DAGOBERTO GILB (1950–) was born in Los Angeles and spent many years in El Paso. His most recent novel is The Flowers. His previous works are Gritos, an essay collection and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Woodcuts of Women; The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña; and The Magic of Blood, which won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award and was a PEN/Faulkner finalist. His fiction and nonfiction are anthologized widely and have appeared in a range of magazines including The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, Harper’s, Latina, and The Texas Observer. Gilb spent most of his adult years as a construction worker and a journeyman high-rise carpenter with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. He lives in Austin, Texas.
In an office swivel chair, Ray Muñoz faced his jobsite and a pane of fixed glass. He’d missed a few days of work without explanation and the field superintendent was due anytime. He would be expected to say something. Only one of the foremen had even brought up his absence this morning, asking with an uncomfortable laugh whether Ray had tied one on or what.
The majority of the men were huddled in pairs and small groups near the coffee truck next to the gate, holding styrofoam cups and sandwiches and burritos, the steam from which quickly became indistinguishable from the overcast sky. Ray could hear a couple of them near his window talking about the leftovers they still had from Thanksgiving, about Christmas, about the sex in the movie last night and about what they were probably going to do today at the job. They were sitting on a stack of large but not full sheets of plywood waiting for the foreman to start them to work. When the time came, Ray rocked in his swivel chair and watched the wobbly manlift roll up the cable line to the eighteenth and the nineteenth floors where most of the men unloaded, and then to the roof where the lift clicked off to let two laborers load several empty oxygen and acetylene bottles. He saw the operator pull the cage door together when they were finished and the counterweight rise as the manlift coasted down where stragglers were waiting for the next trip up.
Ray thought about how only a few years ago he believed he’d be wearing leather bags into retirement. Never did he imagine a chair and a secretary. He worked construction with callused hands that made the tools feel like they had grips, hands that held so many nails and hammers for so many hours they stayed clenched like fists in his off hours. But they earned him a living, not a rich one, but enough not to be ashamed. He remembered how his wife changed his thinking about that. She told him he should stop thinking like he’d just crossed the border and couldn’t do better and to remember the where of his birth, to think about the miracle of possibilities on this side. He knew she was right about miracles because he could touch her with his palms and fingers, always cut and smashed and lumpy with splinters, always dry because of cement and rust, and they could still record the sensation of such a contrary texture. That she fell in love with him should have sent him back faithfully to Mass every Sunday. There was no other explanation: she’d been to college and still married him and lived his life of wages and alcohol, rented apartments and, when children came, rented houses which would never have been homes otherwise. Houston was her idea. He never would have left El Paso. But she was convinced there were opportunities and she was the smart one. And soon there was a new truck, then a new house, and finally, when he got this job, a savings account he planned to surprise her with someday.
His secretary peeked through a crack in the door. “You’re here,” she said as though he never was. “Sorry I’m late. I’m making some coffee right now.” He didn’t say anything to her. He’d fired his last secretary six months ago for not typing well enough and being on the phone too much, but the real reason was that she’d been coming on to him and that was too disruptive to his life. He’d already had his youth, was what he’d decided, and this new world, Houston, had offered him winning dice: while his childhood friends were still struggling near the border, he’d become a superintendent in a major construction company. He was on a roll and he didn’t want to complicate the betting.
He should have known better. Looking back, it was easy to see. Just as his wife had started teasing him about that secretary, she’d been telling him about all the women she worked with at her job in the federal building, about all the fantasies and even affairs that began at their more than an hour lunch breaks with lawyers and government administrators and sometimes diplomats. She even told him about the one she met who spoke—besides Spanish—French, German, and even some Russian. He just never suspected, probably because he was so preoccupied with his new status. He just never suspected that she’d moved with the times too.
• • •
Before the phone call, Sylvia Molina had been methodically packing their luggage, neatly folding all the clothes that she and her husband and their youngest son might need. She’d been thinking about the things she had learned growing up, because this certainly was not one of them. Vacations were a time when her father got to sleep in and nap in the afternoon and talk about it happily if it was a gift from the job, or worriedly if it was because he was unemployed. She could only remember taking a trip once, to Durango, when her grandmother on her mother’s side died. Her father’s parents were from this side and lived with them.
“Are you just about done?” her husband asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“And Jimmy . . .”
“Is already over at Peter’s.” She said that strongly and it even surprised her.
“Is everything okay?”
She could hear the department store’s Christmas music in the background. A voiceless Noel. “I’m a little nervous. I don’t know why.”
“We’ll have a good time. Look, I’ll be home in an hour, maybe two. I gotta go.”
Sylvia hung up the phone guiltily. Everything mental told her that the trip was going to go well. A weekend in Las Vegas before her husband got bogged down with the holidays and then inventory. They’d catch a show, gamble, have a few drinks, eat out. Neither of them had been there before. And it was she who’d wanted to do something exciting.
Excitement, she believed, must be a word belonging to her generation. Her mother had never mentioned the concept to her. What might pass for it in their home came through living next door to Mr. Rodriguez, who would often come home drunk in the middle of the night and would sometimes try to get in his locked front door instead of sleeping in his car. Mrs. Rodriguez would scream at him and the neighborhood about whores and the devil, diseases and lice. Then there was Rudy Rodriguez, their oldest son, who had brought police cars to the street more than once, and Mike, their next oldest, who was a football star at UT-Austin and even tried out for a pro team. She didn’t remember her sisters seeming too concerned about the feeling of excitement either. The older one married when she was twenty, and the big thing in her life was a wedding ceremony and reception and her first baby. She never wanted to leave El Paso for even a drive. Her other sister went to college to get married but ended up a schoolteacher and, as far as she knew, was still a virgin.
Sylvia herself had chosen security when there’d been a choice. Her husband now hadn’t been her boyfriend then. But he wanted to marry her and had a degree from college and a good job with a future, which was the life she was leading today. He was already a floor manager at a major department store in Huntington Beach, they were paying off a mortgage on a four-bedroom house in an almost new development only a mile from the ocean, and they lived on a stainless street where there was no concept of race or creed and where the gloom of unemployment and bad times she heard about over the color television seemed as distant as Mexico. Though they were by no means rich, they could make all their payments on time, and for her birthday her husband had even bought her a microwave oven she never asked for or wanted.
She didn’t often think about the boy she didn’t marry. She was in high school, which he’d only been to for two years before he dropped out. He lived wherever anybody would let him if he didn’t have money, and sometimes that was in the county jail. He told her he loved her but she probably would have let him even if he hadn’t said it. That was a winter night when a windhard hail broke out the windowpane in his rented room off Montana Street. He got up naked, his eyes the only part of him that seemed to have to adjust to the black wind, water cresting his cheekbones and rolling down his back, and he took nails and a hammer from his workbags and made a shutter out of an empty dresser drawer he disassembled with his fist. It was still cold but they were laughing under his blankets because he said there was nothing to worry about, they still had two more drawers with nothing in them.
• • •
Ray withdrew all the money from his account. It was, by accident, a thousand for each of their ten years. Not much by Houston standards, but enough to make him feel gold-plated when he visited back home, and it might have been only the beginning. It had crossed his mind more than once to put it down on some land—he imagined building a house near the river, planting some trees, raising thoroughbreds, starting up a ranch not unlike the one his father spent his life working on—but he never kidded himself about how far away he was from that. He didn’t know what he’d do with it now. He’d been considering a swimming pool, but he always recalled the lean, unemployed times when he wished he’d had enough of a cushion to wait for the better jobs. Good and bad construction workers, including superintendents, came and went for lots of reasons, and he’d taught himself not to be surprised when he was handed an extra check on pay day with “layoff” stamped on it. This time maybe he could have kept the job, but he didn’t offer the company’s field boss an excuse for his time off because he didn’t want to talk about his wife and children. He didn’t know how to explain such things because he’d never learned how and it never occurred to him that he might have to. Layoff checks were to be expected. They always made some sense.
He took the money from the account and cashed his checks. The ten thousand he wanted in hundred-dollar bills. He agreed that he was acting a little crazy but it was a decision as certain as the cash would be in his pocket and the bank manager spent several hours making sure he got it once Ray assured him that he knew exactly what he was doing.
He drank only one beer on the airplane. He sat next to a window in the non-smoking section and no one sat next to him. Sometimes he shut his eyes, but he didn’t sleep. When he opened them he’d see the wing of the airplane shudder. There weren’t enough clouds to look at, and the earth seemed only slightly more alive than one of his hundred-dollar bills. Thinking like this shamed him somehow, and he prayed he’d be forgiven such a huge ingratitude.
• • •
Sylvia relaxed considerably when she saw the green road sign that told them Las Vegas was 175 miles away. She’d examined her map too many times and her husband had noticed. He’d wanted her to go to the auto club and get a new map and make reservations through it because that was what they paid for. But she insisted that she could do it all herself. Everything about this, even calling for hotel prices and making reservations over toll-free telephone lines, even marking out the simple route on a map, had become like a statement of independence for her, a muscling-up in challenge to what in any mind was a contented, idyllic life. And she took it very seriously. She was determined to have things go her way, to direct the flow of events without suggestions or advice or cautions. She was doing this with “her” money, alloting a certain amount for the hotel, food, entertainment, gas, a certain amount for her husband to gamble with, a certain amount for her gambling. She’d figured all this as a debit in her bookkeeping, but she also figured that her winning would verify something, would mean something, though she had no idea what. Winning was her hope, and though she pretended otherwise, she clung to it religiously.
“Do you see that sign?” her husband said to their son. “ ‘Eat Gas.’ Those oil companies think of everything.”
The boy was fidgety and Sylvia told him to go to sleep and when he woke up they’d be there, even though she knew that if he did she’d pay by having to stay up late with him. She could have easily left him at home with the older boy, but she wanted him along for an excuse. With him, they’d have to do their gambling separately, in shifts. She gave her husband another reason for taking the four-year-old along.
“It’s great to get on the road, isn’t it?” her husband asked her. “And in a big, comfortable car. Who would have thought? Think we’ll see Frank Sinatra?”
She smiled. She never doubted that she made a good choice marrying him. He was ordinary in the best ways, watching football games on Monday nights, taking the children to amusement parks every month and her to a restaurant every week or so. His pride would show when they went back to visit their parents, and when someone asked him where they lived, he would say down the street from Carlos Palomino, though in fact they had no idea where the fighter lived, only that it was supposed to be within the same city limits. His small exaggerations like that made up for his unstartling existence, kept him in touch with his neighborhood friends still linked to the less affluent, working class suburb he grew up in. He was a good man, and, most importantly, he loved her.
“It’s pretty here,” she told him.
He chuckled at her. “I guess.”
“In a different way. It’s still open. The sky looks like El Paso’s.”
“I guess I see what you mean. I guess.”
• • •
Ray came to gamble, but instead he wandered through casinos and lost money, betting randomly at dice tables the house favorites like the hard ten and hard four and any craps, and, while at the roulette table, the single numbers and always the double zero. Each time he played a twenty-dollar bill from his paychecks and each time a dealer or a croupier would turn his green paper into red chips which would be eased away and clicked into perfect stacks. He was aimless enough even to play the dollar slots, and when he won sixty dollars, his first winning since he got there, he tinkled and spun away the time until every silver dollar was gone on a triple and double and single line play. When he decided he wanted to sit and drink he settled on seven-card stud with a ten dollar buy-in and alternated between whiskey, his Houston drink, and rum and coke, his Juárez drink. He tried to fill flushes when he had three of the same suit and the high hand showed the same face cards, and he would raise with a low pair under and a low pair up and invariably lose to a full house or a flush. During one hand, he stayed in on three raises each on the last two cards when he had a chance of a high straight, and lost to three nines. After this he simply played drunk, seven rounds worth, waiting for more cards that never came to drop in front of him, losing three hundred dollars more. When he finally stumbled through the tall heavy doors of the casino and stood underneath the heaven of hundred-watt bulbs above the main entrance, watching old men with young women exit limousines with two-hundred-watt shines, with the bells and tingles and shuffles, the melody of all this ringing between his ears like a phrase from a song he heard on the car radio when he walked into work, it occurred to him that he didn’t have to do it this way, that he could win.
He lay down on the bed of his hotel room, listening to the television he’d left on while he’d been out. The movie was Lawrence of Arabia and the voice he heard was Anthony Quinn’s. He didn’t feel drunk anymore, but very alone, and sad. Those days he’d spent in his empty house were angry, and he’d paced, opening drawers and cabinets like he would find something, waiting like he knew what he was waiting for. He’d cried like his youngest son and he only slept an hour or two at intervals throughout the day and night. He wanted to feel alone, but in the morning newspapers scuffed sidewalks and cars would drive off, children would walk to school. In the afternoon he could hear a neighbor’s soap operas if he went to the right window in his house, and a meter man passed through his backyard. In the evening the cars would return and there’d be football, basketball, rock ’n’ roll. From midnight to dawn a digital clock whirred. He was in this new world and he could be hidden, but not alone. Here he was. He turned off the television, letting the darkened room loom with images of the wooden steps outside his office, with a picture of his wife changing her clothes near him, of his children boarding an airplane for a stay in El Paso while he and his wife sorted things out, of his own childhood there, the dirt baseball diamonds, the dirt driveway where he pulled the engine from his first car, the girls he loved so purely, the candles he lit on holidays, the stupid fights he won and lost, his marriage and the move from El Paso and his mother’s tears, his father’s bony handshake—all as distant and dry as that blue sky, as a story he could tell his children who could speak only English.
He heard voices in the hallway. Young men persuading young women to go in. When their door closed, their existence muffled away, and that was good to him. He had even been about to fall into sleep when he heard something that squeezed his heart until he stood up, frightened, and held still for several seconds. He nudged his shoulder into a wall and heard the hymn music coming from the room next door, from a television or radio. Jesus, the lover of my soul, sung by a choir, accompanied by an organ. He went back to bed relieved. He couldn’t take any more surprises and for a moment he thought he’d gone over the ledge. He felt very weary now, even thought he would get some sleep, and he stayed on his back, in the center of the king-size bed, getting up many times throughout the night and morning to drink and to piss, expecting sleep any time, resting in the dark.
• • •
“What’s all this stuff about El Paso?” her husband asked.
“I don’t know,” Sylvia said like a thief.
“Are you homesick? Is it Christmas? You could go there this Christmas if you want. It’s only me that has to be around home this year.”
“No.”
“Because you don’t have to stay home. You could take the boys back with you.”
“I don’t want to go. I didn’t realize I was talking about it that much.”
“You could stay those two weeks school’s out. I could get an airplane and spend the day.”
“I don’t want to. Honest. There’s just something about Las Vegas that reminds me of it, that’s all.”
Her husband sighed and fell onto the bed. “You were talking about it before we got here,” he reminded her.
Sylvia didn’t argue because he was right. She felt embarrassed and wanted the subject changed. “We can all see the Captain and Tennille,” she proposed.
“I don’t know why you’re acting so weird about it. Wanting to be with your family is as Mexican as having babies.”
“Let’s eat dinner and everything.”
“All right,” he yawned, stretching on one of the two hard beds in the bright hotel room.
“We’ll go make a reservation at that booth we saw in the lobby and you take a nap.”
“Good thinking,” he said, yawning again.
She took her son’s hand and the room key and went out the door and said hello to the two maids, a Black and an Asian, who stopped talking as she and the boy passed almost running.
• • •
Once Ray made the decision to win, he knew the first thing to do was to have control, so he began by observing the play at dice tables and cards without drinking or gambling. He passed many innocuous hours and finally took a seat at a seven-card stud game and tested his will. He set a two-hour limit on himself. He didn’t play when he got bad hole cards, and when one of the players was on a winning streak he didn’t stay in if he had a weak though solid hand. When he held a good hand he bet moderately and raised only the last two deals. When he left the table it was with forty dollars more than he had when he sat down.
Later that evening he removed his envelope with the ten thousand dollars from his safe-deposit box at the hotel and walked it to a Texas Hold ’Em table which required a two-hundred-dollar buy-in. A simple game, each player getting two cards down which he combines with five cards the dealer turns up on the middle of the table, it is also a game of big winners and big losers, and this one was for particularly high stakes, even by Vegas standards. Already a second row of spectators strained to see over those in the first row, who snuggled against the metal railing that partitioned them off from the players, all of whom showed a minimum of a thousand dollars in green twenty-five-dollar chips and red five-dollar ones.
Ray took the seat at the top of the oval and counted out five thousand dollars, which were quickly transformed into chips for the dealer by a young woman, and his swell of stacks beat all but two of the players, an obese New Yorker with a slobbish cigar and a bag of green chips, and a slit-eyed, deep Southerner who hid under a cap and peered above several highrise-like piles.
Ray played conservatively in the beginning, in order to follow the betting. He quickly discovered that there were really only three serious gamblers—the Southerner, who bought a few hands with large raises and was challenged only one time by the New Yorker, whose two pair beat one, and a Hollywood movie type who lost with average hands, but whose pocket was so full of hundred-dollar bills he didn’t seem to worry about it, and an Arab who would never show his cards.
After two hours Ray was about eight hundred dollars down. He had won a hand, dropped out of three, and paid to see two. He’d drunk one shot of whiskey early to settle his nerves and it must have worked because, even though he was behind, he felt a confidence he hadn’t remembered since he married his wife, since he accepted the job as superintendent. It was something that only happened to a person a few times but which was as palpable as silver dollars in the pocket: he belonged there, an equal to the best, his hidden status hovering over him like a fawning lover. He knew, and he was certain they knew, he was going to walk away a winner.
His chance came about an hour later when he got two tens underneath, spades and diamonds, and the first card the dealer showed was a seven of hearts. The guy from Hollywood bet unusually high, five hundred, and only the Arab and the Southerner, besides himself, stayed. The next card was a two of spades, and he stayed in for the next five-hundred-dollar bet, and for the five hundred more the Southerner used to scare away the other two.
The dealer turned a ten of clubs and Ray met the Southerner’s next five hundred with a thousand-dollar raise. When the Southerner notched it up another, he matched it and shoved in all the chips in front of him.
“Let’s play ’em up,” the Southerner smiled when he called the bet. The table was excited, but no one moved. Ray didn’t really understand what he was supposed to do.
“Let’s see what ya got there, friend.”
“Turn ’em up,” suggested the New Yorker. “He wants to negotiate.”
He showed his tens. The Southerner had two hearts. It was three tens against a possible flush.
“I’ll give ya two to one on the pot,” offered the Southerner.
Ray didn’t even think it over. He shook his head confidently. Jack of hearts.
“Fifty-fifty,” said the Southerner, who’d stood up to see.
Ray shook his head again.
Two of hearts.
The Southerner was immodestly happy and the spectators breathed loudly as he pushed his chair away and reached in for the pot and, nearly hopping, stacked his mound of winnings to new heights. He talked voluably to the players sitting beside him and gave an unsporting stare of triumph at the loser.
Ray counted out four thousand dollars more. He felt more dazed than defeated, weak-kneed but standing. He was more disappointed than angry, not at the Southerner or himself, but at the deeper injustice of things. It did not make sense. It was not fair.
He thought that maybe he should pull out right then as the cards were being dealt around again. If he backed out, he could spare himself more loss. That would be the sensible thing to do considering the realities of unemployment, even in Houston. And chances were that he would be wearing those work bags again. He felt blurred by his insecurity, but in this fuzz he made out a queen on the table to match the queen-four in his hand.
He stayed in, as did the Arab and the moviemaker, as did the Southerner, who seemed to be playing this one for fun while he continued to reorganize his chips. After the dealer turned up a four and an ace, Ray upped the pot by five hundred on his two pair, and all stayed.
The dealer turned over another four and Ray made it another five hundred. The Arab dropped out, the moviemaker saw the bet, and the Southerner raised it another five hundred.
The last card was a king. Ray bet another five hundred on his full house, figuring the Southerner to play for that. The moviemaker considered the stakes and his chances, then threw in his cards.
“That plus five,” said the Southerner carelessly.
Ray saw that and bet the rest without hesitating.
“I gotta see this one, amigo,” the Southerner said. “Let’s see what you can do.”
Ray matched his queen-four to the table’s queen-two fours.
The Southerner could barely contain himself. He flipped over a king-four and hugged the chips to his corner, crying for some racks to put all his money in. The New Yorker laughed. The other players felt no happiness for him, though they showed no signs of pity for the loser either.
Ray walked evenly to his hotel, contented only by knowing that in this defeat he had not been a fool because they were such strong hands that he couldn’t have played them any other way. He couldn’t say that about many losses. He’d done this gambling to win, and someone else had the better luck, and only luck. It was not always so simple. His wife, for instance, had left him for a richer man who she’d fallen in love with.
He was not sure what to expect next because he was taken by an unusual mood. Late by work standards, it was still early in Las Vegas. He turned off the lights and opened a window to a windless, cold desert, a range of mountains and below a tall, arching sky. He listened for something but all he got was some hotel machine and puffs of traffic. It was maybe okay that he lost, even justice of a kind. It was fresh like the cold air, like the winter air in El Paso.
Ray Muñoz closed his eyes on the bed. He waited to shiver with some strong emotion. Instead fell asleep in the chilled silence of the sanitized hotel room.
• • •
“I don’t see how people can do it,” her husband said after his night out alone. “It goes too fast and hurts too much.”
“Did you win?”
“In a sense. I stopped contributing to the cause.”
Sylvia looked away from him.
“You know, I think they’ve got it rigged, because when I played the dollar slot machines I won right away, on my first pulls. Something like thirty or forty dollars. I thought I had it made, but I never won again after that.”
“Is that all you played?” she asked, angry.
“No, I played some blackjack too. It’s something, this place. There’s so much happening. This man that sat by me was playing twenty dollars a hand and was winning for a long time, but when he started losing he started betting more money. That’s how it is here, easy come, easy go. I think the guy was drunk. Did you know that all the drinks are free? Anyway, I couldn’t take it. I don’t think I can take winning or losing, though it is fun to watch. I wandered all around the casino and counted all the money that other people lost. That felt better than losing all mine.”
“Mine,” she said seriously.
“Ours,” he said automatically. “And I can’t waste it. Maybe if it was money someone gave me and told me I had to gamble with.”
“I did,” Sylvia said.
“And then again I doubt if I could do that,” he laughed without hearing her. “Hey, we’re gonna have to take the baby to the circus shows they have at night. There were these stunt motorcyclists driving inside this ball and it scared the pants off me.” He yawned. “I tried to win him a stuffed animal while I was up there. How long’s he been asleep?”
“A few hours.”
“Too bad they don’t have babysitters. It’d be fun to have a drink together.” He pulled her down on the bed and even touched her breasts.
“He’ll wake up,” she said.
He rolled off. “I guess I’m a little drunk already.” He looked at the television screen. “What’re you watching?”
“I just found it an hour ago. It’s a program on how to play the casino games.”
“They think of everything, don’t they?”
“It’s exciting.”
“It’s not worth the risk though.”
“Do you really think that?”
“Yes. I really don’t think you can win. Las Vegas exists because people lose. The only money I’d like giving them would be to own a piece of it.”
She turned off the television. “I’ve already seen it twice.”
“Leave it on. Maybe there’s a Frank Sinatra movie.”
• • •
Ray slept twelve uninterrupted hours, got up and drank water at the bathroom sink, and slept three more. When the sleep was over, and he shook the blood loose in his veins, he felt what he least expected, like he’d won.
He counted the ten crisp hundred-dollar bills he still had. He counted seven twenties he had in his wallet.
His plan had become very simple. He would go back to El Paso and see his children, he would talk to his brothers and sisters, listen to his mother, visit his father’s grave, and, no matter what happened tonight, he would go home a winner.
• • •
Sylvia stood under a wide archway that divided the hotel lobby from the casino. For two days she’d seen and heard this, but now she was by herself, awed by how quiet it really was and how alone it could make her feel.
She wanted very much to age past this stage in her life. She didn’t think it was right of her and she felt guilty and spoiled. Had she not been so fortunate, had she made different choices along the way, she knew she would probably want nothing more than what she had, and she would have undoubtedly settled for less.
She had no idea what her purpose was in this. She didn’t know what kind of answer this would present her with, what she would do with it. She only knew that winning would be an answer, and that losing would be an answer. She didn’t know which would be preferable, and still she was determined to win.
• • •
That evening Ray turned the thousand dollars into chips and leaned into a craps table. He played intelligently, and when he didn’t feel right, he didn’t place any bets. He waited for the dice and a hot hand. He was up, but not making a killing.
Sylvia had not been doing well. She took cards for blackjack and lost, she laid chips on red and black numbers for roulette and lost, though both by the inconclusive nibble of small wagers. She was more short of time than patience or money. And though she had been afraid of craps because the betting was so complicated, and though she was aware that she could just as easily spend her fortune waiting on the click of a ball at a spinning wheel or the snap of a laminated card on a baize table, she knew it had to be the padded tumble of dice.
At first Ray didn’t find anything too special about the attractive woman who came to stand across from him, and it was only because he didn’t want to bet on a few rolls that he noticed her choosing the poorer odds on the table, like the field and the hard-way numbers. So he watched her, and then he stared at her, and he did this until he felt he had to, until the casino had become nothing more than a faded backdrop of noise and light and color to her. Like the sight of a pretty girlfriend long forgotten, she flushed him with such a strong emotion that it didn’t seem a memory but an awakening as conclusive as the one he’d left his hotel with. He stared, certain he didn’t know her and never had.
Sylvia had very early become used to men’s eyes, and had learned that even though she couldn’t ignore them, she could walk away from them. But rather than being distracted by this large man who gawked at her so childlike, she became more focused and sharp. His unwilled admiration was the warmest luck she’d played with all night.
When she was offered the dice by the stickman, Sylvia was down to her last three nickel chips, while Ray was three hundred above his original thousand. When she accepted the dice and bet one five-dollar chip on a pass, Ray put four hundred on the same and then the full extent of the double odds on her point of four, which she threw on the next toss. He put up a thousand on another pass while she let her ten dollars ride and threw a ten. He backed his thousand with two more on the odds, which, like the four, paid two to one. She rolled two times before a four-six combination appeared.
“Winners on the pass line!” the stickman barked. “The table’s got a shooter!”
Ray counted out five hundred dollars worth of the chips the dealer gave him in winnings and slid them over to Sylvia. “Please,” he said. “Give it back only if we win.”
She might have refused, but she was gagged by confusion. She picked up the dice and threw.
“Seven! Big winners on the pass line!”
Ray wouldn’t take back the money he’d left her in the pass line area, and Sylvia considered setting the loan aside in the rack in front of her, but gave into it, to him, and played the line. She had become the one watching now, watching him, and never had she felt so in control and out of control at the same time.
Ray bet on her pass with certainty and when she had a point he took as many come and odds bets as he could get, and she shot lots of numbers. Sylvia let Ray’s pass line money ride and made her point three more times in a row, which multiplied into winnings of four thousand dollars. Ray quit when he counted close to forty thousand, and it took racks to carry the chips to the cashier’s window.
“Thank you so much,” Sylvia said uncomfortably, as though she were standing under her front door porch light. She held out the money she owed him.
“I want you to keep it,” he told her in Spanish.
She believed that he was not making some haughty or suave or even the slightest of an insincere gesture. But she did expect him to say something about a drink or food. She’d already thought of how probably she’d have to say no, say something about her husband and son who were waiting, but he did not ask, and it did not seem because he was so overwhelmed by his winnings.
• • •
Sylvia checked to see that her husband was asleep beside her and listened for her son’s breathing in the bed near them. She touched herself slowly. At first it was her hand and then it was not. At first she made her stiff fingers tingle across her skin, and then her palms flattened and her fingers softened and bent. Sometimes the hand would even reach her face, her lips, her eyes. She was warm and unlonely. She felt young and she liked the familiar cold air settling above the blanket. She knew that she could not leave the window open long, but she let herself enjoy every moment it was.
• • •
In bed much later that night, Ray was thinking again of Sylvia. He had not cheated on his wife in those ten years of marriage, and though as a young man he had a better than average share of dates, he had not had that many lovers, and those he did have he looked back on as much in defeat as in conquest. Maybe he’d be different this time out. He thought of Sylvia and he felt her as though she were next to him on the vacant side of the bed. He felt her without moving, sexually, and he liked it very much.
• • •
Sylvia and Ray stared at one another as he came into the restaurant for breakfast. He’d chosen the place randomly and seeing her again, by chance, inspired some strange confidence in him.
Sylvia didn’t want to draw him into a conversation so she looked away. Sitting there, patiently waiting for her husband to eat his meal, tested her until she realized that Ray wasn’t going to say anything. Then she felt very alive.
When her husband finished, Sylvia stood, glancing at Ray self-consciously. Her son scooted the wooden chair away from the table noisily and ran out to the other side of the glass door and smashed his face on it to see back inside. He made faces at Ray, who smiled at him from his table.
“Big tip or little?” her husband asked her. “Maybe we should save some to make up for all the losses. We still gotta get home.” He left twenty percent.
She couldn’t let herself look at Ray on her way out, but she walked down the restaurant’s aisle worried about her appearance. When her husband caught up with her, she still couldn’t think of what to say.
“Are you feeling okay?” her husband asked.
“Just sleepy is all.”
“Too much action without the old man last night, huh? You can nap on the way home.”
She took his hand.
“You sure you don’t want to go and visit the family for Christmas?”
“No, really, I only wanted to do this. And I had a good time. I always wanted to know about Las Vegas, and now I do.” She squeezed his hand.
• • •
Outside the restaurant, on the famous Strip, Ray couldn’t help but notice the flat plain of black asphalt that belted the underlying desert, couldn’t help but realize that the miracle of these steel and concrete casinos and hotels and restaurants were doomed by the wind and the sun and the sand, couldn’t help but feel good that he was moving around in this impermanent place like a winner.