The Money Game

by Michael A. Smith

  Ace’s big plan would lead the news in only a few days, but in a way that neither he nor Richey could imagine on this day.

  15/Dad, Me And Richey

  Carmen sat alone in her apartment, savoring the Saturday morning silence. She drank coffee and stared out the patio doors trying to see into the future. Marisa was at a playdate at one of her friend’s house, having stayed overnight, along with two other kids from school. Carmen had agreed to pick her daughter up at 2 p.m. During this time alone to reflect, she hoped to flesh out a plan that would allow her and Richey to move forward into the future together in a way that was satisfying and fulfilling to both of them. Richey’s early morning visit earlier in the week had convinced Carmen they were at a turning point. In addition, Carmen continued to think about her conversation with Marisa that same morning.

  Also, Carmen’s relationship with her father came to mind, because it had so many parallels to her relationship with Richey. She had taken a psychology minor in college in large part because of the father/daughter relationship. She wanted to figure it out. Carmen learned that many people lived in the past, dwelling on hurts and disappointments, and thinking erroneously that by constantly mulling them over, one could somehow change them. A therapist she’d seen for six months even quoted Omar Khayyam to illustrate the point: the moving finger of time has written the events of the past, and nothing “shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

  Carmen understood the practicality of that advice. One only lived in the present moment. The now. She couldn’t live in the past or the future, since that wasn’t physically possible. Nevertheless, she hoped to learn by reflection and not repeat past errors in the present and near future.

  In some ways, Carmen’s dad and Richey were alike. Perhaps Carmen felt that if she could determine what she should have done to have had a more successful connection to her father, maybe she could figure out how to achieve the same success with Richey.

  In her resurrected memory, her dad always sat in a chair on the patio of their home, weather permitting. Otherwise, he camped out in the small living room pretending to watch television. In either case, he kept within easy reach a small cooler filled with beer on ice. A tequila bottle and shot glass sat on a side table. Periodically, he made a trip to the bathroom. That was his ritual for most of her life at home.

  Carmen recalled their most memorable conversation that took place in the spring of the year she graduated from high school. Maybe the impending freedom of adulthood had emboldened her, not that she feared physical violence from her father. Although his temper flared now and then, he wasn’t a violent man. In fact, he was generally philosophical and beaten, having given up on everything and everyone a long time ago.

  “Don’t you get tired of doing nothing with your life?” she’d said, finding him alone on the patio. A chain-link fence enclosed much of their property. A line of lilac bushes at the back of the lot made the whole backyard smell sweet at that time of year. It was a good place to sit in the worse of circumstances. Everyone else in the family — her mother and her three brothers — had abandoned their husband and father to alcoholism years ago and walked around him as if he were a piece of furniture. He wore his usual uniform: jeans, boots, Western belt with a wide buckle, white shirt with fake pearl snap buttons, and a Stetson with a multi-colored hatband. His wife made certain his clothes were clean and pressed. He was a very neatly dressed drunk.

  “What else should I be doing?” he’d asked.

  “Read, talk with your family and friends, and go to church with your wife. Even watch television.”

  “There’s nothing on television worth watching and I don’t believe in God no more, but I am talking to you.”

  He could be frustrating like that when Carmen tried to bait him into an argument she planned to win; had to win, if she was right and he was wrong. “So you actually prefer to get drunk and stare off into the distance?”

  “Yeah. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it, right?”

  His situation had worsened throughout her high school years. Her father worked sometimes in his brother-in-law’s janitorial service that also employed her mother and all three of her older brothers. From listening to her mother, Carmen learned that her uncle Carlos, a very kind person, subsidized their family budget by carrying her father on the payroll even though he did little work. Anywhere else, they would have fired him.

  “So what do you think about when you’re staring at the bushes?” she’d asked indignantly. Carmen remembered the backyard grass, which grew in uneven clumps amid the unfertile, clay soil.

  “Lots of things. Probably the same kind of things you think about.”

  Boys, clothes, cars and college? Carmen didn’t believe they had anything in common.

  “If it wasn’t for Mother and Uncle Carlos, we’d be out in the street.”

  He’d frowned, and seemed poised to lash out at her, but the anger faded to acceptance as he began to nod. “That’s true. They are both good people.”

  “Mother’s much too good for you,” she’d said boldly and with conviction.

  He had turned and looked at her and the look on his face conveyed an attitude, albeit it a tired one. It was as if he wanted to ask: Is all of this really necessary? Instead, he had said: “That also is true. There were better days for us, and we accomplished more than you might think. We’re comfortable here and your mother and I raised a good family. Look at you. Beautiful and smart. You’re going to college, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, her indignation somewhat dampened by his response. “But that’s something I accomplished without any help from you.”

  “That’s the way it should be, Carmen. There’s only so much a parent can do for a child. If you don’t learn to motivate yourself and take care of yourself, life will not be kind to you.”

  “You could try to be part of my life,” she’d said, almost pleading. “You don’t even know me.”

  He had nodded sadly. “Not everyone has a lot to give, Carmen. No one really understands themselves, let alone another person. Me, I’m not smart or exceptional. Not many people are, you know, although almost everyone is ambitious. I figured I was so ordinary that to be ambitious was foolhardy. That doesn’t mean I’m inhuman or that I don’t care.”

  That’s why she wanted to talk to him, because she felt he was a smart person hiding in a bottle. He had something to offer. At age eighteen, Carmen needed all the help and understanding she could get. “Didn’t you ever want to be somebody? To do something?”

  He’d looked at her in amazement. “I am somebody. I do things.”

  “You drink yourself into a stupor every evening.”

  “That, too. You want a beer? You can sit if you like.”

  She’d defiantly taken the beer, which her mother would never have allowed her to drink in the house or on the patio. She’d stood at a distance and sipped from the bottle, afraid to drink boldly or deeply for fear she’d contract his disease. She could still remember her first enticing smell of the hops, though.

  “Just a few people now and then do something that really makes a difference to all of humanity,” he’d said. “The rest of us do what we can to live safely, have enough to eat, and a good place to live. That’s not possible everywhere in the world. Not in the parts of Mexico where our people come from originally. Down there, they think I’m a success, living here in luxury. You see, everything depends on your viewpoint and the goals you set. Many people are frustrated and run around making a lot of noise but they’re just passing through, too. I wish I could have been a scientist or an astronaut, but I don’t think I had the smarts. Not everything in life can be had just by wishing for it, Carmen, or thinking it’s owed to you. Some situations you just have to accept.”

  “You could have tried harder.”

  “Yes, you’re absolutely right. At some point, I decided not to. I’m pretty content now.”

  “You’re drinking and smoking yourself to de
ath.”

  “Well, we’re all dying, aren’t we?”

  She’d cried out in frustration and threw the beer bottle into the grass, being careful not to hit the patio cement and shatter it to bits. As she stalked toward the patio door, he had called after her, “I’m sorry, Carmen. I’m truly sorry.”

  She’d come back to that thirteen-year-old conversation many times in her life, and it haunted her. She didn’t always understand or necessarily believe in all the complex cause-and-effect conclusions about family and its effects on children. Maybe some of them were too subtle and too complex to understand. One of her professors maintained that all families were dysfunctional, to some degree. That didn’t mean they couldn’t fulfill their function.

  Eventually, Carmen had concluded that maybe her dad was right, to a degree. Maybe the way you saw other people wasn’t the way they really were. Maybe everyone had a separate identity for every person they interacted with. Carmen knew that many other people saw her differently than she saw herself, maybe because she portrayed herself differently to them. At work, they thought she was dependable, competent and self-confident, because it was in her financial interest to make them think of her that way. She had to keep her job and draw a paycheck. Her neighbors thought she was always happy and carefree, because that’s the way she acted around them. Her mother thought Carmen was a good mother — a good, single mother. Richey thought she was sexy and an artist. Carmen was amazed that she could fool most of the people most of the time, because many times she didn’t feel she was successful in any of those roles. It provided an insight into Richey’s feeling of failure as an actor.

  At one time, Carmen had concluded that she married a macho man like her first husband, Miquel, to compensate for her weak father. Contradictorily, had she tried to control Miquel the way her mother always controlled her father? Someone always had made a decision for her father about the clothes he wore, what he ate, where he went, even when he should go to work. If he laid off work for two days in a row, her mother would berate him until he wearily got up and went along to clean office buildings. Almost as if that was the price he had to pay to shut her up. Even then, he took a flask with him, according to her mother, who perhaps revealed too much to her daughter.

  Had her frustration with the lack of a relationship with her father made Carmen confrontational, even slightly hysterical, in her early relationships with men? Miquel had certainly accused her of being manipulative and controlling. Worse of all, was she indirectly trying to save Richey as a means of saving her now-dead father? Were they even alike? The one who had no dreams and the one who had nothing but dreams.

  Carmen’s recollections revealed no insights into her upcoming conversation with Richey. Therefore, she sighed, and went about her business.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  As expected on a Saturday, Carmen found Richey perched on his usual bar stool watching the Keno numbers appear magically on the TV screen.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, alarmed and suspicious. “Something wrong? I didn’t expect to see you until this evening. I thought we were going to dinner?”

  “Yeah, we’re still on for that. I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “A lot of people have been dropping by to offer suggestions about what I should do when I grow up and am on my own.”

  He waved a completed Keno card at John the bartender and then dropped it at the head of the bar. “If I win this game, I won’t need to heed any of those suggestions.”

  “Well, until the winning numbers are revealed, let me make my pitch about funding an alternative lifestyle,” Carmen said, as she sat on a bar stool and opened the menu. She pretended to read it intently, as if she didn’t already have all the lunch items memorized. She put the menu down and ordered coffee from John. She needed to keep her wits about her.

  Carmen had a package to sell and she wanted to make a persuasive pitch. She’d dressed for the part in an ankle-length dark blue dress featuring a cream-colored floral pattern running down the left side. In the mirror, the dress seemed to show off her figure in a very flattering fashion. Yesterday, she’d gone to a beauty salon to have her hair and nails done professionally, and listen to several new makeup tips she’d tried this morning.

  She turned slightly sideways so her knees touched his thigh. At the same time, she placed one hand on his arm. She leaned forward slightly, to give Richey a hint of her perfume. “You got any money?” she asked.

  Richey, dressed in his usual weekend uniform of black slacks and blue sweater over a white dress shirt, replied: “Yeah, why? You broke? How much do you need?”

  “I’ve got about sixty-seven thousand dollars in the bank,” Carmen announced. “This is approximately equal to the Keno grand prize after taxes.”

  Richey looked stupefied. “Jesus! Where’d you get that much money, Carmen?”

  She moved her hand up to his shoulder. “When my dad died, mom gave me twenty-five thousand dollars of his life insurance money. It was as much as my three brothers got together, ’cause I’m a girl, I guess. Apparently, Mom thought I’d have a hard time in life. She was right, in a way. Also, I got a modest cash settlement from Miquel in the divorce, since he admitted to adulterous behavior. Finally, I’ve gotten good advice from an investment broker over the past few years.”

  “That’s great.”

  “How much you got in the bank?”

  Richey turned back to his drink, as if embarrassed. “Less than fifteen thousand,” he said, not wanting to mention that Marshon had recently given him two-thirds of that.

  She thought of his modest tri-level house in a neighborhood not far from the bar. “Is the house in your name or yours and Shirley’s?”

  He again turned his head and upper body toward her. “It was a simple divorce, not acrimonious. When I sell it, I owe her half the profit.”

  “How much equity do you figure you got?”

  He calculated. “Twenty thousand net to me, maybe. What’s this all about?”

  Carmen took a deep breath. “So we could cash in all of our chips, sell both our cars and come up with a pot of nearly a hundred thousand dollars. You can win the prize Richey just by saying yes.” She rubbed his inner thigh, signaling that the prize included much, much more. Whatever she needed to do today to convince him, she planned to do with enthusiasm.

  John served Carmen her coffee while Richey stared at her as if she were an alien. He laughed uneasily. “And, then what?”

  Carmen took a deep breath. “They had an RV exhibit down the hill in the parking lot a few weeks ago. I stopped in to look around. It gave me an idea and I’ve been searching RV ads ever since. We could buy a used eight-cylinder truck and a nice-sized camper, maybe something only a couple of years old, for around fifty thousand. Or, we could put down twenty thousand on a new Class A motorhome. Payments would run about six hundred a month. We use the rest of our money to travel around the country. Spring in the Mid-Atlantic States, summer and fall in the northeast, winter in Florida, Corpus Christi, or southern California.” She knew it might sound ridiculous.

  “Kinda like the song lyrics by Dave Loggins: You can sell your paintings on the sidewalk, while I perform in the local cafe.

  “Actually, that’s similar to my plan.”

  “You and me and Marisa?”

  “Certainly. She and I are a package deal. In fact, she’s the inspiration in part for this idea. She thinks I should paint instead of drawing ads picturing happy dogs eating dog food.”

  “As I recall our conversation after my audition for Death of a Salesman, I suggested the same thing and you pooh-poohed the idea.”

  Carmen smiled tolerantly. “Let’s not get into a conversation in which we recall all the contradictory things we’ve said to each other. I’m a human being and I have the option of changing my mind — or listening to my daughter’s advice. I decided that I wanted her to follow her dreams. If I want that, then I should be a model for that lifestyle.”

  “What if you, we, fail?”r />
  Carmen nodded grimly. “I'm more afraid of what will happen if I continue to deny my artistic passion and fail to work and improve my talent. How then could I ever expect my daughter to be independent as an adult, and follow her heart?”

  A distracting noise occurred at the entrance as four young men came in and noisily shouted their drink orders while hanging winter coats on a clothes tree. They argued about the best place to sit, where they could view several college football games at the same time.

  Richey resumed the debate. “This is very disturbing. It’s almost as if you’ve been listening to my rantings and ravings about how one should not deny the artistic life, even if one can’t make a living at it.” He laughed. “I had no idea you were taking me seriously!”

  “That will teach you to be careful about what you say, in case you convince someone like me that you’re right.”

  “I never considered that possibility. However, back to reality, traveling around like that, Marisa couldn’t go to school.”

  “All the better, maybe. I’ve thought a lot about that, too. The new lifestyle alone would be an education for her. I’d have to spend more time with Marisa instead of relying on other people to educate my daughter and influence her values. She’d be out from under all the negative peer pressures that affect teenagers. I’ll have my laptop. We can subscribe to a satellite service and get cable TV and Internet access. On the Web, we can find all the educational tools we’d need to teach her everything she needs to know and more. She won’t fall behind; she’ll learn more. However, she’s not the issue. We are.”

  The skeptical look on Richey’s face indicated he was searching for objections, which didn’t deter Carmen. She hadn’t expected him to endorse her proposal immediately. She braced her shoulders to jut out her chest and slightly spread her legs, remembering to use every means of persuasion at her disposal.