Earthquake Weather (54 page)

Cochran stared into Cody’s frightened, squinting eyes—and admitted to himself that in these last eight nightmare days this rough-edged young woman had become, for better or worse, a part of his life. The jumpy infatuation he had initially felt for Janis was gone, but at this moment he couldn’t imagine a life for himself that didn’t abrasively and surprisingly include Janis Cordelia Plumtree.

“I think,” he said with a weary grin, “we’re partners, by now.”

“Shake on it.”

He shook her cold hand.

“Let’s hit the road,” she said.

“Okay. But let’s have lunch first.” He smiled. “And then you can help me get rid of a stolen car in my back yard, when we get there.”

“I can deal with that,” she said. “I hadn’t forgotten it.”

Thutmose didn’t look up from his bowl when Cochran and Plumtree returned to the booth. The waitress was just taking orders for food, and Cochran quickly asked for carp in wine while Plumtree frowned over the menu and grumpily settled for stuffed mussels.

By the time the food arrived, Cochran had finished both his beers and ordered two more. The fish tasted like pier pilings and the wine sauce was featureless acid and he hadn’t realized the dish would have raisins in it.

All the people in the bar were still talking in whispers, and after his fourth beer Cochran noticed that the whispering was in counterpoint unison—a fast, shaking chant that took in the bang-and-rattle of the bar dice as punctuation. The exhausted-looking men and women were all jerkily walking back and forth and between each other, and after staring in befuddled puzzlement for a few moments Cochran saw that their spastic restlessness was a dance. The dancers didn’t appear to be enjoying it, perhaps weren’t even doing it voluntarily. Beneath the rapid shaking whispers and the noise of the dice there was a deep, slow rolling, like a millwheel.

Plumtree leaned toward him. “Let’s hit the road,” she whispered. “And …
to a-void com-plications …
let’s just walk out without saying anything.”

It was easy enough to slide out of the booth again and walk away across the gritty floor—in the booth behind them Angelica was clearly avoiding her own appalling recent memories by talking consolingly to Mavranos, and Pete Sullivan was waving his empty glass and trying to catch the waitress’s eye—and soon Cochran and Plumtree had made their ducking, sidestepping way, helplessly participating in a few shuffling steps of the joyless group dance, to the front door.

Outside, in the fresh wet-greenery-and-topsoil breeze from Golden Gate Park, the sun had broken through the morning’s overcast and glittered in the raindrops that still speckled the brown Granada and the blue Suburban. Oddly, there were no other vehicles in the lot.

As Cochran opened the Granada’s passenger-side door for Plumtree, she paused by the back end of the truck to peer in through the dusty glass. Cochran had carefully avoided looking at that window at all, not wanting to see the tumbled, broken skeleton of Scott Crane.

Now Plumtree shuddered visibly, and stepped back to catch her balance; but a moment later she again stepped up to the back of the truck and looked in.

And again she staggered, and it was a blank look she gave him as she finally shuffled forward and got into the Granada.

“You okay?” he said as he got in himself and started the engine.

“Fine,” she said. “Don’t talk. On the way to—on the way—stop for some cigarettes and booze. Mores regular, and Southern Comfort.”

Cochran had said “Okay,” before remembering that she had asked him not to talk. He nodded; and, because he was drunk, it was easy for him to think only about how he would get from here over to Mission Street, which would take him south to the 280, seven miles down which he would find South Daly City—right across the highway from the little transplanted-cemetery town of Colma—and his empty, empty house.

Neither of them spoke at all as Cochran steered the old car down the straight, narrow lanes over South San Francisco and then looped west past San Bruno Mountain, with its highway-side Pace Vineyards Tasting Room billboards; and, even with a wordless stop while he ducked into a strip-mall liquor store, it was only twenty minutes after leaving the Loser’s Bar parking lot that he pulled into his own driveway and switched off the car motor.

Plumtree had her arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder as they trudged up the walkway to the front door; and when he had unlocked the door and led her in, then handed her the liquor-store bag and locked the door again behind them, it seemed only natural that they should both shuffle into the bedroom. The bureau drawers were still pulled out and disordered from their hasty visit five days earlier.

Plumtree twisted the cap off the bottle of Southern Comfort and poured several big splashes of the aromatic liqueur into the glass on the bedside table, and drained it in one swallow. Then as she unbuttoned her blouse with one hand, she touched his lips with the forefinger of the other. “No talk,” she whispered.

Cochran nodded, and sat down on the bed to take off his muddy shoes.

I would not deprive Col. Haraszthy of a moiety of the credit due him as the first among the first grape culturists of this state, but an investigation of the subject forces the conclusion, that the glory of having introduced [the Zinfandel grape] into the state is not among the laurels he won … To who is the honor of its introduction due? To an enterprising pioneer merchant of San Francisco, the late Captain F. W. Macondray, who raised the first Zinfandel wine grown in California in a grapery at his residence, on the corner of Stockton and Washington streets, San Francisco.

—Robert A. Thompson,

San Francisco Evening Bulletin,

May 1885

W
ITH NO KEY TO
the motel room, Angelica and Pete and Mavranos just sat in the blue truck for an hour in the Star Motel parking lot. Mavranos hadn’t eaten anything at the Loser’s Bar, and at one point he got out and trudged across the street to get a tuna sandwich, but he came back to the truck to eat it, and when he had tossed the wrappers onto the floorboards there was still no sign of Cochran and Plumtree, nor of Kootie. Every five minutes or so one of them would impatiently get out and climb the stairs to knock at the room door, but there was never an answer.

They had driven back up here in a roundabout route that had taken them through the green lawns of the Presidio, with Pete at the wheel and Angelica watching behind to be sure they weren’t followed. Cochran and Plumtree had sneaked out of the bar and driven away with Angelica’s carbine still under the front seat of their car, but she still had her .45 handgun, and Mavranos’s .38 was on the truck seat now, under an unfolded Triple-A map.

Angelica’s flesh quivered under the .45 that was now tucked into her belt.

The full-throated bang, and after the blue-white muzzle flash faded from her retinas she saw one less motorcycle headlight in the dawn dimness behind the racing Granada … and then she had steadied the jumping rifle sights on another headlight …

“What’s two times twelve, Arky?” she asked quickly.

Mavranos sighed and wiped the steamy inside surface of the windshield. “Twenty-four, Angelica.”

“It’s
your
mentation that’s waxing and waning, Angie,” said Pete irritably from the back seat. “You were saving our lives. If my stupid hands could hold a gun, it would have been
me
shooting out of the car window.”

“Oh, I know you would have, Pete,” she said miserably, “and you came back for me both times when they were shooting at us. I’m glad it
wasn’t
you. I wouldn’t wish this on you.”

Mavranos was squinting at her sideways with what might have been knowing sympathy.

“Twice thirteen,” she snapped.

“Twenty-six,” said Mavranos. “You told me you shot a lady on the
Queen Mary
two years ago, after you thought she had killed Pete. Today you thought these boys had killed me. Both times the bad people
would
have killed us, if you hadn’t stopped them, if you hadn’t killed them. What’s half of two?”

“Oh,” she said with a sudden, affected breeziness, “less than one, if it’s me and Pete. Or even me and you, I guess.” She had been looking past Mavranos, and now she lowered her head and rubbed her eyes. “How long has that turquoise BMW been parked over there? Its engine is running. See the steam?”

Pete shifted around in the back seat to peer. “Four guys in it,” he said after a moment. “The two in the back look … funny.”

Mavranos had not taken his eyes from the Lombard Street sidewalk. “There’s Kootie,” he said suddenly.

Angelica whipped her head around—and the thin, scuffling figure walking down the sidewalk from beyond the motel office was indeed Kootie. She yanked open the truck door and hopped down to the asphalt, and as she began sprinting toward the boy she heard behind her the truck’s other two doors creaking open as Pete and Mavranos followed.

She also heard a car engine shift into gear from idle, and then accelerate.

The Green Ripper,
Kootie had been thinking insistently as he had trudged up the Octavia Street sidewalk toward Lombard—he was afraid to think about his foster parents, and whether or not he might find them still alive after this ruinous morning—
the Green Giant, the Green Knight. I owe him a beheading. The Green Ripper, the Green Giant …

Hours earlier, in the upstairs room of the magical boardinghouse that had appeared at Stockton and Washington, Kootie had picked up the bottle of Bitin Dog in both shaking hands—and he had wondered helplessly how he could possibly keep from drinking it right there. He was sure that the dead woman on the bed had been telling the truth: that the bottle contained real impunity, that if he were to drink it he would simply
lose,
lose
track
of, the enormous sin that made even taking each breath seem like the shameful act of a horrifying impostor. Kootie had despairingly thought that
especially
if his foster-parents were still alive he should drink it—if they were somehow not dead, he couldn’t encompass the thought of going back to them with the mark of a murder on his soul. Angelica would see it on his face as clearly as she would a tattoo.

But he knew that if he drank it, he would forget about them too. In good faith the wine would take all his loves along with all his guilts—and because he would be drinking it in this stolen, unsanctioned moment, the wine would certainly not ever give any particle of them back. It was a kind of maturity that the wine had to offer, which was to say that it was a renunciation of his whole youth—he would be a man if he drank it, but he would be the wine’s man.

After what could only have been a few seconds, really, he had lifted the bottle past his shoulder and flung it into the cold fireplace. It disappeared in that darkness without any sound at all, and he thought that the house had reabsorbed it, and not with disapproval or offense. Only afterward did he fully and fearfully comprehend that he had chosen to remain Koot Hoomie Sullivan—the wounded foster-son of Pete and Angelica Sullivan—the fourteen-year-old who had committed a murder this morning.

That knowledge was like a boulder in the living room of his mind, so that his thoughts had to crawl over it first before they could get anywhere.

He had carried this new and all-but-intolerable identity downstairs, where the old black woman had prepared him a different sort of meal than the peppered venison that was cooking to cinders upstairs. It was a spicy hot salmon that Mammy Pleasant set out for him on the kitchen table, served with the fish’s tail and sunken-eyed head still attached; he forked up mouthfuls of it hungrily, and though it blunted no memories it reinvigorated him, made him feel implausibly rested and strong.

And as he had eaten it, he had learned things.

With some evident sympathy, Mammy Pleasant had told him her own story—and, in this impossible building on this catastrophic day, Kootie found that he had no capacity for disbelief left.

She told him that she had been born a slave in Atlanta in the winter of 1815, her mother a voodoo queen from Santo Domingo. At the age of ten Mary Ellen had been sold to a merchant who had placed her in the Ursuline convent in New Orleans, to be brought up by the nuns—but a Catholic convent had
not
been any part of the god’s plan for her. The merchant soon died, and she was eventually sent to be a servant for a woman who ran a yardage and crockery store way up north in New England, on remote Nantucket Island.

In New England in those days a new variety of wine grape had appeared, brought in obscurely on the transatlantic schooners and cultivated in American greenhouses. Something terrible had already begun to devastate the great old European vineyards of the Herault and the Midi, but in America this new wine from across the sea flourished aggressively. It was variously known as the Black Lombardy and the Black St. Peter’s, but in 1830, at the Linnaean Botanic Gardens on Long Island, it was tentatively dubbed the Black Zinfandel.

On wintry Nantucket Island the teenaged Mary Ellen had discarded the Caribbean voodoo systems her mother had taught her, and had begun giving her allegiance to an older god, a wild deity of woods and ivy. As a teenager she learned to tie strips of pine bark to the bottoms of her shoes, so as to mask her footprints when she stole fruit from neighboring farms at night, and she had only been caught when she had used the trick to steal exotic Brazilian peanuts.

The woman storekeeper had taught Mary Ellen how to ferment and bottle the new wine—and when Mary Ellen was twenty-four, and still a virgin, the store had caught fire and burned, and the storekeeper had died of shock, or possibly fright, after staring too intently at the tall, wildly dancing flames. Mary Ellen inherited hundreds of the miraculously undamaged bottles.

The new variety of wine was also called
pagadebiti,
Italian for debt-payer, and Mary Ellen had understood that the god had come to her in it, and that he was generously holding out to her the duty to drink it and become his American Ariadne, rescued by him from abandonment on a bleak island. She knew that the god was Dionysus, and that he was offering to take all her debts, past and future, in exchange for her individual will.