CHAPTER 18: Fool's Day
And thirty miles to the southeast, beside the curl of the U.S. 93 Highway just short of the arching crest of Hoover Dam, the two thirty-foot-high Hansen bronzes flexed their upswept wings and shifted slightly on their black diorite bases. The star chart inlaid in the terrazzo pavement at their feet vibrated faintly as it reflected the depths of the dawn sky.
From Lost City Cove and the Little Bitter Wash at the north end of the Overton Arm, through the broad basin named for and dominated by the giant square monolith known as the Temple, and out to the farthest reaches of Grand Wash to the east and Boulder Basin to the west, the vast surface of Lake Mead shivered with a thousand tiny random tides, rousing for a moment sleeping vacationers aboard the countless rented houseboats.
And in the mountainside below the Arizona Spillway, the water in the dam's steel penstocks shook with momentary turbulence, and the technicians in the big control room noted the momentary irregularity in the hydroelectric power through the step-up transformers below the dam, as the blades and stay-vanes of the electric generators hesitated for a moment before resuming normal rotation of the turbines.
On the broad concrete gallery below the dam an engineer felt a tremor and glanced up at the seven-hundred-foot-tall afterbay face of the dam and had to look twice to dispel the illusion that the face was rippled like a natural cliff, and that there was a figure on the wall way up at the top, dancing.
Diana Ryan had changed out of her red Smith Market uniform into a green sweat suit, and now she was sipping a glass of cold Chardonnay and reading the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She would try the old man's number again in a little while. It was Sunday morning, and if he was home, there'd be no harm in letting him get a little more sleep.
She heard the master bedroom door open, and then water running in the bathroom, and then Hans shambled into the kitchen, blinking in the sunlight slanting through the window. His beard was pushed up into an odd curl on one side.
"You're up early," she said. Now she wished she had tried the call as soon as she had got home.
"It's later than it looks," Hans said. "Daylight savings is sleep time losings, in the spring." He plugged in the coffee machine and then sat down in the vinyl-covered chair across from her. She had finished with the Metro section of the paper, and he slid it to his side and stared at it.
Diana waited for people-are-bloody-ignorant-apes. He had said he'd be working on his screenplay last night, and the glow of his late-night inspirations had always become resentment by morning.
She could hear Scat and Oliver moving around now, and she finished her wine and stood up to rinse the glass and put it away before they came out.
"Don't tell me how to raise my kids," she said to Hans, who had of course opened his mouth to speak. "And I know you didn't say a word."
Hans knew enough not to roll his eyes, but he sighed softly as he looked back down at the paper.
She crossed to the telephone and punched in the number again, impatiently brushing long strands of blond hair out of her face with her free hand. While she stood there listening to the distant phone ring, the boys came into the kitchen and hauled out boxes of cereal and a carton of milk.
She turned to look at them. Scat was wearing his Boston Red Sox T-shirt, and Oliver had on the camouflage undershirt that she thought emphasized his belly. Oliver gave her what she thought of as his sarcastic look, and she knew Hans must have rolled his eyes at the boy.
Hans is just not father material, she thought as the repetitive ringing went on in her ear. Where's … Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner? Even Homer Simpson.
Hans was shaking his head over some article. "People are bloody ignorant apes," he said. Diana believed it was a line from Waiting for Godot.
At last she hung up the phone.
"Grampa still not home?" asked Scat, looking up from his Rice Krispies.
"He's almost certainly just off with your brother," Hans told Diana. "You worry too much."
"Maybe they're gonna come here," said Scat. "Why don't they ever visit?"
"They prob'ly don't like little kids," said Oliver, who, at ten, was a year older than his brother.
"Your grandfather likes little kids," said Diana, going back to her seat. Probably Scott convinced Ozzie to leave, she thought, to move somewhere else. Ozzie'll get the same phone number tranferred to his new place. Probably the people who killed my mother didn't follow Scott and kidnap the two of them. Or hurt them. Or kill them.
"Okay we ride our bikes to Herbert Park?" asked Scat. "That's what everybody calls it," he added to Oliver, who predictably had started to remind him that it was called Hebert Park.
"Sure," Hans told the boy, and that annoyed her.
"Yes, you can," she said, hoping her tone made it clear that it was her permission that counted.
"I've got to have peace and quiet, get my treatment typed up today," said Hans. "Mike at the Golden Nugget knows a guy who knows Harvey Korman. If he can get him to read it, that's just about a sure fifty K."
Since the boys were in the room, Diana made herself smile and knock the underside of the table.
But after they'd finished their cereal and put the bowls in the sink and gone charging out of the apartment to get on their bikes, she turned to Hans.
"I thought you weren't hanging around with that Mike guy any more."
"Diana," said Hans, leaning forward over the newspaper, "this is biz. Harvey Korman!"
"How did you find out that he knows somebody who knows somebody? You must have been talking to him."
"I'm a writer. I have to talk to all sorts of people."
Diana was standing at the sink, rinsing the cereal bowls. "He's a dope dealer, Hans," she said, trying to speak in a reasonable tone and not seem to be nagging. "And the one time we went to his place he was all over me like a cheap suit. I'd think you'd … resent that."
He was giving her his lordly look now, and it looked particularly foolish with his snagged-up beard. "Writers can't be judgmental," he told her. "Besides, I trust you."
She sighed as she toweled her hands. "Just don't get into anything with him." She yawned. "I'm going to bed. I'll see you later."
He was making a show now of being absorbed by the newspaper, and he waved and nodded distractedly.
The sheets were still warm from him, and when she had pulled the covers up to her chin, she blinked around in the dimmed room and wondered if he would come back to bed when he was done with the paper.
She hoped he would and she hoped he wouldn't. In the springtime, around Easter, she was always … what? Hornier? That was a word Oliver would use, and if she rebuked him, Hans would say, in his most satirical tone, To me, sex is something beautiful shared by two people in love.
Over the buzz of the air conditioner she heard the kitchen chair squeak, and she smiled derisively at herself when she became aware that her heart was beating harder. A minute later, though, she heard the muted snap-snap-snap of the electric typewriter, and she rolled over and closed her eyes.
He's better than nothing, she thought. Is that what they all are, just better than nothing? Wally Ryan was a pretty sorry excuse for a husband, bringing home the clap because he had to go screw other women. He told all his friends that I was frigid, but I think any of them could see that he was just intimidated by being married to a woman, and having actual children. Women are safely two-dimensional, hardly more than magically animated animals from the pages of Penthouse, if you don't have to … live with one of 'em, deal with her, every day, as a actual 'nother human being.