearly believed these things, and was troubled by them—and Armentrout had given her
shock therapy
this morning!—so he said, with unfeigned concern, “Poor Janis! How did that happen?”

They had got to the front of the line, and a nurse scooped a ball of vanilla ice cream into Plumtree’s bowl and tucked a wafer cookie alongside it. Plumtree waited until Cochran had been served too, and then they sidled off to the window-side corner, by unspoken agreement choosing the far end of the room from where Long John Beach sat blinking and licking a spoon. At their backs, beyond the reinforced glass, a half-moon shone through the black silhouettes of the palm trees outside the courtyard.

“We were in a bar in Oakland,” she said quietly when the two of them had sat down on the linoleum by the nursing-station-side wall, “and Cody got real drunk. I was twenty-two, and Cody was drinking a lot in those days, though I always stayed sober to drive home. And we lost time—or maybe Cody had an actual alcoholic blackout!—and when
I
could see what was going on again, I was on my back in a van in the alley parking lot, and the boyfriend I was at the bar with was trying to pull my clothes off. Cody had passed out, and he figured he could do what he wanted with an unconscious woman. This was only … well, it was five-oh-four in the afternoon, wasn’t it? Across the bay, you were just about to catch your wife, wife-to-be, when she fell down the winery stairs. Anyway, this guy gave me a black eye but I was able to fight him off because he hadn’t expected me to …
wake up.
I scrambled out of the van, with him still grabbing at me and me not able to run, with my clothes all hiked up and down. I probably could have got away from him then with no trouble, ’cause I was awake and outside and I think he was apologizing as much as anything; but I …
got so mad
 … at him thinking he could do that to me when I was passed out that way, that I called a real serious
sic ’im!
in my head. You know? Like you would to a pit bull that was real savage but was
yours.
I can see now that all of us, even drunk Cody, helped call it. We hadn’t ever been
that mad
before. We knew it was bad, and that it would cost us, but we called anyway. And we woke up Flibbertigibbet.”

Cochran recalled that this was another of her supposed personalities, a male one. Janis had told him that she didn’t know much of what had happened at the therapy session with Armentrout today—she’d said she had “lost a lot of time” after he had showed her some miniature painting that she couldn’t bear to look at—but that she was pretty sure Flibbertigibbet had been out. Probably Flibbertigibbet had been the one who had reportedly broken the doctor’s desk lamp and bitten his finger, earning Plumtree her most recent stay in the Quiet Room. She had said that she was grateful that Flibbertigibbet hadn’t done anything worse.

“And … Flibbertigibbet—” Cochran was embarrassed to pronounce the foolish name. “—killed the guy?”

She shivered. “He sure did. The big earthquake hit right then, and I suppose the cops thought it was falling bricks that smashed his head that way. It was never in the papers, anything about a guy being murdered there. I ran to my car, and it took me two hours to drive the ten miles home. Nobody at my apartment building, what was left of it, said anything about the blood on me—a lot of people were bloody that day.”

“… I remember.”

The Franciscan shale of San Bruno Mountain hadn’t shifted much in that late-afternoon quake, and only a couple of Pace Vineyards’ oak casks had fallen and burst, spilling a hundred gallons of the raw new Zinfandel like an arterial hemorrhage across the stone floor of the cellar, which Cochran had eventually had to mop up; but when he and a couple of the maintenance men had immediately driven one of the vineyard pickup trucks down to the 280 Highway, they had found cars spun out and stalled across the lanes, and in the little town of Colma hillsides had toppled onto the graves in the ubiquitous cemeteries, and he remembered stunned men and women standing around on the glass-strewn sidewalks, many of them in blood-spattered clothes and holding bloody cloths to their heads. Paramedic vans had been slow and few, and Cochran had driven several people to the local hospital in the back of the pickup truck before eventually returning to the vineyard. The visitor from France, young Mademoiselle Nina Gestin Leon, had been stranded there, and had stayed for the subdued late dinner in the Pace Vineyards dining room. They had all drunk up innumerable bottles of the ’68 late-harvest Zinfandels from Ridge and Mayacamas, he remembered; the night had seemed to call for big, wild reds, implausibly high in natural alcohol content and so sharp with the tea-leaf taste of tannin that Cochran had thought the winemakers must have left twigs and stems in the fermenting must.

“I had blood and wine on my clothes when I went to bed that night,” he said now.

“Cody’s more of a vodka girl,” said Janis. She leaned back against the TV lounge wall and sang,
“You can always tell a
vodka
girl
 …”

“That’s the tune of the old Halo Shampoo ads,” Cochran said. “That’s before your time, isn’t it?
I
barely remember that.”

“Geber me no zeitgebers,” she said shortly. She looked at the nearest of the other patients—poor old Mr. Regushi a dozen yards away, eating his ice cream with his hands—and then she said quietly, “We’ve got to escape out of this place.”

“I think it’d be better to get
released
out of here,” Cochran said hastily. “And I do think we can do it. I have a lawyer up in San Mateo County—”

“Who couldn’t get us out before tomorrow dawn, could he? Dr. Armentrout is going to give me the electroconvulsive therapy again tomorrow—I can tell, I was told not to eat anything after ten tonight. He says he’s elected
me,
Janis, to be the dominant personality inside this little head, and he’s going to …
cauterize
Cody away, like you would a wart.”

Cochran opened his mouth, wondering what he should say; finally he just said, “Do you
like
her?”

“Cody? No. She’s a, a
bitch
is the only word for it, sorry. She thinks I’m crazy to be—well, she doesn’t like you. And I think her story about being a security guard somewhere at nights is a lie—I think she does
burglaries
.”

“Well … I hope not. But if you don’t like her, why not
let
Armentrout … do that?” He could feel his face reddening. “I mean, he
is
a doctor, and you certainly don’t need—”

“She’s a real person, Scant, as real as me. I don’t like her, but I can’t just stand by and let
her
get killed too.” Her lips were pressed together and she was frowning. “‘Cause it would be the death penalty for her, and that without an indictment or jury or anything. Do you see what I mean?”

Cochran doubted that Cody was any more real than a child’s imaginary playmate, much less as real as Janis. But, “I follow your logic,” he said cautiously. Then, recklessly, he added, “I’m ashamed of myself for saying just now to let Armentrout do it again. I can’t bear thinking that it happened to you even once.”

“I’m sure he’s got something planned for you, too,” she told him. “You and me and Long John Beach—we’re not specimens he’s going to let go of.”

Cochran still hoped that he could get some rational planning done here. “This lawyer of mine—”

“This what? This
lawyer
? You think old Dr. Trousertrout hasn’t got lawyers? He’ll sneak some meds into your food that’ll make you such a five-star skitz you’ll be running around naked thinking you’re Jesus or somebody, or even easier just show you a few tarot cards to do it.” She glanced around, then looked back at him and noticed, and stared at, his T-shirt. “A Connecticut Pansy? Unbelievable. Unbelievable! Hell,
you
he could probably just show the
instruction
card to.” She flexed her jaw and winced. “My teeth hurt. I hope I’m not gonna have a nosebleed.”

One of the nurses had brought a portable stereo out and set it on the table and was now trying to get all the patients to sing along to “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Plumtree was humming something different in counterpoint, and after a moment Cochran recognized it as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” “Listen,” she said suddenly, “—what we’ve got to do?—is escape—tonight.”

Cochran was still sure that his lawyer would be able to secure his release, and very possibly Janis’s too, with some routine legal maneuver; and the man might even be able to get some kind of stay-of-shock-therapy for her tonight, if Cochran could get him on the phone. He slapped the pockets of his corduroy bell-bottoms and was reassured to feel the angularity of coins.

“I’m going to call this lawyer—” he said, bracing himself to stand up.

Plumtree grabbed his upper arm with her good hand. “It won’t work, we’ve got to escape—”

“Janis,” he said irritably, “we
can’t.
Have you seen the doors, the locks? How quick the security guards show up when there’s trouble? Unless your Mr. Flibbertigibbet can come up with another earthquake—”

Her hand sprang away from his arm, and she was gaping at him. “Has he …
called
you?”

The group sing-along was already getting out of hand—Long John Beach was improvising lyrics at the top of his lungs, and the other patients were joining in with gibberish of their own, and the nurse had switched the music off and was now trying to quiet everyone—but Cochran was staring at Plumtree in bewilderment.

“Who?” he said, having to speak more loudly because of the singing and his own alarmed incomprehension. “Flibbertigibbet? No, you told me about it, how you were in that Oakland bar on October seventeenth—”

“I never did, not that
date, none
of us would!” She was shaking. “Why would we?”

“Wh—Jesus, Janis, because I told you I met my wife that day, she fell down some steps when the earthquake hit, and I caught her. What’s the matter—”

“My God, not
this
way!” She blinked, and Cochran saw tears actually squirt from the inner corners of her eyes. Her pupils were tiny, hardly discernible. “Why did you mention him, you fucking idiot? I can handle locks—in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost! Rah rah rah, you Connecticut pansy, I hope you get in his way!”

Cochran wasn’t listening to her—he had scrambled to his feet, and now he reached down and pulled Plumtree up too. “Get ready to run,” he told her. “I think we’re going to have a riot in here.”

Long John Beach and a couple of other patients had grabbed the window side of the table, lifted it, and, still singing raucously, now pushed it right over; the bowls and spoons and ice cream cartons tumbled as the colorful tablecloth flapped and billowed, and then the tabletop hit the floor with an echoing knock.