Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  “In most states, you can disown your children once they’re eighteen,” Chuck observes. “There’s a legal procedure.”

  “Worse than them bothering me is them fighting with each other,” says Sitting Bull. “Brothers and sisters shouldn’t do that, not over money.”

  “What else is there?”

  “Maybe for white people, but for us– you’re sposed to help each other, look out for your nieces and nephews.”

  “It takes a friggin village,” says Wheezy. “And that’s more than having the same zip code.”

  “Does it hurt?” Einstein asks Sitting Bull, the first time he’s spoken.

  “It feels heavy,” says the big man. “It feels like my heart is made of lead and is gonna sink down into my belly.”

  “Blackjack,” says Lady, softly. “Sorry folks, the House takes this one.”

  They tighten into a kind of crew then, which happens sometimes, Wheezy rasping about her daughter’s hopeless boyfriends and surprising but equally abusive girlfriend, the Drunks, who really are nice boys even loaded to the gills, learning the game, Einstein making bolder and bolder wagers, his stacks of red becoming green as they get deeper into the shoe, as Lady effortlessly deals the hands, collects for the House and makes the payouts before sweeping the cards back up in the order they were dealt and parking them in the discard rack. She begins to think about Leonard, due sometime in the afternoon, the first she’ll have seen him in almost a year.

  He won’t have any trouble catching on here, his record clean in Reno and Vegas and Louisiana, despite the longer and longer gaps between his periods of employment. He’s never made a scene on the floor, Lenny, and is pretty much the default model for a stick man– thin, good-looking, speedy and glib. Lenny could talk Just Ask Chuck into a puddle.

  As for giving him a second (third? fourth?) chance, it’s tough to scope the odds. It was always streaky between them, from the first sawdust joint they worked together till the last awful meltdown in the parking lot at Foxwoods, blowing hot and cold, the high times so great, so much fun, that even knowing how it inevitably crashes has never kept her away from their game. Cards don’t love you, dice do contortions to put you in the hole, man got a drug habit? Double down.

  “Double down,” says Einstein, hitting her with what might be a deep-and-meaningful with his eyes. He’s been laying tens to ride for her every five or six hands, several of them winners, and though Just Ask Chuck always winks and says ‘Gotta keep the dealer sweet’ whenever he steers one of his own pink chips toward her toke box, she feels a message, an agenda, coming off this guy. It’s not like she’s in a party pit wearing Victoria’s Secret and shaking her tits under his nose, and she’s at least a decade older than he is. Is he asking her not to rat him out to the pit boss?

  “You’re killing me, handsome,” she says and deals him a six that puts him at eighteen, where he’ll stand.

  “Breathe in my direction,” says Chuck to Einstein. “I could use some of that stuff.”

  Streaks are intoxicating when they’re not misery, but Lady knows they are only momentary ripples in a flow that is heading down the drain. She can quote you the numbers, and it matters not that half the table beats her seventeen, or that a few weary players will stagger out into the dawn with fattened wallets– she is only a factory hand servicing a machine that milks people for their money.

  Drunk draws a second eight on the next hand.

  “You might want to split that, honey.”

  “Right. And what’s the point of that again?”

  “Sixteen is tough to hit on, but eight is a good start, and if you play two hands–”

  “I’ve got two chances to beat the House.”

  “And two chances to lose,” adds Chuck.

  “I’ll do it.”

  “You have to make the signal,” says Lady, holding up two fingers.

  “The secret handshake.”

  She points to the ceiling. “The One Above records whatever it sees, but it might be too noisy in here to hear your voice.”

  “Right,” says Drunk, forking two fingers to tap the table, “gotta go to the videotape.”

  “And now you add your second bet.”

  He matches his green quarter on the second eight. Lady deals an eight and a deuce.

  “All right, with what I’m showing, you probably want to stay on the first hand and hit the second.”

  Drunk makes exaggerated signs with his hand.

  “Curveball on the inside corner,” says Drunker, whose eyes have drooped to half-mast as he leans on his friend’s back for support. Lady does Egoscue exercises for her hip every day, but by the end of the ten-hour shifts she’s pulling here–

  Another deuce.

  “Again.”

  A king this time and he busts.

  “The Lady giveth,” says Chuck, “and the Lady taketh away.”

  She flips her hole card, a jack that beats everybody but Einstein.

  “The Lady kicketh our asses,” says Chuck.

  The Lost Man calls out a loud goodnight to Drunk and Drunker as he passes, making a show of pulling his empty pockets out and letting them hang, a sad little smile on his face.

  “When that industrial accident waiting to happen catches up with Schmuck,” says Drunk to Drunker, “I hope I’m not anywhere near him.”

  Boss Man taps his watch face. “Four o’clock,” he says, this quitting time obviously in his night’s strict protocol. “I’m done.”

  Lady helps him color out, trading his mess of reds, blues and greens for a trio of black hundreds. He does a quick mental calculation and leaves her fifteen for the toke, some percentage of some percentage he’s predetermined. Probably a guy who stares at drilling logs all day, making decisions that can mean millions to the Company.

  “It wasn’t the Martingale and it wasn’t the Paroli,” Chuck observes after Boss Man has left the pit. “But the dude sure had some method cooking.”

  “Show me one that always works,” Lady smiles, burning a card in the Boss Man’s honor, “and I’ll switch sides of the table.”

  “You ever gamble?” asks Wheezy, lighting up the first stick from a new pack. She is an inconsistent player, betting hunches from who knows what planet, and a lousy tipper, but Lady likes her.

  “Only in love, darlin.”

  If there was only a breeze to carry the cancer cloud in the other direction.

  They’ve got all blackjack dealers doing one-twenties before a break, so Lady continues to portion out the pasteboards. The tips are better at the poker table, but there are so many games and betting variations now and twice as many smokers. The drinks waitresses, the real lookers who know how to make it seem personal, probably do as well as she does, getting the same minimum base pay but allowed to take cash or chips and never in the position of beating their customers at a hand of cards. You make a living at this racket by making it fun, win or lose, and by keeping the action flowing steadily, mesmerizing them till there is nothing but your table in front of them, with slot noise, voices, the time of day or night all fading from consciousness.

  Lady is a pro and can’t think of a job she’d be better at, but she doesn’t need it the way Leonard does. “I’m an adrenaline junkie,” he told her on their first real date, and at that point it was all he was addicted to. This carpet joint will be hopping as long as the oil boom lasts, the colored lights and MIDI cacophony seeming natural when it’s packed with fun-starved roughnecks. She’s spent enough hours with lonely drunks at the one table left open to play in the wee hours to appreciate the energy here. You work the machine like crazy while there’s still money to extract, then you move to the next spot. Lenny will love it, Lenny’s eyes will shine when he steps into the lobby and the dice will tapdance with joy to know he’s arrived. There is no shortage of meth floating around in Yellow Earth and on the reservation, of course, but availability is never the issue. If there was one crystal left in the Nevada desert, Lenny would know where to start sifting sand.


  “Willpower is like luck with me, babe,” he’s told her more than once. “It comes and it goes.”

  A real player stays a little detached from the game. Keep your guts out of every roll, see the big picture, accept that success and failure are transient and not to be taken to heart. She’ll smile and hug him close when he gets off the little plane, show him how she’s set up the room the casino scored for her, listen to his excited chatter, his stories about the total losers he met in the Program this time, even make plans with him. But she’ll be watching, looking for tells, four feet above it all, like the security cameras recording the conversation of cards and hand signals at the table. When there’s a beef, a question of who’s at fault and how things really went down, you can always roll back the video.

  Sitting Bull makes his second two-hundred-dollar bet in a row, a sure sign that he’s getting tired, his heart feeling heavy. He likes to go out firing ballsy wagers no matter what he’s dealt. He’s enough of a whale here to merit limitless RFB, but while he’ll partake of the comped Food and Beverages, he’s never taken them up on the free Room. ‘Only ten minutes from my house,’ he says.

  Einstein is laying down black chips as well, not looking at anything but the cards as they come out of the shoe.

  He wins again, his four cards adding up to twenty.

  “My, you’ve had a lucky night,” says Lady, as unloaded an observation as she can make it.

  “You mean I should quit while I’m ahead?”

  Again he has her in an eyelock. If he’s counting he’s new at it, and she doubts she’ll say anything to Cloyd during her twenty off. The purse she left in the locker in the break room is made of transparent plastic to make things easier when she goes in and out through security. She started in the business dealing single decks by hand to retired beauticians from Bakersfield, back when half the players still called the game ‘Twenty-One.’ At the last seminar she went to it was conceded that some counters were indeed ‘playing with advantage’ and beating the House, but the interest the phenomenon had brought back to the game, the false hope, had triggered an increase in action that would offset that by millions.

  “Your fate is in your own hands,” she says gently. “I’m just the messenger girl.”

  Einstein colors out and slides her a hundred-dollar tip.

  “When Lady Luck has smiled upon you,” winks Just Ask Chuck, “you damn well better smile back.”

  There is yelling from over by the keno tables then, two men not playing anything standing nose to nose with each other, looking like they need a referee. Lady uses the distraction to pop the shoe open. Sometimes they work in teams, a departing player signaling the count to a newcomer.

  “Time for a change,” she says, pulling out the dozen and a half cards left and signaling the local girl, Nicolette, to take a drink order from her players. “This deck wants to go to sleep”

  THE ROOFING LADDER is a motherfucker to lug over the fields at night, bulky, noisy, heavy enough that Dickyboy has to keep switching shoulders and stopping to rest. The good thing is that the construction site he’s stolen it from is only two miles from the ramp that Chairman Killdeer keeps calling ‘the marina’ in his newsletters, two miles from the propped-up hulk that hasn’t moved an inch since the dedication ceremony. They had a security light on it the first couple months, which suddenly stopped working when the yacht started being pointed out as the symbol of everything wrong with the current tribal government. So when he finally sees the bulky silhouette against the sky over the lake, he can just sit for a few minutes and get his breath back.

  There wasn’t a scene at home, no big dramatic blowout, just more of the same old shit, and he’s had it. There are uncles and aunts to stay with, sure, but they’re all on your case about this and that, and who needs it? He’s done vanishing acts– two weeks, three weeks– before, staying with friends or cousins on the edges of the rez, and nobody called the cops or anything. You show up at school most days of the week, don’t knock out anybody’s brains with a hammer, and you can stay under the radar.

  The ladder at full extension is just long enough to reach the deck of the yacht with enough of a lean that he doesn’t worry he’ll fall backwards. Climbing high is a bitch though, would have been easier a year ago before he porked out so much, and he rests halfway up, listening to the coyotes on the other side of the water. It’s getting cold, but once he’s out of the wind–

  He gives the ladder a little shake, feeling the ridge hook grab onto something above, resumes his climb up. At the top he’s able to unloose enough boat cover to slide under and in, working the little flashlight out of his pocket to help him figure out what is where. Pulling the ladder up after is a nightmare, clattering and threatening to pull out of his hands when the wind takes it, but he finally gets it up, adjusted to its shortest height and stowed along the rail, hidden from outside view by the huge blue tarp.

  On deck under the tarp frame is like being in a tent, the air smelling plasticky and stale, everything with a slight bluish tinge in his flashlight beam. Nothing is locked. Dickyboy enters the cabin, finds the house controls and flicks a map light on, then steps down into what will be the main casino area when it’s all tricked out.

  He’ll need to keep selling to have operating funds, and school is still the best place to make connections, so developing a quick and secure boarding and exit system will be the first order of business. A place to stow the ladder out of sight near the marina, a good idea of who bothers to come down here during this season, some kind of peep hole or periscope to clock the outside before he shows himself. Dickyboy finds a room switch, turns the light on. He has to hope the tarp and the anti-sun windows are thick enough that nothing bleeds through. A bar counter, fixed benches, and some loose chairs pushed into one corner, three tables for gambling. He’s disappointed that the slot machines aren’t in yet.

  The galley is a reasonable size, easy to get in and out of even with his bulk, and the stovetop comes on right away. He’s learned to cook some things in self-defense, his grandmother’s cooking marginal even when she’s not fucked up on something. Dickyboy kneels on the floor, manages to plug the little refrigerator in, hear the hum that tells him it’s operational. Cold beer if he has Dylan or any of the other few guys he trusts come in to hang. Or maybe this will just stay his own little secret as long as it lasts.

  The head is fine for a pee, though he’s clueless as to how the waste system works so he doesn’t flush. Can’t have a pile of your business piling up under the yacht. He feels like Goldilocks in the story, making himself at home in somebody else’s space, a little too big for some of the furniture. Hey, it belongs to the tribe, he imagines himself saying if discovered. I just got here a little early.

  Dickyboy finds a fold-out-bed setup in the crew compartment, lights a joint, lies down, and puts his headphones on. He sets his iPod on random, and the first thing it throws at him is Eminem, Dr. Dre and 50 Cent knocking out “Crack a Bottle.” The wind outside on the prairie is gone, the rez and the rest of the world around it disappeared, just Dickyboy chilling with his herb and his sounds–

  So crack a bottle, let your body waddle,

  Don’t act like a snobby model, you just hit the lotto–

  snug in the Drydock Hilton.

  HE’S NEVER FOUGHT IN a pit before. In a container once, yeah, but with a pretty good floor laid down, and behind the Hooters in Ocala where the ring was just crime-scene tape stretched tight, and a couple times in a real octagon, though they weren’t sanctioned fights, just smokers like this where the promoter had some money to lay out. But this has been dug for some kind of permanent tank to sit in, almost a perfect thirty-foot square sunk five feet into the ground. Nothing’s been poured yet, so it’s just dirt covered with black plastic on the sides, with big strips of hard matting on the ground, the seams gaffer-taped over. And somewhere, Brent, who put the whole thing together, has found metal bleachers to throw up on all four sides. Add the swords and sandals and we got gladiators.


  Scorch sits on the tailgate of one of the ArrowFleet pickups while L. T. smears Vaseline on his face. He’s got mineral oil rubbed everywhere else, slick as a weasel, which is against the rules in sanctioned fights, but Brent said this was “sort of kind of vale tudo rules,” so what the hell. All he knows about the other guy is that he’s big and he’s never been in a pro fight.

  “Kick his ass, man!” yells one of the spectators, passing through the jumble of pickups and rental cars on his way to the bleachers.

  “Will do.” Scorch waves a gloved hand. Half the crowd are likely to be assholes he’s had to collar at Bazookas, so any support is welcome. In Tampa once, a half dozen buddies of the guy he’d just decked swarmed into the cage and he got a bad cut from somebody’s ring before the rest of the crowd and the meatheads hired for security could drag them out. This deal, down in a hole in the ground, won’t be easy to escape.

  Shakes hurries back to them, looking nervously over his shoulder. Shakes is the guiltiest-looking fuck he’s ever met, the kind the public defender takes one glance at and says we’re copping a plea.

  “He’s big,” says Shakes.

  “Fat big or big big?”

  “He’s got a belly, but his arms are like legs. Like a pro football lineman, you take the pads off.”

  “Terrific.”

  He’s getting three grand just to step in the cage, triple what he’s ever got before, and Brent is supposed to be laying another grand for him to win. He wonders if Brent has checked this other guy out, if he’ll bet against him with his own money. Brent lives at the bottom line.

  “I’d ask you to take a dive,” he said this afternoon, not totally kidding, “only it’s two-to-one you get creamed in there.”