Earthquake Weather (41 page)

Armentrout flipped the phone’s cover shut and slammed it back into its cradle. That last speaker had probably been the obese bipolar girl who had killed herself last week—but who was the flat-voiced one who had spoken through Long John, the one who seemed always to quote Shakespeare and who apparently called herself Valerie? Could it be
Plumtree’s
Valerie personality, astrally at large and
spying
on him? Good God, he had told her about his mother!

And the voice on the sidewalk
had
been his mother’s—Salvoy had said she’d been in the bar weeping about someone sneezing in her face.

Armentrout sighed deeply, almost at peace with the realization that he would have to perform a séance, and an exorcism, today.

Long John Beach had hunched forward over the dashboard now, sniffing in fast puffs punctuated by explosive exhalations.

It was so convincing that Armentrout almost thought he could smell wet dog fur. Long John had been doing this sort of thing periodically for the last couple of days, sniffing and whining and gnawing the neurologist’s leather couch—was the crazy man channeling the ghost of a
dog
?

This isn’t the Fool’s dog, is it?

It occurred to Armentrout that in most tarot-card decks the Fool was a young man in random clothes dancing on a cliff edge, with a dog snapping at his heels; and certainly Long John’s crazy speech, his “word-salad” as psychiatrists referred to skitzy jabbering, did sometimes hint at a vast, contra-rational wisdom.

But surely the crazy old man couldn’t be in touch with one of the primeval tarot archetypes! Especially not
that
one! The Fool was a profoundly
chaotic
influence, inimical to the kind of prolonged unnatural stasis that Armentrout needed to establish for the life-support confinement of the Parganas boy.

Could the old man possibly channel someone—or something—that big?

A Dionysus death-day.

Armentrout remembered the catastrophic ice-cream social at Rosecrans Medical Center last week. Long John Beach had seemed to be channeling—had seemed to be
possessed
by—the spirit of the actual Greek god
Dionysus
on that night. It was hard for Armentrout to avoid believing that Dionysus had somehow been responsible for the earthquake that had permitted Plumtree and that Cochran fellow to escape.

Armentrout thought he knew now why the death of the Fisher King had eliminated all the ghosts in the Southern California area. Murdered in the dead of winter, the slain Fisher King had become compellingly identical to the vegetation-god Dionysus, whose winter mysteries celebrated the god’s murder and devourment at the hands of the Titans and his subsequent return from the kingdom of the dead. Being a seasonal deity of death and the underworld—and incarnate this winter in this killed king—the god had taken all the local ghosts away with him, as a possibly unintended entourage, just as the death of summer takes away the vitality of plants, leaving the dried husks behind. In the case of the ghosts, it was their memories and strengths that had lingered behind, while their lethal, vengeful
sentiences
were conveniently gone.

If you like dead leaves, Armentrout thought as he drove, it’s good news to have a dead Fisher King; and I like dead leaves. I
sustain myself spiritually
on those dear dead leaves.

But eventually, he thought, if nature follows her cyclical course, Dionysus begins his trek back from the underworld, and a Fisher King again becomes evident; and the plants start to regain their life, and the ghosts—quickly, it seems!—are again resistant, dangerous presences. The god wants to
rake up
the dead leaves, he wants to gather to himself not only the ghosts but all the memories and powers and loves that had accrued to them … which scraps I don’t want to let him have. He wants us to figuratively or literally drink his
pagadebiti
Zinfandel, and let go of every particle of the cherished dead, give them entirely to him … which I don’t want to do.

When Armentrout and Long John Beach had finally got off the 280 Freeway last Thursday, the crazy old man had suddenly and loudly insisted that they take a right turn off of Junipero Serra Boulevard and drive five blocks to a quiet old suburban street that proved to be called Urbano; and in a grassy traffic circle off Urbano stood a gigantic white-painted wooden sundial on a broad flat wheel with Roman numerals from I to XII around the rim of it. After demanding that Armentrout stop the car, Long John Beach had got out and plodded across the street and walked back and forth on the face of the sundial, frowning and peering down around his feet as though trying to read the time on it—but of course the towering gnomon-wedge had been throwing no shadow at all on that overcast day. The passage of time, as far as this inexplicable sundial was concerned, was suspended.

And if Armentrout could succeed in getting the new Fisher King maintained flatline, brain-dead, on artificial life-support in his clinic, Dionysus’s clock would be stopped—at the one special point in the cycle that would permit Armentrout to consume ghosts with
impunity
—with no fear of consequences, no need for masks.

The two-manikin framework shifted and clanked in the back seat now as Armentrout drove fast through the Seventeenth Street intersection, the car’s tires hissing on the wet pavement. Market Street was curving to the right as it started up into the dark hills, toward the twin peaks that the Spanish settlers had called
Los Pechos de la Chola,
the breasts of the Indian maiden.

“There was still
time
,” Long John Beach said, in his own voice.

“For what?” asked Armentrout absently as he watched the red brake lights and turn-signal indicators reflecting on the wet asphalt ahead of them. “You wanted to get something to eat? There’s roast beef and bread at the house—though I should feed you in the driveway, the way you toss it around.” He passed a slow-moving Volkswagen and sped up, eager to put more distance between himself and that shifting maternal ghost on Lapu Lapu Street. “I should feed you Alpo.”

“I mean there
was
still
time,
even though I couldn’t see it. It doesn’t stop because you have something blocking the light. If we coulda seen in infrared,” he went on, pronouncing the last word so that it rhymed with
impaired,
“the shadow woulda been there, I bet you anything.” The BMW was abruptly slowing, because Armentrout’s foot had lifted from the gas pedal, but the old man went on, “Infrared is how they keep patty melts hot, in diners, when the waitress is too busy to bring ’em to you right when they’re ready.”

“Stay,” said Armentrout in a voice muted to a conversational tone by the sudden weight of fear; he took a deep breath and made himself finish the sentence, “out … of … my … mind. God damn you.” But his thoughts were as loud and rapid as his heartbeat: You can’t read
my
mind! You can’t start channeling
me
! I’m not dead!

Long John Beach shrugged, unperturbed. “Well, you go around leaving the door open …”

From the backseat came a squeak that could only have been one of the Styrofoam heads shifting against the other as the car rocked with resumed acceleration—but to Armentrout it sounded like a hiccup of suppressed laughter.

Tall cypresses hid from any neighboring houses the back patio of the neurologist’s villa on Aquavista Way, and the green slope of the northernmost Twin Peak mounted up right behind the pyrocantha bushes at the far edge of the lawn. After Armentrout had parked the car in the garage and made Long John Beach carry the two-manikin appliance out to the patio, he fixed a couple of sandwiches for the one-armed old man and then carefully began scouting up paraphernalia for a séance and exorcism in the back yard.

The neurologist’s house didn’t afford much for it—Armentrout found some decorative candles in glass chimney shades, and a dusty copper chafing dish no doubt untouched since about 1962, and a bottle of Hennessy XO, which was almost too good to use for plain fuel this way.
Popov vodka
would be more appropriate to his mother’s—

He hastily drank several mouthfuls of the cognac right from the bottle as he made himself walk around the cement deck of the roofed patio, shakily lighting the candles and setting them down in a six-foot-wide circle. Then he picked up a hibachi and walked around the circle shaking clumped old ash in a line around the perimeter; after he tossed the hibachi out onto the lawn, where it broke like glass, he walked around the circle again, stomping and scuffing the ash so that the line was continuous and unbroken. The chafing dish he set on a wooden chair inside the circle, and, needing both hands to steady the bottle, he poured an inch of brandy into it.

Then for several minutes he just stood and stared at the shallow copper pan while the morning hilltop breeze sighed in the high cypress branches and chilled his damp face. I
can
face her, he told himself firmly; if it’s for the last time, and if she’s concealed behind the idiot shell-masks of Long John Beach’s broken mind, and if I’m armed with the Sun card from the monstrous Lombardy Zeroth deck—and there’s brandy to lure her, and then burn her up.

A hitch that might have been a sob or a giggle quivered in his throat.

Will this mean I’ll have committed matricide
twice
?

He shivered in the cold wind, and took another big gulp of the brandy to drive away the image of the old face under the surface of the water, the lipsticked mouth opening and shutting, and the remembered cramps in his seventeen-year-old arms.

He looked up at the gray sky, and swallowed still another mouthful, and mentally recited the alphabet forward and backward several times.

At last he felt steady enough to go back inside and fetch out from under the bed the two purple velvet boxes.

“Finish your sandwich and get out here,” he told Long John Beach as he carried the boxes through the kitchen to the open back door. “We’ve got a … a call to make.”

When Long John Beach came shambling out of the house, absently rubbing mustard out of his hair and licking his fingers, Armentrout had to tell him several times to go over and stand inside the circle, before he finally got the old man’s attention. “And step
over
the ash line,” he added.

At last the old man was standing inside the circle, blinking and grinning foolishly. Armentrout forced himself to speak in a level tone: “Okay, John, we’re going to do our old trick of having you listen in on a call, right? Only this time, you’re going to be the telephone as well as the eavesdropper. ’Kay?”

Long John Beach nodded. “Ring ring,” he said abruptly, in a loud falsetto.

Armentrout blinked at him uncertainly. Could this be an
incoming
call? But this couldn’t start
yet,
he hadn’t lit the brandy yet! “Uh, who is this, please?” he asked, trying to sound stern so that the old man wouldn’t laugh at him if he’d just been clowning around and this
wasn’t
a real call.

“Dwayne,” said Long John Beach.

Armentrout tried to remember any patient who had ever had that name. “Dwayne?” he said. “I’m sorry—Dwayne who?”

“Dwayne the tub, I’m dwowning!”

Armentrout reeled back, gasping. It wasn’t his mother’s voice, but it had to be a sort of relayed thought from her ghost.

“J-John,” he said too loudly, fumbling in his pockets for a match or a lighter, “I want you to light the brandy—light the stuff in that pan there.”

He found a matchbook and tossed it into the circle, then fell to his knees on the wet grass beside one of the purple velvet boxes. I can’t
shoot
him, he thought, it wouldn’t stop her, she’s just passing through Long John’s train-station head.

He flipped open the other box and spilled the oversized cards out onto the grass, squinting as he pawed through them until he found the Sun card.

When he looked up, Long John Beach had lifted the copper chafing-dish pan in his one hand and was sniffing it. And now it
was
Armentrout’s mother’s voice that spoke from the old man’s mouth:
“Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!”

“Put that down,” Armentrout wailed.

The pan tipped up toward the old man’s mouth.

“Mm—” Armentrout choked on the word
mom,
and had to make do with just shouting, “Don’t drink that! John! Kick out that woman’s ghost for a minute and listen to me!”

Suddenly, from the gate by the garage, a man’s voice called, “Dr. Armentrout?”

“Get out of here!” Armentrout yelled back, struggling to his feet. “This is private property!”

But the gate clanged and swung open, and it was the young intern from Rosecrans Medical Center, Philip Muir, who stepped out onto the backyard grass. He didn’t have his white coat on, but he was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie. “John!” he exclaimed, noticing the one-armed old man standing in the ash circle on the patio. Long John Beach was noisily drinking the brandy now, and slopping a lot of it into the white whiskers that bristled on his cheeks and neck these days. Muir turned to Armentrout. “He’s supposed to be at Pacifica.”

“I—have him out on a day pass,” Armentrout panted. “This is none of your—”

“Richie!”
called Armentrout’s mother’s voice from Long John Beach’s throat, bubbling around the last gulp of the brandy.
“Can you hear me under water? I’ve got a
beard
! Did they have to give me …
hormones
? Pull the plug, darling, and let me breathe! Where’s some more of this whiskey?”

Muir sniffed sharply. “And you’re giving him whiskey? Doctor, I—”

“It’s not whiskey,” babbled Armentrout, “it’s brandy, she doesn’t know the difference—”

Muir was frowning and shaking his head. “ ‘She’? What’s the matter with you? Have you got Plumtree and Cochran up here too? I know Cochran is in the area, he telephoned the vineyard he works at—”

Armentrout interrupted him to call out, “I’ll get you more liquor in a moment! Just—
wait
there!”

But Long John Beach blinked at him and spat. “I was never a liquor man,” he said. “I just ate smokes.”