Amy wants to discuss this with her mother. But Raven doesn’t have the attention span. They crawl through a tunnel, dust settling across her forehead like another coating of adobe or clay, a decorative filigree. They stand on the rim of the canyon, their shoulders brushing. It begins to rain; thunder echoes off rock and the ground shakes. It’s like being in a shooting range.
Raven is out of breath. “It’s the ancient ones talking,” she manages.
“Christ,” Amy says. “You’ll end up a tour guide.”
“Big Red’s a guide in Bandolier. He’s got a uniform and a pension,” Raven tells her with a rare edge. Is she jealous?
Amy touches the emergency pint of vodka inside the rain poncho her mother handed her. When she isn’t watching, Amy finishes the bottle.
“You don’t have to drink like this,” Raven said. “Pot is easier on the liver. And it’s more enlightening.”
In a deserted campground, they walk in mud up to their calves. Raven is wearing a stylish leather coat. It simply materialized. It’s like that with her mother, the costume changes, the inexplicable appearance of accessories, the silver belt pulled from a bag, the mantilla that’s both a veil and shawl. Amy is shivering.
“West and south,” Raven decides. “The first decent hotel where it’s hot.”
Gallup is a few disappointing blocks of pawnshops and liquor stores that seem to be lingering posthumously. A community center with windows broken, and a tennis court with the pavement ripped. The net has been hacked up with knives. She imagines playing on the court, bits of glass making her footing slippery. She could fall, sprain an ankle, get cut. But that scenario is too simple. The wound she’s searching for, what she’s stalking, is more profound and permanent.
“The whole infrastructure is going,” Amy notes, glancing at the gutted swimming pool, the brown lawn laced with glass. “It’s not just the cities.”
“My infrastructure is going. But government pills and AA aren’t my answer.” Raven stops the car. There is a pause.
“Listen, I had boyfriends,” her mother begins, almost whispering. “When you were 10, I was the same age you are now. But nobody laid a finger on you, Amethyst. You are my jewel. Everybody treated you right. I made sure.”
Late afternoon is a chasm of shimmering crimson that seems vaguely Egyptian. Raven gets out of the car and hands her the keys. “Your turn,” she says. “Surprise me.”
Amy drives west across desert. She stops in a liquor store, buys four pints of vodka and hides them. She drinks and drives until Raven wakes up, moaning. They’re almost across Arizona.
“What’s this?” Raven asks, mildly interested. She rubs her eyes, can’t find her eyeglasses and opens her map. She examines it, concentrating. The map is upside down.
“Laughlin. It’s a déclassé Vegas on the Arizona-California-Nevada border. Feeds off the retirement dollar. It’s nickel and dime all the way. They let them park their trailers free. Hope they’ll toss a quarter in a slot machine on the way to the john. It’s the collapse of western civilization. The final capitalist terminal. You can watch the empire fall here. Come on. We’ll love it.” Amy is incredibly festive.
She pauses in the oasis of lobby surrounded by casinos. They’re cavernous. They’re the magic caves where Ali Baba and the 40 thieves hid their gold goblets and chests of coins and rubies.
It’s oddly familiar, the assault of neon on walls, the leaden clinking machines and spinning wheels. Then the islands of green felt of card and dice tables. She understands this electric palette. The neon ceiling is like a cathedral. The neon-draped walls are layered in birthday cake pink and yellow icing. Come on. Spend a buck. It’s a holiday.
Here are men in cowboy hats and boots with spurs who recently won a minor event at a second tier rodeo. They have the prize money in their socks. And men who just buried their wives and have ten thousand insurance dollars in their sports jacket pockets. This is what they got for their 30 years, five of it spent going to and from chemo. The money is in a roll with a rubber band around it like another type of ring. This time, they’ll marry fortune.
Here are women who just sold their mothers’ wedding rings for four hundred dollars, their divorced husband’s bass boat and tool set. Nearly three grand in total. They wear flower print cotton dresses, and acres of pink and what might be bathrobes. They sit on stools, considering each quarter with deliberation, calculating their possibilities and counting their change. They extract one dime at a time, rationing themselves, and waiting for the right second, the anointed juncture, to spring forward and pull the lever.
Everyone moves in exaggerated slow motion through the neon drifting from the ceiling and sliding off the slot machines, making the air thicken like cornstarch. All carry coins in plastic cups the size of ice cream sodas, faces devoid of expression. Their limbs are stiff, arthritic. They look jetlagged and confused. They look like they need wheelchairs and want to go home.
Women on social security in mini skirts and fishnet stockings thread their way between the mock islands, carrying trays of free drinks. Only the dealers are swift, flipping out cards like whirling dervishes. Here come the royals. You’ve barely added up your hand and they’re already reaching across felt and raking the chips back in.
Bells are the punctuation, the music of the casino. Bells signaling a payoff and the impending cascade of nickels and dimes. Bells announcing the start of a new keno game. These bells don’t ring with the authority and purpose of churches. Or the promise of thrill like ferry and carnival bells. They don’t mark the hour. They’re designed to keep you from the walking coma you suspect you’re in. They’re like alarm clocks. Then the blast like a siren that doesn’t require translation. Jackpot.
This is the new American score, Amy thinks. It’s not a house, forty acres with a pond and mule and some stray grass to barbeque on anymore. Medicare is just a word, like democracy and justice. This is the global world of the dwarf dollar and the failure of gods and tradition and language itself. There’s been a mass reduction. Even fantasy is truncated, amputated, stuck in a box in the basement. In this new century, we just want one good weekend.
They have a suite on the 17th floor with a view of the Dead Mountains, a swath of the Mojave, and the whip-thin blue chalk line of the Colorado River. Millions of women and men are also standing at windows, at this precise instant, realizing their lives are nothing they thought they would be. Sun is a slap across their mouths.
Amy Gold feels a rising excitement as they ride the elevator back to the lobby. She listens to bells from slot machines and the constant tumbling nickels flowing into steel shells suggesting mouths. Of course, this is what you hear at the end of the world. It isn’t a whimper after all. It has nothing to do with anything human. It’s the sound of symbols in motion. It’s the sound of tin.
Raven is changing a ten-dollar bill for a foot-high plastic cup of quarters. She’s changed her clothes, too. It must be Act 2. She’s wearing a maroon caftan encrusted with tiny beads that sparkle and gold high heels. She has a canary yellow sash around her waist, bangles on both wrists and oversized sunglasses with gold frames. Two old men stare at her.
Amy hasn’t had the right accessories for any of the towns or situations of her life. In the lobby of the River’s End in Laughlin, Amy regrets the silver she didn’t buy in Aspen. And the squash blossom in Taos. She should have taken the birthday beads she was offered by a laughing woman on peyote. Or even a turquoise bracelet from a pawnshop in Flagstaff where she saw thousands in rows in display cases. The Navajo nation was divesting itself of its semi-precious stones for beer and crack and it was horrifying. She didn’t want any of it, not even for free.