Ford County (18 page)

Eighteen years had passed now, and the daughter was gone. Sidney had put on a few pounds and was graying and sedentary
and duller than ever. He worked as a data collector for a midsize life insurance company, and was content to put in his years and dream of some glorious retirement that he, for some reason, believed would be far more exciting than the first sixty-five years of his life. Stella knew better. She knew that Sidney, whether working or retired, would be the same insufferable mouse of a man whose silly little daily rituals would never change and would eventually drive her crazy.

She wanted out.

She knew he still loved her, adored her even, but she could not return the affection. She tried for years to convince herself that their marriage was still anchored in love, that of the long-lasting, non-romantic, deeply embedded type that survives decade after decade. But she finally gave up this fatal notion.

She hated to break his heart, but he would eventually get over it.

She dropped twenty pounds, darkened her hair, went a bit heavier with the makeup, and flirted with the idea of some new breasts. Sidney watched this with amusement. His cute wife now looked ten years younger. What a lucky man he was!

His luck ran out, though, when he came home one night to an empty house. Most of the furniture was still there, but his wife was not. Her closets were empty. She had taken some linens and kitchen accessories but had not been greedy about it. Truth was, Stella wanted nothing from Sidney but a divorce.

The paperwork was on the kitchen table—a joint petition for a divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. Prepared by a lawyer already! It was an ambush. He wept as he read it,
then cried even harder as he read her rather terse two-page farewell. For a week or so they bickered on the phone, back and forth, back and forth. He begged her to come home. She declined, said it was over, so please just sign the paperwork and stop crying.

They had lived for years on the outskirts of the small town of Karraway, a desolate little place, well suited for a man like Sidney. Stella, however, had had enough. She was now in Clanton, the county seat, a larger town with a country club and a few lounges. She was living with an old girlfriend, sleeping in the basement, looking for a job. Sidney tried to find her, but she avoided him. Their daughter called from Texas and quickly sided with her mother.

The house, always on the quiet side, was now like a tomb, and Sidney couldn’t stand it. He developed the ritual of waiting until dark, then driving to Clanton, around the square, up and down the streets of the town, eyes moving from side to side, hoping fervently that he would see his wife, and that she would see him, and that her cruel heart would melt and life would be good again. He never saw her, and he kept driving, out of the town and into the countryside.

One night he passed Chief Larry’s store and down the road turned in to the crowded parking lot of the Lucky Jack Casino. Maybe she’d be there. Maybe she was so desperate for the bright lights and the fast life that she would stoop to hang out in such a trashy place. It was just a thought, just an excuse to see the action that everyone had been talking about. Who would have ever dreamed that a casino would exist in the hidebound rural outback
of Ford County? Sidney roamed the tacky carpet, spoke to Chief Larry, watched a group of drunk rednecks lose their paychecks shooting craps, sneered at the pathetic geezers stuffing their savings into rigged slot machines, and listened briefly to a dreadful country crooner trying to imitate Hank Williams on a small stage in the rear. A few middle-aged and very overweight swingers wobbled and shifted listlessly on the dance floor in front of the band. Some real hell-raisers. Stella wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the bar, nor the buffet cafeteria, nor the poker room. Sidney was somewhat relieved, but his heart was still broken.

He hadn’t played cards in years, but he remembered the basic rules of twenty-one, a game his father had taught him. After circling the blackjack tables for half an hour, he finally mustered the courage to slide into a seat at the $5 table and get change for a $20 bill. He played for an hour and won $85. He spent the next day studying the rules of blackjack—the basic odds, doubling down, splitting pairs, the ins and outs of buying insurance—and returned to the same table the following night and won over $400. He studied some more, and the third night he played for three hours, drank nothing but black coffee, and walked away with $1,750. He found the game to be simple and straightforward. There was a perfect way to play each hand, based on what the dealer was showing, and following the standard odds, a player can win six hands out of ten. Add the two-for-one payout for hitting a blackjack, and the game provided the best odds against the house.

Why, then, did so many people lose? Sidney was appalled at the other players’ lack of knowledge and their foolish bets. The nonstop alcohol didn’t help, and in a land where drinking was repressed
and still considered a major sin, the free flow of booze at the Lucky Jack was irresistible for many.

Sidney studied, played, drank free black coffee brought in by the cocktail waitresses, and played some more. He bought books and self-help videos and taught himself to count cards, a difficult strategy that often worked beautifully but would also get a gambler thrown out of most casinos. And, most important, he taught himself the discipline necessary to play the odds, to quit when he was losing, and to radically change his bets as the deck grew smaller.

He stopped driving to Clanton to look for his wife and instead drove straight to the Lucky Jack, where, on most nights, he would play for an hour or two and take home at least $1,000. The more he won, the more he noticed the hard frowns from the pit bosses. The beefy young men in cheap suits—security, he guessed—seemed to watch him a bit closer. He continually refused to be rated—the process of signing up for the “club membership” that gave all sorts of freebies to those regulars who gambled hard. He refused to register in any way. His favorite book was
How to Break the Casino
, and the author, an ex-gambler turned writer, preached the message of disguise and deceit. Never wear the same clothes, jewelry, hats, caps, glasses. Never play at the same table for more than an hour. Never give them your name. Take a friend and tell him to call you Frank or Charlie or something. Make a stupid bet occasionally. Change your drink routine, but stay away from alcohol. The reason was simple. The law allowed any casino in the country to simply ask a gambler to leave. If they suspect you’re counting cards, or cheating, or if you’re
winning too much and they’re just tired of it, they can give you the boot. No reason is necessary. An assortment of identities keeps them guessing.

The success of the gambling gave Sidney a new purpose in life, but in the darkness of the night he still awoke and reached for Stella. The divorce decree had been signed by a judge. She was not coming back, but he reached anyway, still dreaming of the woman he would always love.

Stella was not suffering from loneliness. The news of an attractive new divorced woman in town spread quickly, and before long she found herself at a party where she met the infamous Bobby Carl Leach. Though she was somewhat older than most of the women he chased, he nonetheless found her attractive and sexy. He charmed her with his usual stream of compliments and seemed to hang on every word she uttered. They had dinner the following night and went to bed right after dessert. Though he was rough and vulgar, she found the experience exhilarating. It was so wonderfully different from the stoic and chilly copulating she had endured with Sidney.

Before long, Stella had a well-paying job as an assistant/ secretary for Mr. Leach, the latest in a long line of women who were added to the payroll for reasons other than their organizational skills. But if Mr. Leach expected her to do little more than answer the phone and strip on demand, he miscalculated badly. She quickly surveyed his empire and found little of interest. Timber, raw land, rental property, farm equipment, and low-budget motels were all as dull as Sidney, especially when weighed against the glitz of a casino. She belonged at the Lucky Jack, and soon
commandeered an office upstairs above the gaming floor, where Bobby Carl roamed in the late evenings, gin and tonic in hand, staring at the innumerable video cameras and counting his money. Her title shifted to that of director of operations, and she began planning an expansion of the dining area and maybe an indoor pool. She had lots of ideas, and Bobby Carl was pleased to have an easy bedmate who felt just as much passion for the business.

Back in Karraway, Sidney soon heard the rumors that his beloved Stella had taken up with that rogue Leach, and this further depressed him. It made him ill. He thought of murder, then suicide. He dreamed of ways to impress her, and to win her back. When he heard that she was running the casino, he stopped going. But he did not stop gambling. Instead, he broadened his game with long weekends at the casinos in Tunica County, on the Mississippi River. He won $14,000 in a marathon session at the Choctaw casino in Neshoba County, and was asked to leave the Grand Casino in Biloxi after wiping out two tables to the tune of $38,000. He took a week of vacation and went to Vegas, where he played at a different casino every four hours and left town with over $60,000 in winnings. He quit his job and spent two weeks in the Bahamas, raking in piles of $100 chips at every casino in Freeport and Nassau. He bought an RV and toured the country, prowling for any reservation with a casino. Of the dozen or so he found, all were glad to see him leave. Then he spent a month back in Vegas, studying at the private table of the world’s greatest teacher, the man who’d written
How to Break the Casino
. The one-on-one tutorial cost Sidney $50,000, but it was worth every penny. His teacher convinced him he had the talent, the discipline,
and the nerves to play blackjack professionally. Such praise was rarely given.

After four months, the Lucky Jack had settled nicely into the local scene. All opposition to it faded; the casino was obviously not going away. It became a popular meeting place for civic clubs, class reunions, bachelor parties, even a few weddings. Chief Larry began planning the construction of a Yazoo headquarters, and he was thrilled to see his tribe growing. Folks who’d been quite resistant to the suggestion of Indian ancestry now proudly claimed to be full-blooded Yazoo. Most wanted jobs, and when Chief broached the idea of sharing the profits in the form of monthly handouts, his tribe ballooned to over one hundred members.

Bobby Carl, of course, pocketed his share of the revenues, but he had yet to become greedy. Instead, and with Stella’s prodding, he borrowed even more money to finance a golf course and a convention center. The bank was pleasantly astonished at the flow of cash, and quickly extended the credit. Six months after it opened, the Lucky Jack was $2 million in debt, and no one was worried.

During the twenty-six years she’d spent with Sidney, Stella had never left the country and had seen very little of the United States. His idea of a vacation had been a cheap rental at a beach in Florida, and never for more than five days. Her new man, though, loved boats and cruises, and because of this she cooked up the idea of a Valentine’s cruise in the Caribbean for ten lucky couples. She advertised the competition, rigged the results, picked
some of her new friends and a few of Bobby Carl’s, then announced the winners in yet another large ad in the local newspapers. And away they went. Bobby Carl and Stella, a handful of casino executives (Chief Larry declined, much to their relief), and the ten lucky couples left Clanton in limos for the trip to the airport in Memphis. From there, they flew to Miami and boarded a ship with four thousand others for an intimate jaunt through the islands.

When they were out of the country, the Valentine’s Day massacre began. Sidney entered the Lucky Jack on a busy night—Stella had advertised all sorts of cheap romantic freebies, and the place was packed. He was Sidney, but he looked nothing like the Sidney last seen at the casino. His hair was long and stringy, darkly tinted, and hanging over his ears. He hadn’t shaved in a month, and his beard was colored with the same cheap dye he’d used on his hair. He wore large, round tortoiseshell glasses, also tinted, and his eyes were hard to see. He wore a leather biker’s jacket and jeans, and six of his fingers bore rings of various stones and metals. A baffling black beret covered most of his head and drooped to the left. For the benefit of the security boys upstairs at their monitors, the back of each hand was adorned with an obscene fake tattoo.

No one had ever seen this Sidney.

Of the twenty blackjack tables, only three catered to the high rollers. Their minimum bets were $100 a hand, and these tables generally saw little traffic. Sidney assumed a chair at one, tossed out a bundle of cash, and said, “Five thousand, in $100 chips.” The dealer smiled as he took the cash and spread it across the
table. A pit boss watched carefully over his shoulder. Stares and nods were exchanged around the pit, and the eyes upstairs came to life. There were two other gamblers at the table, and they hardly noticed. Both were drinking and were down to their last few chips.