Nothing In Her Way (9 page)

Twenty minutes later I was on the bus, going west. I didn’t feel anything at all, and I didn’t think about anything. I didn’t want to.

It was snowing when I got off the bus in Reno, dry powder swirling down out of the Sierra and softening the harsh blaze of neon along streets plowed out and drifted again. I left the bags in the station and walked over to Calhoun’s, feeling the wind search through my clothes. In the late afternoon the place was jammed with the crowd that seems to go on forever, and full of the whirring clatter of slot machines and the click of chips and a dice man chanting: “Here we are, folks. Get ‘em down. New gunner coming out.”

Wally Manners was in his office. He’s tough, but a good friend, and he was glad to see me now. After we’d shaken hands and I refused one of his cigars, he said, “I got your wire. You still want to go to work?”

“Yes,” I said.

“All right. Start tomorrow, after you’ve had some sleep. You look pretty beat.”

“Two days on the bus,” I said.

“How you fixed for money?”

“I’m all right.”

“Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow, then. And Belen. Stay out of here on your time off.”

“O.K.,” I said.

“We’re not interested in winning back your wages. And if you get a hot streak, get it somewhere else.”

I thanked him and walked back to the bus station. After calling half a dozen rooming houses I finally found a place to stay and walked across town carrying the bags. It was a shabby, two-story mansion a little down on its luck. I paid a week’s rent, and after the landlady had brought me up to date on all the other tenants I managed to get away from her long enough to locate the bathroom. I took a shower and scraped off three days’ growth of beard. The cut on my face where Bolton had hit me had healed pretty well, and most of the puffiness was gone from my hand.

It was a stage set for a boardinghouse room. I sat down on the slab of a bed and lit a cigarette and stared out the window. It was night now, but I could see snow eddying silently in the darkness beyond the glass and farther away the reflected neon bonfire of Virginia Street. I tried to remember if I’d eaten anything lately, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. Nothing did. After a while I got into pajamas and turned out the light.

I’d been riding too long and the bed rocked the same way the bus had. I couldn’t go to sleep. I was empty and washed out and beyond caring about anything, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. They’d fly open and I’d be thinking about things, but the crazy part of it was that none of them seemed to make any difference. They didn’t matter in the slightest. The police were looking for me. I was practically broke. I’d never find Lachlan now. Who cared? I was through with her at last, once and for all, wasn’t I? After twenty-three years I’d got the last of her out of my system and she could go to hell, or Donnelly could use her for a clay pigeon, or she could find somebody else to double-cross.

So I’d been afraid Charlie would pull a fast one on her and take it all. I wanted to laugh, but there didn’t seem to be any laughs in me either. I was going to protect her from Charlie, because Charlie was a crook. It was a shame about the laughs, because there might never be another masterpiece like that. It was a classic. Nobody would ever top it. Charlie, I suspect you of being dishonest, so unhand our little Nell. And tell her to give you back your arm.

I’ll come by and pick you up at noon, dear, in my little Cadillac. But don’t hold your breath.

I cursed and threw the blankets off and got up and dressed. The snow was slackening a little as I walked across town toward the lights. I remembered a little bar on a side street off Virginia and went in and sat down on a stool. A couple of shills nursed drinks at the blackjack table, the girl at the roulette wheel dribbled chips through her fingers, and a half-dozen people were shooting craps. Down at the other end of the bar four divorcees in slacks and fur coats were chattering over their drinks.

The barman remembered me, and nodded as he mopped the bar. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.”

“I’ve been away,” I said.

He studied me. “Let’s see. Bourbon, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “With plain water.” I always drank Scotch, but it wasn’t worth the effort.

He peered down the bar toward the covey of quail and shook his head. He hated women in bars. “One Planter’s Punch, one Golden Fizz, one Orange Blossom, and one Alexander. And you know what?”

“No,” I said. I knew what, because I’d heard it before, but maybe I’d get my drink sooner if I went along with him.

“Every damn one of ‘em will pay for her own drink. With a fifty-dollar bill.”

“It’s tough,” I said. I sat for a long time with the drink and then had another, but they seemed to have no effect on me at all. If anything, I felt worse. I got up and walked over to the table to watch the crapshooters. They were mostly women, making two or three passes in a row and betting fifty cents each time as if they were playing a slot machine. I waited until they came around to me, put five dollars on the line, and picked up the dice.

I had no business in a crap game now, and I knew it. I had about fifty dollars to eat on until payday, and I hadn’t even started to work yet. If you have to win, don’t gamble. That’s not a sermon; it’s a brutal piece of truth. It doesn’t mean you’re going to regret it if you lose; it simply means you probably will lose. Gamblers have another way of saying it, which implies the psychological basis: A scared buck never wins. They call luck a lady, and gamblers found out a long time ago that scared indecision gets you about as far with one as with the other.

I tried to tell myself now to stay out of it because I needed the money if I was going to eat. The only trouble was that I didn’t care whether I ate or not—or very much about anything else that I could think of. I shook the dice and threw.

They came up aces. Craps.

I put down another five dollars and bounced the dice against the end of the table. It was eleven this time. I let the ten lie on the line and rolled. I read four. Three rolls later two deuces came up and I shot the twenty. The stickman changed dice on me and I rolled two sevens in a row. I had eighty dollars on the line, got six for a point, and made it on the next throw. I was warming up, but when the stickman shoved them back he shook his head.

“You’ll have to pull down sixty,” he said. “Hundred-dollar limit.”

I handed the chips over. “Cash me in. I’ll come back and match pennies with you some other time.”

You can feel it when it’s like that. I don’t know how to explain it except that there’s an uncanny certainty about the whole thing. You couldn’t lose if you tried. I felt that way now as I walked up the street through the snow, but it meant nothing at all. It just didn’t matter.

This was a gambling house instead of a bar, and there was a table with a limit you could work with. When the dice came around to me I dropped forty dollars on two straight craps and then started throwing passes. I banged into the limit on the sixth one, pulled part of it down, and then threw two more before I lost the dice. When they came around again I racked up five passes, bumping the limit every time, before I fell off.

It was crazy. It was the wildest, most erratic streak of luck I’d ever run into in my life. They changed the dice on me until they got tired of it. I made wild bets—the field, on elevens, hard-way sixes and eights, and nothing made any difference. I won just the same. The crowd started to gather. I cashed in, went outside, took a cab to shake them, and moved on to another place.

I lost a thousand dollars there before I made a point; then I got hot and ran out a string of nine consecutive passes. My clothes, even the coat pockets, were full of money because I kept cashing in and moving around. The crowds made me angry. The word had spread now, and there was no getting away from them. Sometime around midnight I hit a run of bad luck and started losing heavily. I cut down the bets and zigzagged up and down for hours before it started running my way again. And it didn’t seem to matter whether I was winning or losing. I felt just the same. It was just something I was doing to pass the time because I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t remember when I’d slept.

It must have been around five in the morning. I was no longer conscious of anything but a blur of faces ringing the deep-walled pit of the dice table and of the dice themselves rolling out, bouncing, and spinning, and then being raked back. My eyes hurt. There was a tense quiet except for the stickman singing the point. I was trying to make a nine, and had five hundred dollars riding on it. Every number on the dice except nine and seven rolled up, over and over, until my arm grew numb. I wanted to take the dice and throw them against the wall or into the sea of blurred, white faces staring at me. I had just picked them up and straightened a little to ease the kink in my back when I saw her. Her face swam slowly into focus, straight across the table from me. I was going crazy. She couldn’t possibly be here.

I shook the dice and threw them. They bounced, and one caromed off another cushion and came to rest six up. The other was spinning on one corner. I watched it. It stopped. It was the three.

I pushed in the chips. Everybody wanted to talk at once, and they all wanted to talk to me. I stuffed the money in my pockets and shoved impatiently through the crowd. I wanted to get outside in the air and just walk through the snow.

“Mike, please!” She had hold of my arm. I turned. I wasn’t going crazy. The collar of the gray coat was turned up against her cheek and her eyes were very big and pleading. And they were very tired. She must have been driving all the time I was riding the bus.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “Pick me up sometime. Bring your knife.”

I turned away. She held onto my arm. “Mike, will you listen?” she pleaded desperately.

People were beginning to stare at us. And you never knew what she might do next. She was just as likely as not to start screaming and accuse me of wife-beating or poisoning her mother.

“Come on,” I said, “I’ll buy you a drink. You can tell me your little story, and then you can beat it. Or I will.”

We went over to the bar, but people were still following me. She looked helplessly around at the sea of faces and begged, “Mike, can’t we get out of here? What I’ve got to tell you is very important.”

“All right,” I said. Anything to get it over with. I’d had enough for one lifetime. I could get used to being dead if she’d just quit digging up the corpse.

We went out into the street. The snow had stopped, and beyond the glare of neon you could see stars like a million pin points of frost. A car went past with its tire chains slapping, and snow creaked under my shoes. She slowed. “The car is right here.”

We got in. There was just enough reflection from the neon signs for me to see her face very faintly. It was as lovely as ever, but it was awfully tired.

“All right, get with it,” I said. “It’s cold out here.”

“Couldn’t you do anything about that?” she asked quietly.

“No,” I said. “Let’s have the sob story.”

“You still think I double-crossed everybody, don’t you?”

“Why, of course not,” I said. “How could I ever think a thing like that?”

“Mike, darling,” she said almost tearfully, “haven’t you guessed yet what actually happened?”

“Sure. Everything just went black. And you only did it because you loved us.”

“Mike! Please stop it. And listen to me. Don’t you see yet? They double-crossed us. It was supposed to be Saturday.”

“What?” I swung around and caught her by the arm. “No. Don’t give me that. It was Friday. And you didn’t come, so if it hadn’t been for that freight train—”

“Mike, it was Saturday. Remember? Nine days after the beginning date of the option, which was Thursday.”

She was right. They’d moved it up a day, knowing that if she didn’t come by to pick me up they could ditch us both. I wanted to shout. I wanted to grab her and just yell. I wanted to—crawl under something out of sight, I thought.

“I’m sorry, Cathy,” I said. “I’m sorry as hell.”

“It’s all right, Mike. You don’t have to apologize.” She smiled a little. “But it’s still cold in here.”

We found that together we could do something about it. Those two awful days ganged up on me all at once and I held her very tightly, trying not to think about it.

After a while she stirred a little and we got back to what had happened.

“It wasn’t too hard to guess what they were up to,” she said. “When I came back from Houston I had an idea they were speeding things up a little. I called the hotel at Ludley Friday morning, and then called Houston. And when Charlie wasn’t at either place I knew our laughing boys had their shoes in their hands and were headed for the door. I tried to call you, but you were out. It was too late by then to pick you up, of course, but with luck I might get them before they could get away from El Paso. Of course, I could have just gone to them and demanded our share, but since they wanted to play winner-take-all—” She smiled coldly. “Well, they asked for it,” I said.

She turned to face me. “It’s history now, Mike. We’ve got other things to think about.”

She was always one jump ahead of me. “Such as?” I asked.

“Lachlan. The big one.”

“Oh,” I said. “But not right now.”

“Why?”

“Right at the moment I’m too happy to hate even Lachlan. Wait here a minute.” I got out of the car. In the bar that’s never more than two doors from anywhere in Reno I bought a bottle of champagne and talked the barman out of two glasses. Somehow it seemed quite logical, just the thing you always did at six o’clock in the morning.

I slid in behind the wheel and drove, while she leaned against me with her head on my shoulder. We went out the Carson highway and turned off on the road to Mount Rose. It hadn’t been plowed yet, but there were chains on the car and we made it as far as I wanted to go. It was a lookout point where you could pull off the road and look down across the valley. I got out and shoved the champagne and the two glasses into the waist-high barricade of snow left by the plows after an earlier snowfall.

When the champagne was cold it was growing light. I lifted her out of the car, because she couldn’t walk in the snow in shoes that were only high heels and straps, and put her on the hood where she could see. It made her catch her breath. The valley was spread out below us, luminous and ghostly in the dawn, with nothing moving anywhere in all the white. I opened the champagne, the pop as the cork came out sounding strange and out of place in the frozen hush of early morning. We drank it all and then very gravely threw the glasses into the snowy pines below the road.