Nardie had been squeezing the chip, and now she gasped and opened her hand. There was blood on her palm.
"It's got an edge," she said wonderingly.
"It'd better have." Diana held out her own hand. "Cut me, too, and then see if it will cut them."
Five miles to the southeast, the canyon-spanning concrete shoulders of Hoover Dam held back the lake.
After Mavranos had parked his truck in the broad lot by the snack stand on the Arizona side of the dam, and begun the long walk through the heat back toward the arc of the dam where the tourists had been milling with their cameras when he had driven by, the first thing he became aware of over his own exhaustion was the crying children.
The Arizona Spillway was a vast, smoothly curving abyss to his right, big enough, he thought dizzily, for God to take a roomy bath in or for ten million skateboarders to fly away down to their doom; but it was the agitated line of humanity, dwarfed to insect scale by the immensity of the dam, that commanded his attention.
Everyone was hurrying past him, back toward the parking lot. Children wailed, and the wheels of rental baby carriages being pushed too fast rattled shrilly on the concrete, and the adults all seemed to be in shock; their faces were blank-eyed and twisted with rage and horror and idiot mirth. Their bright holiday clothes seemed to have been put on them by attendants who didn't care, and Mavranos wished he had seen ranks of buses back in the lot, ready to take all these people home to some unimaginable asylum. Nut day at the dam, he thought, trying to smile and not be afraid, half price if you can bibble-bibble your lips and cross your eyes.
He tried to walk toward the dam quickly, but he was soon sweating and panting, and he had to lean on one of the concrete stanchions of the rail.
He peered ahead, at the curve of the dam. It seemed too imposingly big to be so far away. He could see cars moving slowly along the highway that was its crest, and he could make out figures moving along the sidewalks and the bridges that led out to the intake towers on the water. From this distance, at least, he could see nothing to have caused all the panic.
But fear was in the wind like the smell of hot metal, like a vibration in the air, like a rat gnawing underground.
He wanted to get back in the truck and drive away on the Arizona side, keep driving until he ran out of gas and then walk further.
Instead he pushed away from the stanchion and walked on down the broad sidewalk, toward the cathedral arch of the dam.
Crane sold his first four-card hand to a middle-aged man in a necktie and sport coat and then watched as the bidding started up for the next hand. It didn't hold his attention; he was still a parent of the hand that would include the four cards he had sold, and thus he might still win a tenth of the pot, but he certainly wouldn't be matching the total and claiming the Assumption.
He glanced out one of the ports at the lake, dotted with scooting water-skiers, and he concentrated on breathing deeply. He had sat on Leon's left this time, and the next deal would be his.
The inaudible high and low vibration had receded away in both directions, and he couldn't sense it anymore, but he thought that some of the others still could. Leon shook his head sharply a couple of times, and Newt had fumbled his first hand and exposed one of his down cards, and the Amino Acid at the bar had broken a glass while getting one of the new players a third martini.
The loud crack of the glass had so enormously startled Doctor Leaky that the smell in the lounge shortly went from smelling faintly of urine to smelling a good deal worse.
A Straight Flush wound up beating a set of Trips. Neither Leon nor Crane was a parent of the winning hand, and after the winner had swept in the money with a nervous smile, Leon pushed the nearest folded hands to Crane.
"Your deal," growled the Hanari baritone. "Let's snap it up here."
"Uh," said the Amino Acid at the bar, "you want me to take the cap'n out on the deck, Mr. Hanari, and get his pants off him and hose him down?"
"He's not the captain," said Leon loudly. "I'm the captain. No, he's got an appointment with a surgeon on Sunday; this won't kill him before then." He waved irritably. "Open the ports, if you like—the breeze will be fresh, if not cool."
Crane thought that ordinarily most of the players would have objected to the smell and demanded that the bartender's suggestion be followed, but today even the toughest of them seemed cowed and uncertain.
The last of the cards were gingerly pushed across the green felt to Crane, who carefully stacked them and patted them square.
Everybody's looking at me, he thought, looking right at the cards. I can't switch in the cold deck right now.
He cut the deck that was in front of him and gave it a genuine riffle-shuffle. "Must be some nice-guy surgeon," he said, smiling at Leon, "to see a patient on a Sunday." With luck someone would agree, or disagree, and draw away the attention of the table.
"S'pose so," said Leon, staring at the cards. Nobody else spoke.
"Say, sonny," Crane called to the bartender as he gave the cards another shuffle, "what time you got?"
"Twelve-fifteen."
Nobody had looked away.
Crane shuffled the cards again. At the average rate of fifteen minutes per hand, the deal might not have time to come around to him again before the game was ended at three. He could wait, and hope, and try to hurry the game along, but at that rate he might well have to go meet his friends and tell them that he had not even got the stacked deck out of his purse.
And then, he thought helplessly, what? Kill myself, I suppose, to keep Leon from taking me?
"Let's go," said Newt.
Crane felt a drop of sweat run down from his armpit and soak into his bra.
Gotta just jump, he thought, and hope there's deep water.
He passed the shuffled deck to his father for the cut, and as soon as the Hanari body had taken off the top of the deck and laid the stack beside the bottom, Crane leaned back lazily and sang, " 'Whe-e-en there are gray skies …' "
" 'What don't you mind in the least?' " screamed Doctor Leaky in a grating falsetto.
Crane almost whipped his head around himself, along with everyone else at the table, so abrupt and loud was the interruption—but he kept his concentration and dumped the cut cards into his purse and flipped the stacked deck up onto the table.
"Damn," he said, not having to fake a nervous tone in his voice, "what's the matter with him?"
The Hanari head was twisted around to look hard at Crane through the unswollen eye. "Why did you start to sing that song?"
"I don't know," Crane said. "Is that what set him off? I've got a tape I was playing in the car—Al Jolson, you know? White guy that always wore blackface? It's a song he used to sing."
Leon seemed jarred, and shook his head. "Deal the cards," he muttered. "Get this over with."
Crane willed his hands to be steady as he skimmed the first cards across the table. Don't want to screw up here, he thought, and have them declare a misdeal.
Nobody really looked likely to, though. Get this over with was clearly the mood of the table.
The animated, nearly invisible statues on the lakeshore seemed to be angular ectoplasmic balloons—when Nardie swiped at them with the edge of the chip, they tore and blew away like cellophane dandelion seeds, releasing hot, dry air and a smell of long-desiccated organic stuff.