Motel. Pool. (13 page)

Tag bypassed the blinking lights and headed for the blackjack tables. Blackjack. Jesus, what if Jack had got himself sucked back to Arizona? Shaking his head over his own folly, Tag chose a table. The dealer looked like Tiny Tim—the ukulele player, not the Dickens kid. His nametag said Timothy, which might have been intentional or maybe was a coincidence. Three other people sat at the table: a middle-aged guy who looked like he was in town for a convention, a grandmotherly type, and a younger woman in a bright-pink dress that showed a lot of cleavage. Tag sat next to her and she smiled at him.

He hadn’t gambled much in the past. His previous trips to Sin City hadn’t been his idea—he’d been dragged there by friends—and during those times he’d mostly walked the Strip, eaten buffets, gotten laid, seen a couple of shows. His lack of experience was one reason he’d chosen this game—it was fairly simple.

Tag handed several bills to Timothy, who gave him back a pile of chips. Then Tag thought about how much to bet. Twenty was the minimum, but he set a hundred on the mark. The other players put down their chips too, and then Timothy dealt the first and second rounds of cards. Tag had a king and a seven; Timothy had a six showing. The lady next to Tag chuckled and added to her pile of chips, doubling down. Tag decided to do the same. Timothy gave another card to everyone except the salesman and Tag, who decided to stand. With a slight grimace, Timothy put another card in front of himself—a nine—and flipped over his remaining card. An eight. “Busted!” the lady in pink said. Timothy handed out winnings to all four players.

Okay. That was a good warm-up. Tag left his winnings on the mark and added more chips. A lot more, in fact—now he had over six hundred bucks at stake. That would pay for over a month at the Baja Inn and Casino. Would have covered his half of the rent in the place he had shared with Jason. It was a couple car payments, a round-trip plane ticket with money left over for a couple days in a decent hotel. It was a semester’s worth of books back when he was in college. It was a lot of money.

For a brief moment, Tag had second thoughts. He could cash out and leave. He could walk back to the Baja, wait for Jack to show up, and get the hell out of Dodge. He could find a place to live somewhere, a job, a—

He could fuck up again, leaving more pain in his wake, more disappointment in his heart.

He let the chips stay.

Timothy got blackjack on the next hand, but so did Tag, so it was a push. The other players all lost, at which point the salesman clucked his tongue, shook his head, and got to his feet. “Done enough damage for now,” he said before walking away. Tag wondered if he’d make it to his hotel room without gambling again. Pink Dress and Grandma remained.

Before Timothy could take more cards from the shoe, the cocktail waitress came by. She smiled at everyone, but she looked tired. Her feet probably hurt. When Tag’s mother had managed to get a job—which wasn’t often—she usually ended up with something that left her standing all day, dealing with dickish bosses or asshole customers. When she came home, she used to slide her shoes off with a groan and collapse onto the couch with her feet up. “Bring Mama a cold drink, Aggie,” she’d say to him. Always Aggie when she was in those moods, never Tag or Taggart. He’d hurry to bring her a can of Coke and she’d sip it with her eyes closed, one hand rubbing the back of her neck.

“Can I get you something?” the waitress asked, breaking him from his reverie.

“Bottle of beer,” he said.

She nodded, wrote on her order pad, and walked away.

“Ready?” Timothy asked the players. Nobody objected, so he dealt. He ended up with nineteen, but Tag had doubled down on a seven and a three and then got a queen.

“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.