At the Jim Bridger: Stories (21 page)

“Glad to be of service,” he said. “Those were some worthy dog bites you suffered.”

I went ahead and put some whiskey in my coffee.

“You saved Baby with a ride and we were able to assist you,” he said. “That’s fair right there.”

“It is,” I said. I was sitting wrapped in the rough blanket.

“We could do one more turn that way,” he said. “If you’ve got a couple weeks.”

“I’m unemployed,” I told him. “But I’m going to need to get a pair of pants.”

It was that day that Leo Rosemont laid out the little plan he’d cooked up. He showed me a stack of black and gold casino chips and asked me what it was. I told him it looked like a stack of ten one-dollar chips from the River of Gold Casino. He told me to look close. I did. It was a stack of the things. Then he smiled and lifted it, and what carne up in his hand was a perfect hand-crafted, hand-painted aluminum tube that had covered what remained: a stack of the black and white twenty-five-dollar chips. “If it fooled you,” he said, “this thing is good to go.”

They did need me for it, which gave me the strangest feeling I’d had in a long time, and I didn’t put the feeling in the record, and maybe I should have, because it was a good and powerful feeling. I was part of something. They needed me, and on that far side of the pernicious events to follow, it didn’t feel like anything too bad, just a kind of windfall that would keep me in proximity with Baby Grayson, my new angel. After midnight, early on the morning of September 9 of this year, when Baby came home from work, we sat around that nasty round table and went over the details. I put those details, every one, in my written chronicle.

In Globe I began helping Mr. Cuppertino with the motel. It started with rne getting up from time to time to register the guests and take their money. At the El Sol almost everyone paid in cash. On Wednesdays I turned the Dumpster so it
could be accessed from the alley. And every other day or so I’d sweep or clean the windows in the office and stack the magazines. I was about halfway through my work inscribing my journal, just past the part when I began taking money out of the casino. I would finish the whole thing in two weeks. Then I’d have to make some big decisions.

Mr. Cuppertino hated people on
The Price Is Right
who would bid just one dollar over the last guy. It struck him as being unfair, and he had written a letter to the show about the practice, urging them to adopt a fifty-dollar margin. In response they had sent him two tickets to the show, which he had pinned to the office bulletin board. Whenever we were watching the program and someone pulled the one-dollar stunt, he would shake his head and say, “That snake!” even if it was a woman.

During commercials he’d ask me about myself, the same questions every day. Why isn’t a young guy like me married? Isn’t my family worried about me? What line of work was I in? Didn’t I think Roberta Gilstrand was the most beautiful woman in the world?

He wanted to know if I was in some kind of trouble or needed some help. We’d become friends, kind of, and I agreed with his view about those assholes on
The Price Is Right
who bid a dollar over the last guy, and Mr. Cuppertino kind of wore me down. Every morning I was writing the miserable things I’d done with Baby and Leo, and then I’d end up sitting in his office watching the people on television jump up and down, which was just a pure pleasure akin to solace certainly, and I began to tell him things. I had a faint feeling that he would be the one who finally would turn me in and end my life with eternal jail, but I let things come out bit by bit.

I told him I fell in love with a woman and was nursing my broken heart. This was true. I told him I didn’t know what had become of her. This was true. But I feared the worst.
True. It had been an unfortunate triangle involving a guy who was cruel and unscrupulous. This was understated but true. I told him a good deal of my troubles were my fault. True. I told him I was staying on a couple more weeks just to gather my wits. This was essentially true.

Mr. Cuppertino asked me if I was afraid.

I asked him did I act like I was afraid.

He said I did, and I told him I was. This was true, and it was a relief to express, but it didn’t diminish the fear that was my steady companion.

At night in Unit 7 of the El Sol in Globe, I lay in bed like one gigantic ear, every bump and scrape starting my heart. Every footstep was Leo Rosemont shuffling up to break down my door, say I told you so, and shoot me dead. When you live on the blade of your fear for weeks, you start to think that you can’t wait for the enemy to be made real. I would have welcomed Leo Rosemont into the room any of those nights, but to make his phantom go away forever.

What we had done, of course, is cheat. A casino is a little house of money and Leo’s plan was to bleed some of that off. Leo, himself, had already been banned from the casino. They got me some clothes from the St. Vincent store in Incon, a kind of cowboy outfit including a fairly decent Stetson, black, and just about the right size. “When we’re all long gone,” Leo Rosemont told me, “they’ll be talking about some guy in a black hat. A handsome dude who must have charmed little Baby out of her panties and then out of her little mind. That sweet girl would have never crossed the line otherwise.” Then he laughed and we started in.

Baby and I would drive up to Incon every afternoon for her shift at the casino. She let me off half a mile away, behind the Incon Gas and Go, for the first time on September 13 at ten minutes to three o’clock. It was our pattern and I put it in my
book. I did not put in there about how I felt about my days alone with her, how the very first time we drove away from their evil hovel with me dressed up like Tex from Texarkana, I was lit and floating in unspeakable joy. My heart rattled, but I closed my teeth against it. We had a thirty-minute drive in the lonesome canyon, which to me was a vivid roaring backdrop for my love. I rode in silence, trusting time to reveal to Baby Grayson how I adored her and what that might mean.

I was mightily relieved to be away from the dark, smoky cabin and the greasy personage of Leo Rosemont, whose major activity was to sip whiskey while he talked about what he’d do to each of his former bosses on the various road crews and logging crews and at the telemarketing group and two restaurants where he’d worked. He’d already done some of it and was proud of vandalizing their private property, their lunches and cars, and the clever way he’d harassed them via telephone, scaring the wives and children of these men. I was scared of Leo Rosemont from the get-go.

At four
P.M
. every night for the rest of September, including Saturdays and Sundays, after having a coffee and factory-made Danish inside the Gas and Go, I walked from behind that solitary building through the dusty, litter-blasted sage toward the lights of the River of Gold Casino.

My pattern was the same each of the twenty days, and it never varied, even the night that Baby finally came to understand my feelings for her and we stopped off the shoulder at the top of Incon Canyon on the way back to the river cabin, the very gravel spur where we first met, and in that dark place she showed me the love that seemed my very destiny. In the casino my pattern was simply to stop by the roulette table and see Baby, and if the pit boss was down by the craps table, she would palm Leo Rosemont’s aluminum sleeve over a stack of twenty-five-dollar chips and slide it to me in return for my twenty dollar bill. I’d play the ten one-dollar chips
right up and put the fake stack in my pocket. If the pit boss was up behind her, I’d play ten and leave, stopping by three hours later during her second shift. Every night with this simple plan, I pocketed exactly $250 in the black and gold chips. I stuffed the chips, still in their tube, into the front pocket of my pants, and I delivered them to Leo Rosemont every night at midnight when we got back. I was not to cash any of the chips.

When I had my score, I was to depart the casino, and I did, taking a tall Coke in a plastic cup from the waitress station adjacent the bar, and I walked into the lonely night.

This was the strangest job I ever had, but I walked out into the dark with my pockets bulging and the knowledge that at eleven Baby would pull the Nissan behind the Gas and Go and find me sitting back there on a dairy crate and we would head for home, such as it was.

Mr. Cuppertino liked Plinko. About once a week contestants on
The Price Is Right
would get to play Plinko, where they earn the big Plinko chips by guessing the digits in the prices of spray starch and wheat nuggets, and then they drop the chips into the huge Plinko board and the chips bounce down toward the money slots. It was fun to watch the way the discs pinged off the nails, hopping from side to side, slowly working toward the ten-thousand-dollar slot or the one-hundred-dollar slot. Roberta Gilstrand stood below in pink Capri pants with her graceful hands on her hips. “They got the thing fixed just about right,” Mr. Cuppertino said. “It’s a fair go. That ten thousand is a long shot, but it happens. I’ve seen it happen.”

He’d advise the players about where to drop their chips, saying, “Left, dear, left, to the left, further left,” but the people always dropped them down the middle, time after time. We rooted for the Plinko players, but then we rooted for
everybody except the people who bid one dollar over the last guy. We were watching a young sailor drop the Plinko chips one morning when Mr. Cuppertino asked me if I would help him with a little project. He was going to refurbish the twelve units of the El Sol, and he needed someone to drive a truck to Hotel Surplus in Phoenix and back.

It was a big yellow truck with a twelve-foot box, certainly the biggest truck I’d driven, and Mr. Cuppertino was gleeful because the whole deal only cost him nineteen dollars for the day. He’d been happy since he’d taped the cardboard sign to the locked office door:
BACK AT
5. “God, I love a road trip!” he said as we wound through the rocky canyons and down onto the desert floor and the hazy unending metropolis of Phoenix in the flat noon light. “It’s good for a person to get out. Mickey knew that. We drove all over the Midwest; her folks lived in Fort Wayne. That’s way up there. You can’t bury yourself in an office and hand out keys your whole life.”

The larger world seen from the elevated cab seemed big and bright to me, too. Sleeping on the damp floor of the river cabin had not made me an optimist, but now with my written record almost done, and the sunshine crashing down everywhere, I felt almost well.

I had everything written down except the final week. That week, just as we’d done for the two previous, Baby Grayson and I went to the River of Gold Casino every night, and we used Leo Rosemont’s aluminum sleeve like a perfect tool and took ten twenty-five-dollar chips from the casino. On the tenth night, I broke my silence with Baby and asked her how she felt about all of this. We were headed for home, rising off the flat toward the summit, and she said, “About what?”

“Taking this money. Leo. Me.”

“I like it,” she said. “If we’re careful, we’ll get new lives out of this.” It was something Leo had told us.

“What do you want in a new life?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. A new life.”

“What about me?” I asked her. I had started talking and it was easy to cross the line. “How do you feel about me?”

“Pretty good,” she said. “You’re doing good.”

“Do you love Leo?” I asked her.

She guided us through the three switchbacks at the top. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

“He’s not always real good to you,” I said. “Is he?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s okay.”

I couldn’t read what was going on, but my heart was beating. “Look,” I said. “Pull over at the top and I’ll check the radiator.”

She did that and I stepped out into the canyon dark. You could hear the river, and the car ticked as I went around the front. I didn’t even open the hood, but I went right around to Baby’s door and I opened it so she could get out.

“What is it, Eugene?” she said to me.

The truth that had been waiting for ten days burst from me. “I want you.” I pulled her up and kissed her soft face. Her body against me was beyond imagining.

“What do you want?” she asked, genuinely confused. But she was kissing me back and her fleshy arms were around my back. We squirmed against the car like that for two or three minutes, as far as you go with clothes, and I became certain I had her cooperation. “We can do this,” she said to me. “If you want to.” She started draping her clothing over the trunk of my Nissan. “No problem,” she said. “Come on.” And she directed me through the rest of our roadside session with a fervor that I savored as much as her warm body under mine.

Twenty minutes later in the car, I straightened her hair with my fingers as she drove and she flinched, saying, “What are you doing?”

“Just fixing your hair,” I said. “I don’t want Leo to know.”

She looked at me, sweetly, blankly, and her expression scared me. “Okay,” she said. “Whatever.”

“No,” I said. “Leo mustn’t find out. Don’t let Leo know what happened.”

“Okay by me,” she said, and then she braked there for Rock Creek and turned off the hardtop into the forest and the trail that led to the dark cabin.

That night, as always, Leo took the stack of chips from the aluminum sleeve and looked at it and smiled. Then he held the sleeve in the short glow of the candle and examined it slowly, and then he’d say the number of days left. He always said the number of days left, and the night that Baby first gave herself fully to me there on the summit turnout, he said, Nine days to go. Some nights then he’d offer me a little Ten High and some nights he’d just start in repairing the aluminum sleeve, using his magnifying glass and his penknife and the small jars of m odel-airplane enamel. I watched Baby hang her vest on the chair and unbutton her blouse going into their bedroom, and the door swung back till it was half closed.

“You meeting any people over there at the River of Gold?” he asked me.

“Nobody.”

“Bartender? Cocktail waitress?”