He remembered Scotty batting at the branches of a rosebush during a brightly sunlit walk around the grounds of the Flamingo a few months ago and piping out, "Look, Daddy! Those leaves are the same color as the city of Oz!" Leon had seen that the bush's leaves were instead a dusted dark green, almost black, and for a few moments he had worried about Scotty's color perception—and then he had crouched beside the boy, head to head, and seen that the underside of each leaf was bright emerald, hidden to any passerby of more than four feet in height.
Since then Leon had paid particular attention to his son's observations. Often they were funny, like the time he pointed out that the pile of mashed potatoes on his plate looked just like Wallace Beery; but once in a while, as had happened at lunch today, he found them obscurely frightening.
After breakfast, while the sun had still been shining and these rain clouds were just billowy sails dwarfing the Spring Mountains in the west, the two of them had driven the new Buick to the Las Vegas Club downtown, where Leon held an eight-dollar-a-day job as a Blackjack dealer.
He had cashed his paycheck and taken fifty cents of it in pennies, and had got the pit boss to let Scotty have a stack of the old worn chips that the casino defaced by die-punching a hole through the centers, and then they had walked to the tracks west of the Union Pacific Depot, and Leon had shown his son how to lay pennies on the tracks so that the Los Angeles-bound trains would flatten them.
For the next hour or so they ran up to lay the bright coins on the hot steel rails, scrambled back to a safe distance to wait for a train, and then, after the spaceship-looking train had come rushing out of the station and howled past and begun to diminish in the west, tiptoed out to the track where the giant had passed and tried to find the featureless copper ovals. They were too hot to hold at first, and Leon would juggle them into his upended hat on the sand to cool off. Eventually he had said that it was time for lunch. The clouds were bigger in the west now.
They drove around, and found a new casino called the Moulin Rouge in the colored neighborhood west of the 91. Leon had not even heard that such a place was being built, and he didn't like colored people, but Scotty had been hungry and Leon had been impatient, so they had gone in. After Scotty had been told that his flattened pennies wouldn't spin the wheels of the slot machines, they went to the restaurant and ordered plates of what turned out to be a surprisingly good lobster stew.
After Scotty had eaten as much as he could of his, he shoved the sauce out to the rim of the plate; through the mess at the center peeked the harlequin figure that was apparently the Moulin Rouge's trademark.
The boy had stared at the white face for a moment, then looked up at his father and said, "The Joker."
Georges Leon had shown no expression as he followed his son's gaze to the face on the plate. The androgynous harlequin figure did resemble the standard Joker in a deck of cards, and of course he knew that the Joker was the only member of the Major Arcana figures to survive the truncation of the seventy-eight-card Tarot deck to the modern fifty-three-card playing card deck.
In previous centuries the figure had been called the Fool, and was portrayed dancing on a cliff edge, holding a stick and pursued by a dog, but the Joker and the Fool were unarguably the same Person.
A piece of lobster obscured one of the grinning figure's eyes.
"A one-eyed Joker," Scotty had added cheerfully.
Leon had hastily paid the bill and dragged his son out into the rainstorm that had swept into town while they'd been eating. They'd driven back as far as the Las Vegas Club, and then, feeling conspicuous in the big car, Leon had insisted on leaving it there and putting on their hats and walking the few blocks back through the dwindling rain to the bungalow on Bridger Avenue that was their home.
Scott's eighteen-year-old brother, Richard, was on the roof, scanning the nearby streets and housefronts when they walked up, and he didn't glance down when they unlocked the front door and went inside.
Leon's wife was standing in the kitchen doorway, and the smile on her thin, worn face seemed forced. "You two are home early."
Georges Leon walked past her and sat down at the kitchen table. He drummed his fingers on the Formica surface—his fingertips seemed to vibrate, as if he'd been drinking too much coffee. "It started raining," he said. "Could you get me a Coke?" He stared at his drumming hand, noting the gray hairs on the knuckles.
Donna obediently opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle and levered off the cap in the opener on the wall.
Perhaps encouraged by the drumming, or trying to dispel the tension that seemed to cramp the air in the room, Scotty ran over to where his father sat.
"Sonny Boy," Scotty said.
Georges Leon looked at his son and considered simply not doing this thing that he had planned.
For nearly twenty years Leon had worked toward the position he now held, and during all that time he had managed to see people as no more a part of himself than the numbers and statistics that he had used to get there. Only today, with this boy, had he begun to suspect the existence of cracks in his resolve.
He should have suspected the cracks earlier.
The boat trips on Lake Mead had been strategy, for instance, but he could see now that he had enjoyed the boy's enthusiasm for baiting hooks and rowing; and sharing some of his hard-learned advice about cards and dice had become, as he should have noticed, more a father sharing his skills with his son than mere cold precautions.
Donna clanked the bottle down in front of him, and he took a thoughtful sip of Coke.
Then, imitating the voice of the singer they'd seen in the lounge at the Las Vegas Club one night, he said, " 'Climb up on my knee, Sonny Boy.' "
Scotty complied happily.
" 'When there are gray skies …' " Leon sang.
" 'What don't you mind in the least?' " recited Scotty.
" 'I don't mind the gray skies …' "
" 'What do I do to them?' "
" 'You make them blue …' "
" 'What's my name?' "
" 'Sonny Boy.' "
" 'What will friends do to you?' "
Leon wondered what friends that was supposed to refer to. He paused before singing the next line.
He could stop. Move back to the coast, go into hiding from the jacks, who would surely come looking for him; live out the remainder of his life—twenty-one more years, if he got the standard threescore and ten—as a normal man. His other son, Richard, might even still recover.
" 'What will friends do to you?' " Scotty repeated.
Leon looked at the boy and realized with a dull despair that he had come, in the last five years, to love him. The lyrics seemed for a moment to hold a promise—maybe Scotty could make these gray skies blue. Had the Fool been holding out a last-chance offer of that?
It could have been.
But …
But it didn't matter. It was too late. Leon had come vastly too far, pursuing the thing whose dim shape and potential he had begun to discover in his statistical calculations all the way back in his twenties in Paris. Too many people had died; too much of himself had been invested in this. In order to change now, he would have to start all over again, old and undefended and with the deck stacked against him.
" 'Friends may forsake me,' " he said, speaking the line rather than singing it. Let them all forsake me, he thought. I'll still have you, Sonny Boy.