The Animals: A Novel (18 page)

When he returned to the MGM after Rick was arrested in front of Grady’s the night they robbed the Quik-Stop, it was because he did not know how else to fill the vacant hours of the early evening and so he went to look upon the lion once more. Perhaps his return was only to assuage his own loneliness, to return to a place that reminded him of his absent friend. But when he entered the casino, he happened to see a calendar through the glass of the cashier’s booth, and realized with a start that it was October 23, the anniversary of his brother’s death. He knew he should call his mother back in Battle Mountain, knew too that she had probably tried to call him several times during the day, but he did not want to make a call in the clanging depths of the casino, not when its purpose was to acknowledge what and who they had lost, so he descended to the arcade, and he wondered, not for the first time, how his life might have been different had his brother still been alive.

There was no lion this time, only an empty stage in the corner, and Nat wandered back to the gaming floor because he did not want to be alone in the silent apartment and he could not think of anything else to do. Had he simply lost his money that night he might never have returned. But he did not lose. He had played only slots with Rick but that night he sat at the blackjack table, having already played the nickels for over an hour, and listened to the dealer explain how he could split a hand, what insurance was and when to use it, how to bet and hit and stand. And of course he lost the first hands but then he started to win and he left that first night with more money than he came in with, not quite doubling his thirty dollars but returning to the apartment with nearly a full day’s extra wages. He made minimum wage at the shop, lubing and doing oil changes all day for $2.75 an hour. Returning home with twenty extra dollars amounted to over seven hours of work. He could not believe it. He could not believe just how easy it had been.

And so he returned, returned to the MGM—the old lion was once again on its platform—and returned too to the blackjack table. This time he did not win, but even in losing he felt a kind of electricity running through him. What he thought then was that he had tapped into the life force of the place in which he now resided in some miraculous way, that he had become, for a moment, finally part of it, part of the world in which he lived. The truth of it went beyond anything he had ever felt in Battle Mountain, at least since Bill’s death, and certainly beyond anything he had ever felt in Reno, because it was not the playing and it was not even the winning that drew him in, but the chance of something happening. Anything. And over the course of that week and the next, he saw the manifestation of that chance two times. The first occurred when an Asian man in a tan suit stood before a slot machine, alarms howling all around him and the number $100,000 flashing above. Nat read later in the newspaper that the man had flown into town from Japan and played only a single dollar before winning the jackpot. The second had been an old woman with a white poodle in her arms. The jackpot that time had been a quarter of a million dollars. She leaped in place over and over again and the little dog yapped in rhythm with her motion. He saw people drop a hundred-dollar chip on a single hand of blackjack. Sometimes they won. Sometimes they did not. There was a lion in the arcade, but this felt like that lion wide awake and free, stalking a herd of gazelles through the carpeted expanse of the casino.

In his memory, the man and later the woman who had won those two jackpots stood as if in the imagined world beyond this one, their bodies adrift in the thin clarity of empty air, the ringing and clanging of the casino’s bells fading into a slow reverberant silence and their bodies shining. He sat up late, thinking about how their lives must have changed after such an event, the golden moment that rotated them out of wherever they had been and into a world so unexpected they could never have imagined its geography at all. Lives made incandescent in an instant. The world around him was filled with separation, each object different from himself: unknowable, unknowing. And yet forces were at work that could pluck one individual name from the faceless luckless masses. The entire town an advertisement that made the possibility into a kind of promise: every casino, slot machine, poker game, barroom wager, like throwing coins into the same dark impossible sea in hopes some leviathan might, of its own free will, loft itself upon the shore.

But all of that had been before. Now he sat at the green felt of a blackjack table, and he actually won for a time. Within twenty minutes he had doubled the paycheck advance Milt Wells had approved, but then his luck turned as it always did. The remainder of the hands had been busts and he had doubled down repeatedly, losing his winnings at twice the rate he might have otherwise. And yet even in this, his despair was lined with a faint ripple of electricity, each new card spelling out a destiny he felt he could almost see into, the hole card facedown in front of the dealer, the players—two others beside him—staring down at their two cards as if they might, at any moment, change value. The fat man next to him laughed every time he lost, as if there was some joke that Nat did not understand.

The dealer’s up card: an ace of hearts. Insurance or even money? she asked him. She was pretty, blond-haired and thick-lipped. He wondered where Rick was. Then Susan.

His cards totaled eighteen. Yeah, let’s do that, he said.

One dollar, she said.

He slid the chip over and she moved it into the insurance line, where it sat just above his cards. She flipped her card over, showing a ten of diamonds.

Blackjack, the dealer said. Two to one on the insurance. She took the two chips he had bet on his hand from the ring before him and then slid two chips back toward him from the insurance line.

Damn, the fat man said. I shoulda done that too.

Nat shrugged. Sometimes it works, he said.

The dealer cleared the table and dealt the cards again. Nat was dealt a ten of spades, which he could hardly look at, so complete was his excitement and terror. He laid two one-dollar chips before him, the last of the ten he had decided to bet, although his pocket still held the remaining forty in cash. When the dealer flipped the next card faceup in front of him, it was an ace of clubs.

Hot damn, the fat man said.

Backdoor Kenny, the dealer said, smiling. Blackjack.

Nat was smiling now too, face slick with sweat, mouth dry. It felt so close sometimes, so close to the bone that he could hardly stand it, as if some essential or elemental or animal part of him was on the verge of shaking out of his skin. As if he had been circling something he could not even recognize but knew was perfect. And somehow he felt like he was in control of what was happening—even though he also knew that the idea of it was absurd and impossible—and yet he could not remember any other moment in his life where he had felt such a thing. Not ever. Here, at least, there was a sense of possibility. Outside the glass doors of the casino was only a narrow path that he already knew led nowhere at all.

She slid the chips in front of him. Six dollars. He had bet two and had he bet fifty he now would have a hundred and fifty. But he had only bet two dollars, the table’s minimum, and so now he had six and was still down four. How quickly fortune could change.

On the next deal he bet ten. The fat man next to him said, Now you’re talking.

Nat glanced at the woman on the other side of him but she did not return the look, instead staring down at the table, her eyes like glass pressed into the bruised gray meat of her face. Below them ran that perfect plain of green felt, like a grassy field spread out to float above the floor on a layer of thin cool air.

BY THE
time Rick’s shift was over at the café, all the money was gone and Nat sat in the corner booth drinking a cup of coffee with the spare change that remained, the feeling of despair and shame that washed over him so acute that he nearly burst into tears, not only from the despair and shame but also from fear and rage and the realization that he wanted, in the sharp clarity of that moment, to be back in Battle Mountain, a state of mind that entered him fully like demonic possession. But when he had been given the loans, Johnny Aguirre had told him that there was no backing out of them, that if he left or ran or tried to disappear he would ultimately be found and it would be much worse for him than if he remained in Reno to face what was coming, whatever that turned out to be. He had been told this soon after he had missed the first payment and had been told it again when he had missed the second. And yet the feeling of homesickness had come upon him again and again while Rick was in prison, each time like an endless well. Sometimes, during those months, he would stare at the telephone where it hung above the stovetop and the impossible urge to call his dead brother would come upon him with a sudden violence that would nearly bring him to his knees. He had never told Rick about such thoughts and he knew he never would. It felt, sometimes, as if a silver wire fled back from the present and into the dark backdraft of the past, not growing thinner with the years but only longer, some great measure of absence that began at his heart and reached not to that night of the anaconda but rather to all the golden days and nights before it, a time that he knew was lost to him and would never be regained.

And now that feeling had returned. Even though Rick was back, there was the undeniable sense that something had changed from when they first arrived in Reno two years before. Then, it felt as if they had stepped across a threshold into some unimaginable world, even though they had no money and could barely afford a loaf of white bread and a package of bologna once they rented that first apartment on Fourth Street. But even that had held a kind of magic, not only because it was the first place Nat had ever lived outside of the trailer but because, in comparison, the apartment felt so tangible and solid that he found himself wondering how something as flimsy and insubstantial as a trailer could survive—had ever survived—the Battle Mountain winters that swept down from Golconda Summit each season and dragged away anything that was not in some way shackled to the earth. And yet he and his mother and his brother, for a time, had lived there together, and someone had lived in the trailer before them and would likely live there after them as well.

They had no furniture in those first months and talked often of driving back to Battle Mountain to collect their beds and another load of personal effects, but they could think of no practical way to transport their mattresses back to Reno. And in any case, Nat did not mind sleeping on the floor enough to care. Not then. He had come to Reno at Rick’s urging but he also knew that it was the start of his life, of his adult life, and that Reno held possibilities for him that Battle Mountain never would. Back home, he might one day have gone to work for one of the mining companies on the flanks of the mountains. Rick’s own father had moved their family to Battle Mountain because he landed just such a job. It was possible that, without Rick, Nat would have found himself at fifty or sixty having never gone beyond the town in which he had been born, that he might have spent all his life at the dry bottom of the same sand-filled bowl. Even had his brother lived, that might have been true.

But he had gone beyond the limitations of that dry plain and at first it had seemed like he was fulfilling some kind of destiny that he could barely imagine was real. Even landing jobs had proven easy. The day after they arrived, Nat was hired by a tire shop, and later that same week Rick found a job in a warehouse from which he would return, over the course of that month, with stories of the various scams and games and hustles of Reno’s nightlife. He learned where to buy pot and where to find black beauties and cross tops and, finally, where to score cocaine, a near-mythical substance that neither of them had even seen outside of a movie screen. That spring they discovered the slot machines at the MGM Grand and they also discovered Grady’s and the 715 Club, beginning there and eventually bar-hopping from the upper end of South Virginia Street all the way down to the Peppermill and Spats and the Met, Rick leading the way and Nat following, both of them drunk on Mad Dog and sometimes stoned and later still high on diet pills and occasionally on cocaine, all of it moving around them and they a part of that flow because they were in the city now, the Biggest Little City in the World, and it was, in comparison to everything they had known, like stepping into the center of a lightbulb and grasping the hot glowing electric filament.