Last Call

by Tim Powers

  On the oven-hot sidewalk of Las Vegas Boulevard, just across the highway from the fountains and broad colonnade of Caesars Palace, Betsy Reculver paused and sniffed the desert air. The wrinkles in her cheeks and temples deepened as she narrowed her eyes.

  The very old man walking beside her kept hobbling along, and she reached out and caught his sleeve. “Halt your ass a sec, Doctor,” she said loudly. Several brightly dressed tourist women stared at her as they walked rapidly past.

  The old man who was known as Doctor Leaky had apparently not heard. For a couple of seconds he tried to continue walking, then seemed to grasp the fact that he was being impeded by something. His bald, spotty head slowly turned around on his corded neck, and his eyes widened as if in vast astonishment when he saw that Betsy had taken hold of his sleeve.

  “Hah?” he said hoarsely. “Hah?” He was wearing an expensive gray suit, but somehow he always tugged the pants up too high. Right now the silver belt buckle was up around his solar plexus. And of course he could never manage to lift his slack lower jaw and close his mouth.

  “Can’t you smell it anymore, you worthless old jug? Sniff.” She inhaled deeply.

  “It’s them!” exclaimed Doctor Leaky in his shrill, birdy voice.

  She looked at him hopefully, but he was pointing at several life-size painted statues of men in togas under the Caesars Palace sign across the street. A tourist had wedged a Bic lighter into the outstretched hand of one of them and was having his picture taken leaning close to it with a cigarette in his mouth.

  “No, it’s not them.” Betsy shook her head. “Come on.”

  A few steps further up the sidewalk, when they were passing the west-facing Mississippi-showboat facade of the Holiday Casino, Doctor Leaky again became excited. “It’s them!” he squeaked, pointing.

  Statues in nineteenth-century dress stood on the deck of the boatlike structure, and in the fenced-off lagoon between the sidewalk and the building floated a moored raft with two Huck Finn-like statues on it. A red sign on the coping read: DANGEROUS CHEMICALS—KEEP OUT OF WATER.

  “You moron,” Betsy said.

  Doctor Leaky giggled. Betsy noticed that a dark stain was spreading across the crotch of his suit pants.

  “Oh, fine,” she said. “God, why do I even keep you around?” In the middle of the sidewalk crowd she raised her hand, and a gray Jaguar XJ-6 pulled up and double-parked in the street.

  She led the old man over the curb and across the pavement to the rear door. The driver, an obese bald man in a woolen Armani suit, had got out and was holding the door open. “My corpse pissed its pants, Vaughan,” she told the fat man. “I guess we’re going home.”

  “Okay, Betsy.” The fat man took Doctor Leaky’s forearm impersonally.

  “It’s them!” Doctor Leaky piped again.

  Betsy sniffed the air again. The resonance was still on the hot breeze. “Who, Doctor?” she asked with weary patience and still a little hope.

  “The people in Doom Town—the lady in the car, and the lady in the shelter in the basement, and all the rest of them. Those kids.”

  She realized that he was talking about the simulated town that had been built in the desert near Yucca Flats when the government had been testing the atom bomb in the early fifties, and false suns had seemed to rise instantly in the night sky beyond the Horseshoe Club and the Golden Nugget. To make it all more realistic, the Army had put mannequins in the houses and in the cars at the test site. Betsy could remember having gone out and looked at the fake city, which had been known to the locals as Doom Town.

  “No, Doctor, get in the car, it’s not them. Those were all fake people.”

  Doctor Leaky laboriously lifted one foot into the car. “I know that,” he said, nodding with ponderous dignity. “The problem is that they weren’t a realistic enough…”

  “Unlike the plaster boys in front of Caesars, sure. Get in the car.”

  “As an offering, a sacrifice, they weren’t realistic enough,” the old man quavered. “The cards weren’t fooled.”

  Vaughan leaned forward to help Doctor Leaky get the rest of the way into the car. For a moment Betsy could see the SIG 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol Vaughan wore in a shoulder holster under his coat.

  Before getting into the car herself, she lifted her face into the breeze. Yes, at least one of the fish was grown to nearly keeping size out there. Maybe it was the fellow who had swum up into her mind at the Dunes the other night. I wonder, she thought, who drink is to him.

  The cycle took twenty years, but they did eventually ripen. Somebody’s out there having a bad time right now.

  Come Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, there would be another resurrection.

  CHAPTER 5

  Chasing the White Line

  Crane got to his feet and carried a fresh beer out onto the porch. “What?” he said.

  “I don’t mean to be readin’ your mail, Pogo,” said Mavranos, “but you’re gonna lose your house if you don’t pay these people.” He was holding out an unfolded sheet of paper with typing and numbers on it. The long gray envelope lay torn open on the table.

  “Who’s that? The bank?”

  “Right. They’re talkin’ foreclosure.” Mavranos was frowning. “You’d better pay ’em. I don’t want to take my chances on a new neighbor who might object to a beery bum living next door.” He leaned forward, and Crane could tell he was serious, for he used his Christian name. “Scott,” Mavranos said clearly, “this is no joke. Get a lawyer, homestead the place, file chapter thirteen bankruptcy—but you gotta do something.”

  Scott Crane held the paper up to his good eye and tried to make sense of it. He couldn’t let himself lose the house, not now that it seemed Susan’s ghost was here.

  “I guess I’ve got to get back in business,” he mumbled.

  Arky blinked at him. “Are you still working at the restaurant?”

  “I don’t think so. They’ve called me a few times, but I haven’t been in there…in weeks. No, I think that’s gone. I’ve got to…get back into my old business.”

  “Which is what? It better get you a paycheck quick—and a big one.”

  “If it works, it does that. I quit doing it…eight, nine years ago. When I, when I married Susan, and started at the Villa. She never said anything, but I could tell it was time to get into something else. Yeah, that’ll work, that’ll work.”

  “So what is it? These people want their money yesterday.”

  Scott Crane had spilled some beer on his pants, and he rubbed at it ineffectually. “Oh, I—didn’t I ever tell you?—I used to be a Poker player.”

  “You should have seen ’em tonight,” he had told Susan at three o’clock one morning as he pulled wads of twenty-dollar bills from his pants pocket. “They were all quiet and grouchy, ’cause they didn’t have any crank, and they kept looking up, real wide-eyed, every time they heard a car door slam, ’cause a friend who drives a tow truck had said he’d bring some by if he got a call to anywhere near the game. I could bluff ’em out any time with a five-dollar raise—they were having a terrible time, asking the guy whose house it was if he was sure he didn’t have any old mirrors to lick, and even thinking about grinding up some of my NoDoz and snorting that. Finally their friend did knock on the door and gave ’em a bindle, this little bitty folded bit of paper with about a quarter teaspoon of crystal meth in it, and then they were all happy and laughing and tapping the powder out on a mirror and scraping it into lines with a razor blade and then snorting it up through a little metal tube. Sudden cheer, yukking it up, you know? And suddenly they’d stay with any hand, and call any raise, and not give a damn if they lost. It was great. But then one of ’em’s eyes go wide, you know, like this—and he gets up and runs for the bathroom. And a minute later all the rest of ’em are bowleggedying around in the hall like Quasimodo, banging on the bathroom door and cussing the guy in there. It turns out the crank was cut with some kind of baby laxative.”

  Susan laughed, but wa
s sitting up in bed and frowning as he took off his pants and shirt. “I don’t mean to be critical, Scott,” she said, “but these people sound like idiots.”

  “They are idiots, honey,” he said, pulling back the covers and getting into his side of the bed. “It’s not profitable to play Poker with geniuses.” He reached up and turned out the light.

  “But these are the people you…look for, and hang around with when you’ve found them,” she said quietly in the darkness. “These are the people who you, what, do your life’s work with…or at least who you do it to, or upon. You know what I’m saying? Aren’t there any Poker players you admire?”

  “Sure there are—but I’m not good enough to play with them and win, and I’ve got a living to make. And I admired my foster dad, but since he took off, I haven’t found anybody to partner up with.”

  “It must be weird to look for people dumber than you, and avoid people as smart or smarter.”

  “Keeps you and me in groceries,” he had said shortly.

  Crane left Mavranos on the porch and went back inside.

  For a couple of hours he managed to lose himself in the recipes and advice columns and personality quizzes in a stack of old issues of Woman’s World and Better Homes and Gardens, and he drank his beers slowly and set his cans down only on coasters. Then he watched television.

  When the house had darkened enough so that he had to get up and turn on the lights, he reluctantly made coffee, then went into the bathroom to shave and take a shower. The shades in the living room were down, so a few minutes later he walked right from the shower to the chair by the telephone.

  Today was Thursday. That was good; one of the most enduring mid-level red-spot games he had ever instituted had been an L.A. area Thursday night game. He pulled out the Orange County and Los Angeles white pages phone books and tried to remember the names of some of the people who had been the steadiest players a decade ago.

  He found a name: Budge, Ed Budge, still living on Beverly in Whittier. Must be sixty by now. He dialed the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Ed, this is Scott Smith. Scarecrow Smith, remember?”

  “Jesus, Scarecrow Smith! What have you been doing? How’s Ozzie?”

  “I don’t know, man, I haven’t seen him in twenty years. I—”

  “And he had another kid he used to talk about. What was her name?”

  “Diana. I don’t know, I last talked to her in ’75 or so, just briefly on the phone. I dreamed—I mean, I heard she got married.” Crane took a sip of his third consecutive cup of coffee and wished he would sober up faster.

  He remembered the call from Diana. He had been scuba diving in Morro Bay and had managed to fire his three-barbed spear into his own ankle, and the telephone had been ringing when he got home from Hoag Memorial Hospital the next day. She had refused to tell him where she was, or where Ozzie was, but she had been upset, and relieved to hear that he was all right. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen then. Three years later he had dreamed of her in a wedding.

  There had been no contact since. Apparently neither of them had been seriously hurt, physically at least, in the last fifteen years—or else their psychic link had withered away.

  “So,” Crane said now, “is the game still going?”

  “I don’t know, Scott, I quit playing a few years ago. One day I figured out I was bleeding away ten grand a year in that damn game.”

  Crane suppressed a sigh. If Crane had still been the motivating force of the game, Ed would never have quit. Crane knew how to baby valuable losers along—flatter their winning plays, never take full advantage of their weaknesses, make the game seem more social than financial—so that they kept coming back; just as he knew how to repel good, winning players by criticizing their Poker etiquette and refusing to lend them money and trying to upset them, and encouraging the other players to do the same.

  “Oh,” Crane said. “Well, do you keep in touch with any of the guys?”

  “Keep in touch? Outside the game? Scott, do you remember the plain old breakfasts?”

  This time Crane did sigh. Sometimes the game had gone on for eighteen hours or more, and the players had taken a break to eat at some local coffee shop at dawn; and the fractured, desultory table-talk had made it stiflingly clear that none of them had anything in common with one another besides the game.

  “Okay, Ed. Have a nice life.”

  He hung up and looked through the phone books for another name.

  This was a solid game, he thought. It has to be still spinning out there. Old Ozzie taught me how to build ’em to last.

  His foster father had been Oliver Crane. Using the name Ozzie Smith, the old man had been one of the country’s respectable mid-level Poker players, from the 1930s through the 1960s. He had never quite been up there with the superstars like Moss and Brunson and “Amarillo Slim” Preston, but he had known them and played with them.

  Ozzie had explained to Scott Crane that a good Poker game can have a life of its own, like a slow-motion hurricane, and he had shown him how to start them and vitalize them, all around the country, so that, like reserve bank accounts, they’d be there if you should someday need one of them. “They’re like that great red spot on the planet Jupiter,” the old man had said. “Just a lot of whirling gas, but always there.”

  If Ozzie were even still alive, he’d be…eighty-two now. Crane had no way of getting in touch with him. Ozzie had made sure of that.

  Jube Kelley was in the book, living in Hawthorne now. Crane dialed the number.

  “Jube? This is Scott Smith, Scarecrow Smith. Listen, is the game still going?”

  “Hey, Scott! The game? Sure, you can’t kill a game like that. I only go once in a while now, but they’re doing it at Chick’s house now. This is Thursday, right? They’ll be there tonight.”

  “Chick’s house. That’s on Washington, in Venice?”

  “Right,” said Sam. “Between the old canals and the Marina Del Rey basins.”

  Crane was frowning, and he wondered why he was uneasy…. He realized that he wasn’t looking forward to being that close to, that surrounded by, the ocean; and going so far west seemed…mildly difficult, like pressing the positive poles of two magnets together. Why couldn’t they have moved the game east?

  “You still there, Scarecrow?”

  “Yeah. What stakes are they playing these days?”

  “Ten and twenty, last I heard.”

  Perfect. “Well, I gotta run, Jube. Thanks.”

  Crane hung up and walked slowly into the bedroom. The cool evening wind sighed in at the window, and he saw no ghost.

  He relaxed and let out an unwittingly held breath, not sure whether he was disappointed or not.

  He was still damp from the shower, but he got dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and old sneakers and another flannel shirt. He tucked a lighter and three unopened packs of Marlboros into his pockets and picked up the Versatel card; he could draw three hundred with it, and he had another forty or so on the bookshelf. Not lavish, but he ought to be able to make it do. Play the first hand noticeably loose, then tighten up for a while.

  And the car keys are in the living room, he thought as he started out the bedroom door—and then he paused.

  If you bring a machine, you’ll never need it, Ozzie had always told him. Like a fire extinguisher in a car. The day you don’t bring it is the day you’ll need it.

  Not, Crane thought now, not in a ten and twenty game at Chick’s! He laughed self-consciously and stepped into the hall, then stopped again.

  He shrugged and went back to the dresser by the bed. This isn’t the time to ignore the old man’s advice, he thought. He pulled open the top drawer and dug behind the socks and old envelopes full of photographs until he found the blocky stainless steel Smith & Wesson .357 revolver.

  What the hell, he thought, at least you’re fairly sober.

  He flipped out the cylinder. All six chambers were still loaded, and he pushed up the ejection-rod to get
one out. 125-grain hollow-point cartridges, as he remembered. He let it fall back in and snapped the gun shut again and tucked it into his belt, hearing the cartridges rattle faintly in the chambers.

  When he opened the front door, he paused.

  “I might be a little late,” he called to the empty house.

  He stopped at a nearby 7-Eleven store for hero sandwiches, a couple of twelve-packs of beer, a box of No Doz and a dozen decks of cards, and then he got on the freeway.

  Back to chasing the white line, he thought as the lane markings of the 5 Freeway flew past like fireflies under the tires of his old Ford. I can remember a hundred, a thousand nights like this, driving with Ozzie along the 66 and the 20 and the 40, through Arizona and New Mexico and Texas and Oklahoma. Always a game behind us and a game ahead of us.

  It had been what Ozzie called a semi-retired life. They traveled and played during the three months of spring, and then lived off their winnings in the Santa Ana house during the other three seasons.

  Scott had been five years old when Ozzie had found him, in the back of a boat on a trailer in a Los Angeles parking lot. Apparently he had been a messed-up little kid—one eye split open and dried blood all over his face. Ozzie had talked to him for a few minutes and had then driven him in his old truck to a doctor who owed Ozzie a lot of money.

  Old Dr. Malk had fitted up young Scott with his first glass eye. The eyes were still real glass in the forties, and for kids they were round, like big marbles, to fill the orbit and make sure the skull grew correctly. The next day Ozzie had taken the boy home to the house in Santa Ana, and had told the neighbors that Scott was his cousin’s illegitimate child and that he was adopting him.

  Ozzie had been about forty then, in ’48. He had quickly begun teaching Scott all about Poker, but he had never let the boy play with anyone else, and never for real money, until the summer of ’59, when Scott was sixteen, and they went off on one of the annual trips together.