by Tim Powers
In all of it he still seemed to see, sometimes, the outlines of his own salvation. Or he tried to believe that he did.
He reminded himself of Arthur Winfree, who had broken the circadian rhythm of a cageful of mosquitoes with a precisely timed burst of light, so that they slept and buzzed in no time pattern at all, and could be restored to their usual up-at-dusk, down-at-dawn pattern only with another flash. Winfree had apparently found the vulnerable point, the geometrical singularity, by studying the shape of the data on mosquitoes rather than the actual numbers that made up that shape.
People in Las Vegas had the shocked, out-of-step patterns of Winfree’s mosquitoes. There were of course no clocks or windows in the casinos, and the man next to you at lunch might be an insomniac who had sneaked down from his room for a “midnight” snack. Mavranos wondered if one of the night-time atomic bomb tests in the 1950s had happened to throw its bright flash across the city at an instant that was a singularity.
He managed a sour smile at the thought that his best hope for a cancer cure might be the nearby detonation of another atomic bomb.
The wheel was spinning again. Roulette was the only casino game in which chips had no fixed denomination, and each player was simply given a different color; Mavranos moved away from the table so that somebody else could play with the blue chips.
He still had about fifty dollars in cash out in the truck, folded into one of crazy Dondi Snayheever’s maps, and—and he didn’t know what he would do with it. He could try again to eat something, though that was beginning to seem like a pointless, humiliating exercise, or he could use it as a buy-in for some game. What hadn’t he tried? Keno…the Wheel of Fortune…
When he pushed his way out against the spring-resistance of the glass doors, he saw that it was night—God knew what the hour was—and that he had been in the Sahara Casino.
As he plodded dizzily along the walk toward the parking lot, he tried to figure out what it was that he really wanted, and he saw himself working on some old car in the garage, with his wife stirring something on the stove inside, and his two girls sitting on the living-room couch he had reupholstered, watching television. If I use the fifty dollars for gas, he thought, I could be there tomorrow morning, and have…a month or so, maybe, of that life.
Before I got so sick that I had to go into the hospital.
He had health insurance, a policy that cost a hard couple of hundred a month and stated that he had to pay the first two thousand dollars of medical costs in any one year—after that the company paid 80 percent or something—but even if dying were to cost nothing, he would still be leaving Wendy and the girls with just a couple of IRAs and no income. Wendy would have to get a job as a waitress again somewhere.
He paused in the white glow of an overhead light, and he looked at his hands. They were scarred and callused from years of gripping tool handles, and some of the scars on the knuckles were from youthful collisions with jawbones and cheekbones. He used to be able to get things done with these hands.
He shoved them in his pockets and resumed walking.
CHAPTER 35
The Partition of Poland—1939
Mavranos paused when he was a few yards away from his parked truck. In the dim parking lot shadows he could see a figure hunched over the hood.
What the hell’s this, he thought nervously, a thief? There’s two guns in there, as well as my remaining money. But why’s he leaning on the hood? Maybe it’s just a drunk, pausing here to puke on my truck.
“Move it, buddy,” he said loudly. “I’m driving the truck out of here.”
The figure looked up. “Arky, you gotta help me.”
Though the voice was weak, Mavranos recognized it. This was Scott Crane.
Mavranos walked around to the driver’s side, unlocked the door, and swung it open. The dome light lit Crane’s face through the windshield in dim chiaroscuro, and Mavranos flinched at the black eye and the hollow cheeks and the stringy hair.
“Ahoy, Pogo,” Mavranos said softly. “What…seeeems to be the problem?”
Mavranos got in and reached across to open the passenger side door. “Come in and tell me about it,” he called.
Crane shambled around the door and climbed up onto the seat, then laid his head back with his eyes closed and just breathed for a while through his open mouth. His breath smelled like a cat box.
Mavranos lit a Camel. “Who hit you?”
“Some drunk bum.” Crane opened his eyes and sat up. “I hope Susan gives him a lot of big bugs.”
Mavranos felt the ready tears of exhaustion rise hot in his eyes. His friend—his closest friend, these days, these bad days—was broken. Clearly Crane was not succeeding in freeing himself from his troubles.
But neither am I, Mavranos thought. I’ve got to go home while I still can; I’ve got to spend what time I have left with my family. I can’t waste any of that time trying to help a doomed man, even if he is—was—my friend.
Womb to tomb, he found himself thinking. Birth to earth.
Shut up.
“Ozzie’s dead,” Crane was saying now. “The fat man shot him. Ozzie died saving me; he knocked me loose from them for a little while, at least. He saved my life, gave it back to me.”
“I can’t—” Mavranos began, but Crane interrupted him.
“He always used to put…a banana in my lunch bag, when I was in grade school,” Crane said, his face twisted into what might have been a smile. “Who wants a mushy old warm banana at noon, you know? But I couldn’t bear to throw it out—I always ate it—because—he had gone to the trouble—see?—to put it in there. And now he’s gone to the trouble—Jesus, it’s killed him—to give me my life.”
“Scott,” Mavranos said tightly, “I’m not—”
“And then I got a note he’d left for me, saying I should take care of Diana’s kids. Diana’s dead, too, they blew her up, but her kids are still alive.” He exhaled, and Mavranos rolled down the window. “We’ve got to save them.”
Mavranos shook his head unhappily and squeezed Crane’s shoulder. Very little of this was making any sense to him—bugs and bananas and whatnot—and he was afraid most of it was hallucinatory nonsense. “You go save them, Pogo,” he said softly. “I’m too sick to be any use, and I’ve got a wife and kids who ought to see me before I die.”
“You can—” Crane took a deep breath. “You can pull a trigger. You can see well enough to drive in day glare. When it gets light, I’ve got to go see a guy who lives in a trailer outside town. I tried to make it yesterday, but I”—he laughed—“but I got so damn depressed. I had the DTs real bad, sat and cried in Diana’s car most of the day, in a parking lot. Bugs were crawling out of holes in my face—imagine that! But now I’ve got some food in me, and I think I’m all right.”
You can still eat, at least, thought Mavranos angrily. “Then go,” he said harshly. “Where’s her car now?”
“Parked down the row here. I’ve driven through every casino lot in town, looking for this here truck. The Circus Circus said you’d checked out with no messages or anything.”
“I don’t owe you any messages, none of you. Goddammit, Scott, I’ve got my own life, what little is left of it. What the hell do you imagine I could do? Who is it you want me to—to pull a trigger on, anyway?”
“Oh, I don’t know…me, maybe.” Crane was blinking around, and he picked up Snayheever’s maps. “If I become Bitin Dog again, for instance. At least I can make sure that my real father doesn’t have this body to fuck people over with.”
A car rushed by fast, and the reflection of its red taillights flashed through the cracks in the Suburban’s windshield like the streak of a tossed-out cigarette butt.
“You want me to make sure of it, you mean,” Mavranos said, “and probably go die in the Clark County Jail instead of with my family. I’m really sorry, man, but—”
He paused. Crane had unfolded a map of California, and, ignoring the twenty-dollar bill that fell out of it. was staring once ag
ain at the lines Snayheever had drawn on the state’s uneven eastern boundary.
“These aren’t route lines,” Crane said absently. “They’re outlines. See? Lake Havasu, where the original London Bridge is now, is the bridge of the nose, and Blythe is the chin, and the 10 highway is the jaw-line. And I can recognize the portrait now—it’s Diana.” There was no expression on his face, but tears were running down his cheeks.
In spite of himself, Mavranos peered at the map. The pencil lines were a woman’s face in profile, he could see now, turned away and with the visible eye closed. He supposed it might be a portrait of that Diana woman.
Crane unfolded the map of “The Partition of Poland—1939,” and this time Mavranos could see that the heavy pencil lines traced a fat, robed person of indeterminate sex daintily dancing with a goat-legged devil. Bleakly he imagined that this, too, might have to do with Crane’s problems.
“I can’t help you, Scott,” he said. “I don’t even have any extra money. I can drop you off somewhere right now, if it’s on the way out of town, south.”
Crane seemed to be calm, and Mavranos hoped he would ask to be driven to the Flamingo or somewhere, so that Mavranos could seem to be doing him at least some last, paltry favor.
“Not now,” said Crane quietly. “When the sun’s up. And I’ll want to try for a couple of hours of sleep.”
Mavranos shook his head, squinting and baring his teeth and trying not to remember the many afternoons he’d spent drinking beer on Crane’s front porch.
Womb to tomb. Birth to earth.
He made himself say, “No. I’m leaving now.”
Crane nodded and pushed the door open. “I’ll wait for you—dawn, in the parking lot of the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel.” He stepped down to the pavement. “Oh, here,” he added, digging in the pocket of his jeans. He tossed a thick roll of twenty-dollar bills onto the seat. “If you’re short.”
“Don’t!” Mavranos called, his voice tight. “I won’t be there. You can’t—you can’t ask this of me!”
Crane didn’t answer, and Mavranos watched the lean figure of his friend disappear into the darkness. After a while he heard a car start and drive away.
Mavranos slapped his pocket for change, then got out of the truck and began plodding back toward the casino. He needed to hear his wife’s voice right away.
There was a bank of pay phones off the Sahara’s lobby; one of the phones was just ringing steadily, and he fumbled a quarter into the slot of the one farthest from the noise and punched in his home number.
Through the tinny diaphragm he heard Wendy’s voice, blurry with sleep. “Hello?” she said. “Arky?”
“Yeah, Wendy, it’s me, sorry to call you at this hour—”
“Thank God, we’ve been so worried—”
“Listen, Wendy, I can’t talk long, but I’m coming home.” He covered his free ear and mentally damned whoever was making the other phone ring for so long.
“Did you…”
“No. No, I’m still sick, but I want to…be with you and the girls.” To be and not to be, he thought bitterly.
There was a long pause during which he helplessly counted the rings of the phone at the far end of the row, and then he heard Wendy say, “I understand, honey. The girls will want to see you. One way or another, they have a father they can be proud of.”
“I should be back before lunchtime. I love you, Wendy.”
He could hear the tears in her voice when she said, “I love you, Arky.”
He hung up the telephone and started toward the door, but he stopped irritably in front of the still-ringing phone and picked up the receiver. “What?” he yelled into it.
The harsh laughter of a woman grated in his ear. “I love you, Arky,” the woman said. “Tell Scott I said I love him, will you?”
Mavranos was shaking, but he spoke softly. “Good-bye, Susan.” He hung up that phone, too, and walked out of the casino.
Back in the truck he started the engine—and then just sat there in the dark cab, staring at the money Crane had tossed onto the seat.
A father they can be proud of, he thought. What does that mean? It should mean a father who doesn’t abandon them. A father they can be proud of. What’s wrong with just a father they can love for a few weeks? What the hell is so terrible about that?
Wendy had said, I love you, Arky. Well, who did she mean by that? Who was it that she loved? The man who had proudly gone off to find his health and who kept faith with his friends? They wore that guy out, honey, he doesn’t exist anymore.
He picked up the money and put it in his pocket, knowing he and Wendy would be needing it.
Goddammit, he thought, can you really prefer a dead man that you can be proud of to a—a broken man you can at least hug?
Can’t we just pretend I never met Scott Crane?
At dawn the broad lanes of the Strip were a little less crowded—mostly with Cadillacs heading back to hotels after a night of heavy gambling, beat station wagons out for the forty-nine-cent breakfasts—and Crane was glad to park the Mustang in the Troy and Cress lot and walk away from it. The police might well be watching for the car, and though they shouldn’t have any particular reason to hold him, he vividly remembered Lieutenant Frits’s telling him that he could be thrown in jail.
Crane walked quietly past the closed multicolor doors of the honeymoon motel units. A frail smile kinked his face as he passed them. Have nice lives, you newlyweds, he thought. Put those HITCHED license plates on your cars, treasure those photos and videos, take home the Marriage Creed plaques and put them up on the walls of your bright new homes.
At the curb he leaned against a light post and stared up and down the Strip, looking for the blue truck. The dry air was still, poised between the chill of the night and the furnace heat of the coming day. His hands weren’t trembling, and he liked the idea of stopping for breakfast on the way out to Spider Joe’s trailer, but he was afraid that Mavranos, if he showed up at all, wouldn’t want to eat. Last night he didn’t look as if he’d been eating much lately.
Mavranos might be driving through Barstow right now, heading back toward the tangle of the Orange County freeways. Crane hoped not.
The top of Vegas World across the street glowed yellow with the first sunlight, and looking back toward the east, Crane could see the tower of the Landmark Hotel silhouetted against the glare of the coming sun.
He looked up and down the broad street. No blue truck.
He sighed, suddenly feeling a lot older as he turned back toward the Troy and Cress parking lot. Take the car? he wondered. How long could Frits hold me for? I could call a taxi, but would the driver wait outside Spider Joe’s trailer? Probably not, if things started flying around like they did at poor Joshua’s card-reading parlor on Wednesday.
He got into Diana’s car and started the engine. Find a car dealership and just buy yourself one, he thought. You’ve certainly got the cash.
But he didn’t put it into gear yet. He looked around at the interior of the car, at Diana’s country-and-western cassettes and an old hairbrush and a pack of Chesterfields on the console. Did Diana smoke them? Chesterfields had been Ozzie’s brand, before he quit. Had the old man bought a pack, suspecting that it didn’t matter anymore?
A shotgun blast, out in the desert—and then dust scattered across the sterile sand. Crane leaned his head against the rim of the steering wheel and, in the midst of the anonymous sleeping newlyweds, he finally cried for the killed foster-father who had found him so long ago and taken him in and made him his son.
After a while he became aware of the muttering racket of a big, badly muffled engine behind him, drowning the steady burr of the Mustang’s V-8.
He looked up at the rearview mirror and smiled through his tears to see the blue bulk of the Suburban, with Mavranos’s lean face glowering at him from behind the wheel.
He switched off the engine and got out of the car, and Mavranos opened the truck’s passenger side door.
“Th
at was eight hundred bucks you gave me last night,” Mavranos said belligerently as Crane climbed in and pulled the door closed. “You got a lot more?”
“Yeah, Arky, I got”—Crane sniffed and wiped his eyes—“I don’t know, twenty or thirty thousand, I think.” He slapped his jacket pocket. “What I gave you was just my twenties. I can’t lose lately, except at Lowball.”
“Okay.” Mavranos drove forward and then clanked the shift into reverse. “For helping you out here, I want all of it except for what we need for expenses. My family’s gonna need it.”
“Sure.” Crane shrugged. “When we get a couple of hours free, I’ll make a lot more for you.”
Mavranos backed into a parking space and then shifted back to drive and spun the wheel to head out of the parking lot. “We likely to get killed on this errand today?”
Crane frowned. “Not likely to, I don’t think. As soon as I mess with the cards, the fat man will know where I am, but we ought to be long gone by the time he’d get there, even if he’s not in a hospital—and anyway, he apparently works for my father. He wants to keep me alive.” He looked over his shoulder at the piled junk in the back of the truck. “You still got your .38 and the shotgun?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope we do run into the fat man.”
“Great. Well listen, before we drive out there, I want to stop by a Western Union, and send Wendy a big bundle.”
“Oh, sure, man.” Crane glanced at him. “Have you, uh, talked to her?”
