Earthquake Weather (16 page)

“ ‘As long as you do not die and live again, you are a stranger to the dark earth,’ ” Plumtree said, obviously quoting something. “Don’t ask me what that’s from, I don’t even know which of us read it. Have you ever thought of having the mark removed? Doctors could do that now, I bet.”

“No,” said Cochran, making a fist of the hand to show the mark more clearly, “I’m kind of proud of it, actually—it’s my winemaker’s merit badge, an honorable battle scar.”

Plumtree smiled and shook her head. “I think I’ll get this Arni Kapama thing, if I can chew it.”

Cochran looked at the menu. “Lamb cooked with sugar and cinnamon? Yuck. I guess I’ll go with the Moskhari Psito. At least that’s beef, according to this. I wish they had plain old cheeseburgers.”

“Well, yeah. We don’t have all night. Are you still set on calling
your
lawyer? What is it you’d be wanting him to
do
?”

The waitress came back then, and they placed their orders; Cochran ordered another bourbon and beer chaser, too, and Plumtree ordered another Manhattan.

“I’d want the lawyer,” he said when the woman had gone sweeping away, “to …
wire me some money
 … so that I could get back home. And I”—he looked straight into her tiny-pupilled eyes—“I hope you’d be willing to come with me, Janis. The lawyer would be able to work for you better if you were up there, and you’d be that much farther away from Armentrout.”

Plumtree sang,
“I’ll take you home again, Kathleen
 …” and then sighed. “What’s the hurry? About you getting back home?”

Cochran blinked at her. “Isn’t that song about a girl who’s going to die?”

“I forget. So what is the hurry?”

Cochran spread his hands. “Oh … a paycheck.”

“What’s the work, in January, in a vineyard?”

He barked out two syllables of a laugh, and flexed his right hand again. “Well—pruning. It’s winter. Get our guys to cut each vine back to two canes, with two buds per cane, and save what they call a goat-spur, a water-sprout replacement spur, closer to the stump for fruit a year or two from now—and then drive around to the vineyards we buy off-premises grapes from, and see how they’re pruning their vines. If they’re leaving three or four canes, and a lot of buds, for a water-fat cash crop, I’ll make a note not to buy from them come harvest.” He looked at the gray ivy-leaf mark on the back of his otherwise unscarred hand, and he remembered the vivid shock-hallucination that had accompanied the childhood injury, and it occurred to him that he didn’t want to be there for the pruning—not this year.
Grape leaves fell like rain …
“Why, what’s on your agenda?”

Plumtree eyed her cola-colored drink as the electric light over their heads flickered, and then she waved at the waitress. “Could I get a Budweiser here?” she called. “Two Budweisers, that is?”

Cochran heard no reply, just the continuing thump and rattle of the bar dice.

After a few moments he spoke. “Janis mentioned that you might want a couple of drinks,” he said, levelly enough. He was annoyed to see that his hand trembled as he lifted his beer glass. He made himself look squarely at her, and the skin of his forearms tingled as he realized that he could
see
the difference, now that he knew to look for it; the mouth was wider now, the eyes narrower.

“My agenda,” said Cody. “I’ve got a lawyer of my own to look up. His name is Strube. He’ll be able to lead me to a boy who’s about fifteen now, a boy-who-would-be-king, apparently, named something like Boogie-Woogie Bananas.”

Cochran raised his eyebrows as he swallowed a mouthful of beer and put his glass down. “Uhh …?”

“This boy apparently knows how to restore a dead king to life. What’s that you’re drinking?”

“Wild Turkey and Coors.”

“Coors. Like screwing in a canoe. Oh well.” She reached across the tablecloth and lifted his glass and drained it in one long swallow. “And two more
Coorses
too,” she called without looking away from Cochran.

“You can afford it,” he said.

“Fuck you!”
yelled a woman in the booth by the door; and for a second Cochran was so sure that she had been yelling at him that his face went cold. But now a man in the same booth was protesting in shrill, injured tones, and when Cochran looked over his shoulder he saw the blond woman who had shouted shaking her head and crying.

“ ’Nuff said,” remarked Plumtree.

If Long John Beach’s crazy lyrics for “Puff the Magic Dragon” had not still been jangling in his head, if Beach had not clasped Cochran’s hand tonight with a hand that he didn’t have, if the bang and rattle of the dice-players at the bar hadn’t been emphasizing the fact that nobody in this bar had seemed to speak above whispers until the woman had shouted, Cochran would never have thought of what he said next; and if he hadn’t downed the bourbon on a nearly empty stomach he would not have spoken it aloud; but,

“You
throw
it, don’t you?” he said wonderingly to Plumtree. “Anger. Like, it can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be
shifted
.” Over the aromas of lamb and mint and liquor, the humid air was sharp with the smell of wilted, chopped vegetation, like a macheted clearing in a jungle. “Is that part of your
dissociative
disorder, that you can stay calm by actually throwing your anger off onto somebody nearby? The lady who kept breaking her spoon in the ice-cream place, and cussing, when the kid wouldn’t give you a twenty … and Mr. Regushi jumping up to strangle Muir yesterday, when Armentrout pissed you off.” He was dizzy, and wished the waitress would hurry up with the beer.

“What gives you the right
—
!
” choked the blond woman by the door.

Cochran exhaled, and gave Plumtree a frail, apologetic smile. “Nothing, I guess,” he said.

“You still got any quarters?” asked Plumtree calmly.

Cochran squeezed his thigh under the table. “At least one.”

“Let’s go make a call.”

They stood up out of the booth and crossed the sandy floor to the pay telephone by the rest rooms in the far corner, and after Plumtree had hoisted the white-pages telephone book up from a shelf under the phone and flipped through the thin leaves of it, she said, “No Strube listed. Not in L.A.”

Cochran was peering over her shoulder at the
STR
page. “There’s a … ‘Strubie the Clown,’ ” he noted. “He’s listed twice, also as ‘Strubie the Children’s Entertainer.’ ”

She nodded. “It’s a good enough flop for a call. Gimme your quarter.”

Cochran dug it out for her, and she thumbed it into the slot and punched in the number. After a few seconds of standing with the receiver to her ear, she said, “It’s a recording—listen.”

She leaned her head back and tilted the receiver, and Cochran pressed his chin to her cheek to hear the message with her. His heart was pounding, and he let himself lay his hand on her shoulder as if for balance.

“… and I can’t come to the phone right now,”
piped a merry voice from the earpiece.
“But leave your name and number, and
Strubie
will right back to
you
be!”
A beep followed, and Plumtree hung up the phone and shook off Cochran’s arm.

“He’s, uh, not home, I guess,” said Cochran to cover his embarrassment as they scuffed back to the booth. Their dinners had been served—two plates sat on the tablecloth, the meat and vegetables piled on them steaming with smells of garlic and lamb and onion and cinnamon, along with another Manhattan and a fresh shot glass of bourbon and five fresh glasses of beer.

“Where
would
we be without you to figure these things out?” Plumtree said acidly as she slid into the booth.

Cochran sat down without replying, and as he began hungrily forking up the mess of onions and tomatoes and veal on his plate he looked around at the bar and the other patrons rather than at Plumtree. He hoped she’d be Janis again soon; and he resolved to catch her if she got up to go to the ladies’ room.

The bartender was a woman too, and as Cochran watched she drew a draft beer for one of the men who had been playing bar dice. The man pulled a little cloth bag from his coat pocket and shook from it a pile of yellow-brown powder onto the bar. The bartender scooped the powder up with a miniature dustpan and disposed of it behind the bar.

Gold dust? wondered Cochran with the incurious detachment of being half-drunk. Heroin or cocaine, cut with semolina flour? Either way, it seemed like an awful lot to pay for one beer.

A black dwarf on crutches was laboriously poling his way out of the bar now, and when he had braced the door open to swing his crutches outside, Cochran caught a strong scent of the sea on the gusty cold draft that made the lamps flicker in the moment before the door banged shut behind the little man. And under the resumed knock and rattle of the dice he now heard a deep, slow rolling, as if a millwheel were turning in some adjoining stone building.

He became aware that his food was gone, along with the bourbon and a lot of the beer, and that Plumtree had a cigarette in her mouth and was striking a match. Cochran’s cigarettes were still back at the madhouse.

When she threw the match into the ashtray it flared up in a momentary flame; an instant later there was just a wisp of smoke curling over the ashtray, and a whiff of something like bacon.

“Brandy in the ashtrays?” said Cochran, in a light tone to cover for having jumped in surprise. “What’s the writing on it say? ‘No smoking near this ashtray’?”

Plumtree was startled herself, and she reached out gingerly to tilt the ashtray toward her. “It says—I think it’s Latin—
Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit amor.
What does that mean?”

“Lemme see.” Cochran tipped the warm ashtray toward himself. “Uh … ‘How romantic, to be … submitting … in a motor bus, having … a bit! … of love.’ ”

“You liar!” She actually seemed frightened by his nonsense. “It doesn’t say that, does it? In a motor bus? You’re such a liar.”

Cochran laughed and touched her arm reassuringly. “No, I don’t know what it says.” He took a sip from one of the beer glasses, and to change the subject he asked, “Why did you say Coors is like screwing in a canoe?”

“Because it’s fuckin’ near water.
Ho ho.
Let’s get out of here. Strubie the Clown ought to be home by now. I’ll go copy down the address listed for him and call us a cab.” She had got out of the booth and was striding away toward the telephone before he could protest.

“Strubie the goddamn
Clown
 …?” he muttered to himself. “It won’t be the right guy, not this lawyer you want. Tonight?”

He at least managed to finish the bourbon and the beers before she got back and pulled him up onto his feet; but when she had marched him to the door and pulled it open—there was no sea scent on the breeze now—she hurried back inside so that she could speak to the blond woman who had been shouting, and who by this time was very drunk and crying quietly.

When Plumtree rejoined him and pushed him out across the Rosecrans sidewalk, she immediately began looking anxiously up and down the street. “I hope the cab gets here quick,” she muttered.

“Oh hell. Me too,” said Cochran, for he saw that she was now holding a purse.

Strubie the Clown’s house was a little one-story 1920s bungalow off Del Amo and Avalon in the Carson area of south Los Angeles, and after the taxi dropped them off Cochran and Plumtree hurried out of the curbside streetlight’s glare, up the old two-strip concrete driveway to the dark porch.

No lights seemed to be on inside the house, but Plumtree knocked on the door. Several seconds went by without any sound from inside, and Cochran blinked around at the porch.

A wooden swing hung on chains from a beam in the porch roof, and Cochran wobbled across the Astroturf carpeting and slumped into it—and instantly one of the hooks tore free of the overhead beam, and the swing’s street-side corner hit the porch deck with an echoing bang.

“Christ!” hissed Plumtree; she reeled back and bumped a ceramic pot on the porch rail, and it tipped off and broke with a hollow thump and rattle on the grass below. Cochran had rolled off the pivoting and now-diagonal swing, but his arm was tangled in the slack chain, and it took him several seconds to thrash free of it. The fall had jolted him. His face was suddenly cold and damp, and his mouth was full of salty saliva; beside the front door sat a wide plastic tray heaped with sand and cat turds, and he crawled over and began vomiting into it, desperately trying to do so quietly.

“You shithead!” Plumtree gasped. “We’re wrecking his place!”

Cochran was aware of the sound of a car’s engine idling fast out at the curb as if it was shifted out of gear, and then the noise stopped and he heard a car door creak open and a moment later clunk shut.

“He’s home,” whispered Plumtree urgently. “Stop it! And get up!”

Cochran was just spitting now, and he got his feet under himself and straightened up, bracing himself on the wall planks. “ ’Scuse me,” he said resentfully with his face against the painted wood. “ ’Scuse the
fuck
out o’
me.
” He pulled his shirt free of his pants and wiped his mouth on it, then turned around to lean his back against the wall.

“Who’s there?” came a man’s frightened voice from the front yard.

“Oh,” muttered Plumtree, “I got no time for this flop.” A moment later she turned toward the front steps. “Mr. Strube?” she said cheerily. “My friend and I need your help.”

“Who are you?”

Cochran pushed the damp hair back from his face and peered out into the yard. The figure silhouetted against the streetlight glare wore baggy pants and a tiny, tight jacket, and great tufts of hair stood out from the sides of the head. The shoes at the ends of the short legs were as big as basketballs.

“We’re people in trouble, Mr. Strube,” Plumtree said. “We need to find a boy whose name sounds like … well, like
Boogie-Woogie Bananas.
He’ll be able to help us.”

“I … don’t know anybody whose name sounds … even remotely like that.” The clown walked hesitantly up to the porch steps, and his gaze went from Plumtree to Cochran to the broken swing. “Is he a clown? I know all the local clowns, I think—”