Earthquake Weather (5 page)

Pete pushed the old woman and the mechanic out of the kitchen, into the crowded office room, and when he turned back to Kootie and Angelica he lifted the front of his untucked shirt to show the black Pachmayr grip of the .45 automatic tucked into his belt.

It was, Angelica knew, loaded with 230-grain hollow-point Eldorado Starfire rounds that she had dipped in an
omiero
of mint and oleander tea; and Pete had carefully etched
L.A. CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL
in tiny letters onto the muzzle ring of the stainless-steel slide.

“Take it, Angelica,” he said tensely. “I could hardly even pick it up this morning. My Houdini hands are on extra solid today.”

Angelica stepped forward and pulled the gun out of Pete’s pants, making sure the safety catch was up and engaged. She tucked it into her own jeans and pulled her blouse out to cover it.

Kootie nodded. “We’ll receive them courteously but carefully,” he said.

Through the open kitchen door, from the street, Angelica could now hear an approaching discordant rumble, like bad counterpoint tempo beaten out on a set of
bata
drums that the orishas would surely reject for being perilously tuned; and when she stepped outside, striding resolutely across the sunlit walk and onto the driveway, she saw a big, boxy red truck turn in from the street and then slowly, boomingly, labor up the gentle slope toward where she stood. Peripherally she noticed that Kootie was now standing at her left and Pete at her right, and she reached out and clasped their hands.

The red truck rocked and clattered to a halt a couple of yards in front of them. It was streaked and powdered with dust, but its red color shone through lividly; and she noticed that an aura like heat waves shimmered around it for a distance of about a foot, and that the leaves of the carob trees on the far side of the driveway looked gray where she viewed them through the aura.

The truck’s driver’s-side door clanked and squeaked open, and a rangy man of about Pete’s age stepped down to the pavement; his worn boots and jeans seemed only deceptively mundane to Angelica, and his lean, tanned face, behind a ragged mustache the color of tobacco and ashes, was tense with care.

“What
seeems
to be the problem?” he drawled, and there was at least some exhausted humor in his voice and his squinting brown eyes.

The passenger-side door was levered open now, and a pregnant woman in a wrinkled white linen sundress stepped down onto the driveway-side grass. She too looked exhausted, and her blond hair was pulled back, like Angelica’s black hair, into a hasty, utilitarian ponytail—but Angelica thought she was nevertheless the most radiantly beautiful woman she had ever seen.

“Any problem here,” said Pete levelly, “is one you’ve brought with you. Who are you?”

“Good point,” said the man with the mustache, nodding judiciously. “About us bringing it with us. Sorry—my name’s Archimedes Mavranos, and this lady is Diana Crane.” He looked past Angelica’s shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “And we sure do apologize to be interrupting your party.”

Angelica glanced behind her, and realized how odd the crowd in the parking lot must look—the kneeling old women giving thanks, the men and women appearing to pantomime swimming and goose-stepping and traffic-directing as they flexed various freshly pain-free limbs, and the six apparently naked men crowded into the Little Mermaid inflatable pool.

“We’re humbly looking,” Mavranos went on seriously, “for a man with a wound in his side that won’t quit bleeding.”

After a moment, Kootie let go of Angelica’s hand; he held up his blood-reddened palm, and then, as slowly as a surrendering man showing a gun to a policeman, lifted his shirttail to show the bloody bandage.

“A kid!” said Mavranos with an accusing glance toward Pete. He peered more closely at Kootie, then stepped forward. Angelica let her right hand brush the hem of her blouse over the .45, but the man had only knelt before Kootie and taken the boy’s left wrist in his gnarled brown hand. “You’ve Möbiused your watchband?” he said gently. “That won’t work anymore, son.
Now
when you do that you’re just insulating yourself from your own
self.
” He had been unbuckling the watch strap as he spoke, and now he tucked the watch into Kootie’s shirt pocket. “If you follow me. Oh, and the same with your belt, hey?
That
I’ll let
you
fix. Lord, boy,” he said, shaking his head as he lithely straightened up again, “both legs and your left hand! You must have been weak as a kitten all day.”

Kootie seemed embarrassed, as though he’d blundered into a girls’ rest room by mistake. The boy quickly unbuckled his belt, straightened out the twist, and re-buckled it; then he pointed at the truck and asked gruffly, “Why is your truck the color of blood?”

The pregnant woman by the truck closed her eyes, and Mavranos crossed his arms and nodded several times. “The hard way, of course. You take the low road and I’ll crawl in the goddamned dirt, right? That’s the spirit. Oh, that was the wrong
question,
boy!”

He turned and walked back to the still-open driver’s-side door, and for a moment Angelica hoped these two people, and whatever they might have brought with them in the truck, would now just go away; but Mavranos only leaned in to hook out a can of Coors beer, which, from the way it swung in his hand as he trudged back to where he had been standing, was already half-emptied.

He took a sip from it before speaking. “But since you ask. This lady and a friend painted it red on Ash Wednesday of 1990, in Las Vegas, to elude detection by the police—like the blood of the lamb over the doorposts in Egypt, right?—and ever since then the truck spon-
tane
-eously turns red every year during Holy Week. Ordinarily it’s blue.”

“This isn’t Holy Week,” ventured Pete. “This is New Year’s Day.”

“Oh, the error of it hadn’t eluded me, honest,” Mavranos said. He looked again at Kootie, and frowned. “You were a street beggar in L.A. a couple of years ago, weren’t you? With an old black guy and a dog? Didn’t I give you five bucks?”

Kootie’s eyes widened, and then narrowed in a slow, shy smile. “Yeah, you did. And it
was
a blue truck.”

“Sure,” Mavranos said. “I remember now I saw room for the crown on your head even then. I should have
figured
it would be you we’d find today.” After crouching to put his beer can down on the pavement, he straightened and spat in the palm of one hand and then struck it with his other fist; the spit flew toward the kitchen, and he looked up at the crazy old building for the first time.

He was staring at the sign over the door. “I
met
Leon,” he said softly; “though he had lost his
testículos
years before.”

On top of her anxious tension, Angelica was now embarrassed too. “It means ‘Testicles of the
Lion
,’ ” she said. “All
consultorios
have animal valor names—Courage of the Bull, Heart of the Leopard, things like that. It’s … a custom.”

Mavranos looked down at her, and his eyes were bright until he blinked and resumed his protective squint. “We’re in the choppy rapids of custom every which way you look, ma’am. Now, the random …
trajectory
of my spit has indicated your building. Will you give permission for my party to come inside?”

Party? Angelica was suddenly certain that there was a third person in the old red truck—a person,
the
person, central to all this—sick or injured or even dead; and suddenly she very strongly didn’t want any of these strangers inside the buildings of Solville. Apparently permission would have to be given for that to happen—and she opened her mouth to deny it—

But Kootie spoke first. “I am the master of this house,” the boy said. “And you have my permission to bring your party inside.”

Angelica wheeled on Kootie, and she could feel her face reddening.
“Kootie, what are you—”
Then she stopped, and just exhaled the rest of her breath in helpless frustration.

Under the tangled curls of his black hair, Kootie’s face looked leaner, older now; but the apologetic smile he gave her was warm with filial affection, and sad with a boy’s sadness.

Mavranos’s grin was flinty. “Just what you were about to say yourself, ma’am, I know,” he growled. “Oh well—now that the boy’s got the strength in his limbs back, maybe he could help me and this other gentleman with the carrying.” He picked up his beer can and drained it, then tossed it onto the grass. Perhaps to himself, he said, softly, “But why couldn’t the boy have asked me
whose truck it was
?”

Again Angelica opened her mouth to say something, but Mavranos waved her to silence. “Moot point and rhetorical question,” he said. “It always happens this way, I guess.”

“At least give me forty-nine cents!” Angelica said. If these people pay me and thus become clients of mine, she thought, if I’m following my
ita
in my dealings with them, we can be protected by the orishas; if there are any orishas left out there, if my
ita
still counts for anything, after whatever it is that has happened today.

Mavranos grinned sleepily and dug a handful of change out of his jeans pocket. “Look at that,” he said. “Exact.” He dropped the quarter and two dimes and four pennies into her shaky, outstretched palm. He looked past her at Kootie and Pete, and called, “You fellas want to give me a hand? Let me get the back of the truck open.”

He plodded back toward the truck, his hand rattling keys in the pocket of his old denim jacket, and Kootie and Pete exchanged a nervous glance and then stepped forward to follow him.

The likeness passed away, say, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender …

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

TROILUS:
Fear me not, my lord;

I will not be myself, nor have cognition

Of what I feel.

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

“In short,” said Sydney, “this is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one …”

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

W
HERE JANIS CORDELIA PLUMTREE
finally wound up was in a chair in the TV lounge.

She had visited people in hospitals where the lines on the linoleum floors
led
you somewhere—“Follow the yellow line to OB” or something—but the black lines in the gray floors of Rosecrans Medical Center just led around in a big dented loop, with frustrating gaps where hallways crossed. Maybe the point was that you were free to pick your own destination … the TV lounge, or the meds station, or your “room” with two unmade beds in it and no bath or shower and a door that couldn’t lock.

There were wire-reinforced windows in the halls and the lounge, but the views were only of fenced-in courtyards, shadowy in the late-afternoon sunlight and empty except for picnic tables and dome-topped swing-door trash cans; and you generally couldn’t get out there anyway.

The pictures on the walls—vapid reproductions of watercolor flowers—had rectangles of Plexiglas over them in the frames, rather than real breakable glass. She couldn’t remember how she knew this, she didn’t recall having touched one in the …
nine
days she’d been living here.

“I think he’s like you,” Dr. Armentrout went on. The rotund white-haired psychiatrist had dragged up a chair next to the one she’d collapsed into after finally stepping off the floor-line circuit and wobbling into the TV lounge. He had been talking to her for a minute or two now, but she was looking past him.

On the TV, hung behind a clear Plexiglas shield up above head-height on the wall beyond Armentrout, Humphrey Bogart was showing his teeth, talking mean and ruthless as he told the fat man, “We’ve got to have a fall guy.” There were no colors—all the figures, the Fat Man and Bogart and Joel Cairo and “the gunsel,” were in black-and-white, like a memory for someone else.

Plumtree shifted on the vinyl chair and tucked her denim skirt more tightly around her knees but didn’t take her eyes off the screen. Murder had been done, apparently, and a scapegoat would have to be …
turned over.

“What a flop,” she said; then added, absently, “Who’s like me?”

“This man Cochran, who’s being transferred here from Metro in Norwalk,” said Armentrout. “His wife was killed last Sunday, New Year’s Day, at dawn—dressed herself up in a bedsheet and tied ivy vines in her hair and ran out into traffic on the 280, up in San Mateo County.” Plumtree didn’t look at the doctor or speak, and after a few seconds he went on, “She was pregnant, and the fetus died too, do you suppose that’s important? Last week he flew her ashes back to her family estate, in France. He appears to have had a delusional episode there, and another when he got off the plane at LAX, in Los Angeles.”

“Rah rah rah,” said Plumtree.

“What happened on that Sunday morning?” he asked, as casually as if he hadn’t been asking her that question every day.

“This guy’s wife was run over by a bus,” Plumtree said impatiently, “according to you. Cockface.”

The doctor’s voice was tight: “What did you call me, Janis?”

“Him, not you. Wasn’t that what you said his name was?”

“Coch
ran
.”

The vinyl seat of Armentrout’s chair croaked as he shifted, and Plumtree grinned, still watching the movie.

“Cochran,” Armentrout repeated loudly. “Why do you say it was a bus? I didn’t even say she was hit by a vehicle. Why should it have been a bus?”

The TV screen went dark, and then flared back on again.

It was a Humphrey Bogart movie; apparently
The Maltese Falcon,
since Plumtree saw that Elisha Cook and Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet were in it too. She was surprised to see that it was in color, but quickly reminded herself that they were colorizing all those old movies now. She couldn’t remember how long she might have been sitting here watching it, and was startled when she glanced to the side and saw Dr. Armentrout sitting in a chair right next to her. She unfolded her legs and stretched them out, with the heels of her sneakers on the floor and the toes pointed upward.