by Billie Letts
“You think we’re on the right street?” Fate asked.
“I guess.”
“There’s 105.” Fate pointed to a narrow two-story building with a sign that said Hotel Nevada.
Lutie found a parking place in the next block, where she discovered that parallel parking wasn’t her strong suit.
They stayed close together as they walked toward the hotel, sidestepping broken glass, fresh vomit, crushed beer cans.
They passed a man sleeping in the doorway of a boarded-up storefront, another drinking wine at the entrance to an alley. A little girl sitting on the curb in front of a bar watched them warily as they approached, then turned her attention back to a dead rat on a manhole cover.
They were only a few feet from the hotel when an old woman wearing a bathrobe asked them for change, and across the street they saw two teenage boys waving at them and yelling, “Gotcha crack right here.”
The hotel smelled of urine and cigarettes. The dim lobby was not brightened by potted plants filled with faded plastic flowers or dirty, mismatched torn chairs. An elderly man, sleeping on a couch, snored softly, a cigar butt resting in his opened palm.
“What can I do for you kids?”
The voice came from a man behind a registration desk where steel bars ran from the counter to the ceiling.
“We’re here to see our daddy,” Lutie said.
“Sure you are. A big family reunion, right?”
“No, we—”
“Rooms are ten bucks an hour. Cash before you get the key.”
“Why would we want a room for an hour?” Fate asked.
“Here’s what I figure, kid. You’re too young to be her pimp or her john, so you two are figuring to find you a quiet place to shoot up. Those are the two most popular reasons to book a room at the quaint Hotel Nevada.”
“Our daddy lives here.”
“Sure he does.”
“His name’s McFee. Jim McFee.”
“No, he ain’t here.”
“We’ve got to find him.”
“Now, look. If you’re snooping around for his stuff, forget it. He didn’t leave nothing behind but a pile of dirty laundry and a busted hot plate. We got rules against cooking in the rooms.”
“You mean he left?”
“You might say that.”
“Can you tell us where we can find him?”
“Carson’s what I heard.”
“Is that a street?”
“Hell, no. It’s a prison.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Prison, kid. Carson City Prison. Your old man’s in the joint.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
LUTIE AND FATE had nothing to say after they left the Hotel Nevada and started back to the car. They didn’t even trade looks but kept their eyes on the sidewalk as if they might discover a message written there for them. Something like “Hi, kids. I love you, Daddy.” Or maybe a phone number for them to call, the number of one of their father’s women, somebody who might look out for them. Perhaps they’d find a secret code painted on a curb, a code unfathomable to everyone but Fate.
For some strange reason, Lutie remembered her daddy smoothing a freshly poured cement walkway to the back door of a house where they’d lived before her mother died. He’d had Lutie place her small hand in the mushy substance, then used his finger to write her name and the date. The memory was so vivid that for a moment she could recall the odor of the cement, could see every detail of her toddler-size handprint.
She started to tell Fate what she remembered but decided to keep it to herself. After all, she wasn’t even sure that what she recalled was the actual memory or just the memory of an old photo her mother might have snapped. Either way, though, she found herself blinking back unexpected tears.
Finally, Fate broke the silence overpowering them since they’d heard the news about their father.
“Well, Lutie,” he said, “what’re we going to do now?”
“I wondered how long it would take for you to start in on me. Thought you might be able to hold off till we got to the car, but once again, I was wrong.”
“What do you mean? Start in on you for what?”
“Go ahead. Say it. ‘I told you so, Lutie,’” she said, trying for the whiny voice of a complaining child. “‘Told you the letter from Floy came back, told you he didn’t have a phone. Said we couldn’t find him.’ So go on, Fate, blame this on me just like I knew you would.”
“No, Lutie, that’s not what I meant. Coming here wasn’t . . . well, it just didn’t work out the way we hoped. So now we have to come up with a different plan. That’s all. Really. I was only asking if you had an idea about what we should do.”
“We?” She came to a sudden stop. “We, as in Batman and Robin? That kind of we? Oh, no, I don’t know what we oughta do, but I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do.”
“What?”
“Leave your skinny ass right here, right on this street, right now. See how you’d make it without me, without no money. Nothing but a pile of stupid books containing nothing of value to no one in this whole damn city . . . except for maybe that guy across the street.”
“That man in the alley? Why would he—”
“Who knows? He might have been the Trivial Pursuit champion of Nevada. Or maybe the Scrabble champion of the whole fucking world. But then the poor bastard stopped winning. Couldn’t remember more than two words that started with q. So he—”
“I suppose you mean words beginning with q but not followed by u. See, those are the ones that trip players up.”
Lutie continued, her anger made even more intense by Fate’s ill-timed interjection. “So the pitiful old son of a bitch turns into a drunk eating out of Dumpsters, sleeping with alley rats.
“Then along comes Fate McFee, his brain bursting with words that start with q . . . but not followed by u. Now Fate gets some coffee down his new buddy’s belly, wipes the vomit off his pants, gets him a clean shirt from Goodwill, and enters him in the Tournament of Scrabble Champions. And guess what? He wins! Gets a silver tray with his initials engraved on it and a check for a million dollars, which he splits with his bright young coach, McFee the Wonder Boy.”
Fate waited to be sure his sister’s rant had ended, then said, “Did you know rats can have sex twenty times a day, Lutie?”
After an interval of several moments of silence, Lutie said, “No, Fate,” her voice flat, seemingly drained of hostility. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. They can multiply so fast that one pair of rats can have more than fifteen thousand descendants in a year.”
Finally, Lutie shook her head—in either amazement at such a dramatic piece of information or at the bewilderment of her brother’s total disconnect with reality.
The temperature inside the Pontiac was high and getting higher, but they slid in anyway, easing themselves onto the hot plastic seat covers with slow, deliberate movements.
“Maybe that guy at the hotel lied to us, Lutie,” Fate said. “He didn’t like Daddy, at least that’s the way it seemed to me, so might be he just made up that story. About prison, I mean.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Daddy might have left, moved out in the middle of the night without paying his bill. Or he could have gotten kicked out because he broke some hotel rule.”
“I don’t think hotels like that one have rules.”
“Hey, what about this? We could call that prison in Carson City,” Fate said with fresh enthusiasm, “ask them if Jim McFee’s an inmate there. If he is, tell him the mess we’re in here, see if he’ll send us some money.”
“I don’t even know where Carson City is, Fate.”
“And here’s another thing. Maybe Daddy’s not in for a great big crime, say like armed robbery or kidnapping . . . or murder.” Fate’s face suddenly drained of color. “You don’t think they’ve electrocuted him, do you?”
“Hell, no! How do you come up with this shit, huh?”
“Listen, Lutie
. When George Bush was governor of Texas, more prisoners were executed than—”
“Fate, Daddy is not a killer.”
“No, he’s not. I know that. He was probably just arrested for something minor, like stealing a pair of underwear, or—”
“Underwear! Why would he steal underwear?”
“Maybe he ran out of clean ones, didn’t have money for the Laundromat, so—”
“For God’s sake, Fate. They don’t put people in prison for stealing underwear.”
“Okay. Maybe he got in a fight. Remember, he did that before. Got in a bar fight, broke some guy’s jaw, busted up the place. Floy couldn’t get him out of jail for thirty days. Even then, it cost her five hundred dollars.”
“That was jail. Not prison.”
“What about this, then? What if he robbed a bank and hid the money before he got caught? What if he has five thousand . . . no, twenty-five thousand dollars buried somewhere here in Las Vegas? He could tell us where it is and we could dig it up, take it to the police, and get him out so he could take care of us.”
“Fate, how can you be so clueless? You spend all your time learning facts, but you don’t know anything about the world, how things work.”
“Why don’t you try, Lutie? What’ve we got to lose? Call Carson City, tell them if Daddy’s there, you need to talk to him.”
“Listen to me. You can’t just call a prison, tell them to put your daddy on the phone.”
Fate, exasperated and in a pout now, said, “Well, you got any brilliant ideas? You have any notion at all of what we’re going to do?”
Lutie stared quietly out the window of the car, where she saw for the first time a parking ticket stuck beneath the windshield wiper. Finally, she said, “Yeah. Come on.”
Following rigid instructions, Fate was letting Lutie do the talking when they returned to the Hotel Nevada.
“Look,” the desk clerk said, “when the law came lookin’ for him, they didn’t stop to discuss their reasons with me. Besides, wasn’t none of my business why he got busted, best to keep my nose out of it. Me and the police don’t see each other socially, if you follow my drift. But if you kids got nothin’ to hide, you could go down to central booking, ask around.”
“No,” Lutie said, “we can’t do that.”
The clerk grinned, exposing teeth stained brown as wormwood. “That’s what I thought.”
“Do you know where he worked while he stayed here? We know he had a job at a casino, but we don’t know which one.”
“Girlie, every asshole in Vegas has worked in a casino. Besides, that kind of information is private. I can’t go givin’ out personal intelligence on my guests. I have to operate on something like the client-lawyer privilege.”
“But you’re not a lawyer, and he’s not a guest . . . not anymore.”
“You’re beginnin’ to try my patience, sweetheart, so why don’t you and your little mime move on and leave me the hell alone.”
“Okay,” Lutie said, “here’s the truth. We’re in trouble.”
“Well, surprise, surprise.”
“And we’ve got to find our dad, quick. So if you’ll just give us the name of the place where he worked . . .”
“What’s in it for me?”
“We don’t have any money. That’s why we’re in trouble.”
“You don’t necessarily have to give me money.”
“Then . . . what?”
“How about a half hour in my back office?”
“You mean for sex?”
“Whatever. You get what you want, I get what I want, we all walk away happy.”
Fate, in a deep, measured tone that he hoped belied his age, said, “You know how old she is? My sister? How old you guess she is?”
“You think I really care?”
“She’s twelve,” he said, a comment that caused Lutie to do a double take of her brother. “You just offered to trade information for sex with a twelve-year-old girl. I believe that defines you as a child predator.”
“So what’re you gonna do? Go to the police now? All of a sudden, you’re ready to walk into a station and—”
“How do you know we aren’t here because of the police? How do you know this isn’t a setup, that we’re not wearing a wire? That the police aren’t going to bust in here in thirty seconds and have you spread-eagled on the floor?”
“Kid, you watch too much television. Right?”
“And you’re a registered sex offender. Right?”
Lutie’s first pleasant experience of the day came in Harrah’s where she discovered that minors were allowed inside the casino as long as they stayed on the nongaming walkway. So after getting directions to the office she was looking for, she made Fate come with her, then stationed him outside the office door, demanding that he wait there despite her having to pull him past a crap table, which seemed to fascinate him.
Lutie’s second surprise came from a statuesque black woman named Nechia, according to her badge, who listened sympathetically to her story and agreed to help.
At her computer, Nechia determined within minutes that Jim McFee had indeed worked there as a janitor until more than a year ago, until mid-November, when he had been terminated. The document she pulled up provided a grainy black-and-white photograph of an unsmiling, unyielding man. And though the photo looked more like a mug shot than a personnel ID, Lutie smiled and said, “Yeah, that’s my daddy,” then reached out and touched his face on the screen.
The picture helped Nechia recall him vaguely only because he’d been taken off the floor in handcuffs following a police chase through the quarter slots; then, as he was led away, he’d let loose with a stream of obscenities that could be heard above the usual din of the place.
The scuttlebutt that circulated around the casino was that he’d been arrested for armed robbery at a liquor store. Sometime later, Nechia heard from one of the other janitors that McFee had ended up in the Nevada State Prison in Carson City. But that was a rumor that never took off, because by then nobody remembered the janitor who’d been arrested, and nobody there really cared to know where he was.
But Nechia knew someone who could find out.
Her brother-in-law, Foster, worked in the records department of a prison just outside Vegas. Ely State. And since both were state prisons, she bet Foster could find out more about Jim McFee. Nechia said she’d give him a call at home that night. Then she asked Lutie to come back late the next afternoon, sometime between five and six. She said she’d share whatever she learned . . . if anything.
Lutie was in such a good mood when she left the office that she wasn’t even mad when she discovered that Fate had disappeared. She found him a few minutes later at the crap table where she’d almost lost him earlier. He was standing between a middle-aged woman screaming, “Come seven!” and a man blowing on a pair of dice just before he flung them the length of the table, where they landed to cheers and complaints from the crowd gathered there.
“Come on, Fate.”
“Lutie, watch this. See the man with that stick? Well—”
“Fate! We’ve got to stay on the path for kids or—”
“It’s called the nongaming walkway.”
“Right. Now come on! I’ve got to come back here tomorrow, but if we get kicked out—”
“Lutie, did you know that on six-sided dice, the opposite sides always add up to seven?”
Once they were back on the walkway, headed toward the exit, Lutie said, “Guess what? That jerk at the Hotel Nevada told us the truth. I think you scared him with that business about him being a perv. That’s why he told us about this place.”
“So Daddy really did work here? Did you find out where he is? Did you ask if—”
“A woman’s gonna try to help us, Fate, but she might not know anything for a day or two.”
As they passed a snack bar, Fate said, “Lutie, I’m starving. How much money do we have left?”
“Not enough.”
“I thought we might buy a ha
mburger. We could split it and—”
“We’re not in Spearfish anymore, Toto. Look up there.” She pointed to a menu posted over the grill. “Cheeseburger,” she read. “Nine ninety-five.”
“Wow. You think we’ve got enough to buy a bag of chips?”
“We’d still be hungry.”
“Then . . .”
“We’ll find a way. Let’s go.”
In the next block, Lutie led Fate up a winding staircase and into the Monte Carlo. “Now, stay behind me and keep quiet or we’ll both starve.”
At the first restaurant they came to, a place called the Garden Café, they stepped to the back of a line of people waiting to be seated. Lutie shot Fate a warning glance when they reached the front, where a hostess said, “Two for dinner?”
“Three, actually,” Lutie said. “Our grandmother’s playing poker, but she’ll join us in a minute.”
Lutie and Fate followed the hostess to a booth and took the menus she offered. “Your waitress will be with you soon.”
Fate studied his menu for several minutes, then peeked over the top and whispered, “What can I have, Lutie?”
“Whatever you want. All you want. This might have to do us for a while.”
“Hi, I’m Gail. I’ll be your server today,” the waitress said. “I understand there’ll be three at your table. Would you like to wait until the other member of your party arrives before you order?”
“No, our grandmother told us what she wanted, so I guess we’re ready.” She cut her eyes at Fate. “Isn’t that right, little brother?”
“I’ll have the fried-chicken dinner,” he said, “mashed potatoes and gravy, corn on the cob, a side order of green beans, and Texas toast. Three slices, please. Also, a piece . . . no, two pieces of chocolate pie.”
“My,” Gail said, “you’ve got a big appetite, don’t you?”
“Boys,” Lutie said with distaste in her voice. “They eat like pigs, don’t they?” Then, without waiting for a comment, she ordered the same meal Fate had. “And our grandmother wants two supreme pizzas.”
“Two? They’re rather large.”
“So’s our grandmother. And Cokes. We’ll all have Cokes.”
