Byrd (16 page)

Elle's aunt and uncle, who had two sons and a daughter of their own, took her in, and Elle shared a room with her girl cousin. She never stopped missing her parents or feeling the awful mix of guilt and relief that she hadn't gone with them. But her aunt and uncle were determined to make her happy, or less unhappy. They took her places, bought her things: clothes, makeup, records, posters for her wall. Her cousins treated her like a sister.

In spite of everyone's kindness, or maybe because of it, Elle left Reno as soon as she was old enough to claim her small inheritance. She moved to L.A.—for good, she thought—telling her aunt and uncle she wanted to be in a place with an ocean. In fact what she wanted was a place where people wouldn't feel the need to be kind.

Nineteen years later, she's back, sharing her old room with Dusty until her aunt can redecorate the boys' room. Everything is the same as before: twin beds, chenille spreads, flowery wallpaper. “Gus roo,” Dusty calls it.
Girls' room
.

Elle's uncle gets her a job as a cocktail waitress in a casino on Virginia Street. She is thirty-seven, old for cocktailing, and jobs aren't as plentiful since the Indian casinos began cutting into Reno's business, but Elle's uncle has connections.

“See?” Elle says to Dusty. “Our luck is changing.”

She works the graveyard shift. Her aunt drives Dusty to and from school every day and takes care of him afternoons while Elle sleeps. Dusty goes to public school where he meets with a speech therapist but is otherwise in a regular class since he can read and write as well as anybody in second grade—better, in fact, because of his speech problem. When he writes, people understand him. He carries a memo pad in his pocket at all times.

Every evening at six, Elle gets out of bed and cooks supper—pancakes or eggs if she's in a breakfast mood, otherwise macaroni and cheese, Boca burgers, tofu dogs. She's making vegetarians of them all. Her aunt and uncle like their steaks and chops, but they are gracious and accept Elle's cooking as her contribution to the household.

Most nights after supper, Roland calls from California. He talks to Dusty first, then to Elle. “What's in Reno that isn't here?” he asks her. “What do you want?”

“I want to be somebody,” she says, quietly, so no one in the house can hear her.

“You are,” he says.

“Somebody important,” she says.

“You are,” he says. “You're my wife.”

“More important than that.”

“You're the mother of my son.”

“More important than that.”

In the casino where she works there's no night or day, only flashing lights and gaudy chandeliers and mirrored ceilings and patterned carpets that reek of cigarette smoke and fried food. Elle wears a strapless uniform and black stockings and serves drinks to people in vacation clothes. The losers are sad, but the winners are worse: men with chips piled in front of them, loud men with gold chains and ruddy faces, their eyes narrow and black as seeds. She bends over when she serves them and they give her big tips.

When her shift is over she puts on sunglasses and walks outside. The morning light is painful. The younger waitresses like to put off daylight for another hour or two by going to the casino across the street. It's their way of being friendly without having to get to know each other.

One morning they invite Elle to go with them. They don't know her. They don't know she's just left her husband. They don't even know she has a husband, or a son.

“Okay,” she says, trying not to sound excited.

She hasn't gambled since she was a child learning poker from her uncle. He taught her Texas Hold 'Em, Omaha Hi-Lo, Four-and-Four, Lamebrains, Criss-Cross, Night Baseball, and Follow the Queen—Elle's favorite, a seven-card stud game in which the card that follows a turned-up queen is wild, and whenever another queen is turned up, the wild card changes. Elle and her uncle and cousins would sit around the kitchen table wearing visored caps, eating sliced bologna on saltines with mustard. Her uncle had names for the cards: Fever, Sexy, Savannah, Eddie, Arnold, Typewriter, Jake, Pretty Lady, Cowboy. He was not a sentimental teacher; he never purposely let anyone win, and Elle rarely did. Even playing penny-ante she sometimes lost all her allowance money. “I told you not to bluff,” her uncle would say. “In a low-stakes game it doesn't pay to bluff because you can't force anybody out. In a wild card game, don't bet without a wild card.”

The casino across the street is bigger than the one where she works, with more machines and more tables. She's intimidated by table poker, and she doesn't want to throw her money away on the slots like the other waitresses. Just inside the door there's a bank of video poker machines. She sits down at the first open one, an old machine with ghosts of cards burned into the screen. She slides in a twenty, the only cash she has. The game is Jacks or Better.

After ten minutes she's lost most of her money. She knows her uncle would tell her to stop while she still has enough for a pack of cigarettes. What keeps her playing isn't a feeling of luck, but something more dangerous: the feeling of having nothing to lose.

She presses a button and the machine deals her two spades, the nine and ten, and three diamonds, the jack, queen, and king—a straight. She can feel her life changing. A man walks up beside her. He is thin and sallow, with combed-back hair. His eyes are hard; he isn't smiling. “Go for it,” he says, his voice low and serious. Elle thinks he must know something. She decides to draw to her diamonds. And sure enough, the miracle that will ruin her: the ten and ace appear. A buzzer goes off. People in the casino look up. The other waitresses, her new friends, leave their machines and come over. “What nerve,” they say, “to go for the royal!” She beams and clutches her pay ticket. Her heart is beating all the way into her fingertips.

She looks around for her mystery man, but he is lost in the crowd, so completely gone she wonders if he was ever there at all.

Dusty never talks at the supper table. He doodles in his memo pad and waits for his father to call.

One night Elle has had enough. “I asked you not to do that,” she says, and snatches the pad away. The pages are covered with drawings of guitars, cutaways like Roland's. The drawings are tiny and perfect and make Elle even angrier.

She changes her strategy, increases her bets. She stays out later every morning. Some days she doesn't get home until noon, and by then she is almost too tired to sleep. She closes the thick rubber shades that make her room look like night. She turns on a floor fan to filter out noise. The fan sounds like an ocean. It makes her think of California, and of Roland. During her first year with him, they went through her inheritance. She wonders if it's possible to win back everything she has lost.

A week after Dusty's eighth birthday, a package arrives in the mail: Roland's old jean jacket. Dusty loves it. Elle has never seen him love anything so much. He insists on wearing it every day, even in the heat. It swallows him, makes him look small and lost.

A royal should come up on average about once every forty thousand hands, so sooner or later she's bound to hit another one. The key is speed. The faster she plays, the sooner she'll win. So far she has used up her initial winnings and is down a thousand, but she isn't discouraged. She doesn't think of losing as losing, she thinks of it as investing, preparing to win again.

She always plays the same machine. It's comfortable, the seat far enough from the screen that she can see all the cards without moving her head. She uses both hands on the deal and hold buttons. She builds up credits so that she isn't constantly pumping in money.

If she doesn't stop to eat or smoke, she can play six hundred games an hour.

Roland says he wants to be a family again. He's moving to Reno. Elle has to remind herself that this is what she's been waiting for.

Her uncle rents them an apartment. He wants to help them the way Roland's parents helped them in California, when they were first taking Dusty to doctors.

The apartment is half of a duplex, a small, flat building on a street of small flat buildings with chain-link fences and skinny, creaking cottonwood trees and dogs that bare their teeth when they bark. Each side of the duplex has its own garage. Elle and Roland have never had a garage. It's small and dark like their apartment, and airless, barely wide enough for a single car, but it has an automatic door and automatic lights.

Their one bit of affluence.

Elle's uncle sets Roland up in a training course for slot technicians. He says it's important for a man to feel like he can support his family, and slot techs make good money. Roland says to Elle, “I'm too old to be going back to school.” He's forty-two. In the time they've been apart, not quite a year, he's begun to go bald like his father. Elle doesn't mind. It's a relief to know that from now on, she will look better than him. He can be the one who worries.

“You're not old,” she says. “You're middle-aged.”

He takes classes called Introduction to Slots, Money Validation, Applications of Electricity, Slot Mechanics, Slot Electronics, Slot Microprocessors, and Troubleshooting. After six months, he gets a certificate. Elle frames it for him. She is trying to be happy.

One night while she's in the bedroom getting dressed for work, Roland walks up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist. They look at each other in the mirror. “You look good,” he tells her. Her skin is smooth and clear. Her hair is a single color now—a blond so pale it looks ivory, like a wedding gown—and she's let it grow longer and she uses a lotion that makes it curly.

“I do what I can,” she says.

“You know,” he says, “things are going to be different this time.”

She pets his arm. She wants to believe him. But besides having him back, and living in the duplex, not much has changed. She still spends her nights cocktailing, her mornings at her machine, her afternoons sleeping. Her aunt keeps Dusty after school and Roland picks him up in the evening. When they come home, Elle gets out of bed and cooks supper and they eat at the coffee table so that Roland can watch
Wonder Years
reruns on TV, the show that opens with Joe Cocker singing “With a Little Help from my Friends.”

“Those were my years,” Roland tells Dusty.

She slides her hands up and down the sides of her machine, where the brass plating has worn off. She closes her eyes and pictures her mystery man with his slicked-back hair. “Talk to me,” she says. “Talk to me.”

The wind in Nevada is full of grit. Gold dust, Roland calls it.

He lands a day job at a casino in Sparks. Every night he comes home with the casino smell—smoke, grease, stale cologne. Elle has it too, though she never knew until she smelled it on Roland. Sometimes when they lie in bed together she can't tell his skin from hers.

The duplex is small and looks dirty even when it's clean. The sink clogs, the toilet backs up. Things break. One morning while Roland is showering, the nozzle flies off and hits him on the head.

They talk about saving for a house. They're both making decent money. Roland is over his cocaine habit—he quit cold turkey soon after Elle and Dusty left him—and he's been turning over his paycheck so that he can't ruin their finances again. He has turned everything over to Elle so that whatever happens this time can't be his fault.

Every day on her way home, Elle stops in the post office and collects the mail—bills, advertisements, bank statements. She knows how close to broke they are, but she doesn't tell Roland. She doesn't want him to know how much she's investing in her machine.

She needs to win. And not just for the money. For her, winning has never been about money.

Dusty's new teacher invites Elle and Roland to a parent-teacher conference. Roland takes the morning off, and he and Elle drive to the school together.

Dusty's teacher, Miss Sink, is younger than most of the waitresses where Elle works, with cleavage showing between the lapels of her dress. Roland looks her up and down. Elle knows what he's thinking.
I used to be a musician. There was a time when you would've stood in line to fuck me
.

“Dusty's speech has improved dramatically,” Miss Sink says, her own enunciation so precise she sounds like she's chewing the words. “He's doing well in all his subjects. But we're having a little problem with his conduct. He passes notes in class.” She hands Elle a page from Dusty's memo pad. On it is a drawing of a skunk, very lifelike, except the skunk has Miss Sink's face—her wide eyes, her clotted eyelashes, her snub nose, her pursed mouth. Under the picture is a caption: “Miss Stink.”

Roland studies the picture. “This is good. Where'd he learn to draw like this?”

Miss Sink tugs at her dress as if it's suddenly too tight. “If this were Dusty's only drawing,” she says, sniffing, “I wouldn't have called you in. But he constantly disrupts the class with his notes. I had to confiscate his pad.”

“He needs his pad,” Elle says, even though all she has to do is buy him another one. Fifty-nine cents. “It's like a body part.”

“Then he needs to learn to use it responsibly.”

“We'll talk to him,” Roland says. He puts his hand on Elle's back.

“That's all I'm asking,” Miss Sink says.

She escorts them to the classroom door and thanks them for coming. Elle pulls the door shut behind them, harder than she means to, hard enough to rattle the glass pane. She can't believe she just gave up a morning at her machine for this.

One evening when she is alone with Dusty, she asks him, “Would you like a little brother?”

He is sitting on the floor, drawing. He doesn't look up. “Not little,” he says. “Big.”

Of course
, Elle thinks. A big brother could take care of him, teach him things. Rescue him from his parents. From a mother who tries too hard to love him, and a father who tries too hard to love his mother.