On that dark day Missy interviewed about a dozen of them in all, men and women, black and white (and Chinese), gamblers who had known and loved P in his short, “tragic” life. There was enough here now for her to put in the book, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still missing something. The gentle spirit that was P, how could he do a thing like this? It is not typical of him. Perhaps she should try again to interview the family, who had all already turned her down, but it wasn’t about family—it was about gambling.
Then the thin, sad, pretty woman approached her. She introduced herself as C.L. and explained that she was in a recovery program and that it had been 100 days since she had last gambled and that she had been advised by her counselor not to attend the funeral because it might lead to a relapse, her being in the company of so many gamblers.
“Degenerates,” C.L. called them, “like I used to be, but no way in hell was I gonna miss his funer—”
As the pretty C.L. broke down in tears, Missy could not help but feel a twinge of jealousy. This was the same C.L. that P had written about with such passion. This was the same C.L. whom P had loved. This was his partner. C.L. herself was there with a partner, a handsome light-haired butch in a dark suit whom she introduced as Maggie.
When C.L. got herself back together, she said, “When you write about P, don’t get all sappy. If you get all sappy, then you don’t understand P at all. P had fun. It wasn’t a nightmare for him. No way. He lived a gambler’s dream. He gambled millions of dollars at a time. What a high that was. What a high. What fun he had. Sweet Jesus.”
“Fun?” Missy said. “He shot his own son. He shot himself.”
C.L. snapped back angrily, “He had fun! That’s what it’s all about! And when it was over, nothing else made sense. There was no point in doing anything else. I don’t know about you, but it makes perfect sense to me. And then his son wouldn’t give him the money. It’s the son’s fault he’s dead! I mean, he’s your father, you’ve got to give him the money. Let him take his chances with it, let him try to turn it into something. It’s only money. P is lucky. P could have done it. P would have turned it around if the kid had just given him that money.”
C.L. looked as if she were about to say more, and Missy wanted to hear more, but the other woman, Maggie, put a hand on C.L.’s shoulder and C.L. said an abrupt goodbye and was led away by her partner, leaving Missy alone with her thoughts.
Another gambler, whom she had already interviewed, came to her and invited her to a friendly game of poker that they were having at the professor’s place in memory of P, but Missy declined. She had work to do. She had thoughts to think.
74.
(The Monkey’s Revenge)
At best it will be a tough sell. There are so many of these books out there now, and not all of them are doing well,” her boss tells her. “America, I think, is moving on to other interests. We may be too late on this.”
Missy laughs. “Actually, it would be good news for us all if America moves on.” On her desk is a mock-up of the book jacket: two hands holding a royal flush in spades. The hands holding the cards are white. P’s hands are black, of course. She will tell the artist to darken the hands. There is still time for a cover change. The book will be released in two months. But no. What is she thinking? White hands are an easier sell. “But I feel strongly about this one,” she says to her boss. “It gets to the heart of what this thing is. The insanity of it.”
Her boss nods as though he understands, but of course he does not.
“Damnit,” she suddenly curses. “Damnit, this is hard.” Her finger is moving again. She hides it under her desk, hoping her boss did not see.
She keeps it under her desk until he leaves her office. Then when she is alone again, she retrieves it from hiding and says to herself, “It’s no use.”
She studies her desk calendar, her thoughts drifting back to the old days.
She still awakens at night from dreams about numbers.
The patterns are so clear. So elegant.
She finds herself making love to Ricardo and her head is full of numbers. She comes hard. She comes thinking of numbers. There is money in her bank account. Her debt is at a manageable level now. Yes, her children love her now. Yes, her children know her now. These are all good things, and she will not go. She will not go, but P was right—the casino still calls to her.
This is the price that she must pay—must she pay it forever? Nothing is truly interesting or engaging anymore. Nothing. Now she sees the world through dark shades, a world that is permanently lacking in brilliance. Her sun and her moon are in the casino, but she does not go there anymore.
She will not go!
Sometimes when her children are talking to her, she is only half listening to them, her breathing shallow, her heart rate soaring, her eardrums reverberating to the sound of the ping-ping, her finger pushing the absent PLAY button over and over again.
Her children stop talking abruptly. They’re looking at her finger now. She sees the look on their faces. She gets a grip on herself. Her finger stops moving.
“Get a grip, get a grip,” she says out loud. “It’s just no use. No use.”
And now her chest is heaving. There are sobs and tears and a physical collapse her children can’t possibly understand, but they hug and kiss and say, It’s okay, Mommy, it’s okay, we’re here for you, Mommy. And that should be enough, but really it’s not, because tomorrow will be yet another day without gambling.
For Missy sitting at her desk, tomorrow will be 365 days since she last gambled.
“It’s just … it’s just …”
Tomorrow will be 365 days since she saw him alive.
“It’s …” She is resigned to misery.
A whole year has passed, and not a day has gone by in which she has not dreamt about numbers. Numbers that should win—if she would just go. If she would just risk a 20. That’s not so much. Now you’re just being ridiculous. It’s your money. It’s one lone 20. Go, Missy, go, the monkey says. Go to the casino. It will be so much fun. You really should go, you know. But if you do not go, that’s fine, I’ll just have to remind you again tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.
And tomorrow.
At her desk, Missy sobs, “It’s insane. It’s just insane.”
… as her finger, of its own accord, begins to push PLAY.
75.
On the 365th day, Missy got the break she needed. The son agreed to see her.
It was September, fall again, the start of the new semester, and he was back on campus and back on the team, though he was no longer a starter.
She met him in his dorm. It was pretty much the average young man’s college room: bed, desk, and posters of voluptuous, scantily clad Maxim women. Next to the deck of cards on the table was an open carton of strawberries he seemed to have been eating before she arrived and a photograph of him and his father taken when he was about 12 or 13.
His old crutches were abandoned in a corner of the room. P’s son, a boy with considerable physical presence, had answered the door standing on his own. He was walking again, though with a noticeable favoring of the right leg. He went back to the bed and propped himself up on a pillow. He was a well-mannered boy, who had shaken her hand and offered her something to drink. She had accepted the glass of Gatorade, though she set it down without drinking. He was a handsome boy, about a half shade darker than his father and a half inch taller, and with a body chiseled to the “athletic perfection” described in the article in the sports section: “Indian Casino Regular Shoots Football Star Son.” His eyes were the beautiful golden-brown of autumn, his head was clean shaven, and in each ear there was the glint of gold from unmatched earrings. He wore baggy shorts, but from the waist up he was bare. His chest and arms were indeed … chiseled athletic perfection. Missy willed herself not to stare. She sat down in the chair he offered and focused on his wounds instead. One bullet had shattered the thigh; the other had gone through the shoulder. The healing had been
slow and painful, she had heard, but he was strong-willed. Now, except for that limp, he was fine. He had kept in shape, and he could still run quite fast, perhaps not fast enough to play ball at the collegiate level ever again, they had said, but this was a kid who did not know the meaning of the word fold. Though he was no longer a starter, not yet, he was a solid second-string and special-teams player. But the shoulder wound—it was familiar and Missy wondered at it.
He shifted his weight on the pillow and stretched out both his long, muscular legs on the bed and recounted the sequence in a tone that was surprisingly childlike:
“I went to see him at his suite in that casino. I knew what he wanted. My mom had told me not to go, but I was his favorite. I always stood up for him. He could do no wrong in my eyes. When I was a kid, he was the one who used to take care of me when I was sick. My most common memory of childhood is me being in the car and him driving me to the emergency room for my asthma and assorted allergies. You don’t know what it’s like to look up and see your dad’s got a gun pointed at you.”
He lifted a strawberry from the open carton and popped it in his mouth and chewed.
“I’m telling him, Then go ahead and shoot me then if this is all I mean to you, but I’m not giving you that money. And I’m looking at him, and it’s like he’s not even my dad anymore. I’m scared because now I don’t know who this crazy man is pointing the gun at me. So I make a quick move to run out of the room, and he fired. Twice. I caught the first one right here.” He rolled up a leg of his shorts so that she could better see the scar. He traced it with fingers red-tipped from the juice of strawberries. He said, “It rocked me. Blam. Then as I was going down, I kinda twisted around and reached my arms out to him. I’m like screaming, Daddy, you just shot me, and blam, the next one caught me in the shoulder. Never heard nothing so loud. Never felt nothing hurt so bad. I’m on the ground, I’m shot, and my dad is still shooting at me. I can’t believe it. I know he’s gonna kill me now for sure. My own father. Because I wouldn’t give him that money. So I start telling him how to get it. I’m no punk, but I’m hurting bad. I don’t want to die. I want to live. I’m trying to recite the bank account number so he won’t shoot me again. But it’s all coming out confused because I’m kinda trippin’, kinda blackin’ out from the pain. I can smell the gunshot. Then he’s on the ground with me, he’s sobbing, and my head is on his chest, and he’s holding me and telling me not to worry, he ain’t gonna shoot me no more. Called me his lucky boy. He stayed with me until the hotel security guards got there. They were like kind of his friends, you know? He made some kind of deal with them to get away from the cops and then he threw some clothes in a bag and bailed out of there. Two days later, they found him dead …”
His voice trailed off as he lost himself in thought.
“Why didn’t you just give him the money?”
“I didn’t want him to be what they said he was. I wish I had given it to him. He would still be alive today. Except for this screwed-up thing he did, he was a good father, you know? He was nice. He was funny. He was cool. He would let you slide. He was like that. I have no father now. My daddy’s dead.”
He looked at her with a helpless expression on his face, and Missy almost bought it.
She said to him, “Do you gamble?”
“What?”
“Do you gamble?”
“A little.” Ah. The wilting gaze. The glint in his eye. The red fingers reaching for another strawberry. “I play cards with the fellas. The horses,” he explained, chewing. “But I win all the time. I’m lucky.”
Lucky.
She said to the lucky boy, “How much of the money that he gave you to hold did you lose?” She watched as he put another strawberry to his lips without answering, then pushed it into his mouth. She watched as he shook his head. She closed her notepad and prepared to leave. “You don’t have to answer. I understand.”
“About $200,000.”
“Two hundred thousand?” Despite herself, she whistled. “You told him that, and he shot you.”
The boy chewed his strawberry. He did not answer.
“You’re so young. That’s so much money.”
“But he’s my father,” the boy said at last. “If he had just given me a few days, I could have won it all back. He shot me.”
“Oh my.” She understood it now.
“Oh my, my butt. He shot me.”
“No. The first time was a mistake because you ran. The second time, he was trying to shoot you in the chest.”
“Trying to kill me,” he accused.
“He was trying to shoot you like he was shot. He was trying to show you. See?” She cocked a finger like a gun at his wound.
He lowered his head.
“Don’t gamble anymore.”
“I don’t gamble, I told you. I ain’t no gambler.” With his head lowered and the tremor in his voice.
“How much of the money is left?”
He groaned.
“How much?”
“About … $50,000. Forty,” he sighed. “That’s all that’s left.”
“That’s still a lot of money.”
“No it’s not,” came the sad reply. “I blew it. It was so much, and now it’s so little.” He was quiet again. His face covered by his hands. He was lost in his gambler’s thoughts, Missy knew. His miserable gambler’s thoughts. Numbers in his head. His body made small trembling movements. After a long while, he lifted his head and said with finality, “You’re gonna put this in that book of yours.”
“The book has already been written. That’s not why I’m here.”
The boy sniffled. “Why are you here?”
“Because of P.” She got up from her chair and went over to him. “He wanted you to have a chance against this thing. You have no idea how much he loved you. It’s not going to be easy, I can’t lie to you. But you’ve got to get help. The first step is to tell someone about it. You need to tell your mother about it—when you are strong enough. And give the money to her. Give the rest of the money to your mother. Let her handle it. She’ll know what to do with it … Or you’ll blow that, too.”
The boy nodded. “Yeah. You know how we are.”
She smiled. Yes. She knew how they were.
His eyes were misty and there were still tears on his cheeks. Missy put her hand on his face. He looked so much like his father. For a brief moment, she imagined there was a cowboy hat on his head. He seemed to come to a decision about something. He reached over to the table, picked up the deck next to the strawberries, and handed it to her. Missy held P’s solitaire deck while his son took out a checkbook and wrote a check to his mother, which he handed to her.
It was a check for $38,271.24. Just like his father, he knew the amount down to the last penny.
“That’s all that’s left. That’s every penny. Give it to her for me. I can’t talk to her. I can’t do it. Not yet. You know how it is.”
“Yes.”
She took the check and the solitaire deck and left P’s son’s room.
But it was such a large check.
There were places that she knew of where people could do things with this check. They could find ways to turn it into cash. By the time the boy figured out what had happened, she would have won all of it back and more. She would share it with him. He would understand. In fact, he would be grateful that she had done it. This is what the monkey told her, this and much, much more, and she drove to the casino and sat in the parking lot in her car, her heart racing. It had been such a long time. She sat in her car and watched the happy ones enter, and the beaten ones exit, with baffled or disgusted expressions on their faces, mumbling promises to themselves that they knew full well they could not keep. It was all so familiar. She could breathe again. The sun shone like a jewel in the sky. The monkey, damn him, was right. She was home again. She was alive.
What’s the harm? said the monkey. See? See?
She sat there in her car and breathed. She breathed. She breathed.
… He has a tough road ahead of him. This thing is hard to get through, much harder to get through alone, but he can depend on me. I will be there for him. I owe that much to his father. This is not a defeat; this is a victory. We have to fight for the rest of our lives to make sure that it is a permanent victory for him. —Missy
She rang the doorbell and then dashed back to her car, where she waited until the mother opened the door and retrieved the large envelope she found sticking out of her mailbox. As the mother read the note, her hand flew up and covered her mouth. A look of shock stiffened her face. Her cheeks became shiny with tears.
Missy saw all this and said to the monkey, See? See?
And then she sped away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank Joseph McNair, Leejay Kline, Louise Skellings, Joseph Steinmetz, Gonzalo Barr, Elizabeth Cox, David Beatty, Ariel Gonzalez, Cameron A. Allen, Sherwin D. Allen (Chief), Anna Ashley, my editor Katie Blount at Akashic Books, and the real-life gamblers whose daily struggles are set down herein.
Much props to Johnny Temple at Akashic Books, who continues to give voice to the voiceless.
Also available from Akashic Books
MIAMI NOIR
edited by Les Standiford
356 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95
Brand new stories by: Preston L. Allen, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, James W. Hall, Barbara Parker, John Dufresne, Tom Corcoran, Paul Levine, Christine Kling, Lynne Barrett, Vicki Hendricks, George Tucker, Kevin Allen, David Beatty, Anthony Dale Gagliano, John Bond, and Jeffrey Wehr.
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