by Rae Meadows
When the hand is done, the dealer (Sheila, Fresno, CA) busts. She’s thirty-five or so, with frosted hair, and she’s pudgy but attractive, with slender hands and rich brown eyes. I flatten three twenties in front of me on the table. She displays the money for a hidden camera in the ceiling before stuffing it into the slot and expertly clicking and stacking chips. An older couple on the end thank her, wish her a Merry Christmas, and leave the table.
It’s just the cowboy and I. Sheila the dealer points the yellow plastic card at me to cut. I want her to like me. I cut the deck, and right off bet a dollar tip for her alongside my own hand. I split eights against her seven showing. The cowboy holds at eighteen. He wins, I win both hands, and Sheila doubles her tip. She thanks me with a slight smile. I actually give the cowboy a high five. He says his name is Boyd. My whiskey arrives just as a new round begins and I feel lucky and energized and anonymous, one with these two, giving an evil eye to a woman in a sequined top who considers joining our group.
But by the time my third drink arrives, Sheila is on a winning streak and I’m down $150, and Boyd now scowls and bites his nails. I like to think we share at the moment one simple desire: to be dealt good cards. When a new dealer comes to take over for Sheila, Boyd looks forlorn, abandoned, as if she owed it to us to stay and help dig us out.
“Come on,” he says to her. “Just a few more hands?”
The spell has been broken. Now down $200, it seems a steeper climb back up with mustached, tan Marty, Elko, NV, dealing the cards.
“Shit,” Boyd says, lifting his hat and replacing it on his head.
“Here for the rodeo?” I ask.
“Yeah. Going back to Rock Springs for Christmas then I compete here again. I’m a bull rider.”
“Wow,” I say.
I finally win a hand.
“How ’bout y’all?” Boyd asks.
“I’ve never ridden a bull,” I say.
This makes him chuckle.
“Shit!” he yells when he hits a sixteen with a queen. Boyd looks barely older than twenty.
The dealer’s hands are smooth and lotion-shiny. His nails are buffed. The hungry way Boyd and I watch those hands makes me think that a table dealer is not so different from an escort. Offering the hope of redemption, for a price. And even though we know better, we’re tempted again and again by the new promise, just this once, just one more, maybe this time. Knowledge that a game is fixed doesn’t curb the urge to play.
I lose another three hands and I’m down a month’s rent. The dealer flicks his eyes to me as if in warning but I’m close to very drunk and not far, I think, from winning it all back. Boyd brazenly hits a seventeen against the dealer’s king and I follow suit, doubling down on a nine, matching my reckless hundred-dollar bet. With an unlikely four of clubs, Boyd hits big with twenty-one and he pumps his fists in the air. For me, eighteen and twenty beats Marty’s seventeen and Boyd catches me in a clumsy hug.
“Hot damn,” he says as the dealer counts out stacks of chips for both of us. We slide a few back in his direction as a tip. “What do you say? Quit on this high note in all our glory?” he asks me.
I’m still down $300 but I’m intrigued by Boyd’s youthful exuberance. He tips his hat back and rubs his hands on his denim-sheathed thighs.
“Bets folks?” the dealer asks.
“I’m out,” I say.
“Me too.” Boyd says. “Where to?” he asks with an eager smile.
“Maybe some air,” I say, sliding off the stool.
I pick up my coat from the floor and feeling unsteady on my feet, I have to grab onto the edge of the table. Boyd’s hand and forearm—over-developed, I assume, from hanging onto a bull for his life—guide me to an exit I wouldn’t begin to be able to find on my own.
It’s late, the night before Christmas Eve, and outside the carnival-like casino it’s quiet and dry-cold as only the high-desert winter can be. I can’t see stars because of the lights but I imagine that over the salt flats they are dense and consoling, making the big sky seem less of an unfathomable abyss.
“Shit, it’s nippy,” Boyd says.
“Yeah.” I lean against a wall to stop the spins. I want to lie down with my face against the frozen sidewalk.
“I won two hundred bucks,” he says. “A Christmas bonus.”
I don’t want him to talk. I want him to pick me up and carry me somewhere so I can sleep.
“I watched them filming Touched by an Angel yesterday over there in Salt Lake City. It was pretty neat. Saw that Roma Downey and the other one, the black woman with the white stripe in her hair. You watch that show?”
I shake my head with my eyes closed.
“I like it sometimes,” he says. “So what do you like to watch?”
His attempt at small talk is endearing but I don’t have the energy.
“Where’re you staying?” I ask.
He turns away and coughs.
“Uh, the Best Western. Down a ways.”
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Twenty-five.”
I know he’s lying but I think it’s to make me feel better.
“You’re sweet,” I say.
“My dad’s in the room. He’s taking me back to Wyoming tomorrow. He’s there. He’s asleep.” Boyd snaps his fingers.
“Oh,” I say, stifling a laugh.
“What about you?”
“Salt Lake City,” I say, knowing a hundred miles is not an option.
He takes off his hat, looks at it, and puts it back on. “I have a good idea,” he says.
His large calloused hand takes mine and pulls me back into Stateline, back into the jarring blur. I am so relieved to be led. I watch my feet against the red carpet, bump into people without looking up. Boyd steers us to the motel end of the casino and pays for a room with his winnings.
He’s gentle, as if I am a wounded bird. He takes off my coat and my sneakers, eases me down on the bed in the dark room. I close my eyes and feel his fingers fumble with the button fly of my jeans. He pulls down the covers and lifts me up over them. I open my eyes and smile so he doesn’t think I’ve passed out and he touches my cheek. He continues with the rest of my clothes, and I give myself over to the kindness in his hands. It’s the first time I have been with someone since McCallister and I fight the instinctive shift into a needing-to-please mode. After a quick strip of his own clothes and the crinkle of a retrieved condom, I feel his warm body beside me, his rough hand softly running along my arm.
Boyd kisses me and I kiss him back without opening my eyes and without words. I pull him close and rock him so he rolls on top of me; I want his weight and his warmth and his skin to press me through to the bottom of the bed. His body is taut and new, and I feel his gratitude, as if he can’t believe his good fortune. I let him give. He moves his hands lovingly over my breasts, where he lays his head for a moment like a baby against his mother.
“I don’t even know your name,” he whispers.
I open my eyes, jarred by the unfamiliar face in the dark. “Jane,” I say.
“Jane,” he says. “I’m Boyd.”
I close my eyes again. “I know.”
Boyd moves down to kiss my stomach. I stay motionless and focus on the warm track his touch leaves on my skin. I sense his hesitation in the face of my silent stillness—he is waiting, I know, for a sign. But I’m thankful he doesn’t say anything. I don’t want to hear his voice or decipher words. I float, moored only by the slippery body of the young cowboy on top of me. I match my breathing to his, faster, shallower, urgent. I imagine myself melting slowly into the bed like hot, poured honey.
*
“Can I tell you something?” Boyd asks, after I have settled in on my side of the bed, welcoming sleep.
“That’s the first time I’ve done it in a bed,” he says. “It’s usually a car or something. This was real nice.”
I turn to his cherubic face.
“Thanks, Boyd,” I says. “It was real nice.”
“
Yeah?” he asks brightly.
“Yeah,” I say.
“’Night,” he says, smiling.
*
At dawn, I wake to the sound of cowboy boots on the landing outside the door as the other rodeo guests head home for Christmas Eve. I sneak back into my clothes and I’m out the door as Boyd slumbers in innocence. My head thuds behind my eyes in the light and my mouth feels sucked dry with a foul aftertaste. I burn it away with industrial coffee from the gas station, but instead of going to my car, I decide to try and win back what I lost.
Parrot Bay, near the end of the strip, is well past its prime. The cocktail waitresses are middle-aged and the local clientele burned-out. It’s empty, save for a couple of gray-haired women in white gloves, now coin-dirty, feeding nickels into slot machines, and a few woolly sorts slumped over the bar. I find the one blackjack table open for business and get to work.
But I have no connection with the dealer, a brusque older man without a name tag who rarely looks at me and carries on a conversation with the bored-looking pit boss. I lose fast. With careless bets and rotten luck, the two hundred I won back goes in ten minutes and I’m down five hundred dollars. The thought of being short on rent makes me feel nauseated, as does the cigarette I smoke down on an empty stomach. I leave the table without a good-bye to the uncharitable dealer and steel myself for the blinding morning glare outside.
But then near the exit I spy a phone.
“Hello?” McCallister says quietly.
“Why are you talking so quietly?”
“Hold on a second.” There are fumbling sounds, then that of a door closing. “Maria’s asleep. What time is it out there?”
“I don’t know. Morning sometime.”
“It’s not even seven yet your time. You must be really excited for Christmas Eve.”
“I can’t wait.”
“So what’s going on?”
“Remember that time we drove to Atlantic City?”
“A total disaster,” he says.
“Well, I’m in Wendover. I lost a bit,” I say.
“Jane, go home. Please? Just don’t do anything until I get there.”
“No. Listen. Please, please don’t come here. That’s why I’m calling. I don’t want to see you. I want to live my life, everything, by myself.”
There is a pause. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him so quiet.
“Merry Christmas,” I say, and hang up.
I speed through the limitless arid and empty salt flats toward home.
chapter 17
When I arrive home, my apartment is quiet, but then Ember staggers into the living room in the same clothes she’s been wearing for days, her hair stringy around her face.
“Where have you been?” she asks. There is a twinge of sharpness in her voice. “I waited up for you last night.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says, slumping down into the couch. “I just thought you’d be here.”
She wipes her nose on her sleeve and starts to wag her bare foot—surprisingly small and girlish—with manic speed.“I have to tell you something you’re not going to like.”
“What is it?”
“I’m going to Moab.”
“But I thought—”
“Just for a few days. For Christmas.” Ember picks at a scab on her hand with such irritation and hostility that I’m guessing she must be out of drugs.
“Oh,” I say, trying not to show how let down I feel, trying to play down the fact that Ember has chosen to be with Ford over me. “I guess that’ll be nice for you guys.”
“You can come if you want,” she says.
“I have to work,” I say, sounding more pouty than I want to. “But thanks.”
“Okay. Well, I’m going to head out. You sure you don’t want to come?” she asks.
I nod, letting the feeling of abandonment settle in my chest.
*
It’s bright and unseasonably warm out, but on the day before Christmas in Salt Lake City, everything is closed. The broad streets are empty of traffic, and despite the cheery sun, it feels deserted and lonely. Even Smith’s is closed, barring me from its aisles of refuge. The only place I find open is the 7-Eleven, where I buy Diet Coke, two bruised bananas, brownie mix, milk, corn flakes, and a sorry-looking Golden Delicious apple for my Christmas Eve feast.
“It looks like we’re the only ones out and about today,” I say to the clerk, a burly Samoan missing his front bottom teeth.
“$11.60,” he says.
When I’m back at home, my mom calls but I let the answering machine take it. I eat a bowl of cereal, make the brownies, and eat half the batch while watching a biography of Jesus on TV. McCallister is at his parents’ house up the Hudson with Maria, Ember is on her way to be with Ford, Boyd the young cowboy is home by now with his family in Wyoming, and in Cleveland, I imagine my mom is hanging the last of the antique ornaments while my sister complains about how selfish I am for not coming home and my dad tunes them out with his third Scotch. I try to feel freedom in my invisibility. With Christmas music on the radio I bathe, lying motionless in the water until my fingers and toes are withered into sunken crevices and I’ve begun to sweat. I can survive alone. I just wish there were a way to dull the ache.
At seven o’clock I get a call from Marisa, who has a date for me. It’s the taxidermist. I laugh when she tells me. I am relieved to have an assignment on Christmas Eve, rescued from my brooding by a mission to make back the rent money I lost in Wendover. From the look of what I put on—long black velvet skirt, gray silk blouse, demure, rose-colored lipstick—and my upswept hair, one might assume I am on my way to Christmas mass, if not for the stiletto pumps that look like two shiny black weapons in the icy porch light.
State Street is all lit up with no one to see it but me. Blinking Santas and snowmen adorn every car dealership and fast-food restaurant. There’s even a huge green plastic wreath on the front door of American Bush. I belt out “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Silent Night.” I dance in my seat to the jaunty tempo of Mannheim Steamroller’s “Joy to the World” as I drive south past West Jordan, trying to coerce my spirits into staying aloft. I pass Lehi, Pleasant Grove, and the “happy valley” of Provo. But the clusters of lights and buildings begin to peter out after Payson and I have to work harder at staying upbeat. Finally I reach Santaquin and I know I can’t be that far.
The weather-beaten Utah map I bought on my drive west has a hole in its corner fold where Nephi should be, so with Marisa’s help I scratched out some directions to Ephraim’s on the edge of a Chinese take-out menu. Although I’ve never been to Nephi, I’m not too worried about getting lost in a town with the same population as my high school.
Nephi, Ralf once told me, was founded by two LDS leaders who were instructed by church higher-ups in the mid-nineteenth century to lay out a town at the mouth of Salt Creek Canyon. Like most of Juab County, it’s rural and almost entirely Mormon, rumored to be rife with fundamentalist polygamists. A large percentage of the residents are direct descendents of the city’s founders. I wish it were daylight so I could get a glimpse of Mount Nebo as I drive south into town, if only for some reassurance that the world has not slid away.
Main Street is desolate and it looks like a Depressionera dust bowl holdout. There is one flickering streetlight and the windows of the small shops are dark. I expect tumbleweeds to roll by. My directions point me west, straight through and out of town, up onto a snow-strewn plateau lit only by the moon. My headlights find the shiny globes of a doe’s eyes just off the road. The radio has gone to static, and I’ve turned it to low, unable to bring myself to turn it off completely. A broken-down tractor marks the county road onto which I’m supposed to turn.
Ephraim’s compound looks to be a trailer with addon upon add-on cropping out from the original doublewide. A lone industrial light sends a shivery glow out from the house across the ice-and-gravel-encrusted driveway. It’s not fear that greets me in the
cold silence outside the car, but an undertone of disbelief—I have chosen to spend my Christmas Eve right here.
The taxidermist’s picture taped up in the office all these months has led me to expect a much more imposing character than the man who opens the door. Ephraim is my height, at best, and rather slight in build. He stands before me in a tank top and jeans, his long, bleached hair held in a red bandanna.
“Merry Christmas,” I say.
“Yeah. I’m just finishing up some work. Have yourself a beer or something.”
“I’m Roxanne,” I say.
“I know,” he says, impatiently waving me in. “I’m not retarded.”
He disappears down a narrow, dark hall leaving me alone in the faux-wood-paneled, galley-sized living room of the trailer, dimly lit and lined with stuffed creatures of all kinds. Eyes are everywhere—elk, deer, rabbits, raccoons—like a gothic hunting lodge. Their heads are macabre, but they have an impressive, lifelike subtlety in their poses. A large TV is perched on milk crates in the corner and a stereo is stacked with CDs—Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Boston, and REO Speedwagon. The banality of this setup makes me feel sorrier for him than I would if he were holed up in a rustic cabin without plumbing.
“I’ll be out in five,” he yells from down the hall.
“Take your time,” I say too softly, and I’m about to repeat myself louder when he calls again.
“It’s a Christmas gift. The guy’s picking it up tomorrow morning. A buck head for his wife. It’s pretty awesome. They live over in Helper. He’s coming by at dawn.”
