Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “What?” Billy said. “There was no body.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said, “the victim just crawled off into the desert to die.”

  “There was no victim!”

  “It’s a shame you didn’t sign for the extra insurance I offered you earlier.” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat sighed. “So, how do you plan to pay for this?”

  “I’m not paying for anything! That…that…I can’t even call it a dent…that…ding must have been there when you leant it to me.”

  “You are accusing me of being a cheat?” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat drew back. “Here, let me show you something.” He produced a sheet of paper, at the bottom of which was Billy’s signature. “This is an affidavit showing what condition this car was in when I most trustfully loaned it to you. See? It says here, ‘Puke-green subcompact in impeccable condition.’ It says absolutely nothing here about the front passenger panel being caved in.”

  “It’s not caved in! It’s a ding! You need a bloody magnifying glass just to see it!”

  “Perhaps I should call the cops?” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat stroked a nonexistent beard.

  “Yes,” Billy said, nodding emphatically. “I think that’s an excellent idea.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said, “no matter who is right and who is wrong, I am sure it will take the police the entire day to sort this out, possibly the rest of the weekend.” He shrugged. “You know how public servants are. And in this heat, they move soooo sloooow…”

  “Fine,” Billy said. “Fine. How do you propose we resolve this?”

  “Well, if you had only signed for the additional renter’s insurance—”

  “Yes, yes, I know about all this. Can we speed this up somehow?”

  I could see Billy’s wheels spinning and the direction they were spinning in was toward getting us out of there and back to the casino as quickly as possible.

  “I think,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said with more absent-beard stroking, “that if you let me keep your one hundred-dollar deposit—”

  “I’m not going to let you keep my hundred dollars! Not when I’m sure you’re going to just turn around and rent this car, as is, to the next poor unsuspecting person who comes along.”

  Mr. Car Dealer Cheat shrugged. “The decision is yours. You can let me keep the hundred dollars that is my due or we can wait around debating this until the cows come home or the casinos close, whichever comes first.”

  “I don’t think there are cows around here,” I said, feeling the need to say something. “Can cows even live in a climate like this?”

  Another shrug. “Then the casinos. We’ll wait here until the casinos close.”

  “But I didn’t think the casinos ever closed,” I said.

  “Which is exactly my point,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said. “As I’m sure your friend well knows…”

  “Ohh, fine,” Billy said. “Keep the blasted hundred dollars. I’ll win that back in a minute.”

  “Ooh,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said. “Big man. Big talk.”

  “Come on, Baby.” Billy grabbed my hand. “Let’s get out of this…insane car dealership.”

  “Good luck at the gaming tables!” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat shouted after us. “And please do come again!”

  Once we were out on the blistering pavement, Billy turned to me, somehow less solicitous than he’d seemed when he proprietarily grabbed my hand back in the shop.

  “You know, Baby,” he said, “you’re turning out to be not quite the talisman I’d envisioned you being.”

  And it was then I realized that it was time to put up or shut up.

  20

  People will tell you that there’s no such thing as “put up or shut up,” that right up to the last minute—of anything, really—you can still change your mind.

  People, generally speaking, can be full of shit.

  Sure, it’s true, in theory, that a woman can say “yes” she’s going to do something twenty times leading up to the thing and at the last minute change it to “um, no,” but try doing that too often in real life and see what it gets you. And, for some reason, it’s a lot more acceptable to change “no” into “yes” than it is to change “yes” into “no.”

  I’d sworn, if not on a stack of Bibles then at least through action and resulting inference that I would in good faith come to Vegas with Billy and in good faith be his talisman. And yet, ever since we’d arrived, it seemed as though I was willing to do anything but that one thing. True, he could have been a better sport about spending a few hours doing something else, but I could see where he was getting annoyed with me and I couldn’t honestly say I blamed him. And I could also see that, if I didn’t do something drastic soon, I was going to lose him completely.

  “I know!” I said, as soon as we got back to the room, the sweat from being outside still adhering my shirt to my body. “Let’s go down to the casino!”

  “Oh, stop toying with me.” He flopped down on the bed, shielded his eyes with his forearm, making him look not unlike a male Greta Garbo.

  “I’m not toying with you!” I said, grabbing his hand and pulling. “I want to go.”

  “No,” he said, still resisting my tug. “You’ll just get me down there and I’ll get all excited, only to have you announce we’re going to see the shark reef.”

  “I’m not kidding, Billy!” I said. “I want to gamble!”

  “Or maybe you’ll drag me to see the Bonnie and Clyde getaway car this time.”

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing his tux down from off the hanger. “Put this on!”

  “You mean…you mean…you mean you’re not joking?”

  I shook my head and, before I was even through shaking it, he was sweeping me up into his arms.

  “Oh, Baby,” he said, “you’ve made me the happiest man in Vegas!” Which made me feel great. Really, it did. There was just one problem: what if I’d used up all my good luck on my previous trips to Foxwoods and Atlantic City? And what if I was now destined to fail?

  But then I remembered that I was as prepared for this as I’d never been prepared for anything. I was Black Jack Sampson’s progeny, even if he no longer went by that name and even if he’d lost more than he’d won; I had digested every word of Blackjack Winning Basics, by Tony Casino, and had even understood most of them; and I had a five-dollar bill crinkling between my breasts. As my old friend Hamlet would say:

  The readiness is all.

  Ka-ching!

  The readiness was soo all.

  Billy and I hit the casino in THEhotel at Mandalay like Mickey Mantle grabbing a mantelpiece and whaling the hell out of a baseball.

  Or something like that.

  Actually, I was doing most of the whaling, pulling Billy along in my wake.

  I sat down at the first table we came to.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to walk around for a bit?” Billy asked. “Perhaps check out the lay of the land? See how the cards are running for each dealer?”

  “No,” I said. “I feel hot.”

  And I was.

  In no time, I’d picked up a few hundred, while Billy had picked up a few thousand. Then, abruptly, I rose.

  “We’re not going already, are we?” Billy asked.

  “Not at all,” I said. “We’re just switching tables.”

  “But this is the table right next to the one we started at. I mean, it’s not very scientific.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  And I seemed to. Again, in almost no time, we were way ahead of where we were when we sat down.

  I rose.

  “Switch?” Billy inquired, more calmly this time.

  “Aren’t you going to ask if I know what I’m doing?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I can see that you do. I totally trust you. I am in your hands.”

  Switch, switch, switch, switch, switch.

  By now I’d worked my way down one side of an aisle and was turning to make my way down the other. Afternoon had turned into early evening, s
omething I could tell from looking at my watch since you couldn’t tell anything about the outside world from inside. And by now I had a little chip caddy to ferry my chips from table to table; the casino had helpfully provided that and one for Billy, as well.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier,” Billy asked, “to just exchange some of our chips into cash at the bank?”

  “It might be easier,” I said with confidence, “but it would jinx things.”

  “How so?”

  “It would make me feel as though I’m partially giving up. So long as I’m hauling all these chips around, I feel as though I’m still on my streak.”

  “Yes, I suppose I can see that, but it does make it difficult to keep count…”

  But I won that argument.

  And I kept winning at the tables, too. And, along with every one of my wins, Billy won, too.

  It would be nice if I could say that my string of luck infected the others at our tables, too, but such was not the case. With the exception of we two, the other players at our tables lost and inevitably dropped out. Certainly, the dealers kept losing to us, but they couldn’t just drop out. So, as we hit table after table, we were building something of a following, a following that was there to observe, rather than play with. And the pit bosses were keeping an eye on us, too. Not to mention the dealers.

  “Let’s skip this table,” I said, halfway down another aisle.

  “What do you mean, skip? Why should we skip it?”

  “I just thought maybe we should shake things up a bit, maybe play at every other table from now on.”

  “Oh, I see, well, yes, I suppose that could work just as well…Oh, hello! Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  Obviously, Billy was no longer talking to me.

  I turned to see who he was talking to, and came face-to-face with the reason why I’d suddenly decided to skip a table, employing the “now I just want to play at every other table” ruse.

  Billy snapped his fingers at the dealer.

  “I know you,” Billy said. Snap, snap. “I know you. You’re that chap who I keep running into everywhere, the one who’s always dropping his yo-yos all over the place.”

  Of course it was Chris.

  “Come on,” I said to Billy. I was standing behind Billy, so that hopefully Chris couldn’t see me.

  “You cut your hair, right?” Billy asked. “Didn’t it used to be shaggier? And, of course, it’s not so easy to place you right away without your yo-yos.”

  “Come on,” I hissed.

  “No, you come on, Baby. We’ve played it your way all day. Now let’s play it my way. And just think how much fun it’ll be to play against someone you sort-of know?”

  Actually, I didn’t think it would be fun at all, but I couldn’t say that. Besides, Chris was doing a great job of maintaining a professional mien. He’d barely nodded once at Billy and once at me, before resuming his job of sliding cards out of the chute.

  As we sat down at Chris’s table, I felt as though we were doing something illegal. Shouldn’t there be rules against a dealer dealing to people he knew? Weren’t there laws against doctors operating on kin? Sure, we weren’t kin to Chris, but didn’t the same principle sort of apply?

  The pit bosses who zoomed to stand behind Chris before our butts had even raised the warmth level on our leather seats certainly made me feel that way, but then I realized how twisted my reasoning was. How could the casinos prevent families and friends of dealers from sitting down at their tables to play? And where was the need? From all the security cameras overhead, not to mention the Capo-Regime-like pit bosses, there was no way a dealer could cheat to favor anybody. Plus, the dealer’s own play was governed by strict rules. And dealers made idle chitchat with players all the time, responded to questions from players too. (“Been enjoying your stay here?” “How long have you been dealing?”) So the only problem would be if the dealer got too chatty with the players or if the players got too chatty with the dealer, thereby disrupting the game and the constant flow of cash into the casino’s coffers. The former didn’t look as if it would be a problem, since after that brief nod Chris barely acknowledged us except to ask if we wanted a hit or to stay. As for the latter…

  “You’re not much better with the cards than you are with those yo-yos, are you?” Billy asked, as Chris’s own cards revealed a hand that was a loser to both of ours.

  Billy’s smile was genial enough, and yet to my ear there was something off there. But then I decided that what I was hearing was a by-product of my own reluctance to play against Chris. And why was I so reluctant? After all, as Billy said earlier, it should have been fun. I mean, I liked Chris, so why wouldn’t I want to play at his table?

  As the play drew on, though, and the other players dropped out as they had at other tables, I became lost in the cards, lost in the winning. I lost sight of Chris.

  Billy leaned in for a whisper as the dealer shuffled the decks. “Have you counted your chips lately, Baby?”

  I blinked out of my haze of cards and looked down at the caddy before me. It was getting full on one side. I tried to do the math, and couldn’t. All I knew was one thing: recalling my original intention, back from when all this started, I realized that I now had exactly what I’d wanted. I had enough money to buy my Jimmy Choo Ghosts. Hell, I had enough money to buy pairs for every day of the week and then some.

  “Omigod, Billy!” I said, leaping up. “I did it! I did it!”

  “What did you do, Baby?” Billy asked.

  “What did you do, Delilah?” Chris asked at the same time.

  “I just…won a lot,” I finished off lamely, not wanting to say. Had this really all been just about a pair of shoes?

  “Yes,” Billy said emphatically. “Yes, you did.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” I was suddenly unsure. “I really did?”

  “Absolutely,” Billy said. “And while I’m hesitant to stop when we’re on such a roll, I would hate to overuse my talisman.”

  “Is it possible to overuse a talisman?” I raised the rhetorical question.

  Hands on my shoulders, Billy had gently spun me around, so my back was to Chris and Chris was once again out of the picture.

  “Baby Sampson—” Billy looked at me fondly, as he held a fake microphone up to my lips “—you’ve just won me more money than I’ve won in one afternoon all year. What are you going to do for an encore, go to Disney World?”

  I shook my head.

  “No? Then what about heading off to see the Shark Reef here at the hotel? I understand they have a forty-million-dollar aquarium covering more than ninety thousand square feet that holds more than one and a half million gallons of seawater and one hundred species of animals. You love all that nature shit. You know. Remember Red Rock Canyon? Sounds right up your alley.”

  I shook my head again.

  “Ah! I know! You want to do some more gambling!”

  I shook my head a third time, hard. I was starting to make myself dizzy.

  “Then, what? What is it you want to do now, Baby, to celebrate?”

  I stood on tiptoes and whispered shyly in his ear.

  “Oh, my, Baby,” he said. “You are an ambitious girl.”

  Back in my high-school days, when it came time for the prom, I’d hear guys in the cafeteria complain about how hard it was to put on a tux. Yeah, right, like it’s so easy for girls to cram themselves into stockings and strapless bras, to starve for weeks in advance so they can wear a dress one or two sizes smaller than usual, to have their hair pulled back so tight into a sophisticated style that they wind up with a migraine, to have so much makeup on that the black mascara spiders its way into their eyes thereby creating an ultra-painful reaction when it gets trapped behind their contact lenses. But I suppose people only know what they know and that whatever the worst pain a person ever has is, that’s it for them. So I’d take the guys’ word for it, that putting on a tux sucked. But I’ll tell you one thing: a tux may suck going on, but it sure comes off easy. />
  “Oh, Baby,” Billy said into my neck as I removed his cummerbund.

  “Oh, Baby,” he said, when the crisp white shirt and bow tie followed, both removed by moi.

  “Here,” he said, pulling away, “let me do you now.”

  Do me now? Well, if not exactly an artful synonym for making love, it had been such a long time I guessed it was okay. But then I saw what he meant: he was going to take my clothes off for me. Normally, this was a moment that, while experiencing the passion with one half of my being, had the potential to throw the other half into sheer terror. What would he see when I was naked? Would he notice that I was nothing like the celluloid, glossy-magazine embodiments of female perfection that men and women are constantly being bombarded with? How could he not notice?

  And yet, I was so caught up in the excitement of the day, so caught up in the winning and the moment, my usual insecurities fell like so many thongs off the back of a Victoria’s Secret truck overturned on Route 66.

  “You are,” Billy said between kisses and clothes fumbling, “you are so…I mean, you are…Baby, excuse me, but did a five-dollar bill just fall out of your bra?”

  “Never mind that,” I said, kissing him forcefully on the lips before pushing him down on the bed and climbing on top.

  “Oh, my,” he said, as I kissed him some more. “But, speaking of money, don’t you think we should do something with the chips first?”

  “Like what?” I said. Kiss, kiss.

  “Like maybe bring them down to the bank and exchange them for cash, then put the cash in the safety deposit box here?”

  “No,” I said, undoing the clasp of his tux trousers.

  “Then perhaps we should at least put the chips into the safe? You know, so they don’t get lost or something here, or in case we run out afterward and forget all about them, or something like—”