Then the odd.
Then the even.
She had five hundred and seventy-six dollars in front of her after that last one, and her head had gone to some other planet. It was not black and green and pink chips she saw in front of her, not precisely; it was braces and a radio-controlled submarine.
Luckey me, Darlene Pullen thought. Oh luckey, luckey me.
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She put the chips down again, all of them, and the crowd that always forms behind and around sudden hot-streak winners in gambling towns, even at five o’clock in the afternoon, groaned.
“Ma’am, I can’t allow that bet without the pit-boss’s okay,” the roulette wheel’s minder said. He looked considerably more awake now than he had when Darlene walked up in her blue-and-white-striped rayon uniform. She had put her money down on the second triple—
the numbers from 13 to 24.
“Better get him over here then, hon,” Darlene said, and waited, calm, her feet on Mother Earth here in Carson City, Nevada, seven miles from where the first big silver mine opened up in 1878, her head somewhere deep in the deluminum mines of the Planet Chumpa-diddle, as the pit-boss and the minder conferred and the crowd around her murmured. At last the pit-boss came over to her and asked her to write down her name and address and telephone number on a piece of pink memo paper. Darlene did it, interested to see that her handwriting hardly looked like her own. She felt calm, as calm as the calmest deluminum miner who had ever lived, but her hands were shaking badly.
The pit-boss turned to Mr. Roulette Minder and twirled his finger in the air—spin it, son.
This time the rattle of the little white ball was clearly audible in the area around the roulette table; the crowd had fallen entirely silent, and Darlene’s was the only bet on the felt. This was Carson City, not Monte Carlo, and for Carson, this was a monster bet. The ball rattled, fell into a slot, jumped, fell into another, then jumped again. Darlene closed her eyes.
Luckey, she thought, she prayed. Luckey me, luckey mom, luckey girl.
The crowd moaned, either in horror or ecstasy. That was how she knew the wheel had slowed enough to read. Darlene opened her eyes, knowing that her quarter was finally gone.
Except it wasn’t.
The little white ball was resting in the slot marked 13 Black.
“Oh my God, honey,” a woman behind her said. “Give me your hand, I want to rub your hand.” Darlene gave it, and felt the other one 454
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gently taken as well—taken and fondled. From some distance far, far away from the deluminum mines where she was having this fantasy, she could feel first two people, then four, then six, then eight, gently rubbing her hands, trying to catch her luck like a cold-germ.
Mr. Roulette was pushing piles and piles of chips over to her.
“How much?” she asked faintly. “How much is that?”
“Seventeen hundred and twenty-eight dollars,” he said. “Con-gratulations, ma’am. If I were you—”
“But you’re not,” Darlene said. “I want to put it all down on one number. That one.” She pointed. “25.” Behind her, someone screamed softly, as if in sexual rapture. “Every cent of it.”
“No,” the pit-boss said.
“But—”
“No,” he said again, and she had been working for men most of her life, enough of it to know when one of them meant exactly what he was saying. “House policy, Mrs. Pullen.”
“All right,” she said. “All right, you chickenshit.” She pulled the chips back toward her, spilling some of the piles. “How much will you let me put down?”
“Excuse me,” the pit-boss said.
He was gone for almost five minutes. During that time the wheel stood silent. No one spoke to Darlene, but her hands were touched repeatedly, and sometimes chafed as if she were a fainting victim.
When the pit-boss came back, he had a tall bald man with him. The tall bald man was wearing a tuxedo and gold-rimmed glasses. He did not look at Darlene so much as through her.
“Eight hundred dollars,” he said, “but I advise against it.” His eyes dropped down the front of her uniform, then back up at her face. “I think you should cash in your winnings, madam.”
“I don’t think you know jack shit in a backyard outhouse,” Darlene said, and the tall bald man’s mouth tightened in distaste. She shifted her gaze to Mr. Roulette. “Do it,” she said.
Mr. Roulette put down a plaque with $800 written on it, positioning it fussily so it covered the number 25. Then he spun the wheel and 455
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dropped the ball. The entire casino had gone silent now, even the per-sistent ratchet-and-ding of the slot machines. Darlene looked up, across the room, and wasn’t surprised to see that the bank of TVs which had previously been showing horse races and boxing matches were now showing the spinning roulette wheel . . . and her.
I’m even a TV star. Luckey me. Luckey me. Oh so luckey me.
The ball spun. The ball bounced. It almost caught, then spun again, a little white dervish racing around the polished wood cir-cumference of the wheel.
“Odds!” she suddenly cried. “What are the odds?”
“Thirty to one,” the tall bald man said. “Twenty-four thousand dollars should you win, madam.”
Darlene closed her eyes . . .
. . . and opened them in 322. She was still sitting in the chair, with the envelope in one hand and the quarter that had fallen out of it in the other. Her tears of laughter were still wet on her cheeks.
“Luckey me,” she said, and squeezed the envelope so she could look into it.
No note. Just another part of the fantasy, misspellings and all.
Sighing, Darlene slipped the quarter into her uniform pocket and began to clean up 322.
Instead of taking Paul home as she normally did after school, Patsy brought him to the hotel. “He’s snotting all over the place,” she explained to her mother, her voice dripping with disdain which only a thirteen-year-old could muster in such quantities. “He’s, like, choking on it. I thought maybe you’d want to take him to the Doc in the Box.”
Paul looked at her silently from his watering, patient eyes. His nose was as red as the stripe on a candy cane. They were in the lobby; there were no guests checking in currently, and Mr. Avery (Tex to the maids, who unanimously hated the little prick) was away from the desk. Probably back in the office, choking his chicken. If he could find it.
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Darlene put her palm on Paul’s forehead, felt the warmth simmering there, and sighed. “Suppose you’re right,” she said. “How are you feeling, Paul?”
“Ogay,” Paul said in a distant, foghorning voice.
Even Patsy looked depressed. “He’ll probably be dead by the time he’s sixteen,” she said. “The only case of, like, spontaneous AIDS in the history of the world.”
“You shut your dirty little mouth!” Darlene said, much more sharply than she had intended, but Paul was the one who looked wounded—he winced and looked away from her.
“He’s a baby, too,” Patsy said hopelessly. “I mean, really.”
“No, he’s not. He’s sensitive, that’s all. And his resistance is low.”
She fished in her uniform pocket. “Paul? Want this?”
He looked back at her, saw the quarter, and smiled a little.
“What are you going to do with it, Paul?” Patsy asked him as he took it. “Take Deirdre McCausland out on a date?” She snickered.
“I’ll thing of subething,” Paul said.
“Leave him alone,” Darlene said. “Don’t bug him for a little while, could you do that?”
“Yeah, but what do I get?” Patsy asked her. “I walked him over here safe, I always walk him safe, so what do I get?”
Braces, Darlene thought, if I can ever afford them. And she was suddenly overwhelmed by unhappiness, by a sense of life as some vast cold junkpile—deluminum slag, if you liked—that was always looming over you, always waiting to fall, cutting you to screaming ribbons even before it crushed the life out of you. Luck was a joke. Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed.
“Mom? Mommy?” Patsy sounded suddenly concerned. “I don’t want anything, I was just kidding around, you know.”
“I’ve got a Sassy for you, if you want,” Darlene said. “I found it in one of my rooms and put it in my locker.”
“This month’s?” Patsy sounded suspicious.
“Actually this month’s. Come on.”
They were halfway across the room when they heard the drop of the coin and the unmistakable ratchet of the handle and whir of the 457
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drums as Paul pulled the handle of the slot machine beside the desk and then let it go.
“Oh you dumb hoser, you’re in trouble now!” Patsy cried. She did not sound exactly unhappy about it. “How many times has Mom told you not to throw your money away on stuff like that? Slots’re for the tourists!”