Earthquake Weather (65 page)

A
NGELICA WANTED TO LOOK
at Plumtree’s bashed ribs and possibly sprained hand, but when Cochran and Mavranos had helped Plumtree to her feet and walked her into the house, she shook them off.

“Leave me be,” she said irritably, leaning over the kitchen sink while blood dripped from her nose. “It’s just a spell of the spasmodics.” She grabbed a dishtowel and pressed it to her face. “Get Teresa to fetch me a cup of Balm Tea,” she said through the towel, “with some gin in it.” Then she blinked around at the low-ceilinged white kitchen she was standing in, with its blocky white refrigerator and the gleaming black box of the microwave oven. “I mean, a glass of Z-Zinfandel,” she amended querulously. “And my bark-soled penance shoes.”

“No,” said Cochran sharply, “not yet. Sit down, Mrs. Pleasant. Have some coffee. Arky, get her a cup of coffee. Listen, we’ve learned some things about Crane’s resurrection.”

He felt goose bumps tickle against the sleeves of his shirt then, for when the woman looked at him, her forehead and high cheekbones seemed for a moment to be patrician with age, and momentarily her blond hair appeared white in the shine of the overhead fluorescent lights; then it was Plumtree’s face, with both eyes the same shade of blue, though the eyelids were still full and vaguely Asian. She sat down in one of the kitchen chairs stiffly, dabbing at her nose with the bloody towel. Her nose wasn’t bleeding anymore, and the Mammy Pleasant personality didn’t appear to feel any pains in her ribs.

Raindrops began tapping against the window over the sink.

“I tried to tell you people everything,” said Mammy Pleasant’s cautious voice, “right from the first, well in time for you to have done it correctly on St. Sulpice’s Day. I was supposed to be your intercessor—I told you then that I would have to indwell one of you, but you thought I just wanted a body to take the fresh air in.”

“We’re listening now,” said Angelica. “And you’ve got the body now.”

“I’ll tell you nothing,
now
,” said Pleasant’s voice. “Your Chinaman holiday isn’t until the day after tomorrow. Ask me about it then, respectfully, and I might tell you what to do, and I might not. At any rate I can have wine for one more day, and my shoes.”

Kootie had started toward the hall, but Cochran said, “Don’t get the shoes, Kootie. They apparently work as a damper to keep her personality from being conspicuous, from being a beacon to this house—maybe she seems to be a
tree,
to psychic radar, when she’s wearing ’em—but I think they’re also a damper on her intelligence. I think they’re like dope.”

“Now I will
assuredly
tell you nothing.”

“But you’ve said that the god’s purpose is your purpose too,” said Angelica in a tone of sympathetic concern. She knelt beside Plumtree. “And that the god’s purpose is to bring Crane back, as king. We need to know what to do.” Cochran guessed that Angelica was already resolved to ditch this whole enterprise, and every person that resided in the Plumtree head, and simply wanted to find out as much as possible before fleeing; but he had to admit that she projected sincerity. Doctors are trained to do that, he thought.

“The god’s
purpose,
” said Pleasant, stubbornly shaking Plumtree’s tangled blond hair. “You’re to take two old women to the sea, and throw them in, because the god’s
purpose
doesn’t include poor frightened old ghosts trying to sleep in some frail shelter out of the rain.” She turned to Angelica, blinking rapidly. “What if we
did
fight him? Who
won
?”

Two old women? thought Cochran. She mentioned another old woman right at the first, on the Solville TV—Angelica said it sounded like a sewing circle. Who’s the other one? Plumtree’s phantom mother?

“Could I have insisted?” the old woman went on. Plumtree’s eyes were blinking rapidly. “I tried to insist! Through your, your ‘boob tube’! You
could
have accomplished it then, on St. Sulpice’s Day, if you had listened to me.”

“And if I hadn’t run away,” said Kootie

“We were well down the wrong track already, by that morning,” Mavranos told the boy gruffly. “Going to the wrong shore, with the wrong wine …” To Plumtree’s sunburned face, he said, “You could have told us more. We might not have listened, but …”

“I needed to be in a body! I told you that much! How could I
think,
without a
brain
?” Plumtree’s eyes were blinking rapidly.

Mavranos’s nostrils were flared and the corners of his mouth were drawn down. “You wanted a body to take the fresh air in,” he said flatly.

Rain was drumming now against the window over the sink, and Cochran could see the bobbing stems of Nina’s window-box basil outside. The back door was open, and the cold draft smelled of wet clay.

“I wanted some time to
rest
,” Mammy Pleasant said in a near-whisper, perhaps agreeing with him. “This little time, these little days sitting with the orchids in the greenhouse, and cooking for people again! I don’t see how anybody can describe
total oblivion
as
rest
—you couldn’t even call it losing yourself, because for losing to go on there has to be a loser, and there wouldn’t be even that. Oh, believe me, the god’s purpose has only been delayed.”

“And made … costlier,” said Mavranos, very quietly. His brown hands were clenched in fists against his thighs.

“Let me tell you about Omar Salvoy’s purpose,” Cochran said, leaning back against the refrigerator. “According to Plumtree’s mom, he wants to get into the right male body and become this Fisher King, and then get Plumtree pregnant—specifically, get
Valorie
pregnant. Valorie is evidently the core child inside Plumtree, and she’s apparently dead. Salvoy believes that if he can father a child by a dead woman—well, not a whole child; I gather it would be just a sort of deformed, unconnected head—that partial child will be a living, obligated piece of Dionysus.”

“Jesus!” exclaimed Angelica, looking away from Plumtree to gape up at him.

Kootie was hugging himself, grasping his elbows; and Cochran thought that this revelation had somehow stirred the boy’s memories of whatever devastating thing it was that he had done twelve days ago, after he had run away from the motel on Lombard Street before dawn.

For several seconds no one spoke.

Plumtree’s head was bowed. “Yes,” she whispered finally, “if he was the king, he could force that. If he had the body with the wounded side, and if he made a mother of Death, he could stand
in loco parentis
to the god. Other kings have sometimes achieved degrees of domination over the god, in other ways.”

“
Loco
parentis is right,” said Mavranos hollowly.

Plumtree’s head snapped back, throwing her blond locks back from her forehead. “The god, in that form,” she said, “and that king, would have uses for a couple of old ghost ladies.” Her face was impassive, but tears spilled down her cheeks. “Thank you, Scant Cochran, for making me understand that the oblivion in the sea is one of the god’s mercies. I do thank him for the offered gift of ceasing to exist. And I’m grateful, too, that it must be the last of his gifts to me.”

Cochran opened his mouth to speak, but Mammy Pleasant rapped Plumtree’s knuckles on the kitchen table. “I will speak, now, and you all will listen,” she said. “When your king’s castrated father was king, he ruled in Las Vegas. And your king ruled and may rule again in the place that rhymes with Arcadia. But there was a king who cultivated the miraculous Zinfandel vine in San Diego until 1852, and who then castled to Sonoma, north of San Francisco, where he grew the vines in the Valley of the Moon, between Sonoma Mountain and Bismark Knob. The god originally intended me to be queen to this king, but I had irretrievably rebelled against the god a dozen years earlier.”

“This was … Harass-thee,” said Kootie.

“Haraszthy,” said Plumtree, subtly correcting the boy’s pronunciation. “Agoston Haraszthy, who took the title of ‘Count’ for the grandeur in it. In 1855 he was made assayer and melter and refiner of gold at the United States Mint at Mission Street, south of Market; and the furnaces burned all day and all night, and after he quit, the roofs of the surrounding houses were all deeply stained with misted gold.” The reminiscent smile on Plumtree’s face somehow implied lines and creases that weren’t actually there. “That was a kingly thing, if you like! But, like most of the men who attain the throne, he refused to submit to real death in the winter. And so in the thirteenth year of his reign, 1861, the worst winter floods in the history of California devastated Haraszthy’s precious grapevines; and in 1863, the surviving vines withered in the worst drought in twenty-five years. I was happy to help in undermining this king’s power, and in 1868 I bought the Washington Street property that had housed the original greenhouse-shrine devoted to the Zinfandel in California, and I tore out the sacred old vines and converted the place to a boardinghouse.”

She stared curiously around at the kitchen, as if to fix the details of it in her memory. “After that sacrilege,” she went on, “Haraszthy was getting no spiritual power from the god at all, no psychic subsidy, and so he just abandoned his ordained throne and the American West altogether, and he fled south all the way to Nicaragua—to distill
rum,
from unsanctified
sugarcanes
!” She laughed gently and shook her head. “He was hiding from Dionysus, who was without a king now, and therefore not as close to human affairs. I decided to put them both out of my picture—and so on the night of June 24th of the next year, on St. John’s Eve, I celebrated the very first voodoo ceremony to be held in the American West, and in the woods out along the San Jose Road my people danced and drummed and drank rum and worshipped Damballa the Great Serpent, and I conveyed my prayers to him. And twelve days later, down in Nicaragua, the Dionysus who was no longer very human found his faithless king—Haraszthy was eaten by an alligator, which was Sebek-Re, a very crude, early Egyptian personification of the fertility-and-death god.”

Cochran looked away from the ophidian eyes and the somehow distinctly Egyptian-seeming smile, and saw that his companions too were avoiding looking into Plumtree’s face. He thought of the broken skeleton out in the greenhouse in the rain, and he wished someone would close the back door.

“I did not know, at first,” Mammy Pleasant’s voice went on carefully, “that the kinghood had rebounded like a snapped rope when Haraszthy fled this continent in 1868. Dionysus,” she said, with a look that Cochran could feel on the skin of his face, “places great stock in names, in clues and similarities in names; and a weapons manufacturer back East who was known as ‘the rifle king,’ and who, among other fortuitous resemblances, had the middle name ‘Fisher,’ became the unintended and unknowing and unsanctified focus of the kinghood. A … measurable westward deflection! … of my magics, made me aware of the obstruction of him, and in 1880 I held another voodoo ceremony—this time in the basement of my grand house on Octavia Street. Again my people drummed and danced to the Great Serpent, and in the December of that year this poor misplaced king-apparent died. He had a middle-aged son, and in the following March the son died too, of consumption, leaving behind a childless forty-one-year-old widow. They had had one child, a daughter, who had perished of the marasmus back in ’66 at the age of a month-and-a-half.”

“Is she the … other old-woman ghost?” asked Cochran.

Plumtree’s head nodded. “And she’s a rebel, like me, now. She wasn’t always—right after her husband died, she consulted a spiritualist, who told her that she was obligated to the god for the attentions he had so generously paid to her family, and that in return she must use her inherited fortune to build an infinite chapel: a gateway for straying ghosts to leave this world through, and go on to the next. And she did, only a couple of years after her precious husband had died. She set about building an enormous house designed to attract ghosts, and then not let them get out; construction of it never stopped for nigh forty years, there was hammering and sawing day and night, and new doors and halls every day—doors and stairways that led nowhere, windows in the floors, faucets way up where no one could reach—and about the only way the ghosts could get out was to be unmade and sent off to the god through one of the fireplaces. She had forty-seven fireplaces there, before she died.”

“I thought hammering repelled ghosts,” said Cochran.

“No,” snapped Angelica, “banging, hammering sounds, the racket disorients ’em. It jolts them out of the groove, resets their controls back to zero—cashes out bets they’d have wanted to let ride.” She looked at Pete. “Of course we know what this crazy house is.”

“And who the old lady was,” Pete Sullivan agreed. “It’s the Winchester House, a few miles down the 280 from here.”

“Winchester,” said Pleasant’s voice out of Plumtree’s mouth. “Yes. And like me she was chosen to be a caretaker and communicant of the god’s
pagadebiti
wine—the consecrated Zinfandel. But one night in 1899, even while I was being evicted from my own overthrown house and taken into custody by the idiot god-fragment known as Bacus, Winchester found a black handprint on the wall of her chapel, in the wine cellar, and she knew that she was being called upon to give over to the god her own husband’s ghost … and she couldn’t bring herself to obey
that,
to forget
him.
And, even while knowing that she’d be punished, she rebelled: she
walled up the wine cellar.
When the god came to take charge of my wandering ghost three days after Easter in 1906, he struck her too,
en passant,
with the earthquake of his arrival—the top floors of her house fell onto her bedroom, and she was trapped in there for hours. But she didn’t repent her rebellion—after her servants freed her, she boarded up that whole wing of the house; and spent six months living on water, aboard a houseboat called
The Ark,
in the south bay here by the Dumbarton Bridge.”

“And the scrap lumber,” said Pete, “from the collapsed upper floors, was used to build a maternity hospital in Long Beach in the 1920s; probably because of the ghost-confusion influences in it.” He looked at Cochran. “That hospital eventually became our apartment building—Solville.”