In the long run, nothing is going to happen just from the kissing of the scars. He has to kiss her somewhere besides the scars. She pushes Ranjeet back on the bed, and she removes the socks from his feet, and she now gazes upon what turn out to be his incredibly beautiful feet. Most guys have bits of sock fuzz nestled between the toes, and most guys don’t clip their toenails enough, or their toenails are mottled with fungus. But Ranjeet’s feet look as though he’s spent his life walking on pillows. How could he have worn socks over feet so beautiful?
“I’m going to . . . let me . . .”
Ranjeet says no, no, no, but he’s still lying on his back, covering his eyes, and she takes the little shriveled thing into her mouth, as if it’s string cheese, and she tries to make something happen, and the minutes pass, and she gives it all the determination she can give it, but maybe she’s just not so good at this kind of thing or maybe he’s thinking of his wife. She has heard that adultery is meant to be electrifying, but it turns out to be tawdry and dull, like life in a casino, and so she just kisses him once softly on the thigh and then gets up and retreats to the bathroom.
By now, the bubbles are halfway up the wall. It’s a big tub and it still hasn’t filled. All of this romantic failure is revenge for her foolishness. Her foolishness for coming out here, for driving eight hours across the desert, like all the other people who came across this desert, believing there was anything genuine here. The people who came to enrich Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano or their heirs. The people who came because a flamingo is good luck or who came because Frank Sinatra performed here and bullied a dealer who dealt from a shoe. She’s more foolish, because she knows better.
She leans back in the tub and steadies herself with one hand, and she walks her feet up the wall a little bit, trying not to eat any soap bubbles, until the tap is trickling down upon her, and she’s in some grotto of moisture and disillusionment, where she belongs, for all her foolishness, and if she comes, she’ll just feel worse about it, but that seems like what she deserves. When the door opens, she doesn’t turn to look, she just lets the tap do what the tap will do, and she lets her fingers knead her, and so there are two of them there, with their dashed hopes, in some casino out in the middle of nowhere, trying to come up with a story that they can sell to the television executives in Los Angeles, and the two of them can’t even get an arm around each other where it means anything, she thinks, feeling her legs trembling, but she shouldn’t think about it at all, she should concentrate on thinking about nothing, she should concentrate on the sound of water, if she thinks about him, she’ll just get distracted, so she just keeps at it, and she thinks that there’s nothing to look forward to at all and that the whole story is built on lies and misrepresentations, the miniseries, and the office in New York, and her friendships there. She hasn’t made a good decision in three months. She thought she was being prudent, and it turns out she wasn’t prudent even once. She was always getting ready to do what she is doing right now, which is to blow everything in such a spectacular way, and this is when she hears Ranjeet at the sink, saying her name, blessing her a thousand times and promising all kinds of crazy things, saying that she is the One Timeless Being, promising that he will give her a half dozen children and that he will jump into a fire for her, and what he’s saying sets off some kind of chain reaction in her head, and when that part is over, she flings herself backward into the bubble bath, so that her feet are periscopes and the rest of her is immersed.
After dinner, Ranjeet and Jeanine head for the gaming pit.
There’s a whole method to selecting a proper table at which to play blackjack, according to Ranjeet, and this method involves divination. The first requirement is that there can be no other player at the table. As they are in Las Vegas on a Wednesday night, and as they have arrived at the pit with little left to say to each other, they go in search of the table that has no players, where the cards are fanned out in front of the dealer like plumage. However, Ranjeet can’t find a dealer whom he likes. He doesn’t want to reckon with a
white
dealer because, he observes, in a strophe of remarkable bile, the white dealers have contempt for immigrants. “There are a billion of us from India in the world,” he says, “and there are more than a billion of the Chinese persons. Do these salaried employees not think that we are going to come here and overrun this land? We
are
coming to overrun it, and we are going to remake it in our image, with our beliefs, our ethics. Why do you think there are so many Japanese here in the casino? And so many Chinese? Here in the casino? Because we are coming for your country. We will dispossess you because it pleases us to do so.” And he’s right; the rest of America, those who are not in a private suite with Mercurio or Lacey, looks like the rest of the globe. Ranjeet walks nervously around the tables reserved for blackjack until he finds the one African American dealer, the dealer avoided by the rest of the players, the dealer with the gleaming skull made perfect with some waxy stuff, and then Ranjeet sits in the fifth seat and he lays down the complimentary chips, failing to offer even a single chip to Jeanine. They wait for the dealer to finish his ritual of shuffling.
Jeanine says, “It’s time for me to tell you the thing I meant to tell you.”
A fantail swept out in front of the Sikh.
“This happened when I was a teenager in Arizona. Believe it or not, I was a really rebellious girl, and there was nothing that my parents could do to keep me in the house. I wasn’t like I am now. I was running around with my friends, in their parents’ cars. We’d go driving in the desert. We drove east. Less civilization. North and east there was nothing but the reservations. We thought we had more in common with the Indians than we did with our parents. Used to spend nights out there. We’d lock the car doors, push the seats back. It made my parents mad, of course, and I’d get grounded for a month. Then I’d go right out there and do it again. I liked the reservations, especially the Navajo reservation. From the road, it was empty as far as you could see.”
The dealer asks Ranjeet to cut the deck. They are ready for gaming. Ranjeet bets the minimum, which is fifteen dollars.
The dealer draws twenty-one on the first hand.
“You don’t want to be out there in late summer, because if you’re out there for very long you’re just going to cook, you know. There are stories about people who leave their baby in the car in the summer. They go into the convenience store. They come out, and the baby is like a piece of dried fruit. Or dogs. They forgot to leave the window open a crack for their dogs, and now their dogs are sun-dried tomatoes. Everyone is trying to avoid fire. You can hear it on the radio. ‘Today the alert is code red.’”
Ranjeet draws fifteen, takes a jack from the dealer, goes over. At this rate, he will last seven or eight more hands. He looks at Jeanine, pleading, as if by pleading he can get her not to tell the story. She waits and then she continues.
“I was going out with a boy named Philip. Philip was not a good boyfriend. My parents didn’t want me to go out with him and they didn’t like how I dressed with him or how I did in school when I was with him, and they didn’t like anything else about him. Philip had planned this party for Saturday night, and we were going to drive north, to Skull Valley. Up near the Bradshaws. Just grasslands as far as you can see. Not as dry as the lower elevations, but the fires are just as dangerous. Up in the mountains you have the pinõn and the ponderosa, and those make for good fuel. It didn’t stop us. You go through there into horse country, and then you go beyond all the horses, and then you’re in Skull Valley. We found a place off the road, where Philip and his pal Ryan and Ryan’s girlfriend, Skye, got out and set up a couple of tents.”
Of the next three hands, Ranjeet wins two. Then he doubles down with two sevens, wins one. Suddenly he’s feeling kind of good about things. He bets forty-five dollars on the next hand, loses, and just as quickly he’s exhausted half of the stake.
“Who wants to cook? We had some trail mix and we had a lot of beer and dope and some hummus that Skye brought. She worked at a health food store in town that nobody really patronized except us. She was always in there reading books about crystal magic. So Skye brought the only food we had, which means that we probably didn’t have as much as we should have. The first thing we did was start drinking the beer and smoking a lot of dope. Philip and Ryan started saying a lot of stuff about how they wished that Skye and I would start kissing, because they wanted to watch. Actually, I never really talked to her much, because Skye didn’t really talk. I told them that they should just lay off of Skye, but they didn’t lay off. They’d probably set the whole thing up beforehand; that’s what I think now. Let’s get the girls drunk. They had some adolescent idea that they were going to set up an orgy on this big camping trip, but obviously they didn’t know us too well.”
“Could you please,” Ranjeet says.
“I want to finish.”
He bets forty-five again, draws thirteen, the number that gives every amateur blackjack player chest pains. He takes one card, and then another, and manages to work himself up to twenty, after which Jeanine watches as the dispassionate and professional African American dealer draws a six at fifteen, for twenty-one.
Ranjeet says, “I need more funds.”
“You’re welcome to use any funds that you have at your disposal,” Jeanine says.
“I don’t have any funds at my disposal.”
“Call your contacts at UBC.”
Ranjeet says, “Let me have the credit card.”
“Why should I give you the credit card? You’re playing like my grandmother.”
“I am very sorry. Please finish your story.”
He bets the rest of his chips. A whippet-thin guy with gin blossoms and a martini approaches the table, and Ranjeet waves him away.
“I figured I should find a way to escape with Skye. So we told the boys we were going to go out into the brush to get comfortable with each other and they should come along in a few minutes, like maybe they should come along in fifteen minutes, and we would be more comfortable, we would be native girls in the brush. And then we ran off. It was dark, you know, and we could smell the campfire even while we were running away through the fields, running as far as we could, out into the prairie, and I remember thinking that I was a little worried about the campfire because of the warnings that summer. Even if the fire alerts never stopped us before. We were drunk and high, and I remember that I saw Skye smiling and laughing for the first time. We thought we would circle back to the road, laughing the whole way. We thought we knew the direction of the road, but as far as we went we didn’t see any road, and we didn’t see any cars or even any lights. We’d thought we’d hitch a ride, because no one was going to leave two girls by the side of the road at night. But we couldn’t find the road.”
Ranjeet holds out his hand for the credit card.
“The story is finished, correct?”
“Incorrect. Go negotiate a second mortgage on your house. That’ll give you liquidity.”
Ranjeet walks away from the table, mumbling to the dealer that he will return in a quarter hour. Jeanine takes a drink from the first scantily clad waitress who comes by and she tips this waitress generously, feeling bad about the outfit and the hours. When Ranjeet comes back, he is furious and he is clutching a number of hundred-dollar bills. He says, “Are you happy now? I did not want to use these hundreds of dollars, because a Sikh does not form dubious associations or engage in gambling, and because these are the last dollars in my bank account, and I was saving them for the expenses relating to my son. Even if I am here and I have degraded my marriage with you, it does not mean I do not love my son, who I think will be an honorable man.”
He places the hundred-dollar bills on the green felt, and the dealer calls over his supervisor to oversee the exchange of bills for chips. Immediately, Ranjeet bets a hundred.
“We’re out in the middle of some prairie that should belong to someone. But we don’t see anyone or any ranch house. There were wild burros out there, according to the signs, and I was starting to think about wild burros, and I was starting to think about other animals of the mountains, you know, bobcats or javelina. I didn’t know; I was kind of worried. It was getting late. And we started calling for the boys, but we weren’t hearing anything. We weren’t hearing anyone calling back to us. I think Skye was really scared. She told me how she didn’t have any family in Arizona, how she had come out west to go to school and then she dropped out of college right away and started working in the health food store and living behind a gas station. We called out some more, and no one answered our calls.”
He wins the first hand, and then he wins the second.
“We figured we were going to have to stay put for the night, so that in the morning we’d be able to see where the road was and then we’d find our way back to town. We thought we needed a fire to keep the animals away from us. There could easily have been snakes out there, you know. Skye had a lighter because she smoked. If we had a fire, someone might find us, too. If people saw fires burning in the night, the fire department would get notified, and they’d come out and dowse them. So we tried to make a little campfire circle and we went looking for twigs and sticks, and all the time we were calling out to each other so we wouldn’t lose each other on top of everything else.”
Up a thousand dollars! A miraculous thing! A God-given thing! A thing that prepares the way for tomorrow’s work, which will involve taking photographs of the locations they are going to use for the Las Vegas episode!
“I’m not done,” Jeanine says. “I was telling you about how we made the little campfire circle, and then when we had the little campfire, we lay down beside it and we told each other stories, like I’m telling you a story right now, and we thought we would keep each other awake, telling stories, so that we could be sure to keep an eye on the fire, or in case the boys saw the fire, or if someone else did and called the fire department.”