Earthquake Weather (2 page)

A long fieldstone wall with pepper trees overhanging it hid a property on the seaward side of Neptune Avenue. At the entrance of the private driveway, by a burly pine tree that was strung with flowering orange black-eyed Susans, the woman pulled over onto the gravel shoulder and switched off the engine. The dawn street was empty except for a couple of dew-frosted cars parked tilted alongside the road, and silent—no birds sang, and the surf beyond the bluff was just a slow subsonic pulse.

Her face was set in a hard grin as she got out of the car, and when she had straightened up on the gravel she began unbuckling the belt on her jeans; and she kept whispering, “Just in the leg, that’s all, settle down, girl! Just in the leg as a
warning,
and anyway he stabbed himself in the leg already one time, just to have something to talk to some lady about—and he shot himself in the foot before that, with this here very spear. No big deal to him, I swear.” She unzipped her jeans and pulled and tugged them down to her ankles, exposing white panties with
SUNDAY
embroidered in red on the front, and exposing also a two-foot-long green-painted trident that was duct-taped to her knee and thigh.

It was a short aluminum speargun spear, with three barbless tips at the trident end and three diagonal grooves notched into the pencil-diameter shaft. The tan skin of her thigh was smeared red around several shallow cuts where the points were pressed against her, and it was with a harsh exhalation of relief that she peeled off the tape and lifted the spear away. Gripping it with her elbow against her ribs, she wrapped one length of the tape back around her thigh, covering the cuts, and then she pulled her pants back up and re-buckled her belt.

She stuck the spear upright through the gravel into the loam underneath, and then leaned into the car and hoisted out of the back seat a Makita power screwdriver and a yard-square piece of white-painted plywood with black plastic letters glued onto it. She fished two screws out of her pocket and, with an abrupt shrill blasting of the Makita’s motor, screwed the sign to the trunk of the pine tree.

The sign read:

REST IN PEACE

“THE LITTLE LAME MONARCH”

LATE OF LEUCADIA;

PREVIOUSLY OF SAN DIEGO, SONOMA, LAS VEGAS

AND REMOTER PARTS.

For a moment she just stood there on the dew-damp gravel, with the Makita in her hand still harshly stitching the dawn air with its shrill buzz, and she stared at the sign with a look of blank incomprehension. Then her fingers relaxed and the machine crunched to the gravel, quiet at last.

She plodded over to the upright spear, plucked it free, and strode around the pine tree and down the unpaved private driveway, away from the street.

Fifteen minutes later and two hundred and fifty miles to the northeast, an earthquake shook the deep-rooted expanse of Hoover Dam, forty-five million pounds of reinforcing steel and four million cubic yards of concrete that stood braced across Black Canyon against the south end of Lake Mead as it had stood for sixty years; morning-shift engineers in the powerhouse wings below the dam thought that some vast vehicle was traversing the highway at the top, or that one of the gigantic turbines had broken under the weight of water surging down through the penstocks buried inside the Arizona-side mountain. Vacationers aboard houseboats on the lake were shaken awake in their bunks, and in the nearby city of Boulder more than two hundred people called the police in a panic.

Dawn-patrol prostitutes and crack dealers on Hollywood Boulevard reeled and grabbed for walls or parking meters as the sidewalk pavement, already sagging lower than normal because of shoddy tunneling being done for the Metro Rail line, abruptly dropped another inch and a half.

Just across the highway from Colma, the gray little cemetery town on the San Mateo Peninsula to which all the evicted burial plots of neighboring San Francisco had been relocated, a pregnant woman wrapped in a bedsheet and screaming nonsense verses in French ran out into the lanes of the 280 Highway.

Along Ocean Beach on the west coast of San Francisco a sudden offshore gale was chopping up the surf, blowing the swells at chaotic angles and wrecking the long clean lines of the waves. The couple of surfers out past the surf line who had been riding the terrifying winter waves gave up and began struggling to paddle back in to shore, and the ill-at-ease men who had been clustering around the vans and pickup trucks in the Sloat Boulevard parking lot cheered up and assured each other that they had stayed out of the water just because it had been obvious that the weather was going to change this way.

Similar abrupt gales split and uprooted trees as far north as Eureka and as far south as San Diego, all on that same morning.

And in a bedroom in a run-down old apartment building in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, a fourteen-year-old boy was jolted awake—out of a dream of a woman running madly through rows of grapevines and clutching in her hand an ivy-wrapped staff that somehow had a bloody pinecone stuck on the end of it.

Koot Hoomie Sullivan had sat up in bed at the shock of the vision, and now he swung his bare feet out from under the blankets onto the wooden floor. His heart was still pounding, and his left hand had gone numb though his watchband was comfortably loose.

He glanced out the window, past the lantana branches that pressed against the glass; the carob trees and the parachute-draped van outside were casting long shadows across the broken concrete, and he could hear wild parrots shouting in the tree branches. It could hardly be seven o’clock yet—he was certainly the first person awake in the apartment—but the warm interior air was heavy with the smell of burning coffee.

“Call me Fishmeal,” he whispered, and shivered. He had not smeared mud on the foot of his bed at all this winter, and he had eaten several slices of rare London broil for dinner last night—he had even been allowed to drink a glass of champagne at the stroke of midnight!—but nevertheless he was again, clearly, experiencing the sense of being nearly able to
see
the whole American West Coast in some off-the-visible-spectrum frequency, as if with eyes underground as well as in the sky, and almost
hear
heartbeats and whimpers and furtive trysts and betrayals as if through the minute vibrations of freeway-shoulder palm trees and mountain sage and urban-lot weeds. And below the conscious level of his mind, faintly as if from distances remote beyond any capacity of natural space, he thought he could hear shouts and sobs and laughter from entities that were not any part of himself. When he had felt this sense of expanded awareness before, it had generally been in breathless dreams, or at most in the hypnagogic state between sleep and waking, but he was wide awake right now.

He stood up and got dressed, quickly but thoughtfully—Reeboks, and comfortable jeans, and a loose flannel shirt over the bandage taped onto his ribs; and he made sure the end of his belt was rotated into a Möbius twist before he buckled it.

He blinked as he let his gaze drift over the things in his room—the tasco 300-power reflector telescope in the corner, the framed black-and-white photograph of Thomas Edison on the wall, the coin-collection folders, the desk with clothes and a pair of in-line skates piled carelessly on it.

He jumped in surprise, and an instant later a woman’s voice mournfully exclaimed
“Oh hell!”
somewhere in the parking lot outside the window.

“It’s bar-time showtime, folks,” Kootie whispered self-consciously, and he opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway that led to the open kitchen and the living room.

He could hear someone moving around in his adopted-parents’ bedroom, but he wanted to have something specific to say before he talked to them—so he hurried to the front door and unhooked the feather-fringed chain and unbolted the door.

The woman who was the property owner was just walking around the corner of the building from the parking lot as Kootie shuffled across the threshold and pulled the front door closed behind him; and her brown face was streaked with tears. “Oh, Kootie,” she said, “all the beasties are dead!”

They were already dead, Kootie thought—but he knew what the woman must mean. The morning air was sharply chilly in his curly, sweat-damp hair, but the breeze was still scented with the night’s jasmine, and he felt ready to deal with this particular crisis. “Show me, Johanna,” he said gently.

“Over by the trash cans and Mr. Pete’s van.” She was plodding heavily back the way she had come, her bathrobe flapping around the legs of her burst spandex tights. Over her shoulder she said, “I gave them some new gravel last night—could that have poisoned them?”

Kootie remembered his dreamed vision of the woman in the vineyard with the bloody, ivy-wrapped staff, and as he followed Johanna around the corner into the slantingly sunlit parking lot, he said, “What killed them was nothing that happened around here.”

He trudged after her across the broken checkerboard of asphalt and concrete, and when he had stepped around the back end of the parachute-shrouded van he stopped beside her.

The beasties were
obviously
dead now. Three of them were sprawled on the pavement and in the ice plant here, their gnarled old hands poking limply out of the thrift-store shirt cuffs, their mouths gaping among the patchy gray post-mortem whiskers, their eyes flat and sheenless behind the scavenged spectacles.

Kootie shook his head and clumsily ran the still-numb fingers of his left hand through his curly black hair. “Terrific,” he said. “What are we going to
do
with them?”

Johanna sniffed. “We should give them a burial.”

“These people died a long time ago, Johanna,” Kootie said, “and these aren’t their bodies. These aren’t
anyone’s
bodies. The coroner would go nuts if he got hold of these. I doubt if they’ve got any more internal organs than a sea-slug’s got … and I always thought their skeletons must be arranged pretty freehand, from the way they walk. Walked. I doubt they’ve even got fingerprints.”

Johanna sighed. “I’m glad I got them the Mikasa glass candies at Christmas.”

“They did like those,” Kootie agreed absently. Her late common-law husband had got into the habit of feeding the shambling derelicts, and for the last three Christmases Johanna had bought decorative glass treats for the things, in his memory. They couldn’t eat organic stuff because it would just rot inside their token bellies, but they had still liked to gobble down things that
looked
like food.

“Good God,” came a man’s voice from behind Kootie; and then a woman said, softly, “What would
they
die
of
?”

Kootie turned to his adopted parents with a rueful smile. “Top of the morning. I was hoping I’d be able to get a tarp over ’em before you guys got up, so I could break it to you over coffee.”

His adopted mother glanced at him, and then stared at his side. “Kootie,” she said, her contralto voice suddenly sharp with alarm, “you’re bleeding. Worse than usual, I mean.”

Kootie had already felt the hot wetness over his ribs. “I know, Angelica,” he said to her. To his adopted father he said, “Pete, let’s get these necrotic dudes stashed in your van for now. Then I think we’d better go to Johanna’s office to …
confer.
I believe this is going to be a busy day. A busy year.”

He nearly always just called them “Mom” and “Dad”—this use of their first names put a stop to further discussion out here, and they both nodded. Angelica said, “I’ll get coffee cooking,” and strode back toward the building. Pete Sullivan rubbed his chin and said, “Let’s use a blanket from inside the van to lift them in. I don’t want to have to touch their ‘skin.’ ”

Angelica Sullivan’s maiden name had been Elizalde, and she had the lean face and high cheekbones of a figure in an El Greco painting; her long, straight hair was as black as Kootie’s unruly mane, but after she put four coffee cups of water into the microwave in Johanna’s kitchen, and got the restaurant-surplus coffee urn loaded and turned on, she tied her hair back in a hasty ponytail and hurried into the manager’s office.

A television set was humming on the cluttered desk, but its screen was black, and the only light in the long room was the yellow glow that filtered in through the dusty, vine-blocked windows high in one wall. A worn couch, sat against the opposite wall, and she stepped lithely up onto it to reach the bookshelves above it.

She selected several volumes from the shelves, dropping them onto the couch cushions by her feet, and took down too a nicotine-darkened stuffed toy pig; then she hopped down, sniffed the air sharply, and hurried back into the little kitchen—but the coffee was not burning.

A sudden hard knock at the door made her jump, and when she whirled toward the door she saw Kootie’s face peering in at her through the screened door-window; and then the boy opened the door and stepped in, followed by Johanna and Pete.

“You’re not on bar-time, Mom,” said Kootie, panting. “You jumped
after
I knocked on the door; and Dad jumped
after
I flicked cold hose-water on his neck.”

Pete’s graying hair was wet, and he nodded. “Not
much
after.”

Johanna was staring at Kootie without comprehension, so he told her, “Bar-time is when you react to things an instant
before
they actually happen, like you’re vibrating in the
now
notch and hanging over the sides a little. It’s … ‘sympathetically induced resonation,’ it means somebody’s paying psychic attention to you, watching you magically.” He looked at Pete and Angelica. “
I’ve
been on bar-time since I woke up. When Johanna found the beasties, I jumped a second before she yelled, and when we went back to the apartment to wash our hands just now, I reached for the phone an instant before it started ringing.”

Kootie led the three of them out of the kitchen into Pete’s long dim office.

“It was one of your clients on the phone,” Pete told Angelica, “Mrs. Perez. She says her grandparents’ ghosts are gone from the iron pots you put them in; the pots aren’t even magnetic anymore, she says. Oh, and I noticed that your voodoo whosis is gone from the cabinet by
our
front door—the little cement guy with cowrie shells for his eyes and mouth.”