A wall of drawers rose in the hallway by the front door and she took an old wooden footlocker from one of them.
It looked like a pirate chest, and it had been dented and scarred when her mother passed it down to her when she was six, in Williston, North Dakota.
Just now it reminded her of Phil Broker, who’d become a sort of pirate.
She carried it into the living room and placed it on the floor, where the tree should go, in front of the broad bay windows. Through the side panel of the window she could see the tree, out in the cold, abandoned on the cobbles. The room was boxed by horrible Prussian blue wallpaper.
Gothic rockets in a turgid sea. She had taken her pills and papered the walls with signals of distress.
She sat down on the shiny hardwood planks, opened the trunk and removed a cardboard box. Inside, stacked with care, were tiny handmade Christmas tree decorations that fit in the palm of her hand.
The pills she had taken for the last six months had magically dried her tears. Now, in the absence of the antidepressants, the vast cloud of accumulated tears condensed in her head and began to drizzle. Hot wet streaks burned down her cheeks.
This is really crazy, Caren. Thoughts wouldn’t balance on her head. They fell off. A jumble of blocks.
With difficulty, she placed them in order. She. And her first husband. Made the decorations. Up north, on their first vacation. The year they were married. In a storm of sawdust, delicate designs had come from Phil’s rough hands like intricate charms. Hers incorporated beads, fabric and feathers.
Arts and crafts class.
Phil, the rustic, turned out diminutive stars, moons, suns, trees and animals on his band saw. She made angels. She selected one of the awkward angels and placed it on a wide plank called a king board. She had learned about king boards from Phil. In colonial times the best lumber went back to England, and it was illegal for a colonist to own a “king board.” The crafty Americans used the wide boards as flooring in their attics where the redcoats didn’t inspect.
Her angel, with its rosy cheeks and misshapen wings, was meant to hang and not to stand, so it toppled over on the king board.
The sound of a roaring crowd carried up the stairwell from the basement. Tapes of old college games. Keith, the Minnesota Gopher quarterback, was throwing touchdowns down in the dark. Keith would never find the time to make a tree decoration. But, unlike Phil, he could plan a Christmas party down to the last detail that the mayor of St. Paul would attend.
Not this year.
A telephone was the only other occupant of this hollow room, and it coiled on the floor like a plastic tapeworm. That phone weighed fourteen years of living. That’s how THE BIG LAW/33
long it had been since she’d left Phil Broker, to marry Keith Angland, who had once been Phil’s partner and then, his boss. She’d deserted Phil because he wasn’t going anywhere and sure-footed Keith was.
She stared at the phone and squeezed an angel in her right hand and made a wish that the phone would ring. That Phil would call. That he would come and give her some help.
He’d come if he really knew. But for now, because she had been vague, he wouldn’t trespass. She’d been vague because she kept hoping Keith would pull it out of the hat at the last minute. Do one of his famous scrambles.
But the federal building story changed all that.
She didn’t trust anyone Keith worked with. There was too much money involved. So it had to be Phil. He’d been off the job for two years. Independent now. And if she’d missed something, he would spot it. So she’d have to take what she had to Phil. And when the time came, let him-as they quaintly put it-drop the dime.
He was up there, alone with his baby, while his damn Amazon child bride was off playing St. Joan in Bosnia.
God. Edgy Phil with a kid. Round with paternity, padded with much laughter. She tried to imagine him smiling. She bet he’d gained weight.
She knew the baby was a girl-Caren flinched as her muscles curved in and stabbed her, in both breasts and in her belly. Her imagination ambushed her with a detailed blueprint of the flawed eggs lined up in her ovaries, racks of them, drawing lots to see who would take the Kamikaze trip down the red rapids this month.
Dammit. Leaving that message was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. Breaking the vows. Going outside her marriage. No, it was just the first step in the hardest thing.
It was going to get much harder.
Something had to be done about Keith.
She shut her eyes and prayed: Please call. Don’t make me do this alone.
7
Going west on U.S. 94, the automatic pilot grabbed the wheel. Tom resisted the first pull, steered straight. The next tug came at the southbound exit for U.S. 494. He beat that one, too. Ten minutes later, as the spire of the state capitol marked the horizon, the impulse snuggled up again. This time, seduction was fast and total; he drove past the downtown St. Paul exits and continued west on 94 until it branched and he took 35E south. The Rabbit knew the way.
Get off on County Road 42, turn west, and then it was eight miles to the Mystic Lake Casino.
Working through the turns, his pulse quickened: Eagan and Prior Lake-the crossroads. Casino to the left. Racetrack to the right. He turned left, passed the frost-rimmed rock-landscaped entrance to the “Wilds” golf course. A few miles later, the casino rose like a squashed modernist wigwam from a sea of parked cars.
He turned into the lot, left the rusting VW, squared his slumped shoulders and walked through the tinted glass doors.
Mystic Lake was roomy and clean, without the sweaty opium den feel of smaller casinos. Showroom bright, a cherry Acura gleamed on a dais. Win me. He inhaled the signature incense of cigarette smoke entwined with the loopy rush of calliope music spiraling off the slots.
With childlike faith, he let it all surround him like the pulsating heart of an immense plastic toy. It reminded Tom of his deceased mother’s living room in Bayport, Minnesota, in the shadow of Stillwater Prison, where his dad had worked as a guard. After Dad died, she’d draw the curtains and re-cline like a silent movie star on the couch in front of the TV, sucking on Winstons that protruded from a slim cigarette holder. Wheel of Fortune flickered on the screen. The volume was turned all the way up.
Mom died before Minnesota legalized gambling. Her one trip to Vegas with her chain-smoking girlfriends was her preview of heaven.
All he had was the two twenties he’d lifted from Barb Luct.
Start small. Play his way up to the blackjack tables. Hell, go to the nickel machines if he had to.
Just show me some magic.
When his stake was minimal, he always started on the same machine, an Atronic game scrolled with bright symbols of heraldry and knights in armor. A bank of them nested between quarter keno and across from a row of deuces wild poker. Camelot combined interactive video with the slam-bam spin of a slot. Three pay lines rotated icons on the drum.
Shields, castles, crenelated pennants, number sevens, battle-axes crossed on shields; the usual arcana of the one-armed bandit. But there were also progressive symbols; when an archery target appeared on one line the play moved to a new screen on which two knights squared off in an archery contest.
Choose left or right.
Two helmets on one line moved the play to a jousting tournament.
Three swords in a row summoned the test of Excalibur and the stone.
Blackjack was cold sober business. You had to count. You had to mind the rules. But this game, with its colorful marquee of castles and armor, took him back to the realm of childhood wishes. He stepped up to a machine like a knight errant confronting a squat Sphinx.
Am I worthy. Judge me. If he pulled the sword from the stone on his first pass Caren Angland would call him up. He would write the biggest story of his life, and they’d have to take him back on general assignment.