by Tim Powers
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 1-15 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 salt-cedar 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.
His father had built the box in 1966, when Dondi had been a year old, and Dondi had spent nearly every hour of his life in the box until 1981, when his father had driven away to Las Vegas, supposedly just for a weekend, and had never come back.
His father had built other boxes for him to stay in when they occasionally went traveling together—one in the woods west of Reno, one in an empty warehouse in Carson City, and one in the desert outside Las Vegas. The Las Vegas box had even had a stained glass window, an inexplicable pietà of the Virgin Mary mourning over the dead body of Christ.
Dondi never knew his mother, though sometimes he would stare at some of his tracings and he’d imagine he could see her.
When Dondi was about twelve, his father had explained to the boy that the plywood structure he lived in was a Skinner box. It was an “environment” engineered to produce a “terminal response.”
It was based on his father’s understanding of the teachings of a psychologist named Skinner, who had apparently taught pigeons to bowl with little miniature balls and pins. The theory held that desirable qualities in an adult human could be defined, and then a procedure could be set up, a pattern of education that would help shape a child toward the terminal response, the desired state.
Dondi’s father had wanted to produce the ultimate Poker player. The attempt had been a failure. His father had wound up making something else.
In previous years the box had been filled with Poker books, and hundreds of decks of cards, and a television that showed nothing but films of real Poker games. His father would come out of the house and crawl into the box and play a hundred hands a day with him, criticizing (“extinguishing”) inappropriate play, and rewarding—with bags of M&M’s candies—play that could be shaped toward the terminal response.
Now the only things left in the box from those days were the big cards on the walls…but Dondi Snayheever stared hard at them, knowing that it would be through them, even more than through the maps, that he would be able to find his mother.
Besides, he already knew what she looked like from studying his tracings.
She was beautiful, like the Queen of Hearts.
“Baker for an early dinner, I nominate,” said Crane. “And a full tank of gas, too. After Baker there’s nothing but straight lines through lunar landscapes till at least the Nevada border.”
“Right,” said Ozzie.
“Gotcha,” said Mavranos. “Pop me another beer, will you, Pogo?”
Crane hooked up a Coors from the cold water in the ice chest, opened it, and handed it to the driver. Mavranos seemed to drain half of it in one swallow, then tucked the can between his thighs. The windows were open, and the hot wind battered at Crane’s ears and had blown his gray hair into a tangle of spikes and curls.
They’d been driving for three hours northeast along I-15. Ever since they’d driven through Victorville, the roadside brush and the shoulder of the highway had been consistently glittering with broken bottles, contrasting with long black strips of retread thrown from truck tires. Mirages and the broken glass gave Crane a spurious sense of being surrounded by water, an illusion strengthened by the boats being towed along on trailers behind many of the other cars they saw and by Ozzie’s remark that this all used to be sea bed, and that you could find primeval sea shells out there in the cross sections of broken rock.
Crane had frequently thought about his own first trip across this desert forty-two years ago, when he had crouched for five hours in the scuppers of a boat, under the inert echo sounder, instinctively hiding from the stars in the high black sky.
Now, in spite of the chain-link fence along the side of the highway and the sand and the twisted Joshua pines beyond it, the desert crossing seemed—even more than it had then—to be a journey over water.
And Crane noticed geometry everywhere, straight lines: mirages out on the flat desert, and the long and nearly horizontal slopes that led away from the low mountains and seemed to stretch halfway across the world, and the line of the highway itself. Sometimes the whole, world-spanning horizon was tilted, and he’d find himself leaning with it.
Mavranos’s truck was a contrast to the eternal regularity and hugeness of the desert.
The boxy blue vehicle, dusty and plain only this morning, now looked like a truck strayed from the caravan of a modest circus. Ozzie had bought several dozen Cobbs Airflow Activated Deer Warning whistles and glued the little black plastic things all over the hood and roof of the truck, some of them aimed diagonally instead of straight ahead, and some lined up so that the exhaust of one was the intake of the next, “like Newton’s prisms”; and he had made Crane and Mavranos cut their fingers to dot bloodstains on each one of a bagful of pennants and banners, all of which he subsequently hung from the antenna and bumpers and luggage rack; and he had glued playing cards onto the walls of the tires, all the way around, and on the fenders, too.
As Ozzie had worked on the wheels, Crane had heard the old man mutter something about diesel and the windshield, but Crane, embarrassed by his foster father’s eccentric precautions and by Mavranos’s deadpan acceptance of them, didn’t want to speak and perhaps provoke some further equipping of the Suburban.
At last they had got moving and had taken the Pomona Freeway out of Los Angeles, and it was only now, after three hours of uninterrupted traveling, that Crane’s impatience and unease had relaxed enough to let him think of stopping.
Baker’s legendary Bun Boy restaurant proved to have burned down, so after pulling off the highway, they stopped at a diner called the Mad Greek.
It was a little place, blue and white with outside tables and a low white picket fence, and Ozzie sat down at a table in the shade while Crane and Mavranos went inside to order.
The menu was self-consciously Greek, with things like souvlaki plates and Kefte-K-Bobs and Onassis Sandwiches, but they just ordered cheeseburgers. Mavranos got beers for himself and Ozzie, and Crane made do with a cup of some cold drink called Tamarindo.
They didn’t talk much as they ate. Mavranos insisted, over Ozzie’s snorting derision, that hibernating sea monkeys crawled out of the floors of the dry lakes when the spring rains came, and Crane just sipped his Tamarindo and stared at the two plastic cups of beer and thought about th
e pay phone he had picked up in the Commerce Casino.
The three of them were about to leave—Ozzie had unhooked his cane from the edge of the table, and Crane had thrown down enough money to cover the dinners and the tip—when a skinny hand darted in and snatched up the ceramic bowl full of wrapped sugar cubes.
The young man who stood by the table had the bowl in one hand and his other hand inside his undersize, slept-in-looking brown corduroy jacket. A sudden spasm of giggling made his teeth seem big, and his eyes were feverishly bright.
For a moment Crane and Ozzie and Mavranos just stared up at him.
“Oh, well, I guess I got a gun!” said the intruder, shaking stringy hair off his forehead. “It’s the only shape drillpress buttons really taste like, did you hear me say that?” He smelled, Crane noticed, like air freshener and old sweat.
Mavranos smiled and spread his hands as if to say We don’t want any trouble, and Crane saw him brace his feet under the table.
“If a person’s mother was the moon,” the young man said earnestly, “he could find her by where she—where she—”
Ozzie shook his head sharply at Mavranos, who lowered his hands.
“Where she left her—her face! Or the raven’s face, the eye of the raven!” The young man put the bowl down and wiped his own face with his sleeve. “Queen of Hearts,” he said, more quietly, “and the Jack going to find her.” He dragged up a chair from an empty table nearby and sat down. Keeping his right hand under his jacket, with his left he dug a box of blue Bicycle brand playing cards out of his pocket and tossed it onto the table. “We gonna play?”
A waitress inside had been staring out the window at their unsavory visitor; but Ozzie smiled at her and waved, and she seemed satisfied.
Ozzie was facing their visitor again, frowning at him, obviously trying to figure out how this madman might fit into the structure they were dealing with and how it would affect things if they were to play with him.
“What…stakes?” asked Ozzie.
“M&M’s,” the young man said, “against your sugars.” He pointed at the bowl he’d snatched up earlier and then pulled two packs of regular M&M’s out of his pocket. “Candy. And sugar, too. It’s bad for your teeth if you let it.” He swatted ineffectually at one of the circling flies. “And flies like it,” he added. “The word for ‘fly’ is mosca in Spain.” He chuckled and shook his head.
“Uh,” said Ozzie, “do you know where the moon…’left her face’?”
“My name’s Dondi Snayheever. Yeah, I got some—some maps, in the car. It’s very difficult to say, as you would say, maps in the car.”
Ozzie nodded. “Let’s play for a map or two. We’ll fade ’em with cash.”
“Letters and lockets and lesson plans, you can’t do otherthing but keep them, because they—they—they’re the leadages candlewise to the father and mother.” He looked hard at Ozzie. “You can’t see any of my maps, sir.”
“What’s the game?” asked Crane cautiously. “That we’re going to play here.”
Snayheever blinked at him in evident surprise. “Go Fish.”
“Of course,” said Ozzie. The old man met Crane’s eyes and made a sort of over there twitch with one white eyebrow.
You want me to go find his car and steal a map or two, thought Crane. Okay. But if I’ve got to do it, I’m by God going to award myself a prize. That’s my ruling.
“I bet the engine’s cooled enough for me to pop the cap off the radiator,” Crane said, getting to his feet. “I’ll go check.” He looked at Mavranos. “Keys?”
“Keys?” echoed Snayheever. “Your radiator is inside the car?”
Mavranos had pulled out his key ring and tossed it to Crane. “Locking hood,” Mavranos said easily. “Where we come from they’ll steal your battery soon as blow their nose.”
“Where do you come from?” Snayheever asked.
“Oz,” said Ozzie testily, his voice sounding very old and reedy. “Shall we cut for the deal?”
Crane got up and walked out to the asphalt, and as he rounded the bushes toward where the cars were parked, he heard Snayheever say, “No, for this I’ve got to deal.”
He’s probably a cheat, Crane thought with a weary grin. We’ll wind up with no sugar cubes at all.
Crane wondered how he was supposed to recognize Snayheever’s car…until he walked past Mavrano’s Suburban and saw the weird little vehicle parked on the other side of it.
It looked like a 1950s English version of a Volkswagen—it had the same bulbous fenders and arching roof—but the body flared out into a slight skirt around the sides. It was impossible to guess the little vehicle’s original color; it seemed to have been dipped in oil decades ago and been driven relentlessly on remote desert roads ever since.
Crane walked forward, feeling as though he were pushing against the hot air and leaving it curling in slow turbulence behind him, like the wake of a ship.
He read the rusty emblem on the front of the car’s hood: Morris.
Crane peered in through the dusty passenger-side window. The car was a mess: The upholstery was all split, stacks of newspapers filled the back seat, and the glove compartment had no door.
A number of ragged-edged folded maps protruded from the open compartment. The passenger door was not locked; Crane opened it, leaned in and pried free a couple of maps from the center of the pile, and then closed the door and walked over to the Suburban, fumbling with Mavranos’s keys.
He got into the truck and stared at Mavrano’s ice chest.
“Go fish,” he whispered, and then slowly reached out and lifted a can of Coors from the cold water. One won’t hurt, he thought. This desert air will dry me out like a dead rat in no time.
He popped the tab. The beer foamed up but didn’t run over the rim of the can.
He looked behind him, but there was no one else in the truck.
Tired of alertness, he drained the beer in one long, gulping series of swallows. It stung his throat and brought tears to his eyes, and he could feel his tense muscles relaxing.
The air inside the Suburban was hotter than the air outside, and smelled of spilled beer and old laundry. Crane tossed the can into the back, where it would not stand out. He hid Snayheever’s maps under an old nylon windbreaker and then got out, locked the door, and trudged back around the bushes to the table.
Ozzie and Mavranos looked up as Crane walked up; young Snayheever was staring at the cards in his hands and moving his lips silently.
“Should we go?” asked Ozzie.
Meaning, thought Crane, will the nut be able to see that I robbed him, in which case we should be gone before he goes to his car. “No,” said Crane, resuming his seat and draining the ice-diluted Tamarindo in his glass, “nothing looks different. Uh…it could do with a little more cooling off.”
“’Kay. Here, I gotta hit the men’s room. You take my cards, Scott.”
Ozzie got laboriously up out of his chair and then hobbled to the nearby rest room door, leaning heavily on his cane.
Crane picked up the old man’s cards. “My turn? To Mr. Snayheever? Okay. Uh…do you have any Nines?”
Snayheever grinned and jiggled in his chair. “Go fish!”
Mavranos pointed at the undealt stack of cards, and Crane picked up the top card. It was the Jack of Hearts.
“How about—” he began.
“Gotta bet!” Snayheever said excitedly. His dirty hair was down in his eyes.
“Oh. Uh, I’ll…what’s the limit?”
“Two.”
Crane grinned lopsidedly and added two more sugar cubes to the pile of M&M’s and sugar cubes in the middle of the table. “Have you got any Jacks?” A big semi truck drove by on the highway, gunning its engine and rattling the windows at Crane’s back.
“Go fish!” said Snayheever.
Crane took the top card. It was the Ace of Spades, and a second after Crane picked it up Ozzie was somehow standing right behind him. “We’re leaving,” the old man said tightly. “The
game will go unfinished. Throw down your hand.”
Crane shrugged and obeyed. When the cards hit the tabletop, the Ace of Spades lay nearly covering two other cards he’d been holding, the Ace and Queen of Hearts.
“We’re leaving now,” said Ozzie shakily. “This minute.”
“Fine!” said Snayheever as his long, trembling fingers gathered in the cards. “Fine! Just go then! I don’t need you!”
Mavranos took Ozzie’s elbow as they walked away from the table, for the old man was trembling and breathing fast; Crane walked out of the patio backward, watching Snayheever and wondering if the young man really did have a gun—but Snayheever, having apparently forgotten about the three of them, was thoughtfully folding a card around an M&M and a sugar cube. Just before Crane stepped around the bushes into the hot breeze, he saw the young man lift the strange burrito to his mouth and effortfully gnaw a bite out of it.
The breeze was from the reddening west, throwing veils of dust and stinging sand across the parking lot and making the lot and the whole town of Baker seem like the architecture of a temporary outpost, due soon to be abandoned to the elements. Crane watched Ozzie hobble along ahead of him, frail in his wind-fluttering old-man’s suit, and for a moment he thought that Ozzie belonged here, a tiny, exhausted figure in a vast, exhausted landscape.
And if they just drove away without the old man, Crane could have as much beer as he wanted. The beer he’d drunk a few minutes ago shifted coldly and pleasantly in his abdomen.
But he forced himself to remember Ozzie as he had been when they’d been father and son—and to remember Diana, and how Ozzie had found her and made her his daughter, Crane’s sister—as he helped Mavranos boost the shaking old man up into the rear seat of the car.
When the old man had sat down, Mavranos slammed the door. “Keys?”
Crane dug them out of his pocket and dropped them into Mavranos’s palm.
“Think he’ll be all right?”
