Mavranos had got out and swung open the back of the truck to help Scott down, uneasily noting the fresh blood blotting Scott’s shirt from the unhealing wound in his side, and though Mavranos had been afraid that they’d be arrested as looters, Scott had insisted on hobbling across the empty street and inspecting the damage.
They had climbed in among the apartments picking their way over the drywall and joist beams and aluminum window frames that had fallen across beds and couches, and shuffled carefully across springy, uneven floors, and stared at the body counts spray-painted by rescue workers on the pictureless walls.
When they had clambered outside again, Scott had sat down on the metal box of a fallen air-conditioning unit. Harsh, shouting rap music echoed from some open window on the other side of the street. “My lands are in disorder,” Crane said. “Broken.”
“From underneath,” said Mavranos stolidly. He had agreed with Dinh that the resurgent phylloxera plague in the north California wine country was a bad sign for Scott’s reign, a message of discontent “from six feet under.”
Scott squinted toward the far side of the empty street. “Sitting on a, an air-conditioning unit, weeping again the king my father’s wreck, this music gibbered by me upon the pavement.” He laid his bare wrist on a torn edge of metal. “So what am not doing? Just five weeks ago the old Flamingo building in Las Vegas was torn down—that was my father’s castle, when he was king, before I killed him—wasn’t that a victory? Las Vegas is turning into a family place, a kid’s place. And Diana and I have had four children, and we…get three crops a year at the Leucadia place ….”
“Why don’t you ever prune back the grapevines, in the winter?”
“They don’t need it. …” He looked up at Mavranos and gave him a wasted grin through his disordered beard. “Well, they don’t, you know. But okay, that’s not the reason. I did prune ’em back, in that first winter after Las Vegas, but later I—I dreamed about it. In the dreams, the branches bled where they were cut; and I dreamed about Ozzie, turned to dust at the touch of Death and blowing away across the desert.”
Mavranos just nodded, and wished he’d brought along one of the beers from the truck Scott and Diana weren’t related, but they had both been informally adopted by the same man, an old-time poker player named Oliver Crane but known in the poker world as Ozzie Smith. He had disappeared in the desert outside Las Vegas during the tumultuous Holy Week of 1990, and Scott had always maintained that the old man had died in saving Scott from a murderous embodiment of Dionysus and Death that had taken the physical form of Scott’s dead wife Susan.
“Maybe you’re s’posed to dream about Death, Pogo,” Mavranos said. “It’s one of the Major Arcana in the tarot deck, and I get the idea that in your dreams you practically go bar-hopping with the rest of that crowd.”
“I humanize them,” Scott said. “A perfect Fisher King wouldn’t just have a wounded side, he’d have no left arm or leg or eye, like the santeria orisha called Osain—his other half was the land itself. I take the archetypes into myself, and they stop being just savage outside influences like rain or fire, and start to be allies—family, blood relations—a little.”
“Poor old Death sounds like the bad witch in Sleeping Beauty,” said Mavranos. “Pissed off because she was the only one not invited to the christening.”
“You haven’t …been there, Arky. Death isn’t a…it doesn’t embody a characteristic that shows up in humans, the way the others do, so you can’t relate to it at all. There’s no common ground. It has no face—and I can’t just arbitrarily assign the face of, say, poor Susan to it, ‘cause that was just my own personal closest death mirrored back at me; anybody else there would have seen some face from their past.” He coughed weakly and shook his head. “In the court of the tarot archectypes, Death’s just a blobby black hole in the floor.”
Mavranos had taken a deep breath then—and he wondered if he could bring himself to say what he thought he had to say here, for Scott Crane was his closest friend, and Mavranos was godfather of Scott and Diana’s first child—but he made himself say it: “Seems to me there is … one face you could put on Death.”
Crane sat there on the air conditioner and stared at the dead grass and didn’t speak, and Mavranos wondered if he had heard him. Then Crane shifted, and coughed again. “You mean the fat man in the desert,” he said softly. “My father’s bodyguard, my father’s emotionless hired assassin. And I killed him, in cold blood—the first shot was in self-defense, to save you as much as me, but he was still alive after that. The last five shots, when he was lying in the gully below the road, were to make sure he didn’t wind up recovering in a hospital.”
Mavranos nodded, though Crane couldn’t see the gesture. The fat man had at some time become a localized embodiment of one of the oldest, possibly pre-human archetypes, a cold figure of almost Newtonian retribution which showed up spontaneously in desert swap-meet legendry and country-western songs and insane-asylum artwork and even, as a repeating obese silhouette, in certain iterative mathematical equations on the complex number plane. Diana’s mother had been an avatar of the Moon Goddess, and the fat man had killed her outside the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas—“shot the moon in the face”—when Diana had been an infant, in 1960. Mavranos had not been sorry when Crane had killed the fat man, but that homicide was surely Crane’s letter of introduction, his indenture, to the kingdom of death.
“No,” said Crane finally. “It can’t be done. It doesn’t need to be done.”
Mavranos had thought of reminding him of the phylloxera, had considered mentioning the many species of tropical fish that had recently stopped being born with any distinct sexes, and the rapid decline in the sperm count of modern male humans—even the slow, progressive collapse of Hollywood Boulevard down into the catacombs being dug for the MTA Metro Rail—but at that point an unkempt middle-aged couple and their two blank-eyed children had come shuffling up through the brown grass to where the bearded king sat, and had hesitantly asked Scott if everything was going to be okay. They were living in their car, they told him, and had hung curtains in the windows, and were wondering if they shouldn’t simply keep living in those cozy quarters forever, even after the houses had been put back up again.
Scott had wearily told them that he would do what he could; and they had showed no surprise, only sympathetic gratitude, when Scott had pushed his own wrist down onto the jagged piece of metal and then held out his hand so that his blood dripped rapidly onto the dry dirt.
Mavranos had muttered a panicky curse and sprinted to the nearby truck for the first-aid kit. And he had noted bleakly, after he had tied a bandage around Scott’s wrist and helped him up for the walk back to the truck, that no flowers had sprung up from where the king’s blood had fallen.
“IT’S WHAT Nardie Dinh calls the Law of Imperative Resemblance,” said Mavranos to Angelica and Pete now.
Fog was beginning to roll in off the ocean, and Mavranos knew that it would be getting worse as the night wore on toward dawn and their route led them inland at Gaviota; maybe he’d get Pete to drive for a while. “There are eternal potent forms out there,” Mavranos went on, “idiosyncratic outlines, and if you take on enough characteristics of one of the forms, if you come to resemble it closely enough, knowingly or not, you find that you’re wearing the whole damned outfit—you’ve become the thing. It arrives upon you.”