by Billie Letts
“Yep, see right there?” He pointed to three black letters printed on the ball: F.E.W. “My initials,” he said. “Frederick E. Wing.”
“What does the E stand for?” Fate asked.
“Never told, never will.” He smiled, then took a money clip from his pocket, pulled off a one, and handed it to Fate.
“Son, you have any idea what this ball costs? Of course you don’t,” he said in response to the blank look on Fate’s face. “It’s a Pro V1. Most expensive ball made. A buck’s a cheap price for getting this back. Now, understand, I’ve got a whole pocketful of these in my golf bag, but I’m having a good game. I can afford to take a stroke on this hole, and I will as long as I recover this ball.”
He waved, his back to Fate as he dropped the ball a couple of feet inside the fence and gave it a whack that Fate thought must have pleased him when he looked over his shoulder and smiled.
“Thanks, boy,” he said as he climbed into the cart, then drove away.
Fate spent the rest of the afternoon searching for misplayed golf balls. He figured any ball that landed outside the fence might mean more cash for him, so he looked through weeds, sand, and gravel, beneath bushes and the occasional tangle of vines. He paid special attention to the brand names on the balls and was particularly pleased when he found a Pro V1 or any ball with initials, believing that they might bring the best prices.
When a woman in a uniform and cap pulled up in a cart marked Wynn’s Security, Fate felt tense for fear he had violated some law. When she motioned him toward the fence, he moved reluctantly in her direction.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Fate held open the bag so she could see what was inside. “Figured I might be able to sell them.”
“You can if they’re in decent shape, but you won’t get much for your trouble. There’s a place called the Eighteenth Hole over on Hacienda Avenue that reconditions used balls if they’re clean. But they won’t give you much.”
“How much?”
“Ten cents each, I think.”
“I sold one a couple of hours ago for a dollar. One ball.”
“Now, who the devil would pay you a buck for a—”
“Frederick E. Wing.”
“Sure, I know Mr. Wing. He’s been a member here forever. Rich, too, but so is everyone else who belongs to Wynn’s.”
“It was a Pro V and had his initials on it. And I’ve got lots more Pro V’s in here, and most of them are initialed, too.”
“Here.” She reached across the fence for the bag. “Let me see what you’ve got in there.”
As she raked through the balls, she would occasionally pull one out and read the initials. “B.J.H. That’s Ms. Hendricks. She only plays with Lady Precepts. And here’s one belongs to Jim Vanzant.”
“You think they’d pay to get those back?”
“They might. Problem is, you can’t get past the front gate, and the boys in the guardhouse for sure will run your little butt off if you stand out there trying to sell used golf balls back to their owners.”
“Well, where is Hacienda Avenue?”
“A long walk from here. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you . . . oh, say, five bucks for the whole lot. That’s more than they’ll pay you at the Eighteenth Hole, I guarantee you.”
“Then how much will you get when you sell them to—”
“Oh, I can’t sell them, kid. I’d lose my job. But it’ll make me look good if I hand Ms. Hendricks’s ball back to her. She’ll remember that when she gives out her Christmas bonus.”
“Okay, it’s a deal if you’ll pay me five dollars for every bag I can fill.”
“Well, you’re quite the wheeler-dealer, aren’t you, kid?” She grinned as she handed him a five-dollar bill. “All right, then. Guess we’re in business.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Fate said as he pushed the money deep in his pocket. “We’re in business.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THREE DAYS LATER, Lutie got a job at the Desert Palms Motel, a seedy three-story concrete-block building with plenty of desert but not a palm in sight.
Two girls had just been fired for selling drugs on the premises, which accounted for Lutie being hired on the spot. She’d been handed an ill-fitting uniform—a jumper and white blouse—and issued a badge bearing her new name, Belinda, a match to her fake documents.
The first time the boss, a Russian named Pavel, called out the room numbers “Belinda” would be responsible for cleaning that day, Lutie forgot who she was supposed to be and failed to respond, prompting Pavel to yell a repetition of his instruction. Not the best of beginnings to a new job.
Each girl was responsible for cleaning sixteen rooms a day, and though some of the women on the staff were in their sixties, Pavel called them all girls.
If the girls could finish their rooms before their eight-hour shift ended, they could leave. If the work took more than eight hours, they stayed until all of their sixteen rooms were cleaned. Regardless, they were paid six dollars an hour. Pavel paid no overtime, the girls received no benefits—no medical, not a day of sick leave, and the idea of a paid vacation was laughable. They had thirty minutes for lunch and two coffee breaks of ten minutes each, one at ten in the morning and one at two in the afternoon.
Lutie was surprised to learn that some of the cleaning women had been working at the Palms for several years, but since most were illegal, they were reluctant to change jobs.
On her first day, Lutie made friends with Urbana, a girl of eighteen from Cuba. On their morning break, they shared a cigarette at a table near the swimming pool, the water so fetid and dark that alligators could be hidden beneath the surface.
“You wanna try to stay away from Pavel,” Urbana warned. “He’s a free feeler. Grab your ass, rub your tits, do more if he corner you in a room alone. You always leaves the door open when you cleaning. If it close, we know he’s inside and we come in to bring fresh towel. He got me alone once, but enough for him.”
Urbana, several inches taller than Pavel and forty pounds heavier, laughed.
“When he wrestle me onto bed, I grab his nuts and squeeze until I thought they pop. He ain’t touch me since.”
After they each took a last puff of Urbana’s cigarette and returned to work, Lutie put in practice some of the advice Urbana had given her, advice to help her finish her rooms in eight hours. And most of the shortcuts saved time and energy, depending—of course—on the condition of the room.
Most of the guests at the Palms did little more than litter the rooms with empty beer bottles and bones from the rib joint across the street. If they’d kept a dog in the room, the girls usually had extra messes to deal with, and if there had been a baby, they often had to contend with messy diapers left in odd places.
But the worst were women who tossed their used tampons under the bed or left their Kotex wadded into the bedding; men who left their used condoms between the sheets or peed into the trash cans.
The weirdest stories were passed around during the girls’ lunch breaks: one who found all the drinking glasses stuffed with pickles; three newborn kittens, left in a cardboard box, taken home by Katrina, a maid who was going to try to bottle-feed them; a Gideon Bible covered with ketchup; and the tale, passed on for years, of finding a baby asleep in a closed dresser drawer. Maria, one of the older girls, claimed to have once found a condom, half-filled with semen, stretched over the mouthpiece of the telephone.
But for its failings—poor pay and lack of benefits, the boorish behavior of the boss and the guests—it was a job that Lutie McFee, aka Belinda Ferguson, needed right now in order to survive.
Fate was spending less time at the library and on the UNLV campus now that he was collecting and selling golf balls. He’d found another course, the Las Vegas Hilton Country Club, which he usually worked in the mornings, then returned to the Wynn course later in the day.
His trek between the two clubs took him past the Chinese restaurant, where he stopped in a couple of days
a week to see his friend Chou, who always greeted him warmly and served him a meal.
And he’d found two more buyers for his golf balls: one a young caddy, the other a security guard at the Hilton gatehouse. On his best day, he brought in fourteen dollars; his worst day paid him a profit of three fifty.
But rather than give in to discouragement, he became more determined to help Lutie put together enough money so they could move into an apartment within the Paradise school zone. And time was running out. That’s when he decided to extend his operation.
He’d seen a bushy-haired little man pushing a grocery cart filled with cans he picked up from the streets, alleys, and curbs, a guy who darted from spot to spot, his eyes seeming to zero in on aluminum from blocks away—cans poking from sacks, from mounds of sand, from overflowing Dumpsters.
One morning as Fate was on his way to the Hilton Club, he stopped the man to ask about the value of the cans, but the guy turned ugly, making threatening gestures, shouting furiously at Fate in a language he didn’t understand. Clearly, Fate had encountered an entrepreneur carefully guarding his business, one he was not prompted to share.
But Fate wasn’t about to be scared off by what he figured must be a lucrative enterprise.
Besides, since he was on the streets most of the day walking to and from golf courses, why not carry an extra plastic bag for wayward aluminum cans? He didn’t think it would be too difficult to locate a place to sell them. And it wasn’t.
That very day, he met a woman pushing a four-wheel walker with a large wire basket mounted on the front, a basket half-full of cans and bottles.
He introduced himself politely, learned her name was Gladys and that she used the walker for exercise following knee surgery. But once she had recovered enough to bend, she’d started picking up debris in her neighborhood, litter tossed from passing vehicles. Then she’d found that a recycling center would pay her fifty-five cents a pound for the cans. She said as a result, she could keep working her stiff knee, do what she could to clean up her street, and make a bit of money on the side.
She told Fate how to get to one of the recycling stations, they said their good-byes, and he was off, a sack in each hand.
By the end of the week, he had almost forty dollars in cash to hand over to Lutie.
One of Lutie’s perks at the Palms was that she and Fate could manage a shower and shampoo a few days a week, those times when Pavel was away from the motel. She caught on quickly to his schedule: banking on Mondays, Rotary Club breakfasts on Tuesdays, and grocery shopping for his mother on Fridays. He was always gone for a half hour, usually more, plenty of time for Lutie to sneak Fate into one of the empty rooms.
Another plus was Maria, the oldest of the girls, a beautician before she left her home in Monterrey. She gave Fate a free haircut while Lutie cleaned a couple of Maria’s rooms, a good trade for all three of them.
But best of all, Lutie made a friend. A best friend. She and Urbana spent their breaks together smoking cigarettes Urbana brought from home, secreted out of her brother’s packs, or those left behind in the rooms after guests checked out. They shared lunches, too. Free sandwiches they got from a flirty boy named Sonny who worked in the kitchen at the Skillet, a café next door to the Palms.
Urbana lived with her twenty-three-year-old brother, Raul, and his friend from Colombia, Arturo. Both guys worked at a body shop a few miles from the Strip, and both sold drugs when their money ran low, which—according to Urbana—was often.
Once, a few weeks after Lutie started working at the Palms, she saw Raul when he came by to pick up Urbana. When he smiled and said hello to Lutie, she felt a jolt like an electric spark run down her belly.
The next day, Urbana said that Raul wanted to take her and Belinda out Saturday night, go to a few clubs, dance, have some fun. Lutie was shocked when she realized how long it had been since she’d been invited anywhere by anyone. But she’d never gone out with a man of twenty-three, had never imagined herself dancing with one as handsome as Raul, had never even gone dancing unless she counted the school dances she went to with Norma, the girl who had pierced her ears in the school bathroom.
“Yes!” she screamed, then she squealed, grabbed Urbana, and twirled her around. And now, finally, she trusted Urbana enough to admit that Belinda was not her real name, a fact that didn’t faze Urbana.
“Do you know how it is, the salsa?”
Lutie’s enthusiasm suddenly waned. She shook her head.
“Not to worry. I teach you.”
And for the rest of the day, Lutie practiced her first salsa lesson as she danced in and out of rooms.
The girls who worked at the motel got paid every Friday, and though Lutie was desperate for the money, she always dreaded being alone with her boss. So each time she went to Pavel’s office for her check, she made sure to keep the desk between her and the free feeler.
They hadn’t gotten along since Lutie’s first payday a few weeks earlier when she saw the salary he had inked in on her check, causing her dread of fighting off the hairy Russian to turn to anger.
The Social Security deduction was no surprise, but when she saw that he’d withheld ten dollars as a deposit on her uniform, she lost it.
“You can’t do this!” she yelled.
“Of course I can. I do it to all girls who work for me.”
“This rag wouldn’t bring a quarter at a yard sale!”
“Every time a girl quit without she turn in her uniform, cost me money. Hundreds of dollars a year I am cost.”
“Yeah, I know those trendsetting designers don’t come cheap. And once you put on one of these”—she ran her hand across the bodice of her jumper—“you never want to give it up. I plan to be married in mine,” she said as she stormed out of Pavel’s office and slammed the door behind her.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Since she had no bank account, she had to give up 20 percent of the total to cash her check at the PayDay Money Store.
Fate had made more selling golf balls and cans in a week than she had working at the Palms.
Lutie didn’t tell Fate she was going clubbing on Saturday night. Instead she lied, said she would be in late because she and Urbana were going to a sneak preview that didn’t start until midnight. Fate didn’t believe her, but he knew she needed some fun in her life, so he didn’t question her excuse. Nevertheless, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t worry about her. Lutie had a history of bad choices.
He stayed in the library on Saturday until after five, then hitched a ride with an old man driving a pickup who took him within a few blocks of the Salvation Army.
Lutie and Fate had become two of the “regulars” at the shelter, so he knew the menu tonight was beef stew, a thick slice of cheese, crackers, and rice pudding. His favorite night was Wednesday, when they served meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, and sugar cookies, but the stew wasn’t bad.
Fate knew several of the other homeless who ate at the shelter every evening: Luisa, who worked at a day care center, and her son, Diego, just a few months younger than Fate; Larraine, the woman who wore a hospital gown and a housecoat three days a week when she had dialysis; Sam, a chain-smoker with lung cancer and his two preteen girls, Emily and Ashley; Brother Evans, who was a homeless preacher; and Ray, the man who conversed with salt shakers, a Vietnam vet suffering dementia.
But tonight, when Fate walked in, he knew something was different. Couldn’t be the food, because he could see pots of stew bubbling on the stove in the kitchen, and the pass-through had bowls of packaged crackers and a tray of sliced cheese.
No, the difference was in the sound—or lack of it. An odd silence had settled over the room. And just as Fate noticed candles burning on each table, Brother Evans stepped from the back of the room and asked those gathered to join him as he offered up a prayer for Sam, who had died that morning.
But instead of bowing his head, Fate scanned the crowd, his eyes coming to rest on Sam’s daughters, Emily and Ashley, who were pressed against a w
oman dressed in a wrinkled gray suit with a briefcase beneath her arm. She had each girl in hand as if she expected them to bolt. Emily, the older sister, looked pale and tight-lipped; Ashley, the younger by a year or two, was crying quietly.
A chorus of amens rose when Brother Evans concluded his prayer. Then Ray, with a guitar strapped across his chest, began to play a song unfamiliar to Fate, with lyrics that sounded unsuited to the occasion. Ray was singing “Still in Saigon,” and though his voice wasn’t bad, the music suffered because the guitar was missing a string. But Ray seemed undaunted by the impaired instrument.
With the final note of the song, Sam’s daughters were shepherded out the door and into a waiting car Fate could see through one of the shelter’s windows. Word soon spread that the girls were headed to foster care.
After dinner, Fate caught a ride back to his “neighborhood” with Marvin, who returned occasionally to the shelter to help with the serving of the evening meal. Long before Lutie and Fate had arrived, Marvin had stayed at the shelter for nearly a year before finding work as a truck driver, a job that afforded him personal use of the truck and enough money to move into a shared apartment.
Back at Floy’s car, Fate found a package of cookies on the hood, his midnight snack. He and Lutie were regularly treated to gifts from their secret friend—fruit, doughnuts, packages of peanuts, candy bars, licorice. Once a flashlight, another time a tiny portable radio, but the reception was poor. And they had yet to see who delivered these treats to them.
But even cookies couldn’t help Fate tonight as he struggled to find sleep. He was uncomfortable on his first night without Lutie, and he couldn’t manage to let go of thoughts about Sam’s daughters.
He wondered if they’d get to stay together with the same family or if they’d be separated. And the story Lutie had told him about kids in foster care kept bad images of Emily and Ashley replaying behind his closed eyes.
Sometime around three, Fate was awakened with the urge to pee. He crawled out of the car, barefoot and wearing only jeans, and had just unzipped his fly when an excruciating pain struck the arch of his left foot.