The Slab (23 page)

And came up with a royal flush, winning four thousand dollars.

Finally, he thought, the magic is back.

His next few hands were losers, but then he hit a straight flush. Another royal flush. Four kings.

Twenty minutes after he’d first sat down, he had won nineteen thousand dollars. And the magic was still powerful within him; he could taste it, feel it in his veins.

But video poker was too slow.

He wanted to make some real money, and he wanted it fast. He took his winnings and bought into a roulette game. Put five thousand dollars on nine, because it seemed like a good number.

The croupier spun the wheel. Eleven. Five grand gone. He chased it with another five, then one at a time. Every time the croupier spun the wheel he could feel the energy build up in him, knowing that the ball would stop on the number he had chosen. And every time, it skipped past his number and landed somewhere nearby.

When he finally stopped, after going to five dollar bets for a while, he had just under three hundred dollars left. He had no idea what time it was but his eyes burned and stubble had sprouted on his cheeks and he felt a gnawing hunger that had been growing throughout the night and now, as he walked away from the table, threatened to double him over. He stumbled from the casino and walked to a coffee shop he’d seen on the way in, wondering how he could face Virginia again. At least he had a little something to show—enough for a bus ticket to get back to Albuquerque.

It was still dark out, with the morning’s last stars fading before the dawn, and the desert air was cold. He pulled his jacket tight around him and made for the glow of the coffee shop’s windows.

Inside he saw the sign that said PLEASE BE SEATED, and he selected a booth. The restaurant was nearly empty. After a few minutes a waitress named Ella gave him coffee and took his order. She came back fifteen minutes after that with a plate of scrambled eggs and sourdough toast and bacon, and put it down in front of him. Then she put the check down and looked at him with a barely restrained, almost frantic grin. “I’ll take that when you’re ready,” she said. “And you might want to pay it right now.”

“Can it wait until after I eat?” he asked, the hunger pains even worse now.

“It could, I guess,” Ella answered. “But…just pay it. I’ll take it up for you.” Ella was blonde and heavy and her eyes twinkled like starlight, and something about the way she wiggled in her white polyester uniform, almost as if she had to pee and had been holding it in for hours, or days, made him want to please her. So he fished out his billfold and removed a twenty and put it on top of the check without even turning the piece of paper over. Ella let out a squeal of delight, scraped them both from the table, and ran them to the register. “He’s the one!” she said, and the rest of the coffee shop’s staff joined her at the counter while she rang up his order and made change. When she returned to the table a procession followed her, including a man who was presumably the manager, in a short-sleeved blue shirt and a cheap patterned tie. He held a manila envelope in his hand and the smile plastered on his face was just as broad as Ella’s. Harold began to wonder if he’d accidentally stumbled into some kind of mental asylum.

The manager pushed past Ella and stuck his hand out. Reflexively, Hal shook it.

“Sir, congratulations,” he said.

“What’d I do?” Hal asked him.

“You’re our one hundred thousandth customer since the new owners took over,” the manager said. He handed Hal the envelope. “So you win the big prize!”

Hal felt the envelope the man had given him, turning it between his fingers, not really believing the whole situation. People didn’t do this kind of thing in real life, did they?

But then again, it was a magic day—real life rules didn’t apply.

The something hard contained within the envelope turned out to be the keys to a brand new RV, and inside the RV’s kitchen cabinet was five thousand dollars in cash and a pink slip for the vehicle. The restaurant’s entire staff, including fry cooks in stained whites with baseball caps and greasy shoes, as well as the handful of customers, trailed Hal out to the parking lot in back of the restaurant where the 1983 Winnebago Minnie Winnie sat bathed by floodlights, a spectacle in earth tones and fiberglass.

Finally convinced that it was really his—the RV and the cash—Hal Shipp went home. Back in Albuquerque, he and Virginia spent only two weeks selling off a few remaining possessions and settling accounts, before they loaded up the Winnebago and hit the road, ultimately landing on the Slab.

Magic days.

***

“It’s a world war in the making,” Mick insisted. He sat cross-legged on a blanket, hugging his own arms, head bowed, looking at her with his eyes rolled up in his head. If he’d had a guitar or a joint he’d have looked like guys at a hundred college parties she’d seen, serious and self-absorbed and utterly convinced of their own wisdom. On the other side of the netting the shadows grew long. Helicopters had been buzzing the range for hours, preventing Penny from doing any of the field research she’d wanted to work on.

“Here’s how it goes,” he continued. “We pound Afghanistan into rubble. But then, under some pretext, we go after Iraq as well. Bush’s dad got no end of shit for not finishing off Saddam Hussein, and since his presidency is all about restoring his dad’s reputation after getting his ass kicked by Clinton, Bush Junior is going to want to finish that battle too. Maybe bin Laden will escape and get into Iraq, or there’ll be another terrorist attack of some kind traceable to Iraq, whatever. Something. And we’ll attack there too.

“Which is the final straw, as far as the Islamic world is concerned, because they understand by now that what the war is really about is oil.”

“Oil?” Penny echoed, enthralled in spite of herself. She’d had the same thought, but wanted to see where Mick would go with it.

“Of course,” Mick said. “Bush is an oil guy, so was his dad, so is Cheney. Oil contributed millions to his campaign. Oil and defense industries, those are the places to buy stock during a Bush administration, I’m telling you. You can get rich enough to become a Republican.”

“Get back to the oil,” Penny prompted.

“Okay, yeah. It’s about the oil. Central Asia is full of it, but there hasn’t been a good way to get it out without taking it through Afghanistan, which hasn’t exactly been friendly, or dealing with the Russians. So our plan is to go in and kick ass all over the region so we can put the pipelines wherever the hell we want. You watch, at the same time, the oil interests are going to go back to demanding we drill in ANWR and Yellowstone and wherever else they want to rape the Earth. How many planes have flown since September eleventh? How many people are canceling trips, staying home? Oil consumption’s already dropping, but they’ll claim we need it anyway. Just like they said before this all happened that we needed it because there was an energy crisis, that California was going to be blackout central all summer. Didn’t happen, because Californians conserved. And everyone knew that Arctic oil wouldn’t be on the market for six to ten years, and even then would only be a drop in the bucket. Because they lie, Penny. They just lie.”

He was speaking faster now, bobbing his head as he went as if in time with some internal metronome. The more agitated he made himself the faster he bobbed and the faster he talked. Sometimes winding him up and turning him loose was fascinating to watch.

“So instead of turning to conservation, Bush and Cheney and those guys are going to try to ram through drilling in national parks and monuments and refuges, dressing it all in the flag and patriotism and the war effort. And at the same time they’ll be killing Muslims for their oil, and in fact the result will be that we will increase, not decrease, our dependence on oil because they refuse to consider any kind of reduction in demand.”

“Sounds about right,” Penny agreed.


“But at some point the Muslim world isn’t going to take it any more. Pakistan and India start throwing nukes at each other, the Israelis and the Palestinians start killing each other faster and faster, and every Islamic nation from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia declares war on us and whatever allies we’re left with. World war. All to line the pockets of Cheney’s pals at Halliburton. With a few bucks going to Enron and Lockheed and the Carlyle Group, for good measure.”

He shook his head, blowing out a breath. “I can see it all lined up like dominoes, but there’s not a fucking thing I can do to stop it, Penny. Do you know how frustrating that is?”

Yeah, she thought. I know.

The sensation of powerlessness she’d been feeling all year came rushing back to her. She had hoped to defeat it by joining this project, taking on this mission. But now she realized just how ridiculous the whole thing was. Even if they managed to shut down this bombing range for a month, what good would that do? It was just one range. One of how many? She didn’t even know.

And of course, when they’d planned this, there had been no terrorist attacks, no “war on terrorism,” to contend with. The statement they’d wanted to make might have fallen on ears that were ready to hear it. But that was two weeks ago. Today, no one wanted to hear talk of peace, of nonviolence. No one cared how the Earth could heal them. They wanted to see blood flow.

She started to lean forward to put a hand on Mick’s knee. A calming hand, she hoped, not a leading one. “I know, Mick. I do.” Before it even got there, she drew the hand back, as if from a hot oven, knowing that Mick would take it the way he wanted it instead of the way it was really meant. He was already reaching for it as she snatched it back.

Chapter Sixteen

Kelly Williams was tired and pissed off and his legs hurt and his back and neck and shoulders ached and he thought if he had to listen to Cam Hensley fucking complain one more time about “my eye oh for God’s sake my eye!” he was going to fucking lose it and unload on the man. Rock had it the worst, he had an arm wrapped around Cam’s ribs, Cam’s arm over his shoulders and was bearing most of the wounded man’s weight, which also meant that Cam’s incessant whining was right in his ear.

Kelly had been on a sortie in Nicaragua when a soldier had taken a Sandinista bullet in the shoulder, twenty clicks from civilization. Every step had hurt, of course, and the guy had started whimpering about halfway back. His companions let it continue for fifteen minutes before warning him, and after that, the third time he’d forgotten and let another whine escape his lips, someone had stuck the barrel of an M-16 against the base of his skull and pulled the trigger.

The lesson? Nobody likes losing a friend, but everybody hates a whiner. Kelly never forgot it.

Of course, that stay down south had cemented a few other things in Kelly, like a taste for black-haired, brown-eyed women on their knees, willing to take everything a group of strange men could think of to give them and then beg for more, knowing that the alternative was a short burst and a shallow grave. That was a taste a man had to indulge in from time to time, which was why Kelly had started up the Dove Hunts years before with some acquaintances from the area. These men weren’t his best friends—some things a man didn’t share with those closest to him, after all, not if he wanted to keep them close. But they were men he felt would be amenable to his idea of a good time, and able to keep their mouths shut about it once they’d experienced the joy to be had. And so far, he’d been right about every single one of them.

But then, knowing how to pick men was crucial to building a team, and Kelly had always excelled at that. Whether the goal of the team was to go out and kill commies, as in Nicaragua, or to get laid, the theory was the same. Put together the men who can do the job without thinking about it too much. It was when you got all intellectual that things turned messy.

These men all looked up to Kelly, and came to him for his opinion about any number of topics. He was definitively the expert when it came to military matters, of course. A few days ago, on the first day of the Hunt, he had been in a men’s room behind a tavern in Indio, he and Ray Dixon, unloading some excess beer. Ray had glanced up from the urinal, and said, “You know what, Kelly?”

“What?”

“I don’t do drugs harder than beer, but I’ll be damned if I’ll take self-improvement tips from something that spends all day getting pissed on.”

Kelly looked down at the rubber splash guard inside the urinal he used, which had DON’T DO DRUGS imprinted on it alongside the manufacturer’s logo. He laughed, and Ray joined him, and they were still laughing as they washed their hands and dried them on rough paper towels. When they had parked themselves at their table again, Ray had put his Coors to his lips and taken a long tug and then looked seriously at Kelly.

“Hey, Kelly, you think we’re gonna really go to war over there?” he asked.

“What, Afghanistan?” Kelly asked. “We have to, Ray. What, seven thousand dead? We can’t just turn our backs on that.”

“Can we win?”

Kelly turned his bottle around in his hands, listening to the sound it made rolling against the wet wood of the tabletop. “There is no finer military force—has been no finer military force in the history of the world—than the U.S. armed forces. We can win any conflict we put our hearts and minds to. Whether we have the balls—as a nation, I’m talking—to stick it out for long enough to win, I can’t say. But if we do, then we can. That make sense?”

“That seems to go for a lotta stuff,” Ray said. “If you got the balls and the desire, you can do it.”

Kelly put his bottle down on the ring of condensation and rubbed a hand across his scalp, pulling his hair back from his forehead. “That’s the only way to live, Ray. The only way life is worth living.”

Ray’s phrase had been Kelly’s motto for years, though he’d never encapsulated it into words like that. The same attitude was what he looked for in men to join him on the Dove Hunt. He had found an inordinate number of them on or near the Slab, as it turned out. He had a theory about that, and it was this: Men who lived on the Slab were men who cared less about material belongings than about freedom, that precious concept that no government could really give to anyone, but which every free man had to carve out for himself. Kelly was all for laws and regulations—they helped provide structure for those people who were willing to allow themselves to be so constrained. But for him, and those like him, they were ultimately meaningless, as much vapor as the latest pop song or TV sitcom that dulled the drones into submission.