Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes (22 page)

“Something like that.”

“Huh?”

But he ignored my duh moment in favor of some introspection. “Sometimes,” he said, “I hate all this.”

“DJ music?” I said. “Well, I suppose it would be more fun if it were Tom Jones.”

“I don't mean that. I mean working in a casino.”

“Why?” For myself, I couldn't see it. I'd started to really love what used to be my father's place of business. Sure, all of the smoke was a bitch. But there was that constant edge of excitement. It was addicting, which was maybe one of the reasons I was hesitant to start playing again.

“Did you see some of those people down there?” he said.

“I saw a lot of people down there.”

“Did you see the ones with that desperate look in their eyes, like everything that has to do with happiness in their life rides on what card they'll turn up next?”

“I guess I saw a few of those.”

“I hate that. And did you see the guy who kept trying to find chips on the ground? What a character! The one in the porkpie hat scrounging around for just one chip?”

“Him I
definitely
saw.”

“That's what I mean. Some of them are just so pathetic. And I hate being a part of all that patheticness. Some nights, I feel like what I do is no better than a crack dealer selling people cocaine.”

“People have free will,” I pointed out.

“Not much,” he snorted.

“Then why do you do it?”

“Some nights I'm not altogether sure. I think I do it mostly because I was born here. This place is in my blood. What else do I know?”

“Yo-yos?” I suggested.

“Well, that's the dream, isn't it?” he conceded. “I guess that's the real reason I do it. The job here gives me my days free so I can work as much as I want to on my craft.”

His craft? Wasn't he laying it on a bit thick now?

“It's great,” he said. “Every day I yo-yo for several hours and then I get to do local gigs, exhibitions like at parties and libraries and stuff, or work casinos in other states on my vacations like you saw me doing in Connecticut.”

“Must be great,” I said. I wasn't sure if I meant it or not—would it be great to pursue one's dream, even if that dream was to be a yo-yoist?—but it seemed like the thing to say at the time.

“Why don't you just quit,” I said, “if that's how you feel, and devote your time to being a full-time…yo-yoist?”

“Because this place really
is
in my blood.” He sighed. “And, yeah,” he said, as though conceding something else, “it's exciting, being around people who could at any second become princes or paupers.”

Speaking of which…

“Oops, gotta run,” I said.

“But you haven't finished your diet cola with lime in it yet.”

“I know and I wish I could stay,” I said ruefully, “but I need to go find the friend I came with and see if he's turned into a prince or a pauper yet.”

Where the fuck was Billy?

Search the casino as I might, though, he was nowhere to be found. At last concluding I was chasing my own tail around in circles like a dog and that my tail didn't want to be caught, I headed back up to the room. Once there, I changed into one of the pretty teddies I'd brought with me—it was lilac lace and required a blueprint to get into it—and crawled into bed to watch some Jon Stewart, hoping to still be awake when Billy returned. With apologies to Shakespeare, there was a long overdue consummation I was devoutly wishing for.

But by the time Jon Stewart finished his fifth Bush joke, my spirits and my teddy gave in at about the same time, the former sagging from lack of sleep with the latter sagging from the heat because I'd been too lazy to turn the AC on earlier, and off I went to sleep.

“If only you'd been there, Baby,” Billy said.

“Huh?” I blinked against the light of the room.

“I kept looking for you everywhere,” he said, removing the jacket of his tux and throwing it with disdain over the back of a chair.

“But I was looking for you, too!” I protested.

“Every single second?” he accused.

“Well, no,” I admitted, thinking of Chris, “I did have to leave the floor at one point. But I looked and I looked—”

“I really could have used you by my side tonight, Baby,” he said.

“Why? What's wrong? What happened?”

“I lost.” He yanked his bow tie off. “I lost big-time.”

Oh, shit.

“Promise me you'll gamble with me first thing in the morning? Earlier, you said you would.”

“Shh, sleep now,” I soothed. “You can even take the bed and I'll take the couch. You've had a tough night.”

B
ut the next morning, I didn't feel any different. I was still reluctant to gamble.

“Let's go to Red Rock Canyon!” I announced, between taking turns in the bathroom.

“Why would we want to do that?” Billy said.

“While you were in the shower, I looked through this brochure here,
Things to Do in Vegas Outside of Gambling.
”

“And, again, I ask, why would we want to do that?”

“Well, you did say you lost a lot last night…”

“Right. So the best thing to do would be to win it all back and then some first thing this morning.”

“But we can't hit the casino first thing in the morning!”

Billy gave me a look that said that of all the stupid things I'd said, and his expression implied that I'd said a lot of them, this was the stupidest yet.

“And this is because…?” he prompted.

I had a flash to our time together in Atlantic City, how we'd spent all day and night in the casino, how Hillary and Biff had spent their time differently, seeing all the sights and falling in love.

“It just seems,” I said, “that if we've come all the way across the country, we should also do a few…other things.”

“Why would we—”

I stopped him before he could question my sanity again.

“Look,” I said, letting myself get all enthusiastic. “Let's just try it my way. We'll go to Red Rock Canyon this morning, see something we couldn't see back home, and while we're there I'll charge up my talismanic powers. Honest. By the time we come back, I'm sure I'll be ready to win. Big-time.”

I must have buried the magic words in there somewhere, because after cinnamon French toast and huevos rancheros in The Café—you can guess which one of us had which, but let me just say that the cinnamon was enough to make me only barely miss my Cocoa Krispies—we were off to find a rental car dealership.

“Can you believe how that guy tried to rip us off?” Billy said, keying the engine of the subcompact, a sickly green not normally occurring anywhere in nature, and driving out of the city toward the desert. Well, really, it was all a desert.

“What are you talking about?” I said, fiddling with the radio. Anything but Dido, I prayed. It wasn't that I had anything against Dido per se, but if I had to go down with that ship one more time, I'd switch my passage for the
Titanic.

“Mr. Smarmy back at the U-Can-Drive-It place. First saying if we wanted something bigger than this toy car, it would cost three times as much, then making me give him that hundred-dollar deposit and trying to sell us that extra insurance.”

“Oh—” I pooh-poohed “—that's probably just the way they do things around here.”

“Right,” he said grumpily. “Bilk the tourists.”

“No, I don't mean that. It's just that, if they didn't take some self-protective measures, they'd probably be inundated with drunken people deciding to get married and then at the last minute disappearing with the cars after deciding to get married somewhere with a little more finesse.”

“Huh?”

“Hey, did you ever see the Vegas two-parter of
Friends?
”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. I'll just navigate.”

I'd never been good at navigating while driving and I proved no better at navigating without driving.

“How can we be lost already?” Billy said.

“I'm as shocked as you are,” I said. “This is the desert and there are supposed to be some canyons out here made of red rock. How hard can that be to find?”

“We should have stayed back at the casino.”

“Trust me, this'll be great. Just keep driving until you see something poking out of the desert and that's bound to be it.”

But after getting us twenty miles lost in the wrong direction—it's tough when you're always used to living east to go west and then have to realize that it's possible to go still further west—it took another hour to get us back to where we wanted to be. Or to where I wanted to be, at any rate.

“We should have stayed back at the casino,” Billy said.

“Wow, this is great,” I said, overriding him as I got out of the car. I tried to imagine what people like Hillary and Biff would talk about if they were there. “Look,” I said. “Isn't it amazing? Visitors can hike, picnic and view plant and animal life under three-thousand-foot-high rock formations!”

“We could be gambling right this minute, probably win a bundle.”

“The strata exposed reveal more than five hundred million years of geological history! The canyon is a bed of an ancient deep sea, where, over time, sediments washed in and the water evaporated!”

“If you wanted to see something different so badly, we could have gone to see the Bonnie and Clyde getaway car. That wouldn't have taken us all morning.”

“It would have taken longer,” I pointed out. After all, who here was the one who was familiar with the brochure? “That's forty miles from our hotel. This is only twenty miles.”

“Yes, but you got us lost, so I'll see your twenty miles and raise you the forty we covered in doubling back and your sixty still beats my forty, which is not a good thing.”

“The boulders and pinnacles range in color from deep sandstone-red to white! The red color is the result of weathered iron composites! Isn't this fascinating?”

“Or we could have stayed right at the casino and seen the shark reef they have right there. Do you realize that? There's a shark reef right in our very casino. If nature was what you wanted, we could have seen some without all this fuss and bother, without ever leaving our hotel.”

“Visitors can explore the park on a thirteen-mile-loop road that winds through the canyon and reveals rock formations that cannot be seen from outside the park! Picnic areas and hiking trails also can be accessed by the loop! Isn't it fascinating?”

“Fascinating would be the anchor seat at a table where the dealer can't deal without busting himself to save his life.”

“A visitors' center at the park's entrance displays trail maps, plant and wildlife information and a history of the area!”

“I really think we should—”

“A few miles south of Red Rock Canyon is Bonnie Springs. There you can get a real taste of Old Nevada, an 1880s western mining town reproduction and Spring Mountain Ranch State Park. It—”

“Baby.” Billy effectively stopped me by putting his hands on either side of my face, his lips on mine. “I want to go back.”

“But we just got—”

“I've seen enough.”

“But we haven't seen—”

“Enough, Baby,” he spoke softly, but if that instant bulge in his pants was anything to go by, he was carrying a big stick. “I want to go back.”

Shit. I was pretty sure that this wasn't how things would be going if we were Hillary and Biff.

“Aren't you having even a little bit of fun?” I asked.

“We're in a desert and, oh, I don't know, there are some
rocks
here. Frankly, I hadn't pegged you as being the Mother Nature type.”

“What? You don't think I can be earthy? I can be earthy.”

“Oh, I'm sure you can. I just figured that if you were interested in rocks at all, they'd be diamonds, you know, the kind one special person puts on another special person's ring finger. C'mon, Baby—” and here he most effectively nibbled my ear “—let's go back to the casino and see if I can't win enough to buy a pretty rock to put on that pretty finger of yours, shall we?”

How could I resist an offer like that?

My mind raced: had Biff proposed to Hillary yet? Did he follow her out to the desert, even though he didn't really want to go, and then get so carried away with the setting that he started promising her diamonds?

Screw Mother Nature! I was going to head back to the casino!

And all would have gone perfectly, or at least all would have had more of a chance to go perfectly, had it not been for the man back at the U-Can-Drive-It place.

“It looks to me,” he said, tut-tutting as he examined the front passenger bumper with a magnifying glass, “like you can't drive it.”

“What are you talking about?” Billy said. “I didn't hit anything.”

“Sometimes,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said mysteriously, “you can hit things without realizing you are hitting anything.”

“I told you,” Billy said, “I didn't hit anything.”

“Of course you would say that,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said. “But tell me,” he added, leaning in to whisper, “how far did the body fly?”

Ever since we'd met him that morning, I'd been trying to place Mr. Car Dealer Cheat's accent. It wasn't quite Middle Eastern, but almost. And now I had it. That last line he spoke, he sounded just like the John Belushi character in the old
Blues Brothers
movie when, in a fancy restaurant, he leans over to a very proper family of strangers and intones, “How much for the little girl?” He sounded exactly like John Belushi saying that. Come to think of it, he even looked like John Belushi!

“What?”
Billy said. “There was no
body.
”

“Ah,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said, “the victim just crawled off into the desert to die.”

“There was no victim!”

“It's a shame you didn't sign for the extra insurance I offered you earlier.” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat sighed. “So, how do you plan to pay for this?”

“I'm not paying for anything! That…that…I can't even call it a dent…that…
ding
must have been there when you leant it to me.”

“You are accusing me of being a cheat?” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat drew back. “Here, let me show you something.” He produced a sheet of paper, at the bottom of which was Billy's signature. “This is an affidavit showing what condition this car was in when I most trustfully loaned it to you. See? It says here, ‘Puke-green subcompact in impeccable condition.' It says absolutely nothing here about the front passenger panel being caved in.”

“It's not caved in! It's a
ding!
You need a bloody magnifying glass just to see it!”

“Perhaps I should call the cops?” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat stroked a nonexistent beard.

“Yes,” Billy said, nodding emphatically. “I think that's an excellent idea.”

“Of course,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said, “no matter who is right and who is wrong, I am sure it will take the police the entire day to sort this out, possibly the rest of the weekend.” He shrugged. “You know how public servants are. And in this heat, they move soooo sloooow…”

“Fine,” Billy said. “
Fine.
How do
you
propose we resolve this?”

“Well, if you had only signed for the additional renter's insurance—”

“Yes, yes, I know about all this. Can we speed this up somehow?”

I could see Billy's wheels spinning and the direction they were spinning in was toward getting us out of there and back to the casino as quickly as possible.

“I think,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said with more absent-beard stroking, “that if you let me keep your one hundred-dollar deposit—”

“I'm not going to let you keep my hundred dollars! Not when I'm sure you're going to just turn around and rent this car,
as is,
to the next poor unsuspecting person who comes along.”

Mr. Car Dealer Cheat shrugged. “The decision is yours. You can let me keep the hundred dollars that is my due or we can wait around debating this until the cows come home or the casinos close, whichever comes first.”

“I don't think there are cows around here,” I said, feeling the need to say something. “Can cows even live in a climate like this?”

Another shrug. “Then the casinos. We'll wait here until the casinos close.”

“But I didn't think the casinos ever closed,” I said.

“Which is exactly my point,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said. “As I'm sure your friend well knows…”

“Ohh, fine,” Billy said. “Keep the blasted hundred dollars. I'll win that back in a minute.”

“Ooh,” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat said. “Big man. Big talk.”

“Come on, Baby.” Billy grabbed my hand. “Let's get out of this…
insane
car dealership.”

“Good luck at the gaming tables!” Mr. Car Dealer Cheat shouted after us. “And please do come again!”

Once we were out on the blistering pavement, Billy turned to me, somehow less solicitous than he'd seemed when he proprietarily grabbed my hand back in the shop.