Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  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.

  CHAPTER 22

  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

  WITH 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 some
how 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.

  But her will had prevailed—she had sold the wine, for profane cash, to a local importer who had a lifetime of old crimes to forget.

  A Hungarian emigrant called Agoston Haraszthy had arrived in America in that same year, 1840, and by 1848 had taken on the role of secret king of the American West in distant San Diego—the first of the New World kings—but Mary Ellen had already unfitted herself to be his destined queen, and his reign would now be unbalanced and obstructed.

  For sheer concealment she went through the rituals of conversion to Roman Catholicism, and then married a man who owned a tobacco plantation in Charles Town, Virginia. She poisoned him with arsenic, and shortly after that married the plantation overseer in order to sacramentally take the man’s fortuitous last name: Plaissance, which derived from the French plaisant:—a jester, a joker. It was a name that was virtually a motley mask in itself.

  She took her new husband back to New Orleans. Though ostensibly Catholic now, Mary Ellen bore little resemblance these days to the girl who had scampered through the halls of the Ursuline convent in muslin dresses and ribbon-tied sandals—she took up the bloody practice of real voodoo, under the tutelage of the infamous Marie Laveau, who got for Mary Ellen a high-paid position as cook for the household of a planter in nearby Bayou St. John.

  Mary Ellen was a sincerely ardent abolitionist, and she used her privileged position to make contacts with negro slaves throughout the New Orleans area; and she managed to spirit away such a number of them to freedom through “the Underground” that the authorities began looking for the light-skinned negro woman who always seemed to attend somehow at the escapes—and this slave-stealing woman was too-accurately described as tall and thin, with mismatched eyes.

  And so one night Mary Ellen had fled, leaving behind in her bed a bolster wrapped in her nightdress with a wig on it. Marie Laveau booked steamship passage for her to San Francisco, by way of Cape Horn.

  Mary Ellen arrived in San Francisco on April 7, 1852—but Agoston Haraszthy himself came to the city only a few months later to establish his kingdom in nearby Sonoma; and of course he had brought with him cuttings of the god’s New World wine, which by this time had already reached the Bay Area and was known, properly at last, as Zinfandel.

  The god would still have forgiven her, on some basis—but she fought him.

  She quickly got employment as a gourmet cook, serving Cajun pirogis and shrimp remoulade and exotic spicy jambalaya to the bankers and gold-dealers of San Francisco—and she made contact with escaped slaves and was able to find jobs for them in the households of affluent families; and then she used her beneficiaries as spies to gather valuable particulars of scandal … murders, illicit births, embezzlements, abortions. Soon she owned several laundries, but blackmail was her real business.

  “My life,” she had told Kootie ruefully this morning at the kitchen table, “was based on the very opposite of any divine pagadebiti.”

  In her voodoo procedures she didn’t hesitate to use the power of alcohol, and even of wine, but always in spitefully broken or vitiated forms. The founder of the mercantile firm F. W. Macondray & Company had erected a grapery, a greenhouse-chapel to the god’s holy vine, at the corner of Stockton and Washington—and so in 1866 Mary Ellen Pleasant, as she now called herself, bought the property and sacrilegiously converted it to the boardinghouse whose kitchen she and Kootie were now sitting in; and to the bankers and steamship owners who dined at her boardinghouse she served hot raspberry vinegar, and cowslip wine, and double-distilled elderberry brandies. When in 1892 she finally killed the man who had been her main benefactor in San Francisco, she first hobbled his ghost by serving him wine from which she had boiled off all the alcohol … and then after she had pushed him over a high spiral stair railing she hurried down to where his body lay on the parquet entry-hall floor and pulled the hot brains out of his split skull, so that the ghost would be sure to dissipate in confused fragments.

  “A su
rer trick than those ashtrays with Madam, I’m Adam or some such nonsense written around them,” Mammy Pleasant had told Kootie this morning.

  “I bet,” Kootie had said hoarsely.

  “But at the turn of the century the god caught up with me,” she had said, taking Kootie’s empty plate to the sink, “and took everything away—my great house on Octavia Street, my servants, my money—until at the last I was a plain homeless charity case, shambling around the Fillmore district like … like a bolster with an old wig on it, in a nightdress. I had only one companion left by then, a negro giant who was actually my captor and guard, known to people as Bacus—” She spelled it out for Kootie. “—because people didn’t ever see it spelled right, which would have been B-A-C-C-H-U-S. He—it—was a sort of idiot fragment of the god’s attention. And finally, on January eleventh of 1904, in the spare room of a mere Good Samaritan acquaintance, I died.”

  Kootie looked past her. He thought the strings of garlic and dried red peppers hung in the high corner of the ceiling had lost some of their color in the last few minutes, even become a bit transparent, but he wished forlornly that he could just forget his life and become one of the boarders here.

  The old woman went on softly, perhaps talking to herself: “For a while after that I just drifted in the gray daguerreotype-plate ghost-world version of the city, lost, mostly on the beaches by Sutra’s Cliff House and Point Lobos and Land’s End. It was a time of cleansing exile for me, like Ariadne abandoned on Naxos by her false human lover Theseus. At last, three Easters and three days after I died, the god mercifully did come back for my ghost, and he knocked down Yerba Buena when he came.”

  She looked up at Kootie, and her mismatched eyes were again sharp. “For me,” she said, “January eleventh is the open door of the revolving year, and on that day I was able to call out to you people, to try to tell you all what you had to do. And I was interceding for you all with the god—he broke your two friends out of the madhouse on that night, and allowed the king’s ghost to be called and drive them right to where you were, where his body was. You had every species of help.”