Wayne shoved the corner of a towel into his ear. “These are, like, weak people to begin with, right?”
Mr. Joey shrugged. “I guess they’re accidents looking for a place to happen.” He looked over toward the purple and turquoise trim work on the Something for Nothing. “This must be the place.”
Wayne pictured Bradruff again, how the color had returned to his face, the little broken vessels in his cheeks reddening like filaments. “He didn’t look stupid. Why couldn’t he understand what was happening in there?”
Mr. Joey sat down on a wobbly turquoise stool. “Does a horsefly know what’s happening when it flies into a bug zapper?”
Wayne tried to imagine what goes on in a bug’s brain when it sees the magic blue light, that mystical glow. He thought of the flawed trembling in a moth’s wings that guides it in to death, and then he turned to watch cars pulling into the parking lot and driving under the casino’s huge sign that whirled its nimbus of bad-colored magnetic neon.
—
A month slid by like the chocolate river, and two jumpers decided to stay among the living when they saw the silvery skiff and watchful eyes below them. The morning Wayne hauled in a three-hundred-pound woman who’d gambled away her trailer, he began to feel powerful, like a real lifesaver, a skiff angel who would never again let anyone come up limp and breathless in his arms. He began to enjoy coming to work.
One August afternoon he looked up as Puck patted the glass guardhouse door with his vast palm.
“What’s going on?” Wayne asked.
“Hey, come inside and put on a white shirt and a badge. We’re short a man on the floor.” Puck had a habit of putting his right fist into his left hand and holding it in front of him. Wayne realized that his arms were too big to fold without splitting his suit. Puck looked as if he were built out of martinis and rib eyes, his neck so big that his tie hung eight inches above his belt.
“I didn’t train for security.”
Puck waved him out into the sun. “It’s just one shift. You don’t carry no gun or nothing. Just walk the slots and make sure the old ladies don’t go crazy.”
Wayne boarded the boat, found the guards’ area, and drew his shirt, badge, and hat. Passing through a different door, he stepped out onto the swirling orange, fuchsia, and teal carpet. The vast room was a dinging, chime-wracked labyrinth of a thousand hooting slot machines, each one with a customer attached like a tick.
The air itself was a fabric woven of bells, coins hammering into trays, the grind and flop of levers, the electric whanging of small payoffs. Wayne surveyed the room and understood that all of the motion and sound was orchestrated to rattle the customers toward a fear that some future allocation of bells would not be theirs, that a big tolling thing was going to happen, perhaps without them—the big jackpot was coming soon, and they’d be caught unprepared, a coin in the pocket instead of whirling through the innards of a benevolent machine. Interwoven with the sound was a fog of continually rebreathed cigarette smoke.
Wayne drifted past a blackjack table as a well-dressed, elegant woman won a pile of hundred-dollar chips, then shoved the whole win out for the next bet, as if wagering two thousand dollars was meaningless. Wayne wondered if the blonde, who was pushing fifty and probably still wondering when her ship was going to come in, would win five thousand, what would that do for her? If she would parlay her money into twenty-five grand, what would that buy but a poky American sedan or a down payment on a nondescript subdivision dwelling? He imagined that most people in the casino were living from paycheck to paycheck, so they gambled against the house, the computerized house that hired geniuses to program the machines and to figure the odds down to the last fate-lubricated turn of the roulette wheel. He looked around through the smoke and the racket, feeling like a conspirator in everyone’s losses.
And then he saw him. Bald Mr. Bradruff was back, stuck on a vinyl stool, rolling quarters into a slot machine, a plastic bucket in the crook of his left arm. Wayne glanced toward the door that led to the outside deck, then looked up at the ceiling camera in his quadrant and held out one finger. Stepping back around a bank of bonging poker machines, he waited twenty seconds until Gagliano, head of security for the floor, got the word through his earpiece and steered his round belly in Wayne’s direction.
“What you got?” Gagliano wore a jeweled badge and gold fringe on his cap. He was old and waddled when he walked, his hands facing backward. Wayne had heard he’d once been a master machinist.
“The gentleman on number four, next row, is the guy who jumped.”
Gagliano’s eyes were drooping from the smoke, and Wayne figured he was near the end of his shift.
“Which guy who jumped? This month, January, last year, what?”
Wayne began to feel queasy, and his stomach read a motion in the boat, as though it were turning from its moorings. He wanted to ask how many jumpers there were in all. “It’s a Mr. Bradruff.”
Gagliano walked around to the next aisle, spoke into his radio, waited a while for an answer, and pretended to ignore Bradruff, who was steadily feeding his machine as if it were a beloved pet. Gagliano adjusted a wheel on his radio and held it close to a furry ear, then came back. “He’s all right.”
“All right my ass. He tried to kill himself.”
“Puck says he’s okay now.” He glanced over his shoulder at Bradruff. “He’s happy enough spending his quarters.” The guard shrugged. He had people to observe, money to count. “If you’re worried about him, just keep an eye on the door to the outside deck,” he said, chucking Wayne on the shoulder. Gagliano spoke a word into his radio and walked away into the craps tables.
On his next round, Wayne wandered close to Bradruff, noted the cheap knit shirt he wore, then passed on into the pebble of hard sounds paving the air, hoping he wouldn’t be called on to slam into the water from up on this deck. After his next turn around the floor, he drifted past Bradruff’s machine again, and this time the man’s eyes flicked up at him, sick and dark, and at the last instant before turning away, they ignited with a fearful spark of recognition. Wayne touched him on a forearm lightly, and Bradruff leaned into the aisle, his hand stupidly caught in the bucket of coins.
“How’s luck treating you?” Wayne asked.
Bradruff looked toward the door. “You the one pulled me out.”
“That’s me. You all right now?”
He turned back to the machine. “You can mind your own business if you want to. I’m just risking a few dollars here.” His eyes bounced between the machine and Wayne’s badge. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
Wayne remembered again the wet heft of Bradruff in his arms, how the color had come back into his face. He took a step closer. “You here by yourself?”
“My son dropped me off on his motorbike. He’ll be picking me up before too long.”
Wayne gave him a look. “You don’t have a car anymore?”
“I didn’t have no car when I came into this world.”
“Well, if you need something, I’ll be right up in here, walking around.”
Bradruff put a hand up on a lever, his fingertips blackened by the coins. “I’m all right with the management. They’re a bunch of nice guys.”
“Yeah?”
“They got my house back. I mean, all the other stuff’s gone, but I still got a roof. My wife and my son’s still living with me.” He dropped his hand into the bucket, fished a quarter, placed it into the slot, and pulled the lever, all without looking at the machine. “Everything’s fine.” Thirty quarters banged into the tray, and Bradruff stared at them, deadpan. “See, things’re looking up.”
—
The next night, Wayne lay awake listening to his water heater knock and rumble. Toward dawn he began to imagine that if he ever had children, this is how it would be, worrying all the time about what they were doing. He went to work and spent the shift watching television and listening to the plastic speaker clipped to his shoulder like a fretting pet bird with a t
hreatening beak. When he got off, he looked in the Baton Rouge directory, found Roy Bradruff’s address, and took a bus to a peeling frame house on a sandy lot south of Catfish Town. A yellow Monte Carlo with a large red sticker on the back windshield listed in a rain-topped rut. Wayne walked in off the street and knocked, and Bradruff came out onto the splintery porch in his knobby bare feet, wearing a washed-out paisley shirt with cream-colored paramecia swimming through a burgundy background. “Hey,” he said.
Wayne saw that the shirt was not washed out but coated with sawdust. “I just wanted to check up on you.”
Bradruff seemed sleepy or half-drunk. He motioned him feebly inside. “You want to sit awhile? I just got off work at the cabinet shop.”
“No. I feel kind of foolish worrying you like this.”
Bradruff made a noise down in his chest, a cracking of phlegm. “You sure don’t owe me nothing.”
“You do any good at the slots?”
Bradruff looked around at his porch ruefully. “What you think.”
“You gonna keep coming to the boat?” Wayne looked over to a bloated yellow dog limping up the steps.
“Only chance I got.”
“Well. It’s a real long shot.”
“Better than no shot.”
Wayne showed his teeth, trying to be pleasant, and rocked back on his heels. “I’ve heard the odds on the big one. Seven million to one is no shot.”
Bradruff pulled his watch face around from the other side of his wrist and read the dial. “Somebody’s got to win it.”
Any further comment would have sounded like an argument, so Wayne nodded and turned for the steps. “I just got off myself, so I’ll head on to the house.”
“All right,” Bradruff said, sounding relieved. “Don’t set up worrying about me, now. I was pretty drunk that time I fell in the river.”
Wayne bumped up against the dog, which walked backward and coughed. “Take it easy.”
“Thanks for coming,” Bradruff told him, under his breath.
Wayne watched him go inside. At least he was still alive, working and making money, still around for his family. Surely something had changed in him a bit—he’d seen the light, Wayne hoped, and come to the surface of things.
—
Ten days later, on the night shift, Wayne and Mr. Joey were playing gin to keep awake when the little speakers on their shoulders began scratching out a frantic string of syllables punctuated by “4D” sung several times staccato, and together they stumbled down the dark bank. The outboard dug into the river, the bow rising into the moonless sky. Immediately past the paddle wheel the skiff rode over a submerged drift log and the motor kicked up with a bang and stalled. Looking upriver alongside the boat, Wayne saw what he knew he would see. When he was a child he’d waited at a rural railroad station with his mother to catch a cross-country train they both knew would be an hour late. He had stared at the empty distance between the rails patiently, knowing the void would fill, for the train was inevitable; it was on tracks and had to come to town, and now Roy Bradruff was coming on, climbing over the casino rail, right on his schedule. He was hitching his rear end off a half inch at a time, moving one buttock, then the other, squinting in the hundreds of deck lights firing up the side of the boat.
Wayne tried to figure the math of the rescue, what he’d have to do if Bradruff made it to the water. The guards on deck were hanging back, their arms extended, waiting for a chance, but Bradruff was red faced, unfocused, and drunk, yelling in a back-road voice that all their son-of-a-bitching machines were broke, that he’d poured his house back into the slots and was down to the clothes on his back. He ripped open his shirt, the buttons flying like shrapnel, and flung it off into the night, then tumbled, bald head over heels.
Mr. Joey had gotten the engine back into the water and started it; the skiff surged upriver alongside the scummy hull, sliding under the falling man who came plunging down on both of them in a percussion of bones. Mr. Joey fell overboard, and one of Bradruff’s tumbling legs struck Wayne in the chest and they both fell backward into the water. As soon as he was under, Wayne kicked away from the light, afraid of the propeller, and when the water darkened to the color of syrup, he came up for air. The river drained out of his ears, and he heard the yells on deck and glimpsed Mr. Joey stroking toward the casino. His lifeguard instincts came alive and he wanted Roy Bradruff like air itself. Spitting out a mouthful of river, he yelled up at the boat, hoping that someone could point toward where he was supposed to swim in the chop, but everyone was busy pulling Mr. Joey out. Behind him he heard a man’s cry, a watery scream that raised the hairs on his neck, and he struck out downriver into the black suck of current, past the end of the boat where the river faded from tan enamel to a dark, oil-laced mystery on which reflections of shore lights sparked like drowning fireflies. He swam fifty yards along the darkening channel, seeing nothing, then stopped to tread water, to listen. Wayne hoped that Bradruff was not below him somewhere, trying to breathe water and swim away to a new place where there would be no blame for whatever he’d done on the boat. He heard a swirl, like the struggle of a caught fish, and dug out toward it, clutching the water as though each stroke might touch a hand or an arm drifting away with a soul’s final motion. He swam until he imagined Bradruff’s body as a gray ember with only one spark at its center, but still something that could be blown back into fire. He swam until his arms went numb and a dark roller ironed him under. A charge of river stabbed up his nose, and, sputtering and lost in a new velvety blackness, he pictured his own young limbs gray as ash and cooling toward death.
The search over, his questing strength gone, he struggled toward the bank. All he could see was a dark wall ahead, and after many strokes he overhanded into the algae-padded side of a moored barge. Sapped and slipping south along its side, he found a cable dangling between two barges and hung on with one hand, letting his body go limp, giving it over to the current like a flag to the breeze. He gathered black breaths, wondering if Bradruff had come up or was journeying backward to his origin, a gamble lost, returned to the dealer.
In fifteen minutes, a Coast Guard boat’s spotlight silver-plated the eddies around him, and he heard, from far off, Mr. Joey’s worried voice calling out to him.
—
The next afternoon he came back to work and was summoned to the cool green office of Mr. Dominic. Puck politely ushered him in, and the manager was smiling. He walked around his desk and motioned with both hands for Wayne to sit in a forest-green leather armchair. The skin on Mr. Dominic’s face was smooth like the hide of the chair. “You thinking of quitting us, I hear.”
“Yes sir.” Wayne felt himself sinking.
“We moving some people around, you know. Thought you might want to get out of that little glass greenhouse and work the boat.” He sat back on the front edge of his immaculate desk.
Wayne opened a hand, looked into the palm, then made a fist. “I was thinking of going back to factory work. Maybe find another truck plant and move.”
Mr. Dominic looked at him. “The Shreveport plant is the closest one, and it’s closing down. You got to stay with us.” He made a gun of his hand and pointed it at Wayne. “Check the want ads. We’re about the only game in town anymore, unless you want to get scalded down at Exxon or elected to the legislature.”
Wayne twisted the soles of his shoes into the carpet. “I guess that’s true. What would I do on the boat?”
“A little security. Just a utility belt with cuffs and mace. Mr. Gagliano could train you in a couple days, teach you the radio codes, how to steer the drunks, how to watch a machine that’s being emptied. Usual stuff. Plus you’d get an extra two dollars an hour.” Mr. Dominic folded his hands on a thigh, waiting for an answer like a man holding all the right cards.
Wayne scanned the room for a window. He had the urge to look outside, but the room was like a plush secret. “Okay,” he said.
“Good. Good.” They both got to their feet, and Mr. Dominic put up a ha
nd, clamping it on Wayne’s neck, shaking it affectionately. “You know, they found that poor man’s body this morning, down under a dock past the lower bridge.”
Wayne’s mind cut off like an engine starved for fuel, and he waited in the quiet office for it to start up again. “Ah,” he said.
“The funeral’s tomorrow afternoon. Just a wake type thing. You think you could show up? You know, represent the boat to the family?”
He thought of himself in this changed identity, the representative of something for nothing. “I don’t know.”
Mr. Dominic squeezed his neck, hard. “You could take the whole day off,” he whispered respectfully. “With overtime.”
—
The funeral home was a long, low building of streaked white brick situated across from a refinery. Wayne’s cab pulled into the gravel parking lot, stopped, and he watched the dust ghosting down the potholed street. Inside, he signed the guest book and met Roy Bradruff’s wife, who was much larger than her husband. She wore long, swinging gray braids and leaned into Wayne, holding his hand and trying to bend it double.
“We know you done what you could,” she said with her beery breath.
He spilled out his rehearsed words. “All of us down at the casino are really sorry about this.” He had to speak up to be heard over a Hammond organ being played in the vestibule by a stick of an old woman. The tune was blurry, the organist bereft of rhythm.
The wife’s eyes were hard to read. “Well, we tried to keep him out of that place. We talked and talked about it, but we all knew something was going to happen. I guess we just didn’t want to admit it.” She looked off to the side.
“You understand it wasn’t an accident?”
She lifted her head. “Yeah. You know, he always gambled, penny-ante stuff, but after they parked that damn boat uptown, he just lost control.”
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