I’ve taken to sleeping in the game room, and I do so in a shimmery emerald chemise. I swing my legs out of bed, and over green silk, I pull on a thick jersey and jeans, then start to lace my duck boots.
Berlin takes in what remains of his game room. There’s been no gambling down here in the year since they made the riverboat casinos legal, and though he’s pretty much accepted that his past life is over, he still calls it his game room. Here he was once the top pit boss in all south Louisiana, but tonight he just shakes his head at the red-foil wallpaper and boot-blacked windows of a room that now reeks of Petit-Chou, the stupid perfume I’ve armed myself with in an effort to snare Randy.
Sobriety and poverty have made my father newly interested in my affairs. From nowhere, he says, “For God’s sake, Auddie, put on a bra.”
“What? I’m wearing a sweatshirt.”
“We’re going flying. There’s a lot of G forces involved, stuff you don’t even know about.” Berlin acts all pissed, but his voice is closer to a whisper. He’d be better off crashing another plane than waking up Mom, who’s been preparing the house nonstop since we got a tip that we might finally be served a warrant this week.
“I think they mentioned gravity to us in school, Dad.”
“And don’t go rolling your dang eyes.”
I silently mouth yes sir.
He walks away at this and starts fumbling with one of the slot machines we have to ditch before the raid. He grabs a silver dollar off the bar and takes a pull. Seven Bar Seven.
He taps another silver dollar on the bar, then looks at me. “So, am I going to meet this boy before he points a gun at me on Sunday?”
I come up beside Berlin, lean against the poker pit railing. I take a dollar and spin, pulling Bell Cherry Cherry. The slot machines are old, from Cuba, with burnished silver casings and hand-painted tumblers — green stars, black bars, crackled gold bells. Berlin’s probably going to bury them tomorrow, and I don’t know how I’m going to sleep without them in quiet formation around me.
“First of all,” I tell him, pulling again, “the ATF won’t even let Randy touch a gun yet, and second, I invited him to our fish fry tonight. You’ll like him.”
Berlin looks away, then meets my eyes, meaning maybe he’ll like Randy and maybe he won’t, meaning he’s not going to speak to the possibility yet.
As the tumblers stop, three silver horseshoes align, sending a brief stream of Kennedy dollars into the pewter hopper below. But this is not luck. Our family has gotten where it is in this world by knowing the future. In back of each machine, below the scrollwork, is a little screw that adjusts how much it pays out.
“Couldn’t we keep one of them?”
He grunts. “Hell,” he says, turning. “Let’s just fly.”
We make our way through the abandoned blackjack and booray tables toward the garage, half-shielding our eyes from what is an all-too-bright past. Except for my bed, it still feels like a bayou version of Vegas in here: fleur-de-lis carpet, wet bar, twin ice machines, a row of banker’s lamps, and a brass smoker’s companion that now holds the keys to the ’69 Super Sport I’ll drive with abandon after Randy agrees to escort me to the Sadie Hawkins dance Saturday night.
“I figure they’ll come in through there,” Berlin says, nodding as we pass the double side doors that lead out to the back parking lot.
I picture a wave of ATF agents and Gaming Commissioners busting through my bedroom door with bright lights and loudspeakers in a raid no one’s supposed to know about. And of course, bringing up the rear, in black body armor, will be Randy. He’s the captain of his JROTC unit at school, but he’s really into the ATF. They have a program called Future ATF that lets you do tons of ride alongs until you pass your entrance exams.
I come up and screw with Dad’s hair, which pisses him off, though he’s kind of a sucker for it. “You’re still the king,” I tell him. “You’re the Jughead of Berlin.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says.
In the garage, I peel back the car cover to check out the Super Sport while Berlin hunts for his aviator glasses through engine parts strewn across oily workbenches. Though he’s sold his cargo planes, it’s hard to imagine they’ll run without all these pieces left behind. He’s been rounding up his tools because he starts as a mechanic for Grumman at Chenault Airfield next week, going to work for the first time since he left the air force ten years ago.
The Super Sport’s paint job, under the droplights, is beyond black. It’s like you spread black jelly across the Chevy’s curves. I crouch to stare into the fenders, and they are almost teary with it. When you reach to touch, you don’t even know where the car will begin, the paint’s that deep, and this girl reflected in the black enamel looks a little older, a solid seventeen, with force and direction. This is the girl Randy’s after, and I imagine him riding shotgun as they race down parish back roads, his surplus Airborne boots on the Super Sport’s dash, her wrist brushing his thigh as she shifts for fourth.
It’s like cayenne in Lycra pants, this thought, and I have to look away from the dark mirror of the quarter panel. Daydreaming like this is what screwed up my spirit drill last night at the wrestling meet. Just the sight of Randy warming up in his blue-and-silver Fighting Catfish tanksuit. Beyond sexy. Those leather mat booties, and that headgear they wear? He had me. I mean, he was practicing hammerlocks.
I come up and lean against the workbench. Mixed with jet engine bearings and platinum spark plugs are superblue feathers, left from when our garage was filled with blue hyacinth macaws, the rarest birds on earth. Berlin’s old air force crash pack is piled among the junk. I run my hands over its black nylon, picture my father’s cargo jet cutting out over Bulgaria or something. Inside are bandages, fishhooks, a crusty bottle of iodine. The pack smells like old mosquito repellent, which somehow makes me think of Randy.
“So, did they give you suicide pills in case the Russians shot you down?”
“Suicide pills?” He shakes his head. “Who would put suicide pills in a survival kit?”
“Just asking,” I say.
“Look,” he says. “The closest I came to the enemy was shooting white russians at thirty thousand feet while airlifting New Year’s vodka to all the boonie NATO outposts.”
I strap the crash pack over my shoulder, and it feels pretty tough.
Berlin finds his flying glasses. He rubs the yellow lenses with a shop towel, then holds them up to the work lights, okays them.
“So this raid,” I say. “It’s like a sure thing, right?”
“We’ll go stay at Aunt Clara’s a while.”
“What’s a while, a week?”
“You just worry about school,” he tells me. “Worry about learning your Spirit Squad routines, about not letting the other girls down.”
“Those girls? They’re so fake. Those are the girls who wrote ‘stay the same, never change’ on my cast when my arm got broke. What’s that supposed to mean? All they care about is Juniors Rule! And crap like that.”
Berlin walks to the sink to wash his oily hands. Talk of my arm usually shuts him up, but not today. “Seems to me that if you cared a little more about juniors ruling, your precious Randy wouldn’t have lost his wrestling match last night,” he says and reaches for some Fosforpuro, a Mexican soap that’s illegal here because it’s bad for the environment. Totally ignoring me, he starts lathering his hands.