Last Call (Last Call 1)

Mavranos shook his head, frowning fiercely. "Are—are you sure? That she's dead? You weren't drunk, maybe, and she left you or something?"

"Arky, I—" Crane spread his hands helplessly. "I'm sure."

"Goddammit." Mavranos was staring straight ahead at the traffic, but he was gulping, and his eyes were bright. "You better tell me about this shit, Pogo."

Crane took the beer can out of Arky's hand and took a deep sip. "She was drinking coffee one morning," he began.

They parked in a big lot just west of the Balboa pier and then walked away from the thunder and spume of the surf to the narrow, tree-shaded lane that was Main Street. Crane's leg ached and throbbed, and several times he called for a pause just to breathe deeply and stand with his weight on his good leg.

Balboa was quiet on this spring morning. Cars hissed past on the wet pavement of Balboa Boulevard, but there were empty parking places along the curbs, and the only people on the sidewalks seemed to be locals heading for the bakery, lured by the smell of hot coffee on the chilly breeze.

"Where'd you used to get these—these godonuts?" asked Mavranos, his hands in the pockets of his tattered khaki jacket.

"Bodonuts," Crane said. "My kid sister made up the word. It's Balboa doughnuts. Not here. Over on the island."

Over on the island. The phrase upset him somehow, and he didn't like the idea that even now there was a lot of water nearby—the channel ahead of them and the ocean behind.

" 'Fear death by water,' " said Mavranos.

Crane glanced at him sharply. "What?"

"That's from The Waste Land—you know, T. S. Eliot. At the beginning of the poem, when Madame Sosostris is reading the Tarot cards. 'And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,/ Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,/ Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find/ The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.' "

Crane stopped walking again, and stared at him. A sea gull was strutting along the sidewalk, and somewhere overhead another one called shrilly.

"You go around reading T. S. Eliot," Crane said.

Mavranos squinted belligerently. "I study. I may not have read all your Hemingway and Frowst and H. Salt Fitzgerald, but I find out a lot of stuff, from all sorts of books, that has to do with me finding a cure—and if you can't see that it also has to do with your troubles, then—"

"No, no, I do see it. You're going to have to tell me a lot more about The Waste Land and about Eliot. It's just that … it's rare to run across someone who just pops off with an Eliot quote, just like that."

"You evidently haven't noticed that I'm a rare person, Pogo."

Doing a kind of limping shuffle now, Crane led Mavranos down Main and past the dressy seafood restaurant to the far sidewalk, beyond the railing of which pleasure boats rocked at their moorings on the gray-green swell. The ferry dock was to their left, past the Fun Zone with its arcades and palm-readers and frozen-banana-on-a-stick stands, but even this narrow area had taken on an air of sophistication since the days when he used to come here with Ozzie and Diana.

It used to be all garishly painted shacky plywood buildings, with hippies and drunks slouching along the stained sidewalk, but now there were stairways with brass railings leading up to terrace restaurants with patio umbrellas, and video games flashing in the arcade, and a glossy merry-go-round that played a weirdly swing version of "Ain't We Got Fun."

Crane felt even more out of place here than he had on the freeway.

One ferry was at the dock, its iron gate swung up to let three cars move booming and creaking up the wooden ramp to the pavement; another ferry was receding away, now about halfway across the mile-wide channel. The ferries, with their worn red and white paint and weathered floorboards, seemed to be the only elements of the local scene that might date from Crane's time.

Crane stepped aboard, not liking the shifting of the deck. Fear death by water, he thought.

The wide wooden seats were puddled with rain water this morning, so after giving two quarters to the girl in the yellow rubber rain suit with the money changer on her canvas belt, Crane and Mavranos stood braced on the gray-painted tar paper deck as the engine gunned and the boat surged gently out onto the face of the water, and they watched the palm trees and boat masts and low buildings of Balboa Island draw closer.

Mavranos pushed back his ragged black hair and peered over the rail. "Jesus, look at all the fish—bass and mackerel, damn, and that's a sand shark. You could fire a shotgun into the water and kill a dozen of 'em."

Crane looked down into the water at the many vague forms under the surface. "I'll bet Saturn will be bright tonight," he said softly, "with all his moons moving behind him."