Earthquake Weather (34 page)

In his first seconds of confusion Armentrout knew he recognized the voice, but he seemed to remember it as disembodied—a ghost?—and this was clearly not a ghost call. The voice and the background breeze-hiss were
real,
unlike the eternal clattering busy-ness of the group-projected ghost-bar.

“You was comin’ on to my
daughter,
man,” the voice said now; “you can’t blame me for having got a bit
testy,
now can you?” Before Armentrout could stammer out anything, the voice went on: “This is Omar Salvoy, and I can’t talk for long. Listen, you and I each got a gun pointed at the other, haven’t we? Mexican standoff. I think we can work together, both eat off the same plate. Here’s the thing—you’d like to get Koot Hoomie Parganas locked up in your clinic, wouldn’t you, in a coma and brain-dead, on perpetual life-support? Or haven’t you thought it through that far?”

It made Armentrout dizzy to hear this voice on the phone speaking his recent, somewhat shameful, thought aloud. “Y-yes,” he said, glancing sideways at Long John Beach and then in the rear-view mirror at the two placid Styrofoam heads. “What you describe is … it could, I guess you’ve figured out that it could, benefit you and me both. But not
yet
—it would have to be after he had been induced to, uh, officially …
take the crown,
if you know what I mean. I was just at the Fisher King’s castle, this morning, and it’s very evident from the look of things there that no new king has been consecrated yet. But after that’s occurred, I could set things up so that you and I could both benefit. As you know, I’m uniquely able to set up that scenario, just as you describe it.”

“Ipse dipshit. Now the girls have got some cockamamie idea about restoring the dead king, the
old
one, to life—I gotta monkeywrench that scheme, that guy is really
old,
he’s hardened in his thought-paths and likely to be resistant, not like the kid would be.”

“All ROM and no RAM,” agreed Armentrout, though he didn’t see how any of this would matter in a brain-dead body.

“Rom? Ram? Gypsies, sheep? Easy on the mystical, there, Doctor, I want you for
science.
You do know about how the spirit-transfer thing works, knocking a personality out of somebody’s head?”

“Uh.” Armentrout wiped his forehead and blinked sweat out of his eyes to be able to watch the freeway lanes. “Yes.” I wasn’t being mystical, he thought—doesn’t Salvoy know anything about computers? Oh well, give him the science. “The force that, that holds them
in,
works the opposite of forces like gravity and electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force, which all get weaker as the, the
satellite,
say, moves further away from the primary; ghost personalities are more strongly
restrained,
the further they get out, especially in sane people, but feel no clumping-together force at all if they stay within the mind’s confines. It’s much the same situation as is theorized for the quarks that make up subatomic particles—if they stay close together, they experience what’s called asymptotic freedom—”

“Speaking of which, I’m gonna have to pick up my ass and tote it out of here. I’m at a pay phone—we’ve stopped for gas in King City, and her boyfriend has just ducked off to visit the gents’ and pump the gas. You’d better get up here, right now; and then on to San Fran, apparently—this thing will go a lot smoother if we’ve got a real licensed psychiatrist along, for authority-figuring in case any locals should object to anything. Wave the stethoscope, flourish the prescription pad. I’ll make a point of getting out here again and calling you with more specific directions as we proceed, so take your telephone with you, you can do that, can’t you?”

“King City? San Francisco? Certainly, I’ve got the phone with me now. Obviously. But the P—the boy—he’s alive, I gather? Is
he
in San Francisco? We need—”

“He’s alive, and on his way there. Gotta go—stay by the phone.”

The line was dead, and Armentrout clicked the phone off, closed the cover, and wedged it carefully between the seat and the console. He would have to dig out of the trunk the phone-battery recharger that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter.

His lips were twitching in a brittle, almost frightened grin. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t work, he thought. When the king died eleven days ago, his death opened a temporary drain in the psychic floor locally, so that all my vengeful old California ghosts, at least, were sucked away, leaving me with their abandoned memories and strengths intact and harmless. I was
fifty miles away,
and my ghosts were banished! That drain has since closed up—but imagine if I could be
in the same building
with a flatline Fisher King! If we can get the new king on perpetual brain-dead life-support, the drain could be held propped open for … for decades. I’ll be able to outright
terminate
patients, consume their whole lives, without fear of being hassled by their outraged ghost personalities afterward. And Omar Salvoy will be able to—what? I suppose to evict all the girls from Plumtree’s head, so that he’ll have that youthful body all to himself, to live in.

It’ll be the best of both worlds, Armentrout thought, nodding and smiling twitchily. All the forgiveness that Dionysus’s
pagadebiti
wine offers, but with the profit from the sin retained intact too!

He glanced again at Long John Beach and the two heads in the backseat. I may be able to outright
ditch
the three of you in San Francisco, he thought.

Who were you calling?” asked Cochran, frowning.

They hadn’t found a Mobil station here in King City, and so they were using some of the Jenkins woman’s cash at this Shell station, and apparently the Torino’s tank hadn’t had room for a whole twenty’s worth of gas—Cochran was stuffing a couple of ones into the pocket of his corduroy bell-bottoms. He must have bought the cheapest gas.

Plumtree blinked at him around the aluminum cowl of the pay telephone. There was only a dial tone to be heard from the thoroughly warmed earpiece of the receiver she held in her hand. Cochran looked tired and bedraggled, she noted, in the cold morning sunlight, and she could see strands of white hair among the disordered brown locks tangled over his forehead.

“It was ringing,” she said, in the old reflexive dismissal of a patch of lost time. “Nobody on when I picked it up.” She reflected that this
might
be the literal truth; but she wasn’t happy to find herself reverting to the helpless shuck-and-jive evasions, the poker-table calls that were bluffs because she didn’t know what her hole cards were, so she went on spontaneously, “Let’s get breakfast now, there’s a Denny’s a block back—we can just have coffee with the others at the Cliff House place—and maybe a dessert, if they have some kind of sweetrolls there. And listen, if there’s a Sav-On or someplace open in this town, I’d like to buy some fresh underwear—these panties I’ve got on still say Tuesday on ’em—and
Tiffany’s
been wearing them.”

“… Okay.”

They got back into the beer-reeking warmth of the car and drove around, but didn’t find any open store at all in the whole town, and so eventually she had to go into the ladies’ room in Denny’s, pull off her jeans, and wash the panties in the sink—with hand soap, wringing them halfway dry in a sheaf of paper towels after she’d rinsed them out—and then shiveringly pull them back on.

Now she was eating scrambled eggs and shifting uncomfortably on the vinyl booth seat, bleakly sure that the dampness must be visibly soaking through the seat of her jeans, and remembering reading
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
in another restaurant booth eleven days ago. She had had the aluminum spear taped to her thigh during that breakfast, the points of it cutting her skin.

“I can’t ever sit comfortably in restaurants,” she complained. She remembered that a telephone had started ringing then, too, on that morning, right in the restaurant; it was Janis’s job to answer telephones, and Cody recalled flipping her lit cigarette into the open paperback book, intending to slam the cover firmly closed and extinguish the coal, since there had been no ashtray on the table and Janis didn’t smoke. But Janis had come on more quickly than usual, apparently, and hadn’t known about the lit Marlboro between the pages.

Cody grinned sourly now.
Excu-u-se
me!

At least my teeth don’t hurt much right now—not any worse than usual, anyway. And I certainly don’t have a nose-bleed! If Flibbertigibbet was on, it wasn’t for very long.

She looked up. Across the table, Cochran was smiling at her gently, out of his tired, red eyes. “Who were you calling?” he asked again.

Okay—perhaps the gas-station pay phone had
not
already been ringing when she had picked it up, and Cochran knew it. Okay. “I call time,” she said, “a
lot.
That’s UL3-1212 everywhere. In England they call it ‘the speaking clock,’ which always makes me picture Grandfather Clock, from the ‘Captain Kangaroo’ TV show, remember?
Wake up, Grandfather!
Even when I have a watch on. Those liquid-crystal displays, you can’t ever be—”

He was still smiling tiredly at her.

“I—” She exhaled and threw down her fork with a clatter. “Oh, fuck it.
I
don’t know, Sid. The receiver was warm, we must have been talking to somebody. My teeth
are
hurting, but we
do
call time a lot.”

“Not for extended conversations, though, I bet.” He took a sip from his glass of V-8, into which he’d shaken several splashes of Tabasco. “In this hippie commune you grew up in,” he said; “what was it called?”

“The Lever Blank. My mom and I lived at their farm commune outside of Danville for another couple of years after my father died.”

“Did they let you watch a lot of TV?”

Plumtree stared at him. “This was mandala yin-yang hippies, Sid! Organic vegetables and goat’s milk. Old mobile homes sitting crooked on dirt, with no electric. My father was the only one that even read
newspapers
.”

“So how did you ever see ‘Captain Kangaroo’? And Halo Shampoo ads? And I’m not sure, but it seems to me that neither one of those was still being aired in ’71. I’m an easy ten years older than you, and
I
hardly remember them.”

Plumtree calmly picked up her fork and shoveled a lump of scrambled egg into her mouth. “That’s a, a terrible point you make, Sid,” she remarked after she had swallowed and taken a sip of coffee. “And I don’t seem to be losing time over it, either, do I? This must be my flop. Do you think I’m an alcoholic? Janis thinks so.”

“Of course not,” he said, with a laugh. “No more than I am.”

“Oh,
that’s
good,
that’s
reassuring. Jesus! The reason I ask is, I need a drink to assimilate this thought with. Let’s pay up and get out of here.”

“Fine,” Cochran said, a little stiffly.

Oh,
sorree,
Plumtree thought, restraining herself from rolling her eyes.

As Cochran took their bill to the cashier, Plumtree walked out of the yellow-lit restaurant to the muddy parking lot. The sky had lightened to an empty blue-gray vault, but she felt as though there were the close-arching ceiling of a bus overhead, and that the battered madman who had hijacked the bus and cowed the driver had now turned and begun to advance on the hostage children, all the brave little girls.

The chilly dawn wind was throwing all sounds away to the south, and she was able to hum “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” until Cochran had come out of the restaurant and shuffled up to within a yard of her, before she had to stop humming for fear he might hear.

North of King City they were driving up through the wide Salinas Valley, with green fields of broccoli receding out to the far off Coast Range foothills. Long flat layers of fog, ragged at the top, hung over the ruler-straight dirt roads and solitary farmhouses in the middle distance, and Cochran began to notice signs for the Soledad Correctional Institute. Don’t want to be picking up any hitch-hikers around there, he thought. We’ve got enough of them aboard right now. Neither he nor Plumtree had spoken since getting back into the car in the parking lot of the Denny’s in King City, though she had taken a quick, bracing gulp of the vodka after she had started the engine, and, after a moment of resentful hesitation, he had shrugged and opened one of the warm beers. The sky had still been dark enough then for her to turn on the headlights, but she reached out now and punched the knob to turn them off.

“Smart thinking,” he said, venturing to break the long silence. “We’d only forget to turn them off, once the sun’s well up.”

“And it’s cover,” she said, speaking indistinctly through a yawn. “You can tell which cars have been driving all night, because they’ve still got their lights on. Everybody with their lights
out
is a local.” She yawned again, and it occurred to Cochran that these were from tension as much as weariness. “But we can’t hide—
I
can’t, anyway—from my father. Those are
his
memories, those TV things. Captain Kangaroo, that shampoo. He was born in ’44.” A third yawn was so wide that it squeezed tears from the corner of her eye. “If we’re compartmentalized, in this little head, then he’s leaking into my compartment. I wonder if he’s leaking into the other girls’ seats too.”

Seats?
Cochran thought.

“Like in a bus,” she said. “
You
could step off, you know, Sid. Like the driver in that movie,
Speed,
who got shot, remember? The bad guy let him get off the bus, because he was wounded. When we stop at your house. I could drop you off at some nearby corner, in fact, so Flibbertigibbet won’t even know where you live.”

After a long pause, while he finished the can of warm beer and reached down to fetch up another, “No,” Cochran said in an almost wondering tone; “no, I reckon I’m … along for the ride.”

Plumtree laughed happily, and began drunkenly singing the kid’s song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” After she had finished the trite lyric and started it up again, frowning now and waving at him, his face heated in embarrassment as he gave up and joined in, singing the lyric in the proper kindergarten counterpoint. And until he put out his hand to stop her, the vodka bottle between her knees was rhythmically rattled as she swung the wheel back and forth, swerving the big old car from one side of the brightening highway lane to the other in time to their frail duet.