Leaving Las Vegas (3 page)

The cab zips by a tattered woman carrying two overloaded bags of laundry under the hot sun, several children in tow. Sera wonders at the woman’s pain—or her ability to remain ignorant of it.

The shade of the hotel tower has just crawled off of the yellow Mercedes; actually, it seemed to crawl slowly over the car and then dart quickly from the peripheral area, like a little girl who suddenly realizes that she is sitting next to a spider. The windows have been open all night, befitting the perpetual heat of the season. Taking advantage of the newly directed sunlight, the man in the car looks again into the cant rearview mirror at the image of a solitary gold chain, nestled in and somehow at home amidst
his voluminous chest hair and unruly neck hair. He nods—an internal debate apparently resolved—and removes a second gold ring from his left pinky. There are now no rings on his left hand.

There is, however, a single, heavily-jeweled ring remaining on his right hand—the index finger—and this is the hand that now, shaking almost imperceptibly, holds the plastic handle of a disposable razor. It scrapes dryly across his face, making an unpleasant noise until one of the hotel’s maintenance vehicles, brushes swirling, goes to work on a nearby area of the parking lot and drowns it out.

Passing the green and gray pebble lawn in front of the one-story apartment building, small change in the cab forgotten, Sera swings open the security gate and limps toward her door, distinguished from the others by a once black, now faded gray italic
6,
permanently affixed and reaffixed to the veneer with various nails and small screws. Inside she shuts the door and feels, as she always does when first entering her apartment, both relieved and threatened by the surprising silence of her home, a silence somehow augmented by the low bombilation of central air and frost-free refrigeration. She puts down her purse and sheds her clothing as she hobbles about, restoring each belonging to its proper location in the appropriate room or closet, maintaining an orderly state of affairs. Herself finally naked and placed in the shower stall, she rotates the chrome knobs and releases the water, standing braced under the spray until her trembling knees fail and she collapses onto the tile wall in front of her; gripping the porcelain soap dish, she feels the water beat on her back and watches it disappear down the drain.

(Even the black girls were constantly hassled. The outcalls, the houses, everybody was in the path of The Policy Cops and their pervasive attempts to piss off the Very Bad Guys. The only girls left working—other than those in the Korean houses—were the desperate junkies. For Sera the problems were even more critical, more personal. She was haunted, pursued, tortured emotionally, sometimes physically, day and night by the one who had made her the object of his obsession. She was and would become his last, best gold chain, an unwilling bauble on his furry chest. He had made it just too hard for her to stay in Los Angeles, so three years after arriving from the East, she had to move, had to leave the little life that she had built.)

Spanking clean, she dries herself with two towels and walks tiptoe over the cold tile floor out of the bathroom and into her bed. As each muscle settles into temporary disuse, her mind, now entrusting control of her body to the soft bed, accelerates, reviewing the day, the week, the month—all the sublimity, all the poetically prosaic moments of her deliberate life—until it abruptly stops and, with the easy effort of survival, drops Sera and her past into a dreamless sleep.

Far outside of town on the way to Henderson there are four or five pawn shops littering the highway. In front of one of these is parked the yellow Mercedes, its owner waiting for the passing of a highway patrol car that might object to expired Canadian license plates. He has driven this distance to avoid being spotted at a pawn shop by anyone who may know him, but in truth there is almost no one who knows him.

The air is hot and dry, and though this man is genetically built
for such a climate, these days he is not properly wound for his environment, or perhaps he is simply naked for the first time. At least now he has some money in his pocket, fewer rings on his fingers.

Sera awakens roughly seven hours later to the early evening sounds of her neighbors returning home from their jobs. She turns to look at the clock and then stops before seeing it, remembering that, with her face beaten, she has no schedule of her own to keep, and with its disregard for hours, Las Vegas has none to impose upon her. Resisting a second impulse to look at the time, she gets up instead to urinate.

At the bathroom sink she peers into the mirror and examines the current version of her look. She has, on the right side of her face, two distinct multicolor bruises, one each in the areas of her eye and cheek, the latter extending inward to swollen lips and upward to her nose, where, compounded by the swell of the former, it transforms her once and future beauty into quite an asymmetrical event. Certainly it’s been worse, perhaps will be again. The pain is really only as bad as the time spent on it, and apart from the dull throbbing ache, punctuated by occasional sharp stings of pain, she feels mostly irritation at the inconvenience. Not that she didn’t walk into it, almost ask for it by ignoring her gut feeling, but she has always tried so hard to play by all the rules, and she feels that in exchange for this acquiescence she should be allowed to proceed unmolested to conclusion. Or, if that is not quite right, at least she knows that she is as hard as she’s going to get and has been for a long time. Glaring at herself, she waits for her vexation to pass, knowing that it has no more basis than its cause. Nothing has changed; there is no toll to
be collected, no psychological scar to flaunt. The world is evidently about to let her stick around: good deal, she knows. She also knows that this episode is now, physical evidence to the contrary, pretty much over. She goes to the television and turns on the evening news. In the kitchen she makes a pot of coffee, puts some bread in the toaster.

Fed, feeling better, still in possession—not surprisingly—of the three bills from last night’s trick du jour—and then some—she brushes her teeth and hair, puts on her jeans and tee shirt and walks to the bus stop.

(Intentionally she stayed a step behind, hanging back in the bushes—the
woods
to neighborhood children, actually just a small grouping of trees in someone’s backyard—not quite hiding deliberately enough so that she couldn’t plausibly deny it should she be discovered. The yellow bus came and went, leaving her alone at the stop and gleeful at the success of her deception. She waited in the winter wind for the next bus, the
late kids’bus,
filled with not-so-familiar faces, kids that wouldn’t know her so well, wouldn’t know the mocking chants that stung her ears every other morning.)

She arrives downtown and makes a few passes up and down Fremont before strolling into one of the virtually interchangeable casinos in that area. Finding an empty five dollar table, meeting the resentful glare of the dealer, whose arms are folded in judgment and inactivity, she slips into the center seat and smooths a hundred out in front of her, rotating and casually examining it in mocking anticipation of the dealer’s own predictable actions. He, the dealer, stands immobile; his only reaction is an annoyed “shuffle-up,” which escapes his rigid lips without the benefit of even an insincere exclamation point. Sera knows this guy. All regular gamblers know this guy. He’s the Las Vegas equivalent of the dour postal worker who’s irked at the propagation of correspondence
in this country; except that there are many more angry dealers per peer capita than there are angry postal workers. This one is fanning out his cards in front of him, flips them over for a moment: everyone can see. Various ritualistic machinations follow, to the point where she finds herself in temporary charge of two green and ten red chips—these in exchange for her one hundred dollars—and two cards—these in exchange for her placing one of her red chips in the circle outlined on the green felt in front of her. She and the dealer then spend about twenty minutes swapping cards and chips back and forth without any substantial or lasting exchange of wealth.

Sera is a competent player knowing all the right plays but has never been serious enough to learn the memory mechanics of card counting, a skill that would give her a slight advantage over the house and therefore more or less consistent winnings during the course of her habitual play. As it is she experiences only short runs of good or bad luck, with the balance of her play blending into a low profile blandness that seems to make the casinos happy as they whittle away at her money until it is gone. Only then, her leisure time completed, can she go home and prepare to earn more, which will be willingly offered up, with full cognizance that it is being sacrificed, when she sits again at the tables, in the casinos, which are under the jurisdiction of the Nevada Gaming Commission, which, small evidence to the contrary, has no wisdom that hasn’t long ago been gained by Sera.

A well-built man wearing a gold cross chained around his neck, a moustache, and a cologne that he probably couldn’t name, nonchalantly sits down next to her and commences spraying her with quick sideways glances and vulgar grins. He offers to buy her a drink, and she points out that the casino would have already done that had she wanted one.

“High roller?” he smirks, indicating her five dollar bet on the
table. He adds a chip to his own bet, bringing it up to ten dollars. “There’s a charm. My name’s Stephen. Maybe I’ll bring you luck, _____”.

“Sera,” she says. “Where are you visiting from?”
San Diego.

They both stand against the dealer’s four and lose to his drawn seven.

“Damn!” says Stephen. “I hate those damn unfair twenty-ones. Phoenix, Sarah. You?” He puts another ten dollars in his betting circle.

“They do seem unfair. Here,” she says. She decides to bet ten also and notices that when she does he raises his bet to fifteen. “You can’t bluff me, you know.”—indicating with a nod his bet—“This isn’t poker.” She smiles.

“No,” he says, smiling back at her smile, “really, Phoenix.”

Nodding, this time to his response, she drops it and increases her bet to fifteen before the deal. He quickly raises his to twenty.