Something for Nothing
Not long after he had been laid off at the truck plant, Wayne lost his new car to the bank, and his girlfriend broke up with him and moved away from Baton Rouge to Atlanta. He had to relocate from his condo to a garage apartment where the floors creaked and the water heater made a sound all night like boiling eggs knocking together in a pot. In the local paper he saw no ads that required his skills, but a new business in town, the Something for Nothing Floating Casino Corporation, ran a large announcement that the boat was hiring for “certain positions.” He took a cab down to the river and was interviewed by a combed-back, portly gentleman wearing a chalk-stripe suit.
“Are you a good swimmer?” the man asked, reading from a list of questions.
Wayne told him that he had been a certified lifeguard in high school, and when the interviewer heard this, he smiled and peered over the front of his desk into Wayne’s lap. “You’re a thirty-four waist?”
“That’s about right.”
“Hey, I know waists. I used to sell suits at Loeb’s before the downtown store closed. You’re not the only one that’s made a career change.” The interviewer opened his desk drawer and pulled out an invoice. “Let me have your inseam so I can order uniforms for you if you pass the swimming test.”
“What kind of work are you hiring me for?”
The interviewer clicked a pen and began to write. “You’ll be in, ah, inspection. Mainly on the riverbank,” he said, opening another drawer and pulling out a pair of brown swimming trunks. “There’s a bathroom,” he said, pointing over Wayne’s shoulder.
They went up the ramp to the boat and then out on the river side of the bow.
“Where do you want me to swim?” Wayne eyed an iron ladder that descended into the murky chop.
“There’s a bad eddy out there. If you think you can, jump and go straight across the current a hundred feet or so, then swim back to the ladder.”
Wayne banged down into the water, fighting across the eddy and out toward the west. The river was gritty, tasting of turpentine and almonds. When he stroked back, as soon as his hand touched the ladder, the man in the chalk-stripe suit yelled down, “You’re hired.”
—
Wayne sat in the glass guardhouse at the edge of the parking lot sniffing the dye in his new gray uniform. Down the bank in the Mississippi River, the Something for Nothing floated in the greasy current looking like a wedding cake decorated by a lunatic. The roofline of every deck was crowded with crudely made serpentine gingerbread, a turquoise-and-lavender pattern repeated on the boxy landing building and along the top of the parking lot fence. Wayne thought the whole place was silly, and he was mourning the loss of his previous job making $37.81 an hour in a vast, clean plant where everything made sense. The mirror-like paint jobs of the leather-upholstered trucks had reflected logic as they bobbled off the assembly line on their way to farmers and carpenters all over America. The plant had shut down mysteriously, and when he asked a foreman why, he was told, “Let’s just say it makes more sense to operate in another state.”
—
The casino manager apprenticed him to Mr. Joey, a slim, meditative man in his midforties. On Wayne’s first day, he took him down to the riverside guardhouse and pointed to an aluminum skiff tethered against the bank. “Maybe later today I want you to take that little boat and run it around the casino a couple times. Get the hang of it, you know?”
Wayne studied the skiff. “Okay. But why do we need a boat?”
Mr. Joey looked down at his shiny black work shoes. “They ain’t told you nothing in the main office?”
Wayne scratched an arm where the shirt’s fabric made him itch. “They just asked me about nine hundred times if I could swim. What’s up with that?”
Mr. Joey put his hands out in front of him, as if he were showing the length of a fish. “Here’s the deal. This boat’s had some bad luck, you know? Now and then we get a customer that’s real mental. He’s maybe depressed and loses too much.”
Wayne glanced back down to the skiff, which carried two inches of rainwater in it from an early morning squall. A Luzianne bailing can floated against the seat. “I hope this ain’t going where I think it’s going.”
“Hey, you a grown-up. What, twenty-six years old, your papers said.” He took a short comb from his rear pocket and ran it straight back through his hair. “When a customer loses big, sometimes he don’t want to leave the boat and face Mamma and the kids.”
Wayne turned toward the Mississippi and watched a loaded tanker coming down from Exxon, pushing a mound of beige river up its bow. “Then what happens?”
“I don’t know what happens to the ones that walk home. But at this boat, maybe once every two months, one of them jumps in the water.”
“Oh, shit.”
Mr. Joey put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, other boats got this problem, too. Just not as bad as us.”
Wayne looked at the Something for Nothing and its narrow shelves of open deck space. A woman stepped out on level three, not letting the door close, and glanced at Baton Rouge as if to confirm the presence of a real world beyond the dim violet fantasy of the casino. She regarded the gloss-white deck, ceiling, and bulkheads, and after a moment was scalded by the light back into the dark racket of the slot machines. “My God,” Wayne said. “We’re the suicide skiff.”
Running his thumb down the music of his comb, Mr. Joey said, “No, we’re lifeguards.”
Wayne sat down on a lavender chair. Back when he’d worked at the community pool, he’d been a veteran at rescuing the nine-year-olds who had wandered out of their depth. He’d stopped children from running and even broken up fights between hormone-wracked boys driven crazy by budding subdivision girls burnished beautiful by sunshine and pool chemicals.
One day, during his second year at the pool, a fourteen-year-old girl named Valerie dove many times into the deep end, even though she had trouble swimming to the edge after she came up. She was thin and went into the water like a spear, but after her girlfriend towed her out twice, and after he had to drop in to help her when she stayed on the bottom like she’d forgotten where the sky was, he banished her to the other side of the rope at eight feet. He saw her treading water against the rope, throwing him baleful looks. Twice she hollered to him that she could swim well enough to handle the deep end, but he shook his head, no.
And then two busloads of third-graders arrived, and the pool became a bobbing stew of yelling bodies ringed by runners and screaming teachers, helpless in dresses. When a boy bubbled under at six feet and Wayne jumped in for the rescue, several shrieking third-grade girls fluttered to him like ducks after bread, hanging onto his neck, pulling his hair. He brought up the boy and in the hubbub didn’t hear the word mister, or half heard it as he backed the raft of hollering kids into shallow water. He saw a boy with tomato-red hair running alongside the pool and yelled for him to stop at the same time as the boy mouthed, “Mister, mister,” and later, while Wayne told a teacher that the sputtering child he’d handed to her should be made to sit on the bus, the redheaded boy came in close and pleaded, “Mister.” Wayne shook the water out of his ears and looked at the freckles that covered the boy like red ants and heard, “Mister, there’s a big girl in the deep end.” He went under like a dolphin then, through cilia of white legs, under the eight-foot rope, his eyes open, and after forty feet he saw the one-piece aqua swimsuit the same color as the pool paint and the gray-white arms and legs coming out of the cloth, limp and drifting.
When he brought her to the surface, her mouth was open and filled with water like a pitcher. He laid the girl on the hot apron and tried to bring her back, bending over her to restart her heart, and then, mouth to mouth, sending last breaths through her lips until the ambulance crew arrived, but again she wouldn’t listen and stay where she belonged.
And the worst part of it all was going to her funeral and explaining to each of her staring relatives why he hadn’t been able to bring Valerie back to her f
amily.
—
For three days Wayne and Mr. Joey sat in their little building, a parody of a steamboat’s pilot house, with purple vinyl filigree running along the roofline and a domed top sprouting a bird-streaked gilded ball. Whenever a customer stepped out onto a riverside deck, a security camera would examine him, and an employee in the monitoring room would make a decision; sometimes the speaker clipped to the shoulder of Wayne’s uniform would snarl out a code, and he and Mr. Joey would run the skiff around the casino, cruising slowly alongside, inspecting the hull, dawdling in the rolling, mud-pungent current, pointing at rust spots and algae until the customer returned to the howling machines.
Wayne began to jump every time the speaker on his shoulder made a noise. He watched the eyes of customers who walked near the guardhouse, trying to tell if any were depressed or desperate, trying to predict their future.
Mornings were the most dangerous times, Mr. Joey told him. The management wanted a strong swimmer on site before sunrise because if a poor soul was destined to become despondent after a night of losing everything, first light was usually the trigger. “Nothing kills off a bad fantasy like sunrise,” Mr. Joey said.
One day Wayne was thinking about this as he walked up to the guardhouse at false dawn, the Mississippi steaming behind it like a sliding lake of phenol and diesel fuel. He washed the westward windows with glass cleaner as the sun came up across the river and charged the mists with heat, the whole July morning beginning to glow like gas in a fluorescent tube. Through the brightening panes he watched clouds rise, mile-high sooty mollusks burgeoning toward thunderhead. Mr. Joey slouched in a chair, asleep behind his dark glasses. The air conditioner in the guardhouse cycled on, and when Wayne put his hand out to the window, he could already feel heat percolating off the pane. He began to worry about the all-night gamblers who might look through one of the few windows and understand that nothing could hide from the sun.
The radio snorted, and Mr. Joey wiggled his nose.
“Four B,” the radio said. Mr. Joey sat straight up. Four meant fourth deck, B meant an intoxicated customer. In the security handbook, C was a conflict on deck. There was a D in the book, but only white space after it.
Suddenly the radio stuttered an electric yell, “Four D, dammit,” and Mr. Joey jackknifed out of his chair. In ten seconds they were in the skiff, Mr. Joe’s spatulate fingers pulling on the starter rope, Wayne in the bow yanking the tether free.
“Heads up.” Mr. Joey gunned the engine and Wayne leaned away from a lavender plank of the imitation paddle wheel zinging at his head. The skiff arced around the back of the casino, climbed a rolling swell cast by a descending tanker, and surfed down into the trough. Above them they heard a yell. A white-shirted security guard on the fifth deck pointed down to where a sour-faced man, pot-bellied and balding, was sitting on the rail, his skinny legs dangling over the water like disconnected cables. “Okay, boy,” Mr. Joey said, “now’s when you earn your keep.”
At that moment the man lost his grip and cartwheeled into the river. Wayne tipped overboard, stroking over to a bubbling swirl where he hoped he could reach in and pull the man out of the current like a rabbit from a hat. As he beat down the waves he pictured the despairing gambler floating quietly just under the surface, beginning to have second thoughts.
The big guard on the upper deck began to gesture and shout. “Over here! Hey, over here!” Wayne swam upstream a few yards and his knee touched something soft, so he went under. He spread his arms, even his fingers, groping blindly, imagining his hands would soon fill with something—dirt from Minnesota, a waterlogged stick—and when he grabbed a handful of pliant cotton shirt, he was startled to be granted more than he expected. He hauled back on the cloth and kicked for the surface, where he shook the water from his hair and brought up next to him a head spitting water and gasping, a cyanic face opening its mouth, and eyes taking everything in at once and not thinking much of it. “Let me go,” the face croaked.
The man began to fight, and Wayne was surprised by his own rising anger. This one wasn’t going to get away. “Come on, you old bastard. You’re going to the bank with me.”
“Let me drown.” The old fellow raised his lardy arms and flailed at the river. It was obvious he couldn’t swim at all.
Wayne circled his right arm around the man’s chest and began stroking toward the skiff with his left. “Be still. I won’t turn you loose.”
Mr. Joey steered the boat in close, reached over, and grabbed the jumper by his belt, hauling him in like a spent fish, staying low in the skiff to keep it from rolling over. He placed a foot on the man’s biceps as he helped Wayne, who tumbled in next to them. He was trembling and his mouth was full of the scary taste of the river. “Why in holy hell did you jump?” he shouted.
The old man propped himself against a seat and wiped beads of river off his bald head, blinking up at the sky as though he expected something to fall out of it and crush him. “I been playing the ten-dollar slots,” he rasped.
Wayne watched him like he was a hound that had wandered out onto an interstate. The skiff swung toward an eroded piece of riverbank next to the guardhouse. “What’d you lose?”
The man put his head down. “Bank account.”
“Well, that don—”
“Checking account. CDs. Paycheck. Maxed all the credit cards.” His voice rose and he picked up his head. “No machine on God’s green earth could put you in a bind like the one I been feeding. It sucked me dry.”
“So then you threw yourself away,” Mr. Joey said.
The man cut his eyes sharply. “Why not, son of a bitch. I’m about all I got left.”
“Here we go,” Wayne said quickly, stepping over the bow and pulling the skiff ashore. He put a hand out to the jumper and didn’t know what to say. “Watch your step,” he finally told him. In the back of the skiff Mr. Joey rolled his eyes.
—
The casino manager, Mr. Dominic, was standing next to the guardhouse dressed in a dark gray suit with the lapels perfectly rolled, the pleats in his pants like razor blades. Next to him stood a large athletic man Wayne had seen many times around the casino. Everybody called him Puck. He held a little phone to his ear and listened as if some superior intelligence were telling him everything. Puck nodded and pocketed his cell, coming to the skiff and helping the man up the bank as if he were an old relative who’d slipped down in a supermarket aisle.
“Hey, you Mr. Bradruff, right? Live up by Government Street?” Puck had a soft, friendly face, a voice like elevator music, and two long, thin scars lining his jaw.
Bradruff struggled up to the parking lot and when he started to cry, Puck held out a huge arm and gathered him in. “Hey, it’s all right, you know? Everybody has a bad day at the tables once in a while.” He jiggled the man in his arms. Wayne was afraid he might rest his cheek on the top of Bradruff’s slick head.
A black Cadillac idled up to the guardhouse. Its door opened and Puck walked Bradruff over to it where they were miniaturized in the vehicle’s tinted windows. When Puck stepped back from the smaller man his suit was dark with river, Bradruff’s image printed on him as though something other than water had passed between them. Puck motioned toward the soft leather folds of the backseat, and the old man ducked in, Puck crawling after him. He spoke a word into his tiny phone, the door closed, and the Cadillac swam up the levee like a glossy reptile.
Mr. Dominic, everyone’s boss, was rocking back and forth in his mirrory shoes, staring after the car.
Wayne cleared his throat. “Shouldn’t that guy be in an ambulance or something?”
Mr. Dominic turned to him, and Wayne saw himself a tiny uniformed figure on the lenses of the dark glasses, his blond head the size of a match tip. “Somebody comes around, you know, like a newspaper man,” he said, “you send them to me, right?”
Wayne was young, but he was not stupid. “Right,” he said.
His boss gave him a stick of spearmint gum and placed a hand on Wayne’
s sodden shoulder. “Not to worry. We gonna get the gennelman the help he needs.”
Mr. Joey came up behind the manager and gave his partner a look. Wayne peeled away the gum wrapper slowly, popped the stick into his mouth, and chewed vigorously, trying to keep from asking questions. He watched Mr. Dominic turn and walk back to the imitation-wood office and concession area, toward his cloud-soft carpet and fragrant secretaries.
Wayne went into the guardhouse and took a dry uniform from his locker. In the tiny bathroom he closed his eyes and saw Bradruff’s streaming face coming up next to his in the river, wet and squalling.
An hour later Mr. Joey came back from the main office and stood in front of the window unit, his palms spread open to the vents. “I was checking on our man.”
“You find out anything about why he jumped? Was he kind of nuts or something?”
“He wiped out around two in the morning. The shift manager, Nelson, that turd, came over and told him that maybe he should lay off and play another day. But Nelson don’t mean it. They taught him to say that in casino school because it drives the bad gamblers insane. Once the house suggests they should stay away from the machines, they’re crazy to get back.”
Wayne stopped buttoning his shirt. “How did he keep playing after he busted out?”
“Puck says he walked up the hill to the all-night pawn and sold his watch, rings, and car.” He made fists and rolled them in the cold air. “When he lost that, Nelson started giving him credit, and then he really went in the hole. I mean down, down, down. About sunup he just couldn’t stand to leave the boat and face his family, or whoever he was gonna have to explain the losses to.”
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