The first thing Vance noticed when they entered Cindy’s apartment was the overpowering smell. He was used to bad-smelling places—besides his own, there was the domicile of his aunt, who lived even farther than Vance and his mother out in the Spillman sticks and who was a crazy cat person that took in strays at the rate of a new one about every three months; the few times he and his mother had visited, the smell of cat piss and shit was so strong that it was like a physical threshold they were crossing—but this was different. It was composed of many different elements—beauty products, cooked food in the dirty kitchen, old marijuana and cigarette smoke, accumulated body odor and sweat, a light and not entirely unpleasant fecal tang—united in a sort of ur-female smell. The odor was magnified by the smallness of the space and the closed windows that looked to have been painted over and never opened. This was a dwelling overwhelmed, overoccupied by its occupant, and the air itself was redolent of an unhappy woman.
There was clutter on every visible surface, and it was difficult to move through the room without stepping on a magazine, a CD, an article of clothing. He and Richard tiptoed across spots of green carpet that appeared sporadically, like rocks in a rushing stream. Cindy collapsed on the sofa and stared at the dead TV, worrying her hands. Her eyes were still red rimmed, but at least she wasn’t sobbing anymore. AAA had successfully jumped her car, which Vance had driven over, hoping the mood would magically improve once they got her home, but it hadn’t. She seemed to be waiting for something to happen, for one of them to do something.
Richard said, “Glass of water?”
She gestured with her thumb in the direction of the kitchen, the airspace of which was guarded by a pair of fat, territorial flies. Richard returned with three glasses; Vance’s was stained with purple lipstick. Cindy continued staring at the TV as though there were a tiny play being staged inside of it for her benefit alone. She opened a little handpainted Oriental box on the coffee table, plucked out a few pills, and washed them all down in one swallow. As he had since being introduced to her, Vance tried to get a handle on what she looked like.
It was difficult. For one thing, she was a blur of nervous fidgets—continually cracking her knuckles and smoothing her overtreated blonde hair back in a lank, high ponytail. For another thing, she was one of those people who looked very different from different angles. From the front, she was striking—gorgeous even—with unusually wide-set eyes that communicated a shimmering intelligence, even though all Vance had seen her do so far was yell at a parking attendant and have a nervous breakdown. But looked at from the side, she had a smushed aspect that reminded him of a dog his father had brought home to appease his mother—an idiot Chow that accidentally strangled itself on its own leash while tied up in the backyard. Vance had come home from school to find it lying on its back, grinning up at the sky, black tongue lolling. He couldn’t square the two angles of her face—they didn’t seem to belong to the same person.
She said, “You can go now.”
Richard sighed and said, “Cindy, I know I’m the last person on earth you want to take any help or advice from, but tell me what’s going on.”
She opened her mouth to speak, and as she did there was a pounding at the door. She shut her mouth and the pounding stopped, which created the unnerving impression that the sound had come from her mouth. The door opened and a man walked a few steps inside, then stopped. He wore the kind of long, outdated leather jacket that expendable muscle wears in mob movies. But he wasn’t muscular, instead was tall and rangy, about Vance’s height, and stooped at the neck like a reading lamp. He was either the world’s oldest thirty-five-year-old or the world’s youngest sixty-year-old; however old he was, the look of unhappy irritation on his face was timeless. Without acknowledging Richard and Vance, he said, “Who are they?”
“My father and his valet.”
“Valet?” He pronounced the word slowly with an incredulous rising tone that, paired with the expression on his face as he looked at Richard and Vance, suggested he thought a “valet” might be akin to a catamite or a sexual slave, then he returned to Cindy. “Where were you last night?”
“Something came up.”
“Doesn’t it always. Look, you can’t keep avoiding me, we need to talk.”
“I know.”
At this, the man sighed and ran his hand through a mortified forelock retreating as quickly as possible from the dour face below. “When then?”
“I get paid tomorrow, I’ll come by the Monaco.”
He sighed again, and his shoulders drooped. His very person conveyed a world-weariness so profound that it made Vance tired just watching him. He seemed like a man whom life had disappointed beyond all reason and expectation—“long suffering” didn’t even come close to capturing the mythic ennui on display. He said, “Can you borrow it from your dad here?”
“I’m sorry, who are you again?” said Richard.
“Mikhail.”
“Oh, of course. Mikhail. I think my daughter would like you to leave.”
“Your daughter would probably like a pony and some ice cream, but that doesn’t mean she’s getting it.”
Richard cocked his head and took an angled, approaching step to the next patch of available floor space, but Cindy waved her hand at him. To Mikhail, she said, “Look, tomorrow, okay? I’ll come by.”
“This shit is getting old,” said Mikhail. “Be an adult, make a payment.” He left. They could hear his footsteps pinging cheerfully down the metal stairs.
“Well?” said Richard.
“I owe him some money. He thinks I do.”
“Yeah, I got that. What the hell is going on?”
The room again lapsed into silence. She turned on the sofa toward Vance—her strange profile morphing magically into the other face, the beautiful one—and opened her mouth to talk:
Her teenage years had been angry and disaffected, full of dubious clothing and bad haircut choices, and silly punk rock played by silly-looking people. Pot figured prominently. She loved math, excelled at it, but hated the smart kids in their AP classes, the way their neat little lives were already chugging down the track to Successville. And though her mother was an accomplished English PhD and a rising star in her field, she could barely get Cindy to read a book. From puberty on, in fact, anything Eileen wanted Cindy to do was anathema. She blamed her uptight, judgmental mother for running off her father and keeping him away; that she hated her father somehow didn’t make her resent her mother any less. The six years between twelve and eighteen were a pitched, unceasing battle of wills between mother and daughter with no winner besides their family therapist’s bank account. When Cindy graduated high school—barely—she laughed at Eileen’s offer to pull some strings and get her into Fresno State. (While she was at it, she said, maybe her mother could pull some other strings and get her into the Special Olympics.) Her best friend, Casey, owned a ’66 Mustang that Casey’s ex had retooled for her, and they set off on a road trip the week after they’d halfheartedly tossed their rented mortarboards in the air.
They spent the summer down in San Diego working at a fish restaurant on Pacific Beach, wearing tank tops and baseball caps. They were staying with friends of Casey’s at the time, a rowdy beach condo full of so many interchangeable frat-surfer types that Cindy never fully pinned down who really lived there. Whoever it was, they didn’t mind hosting a couple of good-looking eighteen-year-old girls, even if Cindy did have pink hair and an attitude. Life there was simple—smoke weed all day, hang out on the beach or anywhere, eat something sometimes, work now and then, and party most nights until the sun came up. At the time she was antsy to get back on the road, not realizing (how could she have?) that this would be the happiest she’d ever be.
Eventually summer ended and temperatures plunged into the low seventies. School started up, the apartment cleared out, and their tips at work ebbed away. One night, after their shift, without discussing it but by some form of psychic agreement (or maybe it was just that obvious that it was time to move on), they got in the Mustang and drove north through the night to Los Angeles. They found themselves on the corner of Sunset and Western, a famous-sounding intersection that in real life featured a hot-dog stand next to a seedy motel unimaginatively named the Sunset Suites. For a hundred dollars and a not-inconsiderable amount of corny flirtation, they haggled a double for two nights out of the Persian shift manager. Lying there with the ceaseless Hollywood traffic sounding like it was inches from the window, Cindy couldn’t sleep. A dual vision of archetypal LA destinies flickered on her mental movie screen—that is, becoming rich and famous, or getting murdered. Or both—that was the ideal, in a way.
But nothing so exciting happened. Really, LA was kind of dull. She and Casey got a shitty apartment in Little Armenia—the real LA, as the local saying went—that they could still barely afford. Cindy walked through a mile of rank exhaust every day to a job at Rocket Video that the manager often reminded her how lucky she was to have. At night, she drank boxed wine and watched the free movies she brought home; many of them depicted Los Angeles as glamorous and sexy, and she supposed that might be the case if you had the money or inclination to ever leave your apartment. She preferred the seedier versions of LA, the city as a vast and depopulated ghost city, like Chinatown or, better yet, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
When she did go out, she went to bars within walking distance that took her fake ID or else didn’t care that she was underage. The places she favored were usually unmarked, besides a neon cocktail sign, and possessed of a certain anti-Hollywood charm. The regulars—square-jawed, walnut-faced alcoholic men with marquee heads of hair booze-glued to their scalps and faded blondes of a certain (very, very old) age—could have done community service starring in videos to be shown to any midwestern teen with dreams of stardom. But Cindy liked these dives. They were dark and quiet and suited her mood; no one hassled her as she sat in the corner drinking her screwdriver through a straw and wondering where her life would go next.
Casey started dating an actor/producer/director/model/musician named Burke and was around the apartment less and less. Cindy got invitations to a few parties out of the deal at first—mostly held at a white-walled modern cube in the hills, where she sat by the shimmering pool while everyone did coke somewhere upstairs—but after a while she realized she was on her own. Casey sometimes didn’t reappear for weeks. The Mustang, unmoved for street sweeping, gradually accumulated tickets until the windshield vanished under a snowdrift of white paper.
In June, facing eviction and a sense of utter defeat, Cindy got her mother to send her eight hundred dollars, promising she’d buy a bus ticket back to Fresno. And she had sincerely meant to do so, but SAN FRANCISCO had somehow looked much more appealing on the Greyhound departures board than FRESNO. On the ride there, she got in touch with an old friend from high school, Matthew, who lived in the Castro and who agreed to put her up temporarily. They had momentarily been boyfriend and girlfriend before Matthew knew he was gay or was willing to admit it. There had been hot (to her) make-out sessions in her car, sound-tracked by Operation Ivy and Screeching Weasel, and even an abortive blow job outside the Mellow Mushroom where he waited tables. She still had fond feelings for him.
His roommate, an older man named Marco Priminger, apparently didn’t have fond feelings for her; he didn’t trust her with a key and forbade her from touching anything while they were out of the house. Not that she would have wanted to—the crumbling apartment was chockablock with seventies kitsch: Partridge Family toys, Sandy Allen records, Keane paintings, a Skimbleshanks costume from a dinner theater production of Cats. It was like being held prisoner on a John Waters set. Sitting there watching a vacuum tube TV, which supported a glass-enclosed Land of the Lost diorama, she had to come to terms with what she’d felt in Los Angeles: the experiment had been a failure, and it was time to return home and get serious, start taking classes. Apply herself. It sounded like a kind of death, but there it was.
It was one of those moments that didn’t seem so pivotal at the time—just depressing—but in retrospect could have changed everything. She was booking another bus ticket, back to Fresno this time, when Casey’s number appeared on her flip cell. Burke had dumped her, and she was going to Vegas for the fall, to cocktail waitress at a casino. Did Cindy want to go? She thought of the gray concrete buildings of Fresno Community College, her old bedroom at home decorated with posters of the Ramones, her mother’s disapproving presence like a gray fog drifting in and out of the house. Yes, she did.
Up and down the Strip—as they had in San Diego—they applied in tandem, a team. The plan was to rake in the big bucks during peak season, convention time, when the blistering desert cooled down to just unbearably scorching. Then they would take off during the holidays, spend the winter somewhere in the mountains learning to ski. They were young and good-looking and had no trouble getting hired at Harrah’s, where they wore incredibly short black leather skirts with sparkly gold tops. They teetered around in heels on the carpet, on endless orbits from the gaming floor to the bar area and back. At their apartment the morning after their shift, they would throw their cash and chips on the bed in a pile as though they’d robbed a bank and cackle over Bloody Marys as they rehashed the night—the losers who had seen Swingers and talked about each other being “so money they didn’t even know it,” the crazy Arab guy who had Casey place a ten-thousand-dollar roulette wager for him, Paul the bartender who slipped them fruity shots in paper cups and wanted to bang both of them and never, ever, ever would.
It was a lark. For a while, they were able to re-create the way it had felt in San Diego—that nothing mattered and everything was fun and would go on being fun forever. But the holidays came and went, then Casey went again, this time back to Fresno, having gotten tired of screwing around and secretly applied to nursing school. Cindy found herself without a plan, this time not in the good way, and wound up waitressing the rest of the next year in the vague hope that something new would present itself and for a third time prevent her from returning to Fresno in utter defeat. (She imagined writing a memoir—like The Red Badge of Richard, as her mother referred to her father’s putative war memoir—a slim volume entitled Returning to Fresno in Utter Defeat.)
Something new presented itself in the person of a pit boss named Brian, who was eighteen years her elder and twice divorced at thirty-nine. But he was good-looking in a deceptively clean-cut way, and he knew the difference between Burgundy and Beaujolais, and he could improvise plausibly on the lounge piano and wear a suit and Italian loafers the way other men wore cargo shirts and Crocs. She moved into his condo in Henderson, and three months later they got married in a little ceremony attended by their closest friends, mostly other casino employees, that was held in the chapel of the Venetian, which everyone agreed was the nicest of the casino chapels.
It was a good couple of years. Brian called in a couple of favors and got her a job working for the casino surveillance team. It was a nine-to-five gig, mostly spent staring at a cluster of video feeds, piped up to the office from the innumerable black-domed cameras mounted every thirty feet or so on the casino-floor ceiling, like the nests of alien hornets. She looked for any sign of malfeasance—pocketing of chips, collusion between players, card counting, or simple outright theft—and called back down to the pit bosses, who meted out the appropriate punishment, usually lifelong banishment. It was tedious, meticulous work that most people would have hated, but she loved it. She loved the sense of disembodiment, of being a pair of invisible eyes hovering over thousands of unwitting people. It was voyeuristic and exciting. That some of the casino’s patrons were, in fact, witting and furthermore despised the unblinking electric eye overhead (at least once an hour, some soused smartass would lift a bird to the camera) meant nothing to her. She liked it, actually: they had no choice; when they set foot in the casino she was their companion—unditchable, unrejectable, undeniable.
It helped that she was good at it, too. In her first eight months on the job, she personally identified thirteen different incidents, all of which were verified after the fact. Her supervisor—an elderly bulldog of a man who seemed to live in the surveillance office—took her aside and told her she had eyes. This was the highest compliment in the business. At the same time her marriage was imploding (inconsideration, incompatibility, infidelity), she was being steadily promoted up the ladder. By the time the divorce came through, she was third-shift supervisor, which ran from midnight to eight.
This was considered the most important shift, as it was the time of day when theft and cheating were most likely to occur, and it was, therefore, the best compensated. By twenty-five, she was divorced and making nearly six figures. Her life had a shape now, though an odd one; she was charting her own destiny, free of both of her parents. Eileen still didn’t approve, still wanted her to come back home and go to college, but that was a joke. She was making more money than she’d ever imagined making, having fun in Fun City, doing her own thing—why on earth leave? Her plan was to bank most of the money until she was thirty, then travel for a few years, unencumbered.
But over the next few years, the money in her account disappeared like water through a sieve. By the time she was twenty-six, she had only managed to save eight thousand and change. Where had it all gone? Shopping, dinner, drinking, drugs, and, in the last couple of years, gambling. She lived in reverse time from the rest of humanity and needed a form of diversion and relief after getting off her shift in the morning. Slowly, this diversion had taken the form of stopping at Binion’s or the Nugget on her way home and playing roulette for an hour or two. She was often kept company by interested—and always uninteresting—men, frat boys on an all-night bender who assumed the chick by herself at the wheel of fortune was looking for company. That was okay; she didn’t mind putting them off, watching them fumble their chips uncertainly as they placed what they thought were large bets (I’ve never seen a hundred-dollar chip before!) on their unlucky lucky numbers, trying and failing to impress her. Eventually they would sulk away and leave her to the cool, relentless clicking of the wheel and the hands of the croupier, first gently releasing the ball, then just as gently passing over her turreted stacks, like a rainstorm over ancient ruins, and sweeping everything into the dark slot of the chip dump.
Sometimes she won, too—once, seven thousand on a two-hundred-dollar thirty-five-to-one shot. But that didn’t matter, really. What mattered was the calm that sitting at the table brought her, a sense of completion that let her go home afterward and sleep through the haunted desert day with no dreams whatsoever.
Over the last couple of years, as though via some kind of occult math, her meager savings had multiplied into vast debt. Five different credit cards, the needle buried deep in the red. She didn’t know what the exact figure was—she strenuously avoided adding up the numbers—but a ballpark sum floated around in her head like a cloud of noxious gas. A hundred thousand. Around this time, Mikhail had asked her to meet him at the Monaco Club, a dive bar he owned a tiny percentage of. She didn’t know why he wanted to meet. They had dated each other, very briefly, but she hadn’t seen him in over a year. Mikhail was one of those characters the city seemed to collect like unusual but worthless coins. He had a photographic memory, a computerlike ability to calculate odds, a magician’s sleight of hand, and nothing whatsoever to show for it. An inveterate and degenerate gambler and grifter, he’d been banned from almost every casino in town, including hers. In early April, she’d sat down across from him in a booth at the Monaco. Even though it was nearly ninety degrees, he still wore his leather jacket, sweat dotting the upper reaches of his high forehead.
His proposal: If she looked the other way when he and two of his partners were working the floor, they’d cut her in on 20 percent of the take. He said her end would probably be worth at least ten thousand a month, maybe more. He told her it wouldn’t involve any actual law-breaking, just a certain amount of nonvigilance on her part. She told him to get lost. He told her to think about it. Sitting in her apartment later that day, she did, despite herself. It was an obvious no, the kind of plan, with the kind of people, that announced itself as a BAD IDEA in capital letters. No, it wasn’t just a bad idea—Mikhail’s plan entered the room in a neon clown suit, wearing big, red, floppy shoes, already soaked with seltzer water and banana cream. She sat down and added up her credit card statements, then called him and told him yes.
It worked for three months. Finally, on a Saturday in July, one of the new surveillance hires spotted something in Mikhail’s hand. Security took several magnets off him that he was using to rig the craps table along with iron-lined dice. Mikhail and his partner were pinned to the floor and photographed and dragged shouting out of the casino by their collars, a minor brouhaha that made page 3 of the Las Vegas Sun. She slept a total of maybe four hours the following week, but no one reported her.
Then came the voicemail from Mikhail saying she owed him ten thousand, that the last payment he’d given her was really an advance payment for the next month and that, since she’d been responsible for keeping them out of trouble, she owed the money back. Plus, he said, he had to hire a good lawyer, and she had a vested interest in making sure the whole thing went away, didn’t she? She didn’t see the need for the elaborate justification—it was blackmail, of course, pure and simple. They met again at the Monaco, and she told him she had no money, that all of it had gone straight to the kneebreakers at Capital One and Citibank. Stooping to the straw of his tequila sunrise, he told her that she’d better figure something out.
So for the last few months, he’d been intermittently harassing her, and she’d been slowly paying him, in tiny increments. Half of her knew the whole thing was ridiculous and that she could and probably should tell him to fuck off. But the other half—smarter or dumber, she wasn’t sure—knew Mikhail could, in fact, make trouble for her. Even if he had no evidence of her involvement, he could talk to her supervisors and implicate her in the whole mess. Tapes could be reviewed that showed Mikhail and his partners skulking into the casino whenever she was working. She could be fired, or worse. It could be bad for her.
But it already was bad for her. She’d had to change her phone number twice to temporarily elude the debt collectors that, for the last year, had been hounding her constantly like a pack of hormonal teenage boys. Her financial problems hadn’t stopped her from blowing money constantly; if anything, her spending had accelerated—the week before, she had stopped at a blackjack table at the Sands on a whim and blown a cool thousand on one bet. It felt bracing, like a blast of cold air had swept into the casino from the desert. The next day, she’d tried to buy a sixty-dollar pair of black work flats at Aldo, and her card was declined.
She’d been considering killing herself lately, in the same vague way she’d previously considered visiting Greenland or the ruins at Chapultepec. She was only twenty-eight, but she felt so much older. The years between eighteen and twenty-eight—between sitting down in the passenger seat of Casey’s Mustang and where she was now—felt like a wall of bricks she’d painstakingly laid. She’d Amontilladoed herself into her own life.
Richard pushed heavily into the Monaco Club. Despite its name, the place was not affiliated with any casinos and at a glance featured no gambling, other than the one you took with your life upon entering. Richard had been in plenty of dive bars in his day, had even worked in one until recently, but he grudgingly admired how the Monaco took the concept of diviness to another level. In one corner of the trapezoidal room, the ceiling had partially collapsed where a pipe had burst. The rusted pipework jutted down like a hernia through a ruptured abdominal lining. The rest of the tiles were sodden and brown and looked ready to go at any second. An incongruous candy machine near the entrance contained what looked like tiny plastic bananas. A grim pair of blondes sipped drinks from plastic cups and smoked by a pay phone next to the bathroom, waiting for a call that would almost certainly not come for them. They were immediately identifiable as prostitutes from their shared bearing, a singular brand of avid hostility. A trio of dodgy-looking men at the bar craned their necks around at him as though he was intruding on a private function. One of them featured a neck tattoo that read STRANGE DAYS in gothic script, with a curlicue extending up over the jawline like the leg of a hidden spider. Richard approached him.
“Is Mikhail here?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Richard.”
“Who’s Richard?”
“I am.”
“What do you want.”
“Jesus. To talk to Mikhail.”
The men looked at one another dubiously. One of them pulled out his phone and sent a text message. Richard waved off the bartender and sat alone at the end of the bar, aware of the trio watching him. He thought how if there was ever a time it seemed reasonable to get a drink, waiting at a bar to confront your daughter’s loan shark or blackmailer or whatever the hell he was seemed like the time. But he didn’t, he just sat there. That was the trick: you just sat there and didn’t do it.
While he sat there not doing anything, he thought about Cindy, sleeping, or unconscious anyway, in the car outside with Vance. She’d been about to speak but nodded off, and they hadn’t been able to fully rouse her—some combination, it seemed, of the pills she’d taken plus a more or less complete nervous breakdown. Eventually, they pried her off the couch, to some murmured fussing but no real resistance. On the way down the stairwell, they passed by a man who did the best he could to pretend he wasn’t seeing two other men carrying an unconscious woman down the stairs. Not entirely unconscious—she took little shambling steps, helping them move her to Vance’s car. Eyes still closed, she scooted into the backseat, where Richard fastened her in place with the seatbelt while Vance went back to retrieve the suitcase he’d hastily thrown clothes into. She lolled as he felt behind her for the strap—her condition oddly reminded him of when they’d gone to Knott’s Berry Farm when she was four. As a long day of standing in lines, eating bad concession food, and standing in more lines, all under a vengeful July Central Valley sun, had progressed, so had Cindy progressed through some toddlery version of Maslow’s stages of grief: from excitement to an overstimulated stupor to hot frustration and subsequent sobbing meltdown to an exhaustion so pure as to render her infinitely pliable, holding his hand and trundling toward the car with her eyes closed. The closed lids had fluttered then as they fluttered twenty-four years later, like a butterfly in delicate, momentary equipoise.
Eventually, Mikhail pushed in from outside, in the process letting in a bit of weak sunlight, which seemed to take one look at the inside of the Monaco Club, turn around, and leave immediately. Mikhail sat down next to Richard, exuding fatigue as well as sweat. The bartender, without being asked, set up a tequila sunrise in front of Mikhail and a moment later impaled it with a straw.
“Where’s your valet?”
“Outside, in the car. He’s also my chauffeur.”
Mikhail stared at him blankly. Richard said, “Tell me what’s going on.”
“She owes me money.”
“How much?”
“Ninety-five hundred, give or take.”
“For what.” Mikhail gave Richard a very abbreviated version explaining for what. Richard said, “I don’t believe you. Leave her alone.”
Mikhail sucked the straw, further hollowing his already hollow cheeks. “Or what?”
“Or I don’t know. Something.”
“Something? You’re not very good at this.” It almost sounded as though he was disappointed.
“I’m a beginner, but I’m willing to learn.”
“Okay.” Mikhail drummed his fingers on the counter.
Richard had anticipated a tense showdown, but the man’s laconic, depressive aura was like a sponge absorbing and nullifying all of Richard’s hostility. He tried again. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll burn this place down.”
“Please, you’d be doing me a favor.”
“Fine, use your imagination.”
Mikhail lit a cigarette. “I have to say, you have a lot of nerve coming in here trying to tell me to forget about ninety-five hundred bucks and acting protective on your daughter’s behalf.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let’s just say World’s Greatest Father you weren’t.” Mikhail sipped from the long straw of his drink, then settled his head in the crook of his bent arm, and said, “She told me about one time you were gone a whole week? Just disappeared. Then came back like nothing had happened.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I bet. She said it happened a lot.”
“I’m not going to discuss this with you.”
“She said you were like a dog that kept running away, getting lost, and brought back home.”
“I made some mistakes, sure.”
“I mean, what do you think that does to a little girl’s psyche?”
“Probably screws it up.”
“Yeah, probably. Might make her fear abandonment by men and yet be attracted to men who are likely to abandon her.” As he spoke, Mikhail’s face was finally animated by something other than fatigued displeasure—it was not an improvement. “She told me about another time—you’d already fucked up somehow and were trying to make it up to her—you bought her this big plastic playhouse for the backyard. Only you couldn’t figure out how to do it, and you got frustrated and forgot about it. She said the plastic pieces sat in a big pile in the backyard for three days before your wife at the time noticed and put it together. She said she didn’t tell her mother about it, because she didn’t want to cause another fight.”
“Did she tell you about how I used to take her to ballet class when she was five? What about how I used to stay home and paint pictures with her?” The truth was he’d been between construction jobs at the time and had little more to do than sprawl around hungover and daub greens and browns on construction paper, but still. He strained his memory for more exculpating evidence. I always. I used to. There was this one time when I. “Anyway, fuck me. Why am I sitting here explaining myself to you?”
Mikhail said, “She told me about one birthday when she was older that you had obviously forgotten about. You showed up at the house to get something you’d left there when you moved out. And you noticed the HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner and half a cake sitting on the counter, and you pretended like you had come for her. And you gave her something from your pocket—was it breath mints?” He guffawed. “Could that be right?”
“It was a Magic Eightball key chain.”
Mikhail made a stabbing motion with his cigarette as he bent again toward his drink. “Right. And she told me she held on to it for years anyway. Kept it in her desk. That it reminded her of you and how she hated you and loved you, too, even though she didn’t want to. Her words. She might still have it, you should ask her. But anyway, the point is, don’t ride into my bar on your high horse about how I’m mistreating your daughter. I’m a piece of shit and so are you.”
Richard watched the bartender wipe grime onto highball glasses with a soiled rag and wondered why this assessment of his character made his stomach twist. It wasn’t as though he’d ever deluded himself into thinking he’d been a good father. And he regularly thought of and referred to himself as a piece of shit. But there was something about hearing it from this cheesy hustler, sweating in his pleather, that codified it as indisputable, objective truth. This guy—this fucking guy—clearly knew from pieces of shit; an abridged family history from Cindy and five minutes around Richard had been all he needed to get it right. Mikhail sucked with a long crackle at the ice in his empty drink, like an enervated spider draining the last bit of life from the husk of his victim.
“All right.” Richard sighed. “So explain what happens if you don’t get the money.”
“I don’t know, maybe nothing. Or maybe I email her boss, tell him my side of things.”
“Why would they believe you? Why would they even listen?”
“They might not. In this life, there are no guarantees.”
“Basically, you’re full of shit is the feeling I get here. You’re just some grubby dirtbag leaning on my kid. No reason not to, right? It doesn’t cost you anything, and if she’s dumb enough to pay, you’re up ten grand.”
Mikhail shook his empty glass in the air. He waited until the new drink had been put in front of him and the bartender had resumed dirtying the glassware before he answered. “That’s basically it, yeah. I’m pretty harmless. But the thing you’re forgetting, and she’s not, is that I know a lot of people who aren’t harmless. I’m not saying I want anything to happen to her, because I honestly don’t. I like your daughter, she’s a tough girl. Really sharp and funny, too. I would genuinely feel terrible if anything did happen to her….” He made a circular motion with his hand as he droned on, like a chess expert going through a tedious explanation of an endgame’s foregone conclusion, and finally wrapped up with “Desperate times, desperate measures. Et cetera, et cetera.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Yeah, man, of course it is.” Mikhail laughed. “See, that’s how you threaten someone.”
Richard pulled out his overstuffed wallet and found one of the checks he’d brought just in case a situation arose, though he hadn’t imagined this particular situation, could never have imagined this particular situation in a thousand years.
“You got a pen?” he said.
Mikhail laughed again. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Banks closed an hour ago, and I’m leaving town now.”
“Okay. You know what? Fine. If it bounces, it bounces, and she still owes me the money. What’s the difference? And I think you do want to help her, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. Hey, you know what else?” He reached over the bar, felt around, and procured a plastic Bic, which he bounced a couple of times on its end. “I like you. I trust you. You’re a lot like me.”
“Now you’re just being hurtful,” said Richard. He took the pen, made out a check for ninety-five hundred dollars, and handed it to Mikhail. He pushed himself up from the bar and stood over the man, imagining, for a moment, plunging the pen down into the bent neck, the exposed ridge of spine. “Listen, if you ever talk to my daughter again, I will kill you. I really do mean that.”
Mikhail folded the check into his front shirt pocket. “That’s good,” he said, looking up and nodding. “Now you’re getting the hang of it.”
Richard doddered through the parking lot, the warm Vegas dusk, and got in the car. Vance sat behind the wheel, jotting something in his notebook. He shut the door quietly and bent backward to look at his sleeping daughter. She moaned in her sleep and turned halfway on her side, her arm unfurling off the edge of the backseat with a languid grace that suggested a hostess at some plantation gala introducing an especially dear and important guest. He nudged her shoulder but to no effect. The limb was unresponsive in its socket, as though unconnected to its owner.
“Okay,” he said to Vance. “Let’s go.”
Very soon, the desert reemerged from under its asphalt and neon camouflage. Squat segments of a rusted industrial chemical storage unit jumbled out into the sand like spilled intestines. A mottled dog limped in their shadows, watching the car long after it had sped past. Various signage on the side of the road desperately advertised LOBSTER! NEW GIRLS, SHOWS NIGHTLY!! WORLD’S LARGEST TRUCK!!! as though the landscape itself was racking its brain, trying to find something to make you turn around and spend more money, in the unlikely event you had any left. As though she sensed a loosening of Sin City’s gravitational field, Cindy roused herself. “Where are we? Where are we going?”
Richard said, “Leaving Las Vegas.”
“No. No no no.”
“Yes. I have to get on to the next stop, and you can’t stay there.”
“I have a job. And I have to pay off that money.”
“I paid him off.”
“What?” She pushed herself halfway up in the seat, against the door. “You what?”
“I paid him off.”
“How?”
“I wrote him a check.”
She laughed incredulously. “A check?”
“They’re these little paper rectangles? People used to carry them around to pay for things?”
He waited to hear more objections, then glanced back and saw she was sleeping again. After a few more minutes, they crossed some impalpable line and slipped the very last, flailing grasp of the city: no more billboards, no more industrial chaos or jackpot truck stops or signs of human existence at all, really. He felt himself relax, secure in the certainty that—as with the state of Oregon—this was a place to which he would never return. What was the opposite of Viva, he wondered, glancing back once more at his sleeping daughter, and then quickly slipping into his own Bonanza Dreams.