Earthquake Weather (12 page)

“What good news,” she said hollowly.

“Whatever you did could be the
cause
of everything that’s been different since New Year’s Day—I thought you were just delusionally
reacting,
the way Mr. Cochran almost certainly is.” He held up one finger as though to count off points of an argument. “Now, you couldn’t have got through all of Crane’s defenses, and abducted his very
child,
as you say you did, without powerful sorcerous help; you’d need virtually another
king,
in fact. Who could that be?”

“You got me.”

“I thought you said you’d be honest with me here. We can schedule another ECT
tomorrow
.”

“I—I’m being honest. I was alone. I don’t
know
whose
idea
the whole thing was.”

“One of you might have been acting on someone’s orders, though, right? On someone’s careful instructions.” He was sitting on the desk now, drumming his fingers excitedly on the emptied velvet box. “There was a boy around, a couple of years ago, living in Long Beach somewhere.
He
was a sort of proto-king, as I recall.” Armentrout wished he had paid more attention to these events at the time—but they had been other people’s wars in the magical landscape, and he had been content to just go on eating pieces of his patients’ souls on the sidelines. “His name was something goofy—Boogie-Woogie Bananas, or something like that.
He
could probably kill a king, or bring one back to life, even, if he wanted to. If he’s kept to the disciplines. Somebody, your man Crane, probably, brought the gangster Bugsy Siegel back to life, briefly, in 1990. You’ve seen the Warren Beatty movie,
Bugsy
? Siegel was this particular sort of supernatural king, during the 1940s. Yes, this kid would be fifteen or so now—he could be the one that sent you to kill Crane. Does a name like Boogie-Woogie Bananas ring any bells?”

Plumtree visibly tried to come up with a funny remark, but gave up and just shook her head wearily. “No.”

“His party had a lawyer! Were you approached by the lawyer? He had a pretentious name, something
Strube,
like J. Submersible Strube the third.”

“
I
never heard of
any
of these people.” Plumtree was pale, and perspiration misted her forehead. “But
one
of us went to a lot of trouble to kill Crane. Obviously.”

Armentrout pursed his lips. “Did you say anything to him, to Crane?”

“Sunday before last? Yeah. I wasn’t going to hurt his kid, this little boy who couldn’t have been five years old yet—God knows how I lured him out of the house, but I had the kid down on his back in this grassy meadow above the beach, with the spear points on his little neck—I suppose Flibbertigibbet
would
have killed the kid!—and when I found myself standing there after losing some time, I looked at the kid’s
father
standing there, Crane, and I just said, almost crying to see what a horrible thing I was in the middle of, I said, ‘There’s nothing in this flop for me.’ ” There were tears in Plumtree’s eyes right now, and from the angry way she cuffed them away Armentrout was sure that she was Cody at the moment. “And,” she went on hoarsely, “Crane said, ‘Then pass.’ He must have been scared, but he was talking gently, you know?—not like he was mad. ‘Let it pass by us,’ he said.”

“And what did you say?”

“
I
lost
time
then. When
I
could see what was going on again, Crane was lying there dead, with the spear in his throat, sticking up through his Solomon beard like a fishing pole, and the kid was gone.” Plumtree blinked around at the desks and the couch and the foliage-screened window. “Why did Janis leave, just now? You made her peel off, didn’t you?” Her expression became blank, and then she was frowning again. “And she’s crying in her bus seat! What did you do to her?”

Armentrout held up the card. “I just showed her this.”

But Plumtree looked away from it. And when she spoke, it was in such a level voice that Armentrout wondered if she’d shifted again: “Strip poker, we’re playing here?” She looked past the card, focusing into his eyes, and Armentrout saw that one of her pupils was a tiny pinprick, as was usual with her, but the other was dilated in the muted office light. The mismatched eyes, along with the downward-curling androgynous smile she now gave him, made him think of the rock star David Bowie. “I can be the one that wins here, you know,” she said. “I can rake in
your
investment, or at least toss it out into the crowd. Strip poker. How many …
garments
have
you
got?”

Armentrout was annoyed, and a little intrigued, to realize that he was frightened. “Are you still Cody?” he asked.

“Largely.” Plumtree struggled up off of the couch to her feet, though the effort made drops of sweat roll down from her hairline, and she stumbled forward and half fell onto the desk. She was certainly still Cody, who had taken the succinylcholine and the electroconvulsive therapy at dawn this morning. Armentrout hastily slid the delicate old tarot cards away from her.

She shook out a Gudang Garam cigarette and lit it.

“This phone is your mask, right?” she gasped through a mouthful of spicy smoke, grabbing the telephone receiver and holding it up. “Your nest of masks? What’s your name?” Armentrout didn’t answer, but she read it off the name plaque on his desk. “Hello?” she said into the telephone. “Could I speak to Richard Paul Armentrout’s mom, please?”

Armentrout was rocked by the counter-attack—she was trying to get a handle on his
own
soul!
That
handle! What personality in her was it that knew how to do this?—but he was confident that Long John Beach was psychotically diffractive enough to deflect this, and many more like it. “I t-took a vial of your blood,” Armentrout said quickly, “when you were first brought in here, because I thought I might put you on lithium carbonate, and we have to do a lot of blood testing to get the dosage right for that. I never did give you lithium, but I’ve still got the vial of your blood.” He was breathing rapidly, almost panting.

“That’s a big ace,” Plumtree allowed, “but you’ve lost one garment now, and I’ve only lost my … oh, call her one silly hat.”

Armentrout looked down at the cards under his hands, and his pelvis went quiveringly cold, followed a moment later by a bubbly tingling in his ribs, for he had no time here to squint cautiously sidelong at the distressing things, and was looking at them squarely. He snatched up the Wheel of Fortune card, the miniature Renaissance-style painting of four men belted to a vertical wheel—
Regno,
Latin for “I reign,” read the word-ribbon attached to the mouth of the man on top; the ones to either side trailed ribbons that read
Regnabo
and
Regnavi,
“I shall reign” and “I reigned”—and he shoved the card into Plumtree’s face as he took a cheek-denting drag on his cigarette.

The bulb in the desk lamp popped, and shards of cellophane-thin broken glass clinked faintly on the desk surface; the room was suddenly dimmer, lit now only by the afternoon sunlight streaking in golden beams through the green schefflera leaves outside the window.

Again Armentrout had got nothing but a lungful of astringent clove smoke. And he wasn’t facing Cody anymore. Plumtree had twitched away the card-concussed, vulnerable personality before he could draw it into the barrel of his flavored cigarette, had swept the stunned Cody back to one of the metaphorical bus seats or dwarf-cottage bunks, and rotated a fresh one onstage.

“Hello?” said Plumtree into the telephone again. “I’m calling on behalf of Richard Paul Armentrout—he says he owes
somebody
there a tre-
men
-dous apology.” The coal on her cigarette glowed in the dimness like the bad red light that draws loose souls in the underworld in the Tibetan
Bardo Thodol.

Armentrout dropped the card and fumbled in his coat pocket for the stun gun. I think I’ve got to put an end to this, he thought; punch her right out of this fight with 250,000 volts and try again tomorrow, after another ECT session in which I’ll give her a full 500 joules of intracranial juice. If she really can summon, from across the hundreds of miles of mountain and desert wilderness, my m—or
any
of my potent old guilt ghosts, and lead them all the way in past Long John Beach’s masks
to
me, they could attach, and collapse my distended life line,
kill
me. They’re all still out there, God knows—I’ve never had any desire for the Pagadebiti Zinfandel,
confiteor Dionyso.

Nah,
he thought savagely, that one-armed old man is a better sort of Kevlar armor than to give way under just two shots—and I
will have
this woman. The damp skin of his palm could still feel her chin, and the hot slope of her throat.
Tell me when I’m getting warmer, Doctor.

He snatched up one of the tarot cards at random with one hand and the lighter with the other, and he spun the flint wheel with the card blocking his view of the upspringing flame; the card’s illuminated face was toward her, while he saw only the backlit rectangle of the frayed edge. Gaggingly, and fruitlessly, he again sucked at the limp cigarette—sparks were falling off of it onto the desk like tiny shooting stars.

“Let me talk to
your
m-mom,” he wheezed, knowing that multiples generally included, among their menagerie, internalized duplicates of their own abusive parents. Surely Plumtree’s distorted version of her mother wouldn’t be able to maintain this fight!

Plumtree’s body jackknifed forward off the desk and tumbled to the carpet. “Behold now,” she gasped in a reedy voice, “I have daughters which have not known man.” Armentrout recognized the sentence—it was from Genesis, when Lot offered the mob his own daughters rather than surrender the angels who had come to his house. “Name the one you want, Omar,” Plumtree’s strained voice went on, clearly not quoting now, “and I’ll throw her to you! Just don’t take
me
again!”

Armentrout was confident that he could consume
this
one, this cowardly, Bible-quoting creature—but this was only Plumtree’s approximation of her mother, not a real personality; so he said, “Give me … Tiffany.”

“Tiffany,” said the woman on the floor.

And when Plumtree got back up on her feet and leaned on the desk with one hand while she pushed her tangled blond hair back from her sweaty forehead with the other, she was smiling at him. “Doctor!” she said. “What bloody hands you have!”

Armentrout glanced down—he had cut his hand on a piece of the broken light bulb in grabbing for the lighter, and blood had run down his wrist and blotted into his white cuff.

“With you, Miss Plumtree,” he panted, managing to smile, “strip poker is something more like flag football.” I can have sex with her now, he thought excitedly. Janis snatched Tiffany away from me before, but Janis is off crying in her dwarf bunk now; and I routed Cody too, and whoever that third one was; and the mother personality has outright
given
Tiffany to me!

“Strip poker?” she exclaimed. “Ooh—” She began unbuttoning her blouse. “I’ll raise you!”

The clove cigarette was coming to pieces in Amentrout’s mouth, and he pulled it off his lip and tossed it into the ashtray and spat out shreds of bitterly perfumy tobacco. He wouldn’t be able to consume any of her personalities this session, it looked like, but he could at least relieve the aching terror-pressure in his groin.

“Sweeten the pot,” he agreed, fumbling under his chin to unknot his necktie.

The close air of the office smelled of clove smoke and overheated flesh, and the skin of his hands and face tingled like the surface of a fully charged capacitor. This psychic battle had left him swollen with excitement, and he knew that the consummation of their contest wouldn’t last long.

She reached out and tugged his cut hand away from his collar, and again she pulled his palm down across her wet forehead and nose and lips—her eyes were closed, so he couldn’t see whether her pupils were matched in size or not—

And then she sucked his cut finger into her mouth and
bit
it, and in the same instant with her injured hand she grabbed the bulging crotch of his pants and
squeezed.

Armentrout exhaled sharply, and the heel of one of his shoes knocked three times fast against the side of the desk as his free hand clenched into a fist.

“Gotcha, Doctor,” said a man’s voice flatly from Plumtree’s mouth. “I got the taste of your blood now, and the smell of your jizz. In voodoo terms, that constitutes having your ID package.”

Plumtree had stepped lithely away from the desk, and now stared down at Armentrout with evident amused disgust as she wiped her hands on the flanks of her jeans.

When Armentrout could speak without gasping, he said, “I suppose you’re … the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet, is that right?”

Plumtree frowned. “That’s what I’ve told the girls to call me. You were just talking to their mom, weren’t you? Playing ‘Follow the Queen.’ ”

“Your name’s Omar,” Armentrout said. “What’s your last name?” He was still sitting on the desk, but he straightened his white coat and frowned professionally. “I can compel you to tell me,” he added. “With ECT and scopolamine, just for example.”

“I reckon you could. But I ain’t scared of a little white-haired fag like you anyway. My name’s Omar Salvoy.” Plumtree’s pupils were both wide now. She picked up the telephone receiver, then smiled and held it out toward the doctor.

From the earpiece a faint voice could be heard saying,
“Let me up, Richie darling! Pull the plug!”

With a hoarse whimper, Armentrout grabbed the receiver and slammed it into its cradle, and then he opened the second velvet box—but Plumtree had stepped around the desk and crouched by the chair.

“
You
got a
gun
in the box there, haven’t you?” said the Salvoy personality jovially while Plumtree’s hand fumbled under the desk. “Think it through, old son. You kill us and you’ve got some fierce ghosts on your ass—we got your
number
now, no mask is gonna protect you from us. Call your momma back and ask
her
if I ain’t telling you the truth.”