So he stays. Two weeks pass. He keeps his room at the Squaw a half-mile off Fremont Street. He plays faro until noon at a locals’ casino run by Mormons and stashes his winnings in a rolled sock in the ceiling panel of his room. The Mormons run a nice joint though they themselves are merely rumors. Julius has heard they live out past the city limits in a compound with eight-foot-high fencing and a swimming pool treated with saline, to simulate the great stinking lake gifted to them by God. He stops sometimes at the train station and fishes out a dime and thinks of his brother and Muriel but he does not call them, and soon so much time has passed he worries they will resent or even forget him, and he dreads this imagined moment, the silence after he says his brother’s name.
One morning he leaves the tables and steps into the dawn street and when he looks ahead to the horizon he sees a fist of fire reach up from the earth and soften into smoke. It is many miles away and the sound reaches him several moments later, a muted bang like a rock hurled against the side of a barn, and he thinks of how his brother, when they were children, would hook a thumb inside his cheek and pull it out to make a popping sound, to indicate that something had gone smoothly. Above him on the rooftops of the casinos a cheer goes up, peculiar, muffled, cautious even, and Julius looks above to see the tiny heads of men and women balanced against the easements, some even forcing their heads through the big looping letters of neon signs. The sky brightens suddenly then, as if the bomb has accelerated the dawn, and washes the buildings and the blinking signs in white until they seem almost to have disappeared. It is as if everything has frozen, as if they have all been returned to the desert unfettered by worry or language, base elements, the faces dissolving in the bright light until they are featureless, each face turned toward the horizon in the same astonished, straining way. He feels suddenly part of something, among these people for the first time.
That night he climbs to the Binion’s roof and sits at the edge with his smoking hand out in the night. He’s never really been on his own before and here it is easy. In the long western evening the booming city makes its careful transition. First the night birds and then the cars quieting and then the brief wind before sunset and the streetlights clicking on, until in a few silent spaces Julius can hear the peculiar hum of the desert. The bombcloud is still visible as a gray paste across the surface of the low moon, flattened now and stretching a hundred miles. He reaches his arm out across the alley and trails his hand through the air. He’d grown up in a shakeshingle ranch and had gone from there to the navy, where he’d never spent a night above the ground. From this height the city seems to belong only to him. He remembers an afternoon in childhood when he and Lee discovered an uncapped silo filled by years of rainwater. They had climbed the ladder and looked down into the hole from the rim, a hundred feet above the ground. The reflection of their own heads in the water was framed by the circle of light coming in, the circle turned black on the surface of the water like a negative and burnished around the edges, as if they stood inside an eclipse. For a moment he wishes for his brother and the future they’d imagined together. He looks out at the desert landscape and thinks of that silo and the memory covers the sight of the moon and the dispersing bomb so they are layered like bits of film, the dark of that water and the light inside it lifted through the bare mountains, so looking out he has a sense of boundless time. He flicks his cigarette up and out so it arcs into the alley. When he looks again the vision has dissolved. His brother has never been here and is not coming to take him home and if he walks through Las Vegas at dawn there is no one who cares to know it, no one waiting in a Torrance alleyway to steal back what they’ve lost. A man like Julius at the tables with his money in plain view. Here there are rules, and they are known, and you can win fifty bucks on a low-card straight fair and square, no hustle, just luck. What comfort in playing against the house and not against men.
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS later Julius walks into the Golden Nugget and sits next to two men smoking spiced cigarettes at the polished bar. For a while they make small talk until Julius learns their occupation. For weeks now he has watched the pitmen and the bosses run the casino floors and the sporting desks, men with quick eyes, and though they watch him and count out his chips he has never spoken to them. He asks the smoking men how a man might find such work. In turn they ask him what skills he has to offer. He is amazed they want to know.
He says, “I know how people steal. And I also know why they do.”
The men look so much alike they could be twins. Each turns his head to the mirror behind the bar as if searching for some message in the glass and then turns back to him. They remind Julius of a pair of sister cats they’d had when he was a child, indistinguishably marked and moving as one body as only animals can, sitting under the oak tree by the bunkhouse snatching birds from the air. He recalls the long faces of those cats, their eyes bubbled and transparent from the side, as he looks at the two smoking men.
“But you yourself do not steal,” says the man closest to him.
He places his fingertips together and looks at Julius over his tented hands. Julius leans toward him on the stool so his arm lies flat against the bar. He’s had a few drinks and is flush with dollar chips.
“Partly I know how people steal because I have stolen, I’ll be honest with you,” he says. “But it seems to me that this ain’t the place to steal, and I’d like to be on the right side of that.”
The men consider this. They take in Julius’s slim frame, his worn-down boots mud-splattered, the length of his hair. Julius has a warm feeling of acceptance, a sense that the men see not a thief or a sailor but someone born to a better fate.
“We’ve seen you around,” one says.
“You play aboveboard, we like that,” says the other.
They offer him a job running pit surveillance and he takes it, shaking each man’s hand firmly but waiting until he is a few blocks off Fremont and nearly to the Squaw before he smiles.
He returns that night and climbs a set of narrow stairs to an attic above the floor of the Golden Nugget. The stairs lead out to catwalks along the walls and through the middle of the attic, touching just off-center above the casino pit below. The catwalks are scaffolded and set so close to the ceiling Julius feels his hair brush against it. Every ten feet a two-way mirror is set into the attic floor, so the man walking the catwalk can look through them and watch the players below. Large fans front and back send in a hot breeze. Julius walks to the center and looks down at a craps table. He sees only the players’ hands, some fat-fingered and hairy, nails untrimmed, others slender and graceful. A man at the edge of the table leans forward to take the pot and for a moment looks up and Julius nearly turns away. But the wide shadowy sheet of glass bows down and out, convex, so the man looking up sees not Julius’s silent gaze but his own face, arched and upside down, as if he is staring into the curved back of a spoon. Julius himself has seen these windows from below, and though he’d assumed he was being watched he had not really considered all this, that above him was a network of paths and railings, made for watching. The whole thing seems to him so ingenious he nearly laughs aloud.
For an hour he moves between the windows watching the action at craps and blackjack. He sees nothing unusual, though from above the character of each game is changed and made piecemeal, divided into possible cheats or cons, and these are different from the things a player would suss out, by virtue of being punishable. Watching the games this way impresses him. In Los Angeles a man like him would never be trusted with such a job.
When he moves toward the center of the scaffold he sees in the distance a dark figure. Julius stops and waits. The figure comes closer and in the light cast up through the windows Julius sees the man’s boots, then his nubby trousers.
“You’re new,” the man says as he approaches.
Julius nods. They stand facing each other over the lighted window. The man is tall and
dark-haired, Julius’s age or a bit younger.
“Henry,” says the man.
Julius says his own name and puts out his hand. The man’s hand is rough but his handshake is light and quick. He holds his other arm against his waist and in the pale light Julius sees it is ripped in scars.
“First time?” the man asks.
“It is,” Julius says.
“What do you think so far?”
Henry does not seem cruel to Julius though his appearance would suggest it, so Julius says what he thinks.
“You play?” Julius asks.
“Sometimes,” says Henry.
“This sheds some light on that, huh.”
“It does,” Henry says. “Seeing it this way is like watching yourself make love.”
Julius laughs and nods, then he reaches up to cover his mouth against the sound and because his missing tooth makes him suddenly sheepish.
“Instructive,” he says, through his hand.
“But a little ruinous,” says Henry.
“That’s right,” says Julius.
He drops his hand and looks at the man a long moment. The look goes on until Henry laughs and Julius laughs with him but then the laughter turns and stops. In this silence Julius becomes again self-conscious and looks away at the floor and then at his own hand on the railing. Henry says, “Welp,” and goes on his way to the other side of the casino loft.
Every few hours Julius and Henry pass each other at the place where the scaffolds cross over the pit below. Henry raises a hand or makes a hasty salute. The breeze across the center cools and dies. Below the tables thin out. On the third pass Henry stops a moment and makes a joke about a woman at the corner craps table, and suggests Julius take a look down her dress, and Julius says he will.
At four A.M. Julius descends the stairway and punches a clock in a back room filled with bank bags and boxes of casino matches behind mesh cage. This room, too, is covered in two-way glass, and an iron door with a sliding bar lock leads to another room. As he marks his pay card, a man in a seersucker suit slips out and closes the door promptly and soundly. From inside the lock is turned again. The man in the suit catches Julius’s gaze and holds it for a long moment, until his eyes begin to seem distant and opaque to Julius, like the two-way glass, as if somewhere inside the man there is another man who looks out, watching him. This must be the pit boss, Julius thinks. The man walks away without speaking.
Outside a yellow paring of sunrise. Julius walks all the way to the end of Fremont where the train station is busy with people. Beyond the station the brown scrubby plain rises into a rim of mountains. Julius steps into a phone booth, fishes out a nickel, and dials his brother’s number. For a long time the phone rings and Julius listens to the jangling bell until the sound becomes the backdrop to a thought he’s having. He thinks of the bomb he saw, and his new job. He wants to tell his brother these things but he isn’t sure where to start. But the fact of his brother seems suddenly necessary, some confirmation that his voice is welcome and known. He recalls the last time he saw Lee, in Okinawa, and feels a hollow feeling of doubt, which passes, which turns to envy and then to fear. Julius hangs up before the call rings out again.
Back at the Squaw he lies awake a long time thinking of the games he’s seen and the men’s hands below him and their various shapes, the half-moons of nail beds catching the neon and the man Henry’s scarred arm, until the daylight breaks fully through the curtains.
* * *
—
CASINOS MAKE SOME GAMBLERS forget the complications that attend money. As he walks the scaffold Julius considers the dark enclosure of the casinos, the money traded for chips and markers, the absence of clocks in any pit or cardroom, nothing closing or changing, breakfast buffets in the middle of the night. All the strategies for disrupting time, for breaking the link between cause and effect. But now it is Julius’s job to resist these things. The peek gives him perspective. He paces the catwalk looking for drunks, card palmers and dice loaders, cheaters of all kinds. He spends the most time above the blackjack tables. Blackjack is the only casino game where the gambler can get an edge over the house and for this reason it attracts cheaters of all kinds. Card markers and sleeve-men, confederacies of slack players who fake dim-wittedness to pass good cards to their partners or bust out better players waiting for the drop. Of course they know he is watching. At the tables they listen for his boots above, trying to gauge the distance before palming an ace or passing a queen, and in this way he becomes a part of the games below and the methods of the cheating men.
Each night between eight and four Julius is their steward. He thinks of himself this way. His job is to watch the players and nothing more. He does not administer punishment, only speculation, only what he believes he sees. Mostly he watches the players’ hands. Those with square or short or clumsy hands may mark but they do not palm. They are not built for it. The slender-fingered men, short nails buffed pale, no rings, wide cuffs touching the clefts of their palms—if those men start to lose, Julius will stay at the well above them past the time he is supposed to move on. Losing, for the best of them, is its own kind of strategy. He reports each suspicion with diligence to the two cat-faced men and collects his check at the end of each week. With the money he makes he pays for his room and his cash-ins and eats steak for breakfast and March starts to fade away. He sleeps through the warming afternoons and wakes with a feeling of purpose.
Then, at the beginning of April, the heat comes and covers the city in a shimmer. The casino attic is so hot Julius can feel his heart straining against his ribs. Sweat drips from his nose and brow and from his fingertips as he paces the catwalk. After an hour he takes off his boots and socks and unbuttons his shirt and wets a hotel towel and wraps it around his neck. He sips from a flask of whiskey and smokes to distract himself.
Before he and Henry are due to switch sides Julius rewets the towel with a cup of water already tepid. He leaves his shirt open and tucks the tails into the back of his jeans and walks to the other side. Henry walks slowly toward him and waves dully and does not call out. He is shirtless, covered in sweat, sheets of it over his face and neck. Julius watches him come. There is no breeze and the bowed glass is waxed by the heat. Henry pauses at the crossing to brace himself against the scaffold for a moment. He reaches out, one hand on the railing and the other pressed suddenly into Julius’s bare chest, his palm squarely in the cleft of Julius’s rib cage. Then he looks at Julius. “Oh,” he says and sinks to his knees, his arms bent so his elbows press into Julius’s thighs and his thumbs hook the flat bones in Julius’s hips. Henry leans his head on Julius’s waist, his cheek turned to the copper snap of Julius’s jeans, and to keep him from falling Julius takes his shoulders and his fingers slide in the man’s sweat. Julius leans as far as he can backward, the scaffold against him. He starts to say, “Now come on.” Henry’s hands fall away and he twists sideways to retch over the scaffold railing and Julius does not wait or offer comfort but turns back. As he walks along the catwalk to the other side he can feel Henry’s palm still there in the center of his chest, like a footprint rising slowly from the stubble of a mown field.
When his shift ends he waits until he hears Henry’s boots on the stairwell and keeps waiting long minutes after the door has banged shut below. It is a quarter past four when he finally collects his boots. He thumps them on the heels to evict mice or spiders and finds the Iowan’s bill there. It’s damp and when he unfolds it, it smells of sweat and cigarettes. He folds it again and puts it back. Downstairs he clocks out but makes a note in the margin that the last fifteen minutes should go unpaid.
Outside a cooling rain has come and gone and the streets reflect the neon in shallow pools at their edges. Julius turns toward the Squaw and is ducking down a side street when Henry catches him.
“Surely you ain’t going home,” Henry says.
“You mean my room or where I’m from?”<
br />
Henry laughs. “Home for the day, bud.”
“Well, I was planning on it.”
“Too hot to be cooped up.”
“A lot cooler now.”
“I owe you a drink, for before.”
The man looks so earnest, so genuinely embarrassed by his own weakness in the heat, that Julius knows he cannot refuse without revealing something about himself. He remembers the shape of the man’s shoulders where he’d touched him, square and ordinary now beneath his shirt. Together they walk down the wet streets and find a tourist bar and order the only kind of beer they have. Julius keeps an eye out for the bosses or any other men who might know them, who might think them in collusion or worse. For a while they talk about the weather and that night’s gambling and the sad landscapes of their childhoods. Henry is from the Central Valley and spent many summers in the fields there.
“I settled for Henry because no one could say Javier,” he says.
When Julius asks why he’s come to Vegas and how long he’s worked the peek, Henry says, “I guess they figure I can’t be much of a cheat,” and raises the injured arm.
“No, I guess you ain’t no palmer,” Julius says.
“Ain’t much of anything.”
Henry smiles and Julius sees something else about him.
“But I bet you play all right.”
“If you mean playing the goat or maybe by ear, because that’s all I’ve ever done till now.”
“I sure wish there was more poker, and not just in them cardrooms,” Julius says.
“House ain’t got no motivation for it. You play it overseas?”
Julius nods.
“What’s your game here?” he asks.
“Twenty-one,” says Henry.
“That so.”
Henry lowers his eyes.
“I know what people think about blackjack players.”
“How many blackjack cheats have you seen from that attic, just this month?” Julius says.
On Swift Horses Page 4
