Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [113]
Nineteen
They had argued over whether he should call his parole officer. “You’re not doing anything criminal,” she said. “They can’t do anything to you. It’s none of their business.”
“They think it is,” Jack said.
“Well, I don’t like it. I don’t like the way they try to lead you around by the nose.”
“Well, that’s the name of the game. I got to call him.” He reached for the telephone, and Sally walked out of the room. He didn’t see her again for two days.
After his shower he went down to the casino, wearing the lemon slacks and blue sport shirt Sally had gotten him as a present, feeling the clamminess of the air conditioning through the thin shirt. Sally wasn’t at any of the tables or in among the slot machines, but Jack wasn’t worried yet. He felt too good about the way things were going. He had to keep reminding himself he was not in prison any more, not even working in a bakery, gagging over the lard barrel or wiping damp flour off his face. He was now a well-set-up gentleman of leisure, making the “Vegas scene,” a young man for whom life had done a complete turnabout, the fiancé of a rich and beautiful woman. Jack wondered what it would be like, never having to worry about money again. Of course, he had never worried much about it in the past, but now he could do anything he wanted. He decided he wanted to go to college and study the liberal arts. It would, he felt, give him a greater opportunity to appreciate life. He did not mean to waste his life, the way these people were wasting theirs.
He watched them gamble: the fools at the little roulette setups making their nervous scattered bets, most of them with stacks of four-bit chips, one with a barricade of expensive domino-like plaques that Jack didn’t even know the value of; betting numbers or thirds or quarters, red or black or odd or even, betting against one of the most powerfully house-favored odds in the joint (it may have been a luxury hotel to some of the guests, but to Jack it was just a rug joint), bucking a vigorish that did not change no matter how trickily you bet. Jack had not always felt contempt for people who gambled, but now, with the prospect of being rich before him, he suddenly did not see the point of it. When he had gambled in the past it had always been for money, never for pleasure. The pleasure had come from winning money because he needed money. The people he saw around him in the casino did not look as if they needed money, at least not enough to buck the house. It was sensible, of course, to gamble against the house if your income was so small you didn’t have a chance anyway. A man making fifty a week and without hope of ever making more could come against the house odds with the genuine hope that he would win a fortune at the risk of almost nothing, because when you start with peanuts all you can lose is peanuts. Negroes shooting craps with relief money were far more sensible than the middle-class gentleman wagering three hundred dollars he can afford to lose, for one reason: the Negro expects to win and the gentleman expects to lose. Gambling, Jack decided, belongs to the poor. The rich or the well-off just make asses of themselves. He liked this new attitude of his; it made him feel superior to everybody in the room.
It bothered Sally that Jack, after the first few halfhearted bets at the dice table, quit gambling. She