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 panel 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 stuff."
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 Frowst 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.