“Nan broke up with me,” he announced.
“No kidding. How come?” his friend asked.
“This guy. She says she…I dunno. She fell in love with him or something. Law school guy. Love bloomed in the lecture hall. His name’s Thor, if you can believe it.”
“Too bad.”
“Also he’s a triathlete.”
“A triple threat. How could you possibly compete with that?”
“Couldn’t,” Benny said. “I’m going to take all my money and gamble it away.”
“That’s a really good idea. An excellent idea. Where you going?”
“Phelps Lake. One of those Indian casinos. Hey, you want me to visit you first? This morning? How’re you feeling?” Benny hadn’t been over to the hospital for two days now.
“Naw. Go up to the casino and gamble all your money away and then call me or just come down here and give me the full rundown about how you’re totally broke and ruined.”
Benny’s idea is that he’s keeping his friend alive by sending out stories from the battlefield. Before he got sick, Dennis was a real player. In any particular room, if Dennis hadn’t made a pass at an attractive woman, it was just an oversight. He had coached Benny in the complicated norms of seduction, separation, and betrayal.
Accordingly, Benny had loaded himself and his life savings into his rusting and dented Corolla and driven eighty-seven miles north on the interstate, past the antiabortion billboards and the federal prison in Sandstone, and now here he is, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sandals, a recent college grad playing blackjack at a casino staffed by Native Americans. He’s bleary and hungover and soul-sick. The trouble is, he’s on a lucky streak and has won three hundred dollars, and he just keeps winning. A curse is on him: he cannot lose. More people are gathering around to watch this desperate, bloodshot young man, and they’re stupefied by his behavior. What they regard as a blessing, he believes is a catastrophe: look at the expression of dismay on his face as his winnings accumulate! Once in a while, the gates of the City of Ruination are closed to visitors. He knocks; he cannot get in.
—
Behind him, the casino zombies are living it up. Air thick with cigarette smoke and fetid hopelessness circulates dully around him, and the blinging electronic music from slot machines projects a kind of hypnotically induced amusement-park ruckus. Having won again on a double down, Benny backs up from the blackjack table and decides to survey the main floor. He will call Dennis later.
Ghouls smoking cigarettes drop tokens into the slots. The machines continue to sing their manic little robot ditties. Here and there, officials survey the operation, pretending that they are merely there to help. It’s a low-rent casino, and the patrons are more humble than you might expect — sha
bbily dressed, glowering, half-mad with unrecoverable losses. An old couple, holding on to each other for stability, newly broke, shuffle past Benny and nod in a stubbornly friendly way to him, this being Minnesota. She’s wearing a cap that says SAY HI TO GRANDMA! and his cap says GONE FISHIN’! A red-haired middle-aged woman at a slot machine to Benny’s right labors away at losing money, and on her T-shirt are the words WHOA IS ME!
Behind him, a man speaks to a woman, probably his wife. They’re both wearing wedding rings. “He looked like a faggot undertaker,” the man says in a thick Minnesota accent, “and I know I’m half-right.”
That does it. The spell breaks. The romance of self-destruction can only go on for so long, and it can’t go on here among these politely unpleasant people. This isn’t Las Vegas, a professionally designed entryway to Hell, where experienced Technicolor devils have been in comfortable residence for decades tossing Mom and Pop down into the pit. It’s just lowly Phelps Lake, where small lives become slightly smaller. Time for Benny to go back to his life, to return to the cities, and drop in on Dennis.
He seems to have sobered up. His headache has gone away. He checks his watch.
Now he’s standing near the entryway door, close to the last-chance slots, and is about to return to his car with his winnings when a man wearing a green tie over a white shirt approaches him with his hand out as if in greeting. The man’s thinning hair is arranged in a halfhearted comb-over, and his eyeglasses sit on his nose at a tilt, the right lens lower than the left. He looks, it is fair to say, like a survivor of a plane crash dressed up to go on a talk show. On the approaching face is a Mr. Potato Head expression of rigid bonhomie.
“Hello, there. I saw you looking at me,” the man says, shaking Benny’s hand, “from across the crowded room, and you were wondering who I was. Who is that man, you were thinking.”
“No,” Benny says sourly. “I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
“It often happens,” the man says, as his hand continues to shake Benny’s. “People see me and it’s like, ‘I know that guy. Who is that guy? Is he famous?’ ”
“I didn’t think that.”
“Well, you will. I have one of those recognizable faces.”
“I don’t recognize it,” Benny says. “Please stop shaking my hand.”
“Will do,” the man says cheerfully. “Do you recognize me now?”
“No.”
“You could say I’m the greeter here.” Finished with shaking, his hand returns to the man’s side. “You could say that I’m the spirit of fun. Ha ha! I like for everybody to have the best possible time here at the Gray Wolf.”
“I have to go,” Benny tells him. “I have to get back.”
“What’s your hurry?” the man asks. “By the way, I’m Nathaniel Farber.” Again the hand comes out, and, unthinkingly, Benny takes it. The shaking recommences. “I was in pictures.” He waits. “The movies,” he says, to clarify.
“Pleased to meet you.” Benny pulls his hand away abruptly. “I have to go.”
“Sometimes people say, ‘Not the Nate Farber!’ Usually they say that. Or they cry out with recognition.”
“I must be the exception that proves the rule.”
“They say, ‘I saw you in Moon over Havana. And I saw you in Too Many Cats! You were so funny!’ ”
“Are those movies?”
“Major studio productions. One at Warner’s, the other at Metro. Of course, that was some years ago.” Fleetingly, the rictus dies on the face of the showbiz veteran. “What’s your name, young fella?”
“Benny.”
“And what brings you to our Gray Wolf Casino, Benny?”
“I was trying to lose my life savings. I was upset.”
“And did you succeed, Benny?”
“I did not. I won a few hundred dollars.”
“Goes to show, Benny, how unpredictable the future can be. The stars, dear Brutus, are not in ourselves. Would you like my autograph?”
“No, thank you.” Nathaniel Farber’s breath, floating like a soap bubble in Benny’s direction, smells of mouthwash tainted with vodka.
“Are you leaving? Please stay. We here at the Gray Wolf feel that you haven’t yet enjoyed yourself to the outer limit.”
“Actually, I have an appointment, sort of, with someone in Minneapolis.”
“A sort-of appointment? I never heard of such a thing.”
“You have now.”
“Who is she?”
“He. Not ‘she.’ He. His name’s Dennis. He used to teach film at the university before he got sick. He’ll know who you are. Excuse me, but I have to go.”
“Why doesn’t he teach film now?” Nathaniel Farber asks.