Last Call (Last Call 1)

When the vehicle came to a squeaking, rocking halt, it was pointing north. He restarted the stalled engine and drove off in that direction.

And far out in the sagebrush reaches of the desert, in cinder-block houses and trailers and shacks in Kelso and Joshua Tree and Inyokern, isolated people were sniffing the dry air, and then, one by one, slapping their pockets for car keys or searching shelves for bus schedules.

And, in Baker, Dondi Snayheever left his box forever to go find his mother.

Travelers know Baker as just the brief string of gas stations and car repair garages and burgers-and-fries restaurants on I-15 in the middle of the vast desert between Barstow and the California-Nevada border—and in fact, it's not much more. West of Baker's main street is nothing but a few short, powdery dirt roads and a couple of clusters of old mobile homes behind tall pine windbreaks, and at the west edge of town—out past the wide grassless yards and the forlorn swing sets and the old barbecues and dressers and half-stripped cars and the occasional satellite dish, all baking in the purely savage sun glaring out of the empty sky—the fenced-in grounds of the ECI minimum-security prison mark the town's west boundary. Beyond the prison's farthest fence is nothing but the desert, stretching away toward the astronomically remote Avawatz Mountains, the flat sand plain studded in the middle distance with huge jagged rocks that look like pieces of a long-ago-shattered planet half-buried in the sand.

A month ago Dondi Snayheever had walked away from his job in an upholstery shop in Barstow. He hadn't been sleeping well, and voices in his head kept saying things in a tone that was urgent but too soft to be understood, and so he had returned to the place he'd grown up in, a big plywood box behind the abandoned house where his father had lived. It was a long mile outside Baker on a dirt road, but somehow every time Snayheever went back, he found empty liquor bottles and used condoms on the carpeted floor of his box. The door couldn't be locked anymore.

It was hot and dim inside the box, and cramped because of the stacks of maps, but his attention was drawn to the oversize playing cards that his father had tacked up on every available section of wall and ceiling.

His father had built the box in 1966, when Dondi had been a year old, and Dondi had spent nearly every hour of his life in the box until 1981, when his father had driven away to Las Vegas, supposedly just for a weekend, and had never come back.

His father had built other boxes for him to stay in when they occasionally went traveling together—one in the woods west of Reno, one in an empty warehouse in Carson City, and one in the desert outside Las Vegas. The Las Vegas box had even had a stained glass window, an inexplicable pieta of the Virgin Mary mourning over the dead body of Christ.

Dondi never knew his mother, though sometimes he would stare at some of his tracings and he'd imagine he could see her.

When Dondi was about twelve, his father had explained to the boy that the plywood structure he lived in was a Skinner box. It was an "environment" engineered to produce a "terminal response."

It was based on his father's understanding of the teachings of a psychologist named Skinner, who had apparently taught pigeons to bowl with little miniature balls and pins. The theory held that desirable qualities in an adult human could be defined, and then a procedure could be set up, a pattern of education that would help shape a child toward the terminal response, the desired state.

Dondi's father had wanted to produce the ultimate Poker player. The attempt had been a failure. His father had wound up making something else.

In previous years the box had been filled with Poker books, and hundreds of decks of cards, and a television that showed nothing but films of real Poker games. His father would come out of the house and crawl into the box and play a hundred hands a day with him, criticizing ("extinguishing") inappropriate play, and rewarding—with bags of M&M's candies—play that could be shaped toward the terminal response.

Now the only things left in the box from those days were the big cards on the walls … but Dondi Snayheever stared hard at them, knowing that it would be through them, even more than through the maps, that he would be able to find his mother.

Besides, he already knew what she looked like from studying his tracings.

She was beautiful, like the Queen of Hearts.

"Baker for an early dinner, I nominate," said Crane. "And a full tank of gas, too. After Baker there's nothing but straight lines through lunar landscapes till at least the Nevada border."

"Right," said Ozzie.

"Gotcha," said Mavranos. "Pop me another beer, will you, Pogo?"