Julie had given JW a plastic Jesus on the cross when she was nine or ten, and it dangled from his rearview mirror, swaying in the breeze, its clear plastic beads refracting the colored lights. He reached up and steadied it. He needed to get home, but the day had unsettled him.
“Okay,” he said, closing his eyes, “if I open my eyes and see a man and a woman holding hands, I’ll go in. Just for five minutes. Just send me a sign.” Carol would have dinner in the oven by now. It would be out in half an hour. He needed to patch things up with her and Julie, to heal the rifts that had formed since the accident. He hadn’t handled it well; he knew that.
She had been even more distant lately, not returning his calls, and the red heat of anger that had been in her voice this last year was fading into a cool reserve. It was fine. He could do what he wanted. Whatever he thought was best. All phrases to let him know that life, and Carol, were moving on, that they had become unhitched. If she would only wait, if he could just get through this, come out the other end with the big win, it would get better. Because with money came hope, and freedom. He could tell Carol about Frank wanting to have a beer. How it made him late and he’d been driving fast to make up the time. Just a half hour inside the casino. Just a short bump. It would give him time to bolster himself.
He opened his eyes, but no one was holding hands. He craned his neck to peer around the rear window stanchion. Not a single couple. He laughed and shook his head.
“All right, all right, I hear you,” he said. He reached for his dangling keys, but then he saw two women join hands.
Close enough. He got out and locked the car. Just in and out. Five minutes, ten tops. A quick bang. It always improved his mood, energized him, made things somehow more manageable. He shot his cuffs and headed for the grand portico.
Most people would be crazy to go gambling like he did, he knew, but as a finance professional he had an advantage, and he used it. He understood margins and risk in a way casual gamblers did not. The senior citizens were clogging the entry foyer. They chattered and lurched about, trying to buy chips. He maneuvered his way through the irritable throng. A voice that sounded like Willie Nelson wafted out of the theater, singing You are my sunshine. He had sung that to Julie as a baby. He stepped into the enswathing maternal smell of stale cigarette smoke.
He spent three hundred dollars on chips and headed into a sonic cloud of silvery coin chinking. No wonder old people like casinos, he thought. He didn’t care for the slots himself because there was no skill involved. He sometimes played poker, but most nights his game was blackjack. And tonight, something was going to happen, he could feel it. He was a dog on the hunt, yelping and straining at the leash, shedding his stiff banking persona and thrilled to be giving himself up to chance.
He passed Charlie and Maynard, two Native guards.
“Mr. White,” Maynard nodded.
“Maynard. Charlie,” he replied. A Native waitress named Stormy carried a tray of drinks. Wide high cheeks, a flat nose, small eyes with a laugh in them, big hoop earrings. They said she was Dakota, but she’d been living outside North Lake and working at the casino for years. She always seemed to find him. “Good evening, Mr. White,” she said.
“Stormy, it is a great evening. You time me! I’ll be in and out in five minutes, boom! A thousand dollars! Or ten!”
She laughed as he lifted a drink from her tray, feeling spry. She shook her head and walked on.
The chrome-and-green-glass escalator gleamed with the satisfying quality of 1950s science fiction, smooth as ice to the touch. It had seemed such a ridiculous thing the first time he saw it, going up a single floor, short in stature and full of grandeur, like the prized possession of a pygmy chieftain. But it had grown on him, his stairway to heaven. He stepped off and rounded the corner by the Moose Café Bar, heading for the blackjack section, where the smiling dealers waited behind their Kool-Aid-blue half-moon tables, always welcoming, always encouraging, but somewhat otherworldly.
“Welcome back, Mr. White!” They greeted him like a head of state. “Welcome back!”
The tables seemed somehow alive, their felt almost like a skin, warm and cool at once, and printed with zones to show where the cards went. The edges were padded for comfort, and each table had four inviting chairs. The dealers stood inside the moons’ curves, ready to play. JW picked his luckiest table and sat down.
Gambling, like banking, was all about managing risk. JW kept a tattered book on blackjack in the car. He had read it cover to cover many times, seeking clues to bend the arc of fate his way. The biggest thing to overcome was the house advantage, which came from being able to play more than one player at a time, tilting the odds slightly in the dealer’s favor. Teams of players secretly working together could overcome this by playing at different tables, but the casinos banned anyone caught doing it. An individual could overcome it by counting cards: mentally adding one every time a small card was played, and subtracting one every time an ace or ten-card came up. When the count got high it meant the deck was loaded with tens and you went in big. But there were cameras over every table, trained on the players to watch for this sort of too-convenient timing, so JW was cautious about using this method. Still, there was something about trolling the stormy ocean of chance, and pulling a big win back out of it, that drew his obsessions to the surface.
Tonight, as it turned out, he didn’t need to count. The cards were all going his way naturally. The payout in blackjack is three to two, and on splits and double-downs a player can double that. The goal is to hit twenty-one without going over. The dealer stays on seventeen or above. JW’s luck held, and over the course of an hour he kept getting the cards, one after another. His three hundred dollars multiplied until he had twenty-seven thousand in stacks of multi-colored chips. A crowd gathered—young, vibrant, alive in the moment, enjoying his spectacular winning streak. The table felt glowed electric blue and the cards had a satisfying slippery thwack.
He knew people tended to make mistakes under such pressure. The best thing you could do was to follow a system and forget about the money and the audience. Some players pulled ten, twenty, or even fifty percent back out of each hand as a policy decision, but in his mind this was foolish because over time the house had a slight statistical advantage. By holding back, he would not be fully putting his money to work against that advantage. Mathematically, it was better to have all his chips in play, and to play it up as fast as he could, then get out.
That’s what he was about to do after another hand. It was time, he could feel it, but he was within spitting distance of paying off the second mortgage on his house. He felt in total control, reacting instantly. He saw the move, he felt it, he knew it was right, and he played it, over and over. Bam, bam, bam: Thor at the hammer, directing each slam of lightning—there, there, there. But that was a false sense. He knew it. He reminded himself to stay calm. He didn’t have to hit twenty-one. He didn’t even have to beat the other players. An old man in a rumpled suit—his ashen face was caving in on itself—presented no competition; neither did a younger one with earrings and a goatee and the cocky, puppy-dog air of some sort of media artist. He slouched in his paisley shirt and flung his dark greasy forelock aside, then let it fall again before flinging it back as if it had only just fallen for the first time. JW only had to beat the dealer. Bam! Another win! Yes! The old man pushed back from the table with a wave and a grim expression. JW watched him hobble off through the surrounding crowd. He took a sip from his drink and cautioned himself to use math, not to get sucked in by his emotions as the stakes rose. If he could stay technical, he could maximize his chances of finding a streak that would beat the house advantage in an even bigger way. He refocused on the game as the dealer began another round.
He had cleared nearly every ace in the shoe. He’d counted seven of them. Aces give players a lot of protection because they can be played as a one or as an eleven, so if you bust past twenty-one playing the ace high, you can fall back and use it as a one. Now that there was only one other player at the table, the odds were actually starting to tilt further in his favor.
“Hit me,” he was about to say, but he held up to think it through, and goatee looked over at him,