News From Heaven

by Jennifer Haigh

  Marnie sat on the bed beside him, leaned close to his shoulder. Her hair smelled of sugar and flowers.

  “You didn’t have to get me a present,” he said.

  “Well, sure I did. Thirty-three is special. You’re the same age as Jesus.”

  “Jesus who?” he said, a smart-aleck moment he instantly regretted.

  (You don’t believe in God? Vera asked him once.

  I believe in math, Sandy said.)

  “You shouldn’t joke about Jesus,” said Marnie.

  He gave her a squeeze. “Sorry. Thirty-three, huh? Seems like he’s been around longer than that.” He ran a hand over the shiny gold wrapping and pictured Marnie in her tiny rented room, cutting and scotch-taping; measuring, probably, to conserve the pricy paper. It seemed wrong to tear it open, untender, a violation.

  “Thanks, baby,” he said, kissing her. “You’re the best.”

  The Lariat was a sawdust joint, built fast after the war by a character named Buster Kilgallon, who saw it all coming and put up his Texas ranch to buy two properties on Fremont—a narrow cow path then, before it became Glitter Gulch. The Lariat and its sister casino, the Lasso, sat kitty-corner at a busy intersection. Their matching signage—two huge whirling ropes, one red, the other green—had been visible for half a mile, until the neighboring casinos built taller and brighter. Same old story.

  The place was busy for a Tuesday night. Men in hats and string ties drank cheap beers. Fleshy women in capri pants hunched over the slots. It was an older crowd, locals mostly—tourists rarely left the Strip. The old sawdust floor had been replaced with carpet, the main room tarted up with chandeliers, yet the Lariat had remained low-profile, one reason he’d chosen it. Certain people were unlikely to venture here. Another reason, equally important: its blackjack tables ran on Strip rules. The dealer drew to 16, and stood on a 17. The rest of downtown played old-style—the dealer hitting a soft 17, a shady rule that favored the house.

  Sandy sipped methodically at his martini, stirred, two olives, dry and cold. He had given precise instructions, like the customers he himself hated, the turkeys who rattled off entire recipes as though the barman had never mixed a drink. But tonight he had no choice; the drink had to be perfect.

  Protocol.

  Drink in hand, he scoped out the floor. Ten blackjack tables against the far wall, four cameras trained on them from above. Just as he remembered, the corner table was in a blind spot. He hadn’t played the Lariat in years, but his memory was precise in these matters. If he stationed himself at the far end, his face would be hidden in shadow. An unnecessary precaution, maybe, but he played better when he wasn’t being watched.

  Gonif: a thief, a swindler. He had looked it up.

  He reached into his jacket for the new wallet from Marnie, soft blond leather with rawhide stitching, heavy against his heart. Inside was his bankroll from Myron Gold and, tucked into a hidden compartment, the two twenties from Joyce. Her birthday card had come a day early, his sister punctual to a fault. Her baby, too, would arrive on time, if it hadn’t already. (The actual due date had slipped his mind.) But a first baby at Joyce’s age was risky, something he hadn’t understood until Vera Gold explained it. Now he found himself worrying about Joyce, a strange reversal. It was Joyce who’d always looked after him. Who’d looked after them all: Lucy, their baby sister; Dorothy, their crazy one. Sandy’s worries were confusing and, he hoped, unnecessary. Joyce had more reliable people to lean on. Her husband—solid, dependable Ed—was surely up to the job.

  To Joyce. To her health, he thought, raising his glass. It was as close as he could come to prayer.

  The corner table went hot, cold, hot. Sandy settled in, his nerves humming. The cards revealed themselves in canny combinations, tens and threes, threes and tens. It took him a moment to grasp the connection: the third of October, the beginning of his Jesus year.

  By eleven o’clock he was down a hundred. Again and again he hit on 13; again and again the face cards found him, inscrutable queens and smirking jacks.

  (The king looked somber, disappointed. Gonif. Of course, he wasn’t talking about money.)

  “You’re killing me,” Sandy muttered to the dealer. In an hour it would be the fourth of October. If the pattern shifted, he’d be even further screwed, forced to hit on 14.

  He found the thin metal disk in his pocket, kept there for emergencies. It was smooth and flat, smaller than a quarter. Carefully he nursed his drink. His fellow players were two gruff men in Western wear—strangers, probably, but alike as brothers. Beside them sat an old babe, Spanish-looking, and what might have been her daughter, both heavily made up and enormously fat. Downtown: no sharks in suits, no beauties showing cleavage. Nothing here to rattle him, no distractions from the game.

  Then, suddenly, the juice found him. He drew one sweet hand and then another. Face cards arrived in decorous pairs, like dinner guests.

  King and queen.

  Queen and jack.

  He was about to pony up again when he glimpsed Marnie across the room. He’d left her at the bar with a rum and Coke, hoping the scene would bore her into surrender, until he could put her in a taxi back to the motel. Now she was attracting lots of attention, from the men, anyway. Nothing could distract the old babes at the slots. In her strapless dress, she belonged at the Sands or Caesars. For the chintzy Lariat—its chandeliers dusty, its walls dark with cigarette smoke—she was like visiting royalty, the best-looking girl the place had seen in years.

  Sandy turned his back slightly, hoping she hadn’t seen him. To his dismay, she headed in his direction, teetering on high heels.

  Not now, he thought, counting furiously. Please, not now.

  A moment later she lurched toward him. “There you are. I lost you,” she said thickly. Her eyes were bleary, her makeup smeared.

  He spoke in a low voice. “Baby, are you okay?” Could she possibly be this tight on one rum and Coke?

  “I drank too much. Some guy kept buying me drinks.” She glanced over her shoulder. At one of the baccarat tables, a man in a Western hat was watching them intently. It was a look Sandy recognized, known to bartenders everywhere: the hillbilly stinkeye. A drunk itching to pick a fight.

  “Oh, Jesus.” Sandy ran a hand through his hair. Now, of all times? The juice surging, the whole table waiting on him. And yet he owed her.

  The count fell out of his head.

  “Cash me out,” he told the dealer. “Sorry, buddy. I gotta go.”

  Outside, he led her to the taxi stand. “I’m sorry,” she said, her hand low on her belly. “I ruined everything.”

  He could not disagree with this.

  “Do you feel sick?” he said.

  “I’m so tired. Aren’t you tired?” She leaned against him briefly, her hair fragrant, as though the stale casino air had not touched her. Sugar and flowers. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  Well, he was up—a little. He could walk away with cash in his pocket: five hundred bucks to catch up on some bills, plus enough for a nice dinner. He could end his birthday in bed with Marnie, the girl who loved him. What was wrong with that?

  Marnie sighed. “Can’t you just quit?”

  It was a question he’d been asked many times—by Vera Gold, his brother, George. Tonight, like every night, walking away was theoretically possible. But he’d spent three hours at the table, sweating, his pulse racing. He had invested other people’s money, his own time and anguish; lost everything, then won it all back. It seemed worse than foolish, it seemed somehow wasteful, to leave holding exactly what he’d brought.

  And back in L.A., Myron Gold was waiting: Gold the human cash register, tracking every cent he’d borrowed, no longer so blind, maybe, to the precious thing he’d stolen outright. Booby traps were everywhere—hidden pits of quicksand, the ground sinking around him. And yet, at the table, Sandy had beaten the odds. In just a few hands, he’d won back all he’d lost and more. If he could accomplish that much in a matter of minutes, what did the rest of
the night hold?

  “Baby, I can’t,” he said. “You understand, right?”

  She nodded almost imperceptibly and stepped into the taxi. From the window she waved goodbye.

  That first night at the Beehive, he’d noticed her immediately, though Donny Valentine did his best to hide her. The two sat, always, at a secluded corner table. Donny came up to the bar and ordered their drinks. Then one night Donny kept her waiting, and Marnie herself approached the bar. She ordered a rum and Coke and fished a dollar in quarters from a little straw purse.

  “I’ll need to see some identification,” Sandy told her sternly, a game he played with the young ones. “Just kidding,” he whispered when the color drained from her face. “I’ll make you anything you want.”

  In a single night he knew everything about her: her teenage reign as Dairy Princess; the conviction of all Winthrop, Ontario, that she was destined to be a star. Her very knowability charmed him. In the year he’d been Vera Gold’s lover, she’d confided almost nothing. Her dark complexity fascinated and repelled him. With Vera, nothing was what it seemed.

  Yet a few crucial things had been simple. Without consulting him, Vera had taken precautions, or perhaps at her age, none were necessary. He’d grown used to the freedom and, with Marnie, was careless. For weeks he crept out of her room at dawn, careful not to wake the landlady, as though it were the worst that could happen.

  Inside, he found a phone booth and lit a cigarette. Vera answered on the first ring. Television in the background, Vera nursing a highball in front of the late news. Like Sandy, she was nocturnal. Her husband slept like a bear.

  “Are you up or down?” she asked. “Dumb question. If you were up, you wouldn’t be on the phone.”

  “Marnie lost the baby.” On purpose, he could have added but didn’t. He had never said it aloud.

  With Vera, he didn’t have to. As always, she heard the words he was too cowardly to say. “Ah, geez. Listen, Sandman: what else could she do?” The line went quiet, Vera switching off the television. “Think about it. Poor kid still thinks she can make it in this town. Hell, maybe she can. What do I know?” Ice cubes clinking in a glass. “But not with a baby, she can’t.”

  Sandy had never thought of it in those terms. “I didn’t tell her to do it,” he said.

  “You didn’t tell her not to.”

  “It could have been different,” he said.

  “Tell me how.” A click, a slow inhale: Vera lighting a cigarette. “What, you were going to marry her? Take her back to Bakersfield?”

  “Bakerton.” The town he’d fled, whose mines had killed his father; the bleak small-town life a prison from which no one escaped. And yet he had considered it: driving back east with his bride beside him, having stopped off in Vegas for a different purpose entirely. It was a task easily managed—no blood test, no waiting, the ceremony over in minutes and cheaper than breakfast. For a time it had seemed a real possibility, the right thing to do.

  “I couldn’t make up my mind,” he said. “I guess she got tired of waiting.”

  “Smarter than she looks,” Vera said.

  Back at the table, the tide had turned. Sandy felt it immediately, the juice seeping from him like blood from a wound. He bet big and then bigger, a strategy that sometimes worked. The juice was fickle; she punished you like a pouty girlfriend. Sometimes you could win her back with a show of bravado. It was worth a try.

  He fingered the cheap silver-plated medal in his pocket—Saint Anne, patroness of miners—his father had been wearing when he died.

  The juice was jealous. Like an angry lover, she knew when his attention was elsewhere. And tonight his mind was crowded with other women. Marnie passed out in the cheap motel room; Vera Gold sleepless in the Hollywood Hills, lying next to the husband who owned his soul. Back in Bakerton, the sister who loved him more than anyone, dying in childbirth, for all he knew.

  In his new wallet were the two twenties, Joyce’s gift to the brother who rarely called and did not visit, who always had something better to do. Money sent without her husband’s knowledge: it was, he knew, the only lie in his sister’s marriage, the only secret she kept from Ed.

  It was enough to cover the motel, a tank of gas to get them back to L.A., expenditures Joyce would approve.

  Forty bucks was enough, probably, to pay for a wedding.

  It was ten to midnight, the last breath of his birthday. Sandy Novak was thirty-three, the same age as Jesus. The two twenty-dollar bills were all he owned in the world.

  With the time difference, it was three in the morning, a fact he put out of his head.

  “Ed,” he said into the phone. “It’s your brother-in-law in California. How the hell are you?” His voice sounded manly, confident. With money in his pocket, his shame had receded. At the roulette table, he’d bet straight up, the whole forty bucks on thirty-three. Happy birthday, pal, he said, to himself or Jesus.

  The wheel spun.

  “Sandy?” Ed sounded groggy, confused. “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s great, Ed. Couldn’t be better.” In a single spin—a straight-up bet that paid thirty-five to one—the juice had come back, filling his veins like blood. Joyce’s forty bucks had become fourteen hundred. “Is my sister awake?”

  “She’s not here, Sandy.” A pause that seemed endless. “She’s in the hospital.”

  A flutter in his chest, his heart skipping. “Oh, Jesus. Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. A little tired.” Another pause. “She had the baby. Rebecca Rose. We have a little girl.”

  It took Sandy a moment to find his voice. “That’s great, Ed. Congratulations. That’s—” His throat ached. “When?”

  “This morning.”

  Again something stirred inside him, a feeble creature no bigger than a moth. His soul fluttered blindly toward the power that made it, the only power he believed in.

  He did the math.

  His niece had been born on his birthday. The odds against it were staggering, a split bet times ten. Three hundred sixty-four to one.

  For the second time that night, he stepped out of the phone booth. Outside the glass doors, wheels were spinning. Cards passed like water through dealers’ hands. He heard a brash shower of metal, a jubilant whoop: one of the old babes had won at the slots. For just an instant his body was filled with it, a roiling storm of sound.

  It was a feeling he’d remember forever, a rare and blinding flash of clarity as he crossed the carpet desert. The longest walk of his life, a journey he’d never made before and would not make again.

  In midstream, the juice still flowing, he cashed in his chips and walked out the door.

  Flashes don’t last, of course, and that one didn’t. After his Jesus year had come and gone, after Marnie went back to Canada and Myron Gold was looking for him and it wasn’t safe for Vera to take his calls, he would remember his one moment of grace. The wallet swollen in his pocket, a feeling nearly sexual, as he crossed the street to Western Union and wired fourteen hundred dollars, the sum total of his earthly wealth, to Rebecca Rose Hauser, the mathematical miracle. The baby girl who shared his birthday.

  Welcome to the world.

  To the Stars

  Saxon County has an airport. Joyce Hauser has lived here her whole life and never knew. Though airport is perhaps too grand a term; airfield is more like it. There is a single bare strip for a plane to land, lit at either end by colored lights: red, amber, blue.

  In the parking lot she cuts the engine. A small plane buzzes in the flat blue sky. Watching it, she thinks: Is that you? As though the plane were her brother himself and not merely carrying what’s left of him. She imagines the view from above, the fall foliage peaking, a wash of color over the hills. Except for some scattered sumac, there are no red leaves, none of the brash sugar maples she and Ed saw years ago in New England, where they’d driven on their honeymoon. In western Pennsylvania the fall is pure gold.

  She rolls down the window and sits a long tim
e, listening to the quiet. The car is a wood-paneled station wagon, five months old, still smelling like its vinyl seats. It’s the first time Joyce has driven it alone. Her son and daughter are three and seven, and always one child or the other must be delivered somewhere. Ed makes do with their old car, a Chevy Nova with rattling windows, prone to overheating. He doesn’t mind the ribbing he gets at work, the principal rolling up to Bakerton High School in a rickety jalopy. It is Joyce who drives their son to his doctor’s appointments, some as far away as Pittsburgh. She needs a dependable car.

  She is startled when the hearse pulls in beside her and rolls down its window. “Mrs. Hauser?”

  It takes her a moment to recognize Randy Bernardi, in his twenties now. Like all the Bernardis, he is handsome: curly hair, square shoulders, dark eyes full of mischief. He was her pupil several years ago at the high school. Like many adults in Bakerton, he can’t seem to call her by her first name.

  Joyce steps out of her car, and for a few minutes they discuss the weather. Randy, once a shy boy, has learned to make small talk. In his profession, she imagines, it is a necessary skill. The Bernardis are the town undertakers—Randy’s father and grandfather, his many uncles.

  “It’s quiet here,” says Joyce. “Is it always this quiet?”

  The airport is used mainly by the National Guard, he explains. To get a commercial flight, you’d have to drive to Pittsburgh, three hours south and west. Occasionally a crop duster lands here, or a cargo plane.

  “Cargo,” Joyce repeats, as if coaxing a reluctant pupil. She is conscious of prolonging their conversation. As long as she is standing in the parking lot with Randy, the next thing will not happen. She will not see the box brought all the way from California, her brother packed inside.