Last Call

by Tim Powers

  “You guys play here a lot?” asked Crane after a while.

  The ancient man called Doctor Leaky answered him. “I been playing back here forever,” he said. “I used to play around the trash cans behind the Flamingo—there were…bungalow-type buildings back there, then—with Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.” He chuckled absently. “That girl had a mouth on her; I never heard such language.”

  Wiz-Ding was sucking on a short dog, a bottle of cheap fortified wine, between slugs of beer, and he was steadily losing quarters.

  He gave Crane a baleful look. “Since you sat down, I pair up every time I draw even one card.”

  Even with the beer starting to hit him, Crane knew it was time to leave. “I been getting hands that make me wish we were playing High Draw,” he said placatingly, “and now you guys’ve taken all my quarters.” He put his hands flat on the asphalt to lever himself up. “I’ll come back after I’ve cashed in my IRA.”

  Wiz-Ding hit Crane while he was off-balance, and he fell over sideways with his feet waving in the air, disoriented by the hot pain in his left eye socket. When he managed to roll over and struggle up to his feet, two of the others had grabbed Wiz-Ding and were holding him back.

  “Take off,” one of them told Crane.

  Doctor Leaky was goggling around uncomprehendingly. “His eye?” he mumbled. “What happened to his eye?”

  Crane picked up his cap and put it back on his head and stood up. He knew better than to make any parting remarks or to try to retrieve the remaining beers. He just nodded and turned back toward the liquor store.

  Another and another cup to drown, he thought, quoting Omar Khayyám this time, the memory of this impertinence.

  But after he had gone inside and made his way to the beer cooler and carried two more six-packs to the counter, the clerk looked at Crane’s swelling left eye and shook his head.

  Crane sighed and walked out empty-handed onto the hot Flamingo Road sidewalk.

  When he saw the blue Camaro convertible idling at the curb, he remembered that he had been expecting it. Behind the wheel Susan looked entirely solid; her lean, pale face reflected the sunlight as creditably as anyone’s would, and her smile was radiant.

  After a ten-second pause he shambled over and opened the passenger-side door. There was a freshly popped can of Budweiser standing up on the front seat, and he let that decide for him.

  This is legal too, he thought as he lifted the can to his lips and sat down and pulled the door closed with his free hand. Just so the driver doesn’t have any.

  “What happened to your eye, darling?” asked Susan as she pulled out into traffic and got into the left-turn lane.

  “Somebody named Wiz-Ding,” he said. His left eye was swollen nearly shut, but luckily he found that he could again see through his false eye. So far things looked normal through it—the blue sky, the red facade of the Barbary Coast Casino to his right, the tall Dunes sign ahead with the rippling of its lights still faintly visible even in the hard daylight.

  “That guy.” She laughed, and Crane realized that whatever this woman-shaped thing was, it was intimate with all suicidal drinkers.

  The thought made him jealous.

  “Not pink elephants for him,” she said. “What do you think would be appropriate?”

  Crane’s body still felt as though it had been worked over with baseball bats. “How about one of those big white beetles? Niños de la tierra?”

  She laughed again as she made the left turn onto the Strip. “You can’t still be mad at me about that. A woman scorned, you know? I’d been holding the DTs back from you, and then you asked for me, and I came, and you changed your mind and offered me to your friend.” She turned her silvery eyes on him for a moment. “I could have given you much worse than a rat and a bug on the other side of the room.”

  Crane imagined having a few of the big, thick-legged children of the earth in the bed with him, for example, and he shuddered in the hot sun. “Bygones,” he said with an airy wave. “Where are we going?”

  “Your memory is nearly gone,” noted Susan approvingly. “We’re going for a walk in the desert. Visit a ruined chapel that will be there for us. Very spiritually beneficial, help you get ready to…become the King.”

  Or vice versa, thought Crane distantly. Help the King get ready to become me. The can in his hand was empty.

  “We’ll stop at a liquor store for provisions,” said Susan, who of course had noted the problem. She giggled. “You know, when I told you to buy a hat, I think I meant something more….”

  Crane cocked a lordly eyebrow at her. “You have some…criticism of my choice in gentlemen’s headwear?”

  “I guess it’s a blackish canary,” she conceded.

  Her sentence rocked him, even through the tranquilizing alcohol haze. It was a line from one of the books he and Susan—the real, dead Susan—had loved, Hope Mirlees’s Lud in the Mist: the book’s protagonist, reproved for absentmindedly putting on canary yellow clothing while in mourning, had protested weakly that it was a blackish canary.

  Was this thing driving the car the real Susan, in some sense? And if she meant to imply that he should be in mourning, was it supposed to be for Diana? Or the dead Susan? Himself, conceivably?

  South of the Aladdin, in sight of the garish multicolored towers of the Excalibur, she pulled in to the parking lot of a little liquor store; the 1950s-style sign above the door read LIQUOR HEAVEN.

  “I’ll wait out here,” she said when she had switched off the engine.

  Crane nodded and got out of the car. He blinked at the place’s glass door, thinking that he had just glimpsed a bent little boy walking in—but the door was motionless, and might not have been opened for hours, or days. He shrugged and stepped forward.

  The place was dim inside, after the brightness of the desert sun, and for him the shelves seemed to be full of canned vegetables with faded labels. Under a high shelf that was crowded with dusty ceramic Elvis collector decanters huddled the register and counter and, not visible at first glance, an ancient woman with a star tattooed right onto her face, from ear to ear and chin to forehead.

  He nodded to her and walked to the back of the store. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the place.

  There was a cooler in the back wall, but on the shelves inside were nothing but short dogs—twelve-ounce bottles of fortified wines like Thunderbird and Gallo white port and Night Train. Oh, well, he thought with a smile as he studied them—any port in a storm.

  Posters were taped on the inside of the glass, advertising a wine called Bitin Dog. “Just Say Woof!” advised the ads.

  The brand name reminded him of something—something that one hurt boy could apparently manage to lose, and another hurt boy could pick up and find comforting—but he could see no profit in chasing down any memories at this point. He opened the door, took two bottles by the neck in each hand, and started back toward the register.

  Ozzie had driven Diana’s tan Mustang right past the liquor store lot when the Camaro turned in to park, but he had seen the gray Jaguar stop at the Strip curb behind him, and he realized dully that it must be the fat man driving it. He had been forlornly hoping, while he followed the Camaro from the liquor store by the Flamingo, that it was just another Las Vegas Jaguar.

  He drove Diana’s car into the parking lot of a travel agency and turned it around, to be ready to drive out again when the other two cars got moving.

  The old deck of cards with the naked women on the backs was scattered across the passenger side of the seat. It depressed him to look at them, even though they had eventually led him to Scott, and he gathered them up, tamped them square, and put them in his breast pocket.

  Dirty cards in my pocket, he thought. He felt his chin and wished he had found an opportunity at least to shave.

  Through the dusty windshield he stared at the baking highway and the dry weed lot beyond it. In Las Vegas, he thought—where the spiritual water table is as exhausted as the literal one, where the
suicide rate is the highest in the world, where this Strip area is called Paradise not because of any Eden-like qualities but just because there was once a club here called the Pair O’ Dice.

  This isn’t the place I’d have chosen. But I can’t say I didn’t know what was…in the cards. I bought this hand on Sunday morning, when I stayed to that showdown at the two- and four-dollar Seven-Stud table in the Commerce Casino back in L.A.

  The Two of Spades had signified departure, saying good-bye to loved ones; the Three of Clubs had been a second marriage for one or both of those loved ones; the Five of Diamonds had been a wedding present, promising prosperity and happiness in that marriage or those marriages; the Nine of Hearts, the “wish card,” was another wedding present, happy fulfillment of ambitions.

  Those had been for Scott and Diana. The three cards that had been face down were what he had had to buy for himself in order to try to buy lives for them. The Four of Hearts was the “old bachelor” card, to identify himself; the Eight of Diamonds was an old person traveling far from home; and of course, the Ace of Spades was, simply, Death.

  A whiff of Diana’s perfume drifted past his nostrils now as he shifted on the seat.

  Time, he thought. Time…time…time.

  But he patted his coat pocket and was bleakly reassured to feel the bulky weight of his little .22 revolver, loaded with hollow-point magnums.

  You’ve had three days, he told himself. That’s enough time.

  CHAPTER 31

  Did You Meet Your Father at the Train Station?

  South of town Susan turned onto the I-15. The red cones of road construction narrowed the highway to one lane for a while, but traffic was light enough so that she didn’t ever have to slow below forty miles an hour, and when the construction was behind them, she sped up to a steady seventy or eighty. Out on the face of the desert the little widely separated houses or ranches seemed to Crane to look defensive, like forts.

  South of Las Vegas, with the towers and streets left behind, the landscape broadened out; the vast plain around them was not perfectly flat but swept up at the distant edges to meet the mountains. Crane imagined that a car way out there without its emergency brake on would roll right back down to this highway—though from here he wouldn’t even be able to see that car.

  The breeze that fluttered his gray hair was hot, and in the roofless car the sun was a weight on his arms and legs, so he unscrewed the cap from one of the chilly bottles of Bitin Dog and took a long sip.

  The dark wine, much harsher than beer, seemed to generate inside him a fire to repel the desert heat. It woke him up, too, stripped away the foggy blanket of inattention, but he found to his satisfaction that he no longer needed the blanket; he was indifferent now to Diana’s death and the problems of Ozzie and Arky. This, he thought, finally, is real, cold adulthood, with not even a scrap of any need for a father.

  “You want some of this?” he asked Susan, holding the bottle toward her.

  “I am it, darling,” she said without taking her eyes off the road. “How are you feeling?”

  Crane took a moment to think of an honest answer. “Disattached,” he said.

  “That’s good.”

  Some kind of wrecked old stone structure was visible now beside the highway ahead, on the right, and Crane leaned forward as he felt the convertible’s brake drums take hold.

  Crane peered at the place that was apparently their destination. Mirages made it hard to judge the outlines of the structure: Its broken gray stone walls seemed at one instant to stretch far back from the highway, and in the next instant looked like nothing but the narrow remains of an abandoned church.

  Through the razory optimism of the morning’s drunkenness he felt a flicker of uneasy reluctance. “Who,” he asked carefully, “are we going to meet here?”

  “‘Did you meet your father at the train station?’” Susan said in a quacking voice, quoting a joke his real, dead wife had once told him. “‘No, I’ve known him for years!’”

  She swung the wheel and pulled off onto the gravelly shoulder. When she turned off the engine, the silence crowded right up to the car, then receded for the faint hiss of the wind in the sparse brush around the uneven stone walls.

  As he got out of the car, carrying his bagged bottles and the one he was working on, Crane noticed that a gray Jaguar had pulled off a hundred yards behind them; and a moment later a tan Mustang drove on past, swirling up a faint wake of dust.

  He knew he could remember both cars if he cared to, but he didn’t care to. He was edgily confident that he had left his emotions behind, with the cast-off shell of his youth.

  Susan had taken three steps out into the sand away from the highway, toward the doorway that held up a weathered stone lintel like a segment of Stonehenge. She looked back at him. “Let’s walk.”

  He tipped up the open bottle for another slug of cold Bitin Dog. “Why not?”

  The doorway led into a round, roofless area that was floored now only by rippling bone-colored sand. Dead cacti stood like randomly placed crucifixes across the uneven expanse. Crane blinked and rubbed his plastic eye, but he could not estimate the distance to the far wall.

  Susan took the bag and held his freed hand. As the two of them plodded over the sand, her hand in his eventually became dry and pebble-knuckled; he drank some of the wine to restore her suppleness, and then before long had to do it again.

  The sun was a chunk of magnesium burning whitely in the dome of the sky. Crane could feel its dry heat diminishing him.

  The very stones underfoot seemed frailed by rot, honey-combed by some internal erosion; and he saw scuttling snakes and scorpions that were inorganic, made of jewels and polished stones; and dry shells of birds whirled past overhead, making sounds like glass breaking.

  He knew that if he could open his swollen-shut left eye he would be seeing a different landscape than the one his false eye was showing him.

  When he had first stepped out of the car, he had seen spots of green, and white and red and orange flowers, brought out by Tuesday night’s rain—but after he had entered the ruined chapel and walked awhile across this vast floor, he could see only stone and sand and the brown-dried cacti, which, he saw when he and Susan passed the first of them, were split open to show hardened lacy cores like the marrows of dry bones.

  His own hands had begun to dry out and crack, so he dropped his now-empty bottle and took another one from the bag Susan was carrying and twisted the top off it, and he sucked at it more frequently than he had at the last one, for he was drinking to maintain both of them now. Astringent sweat stung his forehead under the brim of his Jughead cap.

  The wind was singing in the uneven ridges of the broken walls, a monotonous chorus that seemed to Crane to issue from the dry throat of the idiot desert itself, all message lost in a profound, malignant senility.

  Ozzie had turned the Mustang around on the shoulder and driven back northward, back toward the desolated building—which he knew had no sane business being here—and he slowed the car and angled over toward the east edge of the highway after he had seen the fat man and a white-haired man walk through the stone doorway into the vast ruin. A third man, younger and wearing a tan security guard uniform, had also got out of the gray Jaguar, but he stood now on the shoulder, watching Ozzie park on the opposite side.

  Ozzie noted the holster on the young man’s belt. Well, he thought as he switched off the Mustang’s engine, I’m armed, too. I’ll just have to deal with this fellow, and not let myself forget who he works for.

  He buttoned his coat with trembling fingers, then opened the door to the desert heat and began the task of angling his aluminum cane out from the passenger side of the seat.

  Behind him he could hear the security guard’s street shoes knocking on the pavement of the highway, coming closer. Ignoring the horrified, despairing wail in his head, Ozzie slipped his hand into his suit coat pocket.

  During his long life he had four times had to hold a gun on a man, and even
that had each time made him tremble with nausea. He had never actually shot anyone.

  The man had called something to him.

  Ozzie looked over his shoulder at the young security guard, who was right behind him now. “What?”

  The guard’s brown hand was on the checked wooden grip of the holstered .38 revolver. “I said get the fuck away from the car.” He drew the gun and pointed it at Ozzie’s knees. “You’re not wearing feathers, so you must be the real old guy. Your name’s, uh, Doctor Leaky?”

  Call it, Ozzie thought. “That’s right, sonny.”

  “Okay, Mr. Leroy said you might show up. You’re to stay outside. I’m instructed to kill you if you try to follow them in, and I will.”

  “Can I sit in the Jag and run the air?”

  The young man was still pointing the gun in the direction of Ozzie’s knees and staring hard into his face. For a too-brief moment he glanced across the highway at the Jaguar. “I guess so.”

  “Could you get my cane out of the car? I can’t bend over so good.”

  The man stared at Ozzie in exasperation, clearly wondering if he was worth the trouble of frisking. “Oh, hell,” he said finally, and holstered his gun and stepped toward the Mustang.

  God forgive me, Ozzie thought. Don’t forget who he works for; he’s a soldier in their army. He stood back from the open car door.

  When the guard leaned in, Ozzie pulled the little .22 from his coat pocket and reached in and touched the muzzle to the curly hair at the back of the man’s head.

  And feeling his soul wither in his breast, he squeezed the trigger.

  The man dived forward across the seat, and his legs flexed and then stood straight out of the car for a moment as he thrashed and huffed and grunted inside; after a moment he went limp, and through tear-blurred eyes Ozzie looked up and down the empty highway.

  The bang, muffled inside the car, had hardly been more than a loud snap, and Ozzie knew the wind had carried it away unheard.