Earthquake Weather (50 page)

Cochran was shouting with hysterical laughter as he snatched his foot off the gas pedal and trod on the brake, and Angelica was laughing too, though the sudden deceleration had thrown her against the dashboard.

“He must have landed
right on
Crane’s skeleton!” Cochran yelled delightedly.

“He’ll come up wearing the skull like a hat!” agreed Angelica.

“A
skullcap
!” crowed Cochran, and then he and Angelica were both laughing so hard that he had to slow down still more to keep from weaving in the lane.

“A kamikaze yarmulke,” choked Angelica. “Catch up, catch up, you don’t want to lose ’em now. And turn the windshield wipers back on.”

Cochran’s hands were shaking on the wheel now, and the tires thumped over the lane markers as the car drifted back and forth. When he switched the windshield wipers back on, he could see the dim silhouette of Pete Sullivan inside the truck, clambering over the seats.

When Pete seemed to have got up to the driver’s seat the truck wobbled visibly and then backfired like a cannon-shot, with two flashes of bright yellow flame at the exhaust pipes by the back wheels.

Then Cochran saw Pete Sullivan’s hand wave out of the driver’s-side window, and the truck swayed smoothly back and forth in a clearly deliberate S-pattern.

Angelica exhaled. “He’s got control,” she said softly. “He’ll be pulling over real quick.”

“Not here,” said Cochran, “there’s no shoulder.” He let himself finally take his eyes off the truck and look around at the landscape. The gray surf still streaked the sea beyond the fence to the right, but at some point they had passed the green forest wall of Golden Gate Park, and now it was low pastel-colored apartment buildings and bungalows that fretted the gray sky to the left. “He’ll want to turn inland to find some place we can park,” he said, and he clicked his left-turn indicator to give Pete the idea.

Pete steered the blue truck in a careful left turn onto Sloat Boulevard, and then drove slowly through half a dozen residential blocks of old white-stucco houses to the parking lot at the South Sunset Playground. There were no other cars in the lot as Cochran swung the Granada into the parking space next to the truck, and Angelica was out of the car before he had even come to a full stop. When Cochran turned off the ignition and got out, she was already standing at the opened passenger-side door of the truck. The rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up in the east, and the mirror lenses of Angelica’s sunglasses flashed as she leaned into the truck cab over Mavranos.

“Can you push against Pete’s hands with your feet?” she was saying to Mavranos. “Both feet? Good! Open your eyes, Arky, I want to check your pupils.” She looked up toward Pete, who was still behind the wheel of the truck. “We’ll need to get him to a hospital, stat. He’s conscious, with no bleeding from the ears or nostrils, and this isn’t a bullet wound, but … he
was
knocked out, it
is
a concussion.”

She doesn’t want to say
possible subdural hematoma,
thought Cochran nervously. Mavranos is probably in shock, and doesn’t need to hear that there might be blood leaking inside his skull, lethally pressing against the brain.

Plumtree had climbed out of the back of the car now, and she was leaning on the front fender, blinking around at the lawns and swing sets and the two vehicles. “Did it work?” she asked hoarsely.

“Not a bullet wound?” said Cochran, reluctant to answer Plumtree. He could see that the truck’s windshield was starred with cracks radiating from a hole low down on the passenger side. “What is it then?”

Angelica turned her mirror lenses toward him, then held out a fragment of polished white stone. “A bullet hit this statue he had on his dashboard—some kind of Buddha—and part of
it
hit him, to judge by the fragments in his scalp. A glancing blow to the back of the head, above the occipital region.” She turned back to Mavranos, whose head Cochran could just see on the truck seat. “Arky,” she said. “Open your eyes for me.”

“Did it fucking
work
?” Plumtree demanded. “Is Scott Crane alive now?”

Cochran bared his teeth in irritation and pity. “No, Cody. It—failed, I’m sorry.”

“I think the truck was heading back to Leucadia,” said Pete, who had opened the driver’s-side door and had one foot down on the pavement. “I think it would have driven all the way back there, like a horse that knows the way home—if somebody would have filled the gas tank every hour.”

Plumtree had taken a wobbling step back across the asphalt. “Did it work?” she asked. “Where’s Scott Crane?”

“Radioactive!” Mavranos seemed to say, loudly but in a slurred voice.

“No, Janis,” Cochran said. “I’m sorry, but it didn’t work.” It occurred to him that Plumtree was sounding like a concussion victim herself.

“Look at me,” Angelica said to Mavranos.

“You’re upside-down,” Mavranos said in a high, nasal voice, “but I’ll look at you all you want.” To a tune that Cochran recognized as some old Elvis Costello song, Mavranos sang, “You better listen to your radio.” But he slurred the last word, so that it seemed to be
ray-joe.

Angelica had jerked back against the open door, her forehead wrinkled above the sunglasses. “You—your pupils are normal,” she said uncertainly. “But we’ve got to get you to a hospital, Arky, you’ve got a—”

“Bitch broke my nose!” Mavranos braced himself on his elbow and sat up, feeling his face. “Is my traitor sister here?” He blinked at Angelica. “Who the hell are you people? My nose
isn’t
broken! Am I—did I do it, am I the king?”

Angelica held out the white stone fragment. “This was a statue of a, a fat Buddha,” she said, and Cochran could tell that she was trying to keep her voice level. “Do you—recognize it?”

“Buddha,” said Mavranos in his new, high voice, “it’s not Buddha, it’s Tan Tai, gook god of prosperity. I gave her one like it once, when she was still my loyal half-sister.”

Angelica stepped slowly away from the truck, glancing worriedly at Cochran and Plumtree. “Look only at me please,” she said to them in a quiet, professional tone. “Pete? Eyes front. We won’t be going to a hospital after all, unless I see a deterioration in Arky’s vital signs.”

Cochran could feel goose bumps rasping the fabric of his damp shirtsleeves, and not because of the dawn chill. He understood now that a ghost had got punched into Mavranos’s head back there; and he wondered if it was one of the ones that had clustered ahead of the truck on the drive back from the ruins at the end of the yacht-club peninsula, or if it was one that Mavranos had been carrying with him all along, like an old intolerable photo in a sealed locket.

To Cochran, Angelica said, “You’re a local boy—where is there water nearby? Tamed water, contained water. With—we need to get Arky and me into a boat, very quick.”

“A
boat
?” echoed Cochran, trying not to wail in pure bewilderment. “Okay. Well! Golden Gate Park, I guess. Stow Lake. You can rent boats, I think.”

“Close by?” asked Angelica.

“Two or three miles back the way we came.”

“It’s not—famously
haunted
or anything, is it?”

Cochran rocked his head uncertainly. “There’s supposed to be druid stones on the island in the middle of the lake,” he said, “and I heard that there were stones from a ruined Spanish monastery around the shore; but my wife and I went looking for this stuff a couple of years ago, and couldn’t find any of it. Anyway, no, I’ve never heard of any hauntings or murders or anything.”

Remotely, as if from some previous life, he remembered the picnic he and Nina had unpacked on the Stow Lake island one sunny weekday morning, and how in the bough-shaded solitude at the top of the island hill they had soon forgotten the sandwiches and overturned the wine as they had rolled around on the dewy grass. They had made a sort of bed of their cast-off clothing, and when they had finally collapsed, spent, Nina had said that it had been as if they’d been trying to
climb through
each other.

And now he jumped, for Plumtree had slid her hand up the clinging seat of his wet jeans.

“Can we go?” she asked quietly. “Did they get the dead man back alive again?”

“No,” Cochran said, blinking away tears of exhaustion, “Tiffany. It failed. The dead man is—deader than he was before.”

Her hand was snatched away, but he didn’t look at her to see who she might be now; he just stepped to the side to block her view of Mavranos and said, rapidly, “Remember the little girls we saw on the roof of that clown’s house? I think we’re in the same sort of situation now. Look only at Angelica. Do you follow me?”

“Mirrors can ricochet,” she said bleakly, in the voice he now recognized as Cody’s. “I’m looking no higher than the ground.”

Angelica gently pressed the truck door closed until it clicked, as if to keep from waking someone up. “You lead the way to this lake,” she told Cochran as she pulled open the truck’s back door to get in. “And when we get there, you walk ahead of us and buy the tickets or whatever.”

“Right.” Cochran turned back to the Granada, jerking his head at Plumtree to follow.

“What’s left for us?” Plumtree asked dreamily as she got in on the passenger side and Cochran started the engine again. “After this?” Perhaps she was talking to herself.

“Getting drunk,” he said anyway, clanking the shift lever into reverse. “What did you think?”

“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Right. Of course.”

“Boats first.”

“To the boats,” she said, emptily.

CRESSIDA:
 … he is himself.

PANDARUS:
Himself? Alas, poor Troilus, I would he were.

CRESSIDA:
So he is.

PANDARUS:
Condition, I had gone barefoot to India.

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

A
T THE CORNER OF
Stockton and Washington, Kootie had found only the Chinese restaurant he remembered having passed at dawn, next door to the Jade Galore shop; the restaurant wasn’t open, and the old man who had been peering into a mirror propped against the restaurant wall was gone now, and the big old gilt-framed mirror too. Someone had even swept up the dead sparrows. Kootie had turned away toward the wet intersection, stepping to the curb and mentally cursing the Chinese woman who had given him the useless message, when he sensed a change in the light from behind him.

And when he turned around, the restaurant was gone.

In its place stood a three-story plaster-fronted building with narrow arched windows. At a wrought-iron gate to an enclosed patio garden, the woman in white stood staring out at him, and behind her he could see the big framed mirror, propped now against a knotty tree stump in the rainy garden. On a white sign over the gateway arch, plain black letters spelled out,
PLEASANT BOARDING HOUSE
.

Oh, this is magic,
Kootie thought, his spine suddenly tingling with a chill that wasn’t from the cold rain. I should run away.

Run away to what place, he asked himself bitterly then, that hasn’t been conquered? To what people, that haven’t been defeated and probably killed?

His breath was hitching and catching in his throat.

The Chinese woman beckoned with constrained urgency, and touched a finger to her lips. Kootie noticed that though she was still draped in white, it was a frail linen robe she was wearing now, and the fabric appeared to be dry.

At least she’s offering shelter, he told himself as he shrugged and stepped back across the sidewalk from the edge of the curb. His sneakers squished on the pavement, and he could feel cold water spurting between his toes.

The woman tugged the gate open on hinges that made no sound over the clatter of the rain, and then pushed it closed again after Kootie had stepped through onto the round paving stones laid out across the patio mud. “What is this place?” he whispered to her.

Her face was tense as she shook her head again and pressed her cold lips to his ear. “Later,” she breathed, and at least her breath was warm. “Don’t wake up the master of the house.” As she pulled her face back she nodded out toward the garden without looking that way.

Kootie had to look. He glanced over his shoulder as the woman took his elbow and hurried him toward a pair of windowed doors ahead—but all he saw in the walled garden, aside from the dripping ginger stalks and rose vines on the far side of the rain-stippled puddles, was the tree stump with the mirror leaning against it.

Squinting against the rain, he saw that the stump was a gnarled and hairy old grapevine, a full yard thick, with jagged, chunky outcrops where old canes had been pruned back. A soggy animal fur had been draped around two of the truncated woody limbs as if around shoulders, and to Kootie the bumpy bark between the cane stumps looked, in the moment before the woman pulled him through the doors into a dry, pine-floored hallway, like the whiskery gray face of an aged man.

The woman in the white robe was leading him quickly toward a set of polished black wood stairs that led upward. “What is this place?” Kootie whispered again.

“It’s his boardinghouse,” she whispered back. He takes in boarders? Kootie thought. “It’s not here all the time,” she went on, “but it’s always here on January seventeenth, for people with the right kind of eyes—and with this bad checkmate rain, the place would certainly have been here today in any case—or else this rain couldn’t have happened except on this day, St. Sulpice’s Day. If you’re a fugitive, you’re welcome here.” They had reached a shadowy upstairs corridor with narrow gray-shining windows along one wall, and she led Kootie by the hand to an open interior door.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’ve cooked you a king’s breakfast.”

Kootie could smell some kind of spicy roasting meat on the musty air. “Hungry as a bedbug,” he said, quoting an old Solville line that had somehow evolved from
Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

“Me too!” she said with a breathless laugh as she stepped into the dimly lit room. “This Death-card rain will bring out a
lot
of fugitive places in the city, like toadstools, that won’t be there anymore after the sun comes out again. But the eating is best here.”