Desert of the Heart: A Novel

by Jane Rule

  “A jackpot, girl!” said an affable man standing next to her. “Good for you!”

  “What do I do?”

  “Get the change girl. Here, like this. Just wave and whistle until she comes.”

  Ann turned around at his sharp whistle and saw Evelyn. Evelyn grinned guiltily.

  “The lady’s got a jackpot.”

  “Don’t play it off, ma’am, until the key man comes.” Ann said, a warm amusement not quite hidden in her professional tone. She leaned over to see the machine number and said more quietly, “What the devil are you doing here?”

  “I missed you,” Evelyn said softly and saw in the quick, direct look Ann gave her nothing of disapproval. “It’s fun.”

  “I’ll be off in five minutes,” Ann said.

  Ann’s relief arrived with the key man to pay off the waiting jackpots. Evelyn walked with Ann to her floor locker.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” she asked, holding up the dollars she had been given.

  “No, but you can buy me something to eat. When did you come? How did you get down here?”

  “I walked.”

  Evelyn watched Ann take off her apron, fold it carefully and put it in her locker. Then she brushed both hands together briskly and obviously before she turned the key and pinned it back on to her shirt.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “To show I have nothing in my hands. If you forget, you can be fired.”

  They went together to the restaurant and ordered sandwiches and coffee.

  “I think I’ll come down here every night,” Evelyn said. “It’s much nicer than waiting for you at home, and think of all the money I could win.”

  “You can lose what you’ve won tonight,” Ann said firmly. “But you’re not to spend a penny more. It would be just like you to get gambling fever.”

  “Do you think I’m the type?”

  “I do, my darling, for fevers of all sorts.”

  “I’m pretty safe. I don’t know how to play anything but the slot machines.”

  “You’d learn. Anyway, you can lose enough to scare you without ever graduating to the dime machines. And I can’t keep an eye on you because you mustn’t play in my section. It’s against the rules for relatives, and I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone that we’re not related.”

  “Of course not. We are.”

  “Are you going to stay a while?”

  “Until you’re ready to go home if you’ll let me.”

  “Do you really want to?”

  “Of course,” Evelyn said. “The noise was a little appalling at first, but you get used to that, don’t you?”

  “In a way,” Ann said.

  “And everybody’s having such a good time, almost everybody anyway. I love watching you work.”

  “Well, you mustn’t do too much of that. I’ll start giving away all the House’s money.”

  Evelyn did not go back to the Corral with Ann, feeling Ann a little uneasy at having her there. She was amused by Ann’s quite serious warning to her. Perhaps Evelyn felt safer in the Club than Ann did. She stayed on the second floor and began to watch roulette. It was not really a difficult game. She got a couple of dollars’ worth of chips and lost them almost at once. It was quite an easy game to lose. The crap table was much more complicated. Evelyn did not understand the betting at all; and, because people took turns with the dice, she felt nervous about standing too close to the game. Also there was a kind of intensity in the players and dealers that she did not feel elsewhere. The slot machines really were simpler and more fun. But, even near the slot machines, though the crowd had thinned a little, there seemed a growing tension. Fewer people seemed to be playing casually. There were not as many conversations as there had been an hour ago.

  “I said cap these two machines,” an old woman shouted at a change girl.

  “I’m sorry. There’s still too big a crowd to save machines.”

  “Call the floor boss. I play here every night. I want these machines capped.”

  “I’ll cap one, all right?”

  Evelyn turned away from this argument only to find herself witnessing an even more unpleasant scene, a young husband trying to persuade his obsessed wife to stop playing two dollar machines.

  “Honey, I don’t have any more money. It’s all gone.”

  “Let me see your wallet. Come on.”

  “I’ve got to have enough to get us out of here.”

  “You were lying to me!”

  “Listen, you’ve lost over two hundred. You’ve got to quit.”

  “You’re a rotten spoilsport, tight-fisted, mean, stingy …”

  “Honey, please …”

  “All you ever think about is money!”

  “All right, take it!” he said in disgust. “You make me sick.”

  Evelyn turned away again. She wanted to go back to Ann’s section where everyone seemed to be having such a good time, but she could not. It was against the regulations. Perhaps she could find Silver, but Silver was gone. Where she had been, there was some kind of minor commotion. An old man in a clerical collar was shouting. As Evelyn drew nearer, she could hear something of what he was saying.

  “There can be no divine faith without the divine revelation of the will of God! Therefore, whatever is thrust into the worship of God that is not agreeable to divine revelation, cannot be done but by human faith, which faith is not profitable to eternal life!”

  “Get that crackpot out of here!” someone shouted.

  Two uniformed men stepped up to him and began to move him through the crowd. Evelyn stepped back to let them through.

  “There can be no divine faith without the divine revelation of God!” he shouted again. “This is Vanity Fair. Who judges me but Hate-good? Who are you, all of you, but Malice, Live-loose, Love-lust, Hate-light …”

  Vanity Fair. Of course, she had heard of it all before. He was quoting Faithful’s final speech in Pilgrim’s Progress. Faithful was tried at Vanity Fair and died there. Crackpot the old man might be, but he knew his Bunyan, and he knew Vanity Fair when he saw it: “When they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them …” Evelyn heard him shout just before the elevator doors closed behind him: “I buy the truth!”

  The money in her hand was suddenly distasteful to her, but she resisted being moved by an old man’s fanatic moralizing. She could get rid of the money by feeding it back into the machines it had come from, a solution that would free her from both the little guilt and the morality that threatened her. She started to put a nickel into the machine she stood by only to discover that it took dollars. Well, she had a silver dollar. It would be quicker. Evelyn put the dollar in the slot and pulled the handle. The wheels spun and jarred to a stop one by one. A light went on. A bell rang.

  “No!” Evelyn said, appalled. “I don’t want it. Stop!”

  But the silver dollars crashed into the cup and onto the floor, and a smiling change girl called the jackpot into the board. A key man counted out a hundred and twenty dollars into Evelyn’s reluctant hands.

  “Will you play it off, please?”

  Evelyn put a dollar into the machine, pulled the handle and turned away, but the machine spilled out eighteen dollars.

  “I don’t have to play that off, do I?” Evelyn asked, frantic.

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  She turned away, desperately wanting to get out. She would find Ann. She would tell her that she had to go home; but, when she arrived at Ann’s ramp, she was not there. Evelyn looked at her watch. It was after three.

  “You’re late,” Ann said, standing right behind her in the crowd.

  “Oh darling, I’ve done the most awful thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve won all this money!” Evelyn said, offering it up to Ann.

  Ann looked down at the money, then at Evelyn, and began to laugh. Evelyn’s horror broke. It was funny. Of course, it was funny.

  “It frightened me so for a minute,�
�� Evelyn said, and then she, too, began to laugh.

  8

  ANN HAD NOT EXPECTED the Club itself to accomplish Evelyn’s conversion. She had hoped to keep Evelyn away from the Club entirely and to win her approval by means of a short course in the history of Nevada and a careful abstraction of the Club, revealing it as an ideal symbol of man’s industry in which Ann felt obligated to participate. Trained in the intricacies of defensive logic by her elaborately intellectual father but disciplined in emotion by the shrewd and cryptic wit of the practical world she lived in, Ann had organized an argument to be presented in impressive fragments, offered to Evelyn casually as entertainments, a sort of subliminal advertising for Ann’s own point of view until Evelyn would one day put all the pieces together with the love of coherence she had and speak Ann’s view as if Evelyn had discovered it. The plan had been working very well before Evelyn’s visit to the Club.

  From the book Kate had given her, Ann collected stories of the hundreds of failures to settle the desert, the mining towns turned to ghost towns because the ore ran out or the railroad did not come through. Unionville was typical in its decline. First the church went, moved and converted into a saloon, the bell sold to call ranch hands in to supper. Then the railroad passed on the other side of the mountain, and the courthouse was lost to Winnemucca. Finally even the newspaper folded, and the largest mine closed, its owner claiming that he had spent three million dollars trying to live in Unionville. It was finished. And over and over again the same thing happened, the rush, the boom, the decline, the death. Nevada’s incredible wealth of gold and silver built not one city that could survive the desert and the mountains. Not one. It wasn’t really fair to count San Francisco, was it? Its wealth did not come from the actual produce of the mines but from stock speculation, and, when the last mines closed, San Francisco could feed on the fertile valleys and vast forests of California, on the sea. In Nevada, there were no great valleys, and even the sage, for miles around the mining cities, had been burned for fuel. There was no water. Elsewhere in the world the God of the Jews had brought forth in the desert spring water from the jawbone of an ass. In this desert, there boiled up nothing but the poisonous sulphur of hot springs. There was nothing to support civilization but the man-made railroad and highway, built not to reach the desert but to cross it.

  It was here Evelyn had interrupted the secondhand raw material Ann offered her to discover the present Nevada for herself. Ann wanted her to see not the fact but the meaning of Frank’s Club, Ann’s meaning. For Frank’s Club was man’s answer to the poverty of the land. Reno had grown up along the railroad, along the highway, without a mine to its name. It invented its own. The casinos were Reno’s gold mines, but synthetic and perpetual, correcting the flaw of nature. They could accommodate any number of prospectors. They could support not only the town but the scattered population of the state. When Reno built a church, Frank’s Club supplied both the money to be spent and the souls to be saved. The town could maintain a courthouse and perpetuate laws that restored gold even to the river. It was a sound economy which exported nothing but advertising and imported human beings at their own cost to feed the inhabitants. A perfect kingdom, based on nothing but the flaws in human nature. It thrived.

  And this was the economy, obscured only by a confusion of other minor enterprises, of thriving civilization everywhere in the world. But elsewhere you could be deluded by just that confusion. It was extraordinary how other industries could create the illusion of value, the hallucination of salvation through products as meaningless as automobiles and cosmetics, text books and cameras. It was true that casino owners spoke more loudly than any of the other kings of industry to defend their contribution to society. They could speak more loudly because theirs was the purest activity of civilized man. They had transcended the need for a product. They could maintain and advance life with machines that made nothing but money. And the only requirement, after all, was life, all needs subsidized (food products, housing, education, law, religion) by the lucrative desires of mankind. This desert town was man’s own miracle of pure purposelessness.

  Ann had prepared herself to defend this vision against any other, but she had chosen Evelyn’s own world of the university as the enemy she would have to equal or defeat. The pursuit of learning was, after all, as pure of purpose as gambling, only archaic enough to need subsidizing. She had heard from the secular pulpits of the classroom that learning had value in itself, but there was nothing of more intrinsic value in learning than there was in gambling. For eighty per cent of the people in Frank’s Club gambling was no more than an entertainment. For eighty per cent of the students in the classroom it would be generous to say that learning had even entertainment value. Only a small minority in any group developed a passion for anything. For every obsessive gambler there was undoubtedly a young Faust in the atomic laboratories. And, if there were a few who loved learning for learning’s sake, surely there were many more who loved gambling for gambling’s sake. Human nature was the same in the casino and in the ivory tower. But in the casino the vision was unclouded. You loved the world for its own sake or not at all.

  It was a beautiful argument, but Ann had no opportunity to use it. Evelyn had asked for and taken the facts instead. Reluctantly, Ann let Evelyn drive her down to the Club every evening and pick her up sometimes an hour, sometimes two hours early. After the first night she did not gamble. Apparently winning all that money had had a more sobering effect than losing would have done. Evelyn had no interest in playing either the machines or the games. She came, she said, to be near Ann, but often at the end of shift Ann had to go in search of her, finding her engrossed in observing a particular dealer or change apron or gambler. On the way home, Evelyn was often silent, but sometimes she would ask technical questions about the operating of the Club that gave no room for theoretical answers, and sometimes she would comment briefly on an incident, usually insignificant in itself but given a not quite explicit importance by Evelyn’s view of it. If Ann countered with a view of her own, Evelyn offered no more than a disinterested silence. She was never critical. She did not seem disturbed by anything she saw. Ann very much wanted to ask her what she was really thinking and feeling, but both their bodies were so demanding that, when they were at last alone, always aware of the threatening dawn, their conversation was fragmentary, crude with desire or elaborately incoherent with the last brilliance before sleep.

  During the day, when they might have talked about the Club, Evelyn shared her work with Ann; and, since it apparently did not occur to Evelyn to defend her interest in teaching and learning, Ann could find no opportunity to attack it. Instead, she settled to a study of poetry, learning the discipline of its higher grammar, tracing the folklore of its imagery. Once she challenged Yeats’s view of salvation in Sailing to Byzantium only to be shown that he challenged it himself in Among School Children, and his criticism of education seemed so reasonable and undisturbing to Evelyn that Ann could only accept her clarifications of the text in silence. The poetry was, in fact, so interesting that Ann often forgot to be preoccupied with her own world. In Evelyn she had found a companion for her mind whose knowledge and perception far outreached her own, and she was eager to learn.

  But her contentment was threatened again each night when she looked up and saw Evelyn standing alone in the crowd, at once detached and absorbed. What was she seeing? What judgment was she making? In her concern, Ann worked inaccurately, and several nights running she was either over or under her ten-dollar limit when she checked out. The third time Bill had to sign for her, he spoke with impatience.

  “If you can’t keep your mind on your work, you’d better keep your girl friend out of the Club.”

  “Follow that logic far, and you’ll have to fire yourself,” Ann answered angrily.

  “Meaning?”

  “How often have you signed for Joyce this week?”

  “You forget she hasn’t been working long. She’s doing damned well for a beginner.”
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  Ann censored a nasty retort and turned away. She was angry because Bill was right. She was also angry because Evelyn’s presence in the Club had obviously become a subject of general knowledge and speculation. She did not really care what people thought, but they could keep their ideas to themselves. It was her own fault. She should not let Evelyn come down to the Club.

  “You don’t have to be in such a hell of a hurry,” Silver said, catching up with Ann as she went downstairs to put away her hat and apron. “She’s waiting for you.”

  “Sorry, Sil. I didn’t see you.”

  “You don’t see anybody these days, love.”

  “Don’t you start in on me.”

  “Then don’t let her come down every night.”

  “Why shouldn’t she?”

  “She doesn’t belong here, love. She makes people nervous, you for instance.”

  “Maybe I don’t belong here either!” Ann snapped.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Don’t get at me, Sil.”

  “I can’t leave you completely alone until after the wedding, love. There’s a rehearsal Wednesday afternoon. Joe didn’t see why we couldn’t have it Thursday afternoon. I had to explain to him about not seeing the bride on the day of the wedding.”

  “How are you going to manage that?”

  “He’s spending the night at the Mapes.”

  “Do you want me …?”

  “No, love,” Silver said smiling. “There are no instructions to the maid of honor to sleep with the bride the night before the wedding. It doesn’t say not to, of course, but I think they have in mind a last night of chastity, a last night in Daddy’s old pajamas, a last night of solitary weeping for one’s girlhood. I can’t remember mine very well. Perhaps I’ll weep for yours.”