Once the baby was born, she had added expenses and had to pay a neighbor woman to baby-sit. The situation was ironic: Here she was dead broke and the guy who caused the problem was as rich as Midas.
She wasn’t going to the hotel-casino to blackmail Hughes. All she wanted was a little help, maybe a few thousand or even a little house for her and the baby, nothing much, nothing that he couldn’t give without even missing it. Besides, how could he refuse to help a woman who had had his child?
At the hotel, she was stopped by security at the elevators. Benny came down and stared at her like she was someone from the NAACP crashing a KKK party. He looked real unhappy at the bundle of joy in her arms.
She explained what she wanted with trembling lips. And showed him the baby’s birth certificate. “I just need a little help. Just a few dollars until I can get on my feet.”
“Just a minute,” he told her. He whispered to the security guard and the man made a call on the in-house phone. Within a minute two security people came into the area, a man and a woman.
“Come with us,” the woman said.
“Where?”
“We’re going to make you and the baby comfortable while arrangements are made.”
That sounded all right. They would need time to take her request to Hughes. She followed them to a room that was empty except for a small table and two chairs. It instantly struck her that it was a security interrogation room. Not that Vegas security people did much talking with their mouths. Anyone who tried to rip off a casino—cheats or thieves—usually ended up in a shallow grave in the desert. The only guys who managed to rob a Strip casino pulled the stunt three years ago. They got thirty-five hundred dollars in cash from the Flamingo and a short lifeline when a mob enforcer caught up with them on Franklin Street in Hollywood and put four bullets into the back of their heads.
She was in the room for two hours, getting nervous all the time. After the first half an hour, she banged on the door. The security woman answered the door and Betty told her, “I have to go to my car and get a bottle of milk for my baby.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
She gave the baby the bottle and rocked him to sleep. He cried a little, but he was pretty much a good kid.
After two hours, the door opened up and the two thugs came in. She knew who they were, she’d seen enough of them in her years as a lounge girl, gangster types that float around Vegas like scum sloshing in a tidal bay.
“Get up,” the one who talked told her, “you’re paying a visit to the county to change a birth certificate.”
She stared out the window of the Cadillac, watching people, stores, and streets roll by. They rolled by Zackery Street and she had an inspiration.
“Zackery, Zack Riordan.” She held the baby up and nuzzled her nose against his. “What do you think? Zack Riordan? Is that okay? I like Zackery Scott. Did you see him in Flamingo Road with Joan Crawford?”
“It’s okay with me, girlie,” the thug said.
After Howard Hughes, Jr., officially became Zackery Riordan, they drove her to the Greyhound bus depot.
“What’ll it be, girlie?” The thug had gotten into the backseat with her.
“Reno,” she said.
She’d never been to Reno. It was actually a bigger and more important city than Vegas. Compared to it, Vegas was a one-horse town. There’d be more casinos and more jobs than Vegas.
They pulled up near the bus station and the driver went in to buy her a ticket. The man next to her took her left hand. She started to pull it away but he kept a tight grip on her small finger.
“You’re getting two C-notes and a one-way ticket. Make sure you never come back this way.” He jerked back on her finger.
She screamed. “You broke it!”
“Your friend don’t want to hear from you again, no how, capiche?”
She sobbed, dizzy, ready to pass out.
“Now when I say no how, he don’t want to hear from any lawyer, either. You capiche that?”
Reno was 442 miles north of Vegas and the trip up Highway 95 took ten hours. There was little to see and few places to stop in between. The whole Nevada basin was one big sand box created by mountain ranges on each side that blocked out most rainfall. If you liked sunshine and dirt, Nevada was the place for you. But you had to share it with the lizards, snakes, and scorpions because they were the only other takers.
Two hours up the road she got off the bus at Beatty and found a medical doctor-veterinarian in a flat-top adobe near a weathered, bullet-holed sign that said GATEWAY TO DEATH VALLEY.
“I slammed a car door on my finger,” Betty told him. Her hand was swollen. He gave her a curious look, but didn’t ask questions as he set and bandaged her hand and gave her a couple of pain pills.
She caught the next bus heading for Reno. An old prospector, too old to work in the mines, too poor to live in a town, sat next to her all the way to Tonopah. Like everyone else in Nevada, he was looking for pay dirt.
“It’s all free,” he said, gesturing out the bus window at the endless sagebrush desert. “The federal government owns ninety percent of the state and they don’t even want it, ’cept for a little piece to test their bombs on. The rest is up for grabs. You can fence in a thousand acres and nobody would notice.”
He smelled like many old men who spent their last years walking across the desert to the mountains in search of a mother lode, the smell of Prince Albert pipe tobacco, dust, and dried sweat. His salt-and-pepper beard was nicotine stained around the lips and down one side from chewing tobacco. The old-timers smoked Prince Albert because the slender red tin can fit in their shirt pocket and could be used to stake out a mining claim. When a prospector was sure that the mother lode was under his feet, he’d fill out a claim form, stick it in the tobacco can, and bury it under a pile of rocks on the spot.
“What do you do with a thousand acres of dirt?” she asked, knowing the answer. “You can’t grow nothing on it.”
“When I hit it, I’m going to build me a house out here just like the Taj Mahal in India, close enough to the road so everyone can see it when they drive by. I’m going to build you and that little fella there a house, too.”
She slipped him twenty dollars and told him her name when he left the bus at Goldfield. Who knows? Maybe he would find a vein of silver as big as a house. And then her and Zack would be on easy street. She’d heard about a waitress who had that exact thing happen.
Whenever the bus made a stop along the way—places like Goldfield, Tonopah, Mina, Hawthorne, each a dusty little desert town with Highway 95 as its main street—Betty slipped off the bus to try her luck at the three or four slot machines found in every bus waiting room. Her hand hurt like hell.
By the time the bus rolled down Reno’s Virginia Street and under the big lighted sign that announced “The Biggest Little City in the World,” the two hundred dollars the thug gave her was almost gone. She was down to twelve dollars. Leaving the bus depot, she hoofed it with Zack in arms to the most famous gambling casino in the world, Harold’s Club. Not far away was the spot where new divorcees stood at a bridge over the Truckee River and threw their wedding rings into the river for good luck. With only twelve dollars in her pocket, she could use some of those rings and a pawnshop. She was hungry and hadn’t eaten anything since morning in Las Vegas. But a dollar for food meant a dollar less to feed the slots and that much less chance of hitting a big one.
She couldn’t take the baby in, so she sat him down against the wall next to an open door where he’d be in view while she played the nearby slot machines. It was common knowledge that the clubs liked to put their loosest slots near the entry doors so people walking by would be lured in by the sweet music of jackpots. She never had had any better luck with those machines than any other player but she believed in the rumor and always went to slots at entryways when she was getting low on money.
The quarter slot she started feeding had a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar grand payoff for hitting three jokers,
a pot so big it had to be paid by the house because there weren’t enough coins in the machine. Most quarter machines only paid off twenty-five-dollar jackpots. When you hit a jackpot, you could see the coins gushing down on the other side of the glass plate that covered the coin holder. She bought a ten-dollar roll of quarters and busted the paper wrapping by knocking it against the payoff tray. She stuck the quarters in her side pocket and pulled them out one at a time. They lasted longer when she kept them in her pocket. When she pulled the handle, she tried different body English to make the tumblers hit pay dirt, jerking the handle real hard and fast at first, then moving it gently, pulling it down so slow the tumblers started moving one at a time. She could hear coins dropping in payoff trays all around her but all she got was two quarters several times for a cherry and ten for three yellow bells.
In twenty minutes she was down to her last two dollars.
A blackjack dealer playing a machine nearby said, “Not hitting it today?”
“Not hitting it any day.”
“Cute kid you got there. You and your husband must be proud.”
She hesitated. He was nice looking. Kind of cute really, with black curly hair that went with the black pants, white Western shirt, and black string tie of a dealer. She could tell he was sizing her up. She had had a wedding band, but had sold it for five dollars a month ago.
“My husband’s, uh, dead.” She wished the bastard was dead.
She left her seat and got eight quarters for her two dollars from a change girl. When she got back, the dealer was kneeling down, talking to Zack.
“How you doing there, young fellow?” He held out his hand for Zack to latch onto. “Hey, he’s already got a grip.”
She played the quarters with desperation. Every one knew you should never play when you’re desperate because it killed your luck, but she couldn’t help it. When she was down to her last quarter, she stopped and looked back to where the dealer was kneeling by Zack.
“He’s a lucky kid to have such a pretty mom,” he said.
On impulse, she went to them and rubbed the quarter against Zack’s palm.
“Give me luck, baby.”
She gave Zack a kiss on his forehead and went back to the one-armed bandit. She put the quarter in and carefully pulled down the handle, letting the tumblers engage one at a time. She stared as the tumblers spun and then came to a sudden halt, one by one. Joker, joker, joker—a two-hundred-fifty-dollar jackpot!
She let out a scream that might have been heard all the way to Vegas.
“You’re my lucky baby,” she told Zack. “Lucky, that’s what I’m going to call you.”
“New in town?” the dealer asked.
“Real new.”
“I can help you get a job,” he said. “I know the girls up in personnel. And a place to stay.”
Her face began to flush as he gave her a good looking over. She had already gotten her figure back and it was a good one. Who knows? Maybe this was the right guy for her.
Maybe her luck had finally changed.
5
MINA, TWELVE YEARS LATER
Through the dirty classroom window, I watched a dust devil swirl across the playground. The only thing that made the Mina schoolyard different from the rest of the desert was a pile of dirt that marked the pitcher’s mound and a gunny sack with dirt at each base. There were only three rooms in the school: first and second grades in one, third through fifth in another, sixth, seventh, and eighth in the last one. After the eighth grade, you were bussed forty-two miles to the high school in Hawthorne. The Mina school was constructed from three army surplus quonset huts set side by side. There were no hallways, no gym, no cafeteria, no air conditioning, and only an oil stove in the back of each classroom for heat.
Mina was called high desert, nearly a mile above sea level, but you couldn’t tell that by looking. Every direction out of town was flat, sagebrush and alkali flats. Mina itself was a dusty little kindling-wood town with about a hundred houses and a block of scattered businesses stretched along Highway 95. It wasn’t noted for anything except a whorehouse.
The class burst into laughter as Nancy Barr broke into tears and ran out. Mrs. Wormly, she pronounced it Vermly, glared at us and banged her yardstick on her teacher’s desk. I got the same yardstick on my butt so many times I wouldn’t be surprised if my rear had inch marks on it.
“Be quiet. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Mrs. Wormly had a round tummy, protruding rear, big, heavy breasts, thick arms and legs, puffy red cheeks, and a double chin that bounced when she got excited and talked fast. She wore flowered dresses and always had her hair pulled back into a bun. Her husband, who taught the third through fifth grades next door, was short and stumpy, with a round tummy like his wife’s. He had a bald pate with a ring of red hair and so many freckles he looked like he was rusting.
“Not another word. You should be ashamed.”
She was right, but when you’re twelve years old like I was, some things are funnier because you just don’t know any better. Nancy Barr, who was in the eighth grade, a year ahead of me, had gone up to the front of the class to put the nine times multiplication table on the blackboard. It was Gibbs who saw the small dark stain on the back of Nancy’s dress and said, “Poo-poo.” Janey Hopper called him dumb and said the stain was from Nancy’s first period, but by then us boys were laughing and shouting “caw-caw.”
“The next person who laughs goes to the office.”
The “office” was a small room that had a desk, phone, bookshelves for extra books, a closet where brooms and mops were stacked, and a bathroom with a toilet and sink. All three teachers used it, although Mr. Wormly, who was also school principal, called it his office. He used to teach us older kids, but he developed hives and itched all over and the doctor in Hawthorne warned him he would have a nervous breakdown if he dealt with us anymore.
The Wormlys belonged to the Holy Roller church, which was in a quonset hut even uglier and smaller than the school’s. I went there once with Gibbs and his mother and it scared the crap out of me. People yelling, clapping, and stamping their feet, a woman foaming at the mouth and mumbling some kind of gibberish they called speaking in tongues.
Mrs. Wormly gave me her “you-little-bastard” glare. She always focused on me as the school troublemaker, maybe because I saw her playing with herself. At the beginning of the school year, I had to pee real bad and the other boys were holding the boy’s bathroom door closed so I couldn’t get in. I ran into the office and burst into the bathroom. Mrs. Wormly was on the toilet. Her hand was down between her legs and her mouth was open, her tongue hanging out the corner of her mouth. She screamed when she saw me. I screamed, too, and ran. I never saw a woman’s twat, though I knew it had hair like a man’s, and I didn’t know why she’d have her hand down there, but Gibbs told me his sister, who went to Hawthorne high school, jerks off by rubbing a button down there, that he had once rubbed it for her for a quarter, and that was probably what Mrs. Wormly had been doing. I ended up peeing behind the school.
Mrs. Wormly called Roberta Potter up to the board and I went back to watching for dust devils. We liked to chase them down on our bikes and run into them. At three o’clock we ran out of the classroom and I headed for Main Street with my buddies, Gibbs and Gleason.
Mina didn’t have any street named “main”; it’s just what we called the line of businesses along Highway 95, the two-lane road that ran hundreds of miles down the middle of the state. There wasn’t much in the way of businesses along the main drag: a motel with most of the fourteen one-room units rented out to locals, a general store, two gas stations, three bars, and two restaurants. The only institutes of significance in the town were the three-room school and the whorehouse.
An old-timer had left property to build a better school, but it was across the tracks, near the whorehouse. The choice was between the whorehouse or the new school and the locals decided on the whorehouse because it paid a good chunk of the taxes in
Mineral County, which says a lot about Nevada. Mineral County covered nearly four thousand square miles, three times the size of Rhode Island, and had only about six thousand people, about a third of whom lived in Hawthorne, the county seat.
“When a girl has a period,” Gibbs told me and Gleason as we walked toward the main drag, “that means she’s ready to get pregnant.”
“Nancy Barr’s gonna have a baby?” Gleason asked.
Gleason was also in the seventh grade, but he was a puny, four-eyed runt with skin so pale we called him “polar bear.” Unlike Gibbs, who was an authority on sex, and me, who knew just about everything else, Gleason only knew book stuff, which meant he didn’t know shit from Shinola.
“No, numb nuts, she’s not pregnant. But the bleeding comes when a girl’s old enough to get married and have kids. Now she’s ready any time a guy sticks his boner in her.”
“Nancy’s getting married?”
Gibbs lifted his eyebrows and I swatted Gleason on the back of the head. “Don’t think about it, okay? Your dad say it’s okay we ride on the train?” Gleason’s father worked for the railroad.
“Yeah,” Gleason said. “My dad’s letting us ride in the caboose.”
Gleason headed up the street to Wilson’s Motor Court, where he lived with his mom and dad in a one-room cabin, and I huddled with Gibbs for a moment.
“Did you get the pamphlets?” he asked.
“I’m getting them. MaryJane said she’d have them.”
MaryJane was the madam who ran the Pink Lady, the town’s whorehouse, across the highway and the rail tracks that paralleled the road. I also lived across the tracks, in a three-room shack with my mother, Betty, and her boyfriend. We hadn’t discussed the pamphlets in front of Gleason because he wasn’t as tough as me and Gibbs. The little yellow belly would get scared and tell his mom and spoil it for us to make some money in Hawthorne. MaryJane was giving me sheets advertising the Pink Lady because I told her a man who worked on the train was going to pass them out in Hawthorne. But Gibbs and I were going to do it.
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