Last Call (Last Call 1)

"Oh." Her whisper was weaker. "My eyes aren't very good yet. Don't … tell him I spoke to you, okay?"

She added something else, but it was too faint for him to hear.

"I'm sorry?"

He could hear her take a deep breath, like wind sighing through a leafless tree, but when she whispered again, he was only just able to hear it.

"Give him a drink," she said, and added some more words, all he caught of which were the syllables back us.

"Sure, Susan," Archimedes said uncomfortably. "You bet."

The next car to turn onto Main was Crane's Ford, and Mavranos stood up, for the windshield was just a white webbed skirt around a gaping hole on the driver's side.

CHAPTER 9: The Only Fat Man I Know About

"I just want to go to bed, man," Crane said. He had brought the pint bottle with him from the car. "Well, okay, one beer to chase this stuff with." He took a cold can and sat down heavily in one of the decrepit porch chairs.

Mavranos had been saying something. "What, now?" said Crane. "A fat man in the desert?"

Mavranos closed his eyes, then started again. "A song about a fat man who drives along the highways that cross the Mojave. The 40, the 15, even the one 27 out by Shoshone. A country-western song is how I've heard it, though I guess there's a rock one, too. This fat man's got a warty bald head, and his car has about a million rearview mirrors on it, like the mods in England used to hang on their scooters."

Scott Crane finished the bottle and put it down carefully on the table. "So the question is, have I heard about him?" He shook his head. "No. I haven't heard about him."

"Well, he's not real. He's a—a legend, you know? Like the Flying Dutchman or the Wandering Jew. His car is supposed to break down all the time, because the carburetor's just a wonder of extra hoses and valves and floats and clips and stuff."

Crane frowned and nodded, as if to show that he was understanding all this. "And you say he's green?"

"No, damn it. No. He used to be green, and just a big man, not fat, but that version stopped applying sometime. That image stopped being vital, and you see it now only in things like the Hulk, and the Jolly Green Giant who grows vegetables. Now he's not the Green Knight that Sir Gawain met anymore—because the water's sick and the land's barren, like in Second Kings—now he's real fat, and he's generally black or gray or even metallic. That little round robot Tik-Tok in the Wizard of Oz stories, that's him, a portrait of him." Mavranos looked at his sodden companion and wondered why he was even bothering to explain. "But you haven't heard of him."

"No. The only fat man I know about," said Crane, pausing in mid-sentence to take a long sip of the beer, "is the one that shot the moon in the face in 1960."

"Tell me about that."

Crane hesitated, then shook his head. "I'm kidding, it's just a—a John Prine song."

Some people shouted at each other in the Norm's parking lot, then got into cars; headlights came on, and they drove out onto Main and away into the night.

Mavranos stared at Crane. "Rebar, you said."

"Yeah, rebar. A goddamn iron pole. Fell off a truck. If I hadn't ducked to the side, it would have punched a hole right through my head. I should have got a name off the side of the truck; I could sue 'em."

"And you threw it away."

"Well, I couldn't drive, could I, with it stuck through my car?"

"This fat man," Mavranos went on after a pause, "like I said, he's not real, he's a symbol."

"Of course he is," Crane agreed vaguely; "of basketballs, or Saturn, or something."

"Why did you mention Saturn?"

"Jesus, Arky, I don't know. I'm exhausted. I'm drunk. Saturn's round, and so are fat men."

"He's the Mandelbrot man."

"Good. That's good to hear. I was afraid he was the Pillsbury doughboy. I've really got to—"

"Do you know what the Mandelbrot man is? No? I'll tell you." Mavranos took another sip of his own beer to ward away the cancer. "If you draw a cross on a piece of paper and call the crossing-point zero, and you mark one-two-three and so on to the right, and minus one, minus two, and all to the left, and one-times-the-square-root-of-minus-one and then two times that and then three times that upward from zero, and that times minus one, and minus two, and so forth, below the zero point, you wind up with a plane, and any point on it can be defined by two numbers, just like defining a place by latitude and longitude. And then—"

"Arky, what's this got to do with fat men?"