Tim Powers - Last Call (19 page)

The bar was nearly empty, though a wide oval of parquet in the middle of the floor and a mirrored disco ball turning unilluminated under the ceiling implied times of festivity here in the past. In spite of the Victorian flourishes on the dark wood pillars of the bar and the sporty prints framed on the walls and the heavy use of tartan, the band of mirror under the ceiling and the vertical mirrors that divided the walls every few yards made the walls look like free standing panels, subject to disassembly at any moment. A wide-screen television was mounted on the wall, showing some news program in black and white with no sound.

"What did you buy, in that last hand?" Crane asked.

"Luck," said Ozzie. "It's not too hard to speed-read the hands, get the gist of them, as they go by, like identifying creatures in an agitated tide pool—but if you're gonna reach in and
grab
one, you've gotta be sure you know exactly what it is. I had to wait for a hand that was—that would further us. That we could—that was acceptable. And it's hard to calculate seven cards and all their interactions when you've got a tableful of gamblers joggling your elbow." He rubbed his face with gnarled, spotty hands. "Took a long time for a—an acceptable hand to show up."

Mavranos slouched low in the seat and peered around at the decor with an air of disapproval. " 'Where fishmen lounge at noon,' " he said sarcastically, " 'where the walls/ Of Magnus Martyr hold/ Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.' "

"More Eliot?" asked Crane.

Mavranos nodded. He waved at the nearest cocktail waitress and then turned to Ozzie. "So how's the weather?"

The old man shook his head. "Stormy. A lot of Spades, which is the modern version of the Swords suit in the old Tarot deck. Just about any Spade is bad news, and the Nine's the worst—I saw it a lot. A double Ballantine scotch on the rocks," he added to the cocktail waitress, who was now standing beside the table with her pad ready.

Coke, thought Crane. Soda water—maybe with bitters. Goddammit. V-eight. Seven-Up.

"Hi, darlin'," said Mavranos. " You've got to excuse our friend here—he doesn't
like
pretty girls. I'll have a Coors."

"Maybe he doesn't think I'm pretty," said the waitress.

Crane blinked up at her. She was slim, with dark hair and brown eyes, and she was smiling. "I think you're pretty," he said. "I'll have a soda water with a shake of Angostura."

"There's conviction for you," said Mavranos, grinning behind his unkempt mustache. "Passion."

"He didn't sound like he meant it," agreed the waitress.

"Jesus," said Crane, still distracted by sobriety and Ozzie's talk of bad weather, "you're half my age. Honest, ten years ago you'd have had to beat me off with a stick."

The waitress's eyes were wide. "Beat you off?"

"With a
stick
?" put in Mavranos.

"God," Crane said. "I meant—" But the waitress had walked away.

Ozzie didn't seem to have heard anything after he'd ordered his scotch. "The Hearts suit—that used to be Cups—seems to be allied with Spades, and that's bad. Hearts is supposed to be about family and domestic stuff, marriage and having children, but now it's in the service of—of ruin. The King and Queen of Hearts were showing up interchangeably in the same hands as the worst Spades." He looked at Crane. "Were you playing when the smoke shifted?"

"Yeah."

"You had the Jack of Hearts and the Joker in your hand, I'll bet."

Even though he had decided he believed all this, it made Crane uncomfortable to see evidence for it. "Yeah, I did."

"Those were your cards even in the old days, I remember—the one-eyed Jack and the Fool."

The drinks arrived then, and Ozzie paid the waitress. She left quickly.

Crane stared after her. It bothered him to realize that she was, in fact, pretty, for she held no more attraction for him than did the pattern in the rug. He could imagine her naked, but he couldn't imagine making love to her.

"So," said Mavranos after taking a deep sip of his Coors, "what does all this mean to us?"

Ozzie frowned at him. "Well … the Jack of Hearts is in exile, and the Hearts kingdom has sold out to the Swords; if the Jack's going back, he better do it disguised. And every water card I saw was bracketed by Hearts, meaning the water is tamed by the King and Queen. Since we're headed for Las Vegas, that means we should be leery of tamed water, which sounds to me like Lake Mead."

"Fear death by water," Crane said, grinning vaguely at Mavranos.

"And the," Ozzie went on, "the
balance
is way out of kilter, so your cancer cure looks a little less unlikely, Archimedes. It's like the ball's bouncing around crazy in the Roulette wheel, and it might not even fall into a slot but fly right out onto the floor. Anything's possible right now."

The old man turned to Crane. "
Your
situation is
completely
crazy. I told you the King and Queen of Hearts were acting as though they were the same person? As far as I can deduce, that's the person that's after you, and it's your parent, and is male and female at the same time."

"Ahoy," commented Mavranos. "A her
maph
rodeet."

"My real, biological father … or even my mother … might still be alive," Crane said thoughtfully.

"This almost certainly
is
your biological father," Ozzie said irritably. "The bad King. He must not have recognized you at that damned game; he wouldn't have bothered to become your parent through the cards if he'd known he already was, genetically."

Crane's mouth was open. "How … no, how could Ricky Leroy have been my
father?
He was remembering the older man who had taken him fishing on Lake Mead so many times when he was four and five years old.

"It's a new body," said Mavranos.

"Right," Ozzie agreed. "He can
do
that, don't you listen? And maybe he's had a sex change operation since you saw him."

"Or maybe," Crane said, "he's got both male and female bodies he works out of."

Ozzie frowned. "Yes, of course. I should have thought of that—I hope I'm not too old for this." He sipped his scotch. "And I saw a whole lot of Nines and Tens of Diamonds together, and they mean, in effect,
action now
."

"I'm ready to go," Mavranos said.

Ozzie looked at Mavranos's cigarette—the smoke was rising more or less straight up—and then he held his glass up and stared at it. He hiked around on the seat to look at the television screen, which was now in color. "Don't you guys want lunch?"

"I could do with something," said Crane.

"I think the fortune-telling window has gone by," said Ozzie. "I'm gonna take this drink and go back to that table and kick some ass, now that they all think I'm the poster boy for Alzheimer's disease."

Crane and Mavranos walked around to the little delicatessen in the far corner of the hangar-size room and had roast beef sandwiches while Ozzie went back down to the playing floor.

At one point Crane got up and walked around the perimeter to the men's room. When he came out, one of the pay telephones in front of him was ringing, and he impulsively picked it up.

"Hello?"

There was no answer, but suddenly his heart was beating faster, and he felt dizzy. "Susan …?"

He heard only a click, and after a while the dial tone, but when he finally hung up, he had to admit that, his experience with the cocktail waitress notwithstanding, his sexual responses were working fine.

When Ozzie finally reappeared, taking the steps up from the playing floor slowly and bracing himself on his aluminum cane, he had made back what he'd lost earlier and four hundred dollars besides.

"You guys ready to go?" he asked.

"Truck awaits," said Mavranos, standing up and finishing his beer. "Where to?"

"Some store, like a Target or a K Mart, for supplies," said Ozzie. "And then …" He looked around blankly. "On to Las Vegas."

The air was suddenly dry, and as he got up, Crane thought he heard the pay telephone ringing again, over the constant rattling of the chips

"Let's drive fast," he said.

… if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth …

—Matthew 24:26

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers …

—T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land

For good ye are and bad, and like to coins,
Some true, some light, but every one of you
Stamp'd with the image of the King …

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
Idylls Of The King

Mistigris.
—Poker with the joker added.

—
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 11th ed., 1911

Southeast of the Sierra Nevada range, the Mojave Desert stretches across more than a hundred miles of vast, bleak wilderness before finally rising into the rugged peaks that corrugate California's easternmost edge, peaks with names like Devils Playground and the Old Woman Mountains. The desert is bordered in the south by the San Bernardino Mountains, beyond which lie the Coachella and Imperial valleys, broad quilts whose different-colored squares are fields of carrots and lettuce and cantaloupe and date palms. The water for their irrigation travels west in canals that cut horizon-spanning lines of silver through the Sonora Desert from the Colorado River, tamed now by the Hoover and Davis and Parker dams.

But the river can still be rebellious—in 1905 it flooded and broke through the man-made headgates near Yuma, cutting itself a new channel through the farmlands and towns all the way out to a low plain of salt-frosted desert that had been known as the Salton Pan. The Southern Pacific Railroad managed after two years to block the new flow and force the river back into its original channel—but the Salton Pan had become, and remains still, the Salton Sea, a thirty-five-mile body of water that grows so increasingly salty as its water evaporates that red tides frequently stain the betrayed water like blood, and water-skiers have to avoid sargassos of dead, floating corbina fish.

The river has been harnessed to make the Coachella and Imperial valleys bloom, but the Salton Sea, desolate with wind and sand and salt, sits between them like the patient eye of the wasteland.

In Laughlin, Nevada, fifty miles south of Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, a stiff wind from the jagged Dead Mountains was raising whitecaps on the high, sun-glittering water.

A man in a tuxedo stood on the ferry pier and pulled handfuls of brightly colored casino chips from his pockets and flung them out over the choppy water. Tourists asked him what he was doing, and he replied that he worked for one of the casinos and was disposing of worn chips in the routine way; but he closely watched the patterns the chips took as they flew, and he seemed to be whispering to himself, and when he had scattered the last handful, he stood looking at the water for half an hour before bowing to the river and then walking to a car and driving away, very fast, north.

Fifty miles south of that, at Lake Havasu City, the river flowed high around the massive pilings of London Bridge, the same arching granite structure that until twenty years ago had straddled the Thames. The river's border was green, but the desert was close beyond the bright new hotels and restaurants, and because of the clarity of the air the desiccated mountains seemed nearer than they actually were.

A white-bearded man in a dusty old pickup truck drove over the curb of the parklike area near the bridge; he tromped the accelerator until he was doing about thirty—tourists were yelling and running—and then he yanked the wheel hard to the right, and the old truck spun like a compass needle across the sprinkled grass.

When the vehicle came to a squeaking, rocking halt, it was pointing north. He restarted the stalled engine and drove off in that direction.

And far out in the sagebrush reaches of the desert, in cinder-block houses and trailers and shacks in Kelso and Joshua Tree and Inyokern, isolated people were sniffing the dry air, and then, one by one, slapping their pockets for car keys or searching shelves for bus schedules.

And, in Baker, Dondi Snayheever left his box forever to go find his mother.

Travelers know Baker as just the brief string of gas stations and car repair garages and burgers-and-fries restaurants on I-15 in the middle of the vast desert between Barstow and the California-Nevada border—and in fact, it's not much more. West of Baker's main street is nothing but a few short, powdery dirt roads and a couple of clusters of old mobile homes behind tall pine windbreaks, and at the west edge of town—out past the wide grassless yards and the forlorn swing sets and the old barbecues and dressers and half-stripped cars and the occasional satellite dish, all baking in the purely savage sun glaring out of the empty sky—the fenced-in grounds of the ECI minimum-security prison mark the town's west boundary. Beyond the prison's farthest fence is nothing but the desert, stretching away toward the astronomically remote Avawatz Mountains, the flat sand plain studded in the middle distance with huge jagged rocks that look like pieces of a long-ago-shattered planet half-buried in the sand.

A month ago Dondi Snayheever had walked away from his job in an upholstery shop in Barstow. He hadn't been sleeping well, and voices in his head kept saying things in a tone that was urgent but too soft to be understood, and so he had returned to the place he'd grown up in, a big plywood box behind the abandoned house where his father had lived. It was a long mile outside Baker on a dirt road, but somehow every time Snayheever went back, he found empty liquor bottles and used condoms on the carpeted floor of his box. The door couldn't be locked anymore.

It was hot and dim inside the box, and cramped because of the stacks of maps, but his attention was drawn to the oversize playing cards that his father had tacked up on every available section of wall and ceiling.