"Well," said Mavranos as he straightened the wheel and tromped on the accelerator, "that clears it all up, hah?" His window was rolled down, and as the gathering head wind began to toss his black hair around, he tilted up a new can of Coors and had a long sip. "All you gotta do is go ask some dead guy some questions. A dead guy who you don't know who he is or where he's buried. Shit, we could have this wrapped up by dinnertime."
Crane was squinting out at the scattered low bushes and broken rocks that became a blur in the middle distance, fading out to the hard edge of the distant horizon against the blue sky.
"I thought he looked a hundred," he said quietly. "Actually he'd be … ninety-one this year. What was it they were calling him? Not Colonel Bleep. Doctor Leaky."
Mavranos gave him an uneasy smile. "Who's this? Your dead King?"
"In a way. No, my real father's body. It's senile now, and I guess he doesn't use it anymore, lets it wander around on its own. I remember him … taking me boating on Lake Mead, showing me how to bait hooks, and on my last day with him, when I was five, he took me to the Flamingo for breakfast and to the Moulin Rouge for lunch. It burned down in the sixties, I think."
He shook his head and wished he could have one of Mavranos's beers. A really cold beer, he thought, drunk fast and then uncoiling icily in your stomach … no. Not now that there was something to be done.
"He blinded my right eye, that evening. Threw a deck of those Lombardy Zeroth cards at me, and the edge of one split the eye. No wonder the Bitin Dog personality fit me—a broken-off piece of a hurt and abandoned little boy, cauterized to feel nothing."
"Pogo, I'm really willing to
Crane wasn't listening to Mavranos. "Actually, I think if I'd known
Mavranos was clearly bewildered by all this, but he nodded. "That's the spirit."
Crane resumed watching the highway in both directions for the gray Jaguar.
He paid no attention to the big tan Winnebago RV with a bicycle-laden luggage rack on top and a GOOD SAM CLUB sticker on the back window. They passed it, and then it just chugged laboriously along in their dusty wake, never quite receding out of sight.
They stopped at a Burger King for lunch, and Crane ate two cheeseburgers while Mavranos managed to drink most of a vanilla shake. Crane thought Mavranos seemed to be having trouble swallowing.
They got a room for cash in a little motel on Maryland Parkway, and while Mavranos slept, in preparation for going to a pet store for a goldfish and then setting out on yet another night of chasing his statistical phase-change, Crane bought a succession of Cokes from the machine in the motel office, and for two hours he paced around the pool, staring into the water and trying to figure out where he might find a dead King.
When Arky came reeling back to the room at midnight, Crane was sitting up in the sleeping bag on the floor, doodling on a pad.
"Lights out, Pogo," said Mavranos, his voice harsh with exhaustion, as he fell fully clothed across the bed.
Crane got up and turned out the light and got back into the sleeping bag, but for a long time he lay awake and stared at the ceiling in the darkness.
The moon was two days short of being full, and as Georges Leon carefully hung up the telephone, it irritated him that out here east of Paradise the moonlight shone in through the window of the big Winnebago more strongly than any artificial lights did. He didn't like natural light, especially moonlight.
He wasn't going to let himself get angry at the things Moynihan had said on the phone, or the kind of money Moynihan had demanded.
He could hear Trumbill clunking around in the little bathtub, and even with the air conditioner turned all the way up the chilled air smelled of celery and blood and liver and olive oil. Leon would wait for Trumbill to come out; he didn't want to go in there and see the gross, tattooed naked body kneeling on the floor, the head and arms buried and rooting away in the appalling salad that the man had flung together in the tub.