He got in, and she put the car in gear and pulled out into traffic. The chapels, of course, didn't pay kickbacks on solo fares, so she decided to take him to one of the ones down below Charleston.
She stopped at a red light two blocks up, at Main, in front of the Union Plaza Hotel, and she suppressed a grin, for the hundreds of little white light bulbs over the hotel's broad circular driveway shone in the polish on the unloading cars, making them seem to be luminously decorated for a Fremont Street wedding procession.
Weddings.
Link the yin and yang, she thought, the yoni and the lingam. Other cabdrivers had told her she wasn't the only one getting a disproportionate number of solo fares to the chapels in the last two weeks. All sorts of people wanted to go to the places, and when they got there, they just stood around in the little offices, staring in a lost way at the ELOPED and HITCHED and WED 90 license plates on the walls and reading the laminated Marriage Creed plaques.
It was as if there were a slowly increasing vibration in the sky and the land, something that had to do with a combining of maleness and femaleness, and on some subconscious level these people felt it. No doubt the bar joints and parlor houses out along the 95 and the 93 and the 80 highways were also getting more visitors than usual.
But that thought brought back memories of DuLac's outside Tonopah, and of her brother, and of the room with twenty-two paintings on the walls—and she stomped the accelerator and made a left against the light, speeding down Main to Bridger.
"Jesus," said her fare, "I'm not in a hurry."
"Some of us are," she told him.
Only one side of Snayheever's license plate was screwed down, so it was easy to swing the plate aside and fit the head of the crank through the hole cast in the bumper.
He spread his feet on the pavement and whirled the crank, leaning into it. The engine didn't start, though the back seam of his old corduroy coat, the one he thought of as his James Dean coat, tore a little more. At least he didn't seem to be having any of his involuntary twitches; his tardive dyskinesia was quiet tonight.
Cars were honking behind him, and he knew that meant that the drivers were angry, but the people on the sidewalk seemed to be cheerful. "Lookit the guy with the wind up car!" yelled one. "Careful you don't break the spring!"
"I'd hate to wind up a car," said a woman with him, laughing.
On the second spin the car started. Snayheever got back in, clanked it into first gear, and drove across Sixth Street toward the El Cortez. He had been driving around the downtown area for nearly an hour before he stalled, and he still wasn't having any luck in tracking the place where the moon lived.
But the half-moon was still up, though low in the west, and he watched for clouds and paid attention to the wind and any debris it might carry.
Snayheever knew why he had not ever become a great Poker player. Great Poker players had a number of qualities: knowledge of the chances, stamina and patience, courage and "heart" … and, maybe most important of all, the ability to put themselves inside the heads of their opponents, to be able to tell when the opponent was chasing losses, or letting injured ego do the playing, or faking loose or tight play.
Snayheever couldn't put himself into their heads.
The men Snayheever had played with had all seemed to be … atoms. That is, indistinguishable from one another, and emitting things—atoms emitted photons, and players emitted … passes and checks and bets and raises—without any pattern or system or predictability. Sometimes, Snayheever thought as he drove across Freemont, atoms emitted beta particles, and sometimes players emitted all-in raises or turned up Straight Flushes. All you could do was retreat and lick your wounds.
It was different when he was dealing with things—river and highway patterns, and the arrangement of mismatched jigsaw puzzle pieces, and the postures and motions of clouds. He was sure he'd be able to read tea leaves if he were ever faced with a cup of them, and he felt he understood the Greeks—or whoever it had been—who had foretold the future by looking at animal entrails.
Sometimes the people he met seemed like the recorded ladies who spoke to him on the telephone when he needed to know what time it was. But things had a real voice, albeit a far and faint one, like what comes through a telephone if someone has unscrewed the earpiece and taken out the diaphragm disk.
There was someone at home behind the constantly shifting arrangements of things. And who else could his mother be?
He hoped that reincarnation was true, and that after he died as an unconnected human, he might come back as one of the infinity of connected things. He thought of what the woman on the sidewalk had said when he'd been cranking the car's motor: I'd hate to wind up a car.
You could, he thought now as he turned left to zigzag through the downtown section again, do a lot worse than to wind up a car.
Half a mile southwest of Snayheever, the gray Jaguar was tooling east on Sahara Avenue.
Skinny man waiting to get out.
Vaughan Trumbill's mouth turned down at the pouchy corners as he remembered the remark. The young woman had had something to do with physical fitness; she guided people in exercises, he believed.
In the back seat of the Jaguar the old Doctor Leaky body mumbled something.
Betsy Reculver was sitting back there beside the old man. "I think he said south," she said, her voice scratchy.
"Okay," said Trumbill. He spun the wheel and turned the Jaguar right, from Sahara onto Paradise, east of the Strip. For a while they drove between wide, empty dirt lots under electric lights.
The woman had wanted to get him to join some diet program. Clients, he gathered, were given little bags of dried foods to boil. The idea was to lose weight and not regain it.
I just know that somewhere inside you is a skinny man waiting to get out.
She had said it with a laugh, and a crinkling of the eyes, and a hand on his forearm—to show affection, or sympathy, or caring.
Reculver was now sniffing irritably. "I forget what you said. Is that—that Diana person coming here?"
"I have no reason to think so," Trumbill said patiently. "The man on the telephone said he knew her, and I got the impression that she lived locally, there, in southern California. Our people have been monitoring Crane's house since early Friday, and his telephone since Saturday dawn. I'll hear if they've made any progress at locating her, and she'll be killed if we can find her."
Reculver shifted in the back seat, and Trumbill heard the click as she bit one of her nails. "She's still there, then. In California. With the game coming up again I'm real sensitive—I'd have felt her cross the Nevada line like I was passing a kidney stone."
Trumbill nodded, still thinking about the young woman at the party.
He had made himself smile, and had said, Would you come with me, please? He had taken her by the arm then and led her out of the lounge to the hall, where a couple of the casino security guards stood. They had recognized him. These men will see that you get home, Trumbill had told her. She had gaped at him, taking a moment to realize that he was evicting her from the party, and then she had started to protest; but at Trumbill's nod the guards had taken her out toward the cab stand. Of course she hadn't meant any harm, but Trumbill wasn't going to let even an unknowing idiot thrust that particular card at him.