by Kim Fielding
“Wow,” said Pink Dress, who’d also won the hand, but for a much smaller bet. “You’ve got enough for a nice party.”
Tag gave her a tight smile. The waitress showed up just then with his drink, and he gave her a five-dollar tip. He didn’t have any one-dollar chips anyway. “Hey, thanks!” she said, looking a little perkier. “Can I get you anything else, tiger?”
“Not yet.”
Leaving half his chips on the mark, Tag played another hand. He lost. But he won the next and the next, so that he had a very sizable pile and Pink Dress was practically in his lap. Grandma ignored them both, concentrating on her own bets, which were always exactly twenty bucks. “You should move to another table,” said Pink Dress. “One with a bigger maximum stake.”
He should—this table had a two-thousand-dollar max. But inertia kept him glued to his seat, where he played several hundred-dollar hands, coming out roughly even. The waitress brought him another beer. This time he tipped her twenty. Why not? Wasn’t real money anyway—just little plastic chips. Besides, maybe she had a kid at home who’d outgrown his tennis shoes or had a birthday coming up.
The second beer tasted too bitter. There was a time when Tag drank the hard stuff, even though he should have known better. Fortunately he’d never sunk into the same pit as his father, had never become a drunk. He’d given up everything but beer when he met Jason, because being with Jason was heady enough. Maybe he should switch back now. He was willing to bet the waitress would bring him a healthy shot of whatever he asked for.
Speaking of betting, it was time for another round and Timothy was looking at him questioningly. “You in?” the dealer asked.
“Sure. Why not?” Tag set two thousand dollars’ worth of chips on the table, which made Pink Dress squeal and clap her hands.
Tag got a pair of jacks and the dealer had an ace showing. “Split, please,” said Tag, setting down another two thousand. Timothy kept a straight face, but Pink Dress and Grandma both looked at Tag as if he were insane. He didn’t care, and when Timothy put a nine on one card and ten on the other, Tag didn’t even flinch. “Double down,” he said. “I need more chips, please.” He held out some more bills.
Pink Dress shrieked and whacked his shoulder. “You don’t want to do that!”
“Yeah. I do.”
Grandma had to chime in. “Honey, I’ve been coming to Vegas twice a year since I was in my thirties, and that’s the dumbest thing I ever saw.”
Even Timothy slowly shook his head.
But Tag lifted his chin. “Hit me.”
The dealer took the cash and handed him chips. Then he slid a card from the shoe and set it atop the jack and ten. It was an ace. And before Pink Dress could manage another earsplitting noise, Timothy placed a two on the jack and nine. Shaking his head again, he flipped his own card over. It was an eight.
“Oh my God! Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod!” Pink Dress threw her arms around Tag so hard he almost fell off the stool. “That’s frigging amazing! Ohmigod!”
Tag extricated himself with a grunt. Pink Dress was squishy. He straightened himself on the chair and looked down at the tottering piles of chips, which represented more money than he’d ever possessed at once. “Fuck,” he said. A small crowd had gathered behind him; he could feel their eyes on his back.
When a hand settled on his shoulder, he flinched a little. “It’s because you had jacks,” said a familiar voice. “You can never go wrong with jacks.”
Tag twisted slightly to look up at Jack. He had no idea when Jack had reappeared, but there had been no outcry among the onlookers, so maybe it had been subtle. “I won,” Tag said with a sigh.
“Looks that way.”
Timothy gathered the cards off the table and put them in the discard holder. “Are you going to play another hand, sir?”
Tag had to think a moment before answering. But Jack’s hand was still on him. “No, I guess not. Color me up, please.”
The dealer took Tag’s chips, quickly counted them, and slid a few back, along with eight orange ones. “Thanks, man,” said Tag. He tossed a green chip onto the table for Timothy. Twenty-five bucks. Nothing, right? He ignored Pink Dress’s longing looks. And when he caught sight of the cocktail waitress standing nearby, Tag stood, gathered his winnings, and hurried to her side. “Here,” he said, handing her a black.
Her eyes went wide. “Honey, you do know that’s a hundred dollars, right?”
“I’m having a good night.”
“Well, me too.” This time her smile was warm and genuine. “Thank you, honey. That’s real nice of you.” She raised her eyebrows. “But you’re not expecting—”
Just then, Jack came up from behind Tag and stood close. Tag wrapped an arm around Jack’s waist, which surprised both Jack and the waitress. “I wasn’t expecting,” said Tag. “Like I said, just having a good night.”
Tag let go of Jack and started looking for the cashier. Jack followed along. “That was a hell of a risk you took on those hands, Tag.”
“Paid off.”
“But you could have lost—I know things are a lot more expensive nowadays. But that’s still a lot of money, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“Then why chance it?”
“Dunno. I’m lucky. Always have been.”
At the cashier desk, Tag exchanged his chips for a large stack of Ben Franklins. He was going to need a bigger wallet. He shoved the extra cash into a front pocket.
Finding his way out of the casino wasn’t easy. The place was deliberately disorienting and the doors were hidden. The management clearly hoped that if their patrons didn’t actually forget that the real world existed, they’d at least give up on trying to get there. But eventually Tag did manage to make his way out onto the Strip, where the parade of drunks had gotten livelier and the traffic was barely crawling along.
“I wish you’d stop doing that,” he said to Jack.
“Doing what?”
“Disappearing suddenly. It’s… disconcerting. If you don’t want to talk about something, just tell me and I’ll shut up. I’m not gonna strong-arm an answer out of you.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t much of a conversation partner even before I spent all those years by myself.”
“I’m not much of one either.” Tag smiled. “There’s been lots of times your trick would have come in handy for me.”
“Don’t be eager to have the knack of it,” replied Jack with a note of sadness. Then he shrugged. “I’ll try not to do it.”
“Thanks.”
They walked one of the Strip’s long blocks before Jack spoke again. “Casting couch. It’s a cliché, isn’t it? I gave it up for Sam Richards because he was supposed to make me a star. Guess that makes me a whore.” He gestured at a man who was handing out pamphlets for an outcall service. “Not even a good whore, because I never got beyond bit parts.”
Tag had assumed this much, but hearing Jack say the words was painful. He patted Jack’s shoulder. “A lot of people have done way worse. I’ve done way worse.”
That earned him a skeptical look. “You let some fellow fuck you because you thought he’d help you out?”
“I let fellows fuck me for less than that. Because I was drunk. Because I was bored. I’ve had sex with guys when not only did we not know each other’s names, we didn’t say a single word to each other. At least with this guy Sam, you had a chance to get something out of it. Hell, I’ve let guys fuck me because giving in seemed easier than saying no. And these are just the stupid sex-related things I’ve done. I told you. King of the fuckups.”
He couldn’t read the expression on Jack’s face. And then a group of noisy college students swarmed around and past them, distracting them both long enough for conversation to die out. Tag decided he was hungry and they took a quick detour to McDonald’s. His second burger that day. Lovely. Jack looked longingly at the food as they sat at the table. “That looks good.”
“It’s really not.”
“Then why are you eating it?”
/> “It’s quick and handy.”
When Tag was little, fast food had been a treat, a major splurge rarely indulged in. But sometimes when his parents were feeling flush or when they were celebrating something, they’d go out. Tag would order the kid’s meal and munch on salty fries, then squirm around on the plastic seats as he played with his toy. He’d been well into his teens before he fully realized that Burger King did not represent the peak of culinary aspirations. But even now, the taste of grease and pickles transported him back in time, and he briefly felt like he was seven again.
“Let’s go,” he said, sliding out of the booth and picking up his tray. “I have an idea.”
“What sort of idea?”
“You’ll see. Surprise.”
Jack reacted to that like a small boy, grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. He bounded out of the restaurant onto the sidewalk, where he waited impatiently for Tag. “What kind of name is Taggart, anyway?” he asked, out of the blue, as they crossed the street.
“My mom’s maiden name. Her parents had a little money, I guess, and she and Dad called me that for sucking-up purposes. I’ll let you guess how many times I got called Tag the fag when I was in school.”
“Did the sucking up work?”
“Nope. I only met my grandparents a couple times. They didn’t want much to do with Mom and Dad.”
Jack watched a limo full of screaming young women drive by. Bridal party, Tag thought. “How come?” Jack asked.
“See, if I were a ghost, this is one of those moments when I’d blink out.”
“Oh.” Jack shrugged slightly. “You don’t have to tell me. I was just—”
“It’s okay. Dad was an alcoholic. He got shitty jobs that he never kept very long. Sometimes he went to jail for a while. Not for anything major, just stupid stuff. And Mom was crazy. If she took her meds, she could function okay, but a lot of times she’d stop taking them.” It wasn’t a story he’d shared with many people. Jason knew and was of course very sympathetic, but Tag hadn’t told him until they’d been dating for a while. It felt kind of good to blurt it all out at once like this.
“You must’ve had a hard time of it when you were a kid,” Jack said. He didn’t seem appalled by Tag’s history.
“I… yeah. I guess. I mean, they loved me and they tried their best, but they never should have had me. They couldn’t even take care of themselves.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
“Not exactly. They had a baby before me, but he died within a couple days. Never even made it out of the hospital. After me, Dad got himself fixed. That was one of the few smart things he ever did.”
They’d arrived at the Stratosphere. Tag led the way inside, and they wove their way across the crowded floor.
“Do you keep in touch with your parents?” asked Jack.
“They’re dead.”
Not surprisingly, this was a subject that interested Jack. He grabbed Tag’s elbow and brought him to a halt. “How? When?”
Tag sighed. How had they ended up talking about this anyway? “It was eight, nine years ago. Mom’s appendix burst. She and Dad didn’t have their shit together enough to get her to the hospital on time. And Dad…. You know, the thing is, as fucked-up as they both were, they really loved each other. I mean, they stayed together for almost thirty years through more problems than you can believe. Always one crisis after another. But they always had each other. Until they didn’t. A couple weeks after Mom died, he bought a gun from somewhere, drank a bottle of Jack Daniels, and blew his head off.”
“Jesus. You must have been devastated.”
“God.” Tag shook his head. “I didn’t even find out until a few weeks later. I hadn’t talked to them in a couple of years.” He was going to leave it at that, because this conversation had gone on long enough. It was more than he’d ever said at once about his family. But Jack just looked at him, eyebrows raised, waiting for more. All around them, slot machines jangled and people groaned and shouted.
“Mom and Dad couldn’t handle having a gay son. I could’ve been a drug addict, a nut job—those things they would have dealt with okay. But they just couldn’t accept that I like cock. When I first told them, they went straight to Denial Land. And when that didn’t work anymore, they kicked me out. I was sixteen.”
He hadn’t been getting along with them for months, and he’d largely taken care of himself since he was very young. But still, when they told him to leave, when his stone-sober father and medicated mother watched him throw his things into a bag and toss his keys on the floor…. Fuck. His heart had felt like a granite boulder, and he’d been so alone. Really, he’d been alone since the moment he walked out that door, even during his time with Jason and his other brief flings.
“Let’s go,” he growled and stomped away. He left Jack to scoff at a fifties-themed diner while Tag lined up at the ticket desk. He had to mull over the options before making a choice, but ended up getting two of the all-inclusive passes. He could certainly afford them.
Tag got a little nervous when he remembered they had to go through a security checkpoint. What if Jack set off the alarms? But apparently the scanner wasn’t ghost-sensitive, and he went through just fine. Jack goggled at the elevator operator’s patter about how fast they were ascending. “Sixth-fastest elevator in the world,” the guy said. He was openly flirting with Jack, which made Tag scowl, especially because Jack was enjoying the attention. “And the highest observation tower in the country.”
When they arrived at the 108th floor, the operator gave Jack a leer. “I’ll see you when you go down,” the guy said.
Jack laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.
Tag was ready to pout—which was both ridiculous and pointless—but then Jack sprinted to the nearest window and exclaimed at the view. “Holy cow! We’re so high up!”
Despite himself, Tag smiled. “It’s a great view, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never been anywhere near this high. It’s like being in an airplane. I always wanted to try one of those. I used to think that when I made it big I’d fly everywhere, even just to Palm Springs.” Jack was still excited, but a tone of wistfulness had crept into his voice.
“I’ve only been on a plane a couple times. It’s not that great—no legroom. This is better.”
They walked around the perimeter of the circular floor until Jack stopped short. “What are they doing?” he asked. He pointed at a buff guy in a jumpsuit, who was being covered in a web of straps by a bored-looking employee.
“Bungee jumping.”
Clearly Jack had no idea what that meant. He pushed his way to a nearby window and watched as the jumper walked onto an exterior platform. The employee hooked him up to a heavy wire and nodded at him. The man in the jumpsuit looked like he was going to puke. But his friends stood nearby, cheering him on, so he took a deep breath and leapt.
“What the—!” shouted Jack.
“It’s okay. The wire will keep him from splatting.”
“He just jumped off the top of a building!”
“And paid good money to do it.”
Tag had considered doing this himself the last time he was in Vegas. But he hadn’t had a wad of cash in his pocket back then, so he’d passed. He wondered what it felt like to free-fall, to spend those brief seconds diving toward the earth before the tug on your harness reminded you that you were still tied to life.
“That’s crazy,” said Jack, then looked slightly stricken. “I mean— Sorry, Tag.”
“It’s okay, and you’re right. Even my mother wouldn’t have paid a hundred bucks to fall off a building.”
They walked up a flight of stairs to the next floor, where Jack was even more amazed by the views because the deck was outside. But when Tag led him to one side and Jack realized they were going to ride the Insanity, he actually did a little dance. “Holy cow! Really?”
“Really.”
It turned out that Jack loved the Insanity, which spun them over the Strip. He lov
ed the other rides too—one shot forward over the edge of the building like a roller coaster with a missing track, and the other zoomed straight into the air. He loved them so much that they rode each four times, until the ride operators announced they were shutting down for the night.
Tag enjoyed watching Jack’s pleasure. It was a good feeling, knowing he’d provided more fun in one night than the guy had experienced in decades. It was a real accomplishment, one of the few definite pluses Tag could put in the spreadsheet of his life.
But no matter how thrilling the rides or how enthusiastic his companion, Tag’s heart didn’t beat fast. If the carriage of the X-Scream had continued forward, plunging them all 109 stories to the bright lights below, he would have remained calm, his soul as untouched as it had been along Route 66 or at the Grand Canyon.
Twelve
AT ANY time, Jack might find himself back in Arizona with nothing but an empty gravel lot. Even now as he walked beside Tag to the Baja Inn, Jack fought to keep himself from wavering away. But he was joyous nonetheless because he’d been given such a wonderful gift. For a few hours, he’d felt almost alive again. He could nearly feel his heart beating. And he had a friend. If Jack spent eternity alone in the desert, he’d have this time to treasure. He’d have a few precious memories to take out and admire over and over, like a dragon gloating over his gold.
But Tag was obviously sad. He was probably very tired—it was late and he’d done a lot that day. And Jack had raised the uncomfortable subject of Tag’s family, which had inadvertently upset him. But it was more than that. Tag had been sad since Jack had first seen him, as Tag parked his car by the deserted road and settled in to sleep. He’d been sad at the Grand Canyon, and he’d been so sad at Hoover Dam that Jack suspected he was going to jump. Tag smiled sometimes, and even laughed, but he never shook the mantle of sorrow that hung heavy on his shoulders, haunting him more thoroughly than a ghost ever could.
Tag unlocked the apartment door, then shut it behind him. He kicked off his shoes and walked into the bathroom. The toilet flushed, water ran, and when Tag emerged, he wore only his tight underwear. He rubbed absently at the octopus on his chest. “’M going to sleep. You can watch TV if you want. Won’t bother me.” He pulled back the blankets and climbed into bed.