“Wylie’s sister,” he finally said.
I sighed. “Yes,” I admitted.
“You look like him.”
I had nothing to say to this. Angus sat down on the corner of the desk, next to a stapler and a beige rotary telephone. The office had gray cement walls and no windows.
“Scrawny. Same color hair. How’d you get involved with this guy?” Gerald cocked his head in Angus’s direction.
“Gerald,” Angus said.
“I was looking for Wylie,” I said.
“Did you find him?”
“Yeah, I found him.”
“But now you’re hanging around with this guy here.”
“I guess so.”
“Well,” Angus said, “show me what you need done.”
“Do you gamble?” Gerald said to me, ignoring him.
“Excuse me?”
“Blackjack, slots, craps, roulette.”
“Not really,” I said.
Gerald reached into a desk drawer, pulled out several rolls of quarters, and held them out to me. “Give it a whirl,” he said, “while I put this fellow to work.”
I felt dismissed. “Thanks,” I said.
Back in the gaming room, I watched people playing the slots. A woman in a red sweatsuit got up from her seat and wagged her chin in my direction. “I’m going to the ladies’,” she told me. “You can have it.”
I played for a while, and there was a rhythm to the clicking of the machine and the movements of the levers, a consonance and ringing, that I imagined was as addictive as the thought of winning or losing. Apples, oranges, cherries, apples, oranges, cherries. The wild card slot. I couldn’t ever get a match, and lost all of Gerald’s money in a matter of minutes. Since it was going back to him anyway, I wasn’t too concerned. The people around me worked on their games as if in a trance, hunched over machines or tables, hardly speaking, every so often sipping from vat-sized cups of Coke. A wailing country song halted mid-lament, and “Night and Day” came on.
It was noon, and I hadn’t eaten, but there was no food at the casino. Outside, the heat was malicious and extreme, and the wind blew a blinding dust into my face as I trudged up the road to the gas station. The girl behind the register looked no older than thirteen, and she handled each transaction with superb speed, her fingers flying as she counted back the change for lottery tickets and cigarettes. There were wizened burritos baking under the light of a heating element, and some crusty yellow popcorn that didn’t look much better. I settled for a bag of pretzels and a soda, then sat down on the shaded curb outside.
It occurred to me that Angus could easily drive off and leave me here, that in fact I knew very little about him, that I didn’t have enough money to call a cab, that there weren’t any cabs around here anyway.
Trucks barreled down the road, their grilles and fenders shining in the sun.
A truck pulling a horse trailer parked at the pumps in front of me, and a stocky, dark-haired driver looked me up and down before heading inside. From the trailer came sounds of chewing and sneezing, so I went around the back to look. At least ten goats were packed tight in there, and they stared back at me and bleated their complaints.
The door to the shop opened, and the driver stuck his head out. “What you want there, lady?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just curious.”
I took this as a sign to head back to the casino, the blown grit pelting my bare legs. I could see Angus, unmistakable in his white coveralls, standing on the naked brown land behind the building talking to Gerald, who kept gesturing toward the south. Angus was nodding, his hands on his hips, and when he saw me he grinned. Gerald, on the other hand, turned around and looked significantly less happy to see me.
“Hello,” I said. “What’s going on back here?”
“Just finishing up,” Angus said. His coveralls were spotless.
“I don’t know a lot about plumbing,” I said, “but you’re not even dirty.”
“Easy jobs today,” Gerald said. For the first time, he smiled, and his whole face changed; behind his thick glasses, his brown eyes looked suddenly warm. “A few leaky faucets is all.”
“Even so,” I said.
“I’m like a tightrope walker,” Angus said, “ and the coveralls are my net. I have them just in case, but I never fall.”
“Hah. He’s a kidder, this guy,” Gerald said to me. “I’ve seen him plenty grimy, don’t you worry.”
“So did you win us a million dollars?”
“I lost everything,” I said. “I had to sell the van.”
“Glad to hear it,” Angus said. He put one arm around my shoulder and extended the other to Gerald, who shook it. “We’ll be off.”
We walked back through the casino, Angus carrying a toolbox this time, waving to all and sundry. Most people ignored him but a few, including the woman who’d given up her slot machine for me, glanced up and smiled. She had returned to the same machine, and there was a bucket full of quarters in her lap, probably all the money I’d put into it. She saw me looking at the bucket and winked.
As we got into the van, I was still trying to figure out what Angus had been doing there. “How long have you known Gerald, anyway?” I said.
He shrugged. “Nobody really knows Gerald Lobachevski,” he said. “I just work for him every once in a while.”
“What kind of name is Lobachevski, anyway?”
Angus started the van. “His father was some Russian anthropologist — pretty famous, supposedly. Came to New Mexico to do research at a pueblo and had a little romance. He wound up leaving again before Gerald was born. I don’t think Gerald ever even met the man, but he likes having the name. He likes to be different from everybody else.”
I was going to ask more questions, but became distracted when I realized that instead of turning back toward town, Angus was driving north.
“Aren’t we going back?” I said.
“Now why would we do that?” he said, and winked. Then he turned up the music, which was no longer Sinatra but something classical I didn’t recognize.
“Because we’re in the middle of nowhere?”
“I wish that were true,” he said. “But it’s not.”
The landscape changed from brown to red, with green pine trees unfurling their branches. We were in the mountains now, and I rolled down the windows to let in the cool air. There were no houses, no towns, no nothing. It looked like nowhere to me.
He turned onto a dirt road and the van shuddered in its ruts. I looked at his freckled profile. He was leaning his head on his left hand, his elbow propped against the window, and looked calmer than I’d ever seen him.
He parked deep in the woods, the trees thick and tall, and what sunlight reached the ground beneath them was filtered thin. Angus got out, came around to my side, and opened the door. For some reason he was carrying his box of tools and for a second, looming there in his absurdly clean outfit, he looked like an undeniable threat.
“Aren’t you getting out?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you going to molest me or something?”
“Excuse me,” Angus said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I believe you’ve already molested me. More than once. Could you get out now, please?”
“It’s just that I associate being alone in the woods with, like, horror movies.”
“That’s both sad and ridiculous,” he said.
I climbed out and followed him through the woods into a small clearing, where he set the toolbox down. My sandals were full of pine needles and dirt. Birds were chatting away in the trees. There was something weird about the place, and it took me a second to realize what it was. “It’s cool up here,” I said. “Much, much cooler.”