Six weeks later they were living together in a trailer at the Anasazi Motor Court, eating macaroni out of chipped coffee mugs, screwing and squabbling under the omniscient eye of the manager, Mrs. Frank Lloyd, a diabetic with sad gray skin and a crippled terrier named Ralph who'd take an eager nip out of anyone foolish enough to try to pet him. Dow and Jessie's rent was always late, their electrical service often interrupted for nonpayment, but Mrs. Lloyd rarely complained; these kids were not only the children she'd never had, they were the best entertainment she'd enjoyed since
Three's Company
went into reruns.
During this period Jessie skipped from job to job, unable to maintain interest in activities she regarded as bankrupt to begin with. Life then was a hostile fluid you patrolled like a shark, never relaxing, never lingering, you had an important destination, as yet unknown, but ceaseless movement would steer you there. She worked variously as a waitress, a dog groomer, appropriately dressed attendant at the Bikini Fun Car Wash, telephone operator, telephone sales rep, tour guide at the Liberace Museum (the tears! the laughter! the opera buffa! -- she quit in two days), until finally, on the recommendation of Lindsay Hoyle, who'd been in art class with her at Benny Binion High, she got hired as a brush technician at Lou Fox's Ars Maximus (formerly Monets for Monies). Inside a studio large as a railroad terminal she sat at an easel alongside ninety-nine other "brush techs," slapping out hotel room art at a modest assembly-line pace. Turned out Jessie had a special knack for knocking out Vermeers, an unexpected sensitivity to the poetry of objects, the psychology of light, the inherently transcendent nature of a quiet human space -- qualities to soothe the weary traveler staggering back to his rented room in the dyspeptic dawn with eight clammy cents in his pants and no future, in this life or the next. Mr. Fox was impressed; he slipped her a bonus, he boosted his visits to her stool, where his hands, willful creatures that they were, began lightly stroking the downy cords of her neck, kneading the artist's cramp from her back. Jessie endured these horrid massages as long as she could -- she really liked this job -- but she could feel the swamp in his touch and understood that her boat would not be one rising with the tide. So eventually, regretfully, she gave notice earlier, for once, than she liked, but no big deal, she wanted to lie around the house, too.
For nearly a year the drill had been this: reel home from the wonderful world of work (ticket irrevocably stamped minimum-wage rides only) to find Dow lounging about in his underwear, attended by two or three of his grotty friends with ridiculous names like Badger, Six-Deck Vic, Moe the Mucker, names she had no interest whatsoever in attaching to the proper faces, they were his good buddies, not hers, obsessed devotees of The System, that ever-mutating, ever-iridescent path to blackjack's Holy Grail. The secret mechanics of The System were hopelessly intricate, its parlance -- splitting, doubling down, hi-lo differential -- an insider's code, but the mainspring seemed to involve a species of card counting, a task Jessie could hardly imagine Dow mastering since whatever stores of patience and concentration he had managed to haul down with him from the north country had been thoroughly consumed out here in the great southwestern fry pan of loss and disappointment. His mood had grown progressively reptilian, especially when the guys were gone and Jess was drafted into dealing to him, hand after hand of relentless beejay until her fingers were sore, her head throbbed under the glare of the kitchen fluorescent, the sickening slap of the cards punctuated by his high-pitched shrieks, "No, goddamnit! How many times I got to tell you, dealer stands on seventeen, always, always, always, you idiot!" And she thought, you don't know me, you don't know my secrets.
Yet there was a certain piece of her at the hard durable center -- the last portion up the flue when any good American was cremated -- that answered to Dow's challenge and the nature of his obsession. He attacked his game with a fervor suggesting the enormity of the stakes, more than mere money, for the entrancing beauty of Vegas consisted in the promise that here in the desert sand the problems of life could be not so much reduced as
clarified
into a simple mathematical knot, then quickly "solved" by the application of the appropriate theoretical blade. It was the rare Yankee-Doodle Jill or johnny who escaped being touched by the poignant magic of such belief.
Hungry Dow had been searching for elements of The System since he was a little kid, running a casino complete with toy roulette wheel in the basement of his home in Minnesota, schooling other little kids in the valuable art of losing gracefully, painful previews of a future they would recognize too late. His own destiny, obvious even at this precocious age, was to win, whether by cheating ten-year-olds out of their lunch money or lying to his parents, what did it matter as long as debits were avoided. He was different, he experienced defeat physically, loss equivalent to a bullet to the chest, so when at last he achieved his boyhood dream of getting to Vegas and the city responded by employing his body for target practice, he died into rages only time and convalescence from the gaming tables could cure. Jessie usually left the trailer for Mother's house until optimism returned. That was the greatness of America, hope swam forever in the air before your eyes. And sometimes, just often enough to keep you hooked, faith was rewarded, like the afternoon Dow won $5,500, rushed home with the news, then proceeded to fuck Jessie for more than four straight hours without losing his hard-on. So she learned of the erotic radiance of money. "You know," he told her confidentially, "you can coast through this burg on a twenty-four-hour sex high." Perhaps. But that required you to keep winning and she didn't know any casino bugs who were cruising on anything stronger than desperation adrenaline. Gradually, without fanfare, it became the drug of choice in their house. Money withdrew from their lives like the receding tide; silences lengthened; Dow's precious wooden carving of Ho Tei, the Chinese god of luck, was fondled, caressed, and rubbed with a tender devotion Jessie had never known. She kept expecting him to attack her; and though he fumed, he raged, verbal assaults sharp as claws on her flesh, he never laid a hand on her in anger or in love.
Time ran on without them, Dow at his cluttered table of soiled cards and useless charts, waiting for the Wheel to turn, Jessie at the bedroom window, studying the desert outside for clues. The desert neither waited nor hoped, it endured. The Lizard God remembered when rock flowed like a river, remembered when it would again, the passage between these events no more than the blink of one hooded implacable eye. This town is doomed, she thought, and we, its inhabitants.
And then one perfectly lucid morning she looked at this stranger she'd been sharing her life with for over a year and saw him for the first time and, unable to contain herself, such was the force of sheer astonishment, she blurted out, in all innocence, the fundamental question, "Who are you?"
In reply, Dow flung a full deck of cards into her open face, keen edges cutting at her forehead, her nose, her lips. She was too shocked to respond. Beneath the surface, where words ceaselessly arranged themselves into argument and rationalization, she understood that the Dow part of her life was finished. All that remained was for this truth to float to the top, turn its bloated belly to the light, for her to initiate the series of withdrawal actions that would end with her back in her old room down the hall from Mother, reliving the nightmares of her childhood (gargoyles on the bedposts, the lady machine in the closet with surgical instruments for hands, the trapdoor under the bed where clacking fingers lurked to drag her down to subterranean bondage as a zombie toxic worker in the polluted mills of the future), a headachy muddle of days spent fending off her mother's nagging ("the man held no chips, I could see it in his eyes"), the hideous advances of her mother's boyfriends, older, incontinent versions of Dow with bad skin tone and less brains. When she'd lifted enough bread from these besotted boyfriends' pockets to finance her getaway, she immediately fled into a new apartment, a new life.
She got a job as a dancing slave girl at Nero's Feast. In a week she was dating Spartacus. His real name was Garrett Pugh and he was handsome and kind and not without grand ambitions of his own, such as the realization of one hundred million dollars (a meager one million no longer seemed quite sufficient) by the age of thirty-five, the year his father unexpectedly died of a routine flu virus. The fact that Garrett was determined to amass this wad by one day operating his own casino endeared him instantly to Jessie -- at last, a man working the right side of the tables. By day Garrett carried a spear through Nero's Feast; at night he attended classes at Tom and Jerry's Dealers School, tales out of which only confirmed Jessie's long-held suspicions: the first week was devoted to how customers cheat, the remaining five weeks to how to cheat the customers. Like Dow, he was rarely without a deck in his hands, and eventually Jessie learned not to flinch at the sound of cards being riffled. Trust, a wary but ultimately loyal dog, returned to take up residence inside her, glad to find the bed still warm, the bowl full. Garrett brought her back to the person she was when she first met Dow, and for that, she loved him. His eyes were a soulful brown, his lips the softest she'd ever kissed, she laughed a lot when he was around. They were married, coincidentally, at The Happy Chapel by Reverend Pop in a ceremony so brief their wedding pictures, she liked to joke, were a series of shots of an empty room. One month later she was pregnant with Cammie.
She was ill most of her term, shanghaied aboard this stormy voyage to the mysteriously distant land of motherhood. She carried an emergency paper bag with her wherever she went; Garrett massaged her back, kept her supplied with soda crackers, beef bouillon, and deep chocolate ice cream the few waking hours they managed to share each miserable day. Of course, once she showed, she was immediately fired from her job as dancing slave girl, her obvious condition too blatant a reminder of consequences in a town whose very existence depended upon the deferral of consequences until, that is, your accounts, financial, physical, and emotional, had been thoroughly cleared. At home with only herself and her basketball belly for company, she was bored. Television drove her mad, the noise and fever and folly of a casino without a payout -- ever. She took to reading, between bouts of nausea, cheap paperback accounts of true crime, serial killers stalking the lonely down I-95, a satanic cult of teenage cannibals terrorizing Fresno, the crossdressing rapist of upper Broadway, stories with the same ambivalent allure of a reptile house, dread wound into hypnotic coils vibrant with meaning, even repulsion had its own particular message to impart. Secretly, she thrilled to the dissonance of violation, of accompanying, if only in the safety of her imagination, a fellow human being's reckless steps over the line, over all lines, into a quickening night of absolute freedom -- or was such impunity before the law an enslavement more terrible than prison bars or meek obedience? She didn't know -- but when miscellaneous body parts started washing up in her dreams, when anxious memories of pursuit through darkened rooms she'd never been in before haunted her days, she switched to reading tell-all celebrity biographies for fear the ugliness of the images crowding her head might begin infecting her baby's unborn brain. An irrational concern, but one whose truth she couldn't doubt as each burgeoning week of her pregnancy seemed to draw her deeper into the domain of magic.
The birth was an event of unspeakable proportions, a wild ride among significances memory couldn't recapture without damage: the cosmos was knotted in ligatures of pain; unravel the threads, liberate the stars whose blossoms promise ease from the agony of time; astounding the revelatory force of torment that carried her, teensy squeaking her, up and up, through ceiling and roof, out into space, out of space, to the cold chamber of the dark queen with the patchwork face of old nightmares who leaned from her throne to tell Jessie something she did not want to hear, and as the thin blue lips began to move, Jessie shrank back in horror, spinning down onto a point so dense the soul's implosion was averted only by a nova cry of life surfacing, and she opened her wondering eyes upon the holy puckered countenance of a new daughter, in whose glow the visions of her mad journey toward this sight began evaporating as cleanly as morning dew. Life is death's amnesia, she thought, and forgetfulness a grace to which we cling.
Now her moments were greedily absorbed by Cammie; nurturing a baby, she learned, required milk and her life -- all of it. Distracted by diapers, feedings, fussings, timeless episodes of sheer adoration, Jessie lost track of her husband. She had no leisure to check his pulse, take his temperature, note the onset of disquieting symptoms. As far back as junior high school Garrett had devised for himself a master life plan, a secret timetable charting minimal rates of financial progression year by year to the precocious attainment of lusty tycoonship. Problem: the life was failing to keep pace with the plan. Garrett was fired from his first dealer's job for smiling too much, from his second for dropping a stack of nickel chips during a house rush. He rechecked his figures. An uncharacteristic testiness began to infect his manner. Rejected by several other casinos -- paranoid visions of a deadly blacklisting nibbling at the edges of his mind -- he was finally taken on at the Sand Dollar Saloon, a tacky grind joint for low-rolling tourists where the dealers dressed in fringed satin shirts, knotted bandannas, and ten-gallon hats. Garrett loved playing cowboy. Once he put the costume on, the costume put him on: instant machismo in high-heeled lizard boots. He wore the outfit religiously, at work and at home, exploding into petty rages at the sight of an imagined stain. The pit boss was an unregenerate bastard, stewed in the cynicism of a lifetime back of the tables, ragging the help his sole remaining pleasure. "Vegas is a company town, kid, and you're the uninvited guest." He'd stand directly behind Garrett, exhaling warm shrimp breath down Garrett's neck, "Nerves, kid, it's all about nerves," flashing a skull's vacuous grin, berating him in front of the players for poor posture, improper dress, sloppy dealing, and other fictitious discourtesies. If a player walked with more than a few bills (the exact number varying in accordance with the pit boss's humor) he'd run Garrett through humiliating reps of breaking the deck, burning the top six, seven, eight cards, speed dealing (Garrett's technique only fair), and stripping (which he was lousy at). Then he might leave him in place anyway, through the next break or two, to work off his karmic debt, clear the atmosphere around the table so that the p.c. might be restored to its normal house heavy equilibrium. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Garrett was required to wear white socks, black only on the weekends, charms to counter the players' luck, fines for Garrett if he forgot. Frequently, on off days, Garrett would be unexpectedly called in to work a fourteen-hour shift; not a day passed without the threat of dismissal. When, finally, he assembled the audacity to ask, why are you treating me like this? the pit boss replied, "No reason, I just don't like you."