Desert of the Heart: A Novel

by Jane Rule

  He did not consciously intend his speaking of Ann’s name to be the repeated public announcement of his private feelings, but he could not help it. Ann moved away a little to be out of range of his tenderness. Because she could not accept it from him any longer, it touched her like a minor fear or pain. As they reached the door, he stopped and turned back to Ann.

  “I’ve left my ledger,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Is he married?” Joyce asked.

  “No,” Ann said.

  She put her weight against the door, pushing into the cold, conditioned air, the wrench and grind of the slot machines, the magnified voices of the dealers, the muted crowds. She took hold of Joyce’s arm and guided her through the maze of machines and gaming tables to the escalator, where they rode, half a dozen people apart, to the second floor. It was not as crowded there, but the noise was still beyond measuring.

  “Have you read any of those?” Ann asked, nodding to the mimeographed sheets and the book Joyce held in her hand. “I don’t mean How To Win Friends and Influence People. The only thing important about that book is that old Hiram O. Dicks thinks he looks like Dale Carnegie. So, if you ever run into him—he really looks like one of the janitors—tell him how much you enjoyed his book and how helpful it’s been to you in your work. But that other stuff is important.”

  “I haven’t had time,” Joyce admitted. “I just started this one.”

  Ann looked down at the first paragraph:

  Hello! Welcome to FRANK’S CLUB. You may feel a little uneasy right now as you look around and realize that you are a member of this famous family of FRANK’S CLUB employees. Yes, you are a Green Horn in The Corral, and you aren’t sure what is expected of you. Don’t be nervous. Take it easy. All around you are other members of your family, ready to break you in. And every one of them was once a Green Horn himself. Remember, they also lived through their first day. …

  “Well,” Ann said, “when you get past the crap, there are things in that one you should know. Look, you go on up to the next floor. Have a cup of coffee. Read some of this stuff. Come down in half an hour. I’ll be right over there. Then I’ll check you in.”

  “Where?”

  “Right over there by the wagons. If you get lost, just ask anybody for the Corral.”

  At the cashier’s desk, Ann claimed the key for her floor locker where she could put her purse away. The key pinned to her shirt just below her name plaque, her green change apron strapped high around her rib cage, the change dispenser hooked in place, she went back to the cashier’s desk to check out her money. Janet was already there.

  “Five hundred tonight,” the cashier said, shoving a setup, an IOU, and a free pack of cigarettes to each of them. “How’s the kid?”

  “He’s going to the hospital in a week,” Janet said, counting the money carefully before she loaded her apron.

  “San Francisco?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he’s getting the best a kid could have. Hear you had a fight with my ma last night, Ann.”

  “That’s right,” Ann said. “I didn’t think she’d tell on herself.”

  “She thought it was funny. She always says, ‘If I’m tanked, I just stay near Ann. She’s unlucky as hell, but she keeps me out of trouble.’”

  Ann smiled. She had finished counting her money and was signing her IOU. “I’ll be back in about half an hour to check a new kid in. Okay?”

  Sure.

  Silver stepped up to the counter just as Ann and Janet were ready to go on the floor.

  “Well, you’ll have an easy time of it tonight,” she said to Ann.

  “I don’t need her. I wish Bill had given her to you.”

  “But she needs you, darling. Just relax and enjoy her.” Silver reached for the key the cashier was handing her. “You give me the bottom locker and I’ll …”

  Ann moved Janet away from what was to be one of Silver’s graphic threats.

  “Really,” Janet said, “I don’t wonder they took her off the tables. She should be fired.”

  “Oh, Silver’s all right.”

  “She’s vulgar.”

  “Sure.”

  “Ann, why do you let her make all those remarks?”

  “What remarks?”

  “She’s always at you … suggesting things.”

  “This isn’t a church sewing circle, Janet. It’s a gambling casino.”

  “Well, there are a few decent people around. You, for instance.”

  “Because I have a limited anal vocabulary? Shit,” Ann said softly and grinned. “I like Silver.”

  Janet smiled reluctantly and shook her head. “All right. I’m a prude. I know it. I don’t like her. I don’t like her at all.”

  Of course not. Janet was a faculty wife at a small, isolated college across the border in California. Nowhere was decency more honored and protected than at these little cultural outposts built on the ruins of old mining towns in the crude, uncultivated mountains. The only way Janet could hear the degradation of her job was to suffer not only the ninety mile drive over the empty desert, the fifty pound weight she packed across her belly for eight hours each night, the lack of sleep, but also to suffer the world of the Club in all its corruption with martyred indignation. Ann was her only friend, and even with Ann she suffered, not allowing herself Ann’s company for so much as a glass of tomato juice at the bar. Of course she hated Silver, who used to run a house in Virginia City. “I got sick of administration,” Silver would say. “I’d lost touch with the people.” But Silver was as sensitive to Janet’s disapproval as Janet was to Silver’s vulgarity. Yet Silver admired Janet, perhaps even loved her in the gross sentimentality she had for suffering. Everything Silver thought or felt or did was gross, and she knew it. Her attitude toward herself was one of helpless indulgence. And Ann’s attitude toward her was modeled on Silver’s own.

  Janet and Ann separated to take positions on their assigned ramps.

  “How’s it been?” Ann asked the girl she was relieving.

  “Slow,” the girl said, stepping down onto the floor. “I wouldn’t want every day to be Saturday, but eight hours is a hell of a long time with nothing doing. I’d rather work downstairs.”

  “How long’s he been here?” Ann nodded to the single customer in the area, a young man who was playing three quarter machines at once.

  “Him? Three hours maybe.”

  “How much has he lost?”

  “Oh, he’s got lots of money. He’s changed a couple of fifties since he’s been here. But he doesn’t tip. He doesn’t talk either. Real friendly.”

  Ann stepped up onto the ramp, careful of the weight and swing of her apron. “Remember, they also lived through their first day….” No one had told Ann, on her first, that a quick turn, with the swinging weight of fifty pounds, could knock you down. Only a slot machine had saved her. And she had had nightmares for weeks after that: falling down the escalator in the brutal storm of six hundred dollars worth of change with a floor boss (Bill?) standing at the bottom waving her IOU. Was it a more significant anxiety dream than she had thought? Or prophetic?

  Ann looked down at the young man, who had put his hand up but would not look up. With his free hand, he continued to play two of the three machines. Ann walked over to him, bent down to the machine to check the jackpot reading and the number. Then she returned to the center of the ramp, reached for the microphone, and called the jackpot in to the board. As she spoke, she could hear her own voice, separated from her, magnified over the noise. A key man came to pay. Ann witnessed.

  “Will you play it off now, sir?”

  The young man, still not looking at either one of them, stuffed the bills into his pocket, put a quarter in the lucky machine, and returned to the full rhythm of his work.

  “You’d think he was getting paid the way he works at it,” the key man said to Ann.

  “Maybe he figures it that way.”

  “Maybe.”

  Alone, Ann leaned back
against a slot machine to rest her back. She looked beyond the young man to the guns hung along the wall, the shelved violence of another time. In themselves they did not interest her, except as shapes, but through other people, who so often studied them, she had discovered nostalgia, possessiveness, fear, and she had sketched these attitudes into stances of the body in its alien clothes. Sometimes she overheard and remembered remarks of Freudian embarrassment exchanged between a tourist husband and wife. These had become the captions for at least two successful cartoons she’d sold to Saturday Evening Post. But now, without people, the wall was a meaningless pattern. Her eyes shifted away only to catch themselves suddenly in a ceiling mirror. There was her own face separated from her, but not magnified as her voice had been, instead made smaller. What a device of conscience that mirror was, for behind it, at any time, might be the unknown face of a security officer, watchful, judging; yet you could not see it. You could not get past your own minimized reflection. “I do look like Evelyn Hall,” Ann thought, “and what does that mean?”

  “I’m ready.”

  Ann started slightly, embarrassed. “Right. I’ll take you over.” She signaled to Janet to cover her ramp for a few minutes, then led Joyce to the cashier’s desk. “Did reading some of that help?”

  “There’s so much of it,” Joyce complained. “I’ll never remember it all.”

  “I’ll give her just three hundred tonight,” the cashier said. “Now, you count it, kid. Don’t ever sign an IOU without counting it first.”

  “What happens if I lose any of it?” Joyce asked.

  “Nothing,” Ann said. “If it’s over ten dollars, the floor boss has to sign you out, but you don’t have to make it up.”

  “That’s Bill?”

  “While you’re working on this floor,” Ann answered.

  “Won’t I stay on this floor?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Count your money,” the cashier said.

  Joyce resented the order but obeyed it. Ann felt sorry for her. She was the kind of girl who would not learn to give the cashiers the respect they demanded. In return, they would make her work impossible. She would always be given the bottom floor locker. She would have to wait for change. And she would always be the last to be checked in or out. Delayed in her work, she would be criticized by the other change aprons. The key men would hold up her jackpot payoffs. The customers would complain. Ann watched her counting out her money and gave her a month before she quit or was fired.

  When they got back to the ramp, two or three other customers had joined the young man, who was as oblivious of them as he had been of Ann.

  “How old do you think Bill is?” Joyce asked.

  “That lady over there wants change.”

  Joyce was clumsy and inattentive. Twice she gave the young man nickels instead of quarters. She could not remember machine numbers and so called the wrong jackpots in to the board. But she liked the microphone. It reminded her of this movie where this girl was announcing the trains and this guy heard her voice and couldn’t get it out of his mind and just went back to the train station all the time to listen and try to imagine what she looked like. The fourth time Joyce called in a jackpot, one of the key men was sent down to complain.

  “Look, kid, you’re not running the late night show. You don’t have to whisper. Speak up. And get the number right next time.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” Joyce asked.

  The elderly gentleman who had hit the jackpot pinched Joyce on the thigh, winked, and handed her five dollars. She bared her teeth at him and slipped the bill into her pocket.

  “Take it out,” Ann said quietly.

  “What?”

  “The five. You have to turn it in to the cashier. She splits the tips at the end of the shift.”

  “Well, but don’t you think I earned that one?” Joyce asked, watching Ann. “Why don’t I just split it with you?”

  “Look,” Ann said, “do you see those mirrors? Behind any one of them, one of the security officers might be watching you. If you’re ever seen putting money in your pocket, they don’t give you time to explain. You’re out, and that’s that. And you won’t get police clearance for any other job in town.”

  “Pretty tough, aren’t they?”

  “Go turn the five in to the cashier,” Ann said.

  “Anything you say.”

  When the relief arrived for Ann’s half-hour break, Ann longed for a few minutes to herself, but she took Joyce with her. Joyce had so much trouble getting her apron off and into the locker that they had time for only a quick Coke at the bar before they had to go back.

  “Half an hour!” Joyce said. “More like ten minutes.” She struggled against the weight and clumsiness of her apron while Ann strapped her own on. “It looks so easy when you do it.”

  “It takes practice. Here. Turn around and lean up against the locker. For one thing, you’ve got it too low.”

  “Too low? Where am I supposed to wear it, around my neck?”

  “It rides down,” Ann said. “You can’t carry fifty pounds on your kidneys.” She reached to lift it, her hands grazing the under-curves of Joyce’s full breasts. She tightened the top strap around the small, fragile rib cage. Joyce was not built to carry the weight. “Okay, now try the bottom one yourself.”

  As Joyce turned around, Ann saw the dampness of the hair at her temples, the whiteness of her face.

  “Sit down. Sit down right on the floor.” Joyce obeyed her at once. “Put your head on your knees.” Ann looked down at her. After a moment, Joyce raised her head. “Better?”

  “Yeh. How did you know?”

  “The first night’s always rough,” but, if it was as rough as this, a girl was usually dismissed. Joyce did look better. Should Ann risk letting her back on the floor? How badly did she need the job? “Come on. You’ll be fine.”

  Their section was more crowded now. The young man had to guard his machines from tourists who did not understand that, in the etiquette of gambling, to put hands on another man’s machine was a greater offense than to put hands on his wife. Ann was grateful to be able to keep Joyce busy. While she had something to do, she would not have time to worry about herself. But, standing back to let her do the work, Ann had time to worry. The bravado and bitchery were gone. Joyce was as attentive to the shabby grandmothers as she had been to the affluent business men. Instead of talking, she listened to Ann’s instructions with a desperate patience. Ann watched her with growing respect. Joyce was not simply afraid of being sick. She was determined not to make a fool of herself. But she was very white. It was Ann who saw Bill come into the section and signal her off the ramp.

  “Ann,” Joyce said, as she, too, caught sight of him, “don’t tell him, will you? I’m okay now. I really am.”

  “I won’t tell him,” Ann said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “How’s she doing?” Bill asked.

  “Fine.”

  “There’ve been some complaints up at the counter.”

  “Not lately,” Ann answered. “She’ll be all right. She’s quick.”

  “How’s her back?” Bill watched Joyce as he spoke.

  “Killing her, I should think, but she hasn’t complained.”

  “She’s pretty white,” Bill said. “And she’s not built for it. I was wondering about putting her on the elevators for a while.”

  “Well, don’t do it unless you can persuade her it’s a better job.”

  “All right. I’ll leave her with you for a week,” Bill said. “But she’s had enough tonight. I’m going to check her out.”

  “Okay.” Ann turned to go back to her station.

  “Ann?” She turned back to him. “How about a drink tonight?”

  “Thanks, but I told Silver I’d go home with her. Joe’s away tonight.”

  “I could drop you off there later.”

  “She wants company, Bill.”

  “Sure, of course she does,” he said quickly. “Well, send Joyce dow
n to me, will you?”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  “Some other time,” Bill said.

  He was angry. It was the third time in two weeks that Ann had refused him, but she had no other choice. They had already tried going back to the old friendship, and it hadn’t worked. Awkward politeness shifted to argument, argument to passion, and there they were again in that familiar bed, faced with another impossible morning. “If a wife is what you want,” she had said to him, “go out wife hunting.” But Bill did not know fair game when he saw it. If the woods were not full of virgins, there were, at least, a number of recognizable amateurs. Bill went from whore to homosexual back to Ann again. He was incapable of understanding a woman who did not want to marry, who could not marry a man she loved. And Ann did love him. And now she would not see him. Of course he was angry.

  “What did he say?” Joyce asked.

  “He says you’ve worked long enough for your first night.”

  “You told him.”

  “No, I promise I didn’t,” Ann said. “Nobody works a full shift the first couple of nights. He wants to see you now. Take off. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  Joyce hesitated, caught between pride and relief. Then Bill himself signaled to her and she went. As they stood together talking, Ann watched. In Bill’s presence, Joyce’s color returned, and with her color came her confidence. There were weights her back could bear. Bill looked up. Ann turned away, the palms of her hands aching.

  At two o’clock, there were again very few people in Ann’s section, the young man, a middle-aged couple, and several college boys with fake identification. Half a dozen old men had begun to make their nightly rounds. Two of them had the guile to inspect the gun collection, but the others searched as frankly for dropped coins as barnyard fowl do for bits of corn. Half starved, trembling from lack of alcohol, they did not collect the dimes and nickels for food or drink. Each coin was to prime the pump which would, sooner or later, flood them with vaguely dreamed-of riches.

  Ann saw Walt as he came through the doorway by the cashier’s desk.

  “Hi. Did you have a good time?”

  “Wonderful,” he said. “We went out to Pyramid Lake and went swimming. How’s it with you?”