The Best American Crime Writing (34 page)

Originally, before harassing wild burros was outlawed, the contestants first had to catch one, which they then led, over the course of three days, about forty miles, not without some violence upon the contestants’ persons. Today, the burros are tame, and the three “prospectors” are students at Beatty High School.

The arena turns to dust the instant the announcer blasts a pistol, and the jockeys launch forward in slow motion. Five minutes into this race nobody has yet inveigled their animal to the oil drum. A rangy kid with baggy shorts and white socks hiked up to his kneecaps—his name is Jeff—gets about a foot before his burro ceases to be persuaded and stops cold. Todd, who looks like the school quarterback, leads by a nose. Dottie, with red streaks in her hair, is first to round the drum, do-si-do. Before Todd even crosses the drum’s lengthening shadow, Dottie has hitched her burro near
where a judge sits at one of the three equidistant stations and begun unloading the waiting gear (shovel, matches, kindling, skillet) from its scrawny back. Todd clears the barrel but loses speed on the lee side of the drum. Poor Jeff might as well be trying to persuade a dog to evolve. Just as Todd starts to pack his gear, Dome’s burro sets back out for the second loop around the drum and then back to her station, where she begins to prepare a firepit. Just a fetlock behind, Todd digs a hole the size of a pet’s grave, cracks wood over his knee, and starts striking matches. He contends with wind more than Dot-tie, given that his judge doesn’t block the wind as well as Dome’s judge, deliberately or not, hard to say. Jeff’s judge sits pensively, the shovel and gear unclaimed at her feet. Dot’s judge yells “flame!” but recants when the smoke ends up just being dust kicked up by the burro. Todd takes the lead tenuously; he shelters a weak flame with his hands. Dottie has fire in the hole and it’s a good fire, better than Todd’s.

Dottie warms the skillet while Todd still struggles, blowing. She pours batter. Oops. There’s a problem. The judges huddle. Dottie forgot to oil her pan. For a second it’s unclear if this means disqualification, but they let it slide. The crowd is seized with suspense as Dottie lifts the now nicely browned flapjack to the burro’s muzzle. It takes a sniff. Oddly purses its lips. Then, to the shock of all, the burro bolts backward with a violent capriole. It hates pancakes. The infuriated burro storms across the pen, dragging behind it the terrified girl who is unfortunately connected to the dreaded griddle-cake. Todd patiently oils his pan, pours batter, and proffers the lightly browned flapjack to his burro, who blithely opens its mouth and accepts communion.

Later that afternoon, after Mack’s nap, he and I take a drive in his RAV4 out to Rhyolite. We wind upward to the ghost town, wrapped around the slagged remains of the Bullfrog Hills, past half-dismantled
mills, to a sweeping view of the tailings pond, a 340-acre lake of slurry laced with cyanide that reflects the setting sun bluish-greenly. Rhyolite is nothing but ruins. Devoured facades. The wind actually whistles in a creepy minor key. Ancient street signs poke comically out of the sagebrush. Just past the once opulent bank, a three-story concrete husk, Mack turns the RAV onto a rutted path, and we bump roughly down Gold Lane, toward the trepanned mountainside. Up close it looks like the burrows of some stygian sparrowlike dirt-hill-dwelling people.

Trundling along here, I find Mack easy company. In this ghost town, speaking about cycles of boom and bust, I ask how well his business rode the New Economy, and it takes us, not as circuitously as you might wish, to the heart of Angel’s grief-lust nexus. Which should have been a good thing. I had been struggling over how to approach the subject. It seemed so obvious, yet delicate, and I was momentarily elated to have an inroad into what I expected would prove to be the key to understanding this central paradox. But the subject bores him. He points out a shack where miners slept. The whores back then kept “cribs,” little huts much like the ancient Roman prostitutes’
cellae
, grim mausoleums with the names of each woman etched over the entrance. By my third day with Mack, talking about funeral parlors and sex parlors, sometimes in the same breath, it’s hard not to become confused, so that the tenor of my thoughts is macabre-erotic to the point that I half consciously think of these fallen angels, in turn, as ghosts, necrophilic whores, floozily dressed zombies …

Eleven
A.M.
, Sunday morning, the Beatty Community Church is packed. The church is on a hill, exposed to the raw wind that hasn’t let up since yesterday. (The Fantasy Bungalow creaked like a dinghy all night.) The walls are decorated with Sunday-school handiwork, and the windows are pink-and-blue stained glass. Reverend
Taguchi, a brawny Japanese American with longish hair and a goatee, mounts the pulpit. Service starts with three hymns back-to-back (all in F major). I sit out “Blessed Be the Name of the Lord” but, to mark time, sing along with “All Hail, King Jesus.”

After “Unto Thee, O Lord,” everybody gets up to greet and mingle. I am touched, if uneasy, when most come over to shake my hand, all except a strung-out-looking guy who stands in his pew, nodding forlornly. Tucked in his coat is a pit bull puppy.

After the service the guy with the pit bull comes over while I’m waiting for Reverend Taguchi. He sits beside me in the pew and asks my name. His is Walter. For a second it doesn’t look like it’s going to go any further between us and then he starts to cry. Finally he manages to ask if we can go outside. He needs to talk privately. Why not? I follow Walter out to the parking lot. It is blustery. In fact, at that moment I see my first and only tumbleweed. It is a bantam, disappointing little thing that bounces across the parking lot and then wheels out of sight. Walter wants to know if I’m going to Vegas; he needs a ride. But I’m not going back to Vegas for three more days. Walter seems like an imperiled enough character that I briefly consider making a detour for him, but I’ve already spent an afternoon watching the burro races, a detour that led me to no conclusions except that I do not believe a burro would put up with a sport like that if he were conscious of his own mortality. I ask Walt if he worked at the gold mine, and he says that he’s on “disability,” he’s only lived here six months, that he’s from Philadelphia, which I ignore, since I live in Philadelphia and I don’t feel like having anything in common at the moment. Walt starts to cry again when the dog laps his thumb; a meniscus gently swells at the rim of his left nostril. His brow quivers. He really needs to go to Vegas. There’s this model, he says. This is the sad old story, I think, until he says Hobbytown USA, and I gather that it’s a model airplane he’s pining after.

After a potluck lunch Reverend Taguchi invites me over to his house, a block away, a peeling wind-rattled home with chimes dangling
on the porch. As a county commissioner who vice-chairs the brothel licensing board, Taguchi, despite his moral qualms, cannot say much about Mack’s case, except that he thinks Beatty will survive just fine without Angel’s if the brothel goes under, so we talk about whether or not Beatty will turn into a ghost town now that the mine’s gone. He thinks not. I ask him again how dependent Beatty is on the revenue of Angel’s, and he brushes it off. He cannot abide the suggestion that his town is in any way dependent on the sinful lucre of merchandised sex. There are plenty of other economic options, he says. Like the Yucca Mountain Project? As for the $38 million that the DOE will have given the county by the time the final site recommendation gets approved by President Bush in 2002, his official position, he grins, as a commissioner, is “neutral.” He’s more eager to talk about the county getting money from Mercedes, BMW, Chevy, and Ford, who all do heat testing in the summertime in Death Valley. “They can actually go from below sea level to 10,000 feet in a two-hour period. The
extremes.”
When the reverend walks me out the door we find Walt on the porch. He’s still looking for a ride to Hobbytown USA. By the way that Reverend Taguchi kindly sends him on his way, I get the impression that this is an ongoing thing and by refusing I’m not supposed to feel bad, but I can’t help feeling like I should help Walt escape this place, maybe even take him back to Philadelphia, if that’s where he’s really from. Walt is the saddest thing I’ve seen since I got here; sadder than the burros, sadder than the bored whores flipping through cookie recipes. He is clearly bereaved—of what, I know not. But I can help him no more than the aging pimp can help me. When it comes to grief and lust we are all tumbleweeds.

I end up going to Vegas alone. Halloween morning, I meet Mack for the last time at his gated stucco mansion in northwest Vegas. He answers the door wearing a pink shirt and looking five years
younger than the last time I saw him. He’s just gone to his “beautician,” he says. His cherubic curls look freshly gilt. Elvis croons in the background. Angel is off somewhere sorting through their returned possessions, which choke the hallway along with chaotic piles of court records, unopened mail, and boxes. Mack says that everything hasn’t been returned by the cops, including some pictures of Angel’s dead boys. When he goes in search of something he wants me to see, I poke around. In every nook and cranny is an Elvis doll, an Elvis telephone, or a tiny Elvis under a bell jar. I’m on my knees looking at a video in an evidence bag when Angel emerges, hovering over me.

Her face pale, her mouth drawn, she looks convalescent. She takes me for a tour of her Elvis collection, down the hallway, where pictures of her boys hang on the wall beside portraits of Elvis, to a back room, where all four walls are covered floor to ceiling with plates from the King’s Franklin Mint collection. There is not enough cake in the world to fill all the plates.

Then for no real reason—other than that I was just nosing around their video collection—Angel starts to tell me about the night that the cops searched her house and kept her hostage in the living room. Her voice quavers, and she clutches the bagged video in her hands the way a woman about to be mugged would clutch her purse. She was alone. Mack was in Beatty. When she thought she would lose it (they wouldn’t let her get her “pressure” pills), she got up and put a video in the VCR. It was a tape her son Jesse had made two months before he died. He wanted it played at the funeral, she says, “mainly to apologize to anybody that he had ever done any wrong thing to.” Her eyes jump when a bird flies past the window; after a long moment, while she struggles not to cry, she says that her son told her on the tape, “If you think that you’re alone, you’re not. He said, It’s going to be all right, Mom. It’s Our Father in Heaven.” I am, I think, convinced when she tells me that the cop guarding her was moved to tears, too.

Mack bustles into the room and, with a pained expression, shows me an official inventory from the police; typed at the top it reads, “Swinging File has been removed from this evidence bag and placed in evidence bag marked employee/record files. Report #: 000578.” This list of potential lovers, Mack lets me know, has not been returned. It makes him mad enough to launch into a hot tirade about suing the bastards. This is a great loss to him. He wants that list back and he cannot quite believe that it is gone. I can see it in his eyes. It is a dire, horrible loss.

For the rest of the day, waiting for my midnight flight, ominously moody because I have to fly, I nap in my room at the Imperial Palace to minimize exposure to the Strip and thereby avoid the migrainous hell’s bells and numismatic crepitations of the slots. When the sun goes down I meekly venture out for something to eat. Although it’s Halloween, hardly anyone on the street is in costume. I see the pope hailing a cab. Then I see a hooker in a black velvet cape and a silvery metallic top. I don’t know if she’s a real hooker or not—it doesn’t matter. I stand still until it is all thoroughly convincing. The smell of chlorine from the fountain. The unpared fingernails of the Mexican kid who hands me a flyer for an escort service. The couple that passes and the man who says to his wife: “It beats a sharp stick in the eye!” These details come to life. My life, like the night, seems never-ending.

I was surprised to have the notion brought to my attention—via the happy inclusion of my writing in this very anthology—that I’d written a piece about crime. Mack Moore was a crook, there’s no doubt, and some breaking of the law had inarguably transpired the night he sent the forlorn Cindi on her fateful date at the Stagecoach Hotel, though to this day he insists he did no wrong. What I really wanted to
write about was God’s crime against humanity for sticking us with too much grief (and I guess too much lust), and Mack seemed like an apt object lesson. The desert pimp, as I saw him, was a sort of self-destructive Job
.

Since my visit to Angel’s Ladies, the Nye County commissioners dropped their charges—or rather, let the issue slip into limbo—while Mack continues to make idle threats about “suing the sonofabitches” for entrapment. In a way, I have to say I’m glad he got off. Partly because of my stubborn belief that consensual crimes are not crimes—prostitution, as far as I know, does not fund terrorism—and in this case, the cops had clearly set up Mack
.