Here along the Sioux, I saw as the bus carried us into Riverside in a bubble of air-conditioned artificial silence, Sam Clemens would have truly felt at home. Here was a river town with a Tom Sawyer feel, sunny and muggy and lazy, whose silence continued after we’d stepped out into the heat, life in general so quiet the flies were audible.
The bus stopped before a tobacco-and-fireworks stand run by two women decked in turquoise and wearing buckskin gowns and beaded headbands. Nearby several longhaired Indian men stood around talking, in jeans and boots and checkered shirts with the tails hanging out. Two of them clutched at one another, empty-eyed and drunk, waltzing together with such languor it took a minute to understand they were fighting. The Old Highway kept on across the river and quickly out of town, intersecting the main street and the weedy swatch of railroad right-of-way paralleling it. There were two casinos, each with its nightclub and restaurant, one with a small motel. Otherwise the town seemed built of service stations, hardware stores, lumber yards.
Vince urged me to come to his favored casino, the one closer to the water. By this time I could see he’d attached himself to me, and I went along.
Near the river the air felt even wetter and heavier. There were budding willow trees, and somewhere loud cicadas. The waterfront smelled of agricultural chemicals but also of something sweet and strangely familiar, like cotton candy. Joined as it was to the Mississippi, the river reached a finger of the South into the region, while the casinos, one russet, one sky blue, both covered with murals depicting empty arid desert scenes, and Vince’s with a tall eagle-topped Styrofoam totem pole, labored to produce a Western flavor.
Smokey Henderson’s trio was in fact playing in town, and right here at Vince’s gambling spot. According to the poster just inside the tavern’s entrance, they didn’t strike up until the evening. Of course I’d known this but hadn’t consciously considered it. I hadn’t asked about return buses, either. I think I really intended to stay overnight, drinking and gambling to the detriment of my health and finances. Excessively, in other words. I couldn’t expect to find much to distract me until I started. Why should I? Why should anything be going on in the sunny lifeless afternoon, why would there be any attempt to entertain these retirees interested only in killing the most time with the least number of quarters? But apparently something was happening inside, past the barroom where Vince and I sat. A half-dozen young women had assembled in a clump at the back of the large room, and a couple more were just coming from the darker recesses, the entrance to a showroom with a stage. “You ain’t getting me back there to watch little girls shake their pussies,” Vince told the bartender, taking me by the arm and sitting me on a bar stool beside him. “Naked girls used to make me howl, but now they just give me a serious dose of heartache. Ask me what my favorite pastime is and I’ll tell you: My favorite pastime is blackjack. I’m too fat and I’m too old.”
Vince ordered vodka. I had a club soda. From the showroom came disco music with a booming bass and a crisp piercing treble. Apparently, I gathered as he and the bartender discussed it, an amateur striptease contest was in full swing. The several young women around the place may have been amateurs, but they looked like professional strippers on break in their silken dressing gowns, kissing their cigarettes so as not to endanger their lipstick, guiding their gestures so as to protect their long false nails.
The blipping of video gambling games underlay everything. To one side we had the entrance to the dance competition, and on our right the barroom gave way to an acre of space ranked with electronic slot machines. I saw no crap tables, no roulette, only these instruments sounding like young waterfowl. Vince assured me they kept three tables in the back where live blackjack was played.
As soon as we had our drinks in hand, Vince, talking over his shoulder the whole time, led me into the back room toward the dancing in which he’d claimed to have no interest. He stood well under six feet, but he had tremendous mass and solidity and moved like an ocean liner among the small tables. Just following his silhouette in the near-dark I had the impression that all of his life whatever he’d approached had given way, that if he chose to keep walking now he would explode, if very very slowly, right out through the opposite wall. He got to a vacant table and sat with his back to the stage, where a woman in a thong and nothing else shook her hips and raised her arms and wobbled her breasts. “Skin to win!” somebody shouted, and others took it up, but the loud canned accompaniment stopped abruptly and she danced offstage smiling and bowing.
During the next ten minutes two more women came out heavily clothed and got down pretty quickly to their bare chests and G-strings. Meanwhile Vince kept on in a voice not loud and clear but certainly audible. Lots of his acquaintances, he seemed to be saying, had an inexplicable natural knack for gambling. “Or my brother. Take him. The sonofabitch bastard is just plain dumb-lucky. What can I say? Some people. If he buys a lottery ticket, it’s gonna hit. Not the big hit, but just enough to where, I mean, he’ll come home with twenty tickets and a six-pack and scratch off enough of them ten-dollar jobbies to drink for the next week. Then he’ll sit around stupid drunk on three beers and say such ridiculous stuff I just wanna drop the sonofabitch. I mean just slap him till his eyes bleed. I mean, the question has to be answered: How long can two guys, two grown-ups, live in one single trailer? It was Mom’s, and she left it to him, at least that’s the way the will was written, but it’s mine just as equally, I think he understands that. Anyway, the point is,” Vince said, “mankind was not bred for the close confines. You can get trained to it, but one day you might just shoot somebody. Oh sure, yeah, it works in the military, or in jail, but there they got you locked up, they got their finger on your spine.”
I doubt there were more than a dozen others at the tables around us. All men. Middle-aged, middle-income, midwestern. Golfers. In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don’t know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their clichés yet full of helpless poetry. Meanwhile the music whamming and bamming. The women shaking themselves almost shyly.
Vince spent a good half-minute lighting a cigarette while the MC came onstage behind him. This was a small Asian or Native American woman in a black pantsuit who introduced each dancer again — there had been nine total — and delivered the decision of the judges, who were nowhere to be seen, and summoned forward the winner, a woman in a black Cleopatra-style wig wearing red bikini bottoms and a red vest with quivering red fringe. She tiptoed barefoot onto the stage and received her prize money in a large envelope which the MC was obliged to stick in the waist of her briefs because she held a tall bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her face was a beautified mask, like a Kabuki player’s. They gave her name as “O. O’Malley,” or close to that. But as a matter of actual fact, she was Flower Cannon.
“I know her!” I said to Vince.
“Who? Her?” he said, turning around briefly. “Yeah, she’s here every other Friday. She wins about half the time.”
The music started again but not quite so loud. The stage went dark. Flower Cannon stood bent over in the corner putting on a pair of tennis shoes. She straightened up and raised her beer to her mouth and guzzled. Now she wore an old overcoat like a chemist’s smock.