“Honestly I am.”
“Deal the fucking cards, Patrice.”
“Yeah, Patrice,” Mota said.
“Shut up, Bob,” I snarled.
“Hey.”
“You, too, Manny.”
Finally she started dealing. She had no choice. But I never looked at her. I just stared straight down. A queen slid into my line of vision. Then a 5. I looked at her up card. A 3.
“He’s fifty-five years old,” I muttered.
“Who is?” said Patrice.
“The guy who stole my wife. Can you imagine?”
“Handsome fella like you won’t have a problem finding someone new.”
“I don’t want someone new,” I said. “I want L.”
“The pretty blond girl seems to like you.”
“I told you, she’s nobody.”
“Don’t give up. You never know what’s coming your way in life. That’s the best thing about it.”
“Really? I think it’s the worst thing about it,” I said.
“Everything has a way of working out, even though you can’t see it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Fifteen on three. You know what to do.”
“Hit me.”
“That’s not what to do,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter. He’s fifty-five. He’ll be dead soon. We’ll all be dead soon. Hit me.”
Patrice hesitated. I could feel her trying to make eye contact. I couldn’t look at her. She was so earnest. I didn’t deserve her kindness.
“You heard the player,” Manny C. said. “Hit him.”
She sighed and gingerly turned over a king. “I’m sorry, Raoul.”
I sat there and didn’t say anything. I had just gone through more money than some people will make in their entire lives. Bob Mota came around the table and reached into his coat pocket.
“Gimme another five,” I said.
“There is no other five. You’re done.”
“I’m done?”
“This is what’s left.”
He handed me a thin envelope. I handed it right to Patrice.
“And we checked your credit. It’s not so good.”
“No?”
“Not particularly, no. And there’s something else I didn’t tell you, Ray. I’m a big racing fan. I was at Pimlico when de la Maria won the Preakness. So I’ll give you, say, thirty minutes before I place a few calls. Have a nice evening, scumbag.”
Just as he said it, a cold wave hit me in the face, like someone had dumped a vanilla shake on me. My shades were coated and I couldn’t see a thing. When I took them off, there was the bride I had insulted earlier, holding an empty White Russian. Why did girls drink those things? Didn’t they know how fattening they were?
“I’m never leaving my man. You hear me? Never. We’re gonna be happy, you stupid faggot!”
She marched off toward the elevators. Bob Mota took out his handkerchief and handed it to me.
“Here you go, Ray. It’s on the house.”
YOU LIE BING BULI
June 4
Today he came trudging through the woods with a flashlight like a crazy person. If I were a gun nut, I probably would have shot him. He wanted to tell me about a friend of his who had fallen out of a tree when he was a kid. This after that insanity last week with the newspaper article. Do I have him arrested? Do I move into the city? What?
I GOT IN A CAB outside the MGM and rolled off down Vegas Boulevard, a Grand duffel bag holding more than $200,000 on my lap, the remnants of what was left in the safe. I had thought about tossing it all on a hand of blackjack before I left, but Mota was serious about calling the police, and what did it matter, anyway? While I wasn’t really thinking about anything other than the news about L and Boyd, I’d eventually need money to survive, because there was little to no chance that I’d turn myself in at any point. I mean, no matter what mental state I was in, I just wasn’t the kind of person who would surrender to authorities and take his punishment. I certainly didn’t think I belonged in jail, though there’s no way that fate could have been worse than the one I’d just suffered.
The cabdriver was from somewhere in the Middle East. He wore a turban. Normally I would have asked him about that, since wearing a turban post-9/11 can’t be comfortable, socially speaking, but what did I care about that? Why should I give a shit about his problems? Did he care about mine?
The TV screen in the back of the cab played an ad for some movie in which Liam Neeson played the father we all wished we had. I pawed at the screen until the sound finally muted.
“The movies—they all are the same now, my friend,” the driver said. “Boom boom boom.”
I gazed blankly out the window. Lights. Cars. People. Pointless bullshit piled onto pointless bullshit. Boom boom boom was right.
“He is a fine actor,” he continued. “A learned man. I do not like this Charles Bronson nonsense he does now. It is insubstantial. The man played Oskar Schindler, for heaven’s sake.”
I thought of a story I’d heard about Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson. She’d fallen while learning how to ski on a bunny slope in Canada. She’d thought it was nothing. A pedestrian thump on the noodle. A handful of hours later, she was dead. L had cried about it for days. She had met her in New York once.
“You must honor your talent,” the taxi driver said. “Talent is a gift from God. What you do with it, that is your gift back to God.”
I ignored him. Thought of the Professor. The pie case. The ruination of the world. The hopelessness of it all. All around us, horns blared. People stood three deep, watching the fountains dance in front of the Bellagio. Jesus Christ—they were watching fucking water. It was so depressing.
“Why should Liam Neeson give a shit about God?” I said.
The driver kept his hands steady on the wheel, but his eyes darted to the rearview. They said, What the fuck kind of question is that?
“Seriously. His wife died on a bunny slope. Normal day. Beginner’s ski lesson. Poof. It’s over. God can take away your wife on a fucking bunny slope, and you’re supposed to give a shit what kind of movies you do after that? He lost everything. What does it matter what he does now? I mean, Liam Neeson is supposed to care what— What’s your name?”
“Sameer.”
“He’s supposed to care what Sameer the cabbie thinks about his artistic choices? He lost his wife. Do you even know what that means? To lose someone like that?”
We stopped at a light. Drunk college kids ran across the clogged boulevard, holding plastic fish bowls filled with grain alcohol and a dab of food coloring to make the poison palatable, all of them racing toward some more pointless bullshit. That’s the crummy cycle of life right there. Lovely colored water for fairy wings turns into grain alcohol in plastic fish bowls.
Sameer turned and looked at me through the plastic divider. “I have lost three children,” he said evenly, holding up a trio of crooked fingers.
He turned back around. He no doubt saw me as someone who didn’t get it (and you couldn’t argue with his instincts), but at that moment, all I could think of was how he didn’t get it. How no one got it. The only person who got it wasn’t around to get it anymore. It occurred to me that the only thing worse than no one in the world getting what you got was one person getting what you got whom you couldn’t see anymore. Whom you’d lost. It was worse that way. Lonelier.
I stole a glance at Sameer. He probably thought I didn’t care that he had lost three children. Maybe he thought I was one of those Americans who didn’t give a shit about the terrible things that happened to anyone who was brown and spoke in halting English. He might have thought I felt like he had brought it on himself, with his turban and his opinions on Hollywood. But that’s not what I was thinking. What I was thinking was, what was so terrible about being dead? I mean, what did the dead have to worry about? Did the dead care if some silver-haired motherfucker was waking up on their side of the bed? O
f course not. The dead didn’t give a shit about that kind of thing. If you were dead, what would it matter whom your wife was talking to in the shower? What would it matter whom she was watching movies with? Or having sex with? If you were dead, you wouldn’t care about any of those things. The dead didn’t have those kinds of images searing their eyeballs out. The dead didn’t have rusty hacksaws pulling down hunks of their hearts. Even if there were a heaven and hell and you ended up catching a bad beat on that decision, what could happen in a cauldron of eternal fire that could possibly be any worse than losing the greatest thing there ever was? What did I care about the devil? I already knew him. He drove a champagne Lexus with a MERCHANT OF TENNIS bumper sticker. He’d RATHER BE GOLFING. He invented a plastic contraption to throw tennis balls to dogs with. The devil didn’t wear red, he wore khaki. And the devil didn’t carry a pitchfork. He carried a sand wedge. No one needed to tell Ray Parisi to worry about the devil. It was too late for that.
I leaned my head against the window. To the left, the fountains in front of Caesars were awash in pink lights, and then farther down, the volcanoes in front of the Mirage rumbled and burst, the flames glowing orange over a rock pool of rippling water. Farther up the boulevard, a huge crowd leaned on thick rope railings and watched a pirate ship in front of Treasure Island. Cannons boomed, and swashbuckling thirtysomething actors swung from crow’s nests and ripped sails, most of them having fruitlessly spent their twenties in Los Angeles and were now on the slow road back from where they came. Everyone ooohed and aaahed and took cell phone videos. It was all anyone ever seemed to do there. Watch. The place is the watching capital of the world.
“Those people should all have to walk the plank,” I said, nodding at the group in front of Treasure Island.
Sameer ignored me. I glanced to my right. Another crowd of gawkers was surrounding a Plexiglas booth set up on the sidewalk just past O’Sheas. A young, toothy guy in a tuxedo wielded a bullhorn, announcing that a cash-giveaway promotion was about to begin, and I watched as an elderly woman was led inside the booth. There was a countdown, and then money started swirling around her. She grasped futilely for dollar bills, moving far too slowly to have any chance. When her time was up, she was empty-handed, and the crowd booed her. She had to be eighty years old. As the onlookers dispersed (with the promise of more humiliation to come in exactly half an hour), I spotted Cowboy Bob/Howie Rose out in front of the Imperial Palace. He was sitting in his miserable chair and jerking his head from side to side. The more I looked at him, the more I was convinced it was Howie. No one was fooling me as to his real identity, and whether it was the pills, the booze, or the heartbreak, I felt like I had to do something. Set one thing right before whatever became of me became of me.
“Let me out right here,” I said, reaching for the door.
“Sir, you cannot—”
I handed Sameer a hundred through the opening in the divider. He sighed and switched lanes. I jumped out. The heat was ungodly. Brake lights blinked for miles in either direction. I started to walk away, then turned and knocked on the passenger window. He lowered it.
“I’m sorry about your children,” I muttered.
He looked at me curiously. Didn’t say anything.
“Sameer?” I said. “I’m sorry.”
The light turned and he inched away. I crossed the boulevard, weaved my way through the crowd in front of O’Sheas and the Imperial Palace, and before you knew it, I was gripping the handles of the wheelchair. I had no plan whatsoever. I just started rolling the cripple down the street, pushing him along the crowded sidewalk stretching in front of Harrah’s and Casino Royale. Right as I got near Denny’s, out came the fat son of a bitch with the beard and the van, wiping his filthy face on his Margaritaville T-shirt. Suffice to say he was startled to see someone making off with his meal ticket. I whirled around and headed back the way I’d come, weaving in between clusters of tourists, with him hollering, “Hey! Stop! Hey! What the fuck are you doing?”
I got as far as the Imperial Palace when a guy handing out sex leaflets grabbed an armrest and sent Bob/Howie pitching forward onto the sidewalk. Just as he went tumbling from the chair, I heard someone shout, “Oh, OK. Oh! You son gun Parisi!” and looked up to see none other than Bing Buli standing on the other side of Vegas Boulevard, shirt buttoned to the neck despite the heat.
Clutching the bag of cash, I left Howie and bolted off through the Imperial Palace driveway, where the giant lightbulbs on the roof of the covered drive make you feel like you’re inside a pinball machine, and then continued down an alley between the Imperial and O’Sheas. I looked back and saw Bing dodging traffic. He was still yelling, “Oh, Parisi! Oh, OK! Parisi!” I ran another hundred yards down the alley, ducked under a grove of trees, and emerged in a parking lot, where I could smell fresh tar from a steamroller. Across the street, two kids sat on top of a corrugated tin carport roof and tossed pebbles at me. Bing’s voice was getting fainter, and by the time I zipped past an empty Ramada security booth and hopped a low stucco wall outside the Cascade Warren Apartments, I was safe. I crouched behind the wall to catch my breath, and for a good ten minutes I watched a woman do a graceful backstroke in the apartment pool. I thought of L. Of how we used to sneak into hotel pools in Myrtle Beach, and how she liked me to carry her around in the water. I could feel her slick legs. Her arms around my neck. The sun on our faces. Her eyes as she looked at me, full of love. I cried softly in the darkness, but the woman never heard me; she just glided across the surface, lost in her own world. I closed my eyes and pictured L’s face. It floated at the end of a long string, and I pulled it toward me. I looked at her eyes. What color were they? I could not say for certain. But I could say that if you took two perfect gray stones, set them in a lush green field, let a blue rain fall down for ten thousand days until the rain seeped into the stone, and the grass seeped into the stone, then you could begin to get an idea of the color. But that wasn’t quite right, and I tried to look closer, to describe it to myself another way, but I heard the splashing of water, the woman getting out of the pool, and L’s face floated away. The string slipped from my hand. It was gone.
I opened my eyes. Though the pool was empty, I heard some chattering around the corner. The kids. And Bing Buli. No one else sounded quite like him. I could have stayed hidden. There was no chance he would see me. But I didn’t. For some reason I stood up and started yelling his name. I’d love to tell you why, but I can’t. Maybe I wanted to punish myself. Maybe I wanted to feel something other than what I was feeling. Maybe I wanted to see a familiar face. Who fucking knows?
“Bing! Bing Buli!”
Moments later, he entered the gate to the pool area. His shirt was buttoned up. It was 738 degrees out. He had been running. But he was not sweating.
“Hey, Bing.”
He squinted, his small, rough face illuminated in the glow of the swimming pool lights. We looked at each other for what seemed like a long time. He was no doubt taking in my appearance. Cast. Dyed hair. Scratches on my face from my scrap with Everett from Wisconsin. Bloodshot eyes from pills, booze, crying, bronchitis, and crushing and eternal defeat at the hands of an elderly foe.
“You TV,” he finally said.
“I know.”
“Lot TV.”
“Yeah,” I said. “A lot of TV.”
I looked closer at Bing’s face. Hard times were etched all over it.
“Fat man say you here.”
“Maurice. His name’s Maurice Boudreaux.”
“You lie everything,” he said.
“I know.”
“Mother say Ray good. No believe. You Thanksgiving no more.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You have money?”
“No.”
The money was in the bag at my feet. I have no idea why I said I didn’t have it. I think I knew that if I gave it to him, that would be it. He’d take it and move on. But that shouldn’t have been it. I had screwed him over thoroughly, and then wh
en he’d given me a second chance, I had screwed him over again, only worse. I didn’t deserve to just hand over my father’s money and walk away. I deserved something worse. I wanted something worse. I wanted what was really coming to me.
“No money?” he said wearily.
“No.”
“Oh. Oh. Son gun. Son gun, Ray.”
“I, you know, had it,” I said. “But I blew it. I gambled it away.”
Bing nodded. Put his hands behind his back like he was standing in front of a casket. “You gamble.”
“Yeah.”
“In the Las Vegas.”
“In the Las Vegas.”
I looked him in the eye. He didn’t seem mad. Just sorry.
“You run Bing Buli,” he said.
“I know.”
“You lie Bing Buli.”
“Yeah.”
He sighed. “Oh. No choice. No choice.”
“I know,” I said. “I understand.”
He shook his head grimly, and then he put me down with an open hand to the throat. He followed it up with a few shots to the face, his little fists like cue balls against my head. Even if I had fought back, I would have been no match for Bing, who was a professional and had slugged his way out of the Philippines, where fighting didn’t mean putting someone in a headlock by the bike rack after school. He had suffered in life. He knew what he was doing. I hadn’t, and I didn’t. And he showed me the black lights.
I woke in a puddle of water by the pool, the two delinquents from the roof taking turns dumping a small plastic bucket on me and enjoying the hell out of it. Bing was gone. But the bag of money wasn’t. It was sitting on the ground next to me, and I reached out and grabbed it with my good hand as a handful of people who lived in the apartment complex peered out through screen doors. In the distance, I heard the sound of sirens. I don’t know if they were for me, and I wasn’t about to stick around and find out. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a couple of hundreds, and handed them to the kids. My vision was blurry, and I was in more pain than I could ever remember being in before, but damn if they didn’t look like the western version of those two little bastards who started all of it back in the motel parking lot with their bullshit fireworks.
Swimming with Bridgeport Girls Page 17
