The card still lay where Donna had dropped it after pulling it out of Scotty's sliced eye. For a long time in the darkness Leon sat with his trembling fingers on it.
At last he turned it over, and he ignored the wind whispering around the bungalow as he spun the flint wheel of his lighter and looked.
The card was, as he had feared, the profile figure of the Page of Cups, the equivalent in modern terms of the Jack of Hearts. A one-eyed Jack.
The wind rattling the flimsy screens was from out of the west, sighing across the Mojave Desert from Death Valley and beyond. For at least an hour Georges Leon crouched on the floor and stared in that direction, knowing that it was from that quarter of the compass that his adversary, the one-eyed jack, would one day come.
BOOK ONE: The People in Doom Town
You know, my Friends, how long since in my House
For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
—The Rubdiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward J. Fitzgerald Translation
"Stetson!
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"
—T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land
I watched her fly away for Vegas, sure,
I waved the plane out of sight,
Then I tried to drive home without stopping at a bar, but I
Didn't make it, quite.
And sitting with those blue-jeaned shadows there, that had
Been there all night,
I found myself shivering over my chilly drink,
Half dead of fright.
—William Ashbless
CHAPTER 4: A Real Clear Flash
Crane recoiled out of sleep, instantly grateful that the sun was shining outside.
His heart thudded in his chest like a pile driver breaking up old pavement. He knew he'd been dreaming about the game on the lake again, and that something in the real world had awakened him.
The nights were still chilly in March, and though the sun was now well up—it must have been nine or ten o'clock, at least—the can of Budweiser on the floor beside his bed was still cool. Crane popped the tab and drank half of it in one continuous series of gulps, then absently wiped a trickle of beer from the gray stubble on his chin.
The can had left a pale ring on the hardwood floor. Susan never criticized his drinking, but she didn't seem to like it in the bedroom; she'd pick up the can as casually as if it were a magazine or an ashtray and carry it out to the living room. After he noticed the habit, he had purposely set his Budweiser on the bedside table a few times, but her patient persistence had made him feel mean, and now he did it only accidentally.
The doorbell bonged, and he assumed that it had rung a few moments before, too. He levered himself up out of his side of the queen-size bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, then plodded out into the living room. Still buttoning his shirt, he opened the door; he never bothered to look through the peephole anymore.
His next-door neighbor Arky Mavranos was standing on the porch. "Ahoy, Pogo!" Mavranos said, waving two cans of Coors. "What seeems to be the problem!"
All this was Mavranos's standard greeting, so Crane didn't reply but just stepped outside, sat down in one of the porch chairs and accepted a beer from him. "Ah," Crane recited dutifully as he popped the cold can open and held the foaming thing to his ear, "the sound of breakfast cooking."
"Breakfast?" said Mavranos, grinning through his unkempt brown mustache. "Noon's gone—this is lunch."
Crane squinted out past the porch rail at the tower of the Fidelity Federal Savings building, silhouetted against the gray sky half a mile north on Main Street, but he couldn't focus on the flashing letters and numbers on its rooftop sign. The Norm's parking lot had enough cars in it to indicate the lunch crowd, though, and the daytime crows had replaced morning's wild parrots on the telephone lines. Mavranos was probably right.
"I brought your mail," Mavranos added, pulling a couple of envelopes out of his back pocket and dropping them onto the battered table.
Crane glanced at them. One was the long gray Bank of America envelope with the waxed paper address window—probably his statement. It was never current; if he wanted to know how much he still had in his savings account, he could just look at the slip that was spit out of the Versatel machine when it gave him his card back next time. He tossed the unopened envelope into the plastic trash can.
The other envelope was addressed in Susan's mother's handwriting. He tossed it away even faster.
"Just junk!" he said with a broad grin, draining the beer and getting up. He opened the door and went inside, and a few moments later was back in the chair with the half can of Budweiser that he had, in spite of himself, again left on the bedroom floor. "Wife off shopping?" asked Arky. Off shopping, Crane thought.
Susan loved those discount stores that were as big as airplane hangars. She always came home from them with bags of things like shark-shaped plastic clips to hold your beach towel down, and comical ceramic dogs, and spring-loaded devices you screwed onto your instant coffee jar that would, when you worked a lever on top, dispense a precise teaspoonful of powdered coffee. Her purchases had become a sort of joke among the neighbors.
Crane took a deep breath and then drained the Budweiser. This looked like being another serious drinking day. "Yeah," he answered, exhaling. "Potting soil, tomato cages … Spring's on us, gotta get stuff in the ground."
"She was up early."
Crane lowered his chin and stared at his neighbor expressionlessly.
After a pause he said, "Oh?"
"Sure was. I saw her out here watering the plants before the sun was even up."
Crane got dizzily to his feet and looked at the dirt in the nearest flower pot. It did look damp; had he watered the plants himself, yesterday or the day before? He couldn't remember.
"Back in a sec," he said evenly.
He went into the house again, and walked quickly down the hall to the kitchen. The kitchen was uncomfortably warm, as it had been for thirteen weeks now; but he didn't look at the oven—just opened the refrigerator and took out a cold can of Budweiser.
His heart was pounding again. Whom had Archimedes seen on the porch? Susan, as Crane could admit if he had a fresh beer in his hand and the alcohol was beginning to blunt his thoughts, was dead. She had died of a sudden heart attack—fibrillation—thirteen weeks ago.
She had been dead before the hastily summoned paramedics had even come sirening and flashing and squealing up to the curb out front. The medics had clomped into the house with their metal suitcases and their smells of rubber and disinfectants and after-shave and car exhaust, and they had used some kind of electric paddles to try to shock her heart into working again, but it had been too late.
After they had taken her body away, he had noticed her cup of coffee, still hot, on the table in front of the couch she'd died on—and he had numbly realized that he would not be able to bear it if the coffee were eventually to cool off, if it were to wind up as passively tepid as some careless guest's forgotten half can of soda pop.