Las Vegas Noir

by Jarret Keene

  “Can you really get me out of here?”

  I held her face in my hands and looked directly into her eyes. “I’m gonna get us a blanket first.”

  She laughed again when I rolled off the table. I bumped my hip as I got to my feet. I looked over at her. She was beautiful. For just this moment, it was like it was. I went into the front office to grab a blanket. Raven had rolled over, away from me, when I returned. She was still naked.

  I stopped and looked at her, wishing she didn’t have to go away. But I knew there was no other choice. If she was still here it was dangerous for everyone involved.

  As I approached the illusion I hit the foot release.

  I made myself watch as the spikes came down.

  She turned her head at the sound, but there was no chance to get out of the way. She didn’t even have time to scream. With an illusion, there’s no point in a slow death. Of the forty spikes, no more than six or seven hit her, but it was enough to do the job. The rest slid into their proper channels with a sickening metal-on-metal grate. The blood channels, built into the table for show, worked just like they were supposed to, draining the red flow away from her body and collecting it in a basin at the foot of the table.

  I threw the blanket I was still holding over the whole mess. I got dressed before I retrieved the diamonds from her pants pocket. I had plans for the little beauties.

  The blood was overflowing, dripping on the floor. The basin was never really meant to hold anything. I grabbed a rag to sop it up.

  The back door opened. Pierre Charon stepped in, cell phone in his hand. “She called me.”

  “When?” I asked, not looking up.

  “Now.”

  I went to the other side of the table and lifted the blanket. Her eyes were still open, still filled with shock and horror. Her cell phone was in her hand, the connection still open.

  “She fingered you from the beginning.”

  “It had to be one of us.”

  “You made the right choice.”

  I stood up and tossed the velvet bag to him. It was caught and pocketed in one motion. I was on my honor they were all there.

  “We good?”

  He looked from the bag in his hand to the dead body and back again. He had the diamonds and someone to blame for it. “We’re good,” he said.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  He tilted his head toward Eastern Boulevard. “Eden Memorial. We’ve cashed in a few favors.”

  By the time the hole was filled, the sun was just beginning to rise. Sunrise in Las Vegas is something to behold, the way the rays reflect off the gold and brass of the Strip hotels. With no way to know from which direction the light is really coming, there’s no way to set your compass. I lit a cigarette and basked in its directionless glow.

  ALL ABOUT BALLS

  BY JOSÉ SKINNER

  East Las Vegas

  People in other academic disciplines made fun of American Studies. The joke went: If you check “undecided” one too many times as your major, they put you down for American Studies. Ortiz was in his fifth year as a graduate student in American Studies, and he still hadn’t decided on a topic for his master’s thesis. He hoped Professor Philippe Talon, the ethnographer, might become his thesis advisor, but he’d have to impress the man in some unusual way to earn this honor.

  Dr. Talon, a burly Belgian, was the author of numerous studies of aboriginal peoples throughout the Americas. Talon was fond of debunking other anthropologists’ accounts of the innate peacefulness of native peoples—to him, violence was a constant universal, and he was full of tales of aboriginal violence. Rumor had it that he had eaten human flesh with cannibals in the jungles of eastern Peru, that in Venezuela he had been forced to take part in a ritual castration of a Yanomami captive, and that he had fathered a child among a war-loving, Stone Age people in Brazil. Students who had been to his home reported seeing a shrunken head on his mantel. Ortiz had never spoken to him at length, though whenever the redoubtable professor happened to be in his office, and Ortiz happened to pass by, he invariably glanced in to behold the man buried among his papers and journals, his thick, blondhaired fingers stabbing at his keyboard, his neck spattered with the red tattoo of some indigenous ceremony he’d participated in in the Amazon rain forest.

  In that fifth year of his graduate program, Ortiz decided to go to the annual convention of the American Culture Association. The ACA conference was the main gathering for the American Studies crowd. Ortiz believed a couple of days listening to panel discussions by eminent figures in his field might inspire him to finally decide on a thesis topic. If he got lucky, some of those people might invite him to a few after-sessions drinks; the thought caused him to nibble the ends of his long hair with excitement.

  The conference was being held that year in Las Vegas at a hotel-casino on the Boulder Strip in East Las Vegas called ¡Viva!, a brand-new place with a Latin theme: dealers in sequined matador jackets, waitresses topped with fruit headdresses à la Carmen Miranda, that sort of thing. Ortiz had to go on his own nickel—his university would only pay for his trip if he were presenting a paper, which he wasn’t. But Las Vegas was just half a day’s drive from L.A., and he planned to stay at the Lucky Cuss, a cheap motel on the Boulder Strip not far from ¡Viva!

  It had stormed in the Mojave that spring, and as he drove up I-15 the flowering desert spread vast and golden before him like the carpet of ¡Viva!’s casino floor, which he’d seen on an Internet virtual tour of the place. The air smelled fresh and washed, very unlike casino air, but he kept the windows of his vintage Mustang closed because his hair tangled easily.

  His glossy black hair and high cheekbones occasionally led people to mistake him for an Indian. “Native,” he corrected them, and didn’t disabuse them of the notion. No doubt he did have Native blood, on his Latino father’s side. His mother was English, but his father’s people had been in California since the mission days, and their blood had surely commingled with that of some long-lost tribe. Even better, he might be kin to some still-existing group, one of these tiny tribes with its own casinos and whose members were all millionaires. Maybe he could take a DNA test to prove the connection. That would be something.

  He drew his Vegas street map from his satchel—a satchel made of Moroccan leather, yet old and worn enough to be worthy of an academic—and smoothed it over his steering wheel. He liked studying things when he was driving long stretches—maps, articles, even books. He played a sort of game in which he kept his eyes on the text as long as he dared before snapping them back to the road. He found that while the danger often prevented him from immediately comprehending what he was reading, it had the strange effect of stamping the information photographically in his mind, and afterwards he could recall, in what psychologists called anamnesis, whole passages verbatim: a nifty trick for impressing colleagues.

  The way to ¡Viva! was simple enough: Continue along I-15, then hang a right on Tropicana and keep going east to the Boulder Highway. ¡Viva! stood midway between Sam’s Town and the Lucky Cuss. Sam’s Town had an Old West theme, complete with something called a Western Emporium and a nightly laser show called the “Sunset Stampede.” Vegas! No wonder the American Culture Association loved meeting here.

  He followed the directions he’d memorized and headed east on Tropicana, surprised at how run-down some of the neighborhoods became, jumbles of low-slung bungalows and mobile homes faded in the sun. Obviously not everybody in Vegas was a lucky cuss.

  Curious about a particularly shabby-looking neighborhood, he hung a right onto a street with a paintball store on one corner and a liquor store on the other. He followed the winding street past some more trailers and a dried-up park. Going slow now—the street was full of potholes—he opened his window. The warm air carried odors of raw sewage, boiling corn, and burning rubbish. Farther along, a truly foul scent hit his nostrils and he saw a dead Chihuahua in the gutter, bloated to the size of a dachshund. He rolled his window up fast.

  The
street turned gravelly and petered out at a hodgepodge of trailers and cinder-block huts. In one area, the dwellings were arranged around a kind of courtyard, bare earth save for a dusty elm tree. A compact man dressed entirely in white squatted beneath the tree, hewing, with quick strokes of his machete, a length of wood. The blade of the machete was worn to a wicked thinness: It looked like a long dagger. Behind the man, half-hidden in a doorway, stood a young woman in a white dress colorfully embroidered at the square neckline, biting her knuckles, her black eyes following Ortiz. Two other men, also dressed in white, ducked ghostlike into a squalid alley and disappeared.

  The squatting man looked up. Ortiz waved hesitantly, and the man raised his machete in an aggressive salute. Ortiz followed the line of the machete to its tip, and there, as if speared by the blade, he beheld ¡Viva!’s red neon sign, its letters curved into the shape of a chili pepper.

  There didn’t seem to be any direct way through the wretched little neighborhood to the casino, so Ortiz headed back the way he’d come. But somehow he got turned around in the maze of dirt roads, and found himself driving in a circle. Once again he passed by the dusty square, and once again the young woman’s eyes followed him, and the man with the machete watched him too, this time without greeting. Ortiz clutched the steering wheel with both hands, and noticed that the hair on his arms had risen on end. The stench of the dead dog, and the heat, and the pounding brightness of the light made him want to puke.

  He finally found his way out, and merged with relief into Tropicana’s fast traffic. A few minutes later he arrived at ¡Viva!, where the noise and bustle swallowed him up. He followed the ACA signs up the wide staircase to the mezzanine and registered for the conference. A harried fellow graduate student gave him a canvas bag containing a name tag, a pen, a refrigerator magnet in the shape of a horseshoe, and a book-length schedule of presentations and events. The letters of his last name stood impressively large on the name tag. It was the first time he’d ever had a name tag. He pinned it carefully on his guayabera, above his heart.

  Professor Talon wasn’t listed among the presenters, but this came as no surprise; when Talon left campus, it was to penetrate little-known parts of the world and encounter their peoples, not attend academic conferences. Talon was the real thing: the utterly fearless ethnographer who knew that fieldwork was everything.

  Ortiz headed to a panel on masculinities. Masculinities Studies was hot; there were six masculinities panels at that year’s conference. The one about to start was called “All About Balls” and it offered three presentations: “‘You’re Not a Eunuch, Are You?’ Pirates of the Caribbean’s Postcolonial Masculinities;” “The Leisured Testes: White Ball-Breaking as Surplus Machismo in Jackass”; and “Huevos and Balls: The (Fr)agilities of Maleness in Latino/a Discourse.”

  “All About Balls” was held, fittingly enough, in the Pancho Villa Salon. The audience was well-represented by what Ortiz had come to identify as the various academic types: the jovial older male professor, silver-bearded and bearlike, comfortable in his tenured professorship; the anxious junior faculty member, needing that next book to clinch tenure, building her CV by sponsoring panels at the conference while realizing that all this conferencing was cutting into her writing time; fellow graduate students dressed in solid black, ironic and cool, prepared to declare the whole scene a fraud if they found they couldn’t finish their dissertations. During the presentations, the older male professors laughed a lot, the assistant professors listened intently, and the grad students feigned jadedness. Afterwards, a few people from the audience, including Ortiz, went up to the front to introduce themselves and chat with the speakers, all professors from various institutions.

  “That took some balls,” Ortiz told the huevos-and-balls man. He was a pint-sized Chicano in a sports jacket and tie. Trim mustache. Ortiz had to stoop to meet the humorless gaze behind the man’s rimless glasses.

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” said the professor, eyeing Or-tiz’s name tag.

  There were certain people who took an immediate dislike to Ortiz, and this guy was evidently one of them. They didn’t care for Ortiz’s lustrous hair or his height or his colorful guayabera shirts or his authentic huaraches. They took him for a poser. Ortiz, in turn, pegged the guy for a former Chicano activist turned academic. Those types were always bitter and hyper-critical. They could never take a joke.

  “I mean, like, all of it,” Ortiz stammered. “The panel.”

  “Well, it’s all about balls, right?” the man said dryly.

  There was nothing on Ortiz’s name tag to identify him as a lowly graduate student and thereby unworthy of such animosity. The name tags gave only the bearer’s name—sans title—and school. The professor hailed from a college Ortiz had never heard of. Perhaps, Ortiz thought, he felt threatened by Ortiz’s far more prestigious university.

  “What’s your work on, Dr. Ortiz? Mr. Ortiz?” said the professor.

  “Mr.,” Ortiz said. “Oh, different things.” It was flattering to be taken as having a doctorate and “working on” something.

  “Ah, different things.”

  “I work with Philippe Talon,” said Ortiz.

  “Never heard of him,” said the assistant professor, turning away.

  Heat rose on Ortiz’s face as his testicles rose to his body. He stalked from the room and tromped down the stairs. That was bullshit! Everyone knew of Dr. Talon.

  Down in the gaming area, Ortiz bought a bucket of nickels and played an old-fashioned one-armed bandit, depositing the coins and pulling the lever fiercely, looking up occasionally to observe the dealers at the card tables absurdly done up in spangled matador’s jackets. Weren’t the players aware of the irony of being dealt to by “bullfighters”? Didn’t they know, stupid bovines, that in the end, the matador always wins? Some people just didn’t get irony. Wasn’t it incredibly ironic that a professor who had just given a talk on the follies of machismo should act so macho?

  His coins soon gone, he got up and roamed the depths of the casino. Sure enough, just as pictured on the ¡Viva! web-site, the waitresses sported ridiculous Carmen Miranda headdresses made of what appeared to be real fruit. The bartenders wore billowing white shirts and wide red sashes around their waists, like the men who ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Ma-riachi trumpeters blasted away from a corner of the bar.

  A display near the hotel check-in desk caught Ortiz’s eye. It was a series of life-sized dancing, grinning skeletons carved of wood, the male figures wearing wide sombreros, the females in lacey granny dresses, their bony limbs comically akimbo.

  A voice came from behind him. “Viva la muerte!”

  Ortiz turned and beheld a young bellhop pushing a cart of luggage toward the elevators.

  The bellhop brought his load next to Ortiz. “Pretty wild, huh?” he said. “It’s like Day of the Dead stuff.”

  “Yeah. Who makes it?”

  “Some kind of Mexicans. Not your regular kind of Mexicans. I mean …” The kid’s pimples disappeared in his flush, and he looked away. “Here, I think we got some information about them.”

  Ortiz followed the bellhop to the brochure rack. Not your “regular kind of Mexicans,” were they? Well, he was just a kid. Learning how easy it was to fuck up when you talked to people. Ortiz could sympathize.

  The bellhop produced a brochure about ¡Viva!’s collection of south-of-the-border folk art and handed it to Ortiz. “Enjoy!” he said, moving his cargo along.

  Apparently the hotel-casino had a whole gallery somewhere full of colorful ceramics and squat onyx figurines and more of these dancing skeletons. The skeletons, according to a brief blurb, were carved by an indigenous people from the remote lowlands of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. The Mictlanos were famous for their wood carving, which they executed entirely with machetes.

  Could the odd barrio he’d stumbled across earlier that day be a community of transplanted Mictlanos? Certainly in L.A. it was possible to find neighborhoods of indigenous peoples from sp
ecific regions of Mexico or Guatemala. Why not Las Vegas?

  The Mictlanos—that wasn’t what they called themselves, but the name bestowed upon them by surrounding peoples. Mictlán, in Aztec mythology, was the ninth circle of the underworld, or something like that. Ortiz tried to remember what else Dr. Talon had said about them in his lectures. Weren’t they the group Dr. Talon had referred to as having particularly “attractive” but “dangerous” women, a remark that had brought complaints from some of the female students? Ortiz recalled Talon describing with relish some kind of ritual confrontation between two Mictlano men over a woman, something about a midnight machete battle following a stylized exchange of insults, and a grave dug ahead of time for the loser.

  Ortiz whipped out his laptop and Googled Mictlan and Las Vegas and got zero hits. So: If this truly was a group of Las Vegas Mictlanos undiscovered by ethnographers, what a find. What a fucking find! Now that was something he could write about—something that might impress Talon.

  Ortiz abandoned the casino to discover that night had already fallen. The darkness hung thick beyond the lights of the Boulder Strip, as if the Mictlanos (if that’s what they were) had brought the black jungle night with them. He hesitated. Maybe he’d better wait until the next morning before he ventured back into the barrio. But had Talon ever hesitated to go anywhere on the face of the earth? Of course not. The man had balls. Ortiz had balls. He had to check out his discovery one more time before going to his motel.

  The odor of the putrid Chihuahua guided him to the square. His Mustang bounced along the rutted road, its headlights brushing up and down the tree the man had been sitting under earlier in the day, carving his wood. Ortiz came to a stop under the tree and shut off the engine. Silence and darkness rushed in on him.

  A man’s gruff voice erupted suddenly in the quiet, followed by a slapping sound. Another slap and a woman’s cry: “Ay, ay!” A lull; and then another slap, another sharp “Ay!” It was impossible to tell where exactly the commotion was coming from. Ortiz expected to hear weeping or sobbing, but no: Only a stoic silence followed.