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Authors: Brian Hodge

Wild Horses

BOOK: Wild Horses
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WILD HORSES

by

Brian Hodge

 

 

 

 

 

Cemetery Dance Publications

Baltimore

2012

 

 

Copyright © 1999 by Brian Hodge

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

 

Cemetery Dance Publications

132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

Forest Hill, MD 21050

http://www.cemeterydance.com

 

The characters and events in this book are fictitious.Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

 

First Digital Edition

 

ISBN: 978-1-58767-302-3

 

Cover Design © 2012 by Desert Isle Design, LLC

Digital Design by DH Digital Editions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one’s for Wildy,

for sending those blues

from so far away, yet

still loud enough to be heard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

Many thanks to Doli (and love, but of course), for time and space; to Howard Morhaim, for knowing a good thing when he saw it; and to Paul Bresnick, for
buying
a good thing when he saw it.

Also, to my fellow wayfarers on the Grapes of Wrath Tour, especially Amy, whose heinous and inexplicable breach of gamblers’ protocol has been worth far more in conversational value than the cash she made me lose, and to a certain management-level casino employee who for obvious reasons prefers to remain anonymous.

And, most mysteriously, to the Bluesman, for delivery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gambling is inevitable.
— 1976 Commission of the Review of the National Policy Towards Gambling
Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.
— the Marquis de Sade,
Juliette

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

She should have known eight months ago, when they moved to Las Vegas, that it was a mistake, the stuff of which rough roads and blood clots were made. Omens filled the air that day. A freak storm showered down that afternoon, to send tourists and natives alike into disgruntled fits of despair, unnoticed only by the most inveterate gamblers at their tables. Worse, a throat infection kept Wayne Newton offstage that evening, plunging Boyd into a deep indigo funk that lingered for days.

Wayne Newton. Just which level of Dante’s Hell had she fallen into here? To Allison, root canal sounded more appealing, but it had meant a lot to Boyd: Wayne Newton, throwing down big tips for watery drinks, doing the whole tacky Vegas routine up and down the Strip for one grand evening before settling in as residents and Boyd’s dream job of blackjack dealer extraordinaire — his way of announcing to Nevada at large, “We have arrived!” The master plan ruined, then, courtesy of a strep infection.

Secretly, she had rejoiced.

“If we’d moved here twenty-five years ago,” Boyd lamented, “I bet we’d’ve killed Elvis ahead of schedule.”

Allison recalled frowning. “We were only six years old at the time,” she’d said, but she knew what he meant. Some people carried with them their very own plagues, wherever they went.

Typhoid Boyd — it had a ring to it.

He’d proposed a few weeks later, the presence of all those quickie wedding chapels eating away at his oversexed brain. She’d had the good sense to say no … not yet, at least, an amendment sutured on only to soothe the sting of rejection while she hoped Boyd would otherwise forget all about it.

Love
should
figure somewhere into the equation, of this she was certain, and with equal certainty Allison Willoughby knew that she didn’t love Boyd. Was unsure she’d ever loved anyone who had stood much over four feet tall. There had been no shortage of opportunity during her fourteen years on the run from Mississippi, most of the men arrayed in a stepping-stone succession that implied a monogamous disposition. But each had been, admittedly, a stopgap measure to fill intermittent gaps in her life; there was something just too horrible about living alone for very long.

Paradoxically, apartments seemed noisier when they weren’t shared. She would lie awake at night, listening to creaks and pops surrounding her, each made by a footfall from long ago, when eager breaths once whispered like an ill wind. Every shadow evoked the ghost of a visitor whose face remained as sharp as a razor’s cut; they had come to her nocturnally, those visitors, with numbing frequency and intentions she’d not wholly understood, knowing only there was pain and shame involved.

After a time she’d not even needed faces anymore; could tell them apart from smell alone, variations on a shared group scent that could even today make her gag whenever she caught a whiff of anyone too similar. The fermented testosterone stink wafting down from above had been heavier than their bodies.

Of course she’d never told Boyd any of this. A guy like Boyd, give him a little leverage, sooner or later he’d have to use it.

That Vegas mentality again.

No wonder he was doing so well here.

 

*

 

When after nine months together she noticed signs that Boyd was exploring options elsewhere, it came as no surprise. Allison had long recognized that women were to Boyd Dobbins’s soul what oxygen was to his lungs, and should someone put a gun to his head demanding he give up one or the other, he’d honestly need time to think it over. Women were goddesses, and Boyd overflowed with undying worship.

To hear him tell it, she was the loveliest woman on earth — maybe of all time. Her hair was spun flax, and her eyes emeralds. Her nose was perfectly buttoned, the dusting of freckles across her cheekbones adorably childlike, given lie only by those taut haunches and belly, shoulders and breasts. A daily litany, this; she had become the sacrament of his new religion. Meanwhile, the mirror showed her the crinkled birth of crow’s-feet around her eyes and a tush that screamed for longer rides on her bicycle. It cost Boyd credibility, left Allison feeling it was inevitable that he would fall for the charms of a goddess more radiant still.

As Boyd so obviously had.

The perfume scent clinging to him when he came back late each night from the casino was a simple matter to brush aside: He dealt winning hands to bouncy, squealing women — was he supposed to fight them off when they wanted to hug him? Not when the objective was to keep them at the table long enough to lose their winnings back. Yet what were the odds these affectionate women were, night after night, all wearing the same scent?

And he’d also been leaving earlier each day. Not that she’d ordinarily be likely to notice. His shift began at four in the afternoon, overlapping hers at Gingerbread House Day Care by two hours. One day’s chance failure to raise him on the phone before he left turned into a second, then a third, and a pattern was established. It was getting to be a game — pin the tail on Boyd.

Then there were the smaller signs that would never hold up in a court of law, only before a vigilante jury of her peers: women wronged by Boyd, by the world’s Boyds, who understood feminine radar and trusted its infallibility.

When it came time to force the truth, Allison left work hours early, claiming a doctor’s appointment. Her male supervisor was a nitpicker skilled at bookkeeping, with little talent for relating to children or the women who took care of them. A yeast infection, she’d begun to explain, and he hadn’t wanted to hear another word.

Her commute home was ordinarily made on two wheels. With only Boyd’s car between them, she bicycled to work, never minding it; it helped keep her legs toned. Today, though, she’d planned ahead, borrowing the car belonging to Doug Powell, the quizzical-looking doughboy who managed their apartment building. Earlier this summer she’d found and returned a zippered vinyl bank pouch stuffed with rent checks and cash after Doug had dropped it near the dumpster. He owed her, all right. When she reminded him of it this morning and demanded the car, he’d surrendered his keys with a half-eaten pear in one hand and a Superman comic in the other.

Wearing a breezy sundress and sandals, Allison kept watch over Boyd’s Dodge Daytona from across the alley and down one parking lot. She’d pinned up her hair to get its hot mass off her neck and took frequent drafts from a bottle of Gatorade, trying not to touch anything. Doug’s Toyota had the smell of a forgotten basket of laundry, the feel of a petri dish. Bored earlier, she’d peeked inside the glove compartment to find a bag of Halloween candy bars, melted out of their wrappers into a runny volcanic blob.

Sweating, she fanned herself with a comic book from the backseat. Summer had been murderous, and early September a broiler. Las Vegas was the hottest place she’d ever been, worse by far than the sultry Mississippi summers in which she’d grown up. There, at least, a verdant earth would welcome you, lush grass easing misery as you sank into its cooling layers. But here? They’d taken the desert and paved it. The sun ricocheted off as though the entire ungodly slab of city were a giant reflector. It baked your brain, kept you from thinking straight; left you in a low-grade delirium in which you actually believed you could beat the system and go home rich. He’d chosen well, Bugsy Siegel had.

After ninety minutes of watching, Boyd emerged from their building in his blackjack togs and his annoying gigolo strut. A quarter past two, more than an hour before he needed to leave. Tucked under one arm, a laptop computer brought from his aborted career in Seattle selling swimming pools, hot tubs, home spas. He’d mostly used it for sales calls, a slick multimedia brainwash designed to shame suburban families into admitting how dreadfully empty their lives were without a hole in the ground.

Curious. He hardly needed a computer at the casino — twenty-one wasn’t
that
tough to count to.

Boyd’s Daytona was a glaring beacon, lacquered as red as a fire engine. She heard the electronic chirp as he used his remote to kill the alarm, then trailed after him at the end of the alley.

He led west on side streets, then cut south onto Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip. Come nightfall, this would turn into ground zero, enough lights to trigger headaches even in the blind; a holocaust of glare and flash, a gaudy riot of smeared colors each trying to strobe brighter than the last, and under it all, the desperate and the naive out swimming the seas of neon.

As Boyd held an unswerving course, she began to think he was only heading into the casino early. The Ivory Coast was one of Las Vegas’ newer complexes, south of Caesars Palace, designed to give the impression of stepping into the antiquated days of British colonialism; Kipling’s “Gunga Din”, with slot machines. The concept seemed quietly racist. A pair of doormen flanked the main entrance, looking like soldiers who’d slaughtered the Zulu nation, wearing jodhpurs and red jackets with shiny black belts and boots, white pith helmets, and wooden antique rifles held at port arms.

Inside the lobby lunged a taxidermied bull elephant, cheaply bought and alarmingly old, seventy years if a day. During the grand opening a tusk had rotted loose and crashed to the floor. Casino security had immediately been deployed with cash to buy up all amateur videos of the calamity.

BOOK: Wild Horses
13.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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