Queenpin

  The furniture was still gone except for the box spring he sugar-tongued the landlady into advancing him, but his clothes and toiletries were there. And there were no broken windows or signs of trouble. But I didn’t feel much better. I couldn’t exactly call around the casinos asking for him. So I decided to stay put.

  In the end, I fell asleep waiting, nearly set myself on fire with the cigarette I’d left burning between my fingers. There was light coming through the windows when he busted in close to seven A.M.

  “Sorry, baby. Sorry. They took me for a ride,” he was saying as I tried to open my eyes, straighten my back. I peered across the room and at first all I saw was the spray of red on the side of his face, as if he’d opened a cherry soda pop too fast.

  “Mackey’s boys,” I said, rising.

  “Who else,” he said, voice raspy, broken, not his usual smooth, fast jabber. I walked toward him, eyes coming into focus. It looked like he’d been sideswiped, half his face and neck crusted with drying blood, the side of his head pocked with a nettle of oozing cuts. I stood in front of him. It seemed like I should help, but I wasn’t sure how.

  “They smashed me with a bottle. I guess it knocked me out. I think I was out for a long time. What time is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, my head wavering tentatively over the side of his face. I could see small bits of green glass glittering amid the stubble. “You need stitches, Vic.”

  “Fuck stitches,” he growled, backing away from my hand, shoulders drawing up. “Don’t you get this? You of all people should get it. This is it. I’m out of turns. This was the last warning before limbs start coming off. These boys are choppers and you know it. You know it.”

  I felt the color sinking from my face, but I stood my ground. We never talked about my job, about what I did. I couldn’t help what he’d heard, but I never told him anything straight out. “Listen, Vic, I don’t know Amos Mackey. Only to see him. I—”

  He rolled his eyes. “Can the schoolgirl routine, angel. There’s no more time for dancing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He grabbed me by the arms and looked me in the eyes, his battered face glaring sticky red. “I gotta get the big man thirty Gs by Wednesday or finito. Get it now?”

  I didn’t say anything. Would they really go from a bottle smash to a dustoff? They wanted their money, after all. My mind still reeling from the size of his cuff—thirty thou, Christ, Christ—I tried to think. But I paused too long and he was in no mood to wait.

  “I said, do you get it now?” And as he said it, he shoved me backwards, hard.

  Without thinking I shoved him back, hard.

  His eyes showed surprise and that was when he covered his face with his hands and I thought for a second he might start crying like a baby. But Vic was no milksop. He’d been this close to God’s acre before, I could tell. There were no tears, but the light did go out of him for the first time since I’d met him. No more gleam in his eyes. He tugged at me, put his arms around me, went on and on about how he was sorry, how he knew I was the only one he could count on, all that.

  I took him to the bathroom and we tried to clean up his wounds with the rusty old first-aid kit in the medicine cabinet. He let me put a stitch in and I pretended it was like basting a skirt hem. It wasn’t. Then I made coffee. We sat on the box spring like a couple of hoboes and drank it.

  Slowly, he came back. The Vic from before. Jaunty, ready for anything, and sure, I knew it, a washout, a chump. He was going to chase losses until someone caught up with him, roll his dice into his own grave sooner or later. But as much as I knew it, I couldn’t help myself. He was finally laying it on the line for me. He started up his patter again, but this time it was right to the chase. If I didn’t help him, there was no helping him.

  And he came clean that he knew what I did, he knew my job. He was mostly interested in the bets at the track.

  “Listen, sweetface, didn’t you ever get tempted?” he asked, eyes flickering eagerly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know,” he said, playful.

  There it was.

  “Come on,” he wheedled. “You got more smarts than any girl I ever met. You’re telling me you don’t think about the long green to be had if you’re willing to veer from the script?”

  Busted face and all, he was smiling. All-in, that was Vic. Before I could say much, before I could react to the pitch, the pitch that I knew was on the tip of his tongue, he looked at me, head to toe. He took my coffee cup from my hand and tossed it on the floor. He was touching me again. He lifted my skirt, wanted to see the bruise, which had turned three colors since Friday. “The thing I’m going to do,” he said. “It’s going to mark you worse than that. But you won’t see it. You won’t see it. You’ll just feel it.”

  His hands on me, what could I do. I wanted more. I was the chump. It was me.

  After, he finally got to the sell. Turned out this tout had passed him a tip on some sports scheme that would mean a big payoff for Saturday’s game. College football, what the hell did he know about it? You don’t have to know about football, he said. You just have to know the fix is in. Some thick-headed full-back was taking beans to fumble deep in the other team’s territory and tip the point spread.

  “A lot of fellas have gone to the state pen for that,” I said. “And the rest got suckered by players who decided not to do the dance when they got on the field.”

  “I’m telling you, this is for real, Bo Peep,” he said, splaying his hand eagerly on my chest. “These guys know their stuff. They’re master point shavers. They had fourteen basketball players on the pad all last season and made out like Rockefellers.”

  “Point shaving is a long haul. You make it slow, game by game. You don’t get a big score just working the spread on one game.”

  “You do if the game is right. This is a big one, two corn-fed rivals, a ton of action, and Hayseed U favored by thirteen points over Podunk State. Believe me, this one adds up right. Sure, I’m not walking away in the chips, but I save my neck.”

  “But what good does the tip do you,” I asked. “You got, what, two hundred clams left to stake? I can give you what I’ve got holed up in my mattress, but that still wouldn’t get you to the promised land. Not even close.”

  “That’s the beauty part,” he said, smile spreading across his face like a thick rubber band. “Don’t you see? You’re carrying a fat handbag to the track that day. Can the dime bets and let it all ride on Hayseed U.”

  I felt my mouth go dry. This was it. He was really asking me to do this. He was really doing it. I shook my head back and forth and started to laugh. And then I couldn’t stop laughing. He didn’t like it. Didn’t know what to make of it. I covered my mouth with my hand, tried to stop.

  “What’s so funny, bright eyes?” he said, grabbing my face. “What’s so goddamned funny?”

  “Nothing’s funny,” I said, pulse pounding, body shaking. I felt like I was all nerves, they were shooting through me, bursting just beneath my skin. “Nothing’s funny at all. Don’t you see? It’s crazy. My head would be on a pike by day’s end.”

  It would. Didn’t he know? He couldn’t know because he didn’t know her. What she had up her sleeve, inside her silky gloves. How she could see what I was going to do before I did it. Because she scripted me. She did, not him. Couldn’t he see that?

  “So it’s not you that does it,” he said, shifting gears quickly. “Supposing, baby doll, you get mugged on your way to the track? It’s no one’s fault. Could happen to any slip of a girl who makes her way among sharpers and trouble boys.”

  I paused, looking down at my hands, at the big cocktail ring, the size of a pearl onion, a gift from her after I soft-soaped a state trooper out of popping my trunk.

  “It wouldn’t help you, Vic,” I said, spinning the ring around my finger. “It’s pin money. Even with all the bets I make, they’re so small, they don’t add up. It doesn’t work like that.” I wanted to crawl the wall
s. These types always figured I’d be laying down a million each day because the money boys could really rig all the races, dope up all the horses but their pick, crazy stuff like that, and so if they just knew which way to bet…

  Vic, he was a dreamer, see. You had to see that in him and when you did, it had a charm that worked on you. You wished things were like he wanted them to be. They weren’t.

  “So when do you carry the most coin? Leaving the high-tone casinos? When the box man walks you out? I know you don’t do the major pickups, but you take the vig, don’t you?”

  I looked at him, rubbing my sore arms, my raw arms. Because I knew. Hell, normally it really wasn’t that much cash, and when it was, I had protection. But I knew damn well that she was going to be gone overnight on Friday and I’d be making double the betting rounds I normally did, the small track and the big one. It was more scratch than I usually carried and sure, it seemed like something they’d have a hard boy do, but she’d been burned before by crooked delivery boys. I was the only one she trusted to do it. It wasn’t thirty big ones—no one was going to let a 105-pound frail carry a roll like that—but it was enough to make a dent.

  He could see me thinking, weighing. He was trying to get a read on me, see which lever to pull to make the lights flash, make the cherries line up three in a row.

  “I mean, sugar, you gotta think about your future. Don’t you see? There’s sweets for you too. Down the line.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He smiled and cocked his head. “This arrangement’s a long game, like you said. They got two bean stalks on college basketball teams, another quarterback. I can set it up. You can bet solid the better part of the year and get yourself some fox furs, some chinchilla. I’d like to lay you out on a full-length sable, one with all the teeth still in it.”

  “What makes you think I want a piece of this?”

  He shrugged and smiled. But he didn’t say anything.

  I reached down for my shoes and slid them on.

  “I’m going for some cigarettes,” I said.

  His eyebrows lifted. “Okay. But ain’t that the fella’s line?”

  I could tell he was worried I wouldn’t come back. But he also seemed wired up, edgy, hopeful. He thought he had a line on me. Maybe he did.

  It was still early and as I walked, I was the only person in the world. All you could hear was the click of my metal-tipped heels on the pavement. It was just me and this. This thing. And I knew it had all been headed towards this from the minute she set her hooks in me, from the second I took the bit in my mouth, eager, hungry, ready.

  By the time I reached the newsstand four blocks away, the owner dragging open the rusty shutters, I knew I was going to do it. And it wasn’t the promise of bullion. It wasn’t even, or not just, Vic. Vic and the things he could do to me and the things I wanted to save him from. There was something else at the bottom of it. Something dark and swampy I couldn’t look at, couldn’t face. But it had to do with her. It had to do with her. What would it mean to try to take her on, beat her? What would it be like to smoke-and-mirror the queenpin herself?

  (And she had never opened herself to me. She had shown me what to do, how to do it, but she had never let the veil drop, the mask fall. If she had done that… if she had done that…)

  (And this too, wouldn’t it mean we’d be closer even than now, thick as blood, because it would bind us forever in some way? It would either be the secret thing, the only thing I would keep from her, or if she found out, it would be the thing that would bind us forever, like locking horns in battle, bound in blood.)

  I bought a pack of Chesterfields from the newsstand vendor. My hands shaking, he matched me and I smoked one on the spot. As he clipped the string off stacks of dailies, he glanced at me.

  “Rough night, honey?”

  “Had to make a big decision,” I replied.

  “Who’s the lucky fella?” He smiled, hands covered in newsprint.

  “Luck’s for suckers,” I said, letting the cigarette fall to the ground.

  Back at his place, his hand on my hip bone, my hip fast on the mattress—fuck me, who knew I was so easy? Who knew I’d pull a Judas the first chance I got?

  If I’d waited it out, if I’d been patient, bided my time, looking for just the right chance, then I could have done it right. I could have used all the lessons she taught me to plan it perfectly, like she would have. But that wasn’t what this was. It wasn’t about outsmarting her or about protecting myself. I had to do it fast because there was no time. I had to do it fast before I lost my nerve.

  “You can’t throw any money down on horses, Vic,” I said. “If they find out I got heisted, missed making my bets, and someone scored on the same races, then it’s all over for me, Vic. Do you see? They can connect the dots and it’s over. Tire iron to the head.”

  “Sure, I see, baby, sure,” he said, practically rubbing his hands. The wolf. The wolf but not like before. His eyes not yellow flares trained on me. No, in his head, he was standing at that roulette table, letting his chips roll across his fingers, watching the wheel whirring, everything in his body vibrating with its purr, with the clicking of the spinning ball, the other bettors holding their breath, leaning in, pressing on the polished wood at the table’s edge, the wood groaning as they squeezed it with their anxious fingers, nothing moving but the wheel, the ball, and a comet trail of cigarette smoke twisting up to the low, low ceiling.

  “There’s this rhythm,” he once told me. “Each dealer has his own, like a signature, no two alike. Every time they pick up the ball from the pocket, they do it the same way. Every time they spin it, it’s the same way, with the same go behind it. If you know the dealer, if you know him well enough, watch him close enough, well, the ball will always spin the same number of times and will land the same number of pockets away from the last spin. It becomes a song you know and you can sing along with it. You see, there’s ways to make it all work for you, babycakes. There are. You play like I do long enough, it’s going to pay off, the big gold dream.”

  He was every pit boss’s, every racetrack owner’s, every shark’s deepest dream come to life. He was going to talk himself into losing for the rest of his days. He was a fish, a pigeon. Might as well walk into the carpet joint with his pockets hanging out of his pants.

  Funny how it almost made me cry, it was so beautiful. Who could keep on believing like that? I’d never believed anything like that.

  “You have to promise me, Vic,” I said, and my hands were shaking. I knew I would be seeing her in an hour, taking her to the train station, and how could she not see it all over me? “You have to promise you’ll only bet on the football game. Nothing else. I hear you place bets at those tracks—”

  “Don’t worry, honey,” he said. “I’m playing by your rules. Cross my heart.”

  He was so calm, so pleased, so distracted, thinking not of me but of that big gold dream of his. Suddenly I wanted to smack him. I almost did. Instead, I blurted out, “She’ll never buy it. Don’t you see? My boss, she won’t believe it. I wouldn’t.”

  He smiled and took my arms in his hands, focused his eyes on me. “She will. She will. You just gotta make it look real for her. You gotta look like you were taken.”

  I looked at him and then I said it. I knew it fast and said it. “You’re going to have to put me in the hospital.”

  Before I picked her up, I had a vodka neat, then, in the same glass, a slug of Micrin mouthwash, neat. By the time I was driving her to the train station, my hands were still, my voice was steady. I matched her mask for mask. In my head, I’d talked myself into forgetting everything but doing my job. Pleasing her. Seeing her off.

  Just as we pulled into the station, she said, “What’s going on?”

  I felt something spring in my chest like a kick drum.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem relaxed,” she said, powdering her nose from a small tortoiseshell compact. “Figured you for more jumpy.”


  “Why should I be jumpy?” I said, trying not to suddenly sound jumpy.

  “Because, Little Miss Marker,” she said, snapping the compact shut, “when I’m heel-and-toeing it for a few days, you usually are.” She looked at me. “Don’t tell me, you’re all grown up now, kid?”

  There was a kind of warmth in her voice, not like anyone could notice it but me, but I could. I could hear it and it seeped into my ear like honey. I couldn’t see her eyes, not with those big sunglasses enclosing her face, narrowing her face into a kind of arrow’s head, her sharp chin the point. It was just a mask anyway. That face was just a mask. Listen to the voice, the voice is the thing. Not the usual slither, or jagged edges or grit clenched teeth. There was a warmth. I heard it, felt it.

  “Maybe I am grown up,” I said, trying not to smile too much, to make too much of it, to cause her to retreat. “Or getting closer.”

  “Off your knees at least,” she said, opening the car door and stepping out. “You’re off your knees at least, aren’t you?” she said as she slammed the door behind her and began walking away.

  I sat in the car for five minutes trying to figure that one out. Then I stopped trying.

  He didn’t pause a second before his fist came at me, a hard belt to the jaw that snapped my head against the wall with a nasty pop. I saw stars. I remember thinking, I figured this would be harder for him. It wasn’t hard at all. Then, before I knew it, his left came at me, swiveling my head the other way, cheekbone cracking against the metal door frame of the clubhouse. I thought I would be sick. I held my stomach with both hands. Everything was tingling and I was still standing and I felt everything everywhere.

  “Give me one more. Give me one more,” I whispered, chin raised, face hot, whole body shuddering. He paused, gave his brow a crinkle of worry, but for less than a second, then let me have it. That was the one that knocked me out.