Desert of the Heart: A Novel (17 page)

“I don’t like sad movies,” Frances said. “If you’d go to something cheerful …”

“When I’m suffering? Evelyn, will you go to the movies with me?”

“I ought to work. Sure, I’ll go to the movies with you.”

Ann smiled quickly to conceal an unreasonable envy. After all, if she had wanted to spend time with Evelyn, there had been the whole day. And, if she chose, she could spend what was left of the night. If she chose … why was it that Walter could always find needs simple enough to be answered if not by one person, then by another? He took what there was, a car, an absent-minded affection, a piece of pie. Ann took only reluctantly what was offered or asked for something else. And, when she got what she wanted, she almost always managed to be suspicious of her need or the gift itself, in this case both. Ann looked over at Evelyn. The wry celebration of images had left her head. Only the questions remained. Evelyn looked back at Ann and smiled. Then she turned her attention to Walter again, willing to explore with him his cheerfully broken heart. Ann left them over coffee, engrossed in amiability.

Silver was waiting for Ann by the board. “Have you heard? It worked. Janet’s been fired.”

“Bill can work miracles when he puts his mind to them,” Ann said, grinning. “When did it happen?”

“Yesterday. They sent her a telegram. Bill doesn’t know exactly what it said, but they gave her enough to cover all Ken lost that night as well as medical expenses.”

“Did Bill say anything about how he worked it?”

“All the floor bosses went in together. They weren’t in there more than five minutes. The old man just said, ‘How much?’ And that was that.”

“Glory be to Hiram O. Dicks.”

“Joyce is moving into your locker with you. For a straight bitch, she’s not a bad kid, you know?”

“She’s fine,” Ann said. “I like her. I’d better go down.”

“I’ll go with you,” Silver said. “You free this weekend?”

“Well, yes and no. What’s on your mind?”

“You. Joe’s gone down to the City for the weekend to buy his Adler Elevators for the wedding. I thought maybe I ought to do some shopping, too, buy something wifely and useless like a dress. How do you think I’d look in a dress?”

“Just a plain, old, ordinary dress?”

“That’s it. Both breasts covered and a zip up the side.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“But I’m counting on you to help.”

“I suppose I have to. I’m your maid of honor.”

“What a title for the little fish!” Silver said, shaking her head. “So we’ll go shopping tomorrow afternoon, and, as a reward, I’ll take you home with me tonight.”

“Why not make it tomorrow night? I’d have to pick up some clothes to go shopping.”

“We can stop by your place in the morning, and, if you’re very good, you can stay tomorrow night, too.”

“I don’t know about both nights, Sil.”

“It’s the last weekend we’ll have, love. Remember your principles.”

“Oh yes, my principles, my honor.” Ann frowned.

“I’ll get my hat and meet you at the locker.”

Joyce was already at the locker, remaking up her eyes and smoking a cigarette at the same time.

“Silver tell you about our hero?” she asked as Ann reached in for her hat and apron.

“It’s good, isn’t it?”

“Good for Janet.”

Ann looked at Joyce sharply. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I lost every sou I made last week; so I’m doing the landlady’s laundry and cleaning this week to pay the rent, and I borrowed for the groceries,”

“You’re a fool,” Ann said.

“I like sympathy.”

“If you get hooked, you might as well quit.”

“Well, if the old boy would like to fire
me
for five or six thousand, I might just consider it. Too bad I don’t have a kid with heart trouble.” Ann’s anger rose slowly enough so that she did not have time to reply before Joyce added, “Mine’s a healthy little bastard.”

“How old?”

“More or less just out,” Joyce said, grinning. “He’ll be six weeks on Monday.”

“No wonder you had a rough first night!”

“I meant to thank you for that, you know?” Joyce said. “I could have lost the job.”

“Let’s go, girls,” Silver said, standing at the end of their row of lockers. “We don’t want to get there after all the money’s gone.”

They were all in the Corral for another week, but Ann worked her ramp alone. Joyce had taken Janet’s place under the covered wagon. Ann looked over, missing Janet who always doled out change as if she were giving the neighborhood kids money for the Good Humor man, her natural generosity threatened by a frugal frown, which had been her perpetual expression. She worried about people. Ann wondered how she had taken old Hiram O.’s generosity. She had probably wanted to refuse it, but her pride and principles would not have been as strong as her concern for Ken. That was the saving grace of morality, even the strongest sort. It always gave way to need or love. Ann heard Evelyn’s voice, asking, “Are you talking nonsense on purpose?” Janet might have asked the same question. Hers, like Evelyn’s, was a Purgatory logic, seeded in a pious mother by the gentle guilt of a father, born into a small town, brought to crippled fruit. … Ann’s silent rhetoric hurt her guts. Neither of them would ask that question now. Conversion, in one form or another, was inevitable. Perversion in one form or another? “Take. Eat,” said the serpent, a communion with good and evil. She and Walter had looked up “evil” in the dictionary one night and had found, among other things: “That which hinders prosperity and diminishes welfare.” Whose prosperity? Whose welfare? Ann looked down at her hard-working customers, paying off in seconds that two-and-a-half-year-long death. “Frank’s Club thanks you also for its oil fields and community concerts, its gold-paved driveways and its scholarships, its private senators and its public laws. Frank’s Club thanks you.” But Janet never will. The best thing she knows how to do is pray for you. How many want to be saved? There were hands up on all sides of Ann, signaling luck, waving bills for change. An argument broke out at one end of the ramp between two men over the right to a machine. Ann settled the dispute without having to call a key man. Her wit and ease, her success, lifted her mood out of wry, private uncertainty into a more peaceful assurance. If she ever got tired of being a change apron at Frank’s Club, she could certainly do well as a playground supervisor, for men had to be bandied just like children or dogs. You had to evaluate a situation quickly, choose to interfere or to ignore it. The one mistake was to stand and watch it, for males of all ages and species have to fight in presence of a female. Ann walked back to the center of her ramp, superior as if the height it gave her were her own, benign with power. It was not until she went down to the other end of the ramp that she noticed the missing slot machine.

It was not possible! Slot machines did occasionally disappear, but never from the second floor, never from Ann’s section. She looked around quickly, over toward the door, but through that crowd six men could carry a coffin without being noticed.

“Did you see the workmen take this machine?” she asked customers nearby.

“Broken,” one said. “They must have took it to the basement.”

No slot machine was removed without her permission. “Wise woman. Teacher among children. Idiot!” She reached for her microphone and called her emergency code number to the board. Perhaps the theft had already been seen and stopped from above. Ann looked up to check the mirror position, but her own face reflected there turned her hope to guilt. It was her responsibility. A key man and a relief change apron were with her almost at once. And she did not know how many, among the new customers approaching the ramp, were plainclothesmen. She stepped off the ramp as she saw Bill approaching.

“A put-up fight at the other end,” she said to him. “I thought it was the real thing.”

“Why didn’t you call a key man then?”

“I thought I could handle it.”

“You know that isn’t your job.”

“Yes, I know.”

She did not resent his anger. It was a matter of pride as well as importance to keep anything of this sort from happening. He was no angrier with her than she was with herself. She answered his questions as accurately as she could, repeated her answers, admitted discrepancies of detail. She even tolerated suggestions that she might, in fact, be involved in the theft. Bill knew her better than to consider the possibility, but it was a routine part of his job to be suspicious. The fact that he had loved her and that she had hurt him made him only a little more brutal than was necessary.

After talking with Bill, after reporting to a security officer, Ann was allowed to return to her position. She had missed her long break. The crowd was heavy, almost as heavy as on a Saturday night; and, as Ann walked back and forth, both rushed and nervously alert, her back burning, she felt an undefined hostility in the crowd. Demands for change were curt. Jokes had an edge of malice. And faces, unless she could look directly into them, were sinister and grotesque. Something in the peculiar, artificial light, in the coolness of the air conditioning, distorted the suntanned, summer sweating skin of perfectly ordinary people. They were perfectly ordinary people, Ann reminded herself again and again, countering this new mistrust which was sometimes close to fear. It was not even extraordinary that, in a crowd of this size, there were crooks. Some hospital attendants stole drugs. Some bank managers embezzled money. There were aldermen who helped themselves to the collection plate. Why did she try to defend the Club? It was an argument she had lost half a dozen times with Frances. “Take an ordinary man,” Frances would say, “better still, take a man honest enough to walk three blocks to return too much change to a clerk in a drugstore. What would he do in Frank’s Club?” And Frances was right. He’d have no compunction about trying to cheat any change apron out of a few dollars. Part of the excitement for the tourist was his feeling that he had crossed the moral boundary of society as be crossed the threshold of a gambling casino. The fact that the reputable casinos were operated on a code of honesty more rigid than in any bank made no difference. No public relations scheme would ever destroy the myth that a gambling casino is run by gangsters, staffed by petty criminals whose only purpose is to trick a man, to cheat him, to steal his money. “And who’s to say they aren’t gangsters?” Frances would demand. “Who’s to say you aren’t a petty criminal?” Frances would say Ann got what she deserved. Any man had a perfect right to trick, cheat, and steal back as much as he could get.

“That was a ten I gave you.”

Ann held up the bill folded around her middle finger. It was a five.

“They ought to put you in the floor show for sleight of hand.”

“This is the bill you gave me, sir.”

If pressed by a customer, Ann would have to offer to have her apron emptied. A cashier would count her money. If she had five dollars over the amount of her IOU, the customer was right. On a Friday or Saturday night, only luck let you balance any time in the evening. Everyone made mistakes. And even the automatic coin rollers were not absolutely accurate. A nickel could get into a roll of quarters. But the mistakes were eighty per cent of the time in the customer’s favor. If you held your job, you learned not to make mistakes in the Club’s favor. The Club could not afford it. But the myth persisted. Gambling, condemned generally, reluctantly condoned occasionally, had to be evil.

“This goddamned machine is fixed! They’re all fixed!”

“Yes sir, they are. The Club collects fifteen per cent. If you play long enough, you’ll lose. The odds are for the house.”

“That guy across the way got three jackpots. How much of it is he giving to you?”

Ann was used to these accusations, made angrily or amiably, and had a selection of replies to suit the customer’s mood. She was not usually worried by them. But tonight she had to guard against answering accusation with accusation. They were perfectly ordinary people, coming from all parts of the country into the evil desert, home away from home of every big time gangster in the States, legal headquarters of illegal syndicates, where honest politicians could still be dropped down old mine shafts and never found again, where alley murders were reported with the church news every Sunday. They were perfectly ordinary people, free at last to be fearful, malicious, greedy. Then home they’d go to the good, green, well-watered plains of the Lord to tell what they had seen, the coarse women, the obsessed men, the deserted children, never guessing that these picturesque inhabitants were tourists like themselves. They were perfectly ordinary people. You had to love the whole damned world to love anyone at all.

“Hear you’re giving away slot machines tonight,” the relief said as she stepped up on to the ramp.

“Only to old customers or relatives,” Ann answered.

“I’ve got five extra minutes for you if you’ll give me a share in your cut.”

“You can have everything I get out of it.”

“Sold. Take your time.”

“Thanks.”

Ann passed Silver on her way to her floor locker.

“You didn’t have to do it,” Silver said in a quiet, conspiratorial tone. “Joe and I don’t even want one. It would ruin the high-class decor of my living room.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Ann answered.

“Don’t worry about it, love.”

“No,” Ann agreed tiredly.

It was hard to get through the crowd. Ann moved both cautiously and impatiently, trying to protect her money and her painful back. Once free of the weight of her apron, Ann felt no more than a slight, physical relief. She wished she did not wear a uniform and could for a few minutes disappear into the crowd, talk with or stand silent with, feel with these people who had suddenly become the enemy. But her white, ten-gallon hat and her frontier clothes made it impossible. She was even branded with a name. She had no hope of anonymity. At the bar, drinking tomato juice, she wondered if she was being watched. It was ridiculous! Just because a couple of sharp, professional crooks had taken advantage of her, she didn’t need to get a third-rate case of paranoia over it. She must relax, think of something else. If she decided to go home tonight with Silver, she should call Evelyn. She did not have time. She had to get back.