The Turner House (7 page)

“Well, thank you. Here.” Lelah looked past the woman toward a cocktail waitress, put up a hand to get her attention. “At least let me buy you a free drink. I can afford a free drink.”

They both laughed.

“No, I need to run out of here with my money before I get pulled back in.” She dropped her remaining chips into her purse, a sturdy, designer-looking purse, Lelah noticed, and headed toward the cashier.

This happened to Lelah sometimes in the casino, a stranger high off of a big win gave her money just for bearing witness, and each time she felt like crying. Because she wanted the money so much. Because a stranger could be so generous, when she'd never once thought to do that after a win. Because she perhaps looked as desperate as she felt. Because, truthfully, it didn't take much to make Lelah feel like crying. But feeling like crying was not the same as actually crying, and Lelah was up $20.

She'd been down to less than twenty bucks and pulled ahead before. Her mind ran to wild possibilities of success. There was a red convertible sitting on top of the Wheel of Fortune slots, and though she detested slots as an amateur, vulgar game, she imagined winning so much at a table that they gave the damn thing to her; just put a ramp over the front slots so she could climb up, drive her new Corvette down, and pick up the rest of her winnings at the cashier. Or maybe she'd only get a few hundred, but it would be quick and enough to buy her some time, so she'd resist the urge to try to flip the money and run out of there, hundreds in her pocket, and check in to a nice hotel. Yes, a nice hotel would be a good start, and then she'd take a day or two to figure out what to do next. This was a lot more feasible than the car scenario, she knew; she just had to strategize.

She figured she should eat first, before they ran out of the good stuff at the buffet, then she'd come back and try to make the chip last. Split it into ones at the $5 minimum table, spread it around.

As she piled limp green beans onto her plate, she thought she saw half a dozen people she recognized. The woman near the pop fountain with the red sequin hat was definitely someone Lelah had seen before; she always wore that hat, and she kept rolls of quarters for the slots in her fanny pack. Lelah made a conscious effort to keep her eyes on the food, lest she run into someone from her GA meetings. The defeated did not like to acknowledge one another mid-backslide.

It would follow that Lelah returned to the table where the woman won the chip for her, but every open seat there made it so you could see the craps table behind it. On a Friday night the craps crowd was too lively, and Lelah couldn't risk being distracted. She chose a five-dollar-minimum roulette table near the bar where an older black man named Jim was dealing. Lelah couldn't recall anything spectacular happening to her at Jim's table before, but she didn't have any negative recollections either, so she gave him a try. It was considered bad form to take up a seat when you had so little money to play, but Lelah was determined to make this money grow. She planned to act like she had more cash until it became a reality.

She put ten outside on black, two on 27, and three in the corner between 7, 8, 10, and 11. Jim spun the ball and it landed on 8. That meant she'd get ten from her outside bet and twenty-four from the corner. This brought her to $54, a much more reasonable amount to work with. She took off her jacket.

Lelah never kept a strict count of her money after every play. The exact amount wasn't as important to her while in the thick of the game as much as the feel of her stack of chips. Could she cover them with her entire palm, or did she have tall enough stacks that her hand sat on top of them, and the colors—the orange ones she preferred, persimmon, in fact—still peeked from between her fingers? Yes, this was the thing to measure by. Let the dollar amount be a pleasant surprise after several rounds. She kept playing inside and out, sometimes black, sometimes red, a few corners, a few splits, but always straight up on 27.

Her tablemates came and went. She registered their movements—new faces and body shapes—but not the particulars anymore. The camaraderie seduced her in the beginning, it was a way to warm up to the task at hand, but after a while if she didn't go broke she'd slip into a space of just her and her hands and the chips that she tried to keep under them. A stillness like sleep, but better than sleep because it didn't bring dreams. She was just a mind and a pair of hands calculating, pushing chips out, pulling some back in and running her thumb along the length of stacks to feel how much she'd gained or lost. She never once tried to explain this feeling in her GA meetings. She couldn't even share with them the simplest reasons of why she played. They were always talking about feeling alive, or feeling numb. How the little white ball made them feel a jolt in their heart, or maybe how the moment of pulling on an old-fashioned slot handle for the first time in a night was better than an orgasm. Lelah did not feel alive when she played roulette. That wasn't the point, she'd wanted to say. It wasn't to feel alive, but it also wasn't to feel numb. It was about knowing what to do intuitively, and thinking about one thing only, the possibility of winning, the possibility of walking away the victor, finally.

“You want to change some of those for twenties?” the dealer asked.

He's talking to me, Lelah realized, and she looked down for the first time in at least ten plays. Her hand rested on a cluster of persimmon stacks about six inches tall. Three hundred dollars, give or take, she could feel it. Jim, the dealer, stared at her.

“Sure,” she said. “How about one hundred in twenties, one eighty in fives, and whatever's left in ones again.”

Jim obliged, and Lelah slid a cobalt $5 chip back to him for his assistance.

She had enough for a hotel room now. She knew she should leave. Slide her chips into her purse like that generous woman did earlier and make a beeline for the cashier. But her watch said 11
P.M.
Just another half hour and she could be up $600. With $600 she could find a place to stay for a week, maybe two weeks if she settled for a shitty motel. She could flip the money into something worth leaving with. Not could, she
would.
She just had to try. She put $60 on black, $10 on 00 because it hadn't hit yet, $40 on the third 12 of the board, and $20 on 27.

No matter how still Lelah's mind became as she played, she was never careless; her purse stayed in her lap, her cell phone tucked in her front pocket. Vernon was the one to tell her that over two decades ago, back when they'd taken trips off base in Missouri to the riverboat casinos. “The same guy sitting next to you shooting the shit all night will steal your wallet in a heartbeat,” he'd said, and she'd nodded. This was toward the end of their marriage, and the riverboats, newly opened, were one of the few places where the two of them still had fun. Neither of them was interested in winning money, but Vernon had an engineer's knack for figuring things out, breaking systems down into their parts. They conceived Brianne after one of these trips, and although they weren't exactly in love anymore, Lelah believed they had created their daughter in hope.

“No more bets.”

The ball landed on 14. She had no chips on 14, which meant $120 was gone. The remaining $180 was still more than she had in the bank, but what could you get with that? Not much. If you walked out with $180 when you could have had $600, you didn't walk away the victor. She put money on the same spots again, just half as much.

It wasn't Vernon's fault she'd ended up a gambler; she would never say it was. A few years after the divorce and her return home Lelah started going to Caesars in Windsor on her own, and that's when the feeling found her. The stillness she hadn't even realized she'd needed up until then. When she felt like she was flailing, back on Yarrow not doing anything worth anything with her life and tired of being alone, she could sit right here, put her hand on the chalky surface of the chips, and be still for a moment in the middle of all the commotion of the casino floor.

“No more bets.”

Lelah looked down. Her twenties were gone, gone before she even thought to admire the shiny redness of them. Cobalt and persimmon were left—it felt like forty dollars. Her watch said 11:27. Forty dollars was like no money at all, so she might as well let it play. Straight up on 27 twice and it was gone, and with it, the stillness. She heard the slot bells first, then noticed the stink of cigarette smoke in the air. Lelah found herself part of a loud and bright Friday night in Motor City once again.

SUMMER
1944

A city had its own time and cruelty. There was cruelty in the country too, but it was plain. Not veiled beneath promises of progress, nor subtle when it manifested itself. Francis took in the high-domed roof, the glittering marble floors, and the multitude of corridors as he walked. One stepped into a place like this—a palace like the kinds that Abraham and his wife, Sarah, turned up in, he thought—and felt impossibly small. Just a dim light, easily blown out. Francis arrived at Michigan Central Station with a small bag, his only pair of shoes on his feet, $15 in one pocket, and a letter for a pastor in the other.

He'd hoped for a different letter from the one he carried. It did not introduce him as a clever young man worthy of apprenticeship in the Lord's work. That letter and any chances of a preacher's life were gone.

Reverend Matthews,

I trust that you will be able to assist Francis Turner, of my flock, with securing housing and a good word at one of the fabled places of industry in your city. He is open to any work available. He and I will both be much obliged.

With Faith in Our Lord,

    Reverend Charles Williams Tufts

    Spring of Faith Missionary Baptist Church, Arkansas

Francis had opened the letter as the train thundered through Kansas. It was early morning, and the sky out the window stretched wide and black and endless. That phrase, “of my flock,” was impersonal, as if he and Reverend Tufts had not lived under the same roof, as if they were casual acquaintances. He deserved more warmth than that, a few words to lift him from the ranks of ordinary congregation member to favored almost-son. The reverend could have called his friend ahead of time; he had a phone line in his house, and Francis was sure the other man had one too. Putting the letter in Francis's hand ensured that he would have to look the man up, humble himself before a stranger, and beg his case. He couldn't bring himself to use such a letter, especially not one so impersonal. He kept it in his pocket for the duration of the train ride. This was how it had been done since Henry Ford first took a paternal interest in Negro employment and the cheap labor it provided: manufacturers depended on Up North ministers to supply them with reliable workers, and those ministers reached out to their southern colleagues for help filling the positions. But that was before the war. Who needed a note of introduction in a city on the forefront of the war effort? Francis had read that there were more jobs available in Detroit than in the entire state of Arkansas.

Pride had always played a prominent role in the Turner psyche. Its source went back further than Cha-Cha and Lelah's generation, past Francis's too. Officially, Francis Turner Sr. died in 1930 from a rusty-nail puncture to the bottom of his left foot, but it was pride that did him in. He stepped on the nail walking back from the fields he sharecropped, and the soles of his shoes were so worn that nothing prevented the corroded metal from piercing him nearly to bone. He hobbled home to his wife and six-year-old son and let his wife dress the wound. Francis Sr. ignored Cynthia Turner's pleas to go see a doctor for monetary reasons but also out of pride. There were no doctors in their town, and Francis Sr. could not imagine sending for a white Pine Bluff doctor over a cut on his foot. He doubted the doctor would be willing to even step inside his house, and he would not let any doctor tend to him in the yard as if he were an animal. His was not an arbitrary, selfish sort of pride; for Francis Sr., losing the little dignity he'd held on to as a black man in the South seemed a more concrete defeat than death. Two weeks later Cynthia was a widow, and the debt Francis Sr. left her led to eviction. She and her son moved into a one-room shack that was one bad storm away from being no more than a lean-to. After two years of scraping by, Cynthia found a live-in maid job in Little Rock. She entrusted young Francis to Reverend Tufts, a widower himself, and sent money when she could.

If Francis hadn't inherited enough pride from his father, Reverend Tufts supplemented what he lacked. The man had a congregation of fewer than three hundred poor people, but he indulged in frequent haircuts, a two-story house, and a new car every five or so years, even while paying tuition for his only daughter at Tougaloo College. His brand of pride—heavier on self-regard than Francis Turner's, but still rooted in the same desire to feel a man when the world told you otherwise—extended to his pulpit. The reverend had three deacons and he would have preferred none, but these three were so old and respected, there before he even moved to town, that he couldn't rid himself of them.

During his sixteenth summer, Francis stopped receiving Cynthia Turner's small packages of neatly folded money and sweets. She had maintained one-Sunday-a-month visits with him up until then. She would take a bus out or hitch a ride, and the two of them would sit on the reverend's porch and talk. A stranger driving past might have mistaken the two for teenagers embarking on a courtship via sanctioned Sunday visits. If they were lucky, the reverend would join them and fill up their awkward silences with self-congratulatory chatter. On her final Sunday, Cynthia said her white folks were moving to Dallas, where the husband had some sort of work lined up, and they had asked her to join them. Francis was not surprised that his mother had said yes; the white folks had seven children, and he'd long suspected that the line between blood and water—questionable water at that—had gone blurry for his mother. His sixteen-year-old pride prevented him from showing his disappointment. He took a long look at her smooth, wide face, the high eyebrows he'd inherited, and said a variation of something he'd heard the reverend tell many a congregation member when they moved away: “I'll be prayin for you, Mama. You call or write me if you ever need a thing.”