Tim Powers - Last Call (26 page)

From Lost City Cove and the Little Bitter Wash at the north end of the Overton Arm, through the broad basin named for and dominated by the giant square monolith known as the Temple, and out to the farthest reaches of Grand Wash to the east and Boulder Basin to the west, the vast surface of Lake Mead shivered with a thousand tiny random tides, rousing for a moment sleeping vacationers aboard the countless rented houseboats.

And in the mountainside below the Arizona Spillway, the water in the dam's steel penstocks shook with momentary turbulence, and the technicians in the big control room noted the momentary irregularity in the hydroelectric power through the step-up transformers below the dam, as the blades and stay-vanes of the electric generators hesitated for a moment before resuming normal rotation of the turbines.

On the broad concrete gallery below the dam an engineer felt a tremor and glanced up at the seven-hundred-foot-tall afterbay face of the dam and had to look twice to dispel the illusion that the face was rippled like a natural cliff, and that there was a figure on the wall way up at the top, dancing.

Diana Ryan had changed out of her red Smith Market uniform into a green sweat suit, and now she was sipping a glass of cold Chardonnay and reading the Las Vegas
Review-Journal
. She would try the old man's number again in a little while. It was Sunday morning, and if he was home, there'd be no harm in letting him get a little more sleep.

She heard the master bedroom door open, and then water running in the bathroom, and then Hans shambled into the kitchen, blinking in the sunlight slanting through the window. His beard was pushed up into an odd curl on one side.

"You're up early," she said. Now she wished she had tried the call as soon as she had got home.

"It's later than it looks," Hans said. "Daylight savings is sleep time losings, in the spring." He plugged in the coffee machine and then sat down in the vinyl-covered chair across from her. She had finished with the Metro section of the paper, and he slid it to his side and stared at it.

Diana waited for people-are-bloody-ignorant-apes. He had said he'd be working on his screenplay last night, and the glow of his late-night inspirations had always become resentment by morning.

She could hear Scat and Oliver moving around now, and she finished her wine and stood up to rinse the glass and put it away before they came out.

"Don't tell me how to raise my kids," she said to Hans, who had of course opened his mouth to speak. "And I know you didn't say a word."

Hans knew enough not to roll his eyes, but he sighed softly as he looked back down at the paper.

She crossed to the telephone and punched in the number again, impatiently brushing long strands of blond hair out of her face with her free hand. While she stood there listening to the distant phone ring, the boys came into the kitchen and hauled out boxes of cereal and a carton of milk.

She turned to look at them. Scat was wearing his Boston Red Sox T-shirt, and Oliver had on the camouflage undershirt that she thought emphasized his belly. Oliver gave her what she thought of as his sarcastic look, and she knew Hans must have rolled his eyes at the boy.

Hans is just not father material, she thought as the repetitive ringing went on in her ear. Where's … Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner? Even Homer Simpson.

Hans was shaking his head over some article. "People are bloody ignorant apes," he said. Diana believed it was a line from
Waiting for Godot
.

At last she hung up the phone.

"Grampa still not home?" asked Scat, looking up from his Rice Krispies.

"He's almost certainly just off with your brother," Hans told Diana. "You worry too much."

"Maybe they're gonna come here," said Scat. "Why don't they ever visit?"

"They prob'ly don't like little kids," said Oliver, who, at ten, was a year older than his brother.

"Your grandfather likes little kids," said Diana, going back to her seat. Probably Scott convinced Ozzie to leave, she thought, to move somewhere else. Ozzie'll get the same phone number tranferred to his new place. Probably the people who killed my mother didn't follow Scott and kidnap the two of them. Or hurt them. Or kill them.

"Okay we ride our bikes to Herbert Park?" asked Scat. "That's what everybody calls it," he added to Oliver, who predictably had started to remind him that it was called
Hebert
Park.

"Sure," Hans told the boy, and that annoyed her.

"Yes, you can," she said, hoping her tone made it clear that it was
her
permission that counted.

"I've got to have peace and quiet, get my treatment typed up today," said Hans. "Mike at the Golden Nugget knows a guy who knows Harvey Korman. If he can get him to read it, that's just about a sure fifty K."

Since the boys were in the room, Diana made herself smile and knock the underside of the table.

But after they'd finished their cereal and put the bowls in the sink and gone charging out of the apartment to get on their bikes, she turned to Hans.

"I thought you weren't hanging around with that Mike guy any more."

"Diana," said Hans, leaning forward over the newspaper, "this is
biz
. Harvey Korman!"

"How did you find
out
that he knows somebody who knows somebody? You must have been talking to him."

"I'm a writer. I have to talk to all sorts of people."

Diana was standing at the sink, rinsing the cereal bowls. "He's a dope dealer, Hans," she said, trying to speak in a reasonable tone and not seem to be nagging. "And the one time we went to his place he was all over me like a cheap suit. I'd think you'd … resent that."

He was giving her his lordly look now, and it looked particularly foolish with his snagged-up beard. "Writers can't be judgmental," he told her. "Besides, I trust you."

She sighed as she toweled her hands. "Just don't get
into
anything with him." She yawned. "I'm going to bed. I'll see you later."

He was making a show now of being absorbed by the newspaper, and he waved and nodded distractedly.

The sheets were still warm from him, and when she had pulled the covers up to her chin, she blinked around in the dimmed room and wondered if he would come back to bed when he was done with the paper.

She hoped he would and she hoped he wouldn't. In the springtime, around Easter, she was always … what? Hornier? That was a word Oliver would use, and if she rebuked him, Hans would say, in his most satirical tone,
To me, sex is something beautiful shared by two people in love.

Over the buzz of the air conditioner she heard the kitchen chair squeak, and she smiled derisively at herself when she became aware that her heart was beating harder. A minute later, though, she heard the muted
snap-snap-snap
of the electric typewriter, and she rolled over and closed her eyes.

He's better than nothing, she thought. Is that what they all are, just better than nothing? Wally Ryan was a pretty sorry excuse for a husband, bringing home the clap because he had to go screw other women. He told all his friends that I was frigid, but I think any of them could see that he was just intimidated by being
married
to a woman, and having actual children. Women are safely two-dimensional, hardly more than magically animated animals from the pages of
Penthouse
, if you don't have to …
live
with one of 'em, deal with her, every day, as a actual 'nother human being.

She wondered how Scott had got along with his wife. Diana was pretty sure it had been the wife's death that had upset him so badly just before New Year's. It had been a strong, deeply personal emotion of loss. She had thought she ought to call him then, but after a week or so she had decided it would be awkward to call so late, and she had let it go. Still, his grief had kept her from sleeping well for a week or so.

Diana had always thought of Scott's wife as
that slut
, though she knew it wasn't fair; after all, she had never met the woman or spoken to her or even seen her.

Diana had tried to rationalize her strong disapproval by telling herself that her foster-brother was a drunken Poker-bum, and that any woman who would marry a man like that wasn't worthy of her brother, who was, after all, a good person at heart; but she knew that her real resentment stemmed from the shock she'd felt on that summer day in her eighteenth year when she'd realized he was in the process of getting married, was actually saying
I do
to some priest somewhere and staring into some woman's eyes.

By that time she hadn't seen him for nine years—but she had always somehow assumed that he would marry
her
. After all, they weren't blood-related.

She could admit now that she had married Wally Ryan a year later just as a kind of revenge on Scott, knowing that he would be aware of her wedding, too.

Wally had been big on fishing and hunting, and he was tanned and had a mustache, but he had been uncertain and blustering and
mean
behind his macho front. So were all the boyfriends she'd had since. She was just a sucker for broad shoulders and squinty, humorous eyes. But by the time of the inevitable breakup she had been sick of every one of them. When she'd learned from the divorce lawyer two years ago that Wally had died drunk in a car crash, she hadn't felt anything more than a faint sadness that had been mostly pity.

She had told the boys that their father was dead. Scat had cried and demanded to look at old photographs of Wally, but in a day or two his friends and school had distracted him from grieving over the father whom, after all, he hadn't even seen since he'd been six or so. Oliver, though, had seemed oddly satisfied with the news, as though this were what his father had deserved—for abandoning them? Probably, though the divorce had been Diana's doing. And Oliver's schoolwork, good until then, had become mediocre. And he had got fat.

She should marry again, give the boys a real father—not a succession of Hanses.

She shifted to her other side and punched the pillow into a more comfortable shape. She hoped Ozzie was all right. And she hoped Scott's stabbed leg was healing.

Some boys had made a ramp out of a log and a piece of plywood and were riding their bicycles over it—the braver ones yanking up on the handlebars as they flew off the end, so as to go unicycling for a few seconds up on the back wheel after they landed—and Scat watched for a while and then got on his bike and took a couple of jumps over it himself. On the last jump he stood up and really yanked the handlebars and wound up sitting down hard on the dirt and watching his bike go wobbling away upright across the grass. The other boys applauded.

Oliver, meanwhile, had climbed the chain link backstop and now sat up on the saggy top of it, pointing his plastic .45 automatic at each airborne rider in turn.

He was thinking about nicknames. When he and his brother had first moved to North Las Vegas, they had been known as the Boys from Venus, because they had moved into one half of a duplex on Venus Avenue. That hadn't been too bad—there had also been a couple of Boys from Mars, which was the street four blocks north—but while Scott had kept the same individual nickname he'd always had—Scat, which was all right—Oliver had soon become known as Hardy, because he was fat.

That wasn't all right. Even if they were just calling him that because they were scared of him.

Some of the parents were scared of him, or at least didn't like him. He liked to startle grown-ups by springing in front of them and shoving his toy gun in their faces. Since the gun wasn't real, they couldn't really object, especially when he laughed and yelled something like
Pow, you're dead!

But this Hardy business wasn't any good.

Lately they'd begun calling him Bitin Dog, which was distinctly better. A dog belonging to one of the neighborhood boys had been found dead on the street a month ago, and the animal was generally assumed to have been poisoned. When someone had asked Oliver if he'd poisoned it, he had looked away and said,
Well, it was a bitin' dog.
As he'd hoped, everybody took that to mean that he had done it … though, in fact, he had not.

He had seen Scat take the spill jumping the ramp, and for an instant he had been scared—but when Scat had got up, grinning and dusting off the seat of his jeans, Oliver had relaxed.

The chain-link under him squeaked now as he shifted around to a more comfortable position. He wished he had the nerve to go over the ramp himself, but he was too aware of the bones in his arms and legs and the base of his spine. And he
was
heavier. He could do things like climb this backstop, but it didn't get much attention.

What the hell kind of a name was
Oliver
anyway? So what if it
was
his grandfather's name? Probably
he
hadn't liked it much either. And it wasn't like they ever saw the guy. It didn't seem fair that as the oldest
he
had had to get the joke name, while his younger brother got to be named after their uncle. Whom they likewise never saw.

Way up here off the ground he could admit to himself, but only very softly even so, that the name he wished he had been given was …
Walter
. He couldn't imagine how that had not happened; his father couldn't have been too ashamed of him
right from birth
to give his firstborn his own name, could he?

Suddenly there was a snap and sag as one of the wires tying the chain-link to the crossbar broke, and Oliver convulsively clawed his fingers into the lattice pattern. His face was dewed with sudden sweat, but as soon as he was sure he wasn't going to fall, he looked toward the ramp. Luckily none of the boys had noticed. The fat-boy-Hardy-breaking-the-backstop jokes would have lasted for weeks. Shakily he tucked his gun into his belt and began inching his way back to the vertical section of the fence.

When he was back on solid ground, he sighed and pulled his damp shirt away from his chest and belly. School tomorrow, he thought.

He wished something would happen. He wanted to stop living the life of an obviously worthless little kid.