Last Call

by Tim Powers

  He had won about $350 when, after an hour and a half of play, he glanced at the ashtray and saw the smoke from his current Camel beginning to swirl in toward the center of the table. He looked at his tepid glass of Coke: The level was off, dipping toward the table.

  It was before the draw, and he was holding three Hearts, Jack high, and the Joker. He would have liked to stay and try for the Flush, but he put the cards down on the table and pushed them away from him.

  He gathered up his chips, tossed four yellow ones to the dealer, and stood up. “Thanks, everybody,” he said, and walked away between the tables and up the stairs to where Mavranos sat drinking a Coors at a table by the rail.

  “Check out the smoke,” Mavranos said after Crane pulled up another chair and sat down.

  Crane could see it at the nearest table, where a five- and ten-dollar Hold ’Em game was in progress: A little cloud was gathering over the center of the table.

  Mavranos lit up a Camel and puffed, and the smoke drifted away over the sunken floor of the playing area. “And my beer’s crooked,” he said.

  “Where’s Ozzie?”

  “He’s in that Seven-Card Stud to the right there.”

  Crane stood up and walked over to the section of brass rail nearest Ozzie’s game.

  The old man was looking at the cigarette in the tray by his chair, and the dealer had to remind him that it was his bet.

  The players were about to be dealt the seventh card, and there were only two staying with Ozzie, for the old man had three Queens showing and the other two hands showed only low pairs.

  Ozzie turned his three Queens over and pushed the cards toward the center of the table.

  A cocktail waitress walked past Crane, and he was about to wave at her…but then he thought of Ozzie’s three abandoned Queens. Gotta make sacrifices, he thought. He sighed and turned back to watch the table.

  One of the remaining two players had won with a Full Boat, and as the man scooped in the chips, Crane idly wondered what sort of luck the man had sold.

  Ozzie stayed in all the hands now, folding only after what Seven-Stud players called Sixth Street, the sixth card dealt. Even at the rail Crane could see that the old man’s play was drawing the attention of the other players; at one point Ozzie folded showing a high Two Pair when nothing else at all showed on the board.

  Crane drank three Cokes while he watched, and smoked half a pack of Camels. The smoke kept swirling out over the tables, and Ozzie kept folding before the showdown.

  And so Crane was surprised when in one hand, finally, Ozzie hesitated at Sixth Street.

  The old man was showing a Two of Spades, a Three of Clubs, a Five of Diamonds, and a Nine of Hearts.

  One of his opponents showed four Hearts, and another showed Two Pair, black Kings and Tens. The Two Pair bet ten dollars, and the four Hearts raised it ten—strongly representing a Flush, thought Crane.

  “Twenty to the Nine,” said the dealer to Ozzie.

  He looks a hundred years old, thought Crane anxiously as he stared at his foster father. The old man’s eyes were down, looking at his cards.

  “Time,” said Ozzie, so quietly that Crane could deduce what he said only from the motion of his wrinkled lips. “Time…time…time…”

  The smoke was a funnel over the table, and the constant undertone of clicking chips suddenly sounded shriller to Crane, like the whirling of a rattlesnake’s tail. The air-conditioned breeze was as dry as the breath of the desert.

  Ozzie was shaking his head. “Time!” he said again, loud enough this time now for even Mavranos to hear him and look up from his beer.

  Ozzie’s lip was curled now in something like defiance or resentment, and he looked up. “And ten,” he said clearly, pushing forward three tan chips.

  Crane saw the other players look curiously at this old contender, whose best hand could only be Two Pair, Nines and Fives. From their point of view he could only be hoping to fill a Full Boat, and the Kings and Tens looked like being a better one.

  The man with the Kings and Tens raised, and so did the man with the probable Flush.

  Ozzie pushed more chips out.

  He sighed. “Call,” he said.

  The dealer spun another, face down, to each of the players.

  The Kings and Tens bet, and the Flush raised.

  “Call,” said Ozzie clearly, pushing more chips forward.

  It was the showdown now, and the players flipped their down cards face up.

  The Kings were a Full Boat, Kings over Tens, which beat the Heart Flush Crane had expected. Ozzie’s hand, which he exposed almost ceremonially, was the showing Two, Three, Five, and Nine, and, down, the Eight of Diamonds, the Ace of Spades, and the Four of Hearts.

  Nothing at all. The other players must have thought he’d been trying to fill a Straight—which would have been beaten by either a Flush or a Boat, which the other hands had been, and had looked to be all along.

  Ozzie pushed his remaining chips toward the dealer as a tip, then stood up and walked across the burgundy carpet toward the far stairs. Crane looked back to Mavranos and cocked his head after the old man. Mavranos nodded and stood up, bringing his beer with him as they walked around the sunken playing floor.

  Ozzie was standing by an awning with PLAYERS CORNER scripted above it in neon. “I’m having a drink or two,” he announced. “You,” he said to Scott, “are sticking to coffee or Coke or something, right?”

  Crane nodded, a little jerkily.

  Slowly, but with his bony chin well up, the old man led Crane and Mavranos into the bar and to a tartan-patterned booth against the back wall.

  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 freestanding 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 wat
er 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 hermaphrodeet.”

  “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.

  BOOK TWO

  Mistigris

  …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

  CHAPTER 14

  Toward the Terminal Response

  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 r
ed 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.