“Mine’s fine. Take another taste.”
She does and it tastes fine. Thirsty, she drinks it too fast. She doesn’t seem to notice that he isn’t drinking. He signals for another round; making the switch back will be easy.
Rosie brings the drinks, but looks worried. She’s never seen M overindulge and asks if she’d like some coffee. M blinks and nods. The drinks seem to have hit her and she feels very odd. She takes another sip of the original drink, which is now in front of her, and tells Raph that she thinks she should leave. She’s had too little sleep and too much alcohol.
He partially supports her as they leave the chilled restaurant for the inferno outside. With some difficulty she manages to get into the Bronco.
“I think you need a little walk,” he says, heading across Eastern Avenue into Sunset Park, ill lit and deserted at this time of night.
“I just want to go home,” she moans, barely holding onto consciousness, but growing dimly aware that her survival depends on it.
“You told me to think for myself and I am. You know, you really aren’t very pretty anymore. In fact, you’re almost as ugly as old mud-fence Martha was.” He drives to the center of the park. “Now, get out.” He opens her door and she spills onto the ground, dead weight, feigning unconsciousness. He swears and drags her into the hidden area in the mesquite trees where some kids have built a fort. “I liked you once, but you leave me no choice,” he mutters before going after the murder kit.
Placing the kit down next to him, he kneels over her inert form, unaware that they have been followed and that two figures are making their stealthy way toward him. He wonders if he should try to bring her back to consciousness, because it would be so much more fun if she were awake. He wants her to know just who she’s been messing with.
“Ding, dong, the bitch is dead,”
he sings under his breath and reaches for the plastic bag, when he feels the gun barrel on the back of his neck. Tommy clicks the safety off.
“You filthy, ungrateful little fucker. I ought to kill you right now, but you aren’t worth going to jail for, so I’ll just keep you here for the cops, who’ll be here any second. On your face, hands behind your head! If you’ve hurt her, your time in jail will be very unpleasant.”
The cops come and Tommy and Fast Freddie, two unlikely guardian angels, hand over their prisoner and take M home. When they arrive, Ed and Earl, are waiting outside the house and all troop inside.
“It’s a good thing you’ve got this fan club,” Tommy tells her. “Ed and Earl have been tailing you since yesterday morning at Bagel Nosh. They followed you to Fast Freddie’s and called after you left. They can’t pack heat, so we agreed to come in if things got sticky, so here we are.”
“God, I love you guys,” she says tearfully, giving each a hug and peck on the cheek as they leave.
Later in bed, feeling like Dorothy in Oz, she whispers to Moose, “There’s no place like home.”
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse has come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson
I
n Las Vegas, greed is king, the culture of anonymity is God, and ritual rules them both—except in the case of my friend Alex “Legs” Cleveland. Though a full-blooded Piute, he had refused to seek his spirit guide, declaring it to be nonsense. He carried no totems to the gambling tables, liked black cats, and walked defiantly under ladders. Upon the few occasions a minor doubt crept in, he pushed it aside as if it had a bodily presence and reminded himself that luck was what you made it.
Like today, he thought, leaning against the mirrored pillar that separated the elevator from the picture windows on the twelfth—thirteenth, really—floor of his high-rise apartment building. Today, luck would be making a few bucks on the ponies, enough to delight his latest chorine.
It was not for nothing that they called him Legs.
He watched the shuttle to Area 51’s Groom Lake circle and head toward the Janet Airlines terminal. The morning sun caught its wings and highlighted the snow at the top of Mount Charleston and the elevator dinged behind him. The doors opened and he saw a shadow reflected briefly in the mirrored column at his side.
Stepping toward the elevator, he turned to let the other passenger in, but there was no one there. Strange, he thought, lifting his leg to step inside. He stopped in midair like a dog at a fire hydrant and stared at the large, unconscious, bleeding man who lay awkwardly against the opposite wall.
Gagging, Legs pressed the emergency button. He called down to security and went back to his apartment. The man lived in the apartment above his, so it stood to reason that the cops questioned him closely. They said the man, who had bled out, was a research nut who kept a telescope trained in the direction of Groom Lake. Legs said, “Too bad,” but said nothing about the shadow that had passed behind him in the foyer. He felt no need to get involved.
No longer in the mood to go downtown, he lay on the sofa he’d placed over the stain left by the suicide of the last tenant. The suicide itself didn’t bother him, nor the fact that Vegas was the suicide capital of the world. But the dead man in the elevator was something else. He thought seriously about moving out of the Towers, but decided against it for the moment, at least until after Martin Scorsese came to town to make
Casino
. The director intended to use the entrance to the building in a key scene. As a self-styled talent scout and a resident of the building, Legs would have access. The opportunity to meet De Niro and Woods and stand near Sharon Stone’s long limbs was irresistible.
Meanwhile, his last client had been a major flop. He owed money to his shyster attorney in Los Angeles, among others, and right now his only income was derived from making collections for his great-uncle Willie, the loan shark.
He looked at his watch. It was 4 o’clock.
Willie would be waiting.
“Way-Out” Willie Cleveland, whose given Piute name was Nattee-Tohaquetta, had hit town in the early ’30s to play him some poker with the big boys. He played in small cardrooms until Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn went up, thanks to the Cleveland mob led by Moe Dalitz. On and off, he worked for Moe, and took to playing poker at the Desert Inn. On the day the poker room closed, as a private joke between them, he took on the name Will Cleveland and returned to playing downtown, where his poker career had begun.
On this day, November 16, 1999, Willie spread a winning hand and reached for the biggest pot of the day.
The players were not happy. “Not you again, Willie.” “Gonna take it with you when you go, Willie?” “Gonna give it back to the Indians?”
The dealer tapped the top of his hand. “Uh-uh. I’ll push ’em,” he said, as if Willie didn’t know the rules.
Willie grinned and started to stack his chips. He threw a handful at the dealer, who looked stunned. One chip, maybe two at the end of the day, but a handful?
“That’s it for me,” Willie said. “Deal me out.”
The dealer called for empty racks. “See you tomorrow then.”
“Nope. I’m done.” Willie looked over at the chip runner, who took the three filled racks off the table, flashed on the first time he’d called her Monica, and did it again for old times’ sake. “What’s your moniker, girl?” he said.
“Moniker?”
“Hokay, Monica. One rack’s for you. Cash me out and get Legs.”
Legs, who’d brought his great-uncle downtown in good time to cash in his dinner comp from the day before, was in his “office” at the back of the sports book. He had collected the day’s money and noted it in Willie’s black book—loan sharking being his uncle’s avocation. He was no ordinary shark. Sometimes he gave loans and washed them away; other times he had bones broken. It was all, he said, good clean fun.
Legs ambled into the cardroom, maneuvered his great-uncle and his wheelchair out onto Fremont Street, and looked down with some affection at old Way-Out Willie, who was possibly the shrewdest, most outrageously inventive player in town. He claimed to be 150 years old and his greatest pride was that he still had a good number of his own teeth.
Wondering if any of that was close to the truth, Legs took a cab to Willie’s place later that day. It was a budget motel catty corner from the Las Vegas Convention Center and across the street from Country Club Towers. They ate what was left of Willie’s deli sandwich in silence. When they were done, Willie belched and cleaned his teeth with his fingers.
“They’ll be here for me at midnight,” he said. “You won’t be seeing me again.”
“What the hell …?”
“Quiet down and listen.”
Legs made as if to zipper his lips as, for what indeed turned out to be the last time, Willie told him the story of his life.
Right before his thirteenth birthday, Willie was commanded by his father to leave home and search for his spirit guide. Handing him a carved pipe and a bag containing dried fruit of the peyote cactus, his father said, “Follow the dreams this brings you. They will lead you to your spirit guide. Do not return until you have found each other.”
Willie looked closely at the pipe, ran his fingers over the carvings, put the mouthpiece in his lips, and sucked. He heard a tiny whistle of air, a melody almost. Alone in the darkness, he filled the pipe, lit it, and took one short toke. He inhaled and waited for something to happen. It did nothing at all for him, so the following morning he packed a small bag with a few eggs and other provisions and bade his mother, his father, his sisters, and his uncle farewell. Happy to be getting away from his father’s control, he headed through Paradise Valley in the direction of Walker Lake.
That night, the pipe warmed him and caused him to dream of walking with the Piute Nation from the Humboldt to the Carson. When he awoke, his feet took him first to Cottonwood Station and then to Carson Lake. Finally, when he reached Walker Lake, he made camp in a sheltered place where he could find easy fodder in the small weirs and damns, which diverted the fish from the main lake. Nearby, he found an edible grass containing a seed that was pleasant to chew and, when dried and smoked, induced new and different dreams.
Soon, he ran low on peyote and provisions and high on confusion. He felt lost and lonely and thought longingly of his family. The peyote had also increased his hunger. Thinking to allay his hunger with fish, he made camp behind one of the large scrub bushes that dotted the shores of the lake. He chose to sleep first and fish later. Perhaps, he thought, his spirit guide would come to him and he could head for home with the dawn.
His wish was granted, if only in part, when his dreams were interrupted by the poking head of so strange and hideous an animal that he was sure he had gone mad. What he saw looked like a giant sage hen, with its legs and neck devoid of plumage and incredibly distended so that it stood well over six feet. The feathers that covered its enormous body were an odd grayish-brown color. The good part was the gigantic egg, which he could see within his peripheral vision; the bad was that he could never go home again. He didn’t dare lie to his father, nor could he tell him that this bizarre-looking creature was his spirit guide.
He pushed at the bird, such being what he presumed it to be. It skittered to one side, but made no attempt to fly. He would have understood if he’d known anything about ostriches. However, he did not, yet.
Thus began a lifetime of adventure for Nattee-Tohaquetta, who walked to Austin with his ostrich—the infinitely stupid beast having decided that he was her master.
Then came a stroke of good fortune. The boy met a lovely young woman by the name of Dora who took him into her heart and unto her bosom, settling him at her place of employment—the larger of Austin’s two whorehouses.
The years passed quite happily for Willie, or Natty, as the girls called him in those days. He became for them a mascot of sorts, mostly because of his diminutive size. He did not threaten them, nor they him, and on his sixteenth birthday they took it upon themselves to initiate him into manhood in the pleasantest of fashions.
Dora, in particular, pleased him. To his delight she felt the same way and they became a couple. She, of course, continued plying her trade, but she pleasured him on the side and, in what free time she had, taught him the skill of reading. One of the first books he chose to read was on the subject of ostriches.
His newly gained knowledge led him to his first and possibly most unique money-making idea. He would buy more ostriches and breed them for their skins, their feathers, and their meat. Thus, Willie’s Ostrich Farm and Whorehouse was born.
Legs motioned to show that he had a question.
“Go ahead,” Willie said. “Make it fast.”
“Were those ostriches mean, Uncle Willie?”
Willie laughed. “Mean and stupid. Kick a man to death right easy for no given reason.”
Legs zippered his mouth and Willie continued. He was happy, he said, until one gloomy day his ostrich conspired to lead her fellows away from Willie’s Farm and Whorehouse and onto the road that led from Austin to Belmont. Like some kind of revolutionary army, sixty-three strong, the ostriches crouched down upon the road and took occupation, leaving Willie no longer the owner of an Ostrich farm.
“It made no never mind to me,” Willie said. “I was tired of them stupid critters and wasn’t worried none about them being turned into steaks. Them buggers sure could run. Forty miles an hour sometimes. I knew they’d be okay. Knew my guide would keep an eye on me, anyhow.”
Willie proposed to Dora that she go with him to Las Vegas. When she showed no interest, he split the money from the sale and suggested she buy a house where she could ply her trade or not, as she pleased. They said a tearful farewell. When he reached Las Vegas, he settled into the life of a gambler as if he had been born to it.
He stopped to catch his breath and asked Legs for something to drink. Legs poured one for each of them. He was awed by Willie’s stamina. Though physically frail and confined to a wheelchair, the old man remained a guy to be reckoned with. He had become someone to whom knowing was everything, yet he felt no need to share his knowledge.