Tim Powers - Last Call (45 page)

Crane hadn't even been aware of the point when his consciousness had finally been pounded away into the oblivion of sleep—there had been a full bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon in the hotel room, and he had pulled his mouth free from Susan's hot wetness whenever she began to deflate under him, and he had each time taken yet another slug from the bottle to restore her sweaty, demanding solidity—but when he woke up, hours later, it was with an almost audible crash.

He was lying naked on the carpet in a patch of sunlight, and for several minutes he didn't move at all beyond working his lungs; the abused machinery of his strength was entirely occupied with trying to hold back the pains that were drawn tight through his body and seemed to have stitched him to the floor. His head and groin were the unthinkably stained, dried-out husks of run-over animals by the side of some savage highway.

Eventually one thought made its way through his mind like a man climbing through the roofless, wreckage-choked hallway of a bombed-out house:
If that was sex, I am ready to gladly embrace Death.

From where he lay he could see the Wild Turkey bottle, empty and lying on its side on the rug. He realized dully that he was completely blind in his false eye again.

For a while he had no further thoughts. He climbed up onto his knees—noting dizzily that the disarranged bed, though stained with blood and bourbon, was empty—and then got all the way up onto his feet. He swayed perilously as he tottered to the uncurtained window.

He must have been on about the tenth floor. Below him was a big swimming pool in the shape of an oval with its ends dented in, and framing the pool on the east side like a parenthesis was the scabrous roof of a building he recognized at once, despite seeing it from above for the first time.

It was the original three- and four-story Flamingo building, dwarfed and diminished by the mirror-glass high-rise towers that now surrounded it on three sides and hid it from the Strip, and he was obscurely depressed to see that concrete, and pink chaise lounges with tanned bodies on them, covered the spot where Ben Siegel's rose garden had stood.

He lurched away from the window and shakily picked up his pants. If thine eye offendeth thee, pluck it out, he thought; and if thine alertness offendeth thee, go out and find something to drown it with.

There was a liquor store on Flamingo Road just behind the hotel's multi-story parking structure, and after walking up and down its narrow aisles for a while, he fumbled a hundred-dollar bill loose from one of the wads in his pocket and paid for two six-packs of Budweiser and—it seemed important—a cheap leather Jughead-style crown-cap with silver-painted plastic animals hung all over it and LAS VEGAS printed in gold across the front. The clerk had no trouble making change for a hundred.

Crane put the cap on his head and tucked the bagged six-packs under his arm and started walking back toward the Flamingo. After a few steps in the hot sun he dug one of the cans out of the paper bag and popped it open. Legal to drink on the street in this town, he told himself.

He took a sip of the cold, foamy stuff and smiled as it cooled the overheated machinery of him.
And malt does more than Milton can,
he thought, quoting A. E. Housman,
To justify God's ways to man.

He was walking more slowly now, enjoying the dry sun-heat of the morning on his face, and he began to sing:

"Makin' breakfast of a … pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop … six-pack,
I fought the dri-ink and the … drink won,
I fought the dri-ink and the … drink won."

He laughed, took another deep sip, and started another song:

"I'm back on the sauce again,
Gonna take up … that old True Cross again
Gonna welcome that loss again,
Remembering nothing, woe woe, remembering nothing."

Half a dozen men were sitting in a circle next to a Dumpster behind the liquor store, and Crane turned his wavering steps toward them.

When he approached to within a few yards of the Dumpster, they looked up warily, and he saw that they were playing some card game. Five of the men were in their twenties or thirties, but the sixth looked as if he were about a hundred years old; he was wearing a lime green polyester leisure suit, and his bony hands and bald head were stippled with brown spots.

One of the younger men gave Crane an unfriendly look. "You got a problem, Sluggo?"

Crane grinned, remembering that he had left his gun up in his room somewhere. "A problem?" he said. "Yeah, I got a problem. I got a bunch of beer here, and I can't find anybody who'll drink it with me."

The man relaxed and smiled, though he was still frowning. "Around here we help out strangers. Sit down."

Crane sat down on the asphalt with his back against the hot metal of the Dumpster. They were playing Lowball Poker, in which the worst hand wins, for quarters—though when a raise came around, he saw that the very old man was betting with the brown ovals of flattened pennies.

"Doctor Leaky gets to play with junk 'cause he buys the liquor," explained the one who had challenged Crane; his name seemed to be Wiz-Ding. "If you keep up the good work, maybe you can work up to playing with trash, too."

Crane managed to find a couple of dollars' worth of quarters in his pockets, and he played a few hands, but, like yesterday, he kept getting pat high Trips and Full Boats, which were loser hands in Lowball.

"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 Khayyam 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?
Ninos 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.