Making himself presentable Mr Oakenhurst went, after half-an-hour, to join an acoustic game in a corner of the hotel’s bar, but after a few minutes he grew bored and deliberately let the other players win back most of their stakes, keeping five piles noires as payment for his time. On his way to his cabin he saw a movement high up where the fronds were thinnest and the moonlight was turned to pale jade, some sort of owl. Its eyes were huge and full of hope.
Sam Oakenhurst’s chamber was clean, well kept, though the furniture was old and the bedding darned. A useless V-cabinet stood in the comer. Converted to hold magazines, it dispensed them in return for a few pennies. The magazines were hand-coloured, crudely stencilled versions of old-time V programmes. Mr Oakenhurst put in the coins and the screen opened to offer him a selection.
They were chiefly magazines detailing the escapades of various unfamiliar heroes and heroines - The Merchant Venturer, Pearl Peru - Captain Billy Bob Begg’s Famous Chaos Engineers - Karl Kapital - Professor Pop - Fearless Frank Force - Bullybop - Corporal Pork - violently coloured attempts to reproduce the interactive video melodramas some addicts still enjoyed at the Terminal Café. All the characters seemed engaged in perpetual war between Plurality and Singularity for the domination of a territory (possibly philosophical) called the Second Ether. These unlikely events were represented as fact. The gambler, finding their enigmatic vocabularies and queer storylines too cryptic, replaced them in the dispenser, blew out his lamp and slept, dreaming a familiar dream.
(He had talked to Jack Karaquazian when they were still in New Orleans. He had asked his friend if he would care if he spoke of something that was on his mind.
“Not at all,” the Egyptian had said.
I had this dream, said Sam Oakenhurst. I was standing on this cliff with a pack of dogs and killer blankeys at my back and nothing but rocks and ocean far below and nowhere to go but down when suddenly out of the blue this golden limo pulls up in the air right where I’m standing on the edge and the driver’s eye-balling me. She’s a beautiful woman, real elegant, and she says “Hop in, Sam. Where do you want to go?”
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“Any place you like,” she says.
“Well,” I say, “I guess in that case I’ll stick here and take my chances.”
“Please yourself,” she says and she’s ready to start up when I say “Hey, what’s your name, lady?”
“Luck,” she says, puts the car in gear and vanishes. I turn around and the dogs and the men are gone. What do you make of that, Jack?
“Well,” said Jack Karaquazian after some considerable thought, “I guess it means that luck is luck. That’s all.”
“I guess so,” said Mr Oakenhurst. “Well, goodnight, Jack.”
Next morning they played a game of Joli Jean before breakfast and talked about going up to the Frees.)
He had the dream again, exactly as before, but this time he stepped into the limo.
(Jack Karaquazian kept a room above the main casino of the Terminal Café. You could feel the zee coming up through the floor. The room was filled with shadows and flames, ragged holes of verdigris and kidney. “It’s home,” he had said.)
3. ERASE UNA VEZ EN LA OUESTE
‘I HAD A dream,’ says Precious Mary as she moves against Sam Oakenhurst’s arm. ‘I dreamed I was lying in this field of silver poppies looking up at the moon. I stretched my arms and legs wide and the Moon Goddess smiled. She had a wonderful round pale oriental face like a Buddha. Is that a Buddhess, Sam? And she came down from the midnight blue and pursed her silver lips and she sucked my pussy, Sam, like nobody but you.’ She grins and laughs and slaps at him in his flattered embarrassment.
They had been here at Ambry’s for almost a month. Precious Mary was on her way to join a closed order in Laredo. She collected mosquitoes and her little clear envelopes were full of the different types, including the hybrids. Her pride was a great dragon mosquito, rainbow carapace over two inches long, able to drain a small rodent dry of blood in less than a minute. ‘They thought it carried A,’ she said. ‘But now they ain’t so sure.’
She had cornrows beaded with tiny precious stones - emeralds, rubies, sapphires, diamonds - large green eyes, a refined Watutsi face. She wore a silk shift which swam on the blackness of her skin like milk over marble. Her head, she said, was worth a million guineas, but her body was priceless. She lived, like everyone in De Quincey, at Ambry’s big Gothic timber house just by the jetty which jutted over the flat sheen of a lake revealed below the surrounding yellow and black mist. The lake was never entirely at rest. Shapes just under the surface were mysterious and alarming. Every once in a while a tiny spot of colour would float by. ‘They find big ones out there and milk them,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing but rigs once you get twenty kays over that horizon.’ She pointed to the north. ‘Do you believe in God, Sam?’
Mr Oakenhurst admitted that he did.
‘You believe in a just God, Sam?’
‘I believe God deals you a fair hand.’ He became thoughtful. ‘What you do with it after that is a question of luck and judgement both. And luck is what other people are making of their hands. It’s a complicated game, it seems to me, Mary. Only a few of us are willing to accept the kind of odds it offers. But what else can you do? This is reality, I think. I look at the game. I work out the odds. And then I decide if I want to play or not. I hope I’m doing no more or less with my mind and time than God expects of me.’
‘You’re crazy,’ she said.
That was the last Sam Oakenhurst and Precious Mary ever spoke of religion.
In Milton he had lost his horse to a tall pile broker from Natchez who had proved to be so much better than the table’s other partners that Mr Oakenhurst suspected him of being a secret professional. But he had played a fair game. The broker let Sam take his place on the coach to De Quincey. That trip to the lake shore had been Mr Oakenhurst’s first real experience of the practical realities of the Free States, where whites were supposed to be his equals. He found it awkward to be travelling in a horse-drawn coach with a black man driving and a white man riding inside. On the seat across from him the “bianco” showed no similar embarrassment and chatted amiably on the tandem subjects of fluke attractors and the availability of piles noires. Mr Oakenhurst did his best to converse without seeming to condescend, but he was still suffering from a strong desire to stare in wonder at this educated and self-confident whitey much as one would regard a clever circus animal. His name was Peewee Wilson and he had owned property up in Haute County, he said, until it had popped one morning, all of a piece, and left him “wiv a weird damned hole coloured like dirty bottly-glass an’ radiatin’ coldness so damned bad ah’d felt mahse’f chillered to mah soul.” He had moved his wife and kids to his sister in San Diego and was on his way to join them. He had never been to Biloxi (“Ah have not chosered vat pilgrimage, sah, as yet.”) but was eager to hear Mr Oakenhurst’s account of it and the jugador loved to tell a tale.
So the time had passed pleasantly enough between Milton and De Quincey. Peewee informed Mr Oakenhurst about the famous Colossus of Tarzana, one of the wonders of their new world - a huge figure some two hundred feet high and apparently consisting of living flame which gave off a soft heat filling most observers with a sense of calm and well-being. A tent town had grown around the feet of the Colossus, populated by those who had become hooked on the phenomenon’s influence.