Last Call (Last Call 1)

Crane noted that these cards didn't show any tendency to fly around in any psychic breeze, and irrationally he remembered Spider Joe's saying that it was a heavy deck.

More flies had come into the room, and they were all buzzing around the cards as if the pictures were aromatic food.

Spider Joe's fingers traced the puncture-holes in the margins of the two cards, and he grunted sharply, and then he opened his mouth and began to speak.

"Hagioplasty one-two-three," he said harshly, the words seeming to be coughed out resentfully like blood clots, "gumby gumby, pudding and pineal, and Bob's your uncle and the moon's my mother. I could press charges but larges and barges and rivers and fishers, he's fishing all the time there, it's how you say pescador."

The nonsense words had been echoing loudly in Crane's head, and then he thought they were forming there first and only being repeated by Spider Joe. A stricture seemed to be loosening from around his brain, and he was aware of an invitation to set his thoughts free, like birds, questing out in all directions. It seemed important that the blind man shut up, not say all this in front of the flies.

All sorts of things were important. He knew that he ought to be outside, reading what the clouds would be trying to convey to him.

Beside him Mavranos was leaning forward on the couch, his mouth open. The flies were buzzing loudly—there must have been a hundred of them whirling around in the space over the table now—and Crane wondered if Mavranos meant to eat them and thus learn what they knew. Flies probably knew a lot. The old woman had stood up and was dancing slowly and awkwardly on the carpet, her arms extended, coffee spilling out of the cup she was still holding.

"The father," Spider Joe was saying, "playing Lowball for trash, after the one-eyed Jack."

"No," choked Mavranos. With a trembling hand he struck the two cards off the table, and then he stood up and knocked the rest of the deck out of Spider Joe's hand. "No," he repeated loudly, "I don't want this."

Spider Joe abruptly sagged on the floor, silent, his jaw slack now as the insane jabbering fit let go of him, and only his arched antennas seemed to be holding him upright. The flies dispersed out across the room.

"You don't want it either," Mavranos told Crane shakily.

Crane took a deep breath and herded his thoughts back together. "No," he agreed in a whisper, waving flies away from his eye.

Spider Joe's mouth shut with a click, and he stood up lithely, the stiff wires waving among the randomly circling flies. "None of us do," he said. He pulled the silver dollars out from behind the lenses of his sunglasses and tossed them onto the table. "Let's go outside. One of you bring Booger."

The old woman had stopped dancing, and Mavranos caught her elbow and led her after Spider Joe, who blundered twangingly out the door and down the wooden steps. Crane followed them outside, being careful not to glance at the cards on the carpet.

Crane squinted against the sun glare on the desert and the highway, and the sudden heat was a weight on his head, but the broad, flat landscape was a relief after the claustrophobic trailer.

Spider Joe strode out across the yard until his antennas scraped against the fender of the nearest pickup truck, and then he turned around and walked halfway back.

"I'm still a channel for them," he said. "And they sometimes take possession of me like that, like the voodoo loas do to those Haitians. It's never been the Fool before."

Or Dondi Snayheever, I bet, thought Crane.

"Your father's job," Spider Joe went on. He shook his head. "You should have told me who you are. I think I would have done this over the phone, or through the mail."

"I'm not—" Crane began.

"Shut up."

Mavranos and Booger had sat down on the steps, leaving Crane and Spider Joe standing facing each other. "Booger and I used to work for your father." He rubbed his face. "I don't ever talk about this, so listen. I was a miniaturist painter, trained in Italy since I was a kid to be one of the painters of the heaviest Tarot deck, the absolute goddamn hydrogen bomb of Tarot decks—the one known as the Lombardy Zeroth deck."

He pointed at Crane. "You've seen one of mine, when you played Assumption." He shook his head, and the hot breeze twitched at his gray beard. "There's never more than a couple of guys in the world who can paint it, and even if you're young and of sound mind and body, it takes a good year to paint a set. Or a bad year. And then you need a long vacation. Pretty well name your own price, believe me."

He walked in a quick counterclockwise circle, as, it seemed to Crane, a Catholic might cross himself.