“June,” he used to ask, “what are you thinking?”
And sometimes June would feel bad, and she wished she knew what she had been thinking, or why she had done what she did. But other times, she would flash her blinding smile, laugh, say, “Poppa, it was fun.”
June’s father was an amateur photographer. He had built a darkroom in the basement and spent his evenings there. When she was very small, she hadn’t even known he was home. She thought he went to work after dinner the way he did after lunch. Later, when she knew he was in the basement, she’d been afraid to follow him down into it. An eerie red light glowed when he opened the darkroom door, and often it smelled as if he were striking matches, so in June’s mind, the darkroom was associated with fire. In second grade, a new girl in school told June about hell, and when she described the fires where sinners would burn, howling and howling without ever being incinerated, June thought of the basement, and pictured her father, with his sore red hands, as the flaming miscreant. It made her cry. Hazel, the new girl, took this as the sign of a guilty conscience, and for the next four months, until she left the school as abruptly as she had arrived, she called June “sinner” under her breath.
Hazel frightened her, because by eight, June already had the sense that she wasn’t quite good. Why couldn’t she wear a dress that her mother had carefully sewn and pleated without tearing the skirt or getting ink on the pale cotton? How did she lose her book on the way to school, and why did pencils break and cups drop and pages get ripped whenever she came near? June was easily distracted by the sense of things: the rub of a neatly stitched hem on her thigh, the round, hard smoothness of that pencil, the sound of paper fibers splitting one from the other, the intoxicating scent of a pink flower shooting out of a crack in the sidewalk. The idea that her parents had somehow ended up with the wrong little girl—one who was hapless and pell-mell when they were deliberative and precise—had already formed vaguely in her mind.
The great work of her father’s photography was June’s own childhood: hundreds of two-inch black-and-white squares, carefully documenting a little girl with perfectly combed hair sitting at a piano, a baby lifting her dark head to stare at the white muzzle of a whiskery dog, three children dressed as Indians with feathers stuck in their headbands, a toddler resting a fat finger on the base of a flickering menorah. Her father’s photos were perfect. In seventy years, they would still be detailed representations of a time hardly anyone remembered, but to June, even as a child, they spoke to her mostly as depictions of how she was meant to be: clean and silent and still, instead of rumpled and impetuous and inclined to pull at any stray thread.
And yet she had been loved. Her quiet, careful parents, not given to demonstrative acts, had somehow made this clear. She was loved.
So how could she have gone so long between visits? How could she have left them at all? She didn’t know. If there was any answer, it was that she hadn’t done any of it—as she hadn’t knocked over the cup, as she hadn’t lost her sweater—she had merely lived, from this moment to the next, in this day or that, and there had been so much to attract her gossamer attention. June didn’t think forward and back in quite the way that her parents did, but when this caught up with her, when she had made some error she would never have chosen to make, if she had thought it possible for her father to die without seeing Marshall—for her father to die at all—then she grieved her lack of foresight. And again she felt like the little girl who broke the pencils and snorted at the teacher and said the wrong thing when the rabbi asked what it was that a child should do.
“June, what are you thinking?”
“Poppa, it isn’t thinking at all.”
So she stumbled through this time, with Marshall doing something new every week, and her mother thrilled with every sound and gesture. Now and then, her mom would pull out a jacket and say, “Would you like to take this to Del?” or “I’m going to give these shoes to the auxiliary; is that fine?”
Their days filled up with visits. Nearly everyone she’d ever known was still in Clinton Hill, but they didn’t ask about her life in Nevada. Perhaps Vegas was a taboo, embarrassing to ask about, like whether or not she was a virgin when she and Walter got married (of course not) or whether Leon Kronenberg had really felt her breast (he had, more than once).
It rankled her that people found it awkward to talk about Vegas. She imagined that they looked at her and thought instead of the showgirls in Minsky’s Follies. They disapproved, when topless dancers were not that big a deal, though it was amazing when they all walked out in a line, their backs to the audience, and then spun around in unison, pasties whirling. All those beautiful girls, tall, with long legs and false eyelashes—the effect was dramatic. It did surprise one.
Of course, people here would not approve of the way she and Del lived, the things they did: Marshall in his playpen in a casino, the late nights in a club, the drinks and the cash and the energy of it all. June wanted not to care about this—nobody would ever expect she did care—but it lingered in her mind.
Finally, she bought her own ticket back and didn’t tell Del or her mother until after it was done. Once she had made the decision, she could feel sad about leaving Clinton Hill. Something in her responded to this place: to its gray sky, its squawk of seagulls over the bay, its light, its air, the way people talked, even the smell of the tanneries in summer. These all moved her, they were so familiar, and yet it was impossible. Vegas was her home now.
Del picked her up at the airport.
June was anxious, so her hands shook. She walked down the stairs from the plane with Marshall in her arms. He looked suddenly like a little boy, wearing red pants and a blue jacket. He had on shiny cordovan shoes, with laces, which June had bought him in New York. She was wearing a brown-and-white dress, with a wide patent belt, and a small hat pinned on the side of her head. She had given a lot of thought to their appearance. She was rarely nervous, but here she was, about to see her husband, to show him his adored son, and she felt light-headed and wondered if they were wanted.
Del was standing in the sun about twenty feet back from the bottom of the jet stairs, just behind a woman and her two children who were waiting for someone else. He looked uneasy too. He had his hat in his hands, and when he saw them, he raised it high, as if to wave them in. June relaxed and held up her hand, and Marshall dug his face into her shoulder and kicked his new shoes into her stomach. Then Del was holding them both, and he was kissing her head and kissing Marshall, and Marshall was not sure whether to laugh or cry, and June couldn’t remember why she had been afraid; why she had imagined that Del had not missed her.
“Well, my grown-up man. What tricks have you got to show your dad?”
Del had Marshall in his arms, he was grinning, and Marshall seemed to remember him; he dropped his face toward Del, and their heads cracked together, like a shot. Marshall started to cry, and June made a sound, and Del rubbed his head ruefully. Then June reached up and kissed Del, and he kissed her back, and she felt the warmth of it right through her middle, and knew she was right. This was where she belonged. Where Marshall belonged. She was so glad to be home.
5
On the day Ray Jackson was killed, June was at the house with Marshall. When the door opened, she expected Del to be bringing ice cream, but instead, her husband stumbled in, looking raw and panicked in a way she had never seen. He wrapped his arms around her and cried. When he finally spoke, his words were almost unintelligible. Just for an instant, June wondered how Del would react if something ever happened to her.
He choked out that Ray had been shot—by some lousy drunk, a drifter—and June thought that Ray must have had the night’s take with him. When he was in town, he took the money to the bank for Del. It could have been Del. It could have been Del who was shot. Later, June questioned this thought. Cora slipped that Ray had been on his way home from the bank when it happened, and Leo told the pit bosses not to bring their kids in to swim for a while.
That didn�
��t sound like a drifter.
But that first day, when she barely recognized her husband for the enormity of his grief, June kept silent about the relief that flooded her, imagining that it had been a drifter after the take, and that somehow, incredibly, it had not been Del with the cash that morning.
Del’s friendship with Ray was part of the life he had lived before her. She knew how much he meant to her husband, but she didn’t really know him. He was on the payroll. Security. He went back and forth between LA and Las Vegas. Whatever Ray did for Del rarely put him at the El Capitan, and when he was there, he was formal with June. He called her ma’am, in a way that made her feel silly. She didn’t want him to treat her this way, and yet she hadn’t known how to make him stop. The few times she had tried, smiling or laughing or offering an inside joke about Del, he had been quiet, and she had felt embarrassed.
Ray had the capacity to be still. Twice, June hadn’t even realized he was in a room with her. He was large and very dark, and June had seen him dance, sinuous and graceful. He spoke softly, even when everyone around him was excited, or in the middle of a casino floor, with the racket of dealers calling bets and coins dropping into bins. There had been only one time when Ray had treated June with any familiarity. She was pregnant with Marshall, and unexpectedly, he had placed a thick finger on her stomach and then leaned in to whisper how glad he was that she and Del would have a child. This gesture had moved June; somehow he cared for her baby.
Of course, Ray had children of his own—two or three; she wasn’t sure. In all these years, she and Del had never had him and his wife to dinner, the two had never joined them at their booth in the Midnight Room. This seemed strange now, that June would not know someone Del loved so deeply, that she would have met Ray’s wife only once, that she would not know his children’s names or exactly how old they were. When she returned his wife’s ring a few months after they were married, June suggested to Del that they all go out to dinner, but Del looked at her oddly—where would they have gone?—and said that he would send the ring over with one of the casino hosts. June should pick out some flowers, and perhaps a hat. Ray’s wife liked hats.
So June had ordered an extravagantly expensive hat from New York, and she thought Del might comment on the price, but instead he simply thanked her for choosing it.
In the weeks that followed, June worried about Ray’s wife and his children. She asked Del if they could do something for them, and he answered sharply that of course he already had.
“How’s Augusta?” June asked, the name unfamiliar on her lips.
“Not very well,” he said, in a clipped way that hurt June. After that first day, when Del had sobbed against her, he had not shared his feelings about Ray. It was as if he were angry at her for not caring in the way he cared, though she had done everything she could: sent flowers, attended the funeral, dressed Marshall in a navy-blue suit though the church was small and hot, and he had struggled fiercely to get out of her arms.
Ray’s oldest child, a girl, had jumped into Del’s embrace after the funeral. This startled June, and Marshall had burst into tears, so June had walked away to console him without learning the little girl’s name, without getting a chance to talk to Ray’s wife. She wondered if this is what had made Del angry.
If it wasn’t a drifter, who was it?
Who would kill Ray Jackson? Who would kill anyone associated with Hugh?
Hugh had put up the money for the El Capitan. He lived in LA and didn’t come to Las Vegas because there had been some problem in the past; some reason he couldn’t return to Nevada. Ray handled things with Hugh.
June didn’t like Hugh, and she had been grateful that it was Ray who took care of what the man needed, and she wondered whether Del would now be the one to go back and forth to LA to see him.
She wanted to ask her husband about this—to ask Del what Hugh knew of Ray’s death, to ask him what Hugh might do in response—but Del was closed and angry these days, and she didn’t dare. He had asked her to stay home with Marshall for a few weeks until things quieted down—whatever that meant—and working at home, doing the books while the new maid, Binnie, made Marshall’s lunch or set him down for a nap, June wondered about Hugh.
Eddie had once asked Del about him. They’d all been drinking—even Del was a little in his cups—and Eddie asked how Del and Ray had ended up working with Hugh. June was surprised when Del answered. He never talked about Hugh, and sometimes he didn’t even acknowledge that he knew him when his name came up in conversation.
Del told Eddie that it started when he and Ray were just kids, maybe twelve. Hugh had come to the casino where they worked. He was in his midtwenties, and he’d been on his own awhile. He already had a reputation.
“How much this place pay you?” Hugh said to Ray.
“Thirty cents an hour.”
“And him?”
“Forty.”
Hugh looked from Ray to Del and back to Ray again.
“You’re bigger than your friend. How come you making thirty cents?”
Ray didn’t say anything. Kept his head down.
“Shut up, Hugh,” said Del.
“Shut up? You telling me to shut up?”
“Yeah. Shut up.”
“Those are dangerous words, Skinny.” Hugh moved closer to Del, near enough to speak in his ear. “You think you’re safe ’cause of your friend? Your friend who isn’t making as much money as you are?”
“Ray and I split our pay.”
Hugh whistled. “Is that so?”
Neither Del nor Ray said a word.
“That true, Ray? He give you a nickel for every hour he works?”
“Yup.”
Del stepped away from Hugh, then leaned down to pick up another crate and go back to work.
“Well, that’s another thing altogether.”
Ray joined Del. Hugh didn’t move, just watched the two boys.
“How’d you guys like to make a dollar an hour? Each?”
“Yeah, right. You gonna pay us a dollar an hour, Hugh?” Del was mad. He didn’t want any trouble with Hugh, and his grandmother would take a belt to his backside just for talking to him.
“I might. If you’re up to it.”
“What we got to do?” said Ray.
“Collect some tickets. That’s all. Just the tickets. No money.”
And June gathered that that was how it all started. Del and Ray collected the slips of paper on which people wrote down their bets, and dropped them off with Hugh at night. Somebody else collected the money. It wasn’t until Del got a lot older that he ever collected any money.
By the time Vegas got too risky for Hugh—by the time he was well known for a short and dangerous fuse—he and Ray and Del had been working together for more than fifteen years. Hugh was making a lot of money, running a lot of games. But the county and the state were cracking down. They wanted to keep the feds out of Nevada, and guys like Hugh made that tougher. It was Hugh who figured out that the real money was going to be in the legal casinos; that Del should get one of the new gaming licenses, that he was the only one of the three who could.
So Del had applied for the license, and eventually Hugh put up the money for the El Capitan. Mostly he stayed in California, where he was safe from the Nevada authorities, and it was Ray who attended to whatever Hugh wanted done. For years, June had seen Hugh only in the middle of the night, in their living room, and always with a couple of men standing bodyguard.
Very early on, though, she’d met Hugh in more ordinary circumstances. He’d come to a show when she and Del were dating, and after they said their good-byes, just as he started down the street, Hugh turned and called, “You bet, Del. She’s perfect. She’s gonna be just perfect!”
It irritated her to remember this. The way he’d spoken as if she weren’t there. Who was Hugh to say something about who Del was dating? And why had Del let him?
“I don’t like Hugh,” she had told Del that night. “I don’t like him at all.”
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“Well, that’s good. He’s not someone you should like. But don’t worry about it. You’re not gonna have to worry about Hugh, darlin’.”
She had liked the way Del said “darlin’.”
6
At lunch, Shirley said that it was nice how colored people could sing and all, but that didn’t make it right that white and colored should mix in a restaurant. Nancy said that nobody did anything when Harry Belafonte swam in the Thunderbird pool, but that the Flamingo had burned Lena Horne’s sheets after letting her stay in a room. Shirley said it all came back to money: that the casinos made so much money on the colored performers, they would let them do anything. Sleep in the hotels, play at the tables; Lena Horne’s kids swam in the pool all day long. Colored entertainers used to always stay in one of the rooming houses on the Westside, and then some of them had refused. They brought in so much money, what could the casino hosts do?
And there was going to be trouble, Nancy said, now there was that colored dentist saying he was the head of the N-A-A-C-P in Las Vegas. She drew out the offending letters slowly, enunciating each one, and hitting the final two sounds slightly harder.
June was silent. She was silent more and more now. Now that Del had made it clear he wasn’t going to hire any Negroes for the front of the house. Del said he couldn’t. It was wrong, but he couldn’t fight every battle. He had to keep the El Capitan going. A lot of people’s jobs were at stake. And what about all of the people that worked in the back of the house? June wouldn’t be doing much for them if people stopped coming to the El Capitan.
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