Last Call Page 12

  “‘And human love needs human meriting,’” he whispered, quoting Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven,” which had been one of Susan’s favorite poems. “‘How hast thou merited—Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?’” He laughed again, chokingly, and took a deep sniff of the smoky fumes. “‘Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, Save Me, save only Me?’” The speaker in the poem had been God, but he supposed gods were relative.

  He stared into the glass.

  The telephone rang, and he didn’t move. It rang again, and then he shook his head sharply and poured the liquor over his bandage. He hissed at the new pain as he grabbed the receiver.

  “Ahhh—you?”

  “Right.” Diana sniffed. “The only reason I’m doing this is that I think he would, if you’d got him. Do you remember where he used to take us for—for bodonuts, a lot of Sunday mornings?”

  “Sure, sure.” This is urgent, he told himself; you’re back in the fight, pay attention.

  “I’ll call him and tell him you want to meet him there tomorrow at noon. I’ve met him there once or twice; it’s the only place he’ll agree to talk. Okay? He probably won’t come at all. And listen, if”—she was crying, and he could hear fright in her voice when she spoke again—“if he does, and you’ve got bad friends, tell them he doesn’t know where I am or how to reach me, will you? Make them believe it, I swear on my children it’s the truth.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there.” He rubbed his face. “Diana, you have kids? Are you married? How long—”

  “Scott, this isn’t a social call!”

  “Diana, I love you, too. I swear I’ll kill myself before I let anybody use me to get at you.” He laughed hoarsely. “I’m good at stabbing myself, I discover. God, kid, this is your brother, Scott, please tell me, where are you?”

  He could hear her sniffling. “Where I am is, I’m flying in the grass.”

  The phrase meant nothing to Crane.

  Again there was the click of a broken connection.

  He rolled over gingerly and then got up on his hands and knees, sweating and cursing and wincing as he involuntarily flexed the torn muscles in his leg.

  I can’t leave by the front door, he thought. Even the back door is probably being viewed through the cross-hairs of a riflescope, according to Arky.

  It’s got to be the bedroom window.

  And I’ve got to crawl, at least as far as the hallway, so as not to be seen from outside.

  He knew there was no one else in the house…no other human. What the hell was the Susan thing? It was real enough for Arky to have seen it—and even spoken to it!—and substantial enough to have carried a bottle and glass into the living room.

  The chair in front of him—Susan, the real Susan, had reupholstered it a couple of summers ago. And she had moved the leaning bookcase against the wall corner so that it stood up straight, and she had painted the floors. Yesterday he had wondered if her imprint was so distinct on the place that it could project a tangible image of her.

  Yesterday, somehow, he had not found the notion horrible.

  Now he was trembling at the thought of meeting the thing in the hall, perhaps also on its hands and knees, face to fake face.

  He imagined the face white, with solid white eyeballs like an old Greek statue. What might it say? Would its smile resemble Susan’s remembered smile?

  He shivered and blinked tears out of his eyes. Susan, Susan, he thought, why did you die? Why did you leave me here?

  How much of you is in this thing?

  He began crawling toward the dark hallway arch. Ozzie had never taught him or Diana any prayers, so he whispered the words of religious Christmas carols…until he found himself reciting the lyrics of “Sonny Boy,” and he closed his throat.

  In the hall he stood up, putting his weight on his good leg. Through the open bedroom door he could see the gray rectangle that was the broken-out window, past the dark bulk of the bed, and he made himself walk forward, into the room.

  The door of the closet was open, and she was in there, crouched on the pile of clothes that had been yanked off of the hangers.

  “Leaving me to go off with your friends,” she whispered.

  He didn’t look at her. “You’re—” he began, then stopped, unable to say “dead.” He knelt on the bed and crawled toward the window. “You’re not her,” he said unsteadily.

  “I’m becoming her. Soon I’ll be her.” The room was suddenly full of the smell of hot coffee. “I’ll fill the cavity.”

  “I’ve…got to go,” he said, clinging to the ordinariness of the phrase.

  He carefully swung his cut leg out the window first, then followed it with the other and gripped the sides of the window frame. The night air was cold.

  There was a quiet but violent thumping and whining in the closet—apparently she was having some kind of fit. He boosted himself down to the dry grass and limped away across the dark yard toward the gap in the fence.

  CHAPTER 11

  How Did I Kill Myself?

  Crane squinted against the glitter of the morning sun on the rushing freeway pavement.

  Rain had been clattering in the roof gutters and hissing in the trees when he and Mavranos had furtively left Mavranos’s apartment by the back door, a couple of hours before dawn; but after they’d eaten breakfast in a coffee shop on the other side of town and had walked back out to the parking lot, Mavranos sucking on a toothpick, the sun had been shining in a cleared blue sky, and only the chill of the door handle and the window crank had reminded Crane that it was not yet summer.

  They were driving in a station wagon-style truck Mavranos had bought from some impound yard last fall, a big boxy 1972 Suburban with a cracked windshield and oversize tires and an old coat of desert-abraded blue paint. The truck shook and squeaked as it barreled along down the Newport Freeway, but Mavranos drove it easily with one hand on the big steering wheel and the other holding a can of Coors wrapped in what he called a “deceptor”—a rectangle of supple plastic with the Coca-Cola logo printed on it.

  In the passenger seat, with his knees up because of the litter of books and socket wrench sets and old clothes on the floorboards, Crane sipped lukewarm coffee from a Styrofoam cup and tried to brace himself against the vehicle’s shaking. Mavranos had bandaged his gashed thigh with the easy competence of an old Boy Scout and had assured Crane that it wouldn’t fester, but the leg ached and throbbed, and the one time Crane had bumped it against a chair arm the world had gone colorless and he had had to look at the floor and breathe deeply to keep from fainting.

  He was wearing a pair of Mavranos’s old jeans, rolled up at the ankles like a kid’s because they were too long in the legs.

  Leaning his hot forehead now against the cold window glass, he realized that it must have been a long time since he had last traveled on this freeway. He remembered broad, irrigated fields of string beans and strawberries stretching away on either side, but now there were “Auto Malls,” and gigantic buildings of bronze-colored glass with names like UNiSYS and WANG on them, and clusters of shiny new banks and condominiums and hotels around the double-level marble-and-skylights-and-ferns shopping mall called South Coast Plaza.

  It was an Orange County with no orange trees anymore, a region conquered by developers, who had made it sterile even as they had made it fabulously valuable, and the moneyed complacency of the area seemed by definition to exclude people like him and Arky as surely as it had come to exclude the farmers.

  “Suits,” growled Mavranos after a glance away from the traffic ahead. He paused to sip his beer. “They…replicate. The freeways are dead stopped half the time, you can’t exercise in this air and you can’t eat fish you catch in the bay, and nobody who’d speak to you or me can afford a house even though the suits have terraced all the old hills and canyons with the damn things…and have you noticed that these people don’t do anything? They’re all middlemen—they sell stuff or broker stuff or package stuff or advertise stuff or speculate in stu
ff.”

  Crane grinned weakly against the window glass. “Some of ’em must do things, Arky.”

  “I suppose—but any such’ll soon be crowded out. The suits I’m talking about are growing, replicating, at the expense of everything else, even the plain old goddamn dirt and water.”

  A new BMW passed them at high speed on the right.

  “Susan’s dead,” Crane said suddenly. “My wife.”

  Mavranos turned to stare at him for a moment, and his foot was off the accelerator. “When?” he barked. “How? When did you hear this?”

  “It happened thirteen weeks ago. Remember when the paramedics came, and I said she fainted?” Crane finished the coffee and tossed the Styrofoam cup into the back of the truck. “Actually she died. Fibrillation. Heart attack.”

  “Bullshit thirteen weeks, I—”

  “That’s not her, what you saw and talked to. That’s…I don’t know what it is, some kind of ghost. I’d have told you about it before, but it was only last night that I…figured out it must have something to do with this cards stuff.”

  Mavranos shook his head, frowning fiercely. “Are—are you sure? That she’s dead? You weren’t drunk, maybe, and she left you or something?”

  “Arky, I—” Crane spread his hands helplessly. “I’m sure.”

  “Goddammit.” Mavranos was staring straight ahead at the traffic, but he was gulping, and his eyes were bright. “You better tell me about this shit, Pogo.”

  Crane took the beer can out of Arky’s hand and took a deep sip. “She was drinking coffee one morning,” he began.

  They parked in a big lot just west of the Balboa pier and then walked away from the thunder and spume of the surf to the narrow, tree-shaded lane that was Main Street. Crane’s leg ached and throbbed, and several times he called for a pause just to breathe deeply and stand with his weight on his good leg.

  Balboa was quiet on this spring morning. Cars hissed past on the wet pavement of Balboa Boulevard, but there were empty parking places along the curbs, and the only people on the sidewalks seemed to be locals heading for the bakery, lured by the smell of hot coffee on the chilly breeze.

  “Where’d you used to get these—these godonuts?” asked Mavranos, his hands in the pockets of his tattered khaki jacket.

  “Bodonuts,” Crane said. “My kid sister made up the word. It’s Balboa doughnuts. Not here. Over on the island.”

  Over on the island. The phrase upset him somehow, and he didn’t like the idea that even now there was a lot of water nearby—the channel ahead of them and the ocean behind.

  “‘Fear death by water,’” said Mavranos.

  Crane glanced at him sharply. “What?”

  “That’s from The Waste Land—you know, T. S. Eliot. At the beginning of the poem, when Madame Sosostris is reading the Tarot cards. ‘And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,/ Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,/ Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find/ The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.’”

  Crane stopped walking again, and stared at him. A sea gull was strutting along the sidewalk, and somewhere overhead another one called shrilly.

  “You go around reading T. S. Eliot,” Crane said.

  Mavranos squinted belligerently. “I study. I may not have read all your Hemingway and Prowst and H. Salt Fitzgerald, but I find out a lot of stuff, from all sorts of books, that has to do with me finding a cure—and if you can’t see that it also has to do with your troubles, then—”

  “No, no, I do see it. You’re going to have to tell me a lot more about The Waste Land and about Eliot. It’s just that…it’s rare to run across someone who just pops off with an Eliot quote, just like that.”

  “You evidently haven’t noticed that I’m a rare person, Pogo.”

  Doing a kind of limping shuffle now, Crane led Mavranos down Main and past the dressy seafood restaurant to the far sidewalk, beyond the railing of which pleasure boats rocked at their moorings on the gray-green swell. The ferry dock was to their left, past the Fun Zone with its arcades and palm-readers and frozen-banana-on-a-stick stands, but even this narrow area had taken on an air of sophistication since the days when he used to come here with Ozzie and Diana.

  It used to be all garishly painted shacky plywood buildings, with hippies and drunks slouching along the stained sidewalk, but now there were stairways with brass railings leading up to terrace restaurants with patio umbrellas, and video games flashing in the arcade, and a glossy merry-go-round that played a weirdly swing version of “Ain’t We Got Fun.”

  Crane felt even more out of place here than he had on the freeway.

  One ferry was at the dock, its iron gate swung up to let three cars move booming and creaking up the wooden ramp to the pavement; another ferry was receding away, now about halfway across the mile-wide channel. The ferries, with their worn red and white paint and weathered floorboards, seemed to be the only elements of the local scene that might date from Crane’s time.

  Crane stepped aboard, not liking the shifting of the deck. Fear death by water, he thought.

  The wide wooden seats were puddled with rain water this morning, so after giving two quarters to the girl in the yellow rubber rain suit with the money changer on her canvas belt, Crane and Mavranos stood braced on the gray-painted tar paper deck as the engine gunned and the boat surged gently out onto the face of the water, and they watched the palm trees and boat masts and low buildings of Balboa Island draw closer.

  Mavranos pushed back his ragged black hair and peered over the rail. “Jesus, look at all the fish—bass and mackerel, damn, and that’s a sand shark. You could fire a shotgun into the water and kill a dozen of ’em.”

  Crane looked down into the water at the many vague forms under the surface. “I’ll bet Saturn will be bright tonight,” he said softly, “with all his moons moving behind him.”

  They got off the ferry at the island dock and walked east along the broad waterfront walk, between expensive, yardless houses to the left and a short, sloping beach fretted with private docks to the right. Crane was limping along steadily, though his face was sweaty and pale.

  Dark clouds were moving in again from the north and west, contrasting vividly with the patches of blue sky. Crane looked up and saw high-circling sea gulls lit white by the slanting sun against a backdrop of black cumulus.

  At the southern end of Marine Street a thick pipe protruded from the sand slope and extended a few yards out into the water. DANGER, said a sign above it, END OF STORM DRAIN.

  More water, thought Crane, and dangerous. “It’s to the left here,” he said nervously. “There’s a market up ahead. Vegetables, bread—that’s where we used to get the doughnuts. Old place, been there since the twenties. You wait here.”

  “I might be able to help.”

  “You look like Genghis Khan. Trust me, wait here.”

  “Okay, Pogo, but if the old guy’s there, remember everything he says.”

  “Hey, I’m sober today, remember?”

  Crane limped away up the street, still in sunlight but walking toward the darkness that was tucked in under the northern clouds. Narrow houses crowded up to the sidewalks; the only people he saw were women kneeling in tiny gardens and men doing incomprehensible work with shrill, hand-held power tools in open garages on this Saturday morning.

  The market was called Hershey’s Market now, not the Arden’s Milk Market Spot as he remembered, and what used to be a drugstore across the street was currently a real estate office; but the shapes of the buildings were the same, and he began trying to walk faster.

  “Freeze, Scott.”

  The remembered voice was still authoritative, and Crane obeyed automatically. Hesitantly he looked to the side and saw a tall, thin figure in the shadow under the awning of the old Village Inn restaurant, twenty feet away across the puddled street.

  “Oz?”

  “I’ve got a gun, cocked, hollow-point slugs, pointed straight at my own heart,” said the old man tensely. “Who’s
your friend down by the water?”

  “He’s a neighbor of mine, he’s in the same sort of trouble I’m in. I—”

  “What the hell kind of truck is that to drive around in?”

  “Truck…? The one we came in? It’s his, it’s a Suburban; he buys cars from an impound yard—”

  “Never mind. What book were you reading when we went to get Diana?”

  “Goddamn, Oz, you’ve got no right to expect me to remember that, but it was The Monster Men, by Edgar Rice—”

  “Okay, he hasn’t had the next game yet. Probably be this Easter, though.” The old man stepped out of the shadows, leaning on an aluminum ortho cane with a quadripod base. His hair was thin and cottony white over his pink scalp, and he was wearing a baggy dark gray suit with a white shirt and blue tie. His free hand stayed in the right side pocket of his coat as he walked slowly across the wet pavement to Crane. “What do you want from me?”

  Tears blurred Crane’s eyes. “How about How’ve you been? Christ, I made a mistake, I was a stupid kid; how many kids aren’t? Aren’t you going to forgive me even now, twenty years later? This thing looks like killing me, and you’re acting like—”

  “You look like hell,” the old man said harshly. “You drink way too much, don’t you? And now, when it’s too late, you’re driving around with some bum in a joke truck trying to figure out how to stop the rain. Shit.” He let his cane stand by itself and stepped forward and threw his free arm around Crane. “I love you, boy, but you’re a dead man,” he said muffledly into Crane’s collar.

  “Christ, Oz, I love you,” Crane said, clasping the old man’s narrow shoulders. “And even if I am dead, it’s good to see you one more time. But listen, tell me what happened. How did I kill myself by playing in that—that God damned game?”