Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (5 page)

Peyton slept beside her, not waking until they crossed the Mississippi River again, at Memphis. When he stirred, she turned to peer out the window at plow-scarred fields. After Memphis, the delta stretched out flat and blank—old cotton fields waiting to be submerged under something new and transforming. Billboards planted in the fields like scarecrows marked the way to the casinos. In the distance the casinos began to appear, rising out of the fields like ocean vessels on the horizon—a Confederate armada positioned along the Mississippi, protecting the delta from northern invaders. In this misty atmosphere, Liz thought, the casinos seemed to really float. By law, they were supposed to operate offshore, but their floating was illusory. They actually stood on solid ground a mile or more from the river. She didn't understand a law like that. It sounded slippery, a lie that let the casinos cut loose and glide along an imaginary river. She didn't trust the law. It hadn't been enough to work the kinks out of Peyton. Now she was afraid she couldn't get a divorce because of legal costs.

The bus passed two kudzu-smothered silos, some gray casino-worker housing, and an old diner known for its fried pickles. Then they entered the gates of a gleaming city with white-hot pavement and pastel buildings. When the bus stopped, the passengers split like a cluster of coins banged out of a paper roll and disappeared into the row of casinos. Liz walked fast, ignoring Peyton, who loped along behind her. In the Western-frontier casino that she preferred, Liz marched straight to the bank. When she left the window with her bucket of nickels, she glimpsed Peyton in the lobby atrium, lounging on a bench near a tree decorated with tiny lights. He followed her to a Vacation USA game, where—one by one—she inserted the ten dollars' worth of nickels included with her bus excursion ticket. She liked to hurry through the first action, just for a little warm-up, as if to prove she could withstand loss.

“Don't mess with my luck, Peyton,” she said. “I'm warning you.”

Nearby, a woman jerked a machine's arm and a cascade of coins jingled out. “Hey, Mississippi!” the woman cried. “Tunica is where I get lucky. I get nihilistic when I'm in Vegas, but in Tunica I'm flying.”

Liz loved coming to Tunica. It was as close to a luxury resort as she would ever get—a bright, clean place where she could feel classy. She delighted in the extravagant newness of the decor. The little lights on the surprisingly non-fake ficus trees in the atrium provided a Christmasy mood. And she loved the incessant sounds of the slots—the boiling of overlapping tones, something like the tune in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
played by a full-blown orchestra, complete with flashing lights. The Western motif, with boots, guns, and wagon wheels imprinted on the carpeting, was homey. She pictured herself—wisecracking and flamboyant—in a flouncy skirt and boots with spurs.

But today as she wandered through the place, getting her bearings, Peyton trailed her like a hunter, disturbing her concentration. After the first mad rush, she liked to go slowly. Sometimes she preferred to stand in a line for a while, to slow herself down. She liked the suspense of the games—the way they seemed like life-and-death struggles while they were happening. She couldn't bear uncertainty in everyday life, but at the casinos the sudden emotional turns were like a car chase in the movies. The random surprises of playing the slots made her feel she could revamp her life. At times, being married to Peyton was just sitting in chairs compared with this exhilaration. But at other times, being married to him was more volatile and frightening than any gambling action. It was like being knocked backwards by a thug bursting through a door.

A girl in a skimpy black satin-and-lace costume offered her a free rum Coke from a tray. She looked too young for the job, Liz thought. She wore a black knee brace, which seemed to complement her outfit. “Rollerblading?” the server-girl explained in a nasal accent. Peyton was playing a slot next to Liz. As he pulled the arm, a memory flashed through her mind—Peyton grabbing the handle of the fuse box in the basement after a fuse blew. She had been ironing and making toast while he was watching his tape of
Die Hard with a Vengeance.
He often replayed the most violent scenes in his favorite movies. He had a Top Ten list of best wipe-out scenes. “How can you watch all that?” she had asked him. “It's not
my
life,” he said with a satisfied smile. “No skin off my butt.” She wondered increasingly if she should be afraid, although in his obsession he ignored her, as if he was somewhere in the movie and she didn't exist. But now he was stalking her. She wondered if she had been making excuses for him unconsciously. He had his good side—the way he cooked pancakes on Sundays, his habit of making up funny songs to amuse her. She didn't draw conclusions easily about people. But even before he went to jail, her friends had said: Dump him. You'll end up shooting him. Or he'll shoot you. The rum was opening up her head, and she imagined that she was having deep thoughts.

In the afternoon Liz drank another rum Coke, and her luck improved. As she collected a fanfare of coins from a machine's maw, Peyton appeared with a sack of barbecue and Cokes. Carrying her coin bucket, she followed him outside into the hazy, muggy air. They crossed a small bridge to a bench by the brook—the moat that ostensibly allowed the casino to float. Liz thought of the sump pump in her basement. When it rained, water seeped in, and the basement smelled like a drainage ditch.

“I'm moving up to the Double Jackpot Haywire,” Liz said. “I'm going to put in fifty bucks all at once—in quarters—and then I'm going to hit the
MAX
button until it gives me back something good.”

Her head buzzed. She had forgotten about her stitches, and when she ran her hand through her hair she almost yanked out a stitch, thinking it was a tick.

Peyton handed her a sandwich. She stared at it while he peeled a straw and stuck it in one of the Cokes for her. They sat on the bench and gazed at the picturesque stream, choked with blooming lilies. Peyton was unusually quiet.

“Why don't you call and find out how your mother is?” Liz said.

“I'll know sooner or later. There's nothing I can do, anyway.”

Liz felt a new wave of grief for Daisy—poor, fat Daisy with her mannish cigarette voice and absurd pink pantsuits. Liz had never really liked her. Daisy always told Liz she had no style. Liz meant to find her style one day. It was one of her recent resolutions. Squinting at the sun, Liz blinked the image of Daisy from her mind.

“I thought up a poem for you while I was watching you this morning,” Peyton said.

“When I count up the stuff I really like,

The first thing for sure is my Harley bike

But I guess that isn't really true

'Cause the thing I really like best is you.”

She held up two fingers. “When I married you, I was about two poker chips short of insanely happy,” she said.

“The trouble with you is, you want people to be perfect.”

“What do
you
want?” she asked him.

“I want you to stop acting so ill towards me. It makes you ugly.”

“Well, leave me alone. Why don't you go over to the Hollywood or Harrah's and leave me here? This is
my
casino.” She wadded up her sandwich wrapper. “Hey, what do you mean ugly—looks or acts?”

“I meant your frame of mind makes you act ugly, but I can see it in your face, too. It makes all them little blond hairs stand out and your freckles act like they're on speed.” His face lit up in a sort of Bruce Willis sneer, and she knew he was teasing. She had missed that.

She rubbed at her cheek, as if to calm down her freckles. “Are you ashamed of me?”

“For how ugly you act?”

“Oh, shut up.” She punched his arm.

“I can't help my mama, but maybe I can help you.”

“No, you'd go off and leave me if I was sick. I can't depend on you.”

“The reason people stay married is so they can help each other,” he said.

“Bullshit,” she said.

“I'll help you fix your hair.”

“What's wrong with my hair?”

He tousled the top of her head. “It needs a more natural look,” he said.

“Watch out—you'll pull my stitches!”

“I hate it that you went and had that operation and I couldn't go with you.”

“I don't like you following me around. A girl at work told me I should get a restraining order to stop you from bugging me.”

He kicked at the bench. “I've been stupid. If I could roll time back, I wouldn't do a lot of what I done. But it's like that split second when there's a car wreck, and tragedy happens—just like that.” He clicked his fingers. “And you can never undo it to save your life. Now Mama might go to her grave with her last picture of me in her mind—Peyton the Jailbird.”

His self-pity infuriated her. No tragedy had happened in a split second, she thought.

“To undo the past would be like rolling the Mississippi River backwards,” she said.

The little lily-studded brook was sashaying past, but she had a momentary impression that she was moving, not the water.

During the afternoon she spotted Peyton at a blackjack table. In the past, he typically played till he lost everything; then he always came to her. She'd have five-dollar bills hidden in her clothes in several places—in her inner pockets, in her bra, in a secret pocket fashioned from a drawstring tobacco pouch that she pinned inside her jeans. But he would come after her.

Vaguely aware that he was still parked at the blackjack table, she breezed down the row of slot machines like someone driving a car while mentally miles away. She wasn't focusing on her strategy. She was feeding the machines and drinking rum Cokes. She won ten dollars' worth of quarters on the Triple Diamond and let it ride. It used to be fun to come with Peyton to Tunica. He got her a fake I.D., and they drove down and played until they couldn't stay awake; then they slept in the car at a roadside rest stop, daring criminals and perverts from Highway 61 to kill them—or kidnap them. But that seemed long ago now. She remembered the day he strolled into the backyard and blew apart a rotten stump with some kind of plastic machine pistol. “You can squeeze off a clip in no time flat,” he told her later, as if merely mentioning how many screws it took to assemble a patio bench.

Liz pulled the handle and coins rushed out. As long as she stayed lucky, she felt unafraid and rejuvenated, confident she could handle Peyton. He was still engrossed in the blackjack game. His mother's condition had thrown them onto a Tilt-A-Whirl ride, where they spun around separately, sometimes facing each other momentarily before spinning away again. Liz didn't want Daisy to die, and she knew she shouldn't have run away to Tunica. Now she imagined that when she got home, purged of her need to gamble, she could face Daisy's helpless body—maybe even talk her out of her coma. But what she would do about Peyton was a question that trembled in the air like a tossed coin. She knew she had to be resolute. She had been tangled up in the mess of his mind too long. After another spill of quarters from the Triple Diamond, she felt cocky and clear. She would go home, visit Daisy, possibly go to her funeral, then get a restraining order against Peyton. And file for divorce. She tripped over her coin bucket and almost fell into the arms of a leering greaseball with a toothpick in his mouth.

“Come to Daddy!” the guy cried, giving her a hug.

“Fuck off,” Liz said, jerking free.

Toward the end of the night Liz was twenty dollars ahead, but in the last hour Peyton begged all her winnings from her for blackjack. He was on a streak, he said. When she relented, he said, “You need me. We're in this together.” He stared at her. “I mean that in more ways than one.” She told him she wouldn't have let him have her money if his mother wasn't in a coma.

The bus was jammed with jubilant winners laughing and joking, celebrating, and glum losers who stared at their laps. A merry elderly woman across the aisle from Liz and Peyton chattered about the hundred dollars she had won—enough to buy a chimnea, one of those little patio stoves, she announced. Liz's head was about to blow up, and her mind was flying like microwaves blasting from a cell tower. She touched one of her stitches, a little pair of bristles like whiskers. She aimed peppermint breath-killer at her open mouth.

“Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose,” said the woman across the aisle. “I started with church bingo and worked my way up. Bingo got me hooked. But I know when to quit.”

Peyton nodded. “Everybody's just trying to get a little something, find a way out.”

“That's the truth.”

“Yessir,” Peyton said. “I was in jail, but I never done a thing wrong, and now my poor mama lays dying in a hospital and her last image of me is her son, the jailbird.”

The church woman said, “My husband died last year on June twenty-ninth. Cancer. It had spread to his liver. He couldn't pass water, and he was in such pain I was glad to finally see him go. He's home now, with Jesus.”

“What?” said Liz, jolted into reality. She might have passed out for a second and missed something. Then she realized it was typical of Peyton to cover his losses by acting unusually sociable. She could sense a hollowness beneath his cheer; he had lost Liz's money, and he was losing his mother. She was tired and didn't want to think.

“You'd make a good preacher,” the church woman said to Peyton with a giggle.

“Amen,” Liz said, her eye on Peyton.

He said, “Amen, Brother Ben. Shot a goose and killed a hen.”

The bus darkened, and the passengers quieted. Some time passed, while Liz sipped from a can of Mountain Dew she had brought on board. All the alcohol she had had earlier that day made her feel chilled, and she removed the fleece throw from her bag and spread it over her bare legs. Peyton was asleep, snoring a little. After a while, a murmur on the bus rose to a loud question.