A waitress inside had been staring out the window at their unsavory visitor; but Ozzie smiled at her and waved, and she seemed satisfied.
Ozzie was facing their visitor again, frowning at him, obviously trying to figure out how this madman might fit into the structure they were dealing with and how it would affect things if they were to play with him.
"What … stakes?" asked Ozzie.
"M&M's," the young man said, "against your sugars." He pointed at the bowl he'd snatched up earlier and then pulled two packs of regular M&M's out of his pocket. "Candy. And sugar, too. It's bad for your teeth if you let it." He swatted ineffectually at one of the circling flies. "And flies like it," he added. "The word for 'fly' is mosca in Spain." He chuckled and shook his head.
"Uh," said Ozzie, "do you know where the moon … 'left her face'?"
"My name's Dondi Snayheever. Yeah, I got some—some maps, in the car. It's very difficult to say, as you would say, maps in the car."
Ozzie nodded. "Let's play for a map or two. We'll fade 'em with cash."
"Letters and lockets and lesson plans, you can't do otherthing but keep them, because they—they—they're the leadages candlewise to the father and mother." He looked hard at Ozzie. "You can't see any of my maps, sir."
"What's the game?" asked Crane cautiously. "That we're going to play here."
Snayheever blinked at him in evident surprise. "Go Fish."
"Of course," said Ozzie. The old man met Crane's eyes and made a sort of over there twitch with one white eyebrow.
You want me to go find his car and steal a map or two, thought Crane. Okay. But if I've got to do it, I'm by God going to award myself a prize. That's my ruling.
"I bet the engine's cooled enough for me to pop the cap off the radiator," Crane said, getting to his feet. "I'll go check." He looked at Mavranos. "Keys?"
"Keys?" echoed Snayheever. "Your radiator is inside the car?"
Mavranos had pulled out his key ring and tossed it to Crane. "Locking hood," Mavranos said easily. "Where we come from they'll steal your battery soon as blow their nose."
"Where do you come from?" Snayheever asked.
"Oz," said Ozzie testily, his voice sounding very old and reedy. "Shall we cut for the deal?"
Crane got up and walked out to the asphalt, and as he rounded the bushes toward where the cars were parked, he heard Snayheever say, "No, for this I've got to deal."
He's probably a cheat, Crane thought with a weary grin. We'll wind up with no sugar cubes at all.
Crane wondered how he was supposed to recognize Snayheever's car … until he walked past Mavrano's Suburban and saw the weird little vehicle parked on the other side of it.
It looked like a 1950s English version of a Volkswagen—it had the same bulbous fenders and arching roof—but the body flared out into a slight skirt around the sides. It was impossible to guess the little vehicle's original color; it seemed to have been dipped in oil decades ago and been driven relentlessly on remote desert roads ever since.
Crane walked forward, feeling as though he were pushing against the hot air and leaving it curling in slow turbulence behind him, like the wake of a ship.
He read the rusty emblem on the front of the car's hood: Morris.
Crane peered in through the dusty passenger-side window. The car was a mess: The upholstery was all split, stacks of newspapers filled the back seat, and the glove compartment had no door.
A number of ragged-edged folded maps protruded from the open compartment. The passenger door was not locked; Crane opened it, leaned in and pried free a couple of maps from the center of the pile, and then closed the door and walked over to the Suburban, fumbling with Mavranos's keys.
He got into the truck and stared at Mavrano's ice chest.
"Go fish," he whispered, and then slowly reached out and lifted a can of Coors from the cold water. One won't hurt, he thought. This desert air will dry me out like a dead rat in no time.
He popped the tab. The beer foamed up but didn't run over the rim of the can.
He looked behind him, but there was no one else in the truck.
Tired of alertness, he drained the beer in one long, gulping series of swallows. It stung his throat and brought tears to his eyes, and he could feel his tense muscles relaxing.
The air inside the Suburban was hotter than the air outside, and smelled of spilled beer and old laundry. Crane tossed the can into the back, where it would not stand out. He hid Snayheever's maps under an old nylon windbreaker and then got out, locked the door, and trudged back around the bushes to the table.
Ozzie and Mavranos looked up as Crane walked up; young Snayheever was staring at the cards in his hands and moving his lips silently,
"Should we go?" asked Ozzie.
Meaning, thought Crane, will the nut be able to see that I robbed him, in which case we should be gone before he goes to his car. "No," said Crane, resuming his seat and draining the ice-diluted Tamarindo in his glass, "nothing looks different. Uh … it could do with a little more cooling off."
" 'Kay. Here, I gotta hit the men's room. You take my cards, Scott."
Ozzie got laboriously up out of his chair and then hobbled to the nearby rest room door, leaning heavily on his cane.
Crane picked up the old man's cards. "My turn? To Mr. Snayheever? Okay. Uh … do you have any Nines?"
Snayheever grinned and jiggled in his chair. "Go fish!"
Mavranos pointed at the undealt stack of cards, and Crane picked up the top card. It was the Jack of Hearts.
"How about—" he began.
"Gotta bet!" Snayheever said excitedly. His dirty hair was down in his eyes.
"Oh. Uh, I'll … what's the limit?"
"Two."
Crane grinned lopsidedly and added two more sugar cubes to the pile of M&M's and sugar cubes in the middle of the table. "Have you got any Jacks?" A big semi truck drove by on the highway, gunning its engine and rattling the windows at Crane's back.
"Go fish!" said Snayheever.
Crane took the top card. It was the Ace of Spades, and a second after Crane picked it up Ozzie was somehow standing right behind him. "We're leaving," the old man said tightly. "The game will go unfinished. Throw down your hand."
Crane shrugged and obeyed. When the cards hit the tabletop, the Ace of Spades lay nearly covering two other cards he'd been holding, the Ace and Queen of Hearts.
"We're leaving now," said Ozzie shakily. "This minute."
"Fine!" said Snayheever as his long, trembling fingers gathered in the cards. "Fine! Just go then! I don't need you!"
Mavranos took Ozzie's elbow as they walked away from the table, for the old man was trembling and breathing fast; Crane walked out of the patio backward, watching Snayheever and wondering if the young man really did have a gun—but Snayheever, having apparently forgotten about the three of them, was thoughtfully folding a card around an M&M and a sugar cube. Just before Crane stepped around the bushes into the hot breeze, he saw the young man lift the strange burrito to his mouth and effortfully gnaw a bite out of it.
The breeze was from the reddening west, throwing veils of dust and stinging sand across the parking lot and making the lot and the whole town of Baker seem like the architecture of a temporary outpost, due soon to be abandoned to the elements. Crane watched Ozzie hobble along ahead of him, frail in his wind-fluttering old-man's suit, and for a moment he thought that Ozzie belonged here, a tiny, exhausted figure in a vast, exhausted landscape.
And if they just drove away without the old man, Crane could have as much beer as he wanted. The beer he'd drunk a few minutes ago shifted coldly and pleasantly in his abdomen.