The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories (17 page)

“Well, damn it!”

The tumblers showed a plum, a lemon and a bell. There had been the loud metallic click of defeat and the intense somber face of her husband had a wild quality.

Flora touched his sleeve and said softly, “Franklin, dear, it’s terribly late.”

He turned to stare at her, taking a moment to identify her, having to reach back into his subconscious to reconstitute a world that he had left several hours before and which no longer seemed very real to him.

“Stay here, Flora,” he said. “I have to get some more silver dollars. Don’t let anybody use this machine, understand?”

“Franklin, dear—” her voice half-heartedly chased him, and then died out as he left her behind.

She watched him take a bill out of his wallet, hand it to the cashier, and get a large stack of silver dollars in return. He carried them back, brushed past her and started to feed them into the machine, one by one. He’d gone through five of them with no result when Flora touched his arm again, this time much more positively, and with a grip sufficiently tight to keep him from depositing yet another silver dollar.

“Franklin!” her voice carried a rising concern. “How much money have you lost? Have you been playing this machine all night?”

Franklin’s voice was terse. “I have.”

“You’ve lost a great deal of money then, haven’t you?”

“Very likely.”

Flora wet her lips and tried to smile. “Well, darling, don’t you think you ought to stop?”

He looked at her as if she’d just suggested that he drink a bucket of paint. “Stop?” he half shouted. “How can I stop, Flora? How in God’s name can I stop? I’ve lost a great deal of money. A great deal of money! Look! Look at this.”

He pointed to the big sign over the machine. “Special jackpot $8,000,” it read.

“See that?” he said. “When it pays off, you make eight thousand dollars!” He turned to the machine again, speaking more to it than to his wife. “Well, it’s got to pay off. If a person stands here long enough, it
must
pay off.”

As if to emphasize the logic of his remark, he slammed another silver dollar in the slot, pulled down the lever and stared intently at the tumblers as a cherry came up with two lemons and three silver dollars dropped into the receptacle. Again he lost himself with the machine and became oblivious to Flora. He lost five more silver dollars and felt the gnawing bite of irritation that comes with defeat.

“Franklin, darling,” Flora began, you know how awful you feel in the morning when you’ve been up too late at night—”

He whirled around at her and screamed, “Flora, why don’t you shut your mouth.”

She drew back, white-faced, feeling the shriveling shame that was always caused by Franklin’s temper. He noticed it and it egged him on. It always gave him a kind of perverse satisfaction to yell at Flora. She was so plain and so weak; she was such a piece of dough to be pulled and kneaded and pounded. and she was worth screaming at, because she would react. Not like this machine that had been his enemy for so many hours, his tormentor. He wanted to kick the machine, to scratch it, gouge it, make it feel pain. But the machine was impassive and invulnerable. Flora wasn’t. Flora with her mousy little face. For a passing, exploding moment he wanted to hit her, to smash his fist into her face. But it was almost as good to scream at her and get a reaction.

“I hate a shrew, Flora,” he shouted.

Several people turned to stare at them.

“I can’t stand a woman who hangs over your shoulder and sees to it that you have miserable luck.”

He heard her sobbing intake of breath and it poured kerosene on the fire that flared inside of him.

“That’s what you’re doing to me now, Flora—you’re giving me miserable luck. You and your Las Vegas. You and your Goddamned contests. Get out of my sight, will you? Will you get out of my sight now!”

She made one more weak, pitiful protest, “Franklin, please, people are watching—”

“The hell with people,” he shouted. “I’m not concerned with people. People can go to hell.”

He turned and, with sweaty palms, clutched at the sides of the machine, his lips compressed. Burning on his face was the anger of frustration, mixed with the high fever of the bad gambler.

“This is what I’m concerned with,” he said. “This machine! This damned machine.” His anger burned hotter, his frustration took over. He pounded his knuckles against it. “It’s inhuman the way it lets you win a little and then takes it all back. It teases you. It holds out promises and wheedles you. It sucks you in. And then—” He slammed another silver dollar into the slot, pulled down the lever with both hands, then watched as two plums and a lemon showed up on the tumbler and there was the dull click once again, with silence following it.

He was unaware of Flora now, unaware of the people who stood watching him behind her. He was unconscious of the noises, the lights, the sweat on his body, the fact that his mouth twitched. There was this machine in front of him. There was this machine that had a face on it and it had been cheating him and he had to pay it back. He had to revenge himself on it and the only weapons he could use were silver dollars. He put them in, pulled down the lever, watched, listened, waited.

He didn’t see Flora, handkerchief to face, walk away from the machine and disappear out the door. He didn’t hear a man in a cashmere sport coat comment loudly to his wife that, “the little prune-faced guy was a real nut with that machine.” A waiter asked him if he wanted a drink and he didn’t look at the waiter or answer him. There were only two things left in Franklin Gibbs’s world. Himself and the machine. Everything else had ceased to exist.

He was a sour-faced little man in an old-fashioned suit and he stood at the machine gorging it with silver dollars, trying to make it vomit back at him. He was a dope addict now, in the middle of a long and protracted needle, and he never really knew, even at five in the morning when the room was empty save for one blackjack game, one dice table still operating and himself, that in every clinical sense, he’d lost his mind.

Everything that he’d used to sustain himself through his lifetime his willfulness, his pettiness, his self-delusions, his prejudices—he’d whipped together like a suit of armor and this is what he wore as he battled the machine on into the morning. Slip in the coin, pull down the lever. Slip in the coin, pull down the lever. Slip in the coin, pull down the lever. Keep it up. Don’t stop. Don’t break the routine of hand and arm and eye and ear. This was the new chronology of his life function. Sooner or later the machine would pay off. It would surrender to him. It would acknowledge his superiority by suddenly spewing out eight thousand silver dollars. This was all he thought about as he stood there, oblivious to the dawn outside, to anything except that he was alone in the world with a one-armed bandit that had a face.

When the night cashier left and yawned a good morning to his replacement, he made mention of the funny little duck by the machine who’d been there something like seven hours.

“I seen them get hooked before,” he said to his replacement, then shook his head, “but never like him. Never like that buggy little guy over there!”

That was the epitaph to Franklin Gibbs’s first night at Las Vegas, but only to that night. At eight-thirty in the morning, when Flora came in to find him, he was still at the machine.

Marty Lubow had a brief talk with the resident manager of the hotel about eleven in the morning. They talked in passing of a couple of public relations stunts in the offing, the nature of the ad campaign for Sammy Davis, Jr., who would start at the hotel two weeks hence, and, just before Lubow left, the manager asked him about Franklin Gibbs whom several people had mentioned. There is a grapevine of no mean proportions in the Las Vegas hotel circuit. Let a man make seven straight passes at a crap table and within five minutes the information is known all over town. Or let a movie star drop a bundle and make a scene and a gossip columnist has phoned it in within an hour. But even in a town full of characters and caricatures, there was always room for one more. And a sour-faced little man in a 1937 suit was obviously setting a new record for time spent and money lost at one silver buck machine. The manager queried Lubow as to the nature of the beast and Lubow laughingly told him that if Gibbs could hold out till six that evening they could probably set up some picture stuff. This might be a natural for
Life
magazine.

But at three o’clock that afternoon, after Lubow had seen Franklin, he was no longer interested in any kind of press coverage. Quite the contrary. One look at the little man’s face was quite sufficient to have him phone the house physician to inquire somewhat obliquely how long a man could live without sleep.

At five-thirty, Franklin Gibbs had lost three thousand, eight hundred dollars, cashed three checks, downed one glass of orange juice and one half of a boiled ham sandwich, and had come close to striking his wife across the side of the face when, with tears rolling down her cheeks, she had pleaded with him to come back to the room to take a nap.

Franklin Gibbs’s life was entirely funneled into the slot machine in front of him. At this point he had no recollection of ever having done anything but feed in coins and pull down levers. He felt neither thirst nor hunger. He knew he was desperately tired and that his vision seemed out of focus, but there was no question of giving up.

It wasn’t until nine o’clock that evening, after the hotel manager had told him he would be unable to cash another check and Flora had telegraphed his brother in Iowa—a rambling, incoherent telegram which spoke of disaster—that Franklin Gibbs got an ice-cold, clutching feeling in his gut. He had three silver dollars left and he’d reached the point where he kept mumbling to the machine that it was now time to pay off. He was owed eight thousand silver dollars and there wasn’t any question about it. What was the matter with the machine, anyway? Didn’t it know the rules? He kept talking to it, urging it, arguing with it—sweaty, sodden, obsessed. It was just twenty-one minutes after eleven when Franklin Gibbs put in the last silver dollar. The machine made a strange kind of whirring noise and the lever stopped halfway down on its arc, clanked noisily and then stuck. Franklin Gibbs stood stock-still for a long, unbelieving moment and it came to him that right then, right at that instant, he was being taken. This was the moment of the big cheat. Obviously this was the coin that was to have brought him the eight-thousand-dollar jackpot. He had no doubt about it at all. He was supposed to have won this time, and the machine, the machine with the ugly face, the machine that had hounded him by calling out his name, had now stooped to the nadir of deceit and was refusing to pay off.

Franklin felt ripples of anger rise up from deep inside him, anger that began as a trickle and built to a coursing flood. Anger that bubbled and seethed and boiled. Anger that suddenly pinched at him and clutched at him and tore at him.

“What’s the idea?” he shouted at the machine. “What’s the idea, you bastard! Goddamn you. Give me back my dollar. That’s my last one, you miserable, crummy, dirty—” His breath caught up with him and for a moment all he could do was wheeze. “Give me back my Goddamned dollar.”

He hit the machine. He punched it. He clawed it. He shoved it. Two floor men, a cashier and the assistant manager, headed toward him from opposite points of the room, but not before he had broken the knuckles of his right hand and not before he had pushed the machine off its stand to go crashing down to the floor, and not before he had thrown himself on it, tangling himself up in it, cutting his arm against the broken glass that was its nose and bleeding all over the carpet.

They led him out of the room, screaming, crying, sobbing, shouting and fighting. Flora ran after them, wringing her hands and weeping.

The house physician set and bandaged Franklin’s hand, put three stitches in his arm and gave him a sedative. They undressed him, put him to bed, then stood over him while he fell into an uneasy sleep.

The doctor told Flora that it would be best to take him home the following day and that Franklin should have a long session with his own physician when he returned to Elgin, Kansas. He even murmured something about the possibility of psychiatric help later on. Flora kept nodding at him, her face pale and tear-stained. After they had gone she sat silently staring at her husband.

Somewhere in the nether land of Franklin Gibbs’s subconscious he heard a voice clear and distinct. It was produced by coins rubbing against themselves. It was a metallic, clanking, “Franklin!” that suddenly was shouted into the air. He woke with a start and heard it again. Then again. He got out of bed and walked past a frightened Flora toward the door.