Last Call

by Tim Powers

  “Yeah, last night—and I called her again just before I left to come here,” Mavranos said. “Told her I wasn’t gonna…quit, on anything I shouldn’t quit on. She understood.” His tired face was expressionless. “I believe she’s proud of me.”

  “Well,” said Crane, mystified, “that’s good. Hey, take it quiet past these rooms; it’s all newlyweds sleeping off their wedding night champagne.”

  Then he just winced and closed his eyes, for Mavranos swore harshly and leaned on the horn all the way out onto the street.

  CHAPTER 36

  Some Kind of Catholic Priest?

  “That’s the place,” Crane said two hours later, leaning forward and pointing at the big rusty Two of Spades sign rippling in the heat waves ahead.

  “Shit,” said Mavranos. He tipped up his current can of Coors, and when it was empty, he tossed it over his shoulder into the back of the truck. “I thought you said you have a lot of money.”

  Crane had to agree that the trailer-and-shacks structure standing alone by the side of the desert highway didn’t look affluent. “I don’t think this guy’s in it for the bucks,” he said. He held out his palm with two shiny silver dollars on it. “This was all I was told to bring.”

  “Huh.”

  The two of them had hardly spoken during the drive out from town. Crane had spent most of the drive watching the traffic behind them, but he had not seen any gray Jaguar. Perhaps the fat man had died of a concussion from his gunshot wound, or couldn’t track him when he was…avoiding Susan.

  Mavranos slowed the truck now and signaled for a turn off the highway, and Crane peered at the odd little settlement that was their destination. A big old house trailer—shored up with wooden frameworks and patched and haphazardly painted several faded shades of green—seemed to be the original core of it, but a lot of corrugated iron-roofed sheds had been added onto the back, and there seemed to be pens and chicken coops attached to the side. Two pickup trucks from about 1957 sat in rusty ruin in the unpaved yard between the trailer and the highway, with a newer-looking Volkswagen van behind them. The whole place had clearly been baked and warped by decades of merciless sun.

  “Chez Spider Joe,” said Crane with false cheer.

  “That guy was hosin’ you,” Mavranos said as he slowed almost to a halt and turned onto the dirt yard. “The one who told you about this place.” The truck shook, and the tires made popping and grinding sounds as they revolved. “Hosin’ you.”

  At last he switched the engine off, and Crane waited until the worst of the kicked-up dust had blown away and then levered the door open. The breeze was hot, but it cooled the sweat on his face.

  Aside from the ticking of the engine and the slow chuff-chuff of their steps as he and Mavranos plodded toward the front porch, the only sound was the rackety whir of an air conditioner. Crane could feel attention being paid to them, and he realized that he had been feeling it for the last mile or so.

  He stepped up and rapped on the screen door, beyond which yawned the dimness of some unlit room with a couch and a table visible in it.

  “Hello?” he called nervously. “Uh…anybody home?”

  He could see the blue-jeaned legs of someone sitting at a chair inside now, but a fast scraping sound from around the western corner of the trailer made him look in that direction.

  And then from out of the trailer’s shadow strode a thing that for one heart-freezing moment seemed to Crane to be a giant walking spider.

  He and Mavranos both jumped down off the porch, but when Crane peered more closely at the figure that was now stopped in front of them, he saw that it was a man, with dozens of long metal antennas sprouting and bobbing from his belt, all the way around; they were all bent into different arcs, some brushing against the side of the trailer and some tracing lines in the dirt.

  “Jesus!” said Mavranos, his hand on his chest. “Curb feelers! What are you, Mister, worried about scraping your fancy hubcaps when you park your skateboard?”

  Crane had seen that the man’s gray-bearded head was tilted back toward the sky, and that he was wearing sunglasses. “Take it easy, Arky,” Crane said quietly, catching Mavranos’s arm, “I think he’s blind.”

  “Blind?” Mavranos yelled, obviously still angry at having been scared. “You had me drive you all the way out here to consult a blind card reader?”

  Crane remembered the other person inside. “I don’t think this is the guy,” he said. “Excuse me, sir,” he went on more loudly, his own heart still pounding from the fright of the man’s sudden, bug-leggedy appearance, “we’re—”

  “I’m Spider Joe,” the man said, talking loudly over Mavranos’s building laughter. “And I am blind.”

  Above the unkempt beard the man’s face was sun-darkened and deeply furrowed, and his dirty overalls gave him the look of a down-and-out car mechanic.

  “I,” said Crane helplessly, “was told that you could…uh, read Tarot cards.”

  Mavranos was shaking with laughter now, bent over and holding his knees. “Hosin’ you, Pogo!” he choked.

  “I do read Tarot cards,” the man said calmly, “when I feel I have to. Come inside.”

  Joshua did know something about all this card stuff, Crane reminded himself as he shrugged and stepped forward, and his fright that day was genuine. “Come on, Arky,” he said.

  Spider Joe waved one lean arm toward the door. “I’ll follow you.”

  Mavranos was still snickering, though it sounded a little forced now as he and Crane stepped back up onto the porch and pulled open the screen door. The place smelled like old book paper and cumin seed.

  The person sitting in the chair was a little old woman who smiled and bobbed her head at them, and she nodded toward a couch against the far wall. Crane and Mavranos shuffled around a low wooden table to it, Crane wobbling as he felt the carpeted floor sag under them, and they sat down.

  Spider Joe’s silhouette appeared in the doorway, and, with a loud scraping and scratching and flexing of the stiff wires, he forced his way inside. Crane saw that the faded wallpaper of the little room was scored and torn, and the couch cover was burry with snags, and the shelves were all hung up high to be out of the way of Spider Joe’s antennas.

  “Booger,” said Spider Joe.

  Crane stared at him.

  “Maybe,” Spider Joe went on, “you could fix some coffee for these two fellas.”

  The old woman nodded, got up, and, still smiling, hurried out of the room. Crane realized that her name must be Booger; and, in spite of everything, he didn’t dare glance at Mavranos for fear that they’d both succumb to nervous hysteria and fall off the couch laughing.

  “Uh,” he said, forcing his voice to stay level, “Mr…?”

  “Spider Joe’s what I’m called,” said the gray-bearded man, standing in the middle of the room with his arms folded. “Why, did you want to write me a check? I don’t take checks. I hope you brought two silver dollars.”

  “Sure, I just—”

  “She and I used to have different names. We ditched them a long time ago. These names we have now are only what the people in Indian Springs call us, when we go there to shop.”

  “Funny sort of names,” observed Mavranos.

  “They’re a humiliation,” said Spider Joe. He seemed to be just stating a fact, not complaining.

  “I was wondering,” Crane pressed on, “if you’re blind, how you read cards.”

  “Nobody who isn’t blind should ever read Tarot cards,” said Spider Joe. “A surgeon doesn’t use a scalpel with two blades on it, one for the handle, does he? Shit.”

  He turned noisily and reached one brown hand up to a shelf. A number of wooden boxes were ranked on it like books, and he ran his fingers over the facing edges of them and selected one.

  He sat down cross-legged in front of the table, his antennas bobbing and twanging as they snagged the nap of the worn carpet, and set the box on the table.

  “This is the deck I mostly use,” he said, lifting of
f the lid and unfolding the cloth that wrapped the cards. “There is some danger involved in using any Tarot deck, and this is a particularly potent configuration. But I can sense that you fellas are already pretty much fucked, so what the hell.”

  Crane glanced around at the room, noting the food stains on the carpet and the stack of battered issues of Woman’s World on a far table, and he remembered Joshua’s tastefully mood-conducive parlor. Maybe, Crane thought, if you’ve got the real high-octane stuff, you don’t need to dress it up.

  The blind man spilled the cards out of the box face down and put the box aside. With a practiced one-two sweep of his hands he flopped the cards face up and spread them.

  Crane relaxed when he saw that it was not the deck his real father had used. But even in this dim light Crane recognized the morbid, fleshy style of the finely crosshatched engravings.

  “I’ve seen this deck,” he said. “Or parts of it.”

  Spider Joe sat back, and two of his antennas sprang loose from the carpet and waved in the air. “Really? Where?”

  “Well—” Crane laughed uneasily. Most recently in a Five-Draw game at the Horseshoe, he thought. “The Two of Cups is a cherub’s face with two metal rods stuck through it, right?”

  Spider Joe exhaled sharply. “Are you a…some kind of Catholic priest?”

  Mavranos attempted a laugh, but stopped quickly.

  “No,” Crane said. “If I’m anything, I’m a Poker player. We’re dealing with weird crap here, so I’ll tell you the truth—I’ve only hallucinated these cards, and seen them in dreams.”

  “What you’re talking about,” said Spider Joe thoughtfully, “is a variation of the Sola Busca deck, one that even I’ve barely heard about. I’ve never seen it; the only known example is supposed to be in a locked vault in the Vatican. Not even qualified scholars can get permission to see it, and it’s only known of at all because of a letter from one Paulinus da Castelletto, written in 1512.”

  With a clanking of cups and spoons, the old woman known as Booger came back into the room carrying a tray. She crouched and carefully set it down on the carpet next to the table.

  “Milk or sugar?” asked Spider Joe.

  “Black,” said Mavranos, and Crane nodded, and Booger handed steaming cups to them; she then stirred three sugar cubes into each of the other two cups and handed one to Spider Joe.

  “My deck here,” said Spider Joe, “is just the standard Sola Busca deck. Sorry. But it’ll do. It’s a reproduction of a set owned by a Milanese family called Sola Busca—the name means ‘the only hunting party,’ by the way—which set they permitted to be photographed in 1934. That family and those cards have since disappeared.”

  Mavranos sipped his coffee and leaned forward, reaching out to touch the margin of one of the cards. “They’re marked!” he said. “Brailled, I guess I should say.”

  Crane looked down at the cards and noticed that each of them had at least one hole poked through the margin of it somewhere, as if they had been tacked up again and again, in all sorts of positions on a succession of walls.

  “Yeah, that’s how I read them,” Spider Joe said. “But also it’s a kind of safety measure, that every card in any heavy Tarot deck have at least one tack hole in it. All the serious decks from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have tack-holes in the cards.”

  “Ahoy,” said Mavranos, “that sounds like stakes through a vampire’s heart, or silver bullets for a werewolf.”

  Spider Joe smiled for the first time. “I like that. Yeah, I suppose it works like that, but only in the—the head of the beholder. If there’s nobody, no human being, looking at these things, they’re just rectangles of cardboard. It’s what they become when they enter your head through your eyes that’s potent, and a few tack holes are enough of a topographical violation to step-down their power. It’s like the smog equipment on modern car engines.” He rocked where he sat, and his antennas bobbed in the air. “Both of you touch the silver dollars to your eyes now, and then pass ’em across.”

  Crane lifted the two coins to his eyes, and let the silver edge of the right one tap against the plastic surface of his false eye just for luck. He handed them to Mavranos, who touched them to his own closed eyes and then clicked them down onto the Formica surface of the table.

  Spider Joe found them and tucked them behind the lenses of his sunglasses. He squared up the deck of cards and pushed them across to Crane face down. “Shuffle.”

  Crane did, seven times, though each time it was hard to slide the cards into a block, with the edges of the holes sticking up and catching on the card edges.

  Spider Joe reached out and felt for the deck, then pulled it to his side of the table. “What’s your name?”

  “Scott Crane.”

  “And what, exactly, is your question?”

  Crane spread his hands wearily, then realized that his host couldn’t see the gesture. “How do I take over my father’s job?” he said.

  Spider Joe swiveled his head back and forth as though he were looking around the shabby living room of his trailer. “Uh, you do know you’re in some trouble, right? Having to do with a game you must have played on Lake Mead twenty years ago?” He grinned, exposing uneven yellow teeth. “I mean, that’s your question? Something about your dad?”

  Crane grinned pointlessly back. “Yep.”

  Booger hummed something in the back of her throat, and Crane guessed belatedly that she was a mute.

  “Look,” said Spider Joe, his voice angry, “I’m here to help you. I’m not here to do anything else. I think you’re probably a dead man, an evicted man, but there might be something you can do. Ask the cards about that, not about some damn job.”

  “He’s my father,” said Crane. “I want his job. See what the cards say.”

  “Check it out,” Mavranos said to Spider Joe, “deal the cards. If everybody’s not happy with what you get, we’ll go back to town for another two bucks.”

  For several seconds Spider Joe just rocked on the carpet, his haggard brown face expressionless. “Okay,” he said, and picked up the deck.

  CHAPTER 37

  A Dead Guy Who You Don’t Know Who He Is

  The first card flipped out face up onto the table was the Page of Cups, an engraving of a young man in Renaissance costume gazing at a lamp on a pedestal.

  Crane found that he was bracing himself on the shabby couch in the dim trailer living room—for rain, or for the sound of cars crashing out on the highway, or for the cards all to jump into his face. But though the sunlight slanting in through the venetian blinds seemed to have taken on a glassy quality, like light through clear gelatin, and the thwick of the card slapping the tabletop had been particularly liquid and distinct, the only physical change in the room was the buzzing, looping intrusion of a couple of houseflies from the kitchen.

  The next card was a picture of a man in armor in front of a globe cut into three sections; the title was NABVCHODENASOR, presumably an attempt to spell Nebuchadnezzar.

  Crane noted that these cards didn’t show any tendency to fly around in any psychic breeze, and irrationally he remembered Spider Joe’s saying that it was a heavy deck.

  More flies had come into the room, and they were all buzzing around the cards as if the pictures were aromatic food.

  Spider Joe’s fingers traced the puncture-holes in the margins of the two cards, and he grunted sharply, and then he opened his mouth and began to speak.

  “Hagioplasty one-two-three,” he said harshly, the words seeming to be coughed out resentfully like blood clots, “gumby gumby, pudding and pineal, and Bob’s your uncle and the moon’s my mother. I could press charges but larges and barges and rivers and fishers, he’s fishing all the time there, it’s how you say pescador.”

  The nonsense words had been echoing loudly in Crane’s head, and then he thought they were forming there first and only being repeated by Spider Joe. A stricture seemed to be loosening from around his brain, and he was aware of an invitation to set his tho
ughts free, like birds, questing out in all directions. It seemed important that the blind man shut up, not say all this in front of the flies.

  All sorts of things were important. He knew that he ought to be outside, reading what the clouds would be trying to convey to him.

  Beside him Mavranos was leaning forward on the couch, his mouth open. The flies were buzzing loudly—there must have been a hundred of them whirling around in the space over the table now—and Crane wondered if Mavranos meant to eat them and thus learn what they knew. Flies probably knew a lot. The old woman had stood up and was dancing slowly and awkwardly on the carpet, her arms extended, coffee spilling out of the cup she was still holding.

  “The father,” Spider Joe was saying, “playing Lowball for trash, after the one-eyed Jack.”

  “No,” choked Mavranos. With a trembling hand he struck the two cards off the table, and then he stood up and knocked the rest of the deck out of Spider Joe’s hand. “No,” he repeated loudly, “I don’t want this.”

  Spider Joe abruptly sagged on the floor, silent, his jaw slack now as the insane jabbering fit let go of him, and only his arched antennas seemed to be holding him upright. The flies dispersed out across the room.

  “You don’t want it either,” Mavranos told Crane shakily.

  Crane took a deep breath and herded his thoughts back together. “No,” he agreed in a whisper, waving flies away from his eye.

  Spider Joe’s mouth shut with a click, and he stood up lithely, the stiff wires waving among the randomly circling flies. “None of us do,” he said. He pulled the silver dollars out from behind the lenses of his sunglasses and tossed them onto the table. “Let’s go outside. One of you bring Booger.”

  The old woman had stopped dancing, and Mavranos caught her elbow and led her after Spider Joe, who blundered twangingly out the door and down the wooden steps. Crane followed them outside, being careful not to glance at the cards on the carpet.

  Crane squinted against the sun glare on the desert and the highway, and the sudden heat was a weight on his head, but the broad, flat landscape was a relief after the claustrophobic trailer.