Lay the Favorite

by Beth Raymer

  “When you and Tulip first started dating, was she curious about what you did?” I asked Dink one evening as we shopped for music at Best Buy. He was buying me so many CDs we needed a shopping cart. As a mentor, Dink believed that grooming my musical taste was just as important as teaching me the nuances of sports betting, if not more so.

  “Minorly. She knew I had money. Here. The Ramones, Road to Ruin. Excellent album.”

  I tossed it into the cart. “But what did she think of you being a gambler?”

  “You and your questions,” he said. “Here. The Replacements. Great band.”

  “I don’t think Tulip likes me.”

  “She just doesn’t know you. Why don’t you two do something together?”

  “Like what? Shop for overstuffed chairs for the living room?”

  I snatched up the Gram Parsons anthology, gasped, and pulled it close to my heart. Dink took it out of my hands and placed it in the top area of the cart, where the important, delicate things go—like eggs and children.

  Down Rainbow Boulevard, Dink swerved in and out of traffic. We had stayed at Best Buy for too long. Now we were going to miss Monday night kickoff. I unwrapped the plastic from my CD cases and inserted Sacred Hearts and Fallen Angels, disk 1. I slipped off my flip-flops, slouched deep in the leather seat, and dangled my feet from the passenger side window. “Sing with me!” I shouted over the wind. I smudged the side mirror with my toes.

  “I don’t know the words,” Dink yelled.

  I turned up the volume. Everyone knew “To Love Somebody.” It was a standard.

  I watched Dink begin to sing and keep rhythm by tapping his ticker against the steering wheel. What a perfect companion I had in him. For three months we’d been spending nearly every moment together and each day I could feel my heart becoming lighter. I loved Dink’s stories and generosity, his taste in music and how we made each other laugh. Having Dink in my life was the plain difference between spring break and incarceration. He looked over at me, gave a quick smile, and looked back to the road. I could feel in my throat the desire to say something serious. I pulled the ticker from his hand and played with his fingers. At the red light, I brought my palm to his palm and let my fingers fall in between his.

  We held hands through the Monday night football game, in which Tampa Bay beat the Rams outright, and afterward, beneath the blackjack table at the Golden Nugget. The next night, in the dark of the Hilton sports book, we sat close, my head on his shoulder, and rooted for Gonzaga to dribble out the clock. It was a blowout game between two little-known college teams that no one cared about, except for the coaches, the players, perhaps their parents, and, thanks to the invention of the point spread, a Vegas wiseguy and his young apprentice.

  “I like him so much,” I told my friend Jamie, from the pay phone across from the 7-Eleven. “Do you think I should confess my love and see if he’ll leave his wife and run away with me?”

  “Who’s this again?”

  “My boss.”

  “The guy you said always has tuna stuck in his teeth?”

  I pressed my thumb into a chunk of hardened bubble gum stuck beside the coin slot.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Him.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Between Us

  Most nights after Tulip went to bed, Dink and I met for dinner at the ESPN Zone. Dink presented me with stacks of CDs. Donovan and Joe Jackson were my newest undertakings. As we sat across from each other in the booth, I read song lyrics while Dink watched the late hockey game on the miniature television attached to the end of the table.

  “We need the Bruins and under. Our root is for no one to score. But if someone must score, we want it to be the Bruins.” He brought a fork heaped with mashed potatoes to his mouth.

  I ordered another glass of wine. A friend of Dink’s once lectured me on why I should never order wine at a sports bar. It was the kind of crap that caused headaches and stained lips, the guy said. It was unsophisticated. Embarrassed, I had switched to rum and Coke. Now, alone with Dink, I was free to drink the ESPN sauvignon. The wineglasses ESPN used were as round as cereal bowls and the bartenders poured to the rim. The waiter returned with my new glass. I used my tongue to pick up the pieces of cork that floated on top.

  After dinner we went to the arcade and took turns on the virtual reality boxing game, which included real boxing gloves to wear. I never liked video games but I loved the feeling of letting my hands go and landing punches. I loved the explosive sound effects that came each time my glove smashed into my opponent’s face, which was now covered in blood. Goateed frat boys gathered in a half moon around me and began cracking jokes. They broke my concentration. In a blink I was on my back and my opponent was dancing around me, arms raised in victory. Game over.

  “My turn,” Dink said. He struggled to put on the boxing gloves and his phone rang. Too-lip, he mouthed, before answering. She yelled so loud that Dink had to hold the phone away from his ear.

  “There’s no fucking reason you should be out so late with her.”

  I cocked my head and checked Dink’s wristwatch. Late? It wasn’t even ten.

  “Every night you go to bed at nine o’clock,” Dink yelled back. “Now, because I have a new friend, you’re forcing yourself to stay up just so you can tell me what I can’t do.”

  She hung up on him.

  “No more boxing. I gotta go. She’s losing it.”

  “One more game,” I begged. “Come on, one more game.”

  “Fine. One more game.”

  The next morning, the day of my first pay and collect, the three of us sat beside each other in icy silence. Dink dumped a heap of cash from his duffel bag, I sipped my coffee and doodled, and Tulip sat between us. Tight-jawed and nostrils flaring, she snapped back the pages of a magazine, far too angry to actually be reading. And God knows she wasn’t working. She was nothing more than a chaperone, hanging around to make sure we didn’t flirt.

  I tried to act uninterested in Dink but I couldn’t. Two cups of coffee and the huge stack of money made me giddy. Dink owed a bookmaker in Costa Rica eighty grand. The bookmaker owed the same amount of money to Yitzhak, a customer of his from Tel Aviv who happened to be visiting Vegas. To make everything easier Dink would give Yitzhak the money he owed the bookie. That’s where I came in.

  Using just one hand, Dink counted the money. The stack lay in his palm and with a flick of the thumb, he shot the bills onto the table like cards from a deck. He kept count of eighty thousand while simultaneously reading the USA Today sports section. Veteran gamblers talk a lot about feel. They say that with time they get a feel for the market, the lines, the money. I felt like I was watching feel in action. Dink was so cool.

  “I understand it’s a little weird, bringing this kind of cash to some stranger,” Dink said. “But you get over it. After two or three times you trust I won’t send you to some mob casino manager in the back of a Dumpster somewhere.”

  He handed me the package. “Count and make sure it’s all there.”

  On the floor, I sat on my heels and put the bills, all of them hundreds, into neat stacks of ten. Eighty thousand. Check. I scooped the piles up with one hand and, like a bouquet of roses, brought them to my nose, inhaled, and smiled.

  Tulip’s face contorted in disgust and she grabbed her car keys. Watching her storm toward the door, I noticed she was pigeon-toed.

  “Okay,” Dink said. “Yitzhak, Israeli, short. He’ll be at the roulette table at the Paris. Go.”

  “Wait,” I said, stuffing the money into my backpack. “So, I just go up to him and say, ‘I have your money’?”

  “The whole thing seems weird until you realize the stranger’s just like you. You know, goofy stranger.”

  “Goofy, like awkward?”

  “Goofy like harmless. Goofy like he probably enjoys smelling money too. If you want, we can meet in the Stardust parking lot afterward and go to lunch.” He smiled, bashfully, and handed me three dollars for the valet’s tip.

  I
t was just past nine a.m. Inside the Paris casino, cocktail waitresses in skimpy French police uniforms hurried past me, delivering Bloody Marys and cups of coffee to hungover tourists at the blackjack table. The jingle of coins beat an unsteady rhythm from the rows of slot machines. A casino employee dressed as a peasant sold eight-dollar pastries from a wooden cart. Next to the roulette table two middle-aged men in Ohio State sweatshirts drank thirty-two-ounce strawberry daiquiris from Eiffel Tower–shaped glasses. Beside them stood a short guy in his late thirties. His bangs were black and slippery. The collar of his pink polo was folded up.

  I tapped his shoulder.

  “Yes?” he said. His bright brown eyes met mine.

  “I have your money,” I said. He was cute. I giggled nervously.

  His hands dug into his pockets. “Okay, we go to the suite to count.” His head motioned toward the elevators.

  Dink had mentioned nothing to me about going up to Yitzhak’s suite to count the money. But in the two seconds I considered it, it seemed like normal procedure. How did he know I didn’t skim some bills off the top between the time I left Dink and arrived at the casino? How did I know he wouldn’t take the money from me, pocket some, and then call Dink and say that the package was short? Plus, Yitzhak was five-foot-seven and wearing pink. He certainly didn’t come off as a threat.

  The elevator climbed to the soundtrack of A Chorus Line. One singular sensation and the doors opened to a four-thousand-square-foot suite with wraparound panoramic windows and a domed ceiling painted sky blue with a fresco of fake clouds. Israeli men sat at a lavishly decorated banquet table, feasting on smoked salmon, tomatoes stuffed with scrambled egg, and poppy seed pastries. In the center of the table, atop a silver tray, a cow’s tongue unraveled over red apples and celery stalks. At the other end of the table sat two black guys in oversized jeans and sweatshirts. White desert light shot over the mountains, through the window, and reflected off the tops of their smoothly shaved heads. Stacked on the china plates in front of them were Belgian waffles doused in syrup and snowcapped with powdered sugar.

  The group’s personal cocktail waitress welcomed me with a mimosa.

  “Everyone,” Yitzhak announced, “meet Bar.”

  “Beth,” I said, to the maraschino cherry at the bottom of my champagne glass.

  I took a seat next to the Israelis, who talked among themselves in Hebrew. Shiny black chest hair curled out the top of their unbuttoned golf shirts. On their fingers were huge gold rings set with bright jewels the size of jawbreakers.

  As I finished my mimosa, I heard bills spitting through an electronic counting machine. Across the room, Yitzhak stood in the doorway of the hall closet. With one hand on his hip, and a pointer finger hooked over his bottom lip, he stared at the machine conscientiously, as if it might steal some bills for itself if he took his eyes off it.

  Approaching him, I asked if everything was okay.

  “Bizarre, your line of work, no?” he said. His eyes stayed fixed on the machine. “Do you get nervous meeting strangers, carrying so much money?”

  I didn’t mention that this was my first pay and collect. I repeated the line Dink had said to me earlier, that the people I met were just like me, harmless.

  His Adam’s apple moved up and down as if it too were watching the bills in motion. “You are a very friendly girl,” he said. “You would be a great asset.”

  I did not ask the obvious question: to what? Instead I blurted out, “Really?”

  The last bills shot through the feeder and the neon blue counter blinked 80000.

  “I’ll walk you out,” he said.

  Outside the casino, we stood by the Fontaine des Mers replica. An elderly man posed next to a sculpture of a mermaid holding a large fish that sprayed water from its mouth. A woman with a camera shouted, “Say Vegas!” and the elderly man smiled.

  The wind picked up and blew warm across my face, bringing with it Yitzhak’s spicy cologne. To escape the glaring sun, he moved a step closer. Our shadows collided. “Kiss him,” I said to myself.

  “My friends you met upstairs. We travel from many casinos. Prague, London. We use lasers to operate tables, to see hands of dealers.”

  I sensed that his smile was a way of pretending that he was joking, just in case I threatened to call the cops. You couldn’t work among Las Vegas gamblers without meeting people who tried to take advantage of casinos. Some of the successful card players in Dink’s circle of acquaintances started their careers as “peekers,” meaning they sought out inexperienced blackjack dealers who held their decks carelessly, making it easy to peek at the next card. There wasn’t any more to it than that. Then there were guys who used shaved coins to trick slot machines into awarding credits. One guy was known to use a powerful magnet hidden in his cigarette pack to manipulate slot-machine wheels. But I had no idea what it meant to “operate tables” and I never heard of anything like using lasers to see through cards.

  “If you’re making this up you better tell me now,” I said. “I hate when people make up stories just to see if I’ll believe them.”

  The lasers, he said, were planted inside their rings. The black guys were decoys.

  If I understood correctly, and I think I did, Yitzhak and his crew were doing the kind of thing that landed one in jail. Or, more to the point, got one killed.

  “How much money could I make?” I asked.

  “I think you’d have much success,” Yitzhak said. “A no-sweat, no?”

  A teenager with acne and a clipboard interrupted us. “You guys got a second to save Yucca Mountain?”

  “No,” Yitzhak snapped. “We do not got a second.”

  The teenager dropped his head and wearily made his way toward the elderly couple.

  “Am I so rude?” Yitzhak said, smiling. His lips were full and his teeth crooked in the most perfect way.

  “You’re not rude,” I said. I found his arrogance attractive. His accent too. And he smelled so good. Who cared if Yitzhak was robbing the casino? I liked being close to him. I wanted to hear him talk more. But I also felt that Dink might be worried about me and that it was time to meet him.

  “I have to go,” I said, then waited to see if maybe he’d ask me out. He put his arm around me and I felt my face blush.

  “Okay,” he said, softly. “Maybe you don’t mention this. At least that we promise each other?”

  He scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper.

  “Call me,” he said. “I am really interesting in your thoughts.”

  It was such a beautiful day that I left my car with the valet and walked along Las Vegas Boulevard to the Stardust, my head swarming with fantasies. Yitzhak was interesting in my thoughts. Operation Yitzhak was so much more glamorous than Dink Inc. I had never been to Europe, let alone casinos in Prague. With Yitzhak, I could spend my days poolside, drinking vodka infusions. At night, I’d have sex with him and his Adam’s apple, then slip on a black silk gown, my ruby-red laser ring, and walk gracefully down the mahogany spiral staircase and onto the busy casino floor. In between heists, in our tiny European flat, we would sit, shoulder to shoulder, and count the money. Then make love on the money, fulfilling one of my earliest sexual fantasies.

  A swoosh of pink, white, and blue stars twinkled. The Stardust sign loomed above the parking lot where Dink’s Altima was parked. His big, curly head was silhouetted against the afternoon sun. How could I leave Dink? Prague, I’m sure, would be amazing, but nothing could be better than wandering around the arid desert in jeans skirt and tank top, meeting sexy casino cheats, assisting Dink with his affairs. Vegas is where I belonged. Where I was known, simply, as Dink’s girl. I ran across the street, excited to tell him about Yitzhak and the lasers.

  “Israelis are always behind things like that,” Dink said, unfazed by my story. “Pay and collects can be brutal. I’m sorry …”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I love when things like that happen.”

  The windows were down and we could hear the roar a
nd screams of the roller coaster down the street. I reclined the seat and hung my feet from the window.

  “Where are we gonna eat?” I said.

  “No,” Dink said. “I’m sorry, but I have to fire you.”

  He dropped a letter-sized envelope into my lap and severance pay spilled out. I never knew money could look so terrible.

  I brought my feet back into the car. A lump the size of a bingo ball began pulsing in the center of my throat. I mustered a wispy “I’m sad,” which I said to people just before I cried. A kind of heads-up in case they couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with it.

  Dink’s voice rose with emotion. “Beth, no crying. It’s been fun but this is not good. I can’t have Tulip start drinking again and that’s what she’s threatening to do. You’re young. You’re bright. You’ll find another job.”

  My tears dropped.

  “She says you’re coming between us,” he said. “And she’s right. Do yourself a favor, take the money. Let me know if you need more.”

  “Why don’t you do yourself a favor,” I hollered, “and get rid of your miserable fucking wife.” Screams from the roller coaster.

  “Okay,” Dink shouted back. “Outta the car.” He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “I was gonna ask you to hire my dad,” I said. “I want him to move here.” My tears flew in every direction. I tried to look at Dink but it hurt to open my eyes. I snapped a piece of hair from my scalp.

  “Stop eating your hair and take the money!” He leaned over me and pushed open the door. “I’m not hiring your father. I only hire people I can boss around. No crying. Out!”

  “Stop being so mean!” I screamed, stepping out of the car. I wiped and wiped my eyes, but the tears wouldn’t stop. Snot trickled into my mouth.

  “I’m married! What does that mean to you?”