Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [114]
“Fixed to pay?” he asked. “How do you figure?”
“Oh, everybody knows that. Some of these machines are set to pay off as much as ninety percent,” she said glibly.
“Which is eight and a half percent worse than the line at craps,” Jack said.
She gave him an odd look. “What are you talking about?”
“Look, if you put a hundred dollars into this machine, it pays you back ninety. If you bet the same hundred, a dollar at a time, on the pass line at craps, you get back ninety-eight fifty. If the odds are working. Either way, you lose money. You can’t,” he said dogmatically, “change losing odds into winning odds. No matter what you do.”
“Oh, nonsense. They must mean that the machines pay off ninety percent of the time; that’s entirely different.”
“Horse-frocky.”
“You’re infuriating.” But in a few minutes she moved over to a craps table and religiously bet the pass line, a dollar at a time. Over a period of seven hours, she lost more than three hundred dollars and went to bed with a splitting headache. She blamed Jack for the whole thing.
“I always win at the slots,” she said.
She had never been more feminine, and Jack loved her for it. But by the time they woke up again she was the old Sally. “You’re right, she told him. “I was wrong. But hell, we’re here; let’s play the dime slots, just for fun.” They did and it was fun, and they actually won a few dollars.
They were a little drunk most of the time, and it cut into their lovemaking just enough to keep them from overdoing it; yet, when they did come together it was good, and afterward, Jack would lie beside her and never want to leave her. Not ever. He wanted her beside him. He was afraid to tell her about it, actually, afraid she would laugh at him, and he would lose her.
On their second night there had been a floor show that Jack wanted to see and Sally didn’t. She was still in love with the slots, and Jack went ahead in and watched the show, very conscious of himself, very conscious that these were the big-name entertainers, the most famous people in the world, and he might later on be standing right next to one of them out in the casino or in the men’s room or someplace. The fact is, it was thrilling. Later he told Sally how he felt about it, and she scoffed at him and said, “They’re assholes, every last one of them. Believe me. But you go ahead and worship them if you want. That’s what they live on.”
“I don’t worship them,” Jack said furiously.
“Of course not.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“Why not? Does it offend your manhood?”
“Balls!” He went to the bar. When he came back to the machines, she was gone. He looked around for her, but she wasn’t anywhere. He went up to the room, and she wasn’t there, either, and he began to get a little nervous. It always made him go a little off-balance when she wasn’t around, and that was irritating. Even so, he undressed and went to bed with a bottle of I. W. Harper and a paperback mystery. Finally he was groggy enough, and he threw the book across the room and turned out the light. But sleep would not come. He lay in the dark waiting for her. He knew she knew other people at the hotel; she was always seeing someone and waving, or being talked to by groups of handsome young men and women whom she airily dismissed as “the television crowd” and never once introduced to Jack. She was probably at a party somewhere. He waited three hours or more, and when she came in, turning on the light as if she did not expect him to be there, or asleep, he said, “Where the hell have you been?”
She turned to him. “Ask me that again