Last Call

by Tim Powers

  “Look, though,” said Mavranos, squinting through cigarette smoke, “he’s marked half a dozen routes, from somewhere to somewhere.” With a callused finger he traced one of several heavy pencil lines that meandered across the map.

  “This one’s California and Nevada,” said Ozzie tensely, looking at a map he’d just unfolded. “More routes marked.”

  The old man held it up, and Crane tried to make sense of the map lines that had been emphasized in heavy pencil. The Colorado River was traced from about Laughlin down to Blythe, and then the line moved inland to some town called Desert Center; the 62 Highway was marked from the Nevada border west to the 177 junction; one line just followed the California border from the 1-15 to the river, though there was no road or river along the route, only the imaginary straight line; and heavy pencil strokes had crossed out two names; in the glove compartment Crane found a pencil with an eraser and rubbed out the shiny black patches and then just stared, as puzzled as before, at the names “Big Maria Mts.” and “Sacramento Mts.” revealed underneath.

  “It looks like a big round trip,” said Crane, “from Riverside to the border, down the length of the border to Blythe, and then back up to the 40 on unpaved roads, and back to Riverside.”

  “With a lot of side trips,” said Ozzie. “Notice the fainter pencil lines along these dirt roads out around the 95.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Mavranos ponderously, “the man was nuts.”

  But Ozzie was shaking his head doubtfully. “The moon, the Jack and Queen of Hearts…He was plugged in somehow. Don’t throw these away.”

  There were two other maps, one of Michigan and one of Italy, both deeply scored with pencil lines.

  “I wonder if he’ll miss them,” said Crane.

  “Yeah,” said Mavranos unsympathetically, “next time he’s in Poland he’ll be up Shit Creek without a you-know-what, as my mom used to say. We ready to go inside, or what?”

  “You okay for walking?” Crane asked Ozzie as he opened the door and climbed down to the pavement.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” said Ozzie peevishly.

  Ozzie hurried away in the direction of the men’s room, while Crane and Mavranos stood in the entry and blinked around in the glare-punctuated dimness.

  Just inside the bank of glass doors, isolated on the red-carpeted floor by a circle of velvet ropes hung from brass poles, was a 1920s-vintage car, its body riddled with big-caliber bullet holes. A nearby sign announced that this was the very car in which Bonnie and Clyde had been shot to death. Welcome to Nevada, Crane thought.

  After a few minutes Ozzie came back, white-faced, red-eyed, and leaning on his cane.

  “And Ozzie makes three,” said Crane, pretending to notice nothing out of the ordinary.

  This was the first time he’d been in a Nevada casino in more than fifteen years, but as he led the way through the ranks of clattering slot machines to the restaurant in the back, he felt as though no more than a week had passed since he’d last been in this ubiquitous, rackety hall, doors into which could be found in hundreds of places across the breadth of Nevada. Whether you walked in through a door in Tahoe or Reno or Laughlin, or across a littered pavement in the Glitter Gulch area of downtown Las Vegas or up a polished marble stair on the Strip, it always seemed to be the same big, noisy dark room that you found yourself in. It was carpeted, and it smelled of gin and paper money and tobacco and air conditioning, and a disquieting number of the people at the tables and the slot machines were crippled or deformed or startlingly obese.

  Mavranos was blinking around in apparent bewilderment. “Where the hell are all these people when they’re not here?” he asked Crane quietly.

  “I think they only look like people in this light,” said Ozzie with a tired grin. “Before they spun in through the doors at sundown they were dust devils and tumbleweeds and cast-off snakeskins, and their money was warpy bits of busted mirage; and at dawn they’ll all leave, and if you were watching, you’d see ’em puff away, back to their real forms.”

  Crane grinned, reassured to note that Ozzie could still spin his whimsical fantasies, but he noticed that Mavranos only looked more apprehensive.

  “He’s kidding,” Crane said.

  Mavranos shrugged irritably. “I know that.”

  Without speaking, the three of them began filing down the aisles between the slot machines.

  In the restaurant Ozzie had a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coors, and Mavranos had a bowl of chili and a Coors, and Crane just had a Coke and ate Mavranos’s crackers.

  Mavranos had begun to tell Ozzie about the Mandelbrot fat man, and Crane stood up and said he was going to go hit the men’s room himself.

  He paused on the way to thumb a quarter into one of the slot machines, and after he’d pulled the handle, not even watching the machine’s window, twenty quarters were banged one by one into the payout well.

  He scooped them out in two handfuls and dumped them into the pockets of his jacket, then touched the machine’s handle.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  He pretended that the thing said, You’re welcome. Then he found himself pretending that the thing had said, Give her one good-bye kiss, at least.

  “I…can’t,” Crane whispered.

  Doesn’t she deserve at least that? the machine seemed to ask him. Are you afraid to look her in the face one last time?

  I don’t know, Crane thought. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

  Slowly he limped away from the machine, to the bar, and he dumped a fistful of quarters onto the polished surface.

  “A shot of Wild Turkey and two Budweisers, please,” he told the bartender. Just one last kiss, he thought. I’m no good to my friends if I’m shaky and forgetful.

  The glass screen of a video Poker game was inset flush with the surface of the bar, and Crane dropped a quarter into the slot and pushed the deal button. The images of patterned card backs in the flat glass screen blinked and became face up, and then he was looking at a garbage hand, unsuited and with no Hearts.

  At that instant, about forty miles to the east of where Crane stood, five mouths opened and exclaimed, “God, there’s a Jack!”

  The other people on the bus stared at the old man who had shouted. “What’d he say?” one person asked.

  “There’s a Jack,” someone else answered.

  “What’s he looking at so hard out the window?”

  “Trying to find a rest room, I bet—look, he’s wet his pants!”

  “Jeez, what’s he doing running around loose? He’s a hundred if he’s a day.”

  Thought fragments flickered like deepwater fish in the mind residue that occupied Doctor Leaky’s head, frail sparks of luminescence darting about on unknowable errands in darkness. Ninety-one, ninety-one, ninety-one, ran the unspoken, scarcely connected words. Not a hundred. Born in ’99, born in…that was a Jack. That was a hell of a Jack, west of here…don’t smell roses, that’s good…don’t smell nothing…well, piss…

  Art Hanari finally let himself be coaxed into lying back down on the padded table. The masseur had stopped asking him what he’d meant by the remark about a Jack, and now resumed rubbing a lanolin solution into his taut pectorals and deltoids.

  The masseur ignored Hanari’s perpetual erection. Curious about it at first, he had looked up Hanari’s file, and had found that a “penile implant,” a silicone rod, had been surgically inserted into the organ as a drastic cure for primary impotence; it seemed a waste of time, for Hanari saw no women except for a couple of the nurses and physiotherapists, and he showed no interest in them—or in anyone. He nearly never spoke, and he’d had no visitors for at least eight years.

  But the masseur had not been surprised to read of the implant operation. Patients at La Maison Dieu could afford anything, and he’d seen much more extravagant cosmetic surgeries.

  What had surprised him was Hanari’s birth date: 1914. The man was seventy-six…but his pale skin was smooth and firm, and his hair appeared to b
e genuinely dark brown, and his face was that of a placid thirty-year-old.

  Finished, the masseur straightened and wiped his hands on a towel. He looked at the man on the table, who had apparently gone back to sleep, and he shook his head. “God, there’s a jack-off, you mean,” he muttered, then turned to the door.

  “Twenty to the Sixes,” said the dealer patiently. Old Stuart Benet always needed to be reminded. Right now Benet was snorting at an asthma inhaler.

  “’At’s you, Beanie,” said the player to Benet’s left.

  “Oh!” The fat old man put down the inhaler, lifted the corner of his seventh and last card, and squinted down past his white beard at it.

  “Beanie, you just said it was a Jack,” said another player impatiently. “And if it is, you got Two Pair, and I got somp’n better anyway.”

  Benet smiled and pushed four orange chips forward.

  The remaining players called, and at the showdown Benet proved to have only the pair that was showing in his up cards.

  “Hey, Beanie,” said the winner as he gathered in the chips, “what happened to that Jack you were shouting about?”

  The dealer suppressed a frown as he collected the cards and began to shuffle. Benet was employed as a shill to fill out sparse tables in the Poker room, and even though the casino had hired him as a favor to a valued business associate, he was good at the work—always cheerful, and happy to stay and call and lose money. But shills weren’t supposed to bluff or raise, and that God, there’s a Jack yell had been a kind of bluff.

  The dealer made a mental note to ask Miss Reculver to remind Benet of the rules. The old man never seemed to listen to anyone else.

  The reference desk at the UNLV library always got busy around six in the evening. The students who worked during the day all seemed to come in at once, always shuffling hesitantly up to the desk and beginning in one of two ways: “Where would I look for…” or, even more often, “I have a quick question…” Old Richard Leroy would listen patiently to their intricate descriptions of what they wanted and then, almost invariably, either lead them to the business desk or show them where the psych indexes and abstracts were. Right now he was methodically replacing an armful of books to their proper places on the shelves.

  A few of the students were still glancing at him warily, but he had forgotten having yelled, and was back in the state his co-workers called “Ricky’s ticky-tocky.”

  And Betsy Reculver, the one who had voluntarily spoken the simultaneously chorused sentence, walked slowly along the broad, brightly lit and always crowded sidewalk in front of the Flamingo Hilton.

  For a while she stared up at the procession of stylized flamingos, illuminated by what must have been a million light bulbs, that strutted along in front of mirrored panels above the windows of the new front of the casino. Behind the casino, hidden from the traffic on the Strip, was a long swimming pool, and on the far side of that, dwarfed now by the glass high-rise buildings that were the modern sections of the hotel, stood the original Flamingo building, the place Ben Siegel had built to be his castle in 1946.

  Now it was her castle, though the Hilton people would not ever know it.

  Some other people knew it, though—the magically savvy would-be usurpers called jacks—and they would like to take it away from her. This new jack, for example, whoever it might be. I’ve got to gather in my fish, she thought, and avoid the jacks while I do it.

  She turned and looked across the street, past the towering gold-lit fountains and pillars of Caesars Palace, past the blue-lit geometrical abstraction of its sixteen hundred hotel rooms, to the still faintly pale western sky.

  A jack from the West.

  The phrase bothered her, for reasons she didn’t want to think about, but in spite of herself, for just a moment she thought of an eye split by a Tarot card, and the bang and devastating punch of a .410 shot shell, and blood-slick hands clutching a ruined groin. And a casino called the Moulin Rouge, which hadn’t got around to appearing until 1955. Sonny Boy, she thought.

  She thrust the memories away, fleetingly resentful that they had followed her from the old body.

  It doesn’t matter who this jack may be, she told herself. Whoever it is, I’ve defeated better men before this, and women, too: Siegel, Lady Issit, and dozens more. I can do it again.

  Suddenly in her mind she tasted liquor—and then a flood of cold beer. She was still facing west, and she could tell that the impression was coming from that direction.

  And there’s one of the fish, she thought with cautious satisfaction. Probably a male one since he’s drinking boilermakers. Across the border now, driving into Nevada, onto my turf, following the irresistible impulse to flee the ocean and seek the desert, to abandon everything and make his way here—or maybe tied up in the trunk of Trumbill’s Jaguar, if it was that particular fish and if we’re lucky.

  If he’s not with Trumbill, I hope that jack out there doesn’t find him. I can’t afford to be losing my future vehicles, my customized garments—the selves I’m going to have to rely on for the next twenty years.

  It didn’t occur to her that the jack and the fish might be the same person.

  She smiled when the walk signal at Flamingo Road turned green just as she reached the curb. And, ignoring the curious stares of the tourists crowding past in their colorful shorts and printed T-shirts and foolish hats, she quoted aloud four lines from Eliot’s The Waste Land:

  I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

  Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

  At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

  Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea….

  She turned her smile on the purple western sky. Come home, she thought.

  Come home.

  Crane drank off the last inch of his second Budweiser and tucked his last quarter into the slot in the bar. He tapped the deal button and watched as his cards appeared. A pair of Twos, a Four, a Queen, and the one-eyed Jack of Hearts.

  He pushed the hold buttons under the Twos, then hit the draw button. The other cards blinked away and were replaced by a Four and a King and a Two. Three of a Kind. Three quarters clattered into the well.

  He stood up and scooped out the coins. They were warm, almost hot; and for a moment he remembered shiny copper ovals that had been pennies before the L.A. train thundered over them, and he remembered his real father juggling the hot, defaced coins into his hat to cool off.

  He limped back onto the gaming floor, and as he was passing the slot machine that had paid for his drinks and the video Poker, he noticed a cellophane-wrapped peppermint in the payout well.

  “Thanks,” he told the machine as he took the mint and unwrapped it. “One-armed bandit,” he said thoughtfully, popping the mint into his mouth, “but on my side, right? One-armed. You’re…maimed, aren’t you, like so many of these people? I’m maimed, too.” He touched the surface of his right eye. “Fake, see?”

  A man who seemed to have had his entire lower jaw taken out shambled up to the machine and managed to convey a question.

  “No, I’m not playing this machine,” said Crane. “I was just conversing with it.”

  Come home.

  It was time to be moving on, eastward. He walked back to the restaurant, where Mavranos and Ozzie were sitting over their empty plates and still talking about the imaginary fat man.

  Ozzie squinted up at Crane with exhausted eyes. “What kept you?”

  “That Baker cheeseburger didn’t sit right with me either,” Crane said cheerfully. “Between us you and I must have grossed out half the guys here tonight.”

  Ozzie didn’t seem to have heard. “From what you remembered of Diana’s statements to you on the phone last night, I believe she works at a supermarket, a late-evening shift. When we get to Las Vegas, we can start checking all the markets.”

  Back on the highway, Ozzie fell asleep in the back seat again, and Mavranos was whistling tunelessly as he frowned at the pavement rush
ing by under the glow of the headlights.

  Crane had stretched out his bad leg and was drifting in and out of a doze, lulled by exhaustion and roused by Arky’s occasional random high notes.

  He kept promising himself that he would complain soon, and had finally reached the point of keeping himself awake, waiting for the next high note—when Mavranos stopped whistling.

  “Speeder behind us,” Mavranos said.

  Crane hunched himself around and looked out through the dusty back window. A pair of bright headlights was coming up on them quickly.

  “How fast are we going?”

  “Seventy.”

  A red light came on above the approaching headlights, making a pink field of the Suburban’s back window.

  “Wake up the old man,” said Mavranos, “and get in the back and unlock the gun case. Do it,” he added as Crane opened his mouth to protest.

  “But it’s cops!” Crane protested as he nevertheless scrambled over the top of the front seat, accidentally hitting Ozzie’s arm with his knee.

  “It looked like a pickup truck before the red light came on,” said Mavranos.

  Ozzie was awake, blinking forward and to the sides and then twisting his head around to look back. “You’re not slowing down,” he said.

  “I think it’s a truck,” Mavranos said. “Would people want to stop us bad enough to fake being cops?”

  “Sure,” said the old man harshly. “I’ve still got my gun in my pocket. Where’s yours?”

  “In the box. Got it open?”

  “Yeah,” quavered Crane, “you want yours?”

  “Pass it over subtle.”

  Crane knelt on the litter of books and clothes to block the view as he passed the gun to Mavranos’s upheld hand.

  Ozzie was panting. “I think you’ve got to pull over. If they’re not cops, don’t get out of the car. And—and if they’ve got guns…I don’t know. If they raise the guns, point them at us, I think we’ve got to kill them. God help us. God help us.”