by Tim Powers
When the sky had lightened, and everybody had stood up and put on his or her coat and the engines were gunning in reverse as the boat surged in toward the docks of the marina, Leon rang an empty glass with one long, manicured fingernail.
“Attention, gamesters,” he said. He was smiling under the bandage, but there was a harshness in his voice that silenced all the idle, tired chat. “Tomorrow is Good Friday, and out of respect this game will end at three in the afternoon. Therefore, to get in at least a little bit of decent play, this boat will…set sail at noon. That’s only about six hours from now, so you might want to get rooms at the Lakeview Lodge here, and arrange for wake-up calls.”
Fatigue coursed through Crane’s arteries like a powerful drug, but it struck him as odd that the game should end at three. When businesses had acknowledged Good Friday, he recalled, they were closed from noon until three.
If this was a gesture of respect, it was a strangely inverted one.
Dancing on the edge of the cliff.
Shuffling dizzily through the still-cool air along the Fremont Street sidewalk, Dondi Snayheever was momentarily eclipsed in the shadow of the towering steel and neon tubing cowboy over the Pioneer Casino. He paused to squint up at the slowly waving figure, and he wondered what personage it might be nearly the shape of.
His maimed hand jerked him forward, and he resumed pushing himself forward through the resistance of the morning air.
Shapes waiting, he thought, like the implicit whirlpool in a bathtub just waiting to come into existence when someone would pull the plug. As if when a cloud formation came to look very damn like some certain enormous bird that was waiting in potential, it would actually become that bird.
Birds. Eye of the crow was right last week, but Isis’s temple was blown up now. Another bird now, according to the dreams, a pink one.
In a dream Snayheever had seen the fat man blow up the temple. The fat man had achieved a shape, too—had become the giant that had got stunted and round and lost his green color, had become the warty black ball in the math field, containing all the points that would never become infinite.
The fat man wasn’t that anymore. He was dead, his boundary broken, and the points would soon be scattered across the desert, free to become infinite or not, as they pleased. Snayheever wondered how long he himself would continue to be the thing he had come authoritatively to resemble.
Dancing on the cliff edge, the dog snapping at his heels.
He could sense his missing finger; it was far away to the south, up high, ringing with the vibrations of tremendous hydroelectric power.
He had no choice but to go there; the personage whom he had become was going to be there, and of course would need its shape.
But first there was someone to say good-bye to, and someone to forgive.
CHAPTER 48
Last Call
When Crane unlocked the hotel room door and pushed it open, he smelled hot coffee. Diana and Dinh were standing by the window with cups in their hands, and they looked over at him anxiously.
“No,” said Crane. He took off his wig and watched, to his own mild surprise, as his arm drew back and flung the cap of auburn hair against the mirror. “No, he didn’t buy it. I’ve got to be back there before noon, and I’ve got to stack the deck again in the meantime. I won’t have time to get any sleep.”
Diana hurried over to him and touched his arm. He forced himself not to pull away. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked.
“‘Wood eye, wood eye?’” said Crane absently, quoting the next-to-last line of an old joke Susan had liked.
Diana gave him her cup, which was nearly full and still steaming. “Here,” she said. “I’ll make me another one.”
Crane put it down on the bedside table. “I don’t want any.” The smell of coffee hung in the air like smoke, and he couldn’t get out of his mind the image of a coffee cup on a stove set on low.
And paramedics, and an ambulance, and after that a bottle to keep him from remembering his dreams.
“That was a line from a joke,” he said irritably. “‘Wood eye, wood eye.’” Diana stared at him blankly, apparently never having heard the joke herself. How could she not ever have heard it? “‘Hunchback, hunchback’ is the last line,” he snapped. “I’ve also heard it as ‘Harelip, harelip.’”
Mavranos had walked in from the next room, and Crane saw him exchange a look with Dinh. That’s right, Arky, he thought, I’m going crazy—talking about hunchbacks and harelips. Damn my soul, I would move heaven and earth for a—
The telephone rang on the bedside table, and everyone except Crane jumped. Dinh started toward it, but Crane was closer and snatched it up.
“Hello?” he said.
“‘Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,’” crooned the voice on the telephone, “‘Save Me, save only Me?’”
Crane recognized the lines. They were from Susan’s favorite poem, Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven.”
And of course he recognized the voice.
It’s my wife, he thought.
I shouldn’t talk to her.
Why not?
Because it’s not my wife, he told himself. Remember? It’s drink, or Death, or something that’s both of those things. So I can’t even talk to her. But what if it’s her, a bit of the real Susan, too? Maybe it really is her ghost, and the bad stuff has been laminated onto her.
And even if it’s not her at all, what if drink can do a convincing imitation of her? I’m probably going to die tomorrow, after I’ve failed to do this stupid card trick for the third time, after my father kicks me out of my body. Can’t I at least talk to this thing for a couple of minutes, over the phone? What’s the harm of just listening to what it has to say? And it might have some information we need. And it sounds so much like Susan, and I’m so tired, that I know I can make myself believe that it is Susan. If everyone would just leave me alone.
Finally he spoke. “Just a sec,” he said into the phone, then put his palm over the mouthpiece. “This is private,” he told the other three, “do you mind?”
“Jesus, Scott,” said Mavranos, “that’s not—”
“Do you mind?” Crane repeated.
“I mind,” said Diana, her voice breaking. “Scott, for God’s sake—”
“Well, if I can’t even—all I’m—” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Damn it, go mind in the other room, would you?”
For several seconds Mavranos and Diana and Dinh stared at him; then Mavranos jerked his head toward the connecting doorway, and the three of them silently filed through it and closed the door.
“We’re alone,” Crane said into the mouthpiece.
“What do they say,” Susan’s voice asked, “in a bar, at ten to two, when it’s your last chance to get a drink?”
“They say ‘last call.’” Crane was trying to be calm, but his voice was shaky.
“This is last call,” said Susan. “This is the last time I’ll call you. After you hang up, I’m either gone forever or with you forever.”
“You’re—um, you’re a ghost,” said Crane. He wished he could think clearly. His false eye stung—he hadn’t washed it or irrigated the cavity since Wednesday; he knew he was just asking for meningitis—and his leg ached and he could feel blood leaking out of the bandage below his right ribs. A wave of exhaustion made him close his eyes.
“So would you be, a ghost, if you’d come with me. Forever, whole again. Go to the card game, why not? Pretend you turned me down—go ahead and stack the deck again, if you want, but leave it in your purse. Who cares what hands go where? And have a drink….”
“‘And when you’re mine,’” he said, quoting another poem Susan had liked, “‘I’ll kiss you in my glass, fair goddess Wine.’”
“I’ll kiss you back. ‘It’s even better when you help.’” Now she was quoting Lauren Bacall from To Have and Have Not. “‘Oh, whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad.’” That was from a ghost story. Well, this was a ghost story.
“I know how to whistle,” he said dreamily. “Just put your lips to the bottle and suck.” It warmed him to know that all this was making sense to her, as it would not to anyone outside the once-cozy bounds of their marriage. This had to be Susan’s genuine ghost.
“And you can sled all the way down the hill, right out of the sunlight—on good old Rosebud,” said Susan’s voice. Susan had always loved Citizen Kane. “This Bud’s for you.”
The cup of coffee still steamed on the table. Crane touched it. The handle was as hot as if it had been sitting in an oven, but an instant later it was damply cold, and the cup had become a bottle of Budweiser.
He picked it up curiously. It seemed to be a real beer.
“It’s the only way you can reach me now.”
One sip never hurt anybody, he thought. He tipped up the bottle, but paused with it still short of his lips.
“Go ahead,” said the voice in the telephone. “They’ll see only a coffee cup. Diana won’t know about us. Who cares what hands go where?”
A drink, he thought, and sleep, and Susan in my dreams.
“You’ll have two eyes again,” she said. “Your father won’t have hurt you, won’t have left you. I won’t have left you.”
Crane could remember how he had worshiped his father when he was five years old, and how he had loved Susan. Those had been good things; nobody could claim they had not.
There was a knock at the hallway door, and Crane jumped, splashing cold beer out onto his wrist.
“Quick,” said Susan.
Whoever it was out in the hall was calling, “Heidi, Heidi.”
“It’s just one of my drunks,” said Susan urgently. “I’ll send him away. Drink me!”
The wetness of the beer was cold on Crane’s wrist. He remembered old Ozzie fixing bottles of formula for the infant Diana. Crane’s foster father had heated the bottles in a pan of hot water and tested the temperature by shaking out drops onto his wrist. He wouldn’t have let her have it as cold as this.
I can’t let her have it as cold as this, he thought. My love for my father, my love for Susan were good things, but Diana loves me now. I love her now.
He wondered if, in the next room, Diana was sensing his temptation to embrace the dead.
“No,” he said, all at once shivering in his flimsy cotton dress in the chill of the air conditioning, his voice finally breaking. “No, I—I won’t, not—not me, not your husband. If you are any part of—my real wife, then you can’t want me to, at this cost.” He put the beer down.
“You think you can help your sister?” asked Susan, her voice shrill over the phone. “You can’t help her. Oh, please, Scott, it’s your wife you can help, and yourself! And your real father, whose feelings you haven’t thought of once.”
“Heidi, Heidi!” came the call again from the hallway.
“Oh, go and die!” wailed Susan. Crane thought she was probably talking to the man in the hall, but he chose, despairingly, to take it as addressed to himself.
“I’ll go,” said Crane, “and if I die, at least I’ll—” What, he thought. Be aware of it. Still be the man Diana loves. He took the receiver away from his ear and swept it toward the phone cradle—and his fingers went numb and dropped it.
He reached for the receiver on the floor with his other hand, and it, too, went numb; he was only able to brush the plastic crescent with limp fingers.
“You love me!” cried the voice out of the receiver.
Gasping for breath, almost sobbing, Crane got down on his hands and knees and picked the thing up in his teeth. Susan’s pleading voice was a buzzing in his jaw-muscles now, vibrating through his head. His vision blurred, and he felt his very consciousness fading, but he bit down harder and got up on his knees.
Tears and saliva were beaded on the receiver when he had dropped it at last into the cradle, silencing the voice, and his teeth had cut dents into the plastic.
He flopped back against the side of the bed and blurrily saw that the connecting door was open again; Diana and Dinh were staring at him in uncomprehending alarm, and Mavranos crossed to the hallway door and pulled it open.
Dondi Snayheever walked in on tiptoes, jerking his filthy bandaged hand up and down and smiling crazily with all his teeth. “Heidi Heidi ho,” he said.
Mavranos had moved quickly back to the bed and slipped his hand into the canvas bag in which he kept his .38.
Crane wiped his face on the bedspread and stood up. “What do you want?” he asked Snayheever unsteadily; though he was still panting, he wearily tried to put authority into his voice.
Snayheever had lost weight; his skull shone through his feverish skin, and Crane could faintly see a red aura flickering around the young man’s angular body. The wounded arm was still twitching. Then Snayheever’s bright eyes lit on Diana, and he grunted as though he’d been hit and fell to his knees. “Eye of the flamingo,” he said, “not the crow. I’ve found you at last, Mother.”
After a moment Diana walked over to him, ignoring Mavranos’s bark of warning, and touched Snayheever’s greasy hair. “Stand up,” she said.
Snayheever got to his feet—awkwardly, for his left leg had started jerking. “The other one will find you and kill you,” he said, “if I don’t stop him. But I will. It’s what I have left to do.” He tugged at the lapels of his corduroy coat. “A coat I borrowed from James Dean, and I’ll sing there for the two of you, like a bird, like a lovely little stork that wheels in circling flight, right? Hemingway said that. Flight makes right and he’ll bite. You could say that. I’ve got my finger on the pulse, jammed behind the license plate, and it’s at the penstocks and spillways and floodgates. And he wants to let the spinning wheel go circling around another twenty years, since he’s got a busted nose now—a tweaked beak—and no Queen. He’s gonna squawk on the wave band so nobody can hear anything until it’s too late, and he’ll dirty up the bath water so it’s too screwed up for anyone else to use at all. Ray-Joe, it’s a sad salvation.”
“He’s talking about my brother,” said Nardie, “and it makes sense.”
“Sure, he’s got my vote,” growled Mavranos, his hand obviously tight on the grip of the gun in the bag. “Diana, will you get away from him?”
Diana stepped back and stood beside Crane.
“He means that my brother is at Hoover Dam,” said Nardie tensely, “and that Ray-Joe is going to try to postpone the succession, the coronation, the King’s resurrection in the new bodies—let the cycle go around again, with no issue this time. It’s what Ray-Joe would do; if I did break his nose, he can’t become the King this time around. You’ve got to be physically perfect to do that, and he’ll still have a couple of black eyes and be all puffy, okay? So he’s going to…generate some kind of damping psychic noise, to drown out the King’s signal, and then I think spiritually pollute the water, and everybody will have to wait another twenty years for all this to be ripe again. By then the old King will probably be dead, not having been able to get into any new bodies, and Ray-Joe will have had time to groom another Queen, probably right from birth—and he’ll be able to just step right up to the throne and…sit right down.”
“God,” said Crane, trying to keep the eager relief out of his voice, “is that so bad? If your brother screws it up so that my father can’t do his tricks this year, then I won’t lose my body. And we can all just go home, can’t we? And I’ll have twenty years to think up what to do when finally his…hour comes round at last.”
Nardie stared at him. “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “But you won’t have a wife. Ray-Joe will have found Diana and killed her, like this guy says. Ray-Joe would never want somebody like her for his Queen, and just by being alive, she’d be a big problem, okay?”
“The phone is for calling room service,” said Snayheever, pointing at the bitten telephone on the bedside table. “You order…foods, your various items from a menu, and you eat them. What you don’t do is eat the telephone.” He nodded emphatically. “He’ll
try to eat me, I shouldn’t wonder. I always have a dog. For now he barks all night long at the end of his tether.”
He looked up at Diana. “This son came here to, as you would say, because he wanted to say good-bye to his mother,” he said softly. “We won’t meet again.”
Diana’s eyes were wet as she again ignored Mavranos’s shout and crossed to Snayheever and hugged him, and Crane knew she was thinking about Scat and Oliver.
“Good-bye,” she said a moment later as she released him and stepped back.
“It’s not an easy thing,” Snayheever said, “being a son.” He turned his hot gaze on Crane. “I forgive you, Dad.”
Crane looked at the grimy, stained bandage at the end of the shaking arm, and he nodded, acknowledging that he was grateful to have the forgiveness.
Then Snayheever had turned and limped out into the hall.
Mavranos, his hand still in the canvas bag, crossed to the door and closed it. “Lotta fucked-up people wandering around,” he said quietly. He turned to Nardie. “Your brother’s at the dam, right? And if he disarms the old man’s clock, he’s gonna come looking for Diana.”
“That’s it.”
Mavranos sighed and touched the bandanna around his neck. “One more day,” he said. “I guess I’m going to the dam. Anybody need a ride south?”
Diana looked at him solemnly. “Thank you, Arky. I wish—”
Mavranos gave her a dismissing wave. “None of us exactly like doing what we’re doing. I’ll stop at a pet store on the way and get me a goldfish, just for luck. How about the ride?”
“Yes,” said Diana. “Nardie and I have to go get baptized.”
Crane plodded around the bed and picked up his purse. “Give me half an hour to stack my deck, and I’ll go, too.”
Nardie and Diana had bought a couple of big cans of red paint and some brushes the day before and had painted Mavranos’s Suburban.
