“Pretend you have a rock in your left armpit,” the twerp told everyone. “The rock keeps your arm in the proper position, preventing backlash, for better control of your cast.” Dumbfuck Eugene was taking it all in like a girl. Meanwhile, the actordork continued to hold forth: “Your bait held in your right hand should be even with the reel, so when you make the pitch the bait won’t come down like a stone and hit the fish on the head.”
Who’d this L.A. crud think he was? Make it worse, Pauline, the bartender, who was at least a hard 50, posed her body in a way so Jim knew she was flirting with Mr. Ass-a-minute, and that made him sick.
The moron said, “I like your sign, Pauline.”
“What sign would that be?” She smiled and walked around to the jukebox, casting a glance back at the girlfriend, preparing to slip in a coin.
“That one.” The actor read from a placard:
There ain’t no town drunk here!
We all take turns.
“Oh yeah. I don’t hardly see it no more.”
“And I’ll bet you’re about to play my favorite song there, hon, aren’t ya?”
“Now what song would that be?”
“My favorite: ‘I Been Roped and Throwed by Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral’? Got that one in there, Pauline?”
But the topper was when the prick and his snatch made to leave. The better part of two hours Jim had been dropping quarters in the slot machine nearest his stool; he could just lean to the side and plunk it. He’d turn back before the spinners even stopped, casual-like, as if winning or losing were the same thing.
Then fuckmouth up and says, “Tiff, go see if you can fix that machine for the man.”
One quarter. One quarter, and the machine coughs 4,000 of them out for her. Or flashes the sign, same thing. For him. The actor.
Jimmy D was an unhappy man. He snagged no fish that day, he, a damned good fisherman, and some chump-fag actor walks off with his dough.
Tiffany hadn’t drunk anything but soda that evening, so she was at the wheel pulling the boat back to Vegas, where it was rented from a friend for a few days. She said to Mark, “Jeez, honey, I wish you wouldn’t get so loaded.”
“I wasn’t that loaded.”
“You are.”
“Nah. I could drive.”
“And I could walk the moon.”
“Well, listen. Are you happy? Are you happy, huh? Girl just won herself a thousand bucks. A thousand bucks! Man. Is the girl happy, huh? Happy?” He tickled her where her shirt spared the waistband of her jeans. She wagged her head in assent and gave off with a grin that said, “It’ll do.”
Aram didn’t like looking at the pockmarks in Eugene’s face on his right side, where they were more volcanic than on the left. Therefore, Aram always chose to drive. Coming away from the Red Rooster, the three were silent. Eugene’s harmonica was in the hip pocket that didn’t hold the can of Red Devil snuff.
Jimmy stared straight ahead as if on the lookout for wild burros that sometimes cross the road like part of a hill broke off and slid. Now and then, Aram shot a glance Jimmy’s way to see if he could detect how bad a mood he had been put into by that girl winning at the juke.
Before turning to Jimmy, Eugene poked Aram with his elbow, winked, and then said, “I got it figgered now, pal. Only reason you didn’t get lucky today is your pole’s too short.” Eugene entertained himself with his own hearty laughs. Jimmy said nothing, though there was a twitch at the back of his jaw. So Eugene grew more thoughtful. This time he said, “That guy going on about how anglin’ is an art? I bet you didn’t know anglin’ is an art, the none of us did, did we? Who-o-ee!”
Jimmy said to the windshield: “I don’t need no pussy lessons outta some Jew-boy from L.A.”
Eugene replied, “No, we don’t need none o’ that. Nope,” and rode silent.
When Tiffany came back into the hotel room from a workout in the downstairs gym, she found Mark shaving. She said, “Those guys last night? They sure gave me the creeps.”
“What for? I didn’t see anything wrong with them.” She looked sweet, a little bit damp for her effort. Yesterday’s outing had toasted Tiffany to a honey shade. Her light-brown hair held wheat-colored stripes, all of it tied up on top of her head now in a dust-mop ponytail.
She frowned and said, “I hope we don’t see them again.” She made him recall how Pauline followed them outside, saying to no one in particular, “I got to get some cigarettes from my car.”
Though it had cooled down a lot, Tiffany still had to wrap a Kleenex around the car door handle to open it. Mark opened his door then, and the two stood letting the heat out, looking off into the distance where the jagged, treeless mountains were a flat rust color coated with milky haze. At the end of the street, heat waves still shimmied. In the other direction, a bunch of cars lined up at the Inside Scoop, the ice cream parlor, even though near dinnertime.
Pauline came up and said, “Just a word of advice.” Her skin was of a grayish hue and the pores of her forehead were tiny tattoos. Sunlight fired the fine hairs on her upper lip and the sturdier ones along her jaw. She shaded her eyes and said, “I’d watch my step with Jim Daniels and that bunch.”
Mark said, “They seem all right to me. Good guys, matter of fact.”
“You’re not from around here. But in case you’re thinking of staying a few days, just so you know, Moapa Valley police have been looking at Jimmy for a murder about two months ago.”
“A murder?” Tiffany said. “That man who helped us out at the lake?”
Pauline said, “I’m saying a stranger got caught out in a flash flood, stranded to the axles. Somebody saw them three helping him out there, too, just like y’all. Next time they saw the fella, turkey buzzards picked him pretty much to pieces. His truck was stripped, and his family said his blackjack winnings was gone. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
As Pauline stepped away, Tiffany turned her shoulders as if to watch a passing car and rolled her eyes for Mark’s benefit.
“Thanks for the tip,” Mark said to the woman. “Take it easy now.”
Today, however, Tiffany apparently had second thoughts. She said, “Honey, I know you came up here to fish, but could we not go back to the lake, just stay in town and do the slots and shows? I mean, I know gambling you can take or leave, but look what I won last night, and I don’t see you complaining. You said you wanted to see those cars … .”
“The vintage automobiles, yes.”
“What car was it you said you wanted to see?”
“Duesy,” he said. “A perfect specimen among the eight hundred cars at the Imperial Palace Hotel. Ever hear someone say ‘It’s a doozie?’ Means something superb, something you wouldn’t believe. From Duesenberg, one beautiful Roadster made in the late twenties. Howard Hughes and Wayne Newton used to own the one that’s in the collection now.”
“Somehow I can’t see those two together,” Tiffany said, teasing.
“Sure, it would seat them and Elvis and his ham sandwiches too.”
“So we can stay?”
“How ’bout we compromise. Two days in town, one more on he lake. You first.”
“Oh, good,” she said. And Mark knew she was thinking naybe he’ll change his mind about that last day too.
He said, “So, are you going to win us a million dollars? What would you do with a million dollars, sweetheart?”
Without a pause, she said, “Fix Grandma.”
“Fix what?”
“My grandma is the sweetest, gentlest, kindest person in the world. She scrubbed other people’s clothes and washed their dishes and took care of their kids when she had four boys of her own to do for. Now she’s the one needs care and tending.”
“But she’s in a nursing home, isn’t she?” He hadn’t been going with Tiffany long. He didn’t have that much of a grip on her family.
Tiffany answered, “And she doesn’t remember her name.”
“Baby, you can’t fix that,” Mark said. “Even Mrs. Reagan
couldn’t fix that. A whole president on her hands, and she couldn’t fix that.”
“It’s my money. I’ll do what I want,” Tiffany said. She went over to the small fridge in the room and pulled out a mocha milk.
Mark was right there behind her when she turned around. He took the bottle from her so he could open it and help her not ruin her nails. “I thought we were a team,” he said. “We move as one.”
“My money is your money then?” she asked. “My money, that I win fair and square on the slot machines, you not dropping any coin?”
“If I won, I’d let you have half. Come on.”
“But you aren’t even going to win, because you don’t really want to play, you want to go be sleeping with the fishies, or whatever.”
“Just let me finish shaving, get dressed, we’ll go. Hey, you know what? C’mere.”
He held out his arms, and she came to him with her fists balled up under her chin, as if in protection or supplication.
Tiffany said, “Know what? If I won a million dollars? I mean, what if? Like, who would’ve thought I’d even win a thousand? Well, I’d first want to give Grandma something to walk up and down the halls with. A teddy bear.”
“Uh, we don’t have to win a million dollars for that. Seems manageable, you know, without winning the big one.”
“But see, the patients in those hospitals, they’re all so bewildered. They don’t know where they are but they do know something’s not right. The ladies carry empty purses around. That’s some comfort to them, a purse. They can still recognize a purse. Some of them have soft toys, but they go missing.”
“Go missing.”
“Yes, well, maybe staff takes them home to their little kids, who knows? I mean, those people are paid less than minimum wage, so you might expect it. Or maybe five stuffed animals wind up in one room, one of the women thinking they’re all hers. Sometimes staff puts the toys up high so the patients won’t get them, won’t squabble, but can only look at them, not reach them, and that’s terrible to me. What if I bought dozens and dozens and kept replacing them? Like each week, boom, here’s your twenty new teddy bears. Go give them to the ladies. Dozens of clean, fresh teddy bears.”
“Ah, honey …”
“You laugh. But see, I’ve been doing pricing. I’d like to buy some big soft rag dolls, too, that I saw. They stand about three feet high. They sell them at truck stops. I saw one at the truck stop in Jean, when we stopped for gas.”
“I thought you were looking at Indian jewelry.”
“Mostly these, because I saw them first in Barstow when we stopped to get something to drink. Guess what? They’re only ten dollars, and they’re, like, huge. I wrote down the name of the manufacturer. I could call, order up a ton. Or some teddy bears. See, I can get them for six or seven dollars, but they’re the bigger ones, the ones that don’t sell out at Christmastime or Valentine’s Day. You go in and ask the store manager for a discount. He’d as soon sell them to you for six dollars, even if they normally go for fourteen, than bother sending them back or keeping them around gathering dust till summertime. I already asked this one guy, at Albertson’s, the manager, and that’s what he said.”
Beautiful little thing, a little on the too-small size, Mark was thinking while he finished up at the mirror. Win scads of money, he’d feed her cheesecake till the cows came home. He said, “Whatever you want is all right with me, Tiff,” and saw that smile come back in her eyes. He turned on the shower, and there she was, in the room with him, unbuttoning her jeans. She challenged him with what he could do with his Duesy. At first he answered like a straight-man: “Drive it down Sunset, Hollywood and Vine. Attract an agent. Next step, I’m a famous actor, just from that one serendipitous event.”
“Fool.”
“That’s why you lub me, idn’t it, baby? I am your lubbin’ fool.”
“Well, serendipitous your Duesy into this, fool,” she said.
In the lobby of the hotel later, they did stop at a slot machine, and while Tiffany plied her luck once more, Mark obtained and delivered soft-serve ice cream and the news that there was a million-dollar jackpot waiting for her at a number of places around town. “Well,” Tiffany said, a light in her eyes, “pick one.”
“Let’s go to Terribles. With a name like that, it’s got to be good. Isn’t that what the Smucker’s ad used to say?”
“If you say so.”
He said, “It’s got what they call a progressive Triple-Seven Millionaire Jackpot. It’s not on the Strip, though. It’s north of town.”
“Nah, nah, nah, nah. You stuck me in this rinky-dink hotel on the outskirts already. Henderson? Where in hell is that? I want to go where the action is.”
“I thought I just gave you some of that.”
“My boots are itchin’ to go walkin’, baby. I feel it in my bones. I am a winnah tonight!”
Damned if she wasn’t.
Damned if the girl didn’t have a streak of gold built right into her. Make that not precisely 1 million, but 1.83 million. His baby did it! She broke the bank. She had faith. She was anointed.
Mark told her, at four in the morning after the first hullabaloo celebrations were done with, after the first meeting with the casino bigwigs had vouchsafed the truth of it all, after the phone calls to their loved ones, the sex, the promises, the spoken dreams, the tears and spasms of giggles, Mark told her, “Baby, I know you are not likely to believe this after what happened, but if you could erase what all went down tonight, erase the jackpot, put us back in L.A., in that Tujunga bungalow we found together, both of us slinging dishes and searching for gigs, I would just have to ask you to be my wife. You are the one. I knew it from the start.”
“You bullshitter.”
“You adorable, perfect, glorious Hepburn, you.”
“You only say it ’cause it’s true,” Tiffany said.
They had taken ten thousand dollars cash and went back to the cheap hotel in Henderson that first night and slept upon it, despite the entreaties of the staff at Terribles to stay in one of the premier suites. Mark and Tiffany promised they’d come back later, although he didn’t really know in which splendid hut they would install themselves. Now Mark got up from the bed, went to the closet, and brought out a white teddy bear the size a grandma might be. He said, “Happy Millions, baby. It’s only a start.”
He couldn’t believe it. He told the new guy not to bother beyond the yellow tape. Now there he was, zipping up after taking a leak by the mesquite. “Fred! What the hell you doin’ back there?”
Fred was a rugged old ex-trucker, maybe sixty, sixty-five. He walked like he had stickers in his shoes. When he came up to Jimmy D, he said, “Got you a stinker back there,” and held his pale blue eyes on him a while before he spit to the side. “I’d cover that up with a load of dirt, I was you, before you lay down more tin.”
“Come on back to the office,” Jim D said.
There he peeled off a hundred and gave it to Fred and said, “Thanks for your work. I’ll give you a ring if I need you some more.”
“A pleasure workin’ for you, Mr. Daniels.”
The air conditioner louvers were aimed right down on Jimmy when he called Aram. “Get Bo to call me, pronto.”
“He ain’t on my dance card, Jimmy. I don’t know where to—”
“Raghead, get Bo to call me to-fuckin’-day, or you’ll be eatin’ your own balls for breakfast, dig? Dig?”
Noon, Ron Bodella called. “I know I owe ya,” he told Jim.
“Listen and listen to me carefully,” Jim said. “Your product is stinking. You did a piss-poor job in covering it up, Shit-for-brains.”
“I put lye on it. That shouldn’ta—”
“Did I tell you to listen? Did I?”
The line was silent.
“Your assignment, asshole, is to get you two skunks. I don’t care how, I don’t care where, I don’t want questions, I don’t want explanations, I don’t want delays. I want two skunks. Dead or alive. You put them out on th
at heap … no. Back up. I’m going to dump a load of scrap there, but I want them skunks out by the trees like they been pests and I had to kill ’em. I want them there by tonight. That’s it. Over and out.”
He hung up the phone, loosened his shirt, rose from his desk and stood right in front of the blowing airstream and said, “Shit for brains. All of ’em. Shit for brains.” But then his eyes took on the smile his lips barely formed.
Tiffany cruised the penthouse suite. “How can people live like this?” she asked Mark.
“They do, all over the world. Not just for a day, not just for a night.”
“Where does all the money come from?”
“Only the Shadow knows.”
She lay down on the king-sized bed and said, “I mean really.”
“I don’t know, doll. It’s there, right under us poor slobs’ faces, but it’s invisible to us. You don’t really see what’s so far above your station you can’t imagine.”
“I keep seeing all the poor people in the newscasts. Flood victims. Starving Africans. Neglected kids.” She lay on the bed in her white sundress with the lavender swirls. Spread around her were sheaves of green, like brittle leaves from an exotic tree. The teddy bear sat in a white wicker chair on a cushion of deep-green velvet and gazed out at the horizon thick with yellow smog.
Mark said, “It’s time for me to go, hon. I can get in maybe five hours on the water, then I’m done.”