Ride the Lucky

“Crossing the line,” that's what the Highway Patrol woman said. Neely Thomas was on a gurney, his injuries deemed non-life-threatening, she was taking her initial report, just pad and pencil, he was surprised they still used those. She'd made her observations based on the skid marks and the impact. The young guy in the Jeep had spun round, crossed the line, straight into the path of what remained of a tree that had stood since the days of Columbus. God's wrath . . . ? Mother Nature's fury . . . ? Had it been meant for one of her native sons or a heretic like Neely? Checking football scores while unscrupulous lumber companies took cowardly bites of ancient forbidden forests—turning history into fast food wrappers while poor boys from the tribe died gruesome deaths—a proud people devolving into alcoholism and dissolution while white men chased straights on their sacred burial grounds?

Excerpts from "Drawing Dead":

"You weren't supposed to do that, to look someone in the eye like that and be anything but gracious as they expressed their concern. It was all a show anyway, wasn't it? What condolences were there for someone who just lost a loved one? What could you say? You said something anyway, they nodded, you both moved on . . . It was necessary, it was part of human socialization, it's just the way it was. You didn't hold onto their hands with a leathery grip and say something unsettling. You didn't look at them with blame or anger. It wasn't done, it violated the rules."

"Some part of him, conscious or not, had wanted to get caught. He wanted the blow-up of blow-ups, the one that threatened total dissolution, that put him back in bachelor quarters with a bottle of JB, a portable iron and the channel set permanently on ESPN. He needed to know the extreme, it may have been what got him into the crazy shit to begin with, he needed to push Hope into true meltdown territory. He didn't know why, he just needed it. Why did moths fly into porch lights and fry themselves into a cinder? Why did anyone ever pick up a drink or put down a bet the first time? Were they eyeing the finish line all along? Bankruptcy, divorce, nervous breakdown, unemployment. Spend their 20s and 30s building a life only to destroy it in their 40s? He sometimes saw it as a scream for help the way suicides slit their wrists with a plastic dinner knife and then look for someone to tell. Yet, Hope in all her observational scrutiny, her unceasing watchfulness, didn't suspect a thing. She went happily along, blind to nothing except her own husband's absurd foray into cliché, losing everything they'd saved together to secure theirs and their children's futures. It made no sense to him, and he realized the closer he came to finally emptying those last accounts at the home stretch of his epic losing streak, he had on a surprising and disturbing level, become furious with her for letting him do it."

"It wasn't yet midnight, he was up $600K for the weekend already, and he had a woman by his side he knew he'd be making love to later if he only kept winning. Losing didn't occur to him, though he still held out faint hope it might happen. This could still be a morality tale with a happy ending, perhaps he'd pay his penance and move on. He didn't believe it, though . . . instead he felt he was finally facing the truth."

"They waited as the last card was dealt. In slow motion, it seemed, though maybe the dealer did draw it out, seeing as there was over two million dollars in the pot by now. Other gamblers in the room had gathered, hearing the whispers of what was going on, and this was it, wasn't it? This was Vegas in all her glory. This was what they had all come for. To watch a man win, to watch a man die. Backs were broken at tables like this, lives lost even if the shell went on clocking in and going to work another 40 years, they never outlived the hand that destroyed them."