Driftless (28 page)

Olivia returned to the roulette table and played for nearly an hour without significantly winning or losing anything.

She began to think about the numbers and the wagers. It occurred to her that a dollar could be bet on, say, the ball landing on a black slot. If you lost, you could double the amount of your bet. No matter how many times in a row you lost, as long as you kept doubling your bet, when you finally won—and you would have to win sometime—you would be ahead one dollar.

She tried it and after three spins won one dollar. In this way you could always be assured of going home a winner, so long as you continued playing long enough. You might not win much, but you would not lose.

Her next insight into gambling came with the realization that the numbers—themselves—were meaningless. She noticed that the players around her avoided betting on a particular number after that number had recently won. But this made no sense, she reasoned. The
winning number would as likely repeat as not. If the number sixteen, for example, won five times in a row, the chance of its winning on the next spin remained as good as any other number. Similarly, if the number five had not been a winner for a long time, it should be no more likely to find the little white ball sitting in its slot after the next spin.

The problem was with people. When they were faced with decisions, they felt compelled to find reasons for making them. Numbers that corresponded to birth dates and other special occasions came to be thought of as “lucky.” In addition, numbers were sometimes believed to have charm (threeness or twelveness, for example), when in fact they were empty mathematical symbols. Even more strangely, people sometimes felt they had a relationship with a certain number—a shared affinity, a mutual caring—which made pet ants seem sensible in comparison.

All of this seemed possible because people knew in their hearts that everything happened for some reason. About this they were right, thought Olivia. But they were wrong in assuming they could know the reason. Only God knew why things happened. He had set the universe in motion, hung the stars, and caused inert groupings of molecules to spring to life. The lonely, He comforted. Those who trusted Him, He never failed. And though He did not think for His favorite people, He could influence their choices if they paid close attention.

Olivia went to the cashier’s booth, converted all her money to chips, and returned to the roulette table. She played with faith, and in less than fifteen minutes lost more than forty thousand dollars.

It didn’t seem possible. She looked at the other players at the table. They met her eyes briefly and disappeared, not wanting to share in her bad luck.

Olivia backed away from the table and pushed herself slowly down the rows of slot machines to the lobby. She did not know what to do next. She had fallen through the basement floor of her life and now found herself in an utterly unknown place. She looked at the clock and realized Violet would be at home—back inside the house
Olivia had just lost to the bank. She looked through her handbag but didn’t have a quarter to call.

She sat in the lobby until after midnight, waiting. She assumed they would make some provision for the ruined people left inside at closing time; but when she finally asked someone, she learned the casino stayed open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

This also seemed impossible. How could any place stay open all the time? Yet in this new place where she found herself, anything and everything could happen. The supernatural safety net that had always protected her had been taken away, and she continued to sit in the lobby.

Over the next several hours, the shame, horror, and stupidity of what she had done became well documented in her mind. At two-fifteen she went outside, hung her purse around her neck, and began pushing herself through the parking lot toward the highway.

FEAR

W
ADE ARMBUSTER KEPT A CUSTOM AUTOMOBILE IN HIS FATHER’S machine shed, under a gray car cover. Most of the year it just sat there, surrounded by tractors, plows, rakes, forks, skid steers, fans, and other machinery. He had provided his most treasured possession with multiple layers of peerless green lacquer, into which he could stare as though into a still pool of water, and an interior of rich, oiled leather. With the hood open, the car smiled like an extrovert with new braces. He considered it a work of art more than a machine, though functioning was one of the requirements of machine art.

Sometimes in the middle of night he would slip out of the trailer beside his parents’ house to the darkened shed and unwrap it, pulling the cover from the fenders as if he were pulling clothing from rounded hips, heels, and shoulders. Then in the illumination of a single bulb in the rafters, he stood back and gazed, sometimes for hours. The interlaced shadows, curves, lines, and colors seemed in some primitive language to reveal more about himself, about passion, about life, than he could fully explore.

He viewed it from different angles, never able to fathom the whole, each new view a separate avenue of insight. The genius of the black and orange flames on the front fenders—the perfection of the frolicking waves conforming to the contours of the hood—held a secret that promised to open soon.

On this cold winter night, Wade climbed inside and sat behind the wheel, where a row of darkened gauges looked up at him, mute, shiny, and spotless. He turned the ignition to On and listened to the hum of the small electric motor in the trunk, pumping racing fuel to the carburetors. He stepped on the accelerator twice and turned the key. The massive engine groaned loudly, painfully again and
again, and then came howling to life, the sound reverberating from of the building’s steel sides. A cloud of fuel-rich exhaust loomed up behind.

At every touch of the accelerator, the motor responded—as quick as a sliver. He turned on the parking lights to illuminate the little green bulbs in the housing of the gauges and surveyed the quivering needles that reported on conditions inside the engine. After assuring himself several times that all was well, he armed the nitrous oxide injectors and touched the toggle switch mounted on the gear shift lever. The engine coughed, spit, and filled the shed with an acrid mist. The nitrous tank was frozen. It was winter. He’d forgotten about that.

Wade revved the motor several more times to clear the ports and turned it off, climbed out, and shut the driver’s door. He stepped back to admire the car from the rear and felt almost good enough to go back to bed. Everything seemed just right. Unlike much of the rest of his life, this part, right now, seemed in good order.

But then he noticed something he didn’t like and drew his tattooed hand over his closely cropped hair. He spit on the concrete floor, rubbed his neck, and stepped several feet to the right, hoping to correct the impression.

There it was again, an angle of the car that did not look good. Plain, homely. He spit again and stepped back. He’d seen this before. It had always bothered him about the car and was part of the reason he’d bought another set of alloy wheels—to compensate for the sagging quality of the trunk. Something looked too heavy, bulging, old and fat, coarse and crude.

He closed his eyes and attempted to rid himself of the impression through a condemnation of it—as though some momentary spirit of ugliness had entered the shed from the outside, making his beloved the branch upon which the black witches jabbered.

It was the right car, he insisted, often pictured in magazines. It turned heads. He had consulted experts. Many of them. Last year he’d won prizes at car shows. People often looked at him with envy streaming from their faces.

But when he opened his eyes the evil twins were still there: banality and vulgarity.

He experienced fear. What if this was not the right car? What if he had overlooked a critical part of the vehicle’s intrinsic nature—something that could never be lacquered over, sculpted away, softened by files, sandpaper, and polish, or offset by a view of the massive, chrome-plated differential? Was there something inherently wrong, subtle yet terribly flawed, that he had overlooked?

The only way now to prove to himself—to find out for sure—that he had the right car, was to drive it. He rolled aside the steel door on the front of the building and climbed behind the wheel. Driving at this time of night violated the narrow conditions of his parole, but he couldn’t help himself. Once this kind of internalized fear appeared, it imposed restrictions on the choices he could make.

Fear, more than anything else, had to be listened to. It was the only true guiding principle. Without fear, life would be impossible. And when all the unneeded, superfluous thoughts and feelings were eliminated—the slate of experience wiped clean to the essence of sensation—there would be nothing left but fear. Guarding the palace of oblivion, it stood alone. Without fear, human life had no direction, a moth with one ragged wing.

The engine came instantly back to life and he drove through the opened door. Outside, the three- inch exit pipes did not seem quite so loud, and Wade attempted to creep through the farmyard without waking his parents—a hopeless ambition. Due to the pitch of the camshaft and the stall converter, slow speeds were difficult. The staggered lurching, surging, and gasping that so delighted those attending car shows, drag strips, and rallies now proved a liability. The engine died three times before he reached the road, and his parents’ bedroom window on the second floor lit up like a warning light in the sky.

Once he was over the little hill to the north of the farm, he shifted into second gear, cracked the throttle, and felt the joyous thrust of acceleration pressing him back into the seat.

Turning onto the deserted state highway, he left twenty yards of parallel rubber stripes on the concrete before settling into a level hundred miles an hour. The night was clear, the engine now warm,
and the heater began to circulate leather-softening air. All of the windows of the houses he drove past were darkened.

His sense of
rightness
returned. The steering felt tight, the motor and exhaust sounded just as they should, and the hood and fenders in front of him seemed perfect. Everything was in its proper place. He turned the radio on, loud, and drove several miles along the deserted highway.

As he approached town, a few cars began to appear—old guys in pickups and station wagons going home after the bars closed. He saw some younger people, two small guys in a rusted Honda, a long-haired, heavyset fellow pumping gas into a SUV.

At the traffic lights he turned right to avoid the police station and drove away from town toward Highway 87. He could cross over into Thistlewaite County and return home.

He felt bad about his parents. They would be worried. His mother probably waited for him in the trailer. His father—in the final throes of losing his farm—would interpret this as one more overwhelming failure that he could not prevent.

More cars appeared on the side streets, old guys.

Ahead on the left, the casino parking lot was only about a quarter filled. He could see a woman in a wheelchair pushing herself in front of a row of parked cars. Several rows away three young men climbed out of an old Camaro. Two were about his age. The driver, the biggest, was older, maybe thirty- five. They left the doors of the Camaro open. From the way they walked, Wade knew something was going to happen. Their breath froze in front of their faces, giving them an animal-like appearance.

They met the woman, and one of them grabbed the handbag around her neck and attempted to run away. But she refused to let go. In the struggle she was pulled from the chair onto the parking lot. But she still would not let go.

Wade did not think about what he would do. He did not feel a sense of duty, outrage, or anger. He did not feel anything. He simply turned into the parking lot and put his foot to the floor. His back tires burned a rubber arc toward the line of parked cars, coming to a
stop fifteen or twenty feet from the youths and the little woman still holding onto her handbag.

Wade climbed from his car and looked at the older man. “I’d leave that woman alone if I were you.”

“Would you,” said the bigger man, walking toward Wade.

“I would,” said Wade.

“Maybe you should mind your own business, motherfucker.”

“Maybe not.”

Wade had been in a number of fights during his twenty-eight years. The latest, begun outside a restaurant and ending up inside, resulted in a six-month parole. In all of his other fights—until the actual fighting started—he had been fearful. The possibility of being a coward had terrified him.

But now he was not afraid. He had actually been more fearful, in an overall sense, before he had seen the three get out of the Camaro. As soon as he pulled into the parking lot, all vestiges of fear vanished.

In short, he couldn’t remember ever feeling so good. He wasn’t worried about what he looked like, whether he belonged there, whether someone would think he looked like a hillbilly. He simply knew what to do.

The bigger man prepared to swing but Wade hit him first, knocking him momentarily off balance. It was a good punch and he knew he would win if he was given the opportunity to continue. Wade landed another solid blow, knocking the other man down, then stepped to the side and shouted at the man holding the purse, “Let go of that.”

Then three things happened at once. A brick hit the side of Wade’s head, the handbag was ripped from the woman’s hands, and another car pulled into the parking lot. It sat a safe distance away, the headlights shining at them and the horn honking.

The three ran back to the Camaro, jumped inside with the handbag, and sped through the lot.

Wade ran to the small woman, lifted her from the pavement, ignored the overturned wheelchair, and hurried with her to his car.
Holding her in his right arm, he opened the passenger door and set her on the custom leather seat. Then he joined her inside. “Don’t worry, Ma’am, we’ll get it.”