He couldn’t leave the table, though. That would break the vision. And what would happen then?
“Tissue, champ?” It was the redhead.
He’d started to sweat. Nixon-versus-Kennedy sweat. He took the handful of Kleenex and mopped his eyes. The pill was humming along the track, and he was thinking, Black black black black—
“Red!” the new croupier said. “Red seven. Seven red.”
“Fuck,” Frankie said.
“What’s the matter?” asked the redhead.
“Pick a number,” Frankie said. Belatedly he put a smile on his face.
“I think you’d better do that,” she said.
“Please. Any number.”
“Twenty-one,” she said.
“Great.” Frankie pushed five thousand onto twenty-one, then watched with dread as the croupier replaced the stack with the marker. The pit boss was staring at him. Frankie glanced at his watch. He just needed to last five more minutes. Five minutes! Then he could cash out and get the hell out of here.
The redhead gripped his arm more tightly as the pill slowed. “Come on, twenty-one!” she said.
“Jesus, just shut up,” he said under his breath.
“What did you say?” She pulled her arm away.
“Nothing, just—” His eye was on the ball. Months of practice had taught him to judge velocity. And God damn if the pill wasn’t heading for the neighborhood of twenty-one: nineteen, thirty-one, eighteen, six…and then it dropped. Twenty-one.
“FUCK ME!” Frankie shouted.
Later, he realized that it looked very much like a bomb going off. The roulette wheel jumped ten feet into the air and spun away like a flying saucer. The pill shot into the crowd. Every chip around the table—Frankie’s huge stacks, the croupier’s supplies, the winnings of every player at the table—exploded ceiling-ward and rained down. Every customer within fifty feet of the table became a shouting, grasping, delirious animal.
The redhead looked at him in shock. “What did you do?” she said.
Firm hands grabbed him under his arms. Two large men in dark suits had seized him. “This way, asshole,” one of them said, and they hauled him toward a door.
“It wasn’t me!” he shouted. “It wasn’t me!”
He left Mitzi’s Tavern, thinking about big numbers. Big numbers and contingency plans. How the hell was he going to raise twenty grand? There was only one way.
“God damn it!” He’d pulled into the driveway and had banged into a line of big plastic buckets, sending them tumbling. Farther up the driveway sat bags of cement mix, a stack of blond lumber, and a pallet of something covered by a tarp. He backed up and parked in the street.
Buddy squatted by the front door of the house. He was hammering away at a wooden frame that he’d erected around the cement step. Frankie marched down the driveway, heading for the garage and the back of the house, ignoring him.
Buddy put down his hammer and stood up. “He’s not there.”
“The Buddha speaks,” Frankie said. Then: “Who’s not there?”
Buddy said nothing.
Frankie walked toward him. It looked like he was building a form to repour the cement step, which had been listing for the past decade. But why now? Why anything, with Buddy. “Why do you care who I’m looking for?” Frankie asked. “Maybe I’m looking for Irene.”
Buddy squinted at him. Then Frankie realized that Irene’s car was nowhere in sight.
“Okay, fine,” Frankie said. “Where’s Dad? And don’t you fucking shrug at me.”
Buddy stood very still, emphatically not shrugging. After thirty seconds, Buddy said, “It’s all going to work out.”
“Really? Work out?” Frankie stepped close, getting in his space. “Work out like the fucking casino?”
Buddy blinked down at him.
Jesus Christ, all Frankie wanted to do just then was clock him. But he’d never laid a hand on his brother. When they were kids, Buddy was too small to smack, and then, suddenly, he was much too big. At any size, though, there was no point to it. It’d be like punching a golden retriever.
Buddy’s gaze went glassy, like a TV show had clicked on in his head.
Frankie snapped his fingers at him. “Hey. Retard.”
Buddy focused on Frankie. He frowned.
“Why’d you do it?” Frankie said. “Come on. Just come clean.” Buddy had never told him where he’d disappeared to with his stack of chips. Never told him why he’d sent him to the Alton Belle in the first place. He was supposed to be rich, damn it. Bellerophonics would have been saved, and he wouldn’t be in hock to the fucking Outfit and wondering if the next time he stuck a key in the ignition the van was going to explode.
Buddy said, “It’s all going to—”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Frankie said. “Of course it will.”
AUGUST
10 Buddy
The World’s Most Powerful Psychic has been dead for twenty-one years. Long live the World’s Most Powerful Psychic.
Buddy doesn’t feel powerful, however. Time’s riptide is having its way with him. He’s clawing to stay in the present but keeps being dragged over and over into the past. Once, his memory of the future was as lengthy (and full of holes) as his memory of the past. But now, there’s so little future left. Everything ends in a month, on September 4, 1995, promptly at 12:06 p.m.
Zap.
Sometimes when he thinks about that day he’s terrified. Other times, he’s merely sad. He will miss out on so much, but what hurts most of all is that he will never see his true love again.
But still other times, he’s grateful. There are undoubtedly many awful things to come after that dead stop, and he doesn’t have to watch them over and over. The future will no longer be his responsibility. Someone else will become the World’s Most Powerful Psychic, and he’ll be able to rest at last.
The small supply of futurity, however, only makes the pull of the past stronger. He knows he can’t wallow in history, but sometimes—like right now, this very moment of consciousness—he longs to be somewhen else, somewhen cold, snow outside the window. Because in this now it’s ninety-five degrees and the sweat is running off his naked chest. He’s bent over the front step, setting out ceramic tiles in rows and columns, and his underwear is plastered to his ass. It’s imperative to lay out the tile, dry, before cementing it in place.
“So is this the way you want it?” a voice asks. Oh, right. Matty—the fourteen-year-old version—is helping him. He’s mixing up the thinset in one of the big plastic buckets.
Buddy nods. But then the kid moves on to new questions. Wants to know everything about the Amazing Telemachus Family. Where they performed, what people thought of them. Buddy ignores him. The less Matty knows, the better. At least, Buddy thinks that’s true.
Matty keeps talking. He really wants to know about his grandmother. What did she do onstage? Did she really work for the government? “Could Grandma Mo travel outside her body?” he asks.
This question makes Buddy look back at the boy and frown.
“You know,” Matty says. “Like, walk through walls?”
Buddy stares at him.
“Because that would be real useful, right? That would make her the perfect spy.”
Buddy nods slowly.
“How far do you think she could travel? I mean, all the way into Russia? Frankie said the Russians had psychics, too. Do you think she could go anywhere she wanted?”