The no longer functional
Jericho Army Base is where Axel and the woman have ended up, living in the 1980
Airstream they’ve hot-wired up to a transformer pole. They suggest that Cooper
sleep in an old surveyor’s tent not too far from their silver dwelling. Lina
shows him the well where they bathe. There are still traces of gold in the
water, she says. They cook all meals outside, and a propane tank hisses away
during breakfast and dinner. At night Cooper can see other lights in the far
reaches of the abandoned base. Two horses that belong to Lina drift near the
camp.
Mentioning
Dorn to The Gentile breaks the ice.
God, I knew his mother so
well, I could almost have fathered him.
He’s the smart one among us, Cooper says graciously.
The Gentile thinks, then mutters,
And
now they say
he’s a hippie.
It looks that way.
Coop watches Lina walk over and mount her horse, supple as a scarf, and
suddenly he thinks of Claire. The way she was always serene on an animal. Lina
has, according to The Gentile, a price on her head, her
fi
rst husband still unforgiving about her
escape from his bullying.
A woman in distress...
Cooper remembers. There
are mesas and horse trails and old gold mines to explore during the day. The
fact that Cooper knows horses surprises Lina.
‘Hey, a gambler
who rides!’
So the two of them trek into the desert.
Cooper has to wait for night, in any case— Axel refuses to bring out cards
until it is dark, and then he takes Cooper into the Airstream’s den and closes
the door. They will emerge after three or four hours, at which point Cooper
walks to his tent and crashes into sleep.
Some afternoons he wanders alone through the deserted cafeterias and abandoned
barracks of the military base, which feels like a suburb of the moon. He meets
no one, though at night he will sometimes hear a generator or see a
fi
re. There are only Lina and Axel to talk
to. It feels like a parody of guru
–
disciple teaching,
except that The Gentile has a vociferous sexual life
—
he
has even apologized for the noise, and his yells often sound like screams for
help. Their sex takes place in the late afternoons, and shortly afterwards they
emerge from the Airstream like humbled dormice. Cooper, in his tent forty yards
away, has tied a thin cotton cloth over his eyes so he can nap in the three
p.m. glare, but it’s tough to ignore the shouts of surrender or epiphany coming
from the trailer.
After a week, The Gentile doubles the hours of card-playing. The games now last
at least six hours. At midnight they pause, Axel goes into the kitchen, and
returns with scotch and two glasses, and they begin again. ‘Beware the false
ending,’ he says, as if the previous hours had been only a rehearsal.
The Gentile records their theoretical credits and debits on a chart. By now
Cooper already seems to owe him $30,000. ‘Whoever loses rides into Miniver for
groceries,’ The Gentile announces, ‘and I don’t mount horses or mules.’ Another
night he raises the stakes. ‘If you win, you may sleep with Lina. Try dealing
from the middle of the deck. Anything goes tonight. If I catch you at it, the
bet is cancelled. If you win, you can show that affection I know you have for
her.’ Cooper is deeply embarrassed. ‘Some say I won Lina in a card game,’ The
Gentile continues, ‘though in fact she won
me
in that card game. But of
course I was the dealer. The CIA believes you can break anyone, turn anyone, if
you know their weakness. It’s usually sex, always number one, then money, or
power.
Now and then pride and vanity.
What about you?’
They play with their scotch glasses balanced on the windowsill. ‘It’s easy
being a mechanic playing a large table, so let’s limit ourselves to a small
one. Also, Vegas
has
distractions. We don’t. So you
can watch me carefully.’
Thus begins the second week of a more illicit education.
How
to be an undiscovered cardsharp.
‘It’s something we are not naturally
inclined to do,’ Axel murmurs, ‘to handle things with skill and grace and make
it appear that nothing is happening. You need to give the illusion of the
unexceptional. Slow down your deal, in fact deal like a sucker. Then you can
vanquish them. Now, show me your crimp work.’ It is clear to Cooper that, as
far as Axel is concerned, Vegas
needs
to be buried
under the sands. ‘I look at this military base and have high hopes that Vegas
will end up the same, with entombed singers and comedians. A thousand years
from now we will dig up the tomb of the great Wayne Newton, and he will be a
god again.’ Axel never stops talking. Cooper is reminded of hitchhikers who
enter a car and rattle off biblical quotations with chapter and verse to prove
that the end of the world will arrive before the weekend. The Gentile lectures
about manner and style and focus. ‘I am told that Tolstoy,’ he says, ‘was able
to walk into a room that held a small group of people and understand everything
about them in fifteen minutes. The only person in the room he could
not
understand
was himself. That’s what a good professional is like.’
The Gentile shuf
fl
es and deals quickly and angrily, listing what he loves in the world
he has left
—
espresso, plots in Donald Westlake novels,
the
fl
avour of
chipotle chilies
—
and Cooper keeps watching the deal. If
he accuses The Gentile and he is wrong, he forfeits a thousand.
‘
Just a thousand,
’
Axel says.
‘
Normally if we are falsely accused, we pick up a handgun and blast
your shoulder off. And don’t forget
—if
you win this evening, Lina is
beyond the door. I’ll sleep in the tent. Probably howl like a wolf in jealousy.
But a deal is a deal. I told her, and she approves of the stakes, by the way. I
read of a similar bet in a Faulkner story.’ ‘Don’t distract me,’ Cooper says.
‘I am distracting you. You missed two corrupt shuf
fl
es, during the story about Tolstoy. You
were
listening,
there was content there, there was a maze-like thought
there. You have to forget the content, think about the wheel....’
Two in the morning. Cooper rises and marks his losses on the chart that’s
tacked to the varnished door. There is utter frustration in him. He thought he
was skilled. ‘Do you know what the best line in a movie is?’ The Gentile asks,
still in his seat.
‘You can tell me that tomorrow,’ Coop says. ‘Good night.’ In the other room
Lina says, ‘You lost, right?’ He doesn’t know whether she really is aware of
the absurd stakes proposed by Axel. She takes his hand.
‘Great
hands.
So Axel tells me. Good night.’ Cooper treads through the
darkness, enters the tent, and is asleep instantly. A few minutes later he
wakes to their loud laughter.
The two of them break from cards one night and walk with Lina for hours along a
dry riverbed. They clamber to higher ground, where it is even darker, there’s
hardly a moon, and Coop feels barely attached to the earth. Lina comes
alongside him, and her hand takes his so their
fi
ngers intertwine. For Coop, who has been
solitary so long, it is full of intimacy, a secret gesture. She turns in the
darkness, looks at his pro
fi
le, and says,
‘
Oh, it
’
s you,
’
and moves
out of reach.
‘
I
’
m sorry, it
was a mistake,
’
he hears her
say, as she goes farther away from him.
She keeps reminding him of Claire.
This woman who has been
saved from a mistakenly chosen life by Axel.
She has an abundance that
emerges from her farm-girl’s face. When Cooper leaves a few days later to catch
the bus to Bakers
fi
eld, she offers a shy farewell. He kisses the plaid shirt by her
neck.
Then her temple.
And Axel, who has rarely
touched him in all his time there, gives him a bear hug.
He has, in any case, learned everything he came for. He has won only a few
games against The Gentile, but Cooper knows— although his teacher doesn’t say
it—that he can now deal a pack of cards to the Supreme Court and get away with
it.
In the half-light of the
night bus he studies his hands, turns them over. The Gentile’s hands looked
like a girl’s, like those of a princess. Coop, travelling to meet Dorn and the
others in Vegas, suddenly feels unready. He realizes he has been living within
intricate and private conversations with a possible madman, around one small
light, at one small card table in an Airstream. He is a risk to himself as well
as to the others. He looks up when the bus approaches Vegas, where the sky
above the desert city seems to be on
fi
re.
The Gulf War begins at
2:35 a.m. during the early hours of January 17, 1991. But it is just another
late afternoon in the casinos of Nevada. The television sets hanging in mid-air
that normally replay horse races or football games are running animated
illustrations of the American attack. For the three thousand gamblers inhaling
piped-in oxygen at the Horseshoe, the war is already a video game, taking place
on a
fi
ctional
planet. The TV screens are locked on mute. There are
fl
oor shows, cell-phone hookers, masseurs
at work, the click-clacking of chips, and nothing interrupts the reality of the
casino where the
‘
eye in the sky
’
looks down on every hand played on the surfaces of green baize.
Simultaneously, in the other desert
’
s night,
orange-white explosions and
fi
reballs light up the horizon. By 2:38 U.S. helicopters and stealth
bombers are
fi
ring missiles and dropping penetration bombs into the city. During
the next four days, one of the great high-tech massacres of the modern era
takes place. The Cobra helicopter, the Warthog, the Spectre, and its twin, the
Spooky, loiter over the desert highway and the retreating Iraqi troops, pouring
down thermobaric fuel, volatile gasses, and
fi
nely powdered explosives, to consume all
oxygen so that the bodies below them implode, crushing into themselves.
Dorn, his girlfriend Ruth,
Mancini, Cooper. The four of them talk in the River Café. It’s one in the
morning. Mancini wants to be in on the actual game against The Brethren. ‘I
can’t trust you,’ Dorn says. ‘You’re a good actor, and then sometimes you’re
translucent. We need The Dauphin to be the innocent, and he’s gone. So it will
have to be me.’ Dorn has taken charge.
Do I drive,
then?
says
Mancini.
No. Ruth drives. It’s best
if you sit down with Coop for a few days and work on the hands, timing,
the
moves.
All that.
So, The Speech Therapist drives. And I’m
translucent.
Thus, I am not on
the
fl
oor at
all....
You can
’
t be
,
they
’
ll smell a crew. In fact, be somewhere else that night, another
casino. How much have you discovered about Autry? Does he have a mechanic?
Sidekicks always play with him, so it
’
s dif
fi
cult to identify who is responsible. The
cardsharp drifts from person to person, I think, every few hands.
Cooper interrupts. Then I suggest we just blow them all out of the water.
Then you’ll never have an afterlife in this town. If they are corrupt, they
will recognize corruption. The reason you went to The Gentile was to make what
you are doing invisible.
I don’t care.
I care, Ruth says. This is our world. We work here.
Dorn and Cooper step from
the elevator onto the mezzanine level and walk down the
fl
ight of stairs into the swamp of card
tables. The section of the casino where The Brethren always sit is a small room
off the main poker
fl
oor where, beyond a blue rope, there is a single table. While
strictly overseen by the eye in the sky, the hand-dealt games here have the
dangerous air of an old faro game. No one is fully safe with the human element,
but they have all been warned. Dorn, in a canary-yellow Hawaiian shirt, sips a
glass of scotch and watches The Brethren hunting down a civilian. Autry
gestures a welcome into their game. Dorn and Cooper hesitate. This is expected
of them; normally they are gun-shy with the Born-Agains. They mime having
another drink and signal a possible return, then continue their walk around the
casino. An hour later, when they do eventually step over the blue rope and sit
down with Autry and the two thieves, one on either side of him, it’s quickly
established that this will be a private
game,
there
will be no house dealer. And
it’s
Texas Hold ’Em. This
is how The Brethren play.
In the
fi
rst hand Dorn wins a thousand. It
’
s the expected hook from The Brethren, and
Dorn shows modesty. He leans forward with his long unwashed hair and his big
smile. Autry begins a monologue about the state of the world, this desert, that
troublesome desert. The hands go back and forth for more than an hour, the good
hands essentially cancelling each other out, a familiar rise and fall. Whenever
it is Coop’s turn, he cuts the deck faithfully. The players are all watching
the movement of hands, the buried habits. Coop notices where the player on his
right habitually cuts the cards, roughly the same spot every time. The talk
around the table is constant, interesting anecdote and data, but Cooper thinks
of the wheel. He knows someone will make a move soon. ‘Don’t rif
fl
e-stack for just a minor haul,
’
Mancini has told him. ‘Save the work for
when everything has escalated.’ So Cooper waits.