The Secret History of Las Vegas

by Chris Abani

  It seemed like everything inside, even the air, was coated with grime, determined dirt that nothing would ever clean. Sunil instinctively reached into his pocket for his handkerchief.

  Put that away, Salazar said, settling onto one of the barstools. You’re embarrassing me.

  Sunil ignored him, dusting the barstool before sitting down.

  The bar was far from full, but nowhere near empty. There were a few men and women littered around, drinking by themselves or with one another. Sunil guessed they were regulars.

  Heineken for me, and whatever my friend is having, Salazar said to the barman.

  Same, Sunil said.

  We’ll also take two burgers with fries, Salazar added.

  The barman, a sour-faced man about fifty with long, stringy, greasy blond hair balding at the crown, a faded denim shirt, and jeans stiff with dirt, dipped some glasses in water, shook them out, and pulled a draft for each man without saying a word.

  Listen, Salazar, Sunil said. I want to ask you something personal.

  What?

  Have you ever been married? Any kids? Do you have a girlfriend?

  No to all three, Salazar said.

  May I ask why?

  We’ve known each other two years and we never had this conversation before. Odd. I don’t do well with women. What about you?

  No. I’ve never been married, but I do have a girlfriend of sorts, Sunil said.

  A man, drinking by himself at a table in the corner, got up and walked over to them. He had the heavily muscled look of a recent ex-con and all the black spidery tattoos of prison.

  We don’t get many new faces around here, he said.

  You trying to violate your parole, Salazar asked. Fuckers like you are always on parole.

  The barman came back with two burgers and fries. Salazar put a fry in his mouth, got up, and walked across the room to the jukebox. Selecting a Charley Pride record, he shoved some change in and came back to the bar. The music transported Sunil back to the shebeens of Soweto as he ate. Packed full of sweaty, desperate men and women drowning unspeakable sorrows in the homebrew so strong it could take your voice with one shot.

  After White Alice left, Sunil picked up a job at a shebeen. It was owned by Johnny Ten-Ten’s uncle Ben, and Ten-Ten arranged it for Sunil out of sympathy, and for Nurse Dorothy’s sake, he said. Sunil went to school and came straight to work at the shebeen every day until about eight p.m., and then after a dinner of Bunny Chow with Uncle Ben, he went home to do his homework. The money from the bar helped him pay the rent and keep the house Dorothy had worked so hard for. He imagined she would get better and come home to live there with him. He was fourteen.

  Three years passed like that. Sunil worked washing glasses, sweeping floors, and running errands. And then dinner with Uncle Ben, always Bunny Chow; he ate it so much he came to love it too—the way the lamb stew soaked its way through the hollow chamber of the loaf of bread. Bunny Chow and Cokes; he could have as many Cokes as he wanted, but no alcohol. Uncle Ben was strict about that.

  Never drink this shit, Sunil, he would say, spitting through the holes where several teeth used to be. It will rot your liver, your brains, and your soul.

  But you drink it, Sunil said.

  So now you have proof of what I’m saying, Uncle Ben said, laughing.

  Every day they played this game, and yet somehow Sunil never got tired of it.

  One day, Ben asked Sunil to stay late and help him close up. Ben had never asked before, so Sunil stayed. He had never seen the bar this late. It looked different, felt empty, everything sounding hollow. The music was off, and what little sound there was, in the harsh lighting, was amplified: the swish of Sunil’s broom across the floor, the grating of metal chairs being pulled across concrete and then stacked, the insistent buzzing of flies around pools of spilled beer and bits of food, the tap running as the metal cups were washed by Ben’s wife, a dog in the distance barking to the ghosts of night, a Casspir rumbling by on patrol a few streets away.

  But it was the two or three drunks who wouldn’t leave who fascinated Sunil. They sat, heads hung over the dregs of their drinks, holding on to the metal mugs as though drowning. Several times Ben came out and asked them to leave. Still they sat as though afraid of the night and the silence beyond it.

  It’s like this every night, Ben said with a sigh. Usually Ten-Ten is here to get them out.

  I’ll get them out, Sunil said.

  Ben nodded.

  Two of the drunks left easily enough when Sunil pried them up and gently shoved them out into the dark street. The third, a regular he knew only as Red, was harder to get out. Sunil could barely pry his fingers off the metal mug, and his butt seemed glued to the chair. Red was a small man and Sunil couldn’t figure out where he got the strength.

  Please, Red begged. Please, it’s too damn lonely out there, bruh. You can’t send me out there.

  Go home, please, we have to close, Sunil said.

  No, no, you don’t understand, Red begged. They come every night, every night they come and I can’t, man, I can’t. I know you’re young, but surely you understand.

  Go home, Red, Ben said from across the room. It’s the same every night. Go home.

  Who comes every night, Sunil asked. The police?

  My wife, Red sobbed. My wife and my boy, they come every night.

  Go home, Red, Ben said. The boy doesn’t need your stories.

  But he should hear them, Ben, then maybe he’ll understand.

  Go home, sir, Sunil said.

  I only informed on a couple of undesirables, Red babbled. Only a couple of times on criminals we all hated. Then I tried to stop, I did. I told the police I was no longer informing for them. So they told the ANC boys about me and they took my wife and my son to teach me a lesson. They just took them. I wasn’t there. I was here. I was here.

  Go home, Red, Ben said again, this time crossing the room and pushing him gently to the door.

  Where, Sunil asked. Where did they take them?

  Red stood at the door of the shack, a bent shade of a man, bent even lower by the alcohol. He lifted a trembling finger and just pointed. Into the dark, man, into the night, he said.

  Ben stepped up and gave him one last gentle but firm shove and shut the door. Finish up, he said to Sunil, and went back to the bar.

  Finish up, Salazar said, nudging Sunil. We have to get back on the road.

  Yeah, sorry, I was lost there for a moment, Sunil said.

  Thirty-five

  There was a quality to dusk that Sunil liked. There was something frenetic about it—a grouse disturbed from the brambles, or even a chicken with its brood struck by the shadow of a circling hawk. As though day, like Wile E. Coyote, had just run off the edge of a cliff and was winding his legs in space, desperately trying to keep moving before falling into night. But there was something else too, something besides the surprise. Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.

  Ruins too held that tear in time, that melancholic yearning, when detritus clings obstinately to a past that can no longer be and yet is unable to fall into the disintegration of a new thing. A lonely feeling.

  They drove through the desert, lost and turned around, for a couple of hours. Finally they pulled up to the outskirts of Troubadour. Sunil and Salazar were tense from the many unspoken things that haunted them both.

  They edged past houses blown apart by time and neglect, and others held together by the obstinate will of a rusting hinge dangling a window, or a door leaning drunkenly against a lintel, while in places roofs collapsed politely like deflated soufflés. Past weeds that grew tall from floors, past rusted and stripped cars that still hugged driveways and street corners with the dogged belief of a Jehovah’s Witness await
ing the Rapture. They were both silent.

  As the road they were on wound even farther away from the freeway, they rolled past a graveyard of signs—giant high-heeled pumps with CASINO printed on the side in pinks and garish purples, studded with holes where neon bulbs used to live; a blue-suited fat man with pince-nez glasses, ruddy cheeks, and a leering smile lying prone as though the giant doughnut in his hand had pulled him over; a rusting fairground ride with cracked teacups; a sign in chipped green glass with the legend CARLOS O’KELLY, AUTHENTIC IRISH MEXICAN FOOD under a shamrock from which a taco shell sprouted; a seven-foot-tall duckling mouth open in mid-squawk, wings spread wide, in a yellow so bright it hurt to look at, standing among a litter of dead trucks, like a bath toy thrown from a kraken’s bathtub; MOTEL, HOTEL, GOLDEN, LAS VEGAS, EMPIRE, fragments of signs lost in the glossolalia; and the creepiest thing either man had seen, a twenty-foot-tall corpulent king who seemed a cross between Santa Claus and Henry VIII, beckoning with one hand, maniacal eyes wide open and crazed, lips curled back to reveal large white enameled and rusting teeth.

  What the fuck, Salazar said as they drove by.

  It’s as if Vegas came here to die, Sunil said.

  Well, I guess we are in the right place, Salazar said. Even the fucking art is about freaks.

  The road veered right around a large rock, and when it opened up again, there was the town, spread out before them like a lingering death.

  Fuck me, Salazar said.

  Extending backward from Main Street was a town with a well-laid-out network of small streets, all lined by houses, or the remains of houses. A few tenacious trees hung around, but for the most part it was just desert chaparral. Some houses looked well maintained, even lived in, and several sprouted satellite dishes. Even from where they were, they could see an airstrip with a crashed plane covered in graffiti to one side. The faint sound of music came from the town, a solemn guitar strum and a plaintive voice. Salazar pulled to the side of the road under the WELCOME TO TROUBADOUR sign.

  Do you hear that too, or is it just me?

  I hear it, Sunil said. Why are we stopping?

  I need a minute here. I mean, aren’t you creeped out by this? Plus, it’s getting dark.

  All the more reason to press on and get out of here as soon as possible, Sunil said.

  Okay, Salazar said, but he checked that his gun was loaded first.

  Sunil smiled. It was always the loudmouths who were the cowards.

  As they headed into town, the sky was an indescribable palette of colors that brought a lyrical tint to the reality below, so that the poverty appeared romantic, artistic, and chosen. It was an alchemy that made denial easy, an alchemy that Sunil was practiced in. How else could people live the way they did in South Africa when they were surrounded by the chaotic set designs of the townships and shanty towns that circled the hearts of cities like Johannesburg.

  He was reminded for a moment of Eugene and his love for Dante and the circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell—the strange inverse sense of apartheid.

  All the banks, businesses, and shops of any merit were at the heart of the circle. At one remove, the colored towns, a perfect ring of defense around the white heart. The coloreds were not white but overwhelmingly wanted to be, and even if it was not exactly white they wanted to be, they did want their privilege; and at least they were one up on the blacks. As in any free market, the coloreds were the middle classes, as it were—those who would give their lives to maintain the status quo, a life they knew they could never improve but which had meaning only because there were those who suffered worse; that in fact, a larger population suffered worse. Sunil knew of course that not all coloreds were middle class, but they could at least all dream and aspire to it. In the outer ring of hell, yet closer to the flames, in an orbit so cut off from the benevolence of the heart of apartheid, mired in a poverty they could never gain enough purchase to dream an escape from, were the blacks. And they had to bus into the heart every day to work for the whites, following only one or two access points, where they were policed and harassed to make sure they had the right passes and work papers. They spent 60 percent of their daily income on transportation alone, and since there were no legal supermarkets or shops in the third ring, they had to spend 20 to 30 of the remaining 40 percent on food in the white heart, or sometimes, and only sometimes, in the colored towns, where the prices were even higher but where there were more shops willing to take their money. Then they had to try to make it home from the heart, through the second ring that loved nothing more than to harass and degrade them, so that if they were lucky, they made it home with one-tenth of their income. Those who were more daring walked ten miles or more one way from Soweto to the outer rings of the second level and then rode buses in—a long column of ants carrying their misery on their heads wrapped with the workloads, trailing the side of the road, inhaling the dirt of the passing cars and the inclemency of the weather; all this to keep a tenth of the money they worked so hard for. And as they tried to make ends meet, the white heart grew wealthier and wealthier because almost none of the money ever left it; what spilled over, the second ring mopped up very quickly, long before it could even trickle out to the third.

  While there were some rich and middle-class blacks in Soweto, they accounted for fewer than 3 percent of the township’s entire population, a population larger than the neighboring country of Zimbabwe.

  The crazy thing was, the blacks made up 90 percent of South Africa’s population, which, as it turns out, the whites thought worked for them, because such a large population, kept so far removed from power and divided by hunger and fear, could never fully rise up in opposition. Turns out the whites were wrong. Sunil often thought about America and how the lie of the equality of material conditions would lead to big and violent rifts in the country. Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression—how long before the pot boiled over.

  This variable of time is something those with power know well and learn to exploit with great measure. Sunil found from experience that the easiest way to do this was to corrupt slaves into tyrants, regardless of their race or imagined position. It worked well in South Africa, on the whites as well as on the blacks, because even though the whites thought they were free, they weren’t. In America, too, the improvement of material circumstances, and the gentle padding of minimal power, could seduce even the most cynical citizen. For the blacks the reward was even less: more work than their contemporaries. But work that affords only the essentials, no matter how much better than your neighbors it makes you, can never lead to freedom.

  Why are you so fucking quiet, Salazar asked. You’re freaking me out.

  They were at this point rolling down Main Street, speed cut to a crawl, looking out for signs of life. Even though most of the buildings were boarded up, some light came from the bar, the general store, and the pink building with the neon ANGEL’S LADIES sign. And then there was that music, the guitar and voice that seemed to be everywhere at once.

  At least they’ve got the right businesses open, Sunil said. Food, liquor, and sex.

  So?

  So they can’t be all that weird, Sunil said.

  Amen to that, Salazar said, relaxing for the first time since they’d turned off the freeway.

  They parked just a few doors away from the bar, by an abandoned diner. Sunil peered through the window. Eerily there were still place settings and coffee in the pot on the counter. It looked open, except for the film of dust over everything and the big rat on the counter next to t
he coffeepot cleaning its paws.

  Next door was the pink-painted bordello with the hissing neon sign, and Sunil wondered who Angel was, and why there was a bright-blue neon sign in a ghost town, five miles off a freeway. It wasn’t like anyone new would wander by and see it, and everyone who knew about it didn’t need the sign.

  The bar was a low-slung building probably unchanged from when it was first built around the beginning of the last century. ROSE WALTER’S, a sign above it said. Sunil pulled the white door open and walked in, Salazar behind him. The place was empty, aside from the barman, who was older, with long unwashed hair and a tie-dyed rainbow shirt.

  Welcome, name is Bob, he said. What can I fetch you gentlemen?

  Sunil and Salazar settled at the bar.

  Bob, you’re shitting me, Salazar said.

  You wouldn’t happen to have any single-malt whiskey, would you, Sunil asked.

  Sure do, Bob said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a bottle. He placed it before Sunil, fetched a rag, and wiped it clean of dust.

  Sunil inspected it; good color, good odor. Fine sample, he said.

  Bob laughed happily and poured generous amounts into three shot glasses. He toasted them and downed the whiskey, eyes watering. Sunil and Salazar drank it down too.

  Really good, Sunil said, feeling the familiar warmth spread through him.

  First one’s on the house, gentlemen, Bob said.

  Where the fuck is everyone, Salazar asked.

  They’ll be here. Some fly in from Vegas every night, land in the old airstrip where the crash is. Others come by bus and this place usually has about three thousand people by midnight, when the carnival starts. It’s been good for us, that carnival.