by Martin Seay
Curtis hears his father’s heavy footsteps, telegraphed through the floor, the table, the phone. Little Man!
Hey, Pop.
Real smart, calling when you know I can’t talk for too long. Let me call you back on my cell.
No, that’s okay, Pop. I just want to ask a quick favor. I’m trying to get in touch with Stanley.
Curtis feels a bubble of silence open between them. Stanley? his father says. Stanley Glass?
Yeah, Dad. Stanley Glass. I need to get a hold of him. Do you maybe have a telephone number, or—
What in the hell you need to talk to Stanley Glass for, Little Man?
It’s—I’m just trying to help somebody out, Pop. Friend of mine’s looking for him. This is the guy I told you about, the one who’s gonna hook me up with that job at the Point.
At the what? I thought you said you’re gonna be working for—
The Spectacular. I am. It’s the same thing, Dad. Everybody who works there calls it the Point, because—
Well, then what does your friend want with Stanley Glass? And has he ever heard of dialing 4-1-1? Stanley’s right there in the Philly White Pages. You just gotta—
I don’t think Stanley’s in Philly anymore, Dad. Or in AC. I think he’s out here.
Wait wait wait. Out where?
Vegas, Curtis says. I’m calling you from Las Vegas.
His father draws a heavy breath, lets it out. Curtis has made a mistake by bringing him into this. Look, Dad, he says. I know you don’t have time to talk—
I haven’t kept up with Stanley too much, Curtis, his father says. Stanley is a great man and a great friend, one of my oldest friends in the world, but I haven’t talked to him too much since Mawiyah and I got married. I don’t judge him, and I don’t bear him any ill will, but the fact is, Curtis—
I know, Dad.
The fact is—if I may finish—the fact is that Stanley is a professional gambler. And Mawiyah and I are good Muslims now. Or I’m trying to be one, anyway. And the teachings of the Prophet, peace be upon him, very specifically prohibit—
I know all about this, Dad.
I know you know. But you need to understand. Stanley is a gambler all the time. He is a pure gambling machine. To be with Stanley is to gamble with Stanley. And so: I cannot be around Stanley. I love him, he’s my brother, but—
Look, Dad, I’m making you late. This is not that important. I understand what you’re saying, and—
I just need you to hear me out on this, Curtis.
I’m hearing you out, Dad. All right? I’m sorry I bothered you. I gotta go. Tell Mawiyah goodbye for me.
Curtis hangs up. He stares at the new cellphone for a moment, pondering his own apparently limitless capacity for misunderstanding and foolishness. He still hasn’t called his wife.
He makes the big hotel rack to calm himself down, pulling the sheets flat and tight. This provides a kind of cheap satisfaction and solace. Outside, the rinsed-and-dried city buzzes in the morning light, inventing itself for the coming day.
5
The Strip trolley picks Curtis up at Harrah’s, four hundred yards south of his own hotel. He pays his two bucks, takes a seat near the front, and scans the sidewalks as they roll along: Slots A Fun, the Crazy Girls billboard, the fat blue tentacles of the Wet ’n Wild waterslides. Stooped yellow cranes tend the grave of the Desert Inn, swinging steel girders over pale mounds of earth. Guys with firehoses spray everything in sight, trying to cut down on the dust, but it isn’t working: the ground just drinks it up, and the still air is hung all around with wisps of silica.
The trolley is nearly empty at this hour, silent but for the diesel’s lulling chug, and Curtis finds himself twisted in his seat, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of Mount Charleston through the rain-washed morning air. Lots of snow still left at the peak. Even at this distance it’s fiercely white in the blinding sun, a gap at the horizon, a space intentionally left blank.
The mountain vanishes behind the three-legged tower of the Stratosphere, and Curtis turns forward again. The big casinos are all behind them now, the streets lined with motels, wedding chapels, lingerie shops. The Boulevard between here and downtown always reminds Curtis of Subic, the bridge into Olongapo, minus the shit-smelling river, the moneychanger booths, the boys begging for centavos. A few hard-eyed and ragged leafleteers have already reported for duty, sipping coffee from paper cups, satchels bulging at their feet. Last night’s handbills and magazines blow across the sidewalks: ads for sex clubs, escort services, brothels in Pahrump. The palmtrees are thinning out, replaced by billboards: the city advertising itself to itself. Curtis is surprised by a quick tremor of glee; he catches his breath, fights back a smile. What happens here stays here. He’s alone, at risk, alive in his own skin for the first time in years.
The trolley unloads him near Fremont Street, the main downtown drag, lately closed to vehicular traffic and spanned by a steel canopy studded with concert speakers and tiny colored lights. The lights are off now, the speakers silent. A few earlybird dayshifters drift in from the sidestreets: waiters and dancers and dealers in streetclothes, uniforms stuffed into backpacks or duffelbags. Curtis is still operating on Philly time; he feels foolish for starting so early. Wherever Stanley is now, he’s asleep.
Curtis walks up Fourth to the restaurant at the Gold Spike, amused and a little disappointed to find that the price of a two-egg breakfast has more than doubled since his last visit: they now ask a buck ninety-nine. He places his order at the counter, sits in a booth by the window, watches as delivery trucks and taxis and armored cars move across the dust-flecked glass.
Nearly three years gone by. In the summer of 2000, coming off his first Balkan tour, Curtis got TDY’d to Twentynine Palms to help with combined-arms exercises: six months of grit in his molars, charred rock and crucible sun. The way the Corps saw it, Curtis was a combat veteran who’d been in the Gulf in ’91, who’d done counterinsurgency in Kosovo and Somalia, and they wanted him to share his experience with their green recruits. Curtis had been a terrible teacher, reluctant to revisit operations he felt he’d done a halfassed job on in the first place, unable to come up with anything that felt like wisdom in his mouth. He tried to pass along what he’d learned—battlefield circulation control, rear-area security, processing EPWs—but it all came out as textbook stuff, the same standard-ssue post-Vietnam bromides he’d scoffed at himself at his first CAX back in ’84, and he could tell the boots weren’t hearing it. And anyway, nobody really wanted to think about how to handle fifty Iraqi soldiers surrendering to a four-man scout team, or to a water truck. People are always ready to prepare for the worst, not so much the ridiculous. How many of those fresh-minted marines are in the Sandbox now? Curtis wonders. In Kuwait and Saudi. Waiting for the whistle to blow, for the second half to start.
Twentynine Palms reunited Curtis with guys he went through MP school with at Leonard Wood, guys his own age, and they got to be pretty tight, keeping each other entertained, driving to San Diego or TJ or Vegas on weekends. Damon always organized the Vegas trips: caravans of marines speeding across the desert, taking over whole floors at Circus Circus or the Plaza, semper fi’ing back and forth over craps tables and handing fistfuls of taxpayer dollars over to the girls at the Palomino and Glitter Gulch. Damon’s excursions always drew new faces, younger guys, marines Curtis had never met, and they all wanted to talk about Damon. Shit, they’d say, that guy’s the craziest MP in the Corps. But Damon wasn’t crazy. He always kept it together: pacing himself, quarterbacking, pulling the strings. Always in good working order when everybody else was throwing away their money, puking on their shoes.
On the last trip, they were moving in a pack through one of the big casinos—Caesars, or maybe the Trop, scaring civilians, razzing flyboys from Nellis—when Curtis felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find Stanley there. Stanley looked thin, even gaunt, but still dialed in tight; he was lithe and strong in Curtis’s awkward embrace. When Curtis asked what brought him to to
wn, Stanley just gave him a funny grin that could’ve meant do you have to ask? could’ve meant you’d never guess. They talked for a minute about Curtis’s dad, about the Corps, about people they both knew back East, and then the conversation turned a corner and Curtis, maybe three-quarters drunk, found himself unable to keep up. Stanley was telling a story about a hand of blackjack he’d played at the Barbary Coast—about something that happened during it, or something it made him think of—and then about an English magician named Flood, and a famous trick he did in which unrelated objects moved in ghostly parallel, as if linked by invisible threads. Curtis kept expecting Stanley to explain how the trick was done, or to connect it back to the blackjack game, but he never did, and suddenly he was silent, watching Curtis, waiting for a response.
Now, sitting in the booth at the Gold Spike, sponging spilt yolk with folded-over toast, Curtis is shaken by the memory: it cools his blood, stifles his appetite. It’s hard to say why. Partly it bothers him that he could fail so completely to understand a man he’s known his whole life. But that’s not it, or not entirely. Something else is poisoning the recollection: a nightmare feeling, irrational and uncanny. A sense of menace hidden in plain sight. The presence of an impostor. As if it wasn’t really Stanley that Curtis met in the casino that night. Or, worse, that it was Curtis who was off, who wasn’t really himself.
At the time, of course, he didn’t feel any of this: it was just an awkward moment. He and Stanley stood there; Curtis looked down, shuffled his feet. Then Damon walked up, and Curtis introduced them.
And that was it: the first time the two of them met. It seemed like such a small thing then. Like nothing. Now Curtis can barely track what has followed from it.
The rest of that night is a drunken blur in his memory, but he retains one last lucid image: Damon sitting at a $25 table, bright-eyed and focused, smirking at his cards as Stanley hovered behind him, a hand on his shoulder, whispering into the shaven base of his skull.
So in a way, Curtis figures, all of this is his own fault.
6
The dayshift comes on at noon, and Curtis begins walking down Fremont, from the ElCo to the Plaza, stopping at every casino along the way. He talks to croupiers and dealers, waitresses and bartenders, floor people, security guards, and every pit boss or casino host whose ear he can bend. In each case he tailors his story to his audience, mostly blowing variations on I’m looking for a friend, he’s staying somewhere in town, I’m hoping to throw some action his way. Everybody gets Curtis’s cell number, and he drops a few double sawbucks where he thinks they might do some good. A couple of people say they’ve seen Stanley in the last week or so. Everyone over the age of forty seems to recognize his name.
Curtis was nervous at first about operating in the open, laying such thick spoor, but he’s over that now. If he’s not visible, then this isn’t going to work, not in what little time he’s got. He’s never been wired for cloak-and-dagger shit anyhow, which by now Damon should know. Sneaking around, in Curtis’s view, generally amounts to time-wasting; better to just say what you want, then own whatever comes with wanting it. If Damon has a problem with that approach, he could have called somebody else. Out here Curtis has done nothing wrong, has nothing to hide from. Not yet, anyway.
At each place he stops, he makes the same clockwise circuit of the tables, scanning the crowd for Stanley’s bald head, his narrow shoulders, his beaked nose. He comes up empty every time, but always feels like there’s something he’s not seeing. He’s rusty, and still doesn’t trust his eye.
He leaves Main Street Station with two rolls of quarters in his pocket and catches the trolley to the Stratosphere. Starting his long trek south. He’s making better time, zeroing in on the right people: pit bosses with ten-dollar haircuts, middle-aged bartenders, valets who look him in the eye. Damon’s cash is going fast, but Curtis feels like he’s buying something with it now.
Nobody’s asked him any tough questions, but he runs through his story anyway, rehearsing made-up dialogue as he’s passing between casinos, crossing the boulevard. Thinking back to ten days ago, South Philly, Damon in a booth at the Penrose Diner. Swirling the dregs of his third coffee, brown parabola lapping the bone-white rim. I’m not asking you to lie. Just keep it simple. If anybody presses you, you just tell ’em you’re collecting on a marker. That’s the truth, right? Yellow hair trimmed to a uniform half-inch, longer than Curtis had ever seen it. Beige houndstooth suit wrinkled like it’d been slept in, though Damon clearly hadn’t slept in days. The trick is to have layers. See? You give up a little, they think they got the whole picture. Dark eyes watery but alert, like greased ballbearings. One obsidian cufflink in his black poplin sleeve, a few raveled threads where its mate was torn out. It’s fine to drop my name if you think that’ll help. Nobody’s gonna know what happened in Atlantic City. Or, if they do know, they won’t make any connections. A new mobile phone atop an unmarked #10 envelope. An e-ticket printout inside—UA 2123 dep PHL 07:00 arr LAS 09:36 03/13/2003—wrapped around three packs of hundred-dollar traveler’s checks. What you tell your wife is your business. Look, this is not dangerous. Nobody’s breaking any laws. You find him, and you call me. You do it no later than twelve a.m. next Tuesday night. It’s that simple.
Curtis watched Damon’s Audi pull out of the lot and disappear up the onramp toward the Whitman Bridge. He finished his slice of apple pie along with the chocolate napoleon that Damon had barely touched, ordered himself another coffee, and sat not reading his newspaper until nearly rush hour, when he walked back to the subway. The next morning he awoke at four with Danielle’s alarm, listened as she dressed and left for work, and lay sleepless and staring at the sky through the miniblinds as it went from black to red to yellow to white. Then he rose and cleaned up and caught the bus down to Collingdale, where he bought the gun.
South of Fashion Show Mall the casinos are bigger, busier now that it’s later in the day, and everything takes longer. By eight o’clock he’s past the airport, leapfrogging places that seem unlikely, feeding quarters to the southbound trolley as it carries him from block to block to block. He stops at the buffet at the Tropicana to load up on prime rib and peeled shrimp by the glow of heatlamps and coral-reef aquariums, then sits for an hour above the deserted pool and watches the reflections of palmtrees nod in the wind-purled water. Once his food has settled, he humps it east to the Hôtel San Rémo, west to the Orleans, south to the Luxor and Mandalay Bay.
On the long ride back to his own hotel he nods off for a second, then jolts awake, his heart skittering. Outside the streaked bus windows the city seems different, alive in a way that it wasn’t before. There’s steady foot traffic along the boulevard, laughing and shouting and acting out, and the street is full of high-end rental cars, windows down, stereos rattling. Stretch limousines idle at curbside, sly and circumspect, while the sidewalk procession slides backlit across their mute black windshields. Time seems to pass in a hurry. Curtis thinks of bad places he’s been, of nights he’s spent along razor-taped perimeters, eyeing burning wells and distant winks of small-arms fire. Very different from this. But the same nervous thrill, the same sense of something gathered just beyond the lights, waiting for a signal to move. For the first time in a long while Curtis feels as if he’s in the world again—the real world, inhuman and unconstructed—where he can be anybody, or nobody, and where anything is possible.
He’s reached the door to his room, is swiping his keycard, when his cellphone throbs to life. The unfamiliar ringtone startles him; he jumps, the door swings open, and the keycard drops and slides along the tile just inside the jamb. Curtis digs for the phone as he stoops to retrieve it.
A loud voice on the line, not one he can place. Curtis! it says. How you been, man?
I’m good. What’s up?
You know who this is? You recognize my voice? It’s Albedo, man! Remember me? I hear you’re in town!
Curtis doesn’t know anybody named Albedo—or Al Beddow, for that matter. A white guy, p
robably his own age. Blue Ridge accent: North Carolina, Virginia. Crowd noise in the background. Yeah, Curtis says. I’m here for a few days.
That’s great, man. We gotta hook up, we gotta hang out. What are you doing right now?
I’m—I just got back to my hotel.
Your hotel? Fuck, man, it’s like eleven. You can’t go back to your hotel. Look, I’m at the Hard Rock right now with some people. You need to get your ass over here. You know where it is?
Curtis knows where it is. He’s half inside his doorway, dead phone cradled in his hand. Trying again to place that voice. Maybe somebody he talked to earlier. Maybe somebody who’s watching what he says because of who he’s with. Curtis closes his eyes, tries to form a picture of Albedo—shrouded in dim light, loud music, the clamor of raised voices, Stanley’s maybe among them—but at the center of Curtis’s picture is an absence, a void in the smoky air, and he quickly gives up.
Leaning farther into the dark entryway, checking the fax and the message-light, he hears a door slam somewhere down the corridor and is suddenly uneasy, an interloper in shared space, aware of the closeness of unseen others. Somebody’s been here while he was out: housekeeping, of course. For a second he can sense the strata of odors in the room—a hidden history of cleansers, perfumes, sweat—before his nose habituates and they’re blended, gone. Due south, a block off the Strip, some kind of event is going on, the grand opening of something. Four times a minute the beam of a swiveling searchlight falls through the open curtains; the suite’s furnishings appear, disappear, appear. With each sweep, the air over the city turns a solid blue, flat and opaque, and the room seems telescoped, shallow, a diorama of itself.
After a couple of passes, Curtis pulls his revolver and checks it in the wan light that leaks from the hallway. Then he hurries back to the elevators, and the door shuts itself behind him.
