by Baird Harper
Bello waits for a spot to open up at the five-dollar table. The dealer is a skinny kid with hair as red as his vest who wears the uniform like a costume. He’s bored and courteous the way dealers are, but without the cold air coming off his chin. Something sparks in his eyes when a fat lady hits on a hard sixteen, and Bello can see how smart the kid is. He wants to know why the kid isn’t in school.
“I wanted to ride the high seas,” the young dealer replies.
A man in a Sox cap laughs hard at this to show everyone he understands a joke.
“Actually,” the dealer adds more sincerely, “I dropped out.” He pulls an ace of hearts off the pile and lays it on top of Bello’s ten. Blackjack.
It goes like this for forty minutes, a run of luck like he’s never had before. Bello plays it soft and wins two of every three hands. He plays reckless and takes three of four. He gets dumb and still breaks even. His forty turns into five hundred before the kid is replaced by a gray-haired woman who beats Bello seven times in a row.
//
The bar is separated from the gambling floor by tall glass panes that muffle the chimes of the slots. Horses race on the TVs. Bello takes a seat and watches the blackjack tables. He lays his hands on the bar top. They’ve finally quit shaking.
“Those hands hot today, sir?” the bartender asks.
Bello orders a whiskey on the rocks. As the bartender makes his drink, he thinks of those terrible minutes underneath the ice, the memory as fresh as last night’s dream. And now this extra day demands that he endure it yet again, once more before it’s all over.
“Before what’s all over?” the bartender asks, setting the drink down.
Bello looks up, trying to retrieve his bearings. He can feel the ship tilt just so. “Someone I know is getting out of jail,” he explains. “Early. For good behavior.” Bello gulps his drink, feeling the liquor seep out the hole in his gut, his entire torso growing swamped. “I went up there today and waited for him, and do you know what they said to me?”
The bartender wags his head.
“He’s getting out tomorrow!” It feels like he’s delivering the punch line that the man on the park bench had been waiting for. But no part of this is funny. “What do you suppose that one extra day could be about?”
A grim smile creeps onto the bartender’s face. “Maybe, for one day, the guy’s behavior wasn’t so good.”
Bello sees the red-haired kid replace a dark-skinned dealer near the buffet. From the distance, without his glasses, they’re just shapes and colors. But with the young dealer, Bello can feel the luck. He carries his drink out to the table, makes a quick stack of his chips, and pushes in.
“It’s ten here, sir,” the kid says.
Bello looks around. The other faces wait for him to understand.
“Ten dollars,” says a man in a cowboy hat.
The kid’s eyes study Bello, a quick scrutinizing glance like he thinks this bumpkin act is Bello’s way toward the upper hand. But this isn’t poker. There’s no value in duping the rest of the table. Everyone’s luck is his own. He pushes in five more dollar chips and the winning wave picks up again. The kid drops double face cards on him four hands in a row. When he finally loses, the cowboy screams, “I didn’t think that happened to you, old-timer!” A large pockmarked goon with a name badge comes over to see if everything’s all right. The cowboy grumbles that everything is just perfect. When the pit boss slides away, the young dealer resumes. The cowboy busts. Bello hits blackjack.
When the kid gets replaced, Bello leaves the table immediately. His forty is now over two thousand. He leans against a slot machine, finishing his drink. He watches the red-haired kid take over at a twenty-dollar table. There are only three other people willing to put twenty dollars down at a time—two men in gray suits and a greasy-haired mobster with reflective sunglasses. Bello sits and pushes in. He loses on a nineteen, then wins four of five. His stacks look absurd. He accidentally hits when he means to stay, and the five of diamonds makes his sixteen into twenty-one. The good fortune is overwhelming. It’s as though he’s left his own life and wandered into someone else’s. He feels warm and buoyant and new, like a born-again believer stripped down to only his original sins. He separates three hundred dollars from one wing of his chip pile and pushes it to the kid’s elbow.
“This is for your college fund,” Bello says.
The dealer’s face whitens. “I can’t accept that, sir.”
The mobster across the table pulls his sunglasses down his nose. “Take it, kid. This old man’s senility isn’t your problem.”
Bello turns to the mobster, his hand settling on the lump of steel beneath the fabric of his pants. “You think I care what you say? I don’t care at all. I’ve got nothing to lose here.” He can see himself in the man’s lenses—two withered twins skulking behind piles of wealth.
The pit boss checks in again. “Is there a problem here?”
“Everything’s fine,” the young dealer insists.
The mobster points to Bello. “This amateur’s showing up the rest of the table.”
A small crowd has gathered. Some young men in fraternity sweatshirts, a group of women in workout clothing, and standing near the dealer, Bello recognizes the removal services man from the park bench, his wide grin, his red sweatshirt. From across the table, without his eyeglasses, the autumn tree on the man’s chest looks like flames again. The stranger’s pale eyes lift and meet his own.
This, Bello thinks, is not being unmemorable.
The pit boss leans over the table, his neck folds biting a gold chain, his doughy hands spreading out over the felt. “Congratulations on your good luck today, sir. We’d like to invite you to join a table in the high rollers’ club.” He slides a gold-embossed ticket to Bello.
The pit boss sends the kid on break and calls in a new dealer. The disputed markers go back into Bello’s stacks. A woman with a headset helps him carry his winnings to the window where the man behind the glass pushes a much smaller stack of chips into the metal tray. The markers are all glossy gray except for three stray yellow chips.
“What’s this?” Bello asks. “Where’s the cash?”
The woman with the headset smiles. “Don’t you want to keep going?”
Bello takes the gray chips into his hands—each one worth five hundred dollars—and counts sixteen of them. They’re a color he’s never seen before, with greater heft, it seems, and a thick glassy varnish. A new class of wealth to attend the uncanny run of luck. “Keep going?”
“Keep playing,” the woman says. “Or, if you’re finished, you can cash out.”
All around him the evening has brought on a horde of fresh faces, the shrill clanging of the slots overtaken by the lower, fuller sound of so many voices begging after luck. “Just these for now.” Bello drops the three yellow markers back into the metal tray, and the man behind the glass replaces them with a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Bello fans them out, the smooth virgin bills. This was supposed to be the last day of his life, but now it feels like the beginning of something, the thrill of luck and money and the savory reek of the all-you-can-eat buffet making vengeance seem a distant, unlikely task.
The woman with the headset steps closer, touching his elbow. “Is something wrong, sir?”
“I could use a little fresh air,” he says. “All this excitement, it’s got me feeling . . .” The woman’s eyes go dim waiting for him to finish. She seems familiar to him in this moment—her weary gaze and glossed lips—but the headset interrupts this impression, making her someone from the present after all.
//
Outside, the night has come on. Droves of gamblers pour past him at the entrance. Beyond them, the homeless shake their cups. He quickens his pace across the parking lot, hands palming the chips in his pockets, the pistol. He looks up after several minutes and realizes he’s somehow missed the lighted concourse leading to the hotel. The big pink building floats in the sky behind him now, but when he walks directly toward it, he com
es to a high fence between the two parking lots. He turns and shuffles along the fence, unsure now where he is in relation to the casino. Now and again, voices pop up and he wheels frantically to wait for a pair of old ladies to pass, then a bunch of college boys, a transvestite in heels. Each time, he finds his hand sweating on the pistol. He tells himself he’s not supposed to care about the money, or about his life, but then there are steps behind him again, and he worries about losing his luck.
He steps up onto the narrow band of grass between the curb and the fence so his own footfalls don’t obscure the sound of approaching footsteps, until he reaches a gap in the fence where a tree has recently been cut down. In the hollowed center of the stump, a hoard of shining coins glints dimly in the shadows. He reaches for them, then stops short, realizing that the pile of silver is actually a roiling mass of beetles.
He climbs over the stump to the other side, ducking behind a parked car to watch the gap in the fence, the black sky divvied into a thousand chain-link plots. His heart sprints. The wind carries the murmur of a distant bingo caller. Then a sound of footsteps again, a cough. A silhouette climbs over the stump, a thin figure in khaki pants and a dark sweatshirt with the hood drawn up. Bello presses himself against the car, palms the gun inside his pocket. The figure approaches, so close now that his mint gum is in the air.
Bello lunges from the shadows. “Why are you following me?”
Familiar hands push back the hood and the young dealer’s face materializes, then his bright red hair, tousled now and wild.
Bello leaves the gun in his pocket. “What do you want?”
“You really blew it in there.” The kid glances over his shoulder. “We could’ve gone on till the end of my shift if you hadn’t dropped all that cash on me. You think the pit boss isn’t gonna raise an eyebrow at that kind of tip?”
“So, you want the money after all?” Bello says. “Is that what this is?”
“I was thinking more like fifty-fifty.” The kid shakes his head. “If you hadn’t dropped that tip, we could’ve made even more than—how much?”
“I won eight thousand dollars,” Bello says.
The kid puts out his hand. “Well, half of that is still something.”
Bello stares at the open palm. “You think I was cheating in there?”
The dealer squints back curiously, as if he’s trying to discern a joke.
“Is something funny to you?” Bello asks.
“You didn’t see it, did you?”
“See what?”
The kid makes a flourish with his long fingers, as though sprinkling dust over his fist, then throws open the hand to show an ace of hearts in the palm.
Bello rips the gun out of his pocket, puts it under the dealer’s chin. “I was riding luck in there, not some shady arrangement.”
The kid raises his hands. “Okay, pops,” he says, still smirking as he tips his head back. “Okay. I guess it’s your luck even though I’m the one doling it out.”
Bello touches the gun to the kid’s throat for good measure, then turns and staggers through the lot. He pauses on the running board of a van to let his heart settle, every breath a taste of asphalt, car exhaust. A sedan trolls by on its way out into the world, its occupants still wearing their glassy gambling stares. He shakes the bullets out of the chamber and pockets them. He does not want to kill the wrong person.
//
Inside the hotel, he asks the desk for aspirin, but they only have Tylenol, so he goes to the bar and orders a whiskey. He pours it into his riddled stomach, and summons again the sour, vengeful man.
After he sets the tumbler on the bar top, he watches the vaporous outline of his clutch vanish from the side of the glass. “These hands were hot today,” he insists. And for a moment he thinks he should go find the young dealer and tell him what luck really is. Shaking down an armed vigilante in a dark parking lot and coming out alive—that’s luck. Or the removal services man in the park with his unsolicited advice. In life, he’d said, we don’t usually get to see the trouble coming. But hadn’t the trouble already come? Years ago?
A middle-aged woman on the next stool watches him swallow and breathe. She stinks of hair spray and vodka, so much perfume it holds a shine to her neck. She leans a bit closer and asks, “You win tonight, honey?”
Bello looks up, studying her blurred shape in the mirror behind the bar. “Tomorrow,” he mutters, “is my day.”
She swivels toward him, her knee-high boots connecting with his thigh. “Well, I’m more of a tonight kind of girl, myself.”
She looks almost familiar, her tired eyes lolling in the sockets.
“It’s always about tomorrow with you gamblers.” She tips back an empty drink. “But what would you be doing right now if there was no tomorrow?”
“Can you stop that?” Bello asks. “It’s embarrassing, for both of us.” In the mirror, he watches her absorb these words, her eyes narrowing, her mouth dropping open.
“This is when I throw a drink in your face,” she says, “if I had a drink.”
He digs into his pocket and drops the wad of twenty-dollar bills on the bar top. “Whatever she’s drinking.”
The bartender brings over a tall clear cocktail.
“That’s better,” the woman says, stirring her icy drink. “Now tell me all about your big plans for tomorrow.”
Bello feels his heart peeling again, a textured sensation, as if the surrounding muscles are losing their grip, the chambers dividing. “I was going to kill someone today,” he says, “but now I have to wait.”
The woman’s eyelids flutter sleepily. “You don’t have to try to scare me, honey. I find the cash way more impressive.”
Bello puts his hands on his thighs, feeling the contents of his pockets, the muted shapes of luck and vengeance. But there is room for only one confrontation. “Tell me something,” he says, trying to sound benign. “Do you know who the Soyfield Strangler is?”
Her knee lifts off his thigh. “Okay, now you’re scaring me.”
“I mean it,” he says. “Who is he? I want you to tell me.”
She puts her drink down and backs off the far side of the stool. “I bet you think you’re funny,” she says. “But you’re not. You’re really just sick.”
He watches her gather her things and leave, wonders if she’s getting the police. Someone should, because a man who drowns in his dreams has too little to lose. Tomorrow, the people he met today will ask what they could have done to save a life, but their answers will be the same as his: You cannot stop the past.
The bartender looks up. “Pardon?”
Bello palms his tumbler, but his grip leaves no fog on the glass. He slides off the stool, all his cash still on the bar top. “For your college fund,” Bello says. But the bartender is someone else of course, a big Irishman with a beard who twists his brow and says, “Are you all right, sir?”
Then the woman comes back into the bar, already having found a new companion, a big fellow in a blazer she leads across the room by the hand. They sit at a table by the window, the fat man’s frame a dark blur in the foreground, the woman’s neck shining open every time she throws her head back to laugh. From this distance, Bello can’t tell if she’s paying any attention to him. So he walks across the room and stands right behind the fat man, staring at her, waiting for eye contact. When the woman finally meets his gaze, her throat constricts.
//
Upstairs in his room, he undresses to his T-shirt and boxers. Loading the bullets feels like putting a thing back together, an easy repair, metal back with metal. He sets the gun on the nightstand and stacks the chips beside, pulls the chain on the bedside lamp. Sitting in the dark, he tongues the ring from its nestle between cheek and gum, slides it forward and spits it gently onto his palm. The wet hoop sparkles in the heavy dark. When he throws back the comforter and climbs into the sheets the bed is so cold he can already feel himself slipping under the water. His hands grow icy, his luck running away. He is unmemorable. He is Sm
alltime. He thinks: There is still tomorrow.
TIME AND TROUBLE
Kate eats this day’s breakfast and reads its news. She takes a shower and gets dressed. She packs sandwiches for Hartley to eat on the ride home. The car is full of gas, the pantry stocked, the house spotless. All because this is the day her boy is finally being released. But then her husband comes into the living room saying something with the phone in his hand, and the day loses its meaning.
“I don’t understand,” she says.
Neelish’s hands wring the phone. “I just called the prison to double-check the timing,” he explains, “and they said he’s not being released until tomorrow.”
“Why would you call?” Kate demands, as if the act of asking has caused the delay. She thinks of the Greek myth, the one about the child abducted and taken to the underworld, to be released under the one condition that the mother not turn around to check on the child’s progress on the long walk back toward the world of the living. Or was it spouses who’d been put through this mythic ordeal? She can’t remember. Kate’s field is language arts, but this fall she’s a long-term substitute for a social studies teacher on maternity leave. All month it’s been ancient Greece, the hallway littered with papier-mâché columns, Ionic or Doric or whatever they are. She knew the difference at one time, but now, with Hartley’s days winding down, anticipation has made her stupid.
“Did I write down the wrong date?” she asks. Her absentmindedness infects everything lately. She’ll enter the pantry without a clue as to what she came to retrieve. Or she’ll find herself walking down the middle school corridor past the sagging paper ruins, forgetting why she left her room to begin with. What period is it? How many days are left?
For almost four years she said nothing, but with the day creeping so close she couldn’t not tell them about Hartley. As if she’s proud of him now. Last week, during third period, she came out of a daydream about picking him up from prison, and the fifth graders caught her in this reverie, their eyes reflecting her own trembling excitement. “My son has been in prison,” she announced. “He got into a car when he shouldn’t have, but he’s finally coming home, and now all that is ancient history.” She could see their minds chewing on it, the smart ones already chasing down the truth.