Sweet land stories - E. L. Doctorow [15]
In the men’s room, where the floor was all wet and some drunk had lost it, I carefully combed my hair. Then I went out and sat down at a five-dollar table that looked about right and bought fifty dollars in chips. Little blond lady dealer, a pit man just behind her. Four decks in the shoe, but my system is not counting cards. My system is betting modestly while sitting next to a high roller with a big stack in front of him. Kind who talks too much and swivels around with each winning hand to see if he’s gathered the audience he deserves.
I didn’t look at the dealer, but smiled as if to myself every now and then. I was very quiet. When I doubled, if the pit man had moved on, I put down a chip for her. She didn’t look at me, but nodded slightly and smiled as if to herself. Tiny mouth but well shaped. There arose a sympathy between us. It’s not as if any cheating goes on, it’s more like a flirtation through the cards. Things happen. At the end of a half hour it was as if she’d taken the edge of her plump little hand and cut one of the high roller’s stacks and slid it over to me. I got up at that point—it was supposed to be a fun thing, nothing to take too far. That would lack class, ruin the whole game between us. I left twenty for her and cashed in for a hundred twenty-five dollars net.
It was a short drive to the Mexican part of town. Dark there, quiet, not many lights. I parked into the curb, rolled down the window, and sat there and had a smoke, and pretty soon a kid came along. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen, fourteen. Peered in at me for a good look. When I told him what I was buying, he went to the front of my car and looked at the California plate. Then he went around a corner and a few minutes later someone who could have been his mother was standing at my window. She was a heavyset woman with a handsome broad face and a black dress too tight for her, but she acted tired, or fed up. She wanted one-fifty for a six-pack, which was cheap enough, but I told her as honestly as I could I only had one and a quarter to spend. She said something indicating her disgust in Spanish, but then she nodded and I drove away with two Visas, two MasterCards, and two Amexes, one of them Gold.
What was I up to if not executive decisions? I felt almost proud of myself by the time I got back to the motel. Karen was asleep with her arm around the infant. Her shift had ridden up. She was weird and maybe even a witch of a sort, but those were the smoothest young legs and artfully draped crescents of backside a man could ever hope to gaze upon. But I was tired too and decided to wait till morning. I conformed one of my driver’s licenses, practiced my signature, and then went to sleep in the other bed thinking what a great country this was.
OF COURSE the infernal problem remained, whatever the stupid mood I happened to be in. How was I going to get little junior away from Karen without making her crazier than she was? And if I managed that, how to avoid the law while finding a way to deliver him to his proper parents? And thirdly, how to keep Karen out of a U.S. District Court, as well as the newspapers as an object of public odium, to say nothing of myself?
And then in the morning of course she was so busy with the baby that she didn’t have time for me. Or inclination. Everything was Jesu this and Jesu that, all her love flowing out of her and none of it coming in my direction. She sent me off for more supplies, so careless of my feelings she didn’t even feel it necessary to explain that the baby was taking all her weakened strength, as if she was a real mother recovering from the act of giving birth. She just expected me to understand that from the way she moved about, holding her hand in the small of her back for a moment of thought, or blowing back from the corner of her mouth a strand of hair that had fallen over her eye because both her hands were busy diapering the kid, and so on.
It is strange how different the same woman can be at different times, even a lovesick crazy one like this, who was so moony