His Caprice shot on into the sunset, becoming small and bright as a satellite. But even then he could feel gravity taking hold. The waves of the casino accreted weight and moment. The car reached a sort of apogee, and then he pulled over and turned around.
3
The Many Lakes Casino lot was awash in color and buzzing with sound. A charter bus disgorged senior citizens under the massive front portico, their silver hair running from green to red to blue in the shifting lights. One of them trailed an oxygen tank with aluminum wheels.
JW turned off his car. A breeze lifted in through the window. The dark leaves of sugar beet greens clattered on the edge of the lot. Several pairs of men and women were walking toward the casino, hand in hand.
Julie had given JW a plastic Jesus on the cross when she was nine or ten, and it dangled from his rearview mirror, swaying in the breeze, its clear plastic beads refracting the colored lights. He reached up and steadied it. He needed to get home, but the day had unsettled him.
“Okay,” he said, closing his eyes, “if I open my eyes and see a man and a woman holding hands, I’ll go in. Just for five minutes. Just send me a sign.” Carol would have dinner in the oven by now. It would be out in half an hour. He needed to patch things up with her and Julie, to heal the rifts that had formed since the accident. He hadn’t handled it well; he knew that.
She had been even more distant lately, not returning his calls, and the red heat of anger that had been in her voice this last year was fading into a cool reserve. It was fine. He could do what he wanted. Whatever he thought was best. All phrases to let him know that life, and Carol, were moving on, that they had become unhitched. If she would only wait, if he could just get through this, come out the other end with the big win, it would get better. Because with money came hope, and freedom. He could tell Carol about Frank wanting to have a beer. How it made him late and he’d been driving fast to make up the time. Just a half hour inside the casino. Just a short bump. It would give him time to bolster himself.
He opened his eyes, but no one was holding hands. He craned his neck to peer around the rear window stanchion. Not a single couple. He laughed and shook his head.
“All right, all right, I hear you,” he said. He reached for his dangling keys, but then he saw two women join hands.
Close enough. He got out and locked the car. Just in and out. Five minutes, ten tops. A quick bang. It always improved his mood, energized him, made things somehow more manageable. He shot his cuffs and headed for the grand portico.
Most people would be crazy to go gambling like he did, he knew, but as a finance professional he had an advantage, and he used it. He understood margins and risk in a way casual gamblers did not. The senior citizens were clogging the entry foyer. They chattered and lurched about, trying to buy chips. He maneuvered his way through the irritable throng. A voice that sounded like Willie Nelson wafted out of the theater, singing You are my sunshine. He had sung that to Julie as a baby. He stepped into the enswathing maternal smell of stale cigarette smoke.
He spent three hundred dollars on chips and headed into a sonic cloud of silvery coin chinking. No wonder old people like casinos, he thought. He didn’t care for the slots himself because there was no skill involved. He sometimes played poker, but most nights his game was blackjack. And tonight, something was going to happen, he could feel it. He was a dog on the hunt, yelping and straining at the leash, shedding his stiff banking persona and thrilled to be giving himself up to chance.
He passed Charlie and Maynard, two Native guards.
“Mr. White,” Maynard nodded.
“Maynard. Charlie,” he replied. A Native waitress named Stormy carried a tray of drinks. Wide high cheeks, a flat nose, small eyes with a laugh in them, big hoop earrings. They said she was Dakota, but she’d been living outside North Lake and working at the casino for years. She always seemed to find him. “Good evening, Mr. White,” she said.
“Stormy, it is a great evening. You time me! I’ll be in and out in five minutes, boom! A thousand dollars! Or ten!”
She laughed as he lifted a drink from her tray, feeling spry. She shook her head and walked on.
The chrome-and-green-glass escalator gleamed with the satisfying quality of 1950s science fiction, smooth as ice to the touch. It had seemed such a ridiculous thing the first time he saw it, going up a single floor, short in stature and full of grandeur, like the prized possession of a pygmy chieftain. But it had grown on him, his stairway to heaven. He stepped off and rounded the corner by the Moose Café Bar, heading for the blackjack section, where the smiling dealers waited behind their Kool-Aid-blue half-moon tables, always welcoming, always encouraging, but somewhat otherworldly.
“Welcome back, Mr. White!” They greeted him like a head of state. “Welcome back!”
The tables seemed somehow alive, their felt almost like a skin, warm and cool at once, and printed with zones to show where the cards went. The edges were padded for comfort, and each table had four inviting chairs. The dealers stood inside the moons’ curves, ready to play. JW picked his luckiest table and sat down.
Gambling, like banking, was all about managing risk. JW kept a tattered book on blackjack in the car. He had read it cover to cover many times, seeking clues to bend the arc of fate his way. The biggest thing to overcome was the house advantage, which came from being able to play more than one player at a time, tilting the odds slightly in the dealer’s favor. Teams of players secretly working together could overcome this by playing at different tables, but the casinos banned anyone caught doing it. An individual could overcome it by counting cards: mentally adding one every time a small card was played, and subtracting one every time an ace or ten-card came up. When the count got high it meant the deck was loaded with tens and you went in big. But there were cameras over every table, trained on the players to watch for this sort of too-convenient timing, so JW was cautious about using this method. Still, there was something about trolling the stormy ocean of chance, and pulling a big win back out of it, that drew his obsessions to the surface.
Tonight, as it turned out, he didn’t need to count. The cards were all going his way naturally. The payout in blackjack is three to two, and on splits and double-downs a player can double that. The goal is to hit twenty-one without going over. The dealer stays on seventeen or above. JW’s luck held, and over the course of an hour he kept getting the cards, one after another. His three hundred dollars multiplied until he had twenty-seven thousand in stacks of multi-colored chips. A crowd gathered—young, vibrant, alive in the moment, enjoying his spectacular winning streak. The table felt glowed electric blue and the cards had a satisfying slippery thwack.
He knew people tended to make mistakes under such pressure. The best thing you could do was to follow a system and forget about the money and the audience. Some players pulled ten, twenty, or even fifty percent back out of each hand as a policy decision, but in his mind this was foolish because over time the house had a slight statistical advantage. By holding back, he would not be fully putting his money to work against that advantage. Mathematically, it was better to have all his chips in play, and to play it up as fast as he could, then get out.
That’s what he was about to do after another hand. It was time, he could feel it, but he was within spitting distance of paying off the second mortgage on his house. He felt in total control, reacting instantly. He saw the move, he felt it, he knew it was right, and he played it, over and over. Bam, bam, bam: Thor at the hammer, directing each slam of lightning—there, there, there. But that was a false sense. He knew it. He reminded himself to stay calm. He didn’t have to hit twenty-one. He didn’t even have to beat the other players. An old man in a rumpled suit—his ashen face was caving in on itself—presented no competition; neither did a younger one with earrings and a goatee and the cocky, puppy-dog air of some sort of media artist. He slouched in his paisley shirt and flung his dark greasy forelock aside, then let it fall again before flinging it back as if it had only just
fallen for the first time. JW only had to beat the dealer. Bam! Another win! Yes! The old man pushed back from the table with a wave and a grim expression. JW watched him hobble off through the surrounding crowd. He took a sip from his drink and cautioned himself to use math, not to get sucked in by his emotions as the stakes rose. If he could stay technical, he could maximize his chances of finding a streak that would beat the house advantage in an even bigger way. He refocused on the game as the dealer began another round.
He had cleared nearly every ace in the shoe. He’d counted seven of them. Aces give players a lot of protection because they can be played as a one or as an eleven, so if you bust past twenty-one playing the ace high, you can fall back and use it as a one. Now that there was only one other player at the table, the odds were actually starting to tilt further in his favor.
“Hit me,” he was about to say, but he held up to think it through, and goatee looked over at him, mildly amused, and took a slug of his cocktail.
“You doing okay, my man?”
JW nodded, giving him minimal attention. It was stupid to banter at a time like this. It was all about managing risk. He was at seventeen, and this was not the conservative move he’d been making all night long. His heart sped up just thinking about it. But he’d seen almost every face card played already, and the tens, too, so the chances of going bust were smaller than average; in fact, they were increasingly smaller than average. Still, it was crazy to take a chance with so much money riding on one bet, so this time he held back three thousand in chips, breaking his own policy. The crowd applauded as if he’d done something brilliant. A man came out of nowhere and pointed at him.
“You, sir, are a winner!”
Obviously drunk. He sipped the water from the bottom of his ice. Stormy swooped in with another round of free drinks. “No, I’m okay,” said goatee. He lifted his hands up and leaned back, patting his paisley belly. “I gotta maintain my girlish figure.” He laughed and flung his hair. “Gotta fit in a canoe tomorrow.”
“JW, why don’t you take a break?” whispered Stormy. He could feel her warm breath on his cheek as she clawed up his old cocktail napkin. “Have a drink and cool down,” she said.
He glanced at her and saw her concern. Dave Anderson, the casino manager, was watching from behind the crowd. He had read that managers often sent a waitress like Stormy in to distract a player and break a winning streak.
“We need this,” he told her. He thought about the relief, how happy Carol would be. “Hit me,” he told the dealer.
It was a three. His instincts were verified, and the crowd applauded. He had an extremely formidable twenty. Stormy sighed and pulled away with her tray.
“I’ll stay!” He laughed. Three to two on twenty-four grand. He’d hit the road with thirty-nine thousand dollars, enough to really turn things around.
Goatee busted out at twenty-four. “Dude, it’s all yours,” he conceded, pushing back from his chair, smiling around at the onlookers, his cheeks bright red. JW nodded and waved. Everything he had was riding on the next few cards. He should be nervous, he realized, but he felt good. Confident. The math was on his side. The probability of the dealer beating his twenty was very low. He was giddy. He was bouncing his knee under the table.
“Dealer has an ace in the hole, does the player want to buy insurance?”
It had to be the last ace. And even though he was a finance guy, JW hated insurance. He preferred to use risk management strategies that he could control. He quickly ran through the odds. If the dealer turned up an ace chances were about one in three that the next card would be a ten-card and the dealer would hit twenty-one. An insurance bet was like hedging in stocks. It paid two to one if the dealer got twenty-one, helping mitigate the loss. But you lost it if not, which dampened the win. He drummed his fingers. Because so many face cards had already been played, the chances of the dealer turning up a ten were lower than normal, and twenty-one was the only score that could beat his hand. Plus, he only had three thousand held out of play to bet with, so even if he won the insurance bet, he’d walk away with a measly six thousand, and if he won the main bet, he’d lose the three, reducing his take to thirty-six thousand, which was short of the amount he had decided he would walk away at. He could take a loan from the casino, but he didn’t really have any more money in the bank to pay it back with.
“I’ll pass.” Just one card more.
The dealer’s king of hearts. The blast of it obliterated all other sound. Gone were the incessant chinking and bleeping, the congratulatory encouragements of the slot machines. Gone were the music and the cacophonous crowd applauding his moves. Gone were the sibilant laughter of his children and the raspy guffaws of his wife. Gone were the discussions, the awards, the handshakes at the bank. The only sound in life was the sound of a car crashing and thundering through his chest.
“House wins,” he faintly heard the dealer say.
He closed his eyes. It was gone. He struggled for logic. Don’t try to recapture it, he thought, just realize where you are now. And yet a wall of grief rose up in him. All that money, just torn away. He opened his eyes and looked down at his remaining chips. A measly three grand. The crowd of poor, older people began to drift away.
It shouldn’t have been. The odds had been with him. But he had to play on, and put emotion behind him. In fact, the odds were even better now, when he thought about it. He held back his three-hundred-dollar nut and pushed the remaining twenty-seven hundred into the box. He could claw his way back up to into thirty and this time he’d walk away, no matter what. Even at thirty. He could imagine Carol’s surprise, and her relieved happy smile, at thirty thousand dollars. He needed that happy smile. The money would solve so many problems, the silly mundanities that had been driving them apart.
Two new players joined him at the table—an excited blonde in her twenties and her obsequious boyfriend. The dealer replenished the shoe, and JW slid his cards over the magic blue felt. Turned them up to look. A five and a seven, so he was at twelve. The play cycled to the boyfriend, then the blonde, and no face cards came up, making his chance of getting one that much higher. Dealer could get one, too. So he had a choice. He could sit at twelve and probably lose the twenty-seven hundred, or he could take a hit. The odds were two to one he would survive, since face cards are only a third of the deck.
“Hit me,” he said.
It was a jack.
“Sorry, JW,” the dealer said as she raked in his chips.
He sipped his drink, then picked up his original three hundred dollars.
“No worries. All about the fun, right?”
She nodded and dealt a new hand as another player took his place.
He rode the glass-and-chrome escalator back down. Willie Nelson had gone and the lines were long at all the teller windows, so he used the cashier booth in the center of the slots area. The whir of colors and ringing bells made him feel like he was standing inside a toy. The machines emitted friendly voices, as if he were at a vast cocktail party of single robots on the prowl. The blue hairs sat staring at them, sipping their cocktails and their red wines and munching on pretzels as they pushed the spin buttons over and over. Spin, coin, spin, coin. Chink-chink.
As JW stepped up to the cashier he saw the woman across the aisle do something incredibly stupid: she left a dollar slot machine with a Top-Dollar Advisor feature and headed for the flashing-light slot machine near the front. He couldn’t believe it. The Top-Dollar Advisor was one of only two machines like it in the entire casino. It was rumored to have the highest payout percentage in the state, and so it was almost never available. He knew he should be getting on the road, but he had time for a few quick spins. He traded his chips for tokens and hurried to the prized stool, slipping in ahead of a man who was pushing his walker in the same direction. Immediately, he hit a payout and collected twenty dollars.
“I think this round’s on you!” the machine said in the voice of Cliff Clavin from the old TV show Cheers, and the chorus sang wh
ere everybody knows your name. He put the tokens in his keeper basket and played again.
“Congratulations!” Cliff said cheerfully, while the display advised him of the upcoming odds. If you paid attention, he knew, over time the Top-Dollar Advisor could help you beat the house.
After another hour or so he was still hanging in there. He was down to about a hundred and fifty dollars, but he still had the twenty-five in winnings off to the side, so he wasn’t doing too bad. Plus he’d had a lot of fun and several more free drinks. The difference between guys like him and problem gamblers, he realized, was that he knew when to stop. He’d spent half his nut, so it was time to lock in his winnings and cash out. All in all, he was only down a hundred and twenty-five. It was a fair price for a night out having fun, and he’d had a couple free drinks and some food to boot, so it was less than a hundred bucks when you thought about it. Not bad for entertainment.
He cashed out at the VIP window.
“See you tomorrow,” the teller said.
He shook his head. “I’m not in here that often,” he replied.
“I know,” she said, flushing. She smiled, wrinkling up her nose. “Just wanted to say something to you. Have a good night.”
As he passed the Big Winner mirror he noticed how rounded his shoulders were. He stood up and pulled them back, stretching his shoulder blades—like angel wings, the chiropractor had told him after Chris’s accident, back when his headaches were nonstop and he worried he had a brain tumor. He really needed to practice better posture. He used to have that naturally from training horses. It was probably the driving. He would exercise in the morning. That kind of self-discipline was something he’d always been good at. It had always been his secret weapon, in business and in life—his ability to pursue the goals he set with unwavering determination. He glanced at his watch. 10:57.
Fuck.
He hurried to the car.
Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) Page 4