Gorilla Beach (13 page)

Fredo examined Gia. She seemed to be paying attention. He searched her face for a glimmer of idiot savant.
Rain Man
magic.
What he saw, though, was a Kewpie doll with a huge pouf, giant eyes, and a rockin' pair of gazongas. Was this guidette really a conduit for Dumb Luck? They'd find out soon enough.

“Red or black,” he asked her, his voice cracking.

“Love 'em both. If I had to choose, I'd wear black.”

“Agreed,” said Bella.

Fredo took a vial of pills out of his pocket and swallowed one. “I mean the color to bet on. Red or black?”

Gia seemed confused. “Can I bet on tan?”

Gia took pity on
Fredo. He looked panicked, as if his life depended on her answer to … er, what did he want again? “Can you repeat the question?”

“Should I put the money on red or black?” he said, high-pitched, but really slowly.

“I'm not retarded. You can talk like a normal person.” She smiled at the other people around the roulette table. “He's not my boyfriend.”

“Or mine,” said Bella.

“Gia, please,” said Fredo. “Close your beautiful eyes. Take a few deep breaths, and let your mind go blank. Empty it out. It might take a while, but if you—”

“Done.”

“Oookay. Now, let a color pop into your head.”

“Leopard print.” Whenever Gia closed her eyes, she saw spots.

“You're killing me,” whined Fredo.

“Bet on black.” Weird as it might seem, when Gia closed her eyes and meditated for a split second, a velvety curtain of midnight black appeared in her head.

Scrambling, Fredo dropped two $50 bills on the felt. The roulette operator said, “Changing a hundred.” He started to give Fredo ten yellow chips worth $10 each.

“I hate yellow,” said Gia. “We want pink.”

The dealer said, “Changing a hundred in chips,” taking back the yellows and replacing them with pinks.

The pit boss, a freckled redhead—her name tag read
ERIN GOBRAUGH
—watched the chips swap. She nodded at Gia, as if she approved of her color choice.

Fredo put five chips on the black bar, worth $50.

“Just five?” asked Gia. “Bet 'em all.”

Bella said, “What the hell, Fredo? Go big or go home.”

Fredo moved his entire pile into the black square.

The ball was in motion. Gia made the sign of the cross and blew a kiss at the wheel. She chanted, “Go, black! Go, black!” To the dark-skinned man standing next to her, she added, “No offense.”

The wheel slowed. The ball bounced. Fredo held his palms together as if he were praying to the roulette gods. Gia's pulse raced, too. Bella seemed bemused.

The ball came to rest. The operator said, “Thirty-three, black.”

Gia jumped up and down, clapping her hands. “Yay! We won! I saw black in my head, and it came up. I'm psycho!”

“You mean
psychic,
” said Bella.

“
Duh,
that's what I meant. I've got the sight! I'm mutherfocking
gifted,
yo!” Gia closed her eyes again, and that same curtain of color shimmered in her mind. Except—superstrange—it was green???

“What's the matter?” asked Fredo, seeing her confusion.

“Okay, not gifted. The signal from the universe is jammed.”

“Did you see anything? A number?”

“The color green. Makes no freakin' sense.”

Fredo jumped into action. “Two hundred on green!” he said, moving a stack of chips into a bar that had the numbers 0 and 00 in it.

The dude next to Gia said, “I'm in,” and put some of his chips on top of Fredo's. An old lady did, too, and a few others.

The operator said, “Run on green.”

Erin, the ginger pit boss, came over to watch the spin. Gia said, “Wait! My ritual.” She made the sign of the cross, then kissed her fingers, then blew a kiss at the wheel. The operator spun it.

“Double zero,” he said when the ball fell into the slot. “Winners!” A cheer went up around the table. Double zero, in this case, was not two times nothing. Fredo's pile of pink chips turned into a magenta mini–Empire State Building.

“How much is that?” asked Gia.

“We started with a hundred,” Fredo said. “And now we've got … over six thousand.”

“What?”
It'd take Gia months at the movie theater to make that much. She'd won a fortune in five minutes? Not possible. How could casinos stay in business if they gave money away like that?

Gia couldn't help herself. She threw her arms about Fredo and pulled him into a tight hug.

“Ack!” He went rigid in her arms. Froze stiff, then started jerking uncontrollably.

Gia backed off, repelled. To Bella she said, “He's having a seizure.”

He whispered, “No, I … er … I have a phobia about hugging. I do it this way.” Fredo stood at Gia's side and put his arm around her shoulder, pressing their sides together, but not touching the fronts at all.

Bella laughed. “Whaddaya call that?”

He blushed. “My mom calls it the Safety Sidehug.”

“Safety from
what
?” asked Gia. “From touching icky girls and yucky boobies? With hugging, safety doesn't come first. It doesn't come at all. We do Full-Frontal Guido Hugs.”

She grabbed him. Showed him. Bella clamped onto his back, making a Fredo sandwich. “More than two people in a Guido Hug is a Guido Hump,” said Gia. “Or you could say Group Hump.”

“Don't say
hump,
” he whimpered, struggling to escape as if he were afraid something terrible would happen.

And it did. Gia said, “Oh, my, Fredo! You
are
excited about winning.”

Then the girls let him go. Fredo popped another pill. He seemed freaked out by the contact. Gia suddenly understood. The kid wasn't just shy. He had a real tit terror. She flashed back to the embarrassing moment when Donna hugged him at the Cowboy Club and he squirmed frantically to get free. Maybe Donna forced him to breast-feed until he was twelve or something.

“You okay?” she asked him, concerned. Had she taken a joke too far?

Frazzled, he said, “Maybe we should call it a night.”

“You can't leave now,” said one of the other players. “You're on a roll.”

“We're taking a short break,” said Gia. “Can you guard our chips for ten minutes?”

“Of course,” said Erin, the pit boss.

“Bella, we have to give Fredo a crash course. To the nearest bar!” Gia took one of his elbows, Bella took the other, and they dragged him to Circus Max, a horseshoe-shaped bar near the roulette tables.

“I'm fine,” he protested.

“Just one practice Guido Hug,” said Gia. “You have to do a shot of Patrón first.” To the bartender, she held up three fingers.

The shots appeared. “Down the piehole,” she said. The girls showed him how.

Fredo drank his, made a face as if his tongue were on fire. Then Gia nodded at Bella, and they grabbed the kid and pressed their boobies against him. “Just let it happen,” encouraged Gia. “They're just big mounds of fat and tan.”

“And silicone,” said Bella.

“Nothing to be afraid of.”

He nodded, a bit frantic. “This is good,” he croaked. “I'm totally relaxed.”

They held for a ten-second count. Took a rest and tried it again. Fredo did seem to take it better the second time. A guy at the bar in a suit asked, “Is it my turn now?”

Fredo exhaled deeply. “Can we play more roulette now? I've had all the hugging I can stand.”

The girls said, “Okay.” Gia felt as if she'd accomplished something.

They returned to the table. Someone said, “The psycho girl is back.” He offered her a chair and pushed it right up to the table so she could see better. She settled into the seat as if it were a throne. This was more like it. She was the center of attention, exactly where she belonged.

Gia closed her eyes and waited for the colored curtain in her mind to appear. When it did and she shared her vision, a dozen gamblers scrambled to place their bets.

Bella ran from Nero's
to the north end of the boardwalk, past the Taj Mahal, Resorts, the go-carts pier, and then turned around to run back the other direction. The sun was scorching already, at noon, but she liked to sweat. After last night, she needed to feel the strain of pumping muscle and moving joints. It was predictable and normal. What Gia did at the roulette table? That was out of this world. It was crazy. Totally mind-boggling.

The kid hit nearly every bet! She missed about 25 percent of the time, but Fredo was smart and never put all their money on any one single bet. The stacks of chips kept getting taller and taller. By the time they packed it in, they'd won $18,000. A huge crowd of people were betting with them and doing Gia's signature ritual, the cross and kiss blowing, during each spin.

If Bella were a casual observer, she'd've believed that Gia did have a gift, or some kind of psychic power. But Bella knew that wasn't possible. Or was it? Maybe such abilities did exist. It occurred to Bella, following that line of thought, that perhaps Madame Olga was the real deal. If Gia could accurately predict the spinning of the wheel, maybe Olga knew, for sure, whether Marissa's cancer would come back.

Her mind occupied, she jogged past Nero's. When she realized she'd gone too far, she stopped to look around and noticed she was standing right in front of Madame Olga's storefront. Clearly, her subconscious had brought her back here. If she had any courage, she'd go inside and listen to what the woman had to say. While deciding what next, Bella stretched her legs.

“Hey! Bella!”

She turned to the sound of her name. It seemed to be coming from Madame Olga's. From out on the boardwalk in the glaring sun, she couldn't see into the store unless she went closer. She took a step, and a boy stepped out of the dark and walked toward her.

“Will Lugano?” she said, recognizing the punk artist from the wedding.

“You're in AC,” he said, stating the obvious.

“It got a little hot in Seaside.”

“Hot out here, too. Come into the shade.”

She followed him into Madame Olga's. The psychic wasn't there. As if sensing her confusion, he said, “I share the stall with a psychic. She does readings; I do drawings. And she helps me with my website, too.”

“You have a website?”

“Cheapestportraitartistinatlanticandoceancounties.com. I told you. Have a seat.”

Bella sat down. “What happened to you at the wedding?”

“When people start throwing punches in parking lots, I'm ready to leave.”

“Well, your portrait was a hit. The bride loved it.”

“Good.”

Bella looked at Will's setup. Stacked up against the walls and on the tables were cartoony portraits on white paper, mounted on cardboard, and wrapped in plastic. Leaning against Will's chair was a heavy sketchpad and a box of black Sharpies.

“That's Kim Kardashian,” she said, pointing at one of the
caricatures. “You nailed her ass. And this one is Tom Cruise? On a spaceship?”

“Flying off to meet L. Ron Hubbard on Planet Crazy.”

Bella squinted at another cartoon of a girl with big eyes, a huge pouf, caterpillars for eyelashes, a cocktail in one hand, and a can of hair spray in the other. “Who's that?”

“Snooki from
Jersey Shore
?”

“Never heard of her.”

“You must recognize this one.” Will pointed to another of the portraits for sale.

“It's you.” A punk with jagged black hair, black liner around light eyes, in a motorcycle jacket and boots, holding a heart-shaped grenade in one hand, and a guitar in the other.

“I'm flattered, but it's not me. It's Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day.”

Er, who? “You did all these?”

“My other part-time job: I also do three-minute caricatures for tourists. Twenty bucks a pop. Here's my latest.” Will turned the sketchpad around. It was Bella in her jogging outfit, stretching. The high, long ponytail, and the angel wings tattoo blazed across her shoulder blades, gave her away. He'd drawn her profile with just a few lines, but somehow captured her.

“How do you do it?” she asked. “I've been to art classes, but all we learned to draw were still lifes and nudes.”

“Did you do gesture drawings? Lines that show movement? That's what I did for you with the stretch pose. The caricatures are just glorified cartoons. Big head, small body. I look at the face and find the one feature that stands out. I play it up, throw in some props and details, and I've got twenty dollars in my pocket.” He handed her the sketchpad. “If you have any chops, it's easy. Try it.”

“I'm not good enough.”

“You are. You did a good job with a ballpoint pen and a cocktail napkin. I'd love to see what you can do with a Sharpie.”

“I'll watch you,” she said as a family approached. A mother, father, and two kids, a girl and a boy. Judging by the towels and bathing suits, they'd spent the morning at the beach.

The girl said, “Daddy! I want a picture of myself. Please, please, please …”

Will whispered, “Gotta love the brats.”

The father was hot and sandy and sunburned. He'd have said yes to anything to get the kid to shut up. “Make it quick,” he said.

The girl sat on the portable stool in front of Will. She smiled big, showing a couple missing teeth, which was, to Bella's eyes, her most distinctive feature.

The mother said, “She's gorgeous, right? Same face as Angelina Jolie, but softer.”

The girl did have big lips and straight dark hair. But the similarities ended there. The girl was average. Not a siren or a mysterious beauty. But mothers loved their daughters. They saw beauty where little could be found.