Saturday, July 3, 1948
9:15 p.m.
At last, Leaky walked out his front door and got into the Commander. He adjusted his glasses, pushed them back on his nose, and grinned at Babe. “I’m feeling lucky. You feeling lucky?”
“Don’t know how I feel,” Babe said as he pulled the car away from Leaky’s alley house. He thought he caught a glimpse of Carla’s shadow in the window, tracking them, watching them go.
“I feel—different,” Babe said.
“I hear you,” Leaky said, pointing two fingers at Babe, then back at himself. “I’ll keep my eye on you.”
“Tonight, tonight, I’ll never forget tonight,” Babe said.
“That’s a song, right?”
“Yes, it is, Montel,” Babe said. “It’s a song.”
Babe shut down after that, his mind a whirl of thoughts, strategies, images, and sounds—dice being thrown, clacking, people shouting, waving fistfuls of money—and faces. His children. Hootie. Karter. And Rosie, smiling that afternoon two days ago, bending over her land. Their land. Their future. He saw her face, the smile stitched on, slowly expanding and coming closer, and then, behind her smile, Babe could see tears, big, lumpen, full, rolling down her cheeks in slow motion. Her face became wider—and wider—until her face filled up his entire sightline and he could only see her tears.
11:58 p.m.
Babe couldn’t lose.
Bet after bet went his way. Pass line bets, backup bets, come bets, the field, all the hard ways—the ten, four, six, and especially the hard eight—they all came in. Reeling in these fish, Babe thought, trapping the high-stake gamblers who came to this game from all over the Midwest, specifically to go up against him, to take on the man some called the Missouri Mechanic. They arrived hopeful and flush, their faces crimson from their pulses racing, their hopes dashed, their losses mounting, betting against Babe, believing the odds were dramatically in their favor, while every time Babe broke their hearts and thinned their wallets. Babe keep stacking his growing piles of chips in front of him, so many chips that the croupier, whom Babe called Stick Man, handed him his own tray. And when Babe filled that up with his winnings, the chips spilling onto the felt like a small black river, Stick Man handed him a second tray, and Babe started slamming chips into that one, too. The dice came back around to Babe.
“Let’s do the hard eight again. Eight’s my lucky number. August eight. My birthday. And the day I got engaged. Eight, eight. Come on, eight!”
He tossed the dice and—
“Eight again! And he made it the hard way,” Stick Man shouted. The crowd around the table roared. Babe shyly ducked his head, gave the room a What-can-you-do? shrug, and allowed a grin to snake across his face as Stick Man slid thirty more black chips—worth a hundred dollars apiece—across the felt toward Babe. Babe snatched them away as fast as a magic trick and slid them into his tray with a clack.
“Guess tonight’s my night,” Babe said.
A cheer went up.
At midnight, the bell from the church at the end of Main Street clanged twelve mournful times, like a dirge, and Babe felt the energy in the casino shift. He actually saw it coming first, a shadow creeping across the craps table like a dark mist, hanging there for a moment as the entire room went dark.
Then the new day started—July Fourth—and Babe couldn’t win.