by Rod Serling
Flora kept her eyes on Franklin as she pulled the lever down, listening to the sound of the tumblers and then the empty poof and then the silence. The comers of Franklin’s mouth twitched in a righteous smile, and for one fleeting moment Flora hated him. Then habit took over for her, and she stood quietly at her husband’s elbow and heard him declare that he was going back to the room to get ready for dinner. “I guess I’m not very lucky,” she said softly.
He didn’t answer. At the door she looked straight into his face.
“Franklin, it was only a nickel.”
“Twenty of them make a dollar, Flora, and I work hard for those dollars!”
He was about to open the door when a drunk standing by a dollar machine turned and saw him. The drunk grabbed Franklin, pulled him over to the machine. Franklin recoiled as if exposed to something infective, but the drunk held Franklin firmly with one hand, a glass in the other.
“Here, old buddy,” the drunk said, “—you try it.” He put down his glass and took a silver dollar from his pocket. “Here, go ahead. I’m one hour and thirty minutes on this miserable, crummy, money-grabbin—!” He forced the silver dollar into Franklin’s hand. “Go ahead, old pal. It’s yours. You play it.”
A woman at the bar waved frantically at them. “Charlie,” she screamed, “are you gonna come over here or am I gonna come over there and get you?”
“I’m coming, honey, I’m coming,” he answered. He smiled at Franklin, burped out a shaft of Johnny Walker-flavored air, patted Franklin on the back and then guided his hand, still holding the silver dollar, into the slot on top of the machine.
Franklin looked like a small animal caught in a trap. He looked wildly left and right, searching for aid, embarrassed, discomfited, frightened.
“Really,” Franklin said, “I’m not at all interested. Please, I’m in a hurry—”
The drunk chortled happily as the silver dollar was deposited in the slot, then walked unsteadily toward the bar.
Franklin glowered at the machine. His first thought was the possibility of getting the silver dollar back without having to play it. He studied the machine intently It was like all the others. Big, gaudily lit, with a glass-covered compartment in the center, showing an incredible number of silver dollars inside its big metal gut. Two lights over this compartment had an odd similarity to eyes and the slot at the bottom filled out the picture of a monstrous neon face. Franklin raised his right hand to the lever. Over his shoulder he saw Flora smiling hopefully. Then, as if taking a big decisive step, he yanked down the lever, watched the whirling tumblers that one after another came to a stop, showing two cherries and a lemon. There was a loud metallic clack and then the sound of the coins as they arrived in the receptacle at the bottom—ten of them.
Franklin was only faintly aware of Flora’s delighted squeal. He looked down at the coins and slowly, one by one, took them out. A strange, warm sensation was running through him; an odd excitement that he’d never experienced before. He saw his reflection in the chrome strip on the machine and was surprised at what he saw—a flushed, bright-eyed little face, cheek muscles twitching, lips stretched tight in a thin smile.
“Oh, Franklin, you are lucky.”
He looked at Flora, manufacturing a grimness of face and tone, and held up the silver dollars in his palm. He said, “Now, Flora, you’ll see the difference between a normal, mature, thoughtful man and these wild idiots around here. We will take these, put them in our room, and we will go home with them.”
“Of course, dear.”
“These baboons here would throw it away They’d compulsively put it back into the machine. But the Gibbses don’t! The Gibbses know the value of money! Come on, my dear, it’s late. I’d like to shave for dinner.”
Without waiting for her, he turned toward the door. Flora padded after him like a diffident pet. A look of pride was on her face as she watched the tiny, erect figure ahead of her pushing his way through the crowd with a resolution and a strength that seemed to reaffirm the status of Elgin, Kansas. Neither of them saw the drunk return to the machine and put in another silver dollar. But Franklin heard the sound of coins landing in the receptacle.
He whirled around, startled. He had heard coins all right, but he had heard something else too. He had distinctly heard his own name, a metallic, raspy jumbled rendition—but, nonetheless, his name. The coins had landed in the receptacle and had called out, “Franklin.” He rubbed nervously at his jaw and turned to Flora.
“Did you say something?” he asked.
“What, dear?”
“Did you call my name, Flora?”
“Why no, dear.”
Franklin looked over toward the machine again, puzzled. The drunk was weaving his way back toward the bar and the machine was unattended.
“I could have sworn—” Franklin began. Then he shook his head. But he studied the machine for one more moment. It did resemble a face, the two lights were eyes, the glass-covered square in the center with the silver dollars inside—that was the nose. And the opening at the bottom where the money came down—that was the odd little mouth with the protuberant lower lip.
“Like a face,” he said aloud.
“What is, dear?” Flora asked.
“That silly-looking machine. It’s like a face.”
Flora turned to stare at it blankly then she looked back at Franklin. “A face?” she inquired.
“Never mind,” said Franklin. “Let’s get ready for dinner.”
All the way back to the room Franklin pondered over the experience of hearing a machine call out his name. It was ridiculous, of course, he realized. It hadn’t really happened. It had been a combination of voices and sounds and his own imagination, but it had been real enough to startle him, to jar him at that moment. But he was not the least bit frightened by what had happened. Indeed, he felt a sensation of strength and accomplishment. He’d beaten that ugly machine.
He, Franklin Gibbs, had walked into the arena of the enemy, spit in the eye of immorality, turned his back and walked away. It was a triumph of Good. What he didn’t admit to himself as he shaved his severe little face, was that the victory had been too ephemeral. Too quick. Too fleeting. Franklin Gibbs, though he would never admit it aloud at this moment, wanted to go back into the arena!
They had dinner and saw part of the early show. Franklin was upset because the waiter had put chives in his baked potato without asking him and he’d always hated chives. They never got to see Frank Sinatra because the opening comedian was too dirty. Flora giggled nervously at some of the things he said, not fully understanding them, then glancing at Franklin apologetically. Franklin sat stiffly upright, unsmiling and disapproving. When the eight girls in black sequins were halfway through the second dance number, he arose, nodded tersely at Flora, and started out. Unquestioning, Flora followed him.
At ten o’clock they were in bed; Franklin had delivered a most comprehensive critique on foul-mouthed comedians and dirty little sluts off the street who became dancers. He had brushed his teeth, performed the ritual of an alcohol rub in his hair using a special medicine prepared for him by their Elgin druggist, brushed off perfunctorily Flora’s suggestion that they might visit the gambling room once again, just to observe, and gone to bed. Flora fell asleep almost immediately as she always did. Franklin, on the other hand, lay with hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. There was a small night light by the door and it sent a very low orange gleam into the darkness of the room. The silver dollars were stacked up on top of the dresser in front of the mirror. At intervals Franklin’s eyes would move down so that he could look across the foot of the bed to the stack of coins. He was getting drowsy and was almost asleep when he heard the sound again.
“Franklin!”
It was coins tumbling together out of a machine and calling out his name, “Franklin!” It happened three times in a row before he sat upright in bed looking around. It was an odd indefinable kind of sound. The closest thing to it Franklin could imagin
e was if his name had been pronounced by a robot. He looked at the coins on the dresser and was mildly surprised that the pile seemed to look higher, more than ten coins now. It was as if there were twenty silver dollars piled on top of one another. And the longer he looked at them the higher the pile seemed to grow.
He got out of bed and walked over to the dresser. He picked up the coins and juggled them in his hand. There was a nice feeling to silver dollars in the hand, he decided. A nice heavy feeling. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, and felt vaguely disturbed by what he saw. The Franklin Gibbs that stared back at him wore a face of greed and avarice, of a compulsive hunger, a lecherous, naked desire. It was not his face at all except in broad outline.
Flora was suddenly awake. “Is anything the matter, dear?” she asked.
“There is nothing the matter,” he said, forcing an evenness to his tone, “except—” He held out the silver dollars in his hand. “This is tainted money, Flora. It is absolutely immoral. Nothing good can come of money won like this. I’m going back inside and feed it back into the machine. Get rid of it.”
Flora slowly lay back in bed, dulled by sleep. “All right, dear,” she murmured. “You do what you think best.”
She was asleep by the time Franklin had put his clothes back on and was combing his hair in front of the dresser mirror. “If there’s one thing that I understand extremely well, Flora,” he said to his sleeping wife across the room, “it’s morality! And I will not have tainted money smelling up our pockets. I am definitely going back in there and get rid of it.” He turned to her, “Now go back to sleep, Flora.”
She was breathing regularly in measured rhythm. Franklin turned back to the mirror and straightened his coat, picked up the silver dollars, smiled at them, and then, feeling the excitement rise in him again, walked out toward the big room that never went to sleep.
Three hours later Franklin stood by the machine, his tie knot pulled down, his shirt, unbuttoned, his coat open. He was unconscious of time or noise or the way he looked or anything else. His whole existence had resolved itself into a simple set of actions. Put the coin in. Pull down the lever. Watch and wait. Put the coin in. Pull down the lever. Watch and wait. Study the tumblers and hold your breath. A cherry always meant something in the way of a return. Lemons were death. The strip of writing like a label appeared only in a few winning combinations. The bells were hopeful, but you needed three of them to make it worth your while and the plums weren’t any good at all. He didn’t know or care that all of his carefully wrought and conceived standards, his entire frame of reference, everything he’d ever stood for or purported to stand for, had now been shoved down a drain some place. What was important to him were cherries and bells and plums and the combination of them as they appeared when the tumblers stopped. He kept feeding the machine the coins and pulling down the lever and studying the machine and pulling down the lever and feeding and pulling and feeding and pulling. Three times he went to the cashier’s desk to break bills, always nervously watching over his shoulder to make certain no one would take his machine. Each time, after he’d collected the silver dollars, he would literally run back over to the one-armed bandit, and even this didn’t register with him as not being the sort of thing Franklin Gibbs would have done in Elgin, Kansas, twenty-four hours earlier.
At two in the morning Franklin Gibbs still didn’t know what was happening to him. The clammy sweat of fatigue ran down his face and clung to his pores. He found his body jerking spasmodically as the tumblers came up one after another. His stomach felt empty and drained. He was aware that he was losing a great deal of money. How much he wasn’t sure—he didn’t allow himself to figure it out. All he knew as a certainty was that he, Franklin Gibbs, would never be defeated by a filthy, immoral machine. And beyond that, he wanted silver dollars. He wanted them desperately. He wanted to listen to the click of the machine and then the exciting clatter of coins rubbing against themselves as they flooded out of the machine. He wanted to load his pockets with them and feel them, bulky and heavy, against his body. He wanted to reach into his pockets and run his sweaty fingers over them.
So he continued to play and at three-thirty in the morning Franklin Gibbs was a desperate little man with a stiff, sore right arm and an obsession that blocked out the rest of the world and left him standing by a one-armed bandit feeding it coins. Winning three, losing five. Winning two, losing three. Winning six, then losing ten.
A half-hour later Flora came, her face a contradiction of sleep and concern. She had awakened to find the bed empty and hadn’t remembered her conversation with Franklin prior to his leaving the room. Her eyes went wide when she saw him standing close by the machine. She had never seen her husband look this way. His suit was rumpled, his shirt sweat-stained, his face, under a growing beard stubble, was oyster white. There was a glazed quality to the eyes and it was almost as if he were looking through her rather than at her. She nervously approached him in time to hear him scream.
“Well, damn it!”
The tumblers showed a plum, a lemon and a bell. There had been the loud metallic click of defeat and the intense somber face of her husband had a wild quality.
Flora touched his sleeve and said softly, “Franklin, dear, it’s terribly late.”
He turned to stare at her, taking a moment to identify her, having to reach back into his subconscious to reconstitute a world that he had left several hours before and which no longer seemed very real to him.
“Stay here, Flora,” he said. “I have to get some more silver dollars. Don’t let anybody use this machine, understand?”
“Franklin, dear—” her voice half-heartedly chased him, and then died out as he left her behind.
She watched him take a bill out of his wallet, hand it to the cashier, and get a large stack of silver dollars in return. He carried them back, brushed past her and started to feed them into the machine, one by one. He’d gone through five of them with no result when Flora touched his arm again, this time much more positively, and with a grip sufficiently tight to keep him from depositing yet another silver dollar.
“Franklin!” her voice carried a rising concern. “How much money have you lost? Have you been playing this machine all night?”
Franklin’s voice was terse. “I have.”
“You’ve lost a great deal of money then, haven’t you?”
“Very likely.”
Flora wet her lips and tried to smile. “Well, darling, don’t you think you ought to stop?”
He looked at her as if she’d just suggested that he drink a bucket of paint. “Stop?” he half shouted. “How can I stop, Flora? How in God’s name can I stop? I’ve lost a great deal of money. A great deal of money! Look! Look at this.”
He pointed to the big sign over the machine. “Special jackpot $8,000,” it read.
“See that?” he said. “When it pays off, you make eight thousand dollars!” He turned to the machine again, speaking more to it than to his wife. “Well, it’s got to pay off. If a person stands here long enough, it must pay off.”
As if to emphasize the logic of his remark, he slammed another silver dollar in the slot, pulled down the lever and stared intently at the tumblers as a cherry came up with two lemons and three silver dollars dropped into the receptacle. Again he lost himself with the machine and became oblivious to Flora. He lost five more silver dollars and felt the gnawing bite of irritation that comes with defeat.
“Franklin, darling,” Flora began, you know how awful you feel in the morning when you’ve been up too late at night—”
He whirled around at her and screamed, “Flora, why don’t you shut your mouth.”
She drew back, white-faced, feeling the shriveling shame that was always caused by Franklin’s temper. He noticed it and it egged him on. It always gave him a kind of perverse satisfaction to yell at Flora. She was so plain and so weak; she was such a piece of dough to be pulled and kneaded and pounded. and she was worth screaming at, because she would react. Not
like this machine that had been his enemy for so many hours, his tormentor. He wanted to kick the machine, to scratch it, gouge it, make it feel pain. But the machine was impassive and invulnerable. Flora wasn’t. Flora with her mousy little face. For a passing, exploding moment he wanted to hit her, to smash his fist into her face. But it was almost as good to scream at her and get a reaction.
“I hate a shrew, Flora,” he shouted.
Several people turned to stare at them.
“I can’t stand a woman who hangs over your shoulder and sees to it that you have miserable luck.”
He heard her sobbing intake of breath and it poured kerosene on the fire that flared inside of him.
“That’s what you’re doing to me now, Flora—you’re giving me miserable luck. You and your Las Vegas. You and your Goddamned contests. Get out of my sight, will you? Will you get out of my sight now!”
She made one more weak, pitiful protest, “Franklin, please, people are watching—”
“The hell with people,” he shouted. “I’m not concerned with people. People can go to hell.”
He turned and, with sweaty palms, clutched at the sides of the machine, his lips compressed. Burning on his face was the anger of frustration, mixed with the high fever of the bad gambler.
“This is what I’m concerned with,” he said. “This machine! This damned machine.” His anger burned hotter, his frustration took over. He pounded his knuckles against it. “It’s inhuman the way it lets you win a little and then takes it all back. It teases you. It holds out promises and wheedles you. It sucks you in. And then—” He slammed another silver dollar into the slot, pulled down the lever with both hands, then watched as two plums and a lemon showed up on the tumbler and there was the dull click once again, with silence following it.
He was unaware of Flora now, unaware of the people who stood watching him behind her. He was unconscious of the noises, the lights, the sweat on his body, the fact that his mouth twitched. There was this machine in front of him. There was this machine that had a face on it and it had been cheating him and he had to pay it back. He had to revenge himself on it and the only weapons he could use were silver dollars. He put them in, pulled down the lever, watched, listened, waited.