Tim Powers - Last Call (69 page)

"
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.

As he jiggled on the front seat of the barreling truck now, Crane tried to hold his head in a position at which the cracks in the windshield would not pick up the garish red of the hood. He didn't like to see what seemed to be a metallic red spider flickering on the horizon.

"Visions and dreams and a crazy man's talk," Mavranos said resentfully, squinting ahead and steering with the fingers of one hand. "We're probably all crazy, too—look what they've done to my truck, Ma." With his free hand he lifted his can of beer and took a foamy sip. "I knew a guy once who claimed he was a Martian. His TV set had told him he was. Makes just as much sense as any of this. Poor old Joe Serrano, I should apologize to him."

Diana stirred on the back seat. "That's not a Martian name," she said, "that's a Mexican name. Who was he trying to fool?"

Crane started laughing, and soon they all were, and Mavranos put his beer between his thighs to grip the wheel with both hands.

At Boulder Beach, still short of the marina, Mavranos pulled over and stopped on the shoulder to let Diana and Nardie climb out. The beach was only a hundred yards away, beyond the ranks of colorful campers and RVs with their awnings flapping, and the lake was blue against the distant jagged brown mountains of the far shore.

"By afternoon everything should be over," Diana said, standing on the roadside gravel and leaning in through Crane's rolled-down window. "Us girls will walk up to the marina after we've had our dip. There's a hotel there, Scott says, the Lakeview Lodge. Let's meet at the bar." She kissed Crane, and he curled his fingers in her blond hair and kissed her fiercely.

"And tomorrow," he said when he had finally let go of her, "we'll get married." His voice was hoarse.

"That's what we'll do," she said. "Arky, Scott—both of you watch it, hear? And we'll be careful, too. We need to have a bride and groom and maid of honor and best man. All four."

Mavranos nodded, then took his foot off the brake and gave the engine gas and in seconds had swung back onto the highway.

"Drop you off at the marina?" he said, loudly over the wind in the open windows.

"Sure, that's close enough. I'm getting better at walking in these shoes."

"Couldn't tell to watch you do it."

"I'd like to see
you
try it."

"I bet you would, Pogo." Mavranos took another sip of his beer. "On the phone—she tried to talk you into ditching Diana and going with her instead?"

"Yeah." Crane shivered in his dress. "I talked myself out of it."

"Jawed from the snatch of defeat."

"Yeah, right." He shifted around on the seat. "Arky, I—"

"Don't say it. You may be wearing a dress, but that don't mean you can kiss me, too."

Crane smiled, feeling the makeup in the creases of his face. "Okay. Be there this afternoon."

Mavranos made a right turn, toward the marina, and at a red light Crane climbed out of the truck and straightened his dress. He rapped on the red hood the way a Craps shooter might blow on dice, and then the light had changed and the blotchy truck boomed on across the intersection.

Crane walked slowly down the slope toward the gleaming white boats moored at the docks and slips, and he was not even aware now of derisive hoots from a passing car. He walked in the sunlight and the cool breeze and the smells of lake water and gasoline and sage, and he thought of all the people who were dead: Susan, and Ozzie, and the fat man, and probably Al Funo, too, considering the way Diana had said she'd set
him
up. And tomorrow night Crane and Arky and Diana and Nardie might be down in the black water themselves, down where the Archetypes lived. He wondered if in some dim way ghosts were able to talk among themselves, and, if so, what they would all talk about.

"Ahoy, Cinderella!" came a call from ahead of him. He looked up, and saw one of the Amino Acids waving at him from the deck of the houseboat. Crane quickened his pace.

"You wait till high noon," the young man said, "and you'll turn into a pumpkin left on the dock here. Skate your weird ass over, girl, and step into my metal detector, as the spider said to the fly. There're a dozen aboard now already, and you're number thirteen."