Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [19]
She keeps reminding him of Claire. This woman who has been saved from a mistakenly chosen life by Axel. She has an abundance that emerges from her farm-girl’s face. When Cooper leaves a few days later to catch the bus to Bakersfield, she offers a shy farewell. He kisses the plaid shirt by her neck. Then her temple. And Axel, who has rarely touched him in all his time there, gives him a bear hug.
He has, in any case, learned everything he came for. He has won only a few games against The Gentile, but Cooper knows— although his teacher doesn’t say it—that he can now deal a pack of cards to the Supreme Court and get away with it.
In the half-light of the night bus he studies his hands, turns them over. The Gentile’s hands looked like a girl’s, like those of a princess. Coop, travelling to meet Dorn and the others in Vegas, suddenly feels unready. He realizes he has been living within intricate and private conversations with a possible madman, around one small light, at one small card table in an Airstream. He is a risk to himself as well as to the others. He looks up when the bus approaches Vegas, where the sky above the desert city seems to be on fire.
The Gulf War begins at 2:35 a.m. during the early hours of January 17, 1991. But it is just another late afternoon in the casinos of Nevada. The television sets hanging in mid-air that normally replay horse races or football games are running animated illustrations of the American attack. For the three thousand gamblers inhaling piped-in oxygen at the Horseshoe, the war is already a video game, taking place on a fictional planet. The TV screens are locked on mute. There are floor shows, cell-phone hookers, masseurs at work, the click-clacking of chips, and nothing interrupts the reality of the casino where the ‘eye in the sky’ looks down on every hand played on the surfaces of green baize. Simultaneously, in the other desert’s night, orange-white explosions and fireballs light up the horizon. By 2:38 U.S. helicopters and stealth bombers are firing missiles and dropping penetration bombs into the city. During the next four days, one of the great high-tech massacres of the modern era takes place. The Cobra helicopter, the Warthog, the Spectre, and its twin, the Spooky, loiter over the desert highway and the retreating Iraqi troops, pouring down thermobaric fuel, volatile gasses, and finely powdered explosives, to consume all oxygen so that the bodies below them implode, crushing into themselves.
Dorn, his girlfriend Ruth, Mancini, Cooper. The four of them talk in the River Café. It’s one in the morning. Mancini wants to be in on the actual game against The Brethren. ‘I can’t trust you,’ Dorn says. ‘You’re a good actor, and then sometimes you’re translucent. We need The Dauphin to be the innocent, and he’s gone. So it will have to be me.’ Dorn has taken charge.
Do I drive, then? says Mancini.
No. Ruth drives. It’s best if you sit down with Coop for a few days and work on the hands, timing, the moves. All that.
So, The Speech Therapist drives. And I’m translucent. Thus, I am not on the floor at all… .
You can’t be, they’ll smell a crew. In fact, be somewhere else that night, another casino. How much have you discovered about Autry? Does he have a mechanic?
Sidekicks always play with him, so it’s difficult to identify who is responsible. The cardsharp drifts from person to person, I think, every few hands.
Cooper interrupts. Then I suggest we just blow them all out of the water.
Then you’ll never have an afterlife in this town. If they are corrupt, they will recognize corruption. The reason you went to The Gentile was to make what you are doing invisible.
I don’t care.
I care, Ruth says. This is our world. We work here.