CASINO
THE CASINO was built back from the beach, up in the dunes overlooking the lake. You can see it for miles. It’s a solid, bulky two-storey building, they paint it creamy yellow every couple of years, and it’s always had a dark red roof.
Inside there is a long counter where you line up to buy ice cream and Popsicles and cold drinks and nickel bags of chips, and beyond the counter there is a row of slot machines, and two carousels of postcards, mostly pictures of Mounties or giddy long-legged women in short shorts and pigtails. The public washrooms, off in the corner, aren’t all that clean. The floor is just cement because people bring sand in on their feet and lake water drips from their bathing suits, leaving small puddles.
Six wood pillars support the dance floor upstairs and when there’s a dance on you can stand underneath, near a slot machine for instance, and imagine that the whole thing is going to cave in on you.
On a Saturday night, the dancers park bumper to bumper on the hard sand beside the Casino, maybe lean against their cars for a few minutes to take in some lake air or talk to someone they haven’t seen in a while, and then they walk in through the big double doors, which are always wide open. Just inside the doors they pay their fifty cents and get the back of their hands stamped, sometimes with a flag, sometimes with a small blue rose, and then they turn left up the worn oak staircase. The staircase was once a classic, it was built double wide, wide enough for three or four to walk abreast and with easy shallow risers, but it’s taken quite a bit of damage from the years of use and from the wet air off the lake.
Upstairs, on the far side of the room, there is a large stage recessed into the wall, about three feet off the floor, and tucked behind the stage, accessible only by a steep back staircase, four small rooms hold narrow beds for the university students who work the long counter downstairs. But most of the upstairs is nothing but open dance floor, a proper dance floor, hardwood of some kind, likely the most costly part of the entire building. And, although the span on this second floor is significant, there are no support pillars to spoil the movement of the dancers. That cost something too.
There is a balcony surrounding the dance floor on all but the bandstand side. It must be ten feet wide. You can dance out there if you want some privacy, and when a couple leaves the dance floor and goes out to the balcony they are pretty much left alone. If a storm comes up on a Saturday night there are hinged shutters which can be dropped to enclose the balcony, to make a box, and when this happens there are lots of people who know how to do it. Anyone can help. Through the week, the shutters are closed, but when the Saturday night dance is on, the view is magnificent.
There are no tables surrounding the dance floor, no chairs. Liquor is not served. On a Saturday night, any booze at the dance is already at work in somebody’s bloodstream, although some of the older men will sometimes pack a hip flask. The police take turns dropping in and they stand around for a while with their arms folded, leaning against the wall opposite the bandstand, talking to people. They live in town in rented houses, play ball with some of the men. They gauge the level of drunkenness in the crowd and they are expected to do this. They get paid to know where trouble is likely to start. But the young men seem to know when the cops are coming, they are able to watch and read a pattern. They make lots of trips out to the parking lot to get their bottles from under the seats of their cars.
On most Saturday nights, the floor is packed tight with couples moving to the music. The music pours out through the open balcony and waves of moist air come in off the lake to refresh the dancers.
THE BEACH is wide, composed of fine white sand. At least it looks white, especially at night. But the individual grains are really tan, interspersed with black. It’s always a surprise to find black grains, but you can see them in the daytime when you take a handful of sand and let it sift through your fingers. Black like pepper. Tall beach grass grows in the dunes around the Casino, but not down on the beach itself. There, the sand is bare and flat. The placement of the Casino, up in the drifting dunes, is a precaution against the occasional year when Lake Huron wants more of the beach for itself. This does happen. A few times, loud, pounding waves have come very close to the foundation and sometimes a wild summer storm will leave dark and surprisingly large pieces of driftwood high up in the dunes. But usually the lake throws only small casual waves and always the depth of the water increases very gradually.
You can teach children to swim at this beach. There are no sudden drops to frighten them, no rocks, no mysterious undergrowth. There is nothing on the bottom but small parallel waves of sand, which can be seen clearly through the water. Minnows abound, but children are not afraid of minnows. And if you swim out far enough, just beyond shoulder depth if you are ten or eleven, you are rewarded with a sandbar. Suddenly you can stand up and shout to the shore and the water is only at your waist. Then you can swim back, toward the Casino. There are more sandbars, of course, farther out, but you don’t get to stand up on them; they’re just there, beneath you. Children who are brought to this beach can often do a handstand in the water before they can swim in it. And swimming with your eyes wide open is a piece of cake.
The Casino road is a sticky blacktop, it cools faster than the white hot afternoon sand. There are a dozen buildings along this road. There is a new drive-in where teenaged girls in short shorts and crisp sleeveless summer blouses carry trays of burgers and shakes to cars full of tired families or wide-awake young men. There is a roller rink and a mini-golf and a deserted cement-block hotel, left over from another era. Behind the hotel there is a small permanently locked ice-house. Older cottagers can remember the snakes that disappeared in all directions when you pulled a block of ice from the sawdust which kept it hard in the summer heat. And behind all these commercial establishments are the cottages, the originals, with screened porches and substantial stone fireplaces and good dry wood stacked somewhere near the back door. Most of the cottages have weathered nameplates nailed above their front screen doors: Thistle Do Me, Dunworkin, Tipperary, Lakeview.
On summer Saturday nights, the sun moves down over the lake just as the dance is getting under way. That’s when the air cools. The water and the sky above it absorb the colours left behind by the sun and older people who are not at the dance sit in their screened porches or walk the beach just to see these colours. Later, the lake goes dark and the light from the moon and the stars shows silver on the waves. Sometimes the entire face of the lake is silver.
You can see this from the Casino balcony, when you’re not dancing.
THE BAND is always the same. It is composed of five men, only one of whom is over twenty-five, and he’s way over. There are two guitars, a fiddle, drums and a piano. The older man plays either the piano or the fiddle, switching off with the young man who might be his son. The lead singer plays guitar and is very good looking. He is cute, to use the vernacular. The crushes on him almost bounce off the walls. But he’s learned how to flash a quick smile without engaging in what could be construed as meaningful eye contact. He has a young wife and sometimes she comes to the dances, but not always.
The band members don’t wear jeans or jackets or string ties. They’re dressed in khaki pants and nice short-sleeved summer shirts. Their repertoire suits the crowd just fine. Some jives early on, slow songs for slow dancing a little later, then, to bring everyone back to the sweaty earth, a polka or two, and a square dance if the older man who plays the fiddle and the piano sees enough dancers in the crowd to get it going properly. He calls the squares and he is not much amused by the young types who assume positions and then bugger it up for everyone, mocking each formation as he calls it. Near the end of the evening the band plays “Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On” and they always close with Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams.” If you haven’t got your arms around someone good by “Send Me the Pillow,” there’s hardly any time left, “Sweet Dreams” is coming fast.
The guys in the band must watch the couplings and the quarrels,
but they don’t show much interest. They are discreet, at least while they play. Maybe later they talk about the dancers, and the non-dancers; maybe they have cruel things saved up to say to each other, or funny things. Maybe they see the dance as a show to watch, just something to enjoy.
DUNCAN is seventeen and blond and vain, although he would say he’s just confident. On most Saturday nights, second only to the lead singer in the band, he’s the cutest guy at the dance and he knows it. He looks a bit like Ricky Nelson, even his sister tells him this, but he carries himself like James Dean. He loves movies. He’s got the confused sulk down pretty good and he knows when to smile, how to make it spread out around him. He gets by in school. His teachers in the small high school in the town just eight miles inland are agreed that he’s a lot brighter than he pretends to be, and they’re all passing him, with B’s, and a few C’s to show they mean business. They’re waiting for him to click into gear, to stop being James Dean and start being whatever it is he can be. He dresses for the dances in tan pants and a lightweight pastel V-neck sweater, both pressed by his mother, he won’t wear anything wrinkled, and in white bucks which he saved for and drove alone across the Bluewater Bridge to Port Huron to buy. The white bucks are usually impeccable.
He’s got a friend, Jack, and they hang out together, loosely. Sometimes they get a bottle of rye to keep in the car, sometimes they don’t bother. The police don’t pay much attention to them.
On a typical Saturday night, Duncan dances twice, maybe three times. Although his sister is usually at the dance with her friends, he wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole. If she asks him for money, he’ll give her some, but he doesn’t want to get involved in her little world. She’s got one friend, Donna, who hangs around the house a lot. Donna’s pretty good, she just naturally sees the bright side of things and she can be relied upon to help him with his algebra, so he usually dances with her, one song only. Soon after he takes her back to the wall someone else will approach her, and Duncan understands that his dancing with her gets her started for the night. He figures it’s the least he can do. Once, while he was guiding her around the floor, Donna told him a dirty joke, she whispered it into his ear. He was pretty disgusted.
He waits awhile before he dances again, leaning against the wall, talking to Jack or some of the other guys, sometimes to one of the cops. Usually there are American girls at the dance, lots of Americans own cottages. He always waits and watches and picks out the best one. They’re different from his sister and Donna and the others. Their clothes are always one year better. And they draw attention to themselves on purpose, laughing, flirting, coming up the stairs sometimes alone, like they don’t care. Duncan thinks maybe they don’t care and this frightens and impresses him. He doesn’t really know any of them, except their names, everyone knows their names.
When he gets his arms around one of them, she’ll settle right down, she’ll become quiet and talk to him and ask him questions, softly. Just the opposite of the girls from town. They’re like scared birds until you ask them to dance, and then they get stupid, silly, loud in your arms.
He likes to save the last dance for the lead singer’s wife, if she’s there. She’s the only woman he knows who smells the same all the time, some perfume she wears. He’s not nearly the dancer she is but he doesn’t mind, he lets her lead him around the floor. When they’re dancing she sometimes waves to the band, he can feel her hand lift from his shoulder and he knows she’s smiling. Once, when they were as far away from the band as you can get, he tried to pull her a little closer, but her arms turned into steel, holding him where he was.
DUNCAN will survive his James Dean phase. Donna will pound enough algebra into his head to ensure his acceptance to a good university, which his parents will pay for, as they planned all along. He will study law, having determined at the ripe old age of twenty that what people are best at is getting themselves into trouble, and that there’s a dependable and generous living to be made from this inevitability. He won’t marry Donna. He won’t marry anyone until he’s finished his law degree. This first wife will be pale and willowy, until about the third child. By the time the fifth is born, she won’t look anything like the woman he married and he’ll trade up to a dark academic who looks at thirty-eight pretty much the way she’ll look for the rest of her life. Eventually, at a Christmas dinner with parents and wives and husbands and kids, after a bad year all round, including some tricky business with prostate cancer, his sister will call him a little snob. He will calmly respond that he will never cease to be amused by her intensity. She will dig in then, remind him of mediocre marks and of Donna, who will have had a hysterectomy at twenty-three and married no one. In mid-life, he will attend only an occasional dance at his golf club and take the proffered hand of his second wife, reluctantly.
JACK is skinny, really skinny. And tall. He towers over Duncan. His mother has a terrible time finding pants to fit him. He considers his physical state to be temporary, and he largely ignores his clothes and any talk about them, or about his body. He is happiest when he forgets himself entirely. He has a game going where he can get through a whole evening as if he has no physical presence at all, as if he’s invisible. He can have a great time this way. He’s not as smart as Duncan but he pulls down better marks; he’s what the teachers call a worker. He doesn’t mind schoolwork. It’s just like anything else, a garage to clean out, a yard to mow, you do it, check it over, make damn sure you don’t have to do it twice.
He goes to the dances all the time, usually rides out with Duncan. He’ll beg a bottle from his older brother if Duncan wants one, and when he drinks he gets pretty loose pretty fast but all this does is make the laughs come easier. Everyone thinks he’s funny, and he is. He’s good company. The cops know him and they watch to make sure he doesn’t get behind the wheel when the dance is over, other than that they leave him alone.
He dances a lot. He’ll dance with anyone. Girls will walk up and grab him when they need a partner. Even for slow dances. They give him little bits of stuff, a touch here, a breast against a forearm there. This just makes him happy. It would never occur to him to make a move on one of them; he’s waiting until his body is better developed, until it’s something a girl might want. He believes in the future.
He figures the American girls are from outer space. But after they catch on that he can be asked to dance, they won’t be stopped. So he dances. When they ask him about his family or his school or his summer job, he lies through his teeth, tells them he’s rich and brilliant, a superachiever. He told one girl he had six offers of a summer job. And she said exacdy what he wanted her to say. That’s wonderful. None of the ones from town ever say that, not to him, anyway. If the girls forget themselves and cuddle into him during a slow dance, he can make his body disappear altogether. They can’t get at him.
He’s got magazines at home, hidden between his mattress and his box spring, and when he wants to imagine what the future will be like, when he’s heavier and not so clumsy, he pulls them out. He gets the magazines from his brother’s stash, takes two or three at a time and trades them around. If he got caught, he’d get killed, but his brother isn’t all that organized.
Jack is the one who told Donna the dirty joke. When Duncan tells it back to him in the car on the way home, he just laughs all over again.
JACK will run into trouble in university. He will get tired of having to work harder than the other guys. He will meet his residence roommate’s cousin right before Christmas in his first year and start to date her, seriously. He will listen to her, he’ll hear all kinds of things he never dreamed of. She will invite him to touch her and claim that she loves his long body and he’ll fall, hook, line and sinker. He’ll quit school and move around a bit from one joe job to another, trying to avoid the accusations in his parents’ eyes. And then he’ll take her home to meet them and they’ll see that for the first time he’s not laughing, he’s just terribly happy. His mother will lie beside his father in their bed and whi
sper, this girl loves him, this is his chance.
He will get a job as the manager of an arena in a town not far away from his own and father four children, three of whom will go to university, and prosper. One of his sons will run into trouble in his teens. There will be bad marks and senseless theft and drugs and kitchen fights and lots of appointments with well-dressed counsellors in the city. Eventually the kid will come round, more or less. His wife will have one embarrassing mid-life affair, an intense ridiculous passion, which she will take with her to the grave. Jack will remain extraordinarily thin all his life, as will his sons. When he is quite old, he will remember the Casino and the Saturday-night dances. He will remember the words of songs and the way the lake smelled different after dark. But he won’t be able to remember which of the Rawlings boys was his friend those summers. His wife won’t know, of course. She wasn’t there.
GRADY is quite a bit older than the others at the dances, grey hair and less of it, bad veins in his legs, a paunch, some shrapnel. He still wears his hair cropped short, army style, and he usually has a cigarette tucked behind his right ear, although he hasn’t touched tobacco for years, not since his chest started to tighten up on him.
He’s married all right but he doesn’t ask his wife to come to the dances any more. She’s been born again and she’s changed, changed in every way. Grady tells people that he’s hoping she can get herself born just one more time. He spends most evenings out of the house, his own house, bought and paid for, and he can’t even relax in it. Sometimes he tries but she hovers around him for no reason, breathing over his shoulder if he’s reading something, changing the channel on him if he’s watching TV. Often he’ll walk uptown to the poolroom, which is respectfully called the library by most of its patrons. The talk’s pretty good there and there’s usually an opportunity to lighten the pockets of some of the apprentices by a few bucks. Grady’s wife has given up trying to convert him, now she just notes his sins. She’s got a list, he’s sure, hidden away somewhere with her other religious stuff. She never was what you’d call a party girl but she could dance, she could at least dance.
Casino and Other Stories Page 3
