Back in the World

by Tobias Wolff

  “Thanksgiving,” the doorman said. Then he said something that Father Leo couldn’t hear because of the noise.

  There was no point in looking for Jerry in that crowd. Father Leo went back inside and took a seat at the bar. From the bar he could keep an eye on both the lobby and the casino. He sipped at his drink and glanced around. A muscular-looking girl with tattooed snakes coiling up her bare arms was poking out numbers on a punchboard. Two pudgy Indian men wearing identical Hawaiian shirts sat silently side by side. At the end of the bar a small, red-haired woman was emptying her purse and spreading its contents in front of her. She dipped her hand into her purse with the predatory crispness of a robin driving its beak into the ground, and Father Leo found himself watching her to see what she came up with. At last she found what she was after—cigarettes—and lit one. She pursed her lips and blew out a long stream of smoke. Then she noticed that Father Leo was looking at her. She looked back at him. Father Leo gave a little nod, and lowered his eyes. Soon afterwards he finished his drink and left the bar.

  Father Leo sat in the lobby for an hour, reading newspapers. Every time someone came in he looked up. When he felt himself getting sleepy he went to the desk and talked to the clerk. Jerry had left his key, but no message. “That’s strange,” Father Leo said. He walked across the lobby to the elevator. The red-haired woman from the bar was standing inside, holding the door for him. “What floor?” she asked.

  “Five. Thank you.”

  “Coincidence,” she said. “That’s my floor too.” She and Father Leo stared at each other’s reflections in the mirrored wall. She was about his age, older than he’d thought. There were wrinkles around her mouth. He saw that she was badly sunburned except for a white circle around each eye. He could almost feel the heat coming off her pink skin. She was tapping one foot.

  “Been here long?” she asked.

  He shook his head. The elevator stopped and they got out. She walked beside him down the corridor. “I flew in two days ago,” she said. “I don’t mind telling you I’ve been having a ball.” When Father Leo put his key into the lock she read the number on his door. “Five-fifteen. That’s easy to remember. I always leave work at five-fifteen. I could leave at five but I like it when everyone’s gone. I like to just sit and look out the window. It’s so peaceful.”

  “Good night,” Father Leo said. She was still talking when he closed the door. He sat for a time on his balcony. There were high palms around the pool, and overhead a bright crescent moon. Father Leo thought of a band of marauders camped by a well in the desert, roasting a lamb over a spitting fire, the silver moon reflected in the chasing of their long inlaid rifles. Veiled women moving here and there in silence, doing as they were told.

  Before he went to bed Father Leo called the desk. Jerry was still out.

  “It’s only twelve-thirty,” the clerk said. “You could try later.”

  Father Leo turned out the lights. The ceiling sparkled. He was staring at it when he thought he heard a sound at the door. He sat up. “Who’s there?” he called. When no one answered he said, “Jerry?” The sound did not come again.

  On his way to breakfast the next morning Father Leo stopped by the front desk. Jerry still hadn’t come in. Father Leo left a message—“I’m in the coffee shop”—and when he finished eating he changed it to “Went out. Be back soon.”

  Though it was just after eleven, the street was already jammed with people. A dry breeze blew, bearing a faint smell that made Father Leo think of the word sage. Off in the distance purple mountains floated on a shimmering lake of blue. The sidewalk glowed.

  For the rest of the morning Father Leo searched the casinos. He thought that Jerry might have wandered in and got caught up in one of those games that went on forever. But he didn’t see him, or if he saw him he didn’t recognize him. That was possible. There were so many people. Bent over their machines, faces fixed and drained by the hot lights, they all began to look the same to Father Leo. He couldn’t tell who he was looking at and it wore him out to try. At two o’clock he went back to the hotel, intending to search the casinos again after he’d eaten lunch.

  He sat at the counter and watched the crowd move past outside. It was noisy in the coffee shop, which was full of Japanese men in business suits. They all wore cowboy hats and string ties with roadrunner clasps. At the back of the room a bunch of them were playing slot machines. There weren’t enough machines to go around so they took turns, standing behind each other in little lines. One of them hit a jackpot and all the others, including those at the tables, stopped talking and applauded.

  “If it isn’t five-fifteen.” The red-haired woman from the night before sat down at the next stool and offered Father Leo a package of Salems with one cigarette sticking halfway out. He shook his head. She slid the cigarette from the pack, tapped it once on the countertop, and put it in the ashtray. “For later,” she said. “I can’t smoke on an empty stomach.” Her face had turned the color of brick. It was painful for Father Leo to look at her and to think of how hot and tight her skin must feel, and how it must hurt her to keep smiling the way she did.

  “By the way,” she said, “I’m Sandra.”

  Father Leo did not want to know this woman’s name and he did not want her to know his name. But she kept waiting. “Slim,” he said.

  “Then you must be a Westerner.”

  He nodded. “Seattle and thereabouts.”

  She said, “I met a fellow in the casino named Will. In Chicago you just don’t hear names like that. Will and Slim. It’s so different. I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”

  “Not at all,” Father Leo said.

  The waitress took Sandra’s order and slipped Father Leo’s check under his plate. He picked it up and looked at it.

  “Let me treat you to a refill,” Sandra said, pointing at his coffee cup.

  He stood. “No thanks,” he said. “I’ve got to be going. Much obliged.”

  Father Leo left another message for Jerry and went upstairs to his room. He thought he would lie down for a while before making another tour of the casinos. When he stepped inside he saw that his suitcase was open, though he could remember closing it. On the table next to the suitcase a cigarette was coming apart in a glass of water.

  He knelt and went through the suitcase. He sat back for a moment, caught his breath, and searched the suitcase again. The chips were gone. Father Leo flushed the cigarette down the toilet and dropped the glass in the wastebasket. He could feel the blood pulse in his temples, its beat strong and uneven, surprising him and shaking him as if he were hollow. He sat on the bed. The hollowness spread downwards to his chest and legs. When he stood he rose up and up. He saw his shoes side by side on the rug, a long way below. He walked over to the balcony door and back. Then he began to talk to himself.

  The things Father Leo said didn’t make any sense. They were only noises. He kept pacing the room. He struck himself over the heart. He gripped his shirt in both hands and tore it open to his waist. He struck himself again. Back and forth he walked.

  The sounds he made grew soft and distant, then stopped. Father Leo stood there. He looked down at the front of his shirt. One button was missing. Another hung by a thread. The room was hot and still smelled of the thief’s cigarette. Father Leo slid open the glass door and went out onto the balcony. The desert was hidden by casinos but he could feel it all around him and taste its dryness in the breeze. The breeze ruffled the surface of the pool below, breaking the sun’s reflection. The broken light glittered on the water.

  When the desk clerk saw Father Leo coming, he shook his head. Father Leo walked up to him anyway. “No message?”

  “Not a thing,” the desk clerk said. He went back to his magazine.

  Father Leo had meant to report the theft, but now he didn’t see the point. The police would come and make him fill out a lot of forms. They would ask him questions; he felt uneasy about that, about explaining his presence in Las Vegas.

  For the rest of the
afternoon he went up and down the street, looking for Jerry. Once he thought he saw him going into a casino but it turned out to be somebody else. Father Leo returned to the hotel. He didn’t feel like going back to his room, so he bought a copy of Time and went out to the pool.

  Two young girls were doing cannonballs off the diving board. Father Leo tried to read an article about the creation of the universe but he couldn’t keep his mind on it. After a time he gave up and watched the girls, who sensed his attention. They began to show off. First they did swan dives. Then one of them tried a flip. She hit the water with a loud crack, flat on her stomach. Father Leo started out of his chair, but she seemed to be all right. She pulled herself up the ladder and left the courtyard, crying. Her friend walked carefully out to the end of the board, turned around, bounced twice, and executed a perfect backward flip. Then she walked away from the pool, feet slapping on the wet cement.

  “Coincidence,” Sandra said. “Looks like we’ve got the pool to ourselves.” She was standing beside the next chair, looking down at him. She stepped out of her high-heeled clogs and took off her robe.

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” Father Leo said. “Not with that burn of yours.”

  “This is my last day,” she said. “I wanted to catch the sunset.”

  Father Leo looked up. The sun was just touching the roof of the hotel across from them. It looked like another sign.

  Sandra sat down and took a bottle of baby oil out of her tote bag. She rubbed the oil along her arms and across her chest, under the halter of her bathing suit. Then she raised her legs one at a time and slowly oiled them until they glistened. They were deep red. “So,” she said, “where’s your wife?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Me either,” she said.

  Father Leo closed his magazine and sat up.

  “What shows have you been to?” she asked.

  “None.”

  “You should go,” she said. “The dancers are so beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such beautiful women in my whole life. Do you like to dance?”

  Father Leo shook his head.

  Sandra drew her legs up. She rested her chin between her knees. “What do you like?”

  Father Leo was about to say, “I like peace and quiet,” but he stopped himself. She was lonely. There was no reason to hurt her feelings. “I like to read,” he said. “Music. Good music, not weird music. Eating in restaurants. Talking to friends.”

  “Me too,” Sandra said. “Those are the same things I like.” She lowered the back of the deck chair and rolled onto her stomach. She rubbed baby oil over her shoulders, then held the bottle out toward Father Leo. “Could you give me a hand?” she said.

  He saw that she wanted him to oil her back, which looked swollen and painful, glowing in the little sun that was left. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. She put the bottle down. “Sorry I asked.”

  “I’m a priest,” he said.

  “That’s a new one,” she said, not looking at him. “A priest named Slim.”

  “Slim is my nickname,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Your nickname. What kind of priest are you, anyway?”

  Father Leo began to explain but she cut him off. “You’re no priest,” she said. She sat up and began stuffing things into her tote bag—lighter, cigarettes, baby oil, sunglasses. She put her robe on and stepped into her clogs. She stood there, looking down at him. “What are you, anyway?”

  “I came here with a friend,” Father Leo said. “He’s been gone ever since last night. I don’t have any idea where he is.”

  “I don’t know what you are,” she said, “but if you come near me again I’ll scream.”

  Father Leo thought of calling the police, but he was afraid that if they did find Jerry they would discover his real name and put him in prison. He looked up the numbers of all the hospitals in town. There were seven. None of them had a Jerry Royce registered, but at Desert Springs the nurse who took the call said that on the previous night they had admitted a John Doe with what she called a “sucking chest wound.” Father Leo asked for a description of the man, but she did not have his file and the line to Intensive Care was busy. “It’s always busy,” she told him. “If you’re in town, the simplest thing is to just come over.”

  But when Father Leo arrived at Intensive Care, he discovered that the John Doe was dead. He had died that afternoon and they had sent his body to the morgue. Father Leo put his hands on the desk. “The morgue?” he said.

  The nurse nodded. “We have a picture. Would you like to see it?”

  “I guess I’d better,” Father Leo said. He was afraid to look at the picture but he didn’t feel ready for a trip to the morgue. The nurse opened a folder and took out a large glossy photograph and handed it to him. The face was that of a boy with narrow features. His eyes were open, staring without defiance or shyness into the blaze of the flash. Father Leo knew that the boy had died before the picture was taken. He gave the picture back.

  The nurse looked at it. “Not your friend?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “What happened?”

  “He was stabbed.” She put the folder away.

  “Did they catch the person who did it?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “We get over a hundred murders a year in town.”

  On his way back to the hotel Father Leo watched the crowd through the window of the cab. A group of sailors ran across the street. The one in front was throwing coins over his shoulder and the rest were jumping for them. Signs flashed. People’s faces pulsed with reflected light.

  Father Leo bent forward. “I just heard that you get over a hundred murders a year in town. Is that true?”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” the cabby said. “This place has its drawbacks, all right. But Utica’s a damn sight worse. They’ve got almost two feet of snow right now and there’s more on the way.”

  At half-past two in the morning Jerry called. He was sorry about the mix-up, but he could explain everything. It turned out that while Father Leo was upstairs that first night Jerry had met a fellow on his way to a poker game outside town. It was a private game. The players were rich and there was no limit. They’d had to leave right away, so Jerry wasn’t able to tell Father Leo. And after he got there he’d had no chance to call. The game was that intense. Incredible amounts of money had changed hands. It was still going on; he’d just broken off to catch a few winks and let Father Leo know that he wouldn’t be going back to Seattle the next morning. He couldn’t, not now. Jerry had lost every penny of his own savings, the seven thousand dollars from the man at Boeing, and some other cash he had held back. “I feel bad,” he said. “I know this is going to put you in an awkward position.”

  “I think you ought to come home,” Father Leo said. “We can work this thing out.”

  “They’ll throw the book at me,” Jerry said.

  “No, they won’t. I won’t let them.”

  “Get serious. Vincent’ll have me for dinner.”

  “She doesn’t have to know it was you,” Father Leo said. “I’ll tell her I took it.”

  Jerry didn’t answer right away. Finally he said, “She’d never believe you.”

  “Why not? She already thinks I’m a killer.”

  Jerry laughed. “Slim, you’re something. Thanks, but no thanks. I still have four hundred left. I’ve been down further than that and bounced back, I’m just getting warmed up.”

  “Jerry, listen.”

  “Haven’t you ever had the feeling that you’re bound to win?” Jerry asked. “Like you’ve been picked out and you’ll get taken care of no matter what?”

  “Sure,” Father Leo said, “I’ve had that feeling. It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “For God’s sake, Jerry, use your head. Come home.”

  But it was no good. Jerry said good-bye and hung up. Father Leo sat on the edge of the bed. Th
e telephone rang again. He picked it up and said, “Jerry?”

  It wasn’t Jerry, though. It was Sandra. “I’m sorry if I woke you up,” she said.

  “Sandra,” he said. “What on earth do you want?”

  “Are you really a priest?” she asked.

  “What kind of a question is that? What do you mean by calling me at this hour?” Father Leo knew that he had every right to be angry, but he wasn’t, not really. The sound of his own voice, fussy and peevish, embarrassed him. “Yes,” he said.

  “Oh, thank God. I’m so frightened.”

  He waited.

  “Someone’s been trying to get into my room,” she said. “At least I think they have. I could have been dreaming.”

  “You should call the police.”

  “I already thought of that,” she said. “What would they do? They’d come in and stand around and then they’d go away. And there I’d be.”

  “I don’t know how I could help,” Father Leo said.

  “You could stay.”

  “My friend still isn’t back,” Father Leo said. “We have to leave tomorrow morning and I should be here in case he calls. What if you were dreaming?”

  “Please,” she said.

  Father Leo slammed his fist into the pillow. “Of course,” he said. “Of course, I’ll be right there.”

  After Sandra unlocked the door she told Father Leo to wait a second. Then she called, “Okay. Come on in.” She was wearing a blue nightgown. She slid into bed and pulled the covers up to her waist. “Please don’t look at me,” she said. “And in case you wondered, I’m not making this up. I’m not that desperate for company.”

  There were two beds in the room, with a night table in between. Father Leo sat at the foot of the other bed. He looked at her. Her face was red and puffy. She had white stuff on her nose.