Las Vegas Noir

Bennie Rojas and the rough riders by Pablo Medina

West Las Vegas

The morning Bennie Rojas boarded the plane for Las Vegas, he was convinced he’d just gotten a new lease on life. Cuba, that small island rocked by politics and hurricanes, was already beginning to fade into the past and all his troubles were but flickering specks in a distant black sky. In the seat to Bennie’s right was one of the cooks from the Tropicana, the grandest nightclub in the world. To the left was a taciturn man with a scar that ran from his ear to his chin. He’d gotten on board in Miami, where the plane stopped on its way west, and had said nothing for four and a half hours. Naturally, Bennie assumed he did not speak any Spanish. Tough guys, Bennie thought. There’s nothing you can do about them. And so he spent the whole trip talking to the cook, a fellow from Matanzas with a pencil-thin mustache and a head the shape of an eggplant. His name was Orlando Leyva.

They promised me a job, Orlando said nervously. Rivulets of sweat ran down his face and moistened his collar. He was a man given to perspiring and every time the plane hit an air pocket more sweat poured out of him.

They promised me a job too, Bennie said. I’m not worried. I’m told Lansky is a man of his word.

Unless he isn’t.

Unless he isn’t, Bennie had to admit. If it weren’t for politics, Havana would be paradise. Maybe Las Vegas is paradise.

Las Vegas is in the desert.

Where do you think the Garden of Eden was located, chico, in the Caribbean?

Waiting for his bags in the claim area, it occurred to Bennie that Vegas was definitely not paradise but it sure was better than being unemployed in Havana living with a wife he couldn’t stand. Besides, the revolutionaries considered all casino employees to be part of a vast conspiracy of corruption: worms feeding on the dung heap of capitalism. It was only a matter of time before they came after Bennie and put him in one of their decrepit jails.

But Bennie was an honest man. Not once during his ten-year career as a twenty-one dealer did he skim, not once did he pass chips or take a hit or sell a customer short. And he didn’t get involved in politics or union business. All those complaints about unfair business practices and worker exploitation were not for him. He knew his bosses were not the most honest people in the world, but that wasn’t his concern. He did his job, put his time in, had a Cuba libre (a mentirita, people were calling them lately) with the other dealers after his shift, and went home to his hysterical wife, whom he referred to as Juana la Loca. No one had anything on him, except that, in this particular case, he was on the wrong side of the fence.

For a while after Fidel took over the casinos remained open and Bennie went to work as usual. There were still American tourists coming to Cuba, suckers willing to have their money taken while they drank themselves silly on daiquirís. Bennie’s job was to be a card dealer, not a priest. He’d see the Americanos at the table with a couple of gorgeous Cuban redheads wrapped around them and say to himself, Man, if I only had the money, I’d be right there next to them. Then one day two men came around asking if anyone wanted to go work in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas? Where the hell is that? Bennie asked. In the middle of nowhere, one of the guys said. But soon it’s going to be the next Havana. You schmucks want to stay here and rot? Schmuck was an English word Bennie had never heard. The guy doing the talking kept straightening his tie as he spoke. He looked like a movie gangster except that he was very young, maybe twenty years old, and he spoke in a reedy falsetto.

I have a wife, Bennie started to say, then he remembered he hated his wife. This was a perfect opportunity to escape the clutches of his lousy marriage, to escape all he sensed was coming to the island.

Six other dealers volunteered that day as well as eight cooks, twenty showgirls, and an unknown number of musicians. Two weeks later Bennie was at the Las Vegas airport, waiting for his bags and making small talk with Orlando and three of his culinary colleagues. The taciturn man with the scar led the five of them to a Ford station wagon and drove them to a motel off Rancho Drive. It was mid-July and the heat rose from the asphalt, turning the station wagon into a pressure cooker. The heat of Havana was nothing compared to this. Bennie mentioned his discomfort to the cooks but they, used to the infernal atmosphere of commercial kitchens, thought nothing of it. Paradise indeed.

Another man met them at the motel and gave each of them a room key. Bennie’s was number 207.

Good number to play, he said to Orlando. Number two is butterfly. Number seven is seashell.

Mine is 112. One is horse. Twelve is whore, Orlando responded. Not too good. That Chinese system is foolishness. There are better ways to make money.

Then the man announced that someone would be by for them the next morning at 7:30 and left.

For seven years Bennie lived in that motel, caught between a present substantially narrowed by a dead-end job and a suffocating nostalgia for the glories and joys of a past that was neither glorious nor joyous. His one friend, Orlando, was a man of limited intellectual capacity and no imagination to speak of. His conversations never strayed from the perfect demi-glace he’d concocted that morning or the bread he’d baked for lunch or the celebrity who’d entered the kitchen and offered his compliments on the salmon mousse. When Bennie tried to engage him in more expansive topics, such as baseball or women, a blank look came over Orlando’s face and at the first opportunity he’d switch the conversation back to kitchen matters. Bennie worked the graveyard shift because nights were hardest for him to spend alone. He’d sleep mornings as much as he could, until about noon or so. Then he’d shower, pick up the local paper, and go to a cafeteria on Sahara where he’d have two eggs fried over easy, bacon, toast, and bad American coffee. The rest of the time was his to do as he wanted. He napped, read the paper again, and, in the cool months, took long walks on streets that led nowhere but back into themselves. His shift began at 11 p.m. but more often than not he did a double, starting at 3 o’clock and going straight through until 7 the next morning.

Making money wasn’t the object; he simply had too much time on his hands and no way of whiling it away. The summer was too hot for anything but sitting in air-conditioning; the winter was high season and Joey, his pit boss, threw as much work at him as he could handle. His wife, who had since moved to Miami, sent him divorce papers, which he signed and sent right back. There was no ocean to look at like there was in Havana; only desert and fancy casinos where the tourists dropped their money. Mostly there was a lot of dust which got in his eyes and made him teary, as if he wasn’t teary enough already. There were plenty of women, beautiful ones, but none was accessible to him, a simple dealer from the tropics with a thick Cuban accent — like Desi Arnaz chewing on a raw steak, Joey once said — and the looks of a Galician grocer. The way to attract women, an uncle of his told him long ago, is to impress them with your power and your wealth. Good looks will only go so far. The woman needs to see you as a god, and those attributes are the closest we humans have to divinity. And just when Bennie had resigned himself to a life of celibacy, he met a woman, a round Mexican who cooked him fiery dishes and made love like a Zapotec beast. She always brought food — enchiladas, tacos, moles — enough for him and for Orlando who lived downstairs. Her name was Mercedes. She took care of both of them, in more ways than one, but she had her eye on Bennie. Barriga llena, corazón contento, she would say with a sparkle in her eye, expecting any moment he would say back to her the magic words.

As he sat outside his room on his day off, Bennie heard a commotion on the first level of the motel, followed by a woman’s voice that sounded very much like Mercedes screaming, Puto, cabrón, hijo de la chingada. He rushed down the steps to the first level and saw Orlando the cook on the floor, leaning against the brick outer wall of his room with a butcher knife stuck half-way into his chest. His eyes were glazed and a string of bloody saliva hung from his lips. Orlando babbled something about someone taking twenty thousand and said nothing else. He looked up at Bennie before letting out a long sigh like a balloon deflating; then his eyes lost their bearing and his head drooped softly to the side.

Bennie’s first instinct was to go back upstairs and forget what he had seen, let someone else deal with the situation. Instead, out of deference to his friend, he looked around to make sure no one else had witnessed the killing, maneuvered Orlando away from the wall with great difficulty — he was a bulky guy, as cooks tend to be — and dragged him back into the room. Bennie shut the door and turned the air-conditioning as high as it would go, figuring it would help preserve Orlando. He sat on the unmade bed and tried to light a cigarette. His hands were shaking so badly it took four tries before he could bring the match to the tip and take the first drag. Sure, he’d seen plenty of people die, like his mother and her sisters, and a cousin with leukemia, but never like this, with a knife sticking out of them and their last words about money. This would never happen in Cuba, he thought, then thought again. Of course it would. Still, at this moment he wanted to be back there in his old apartment on Lagunas Street where his parents had lived and their parents before them, now occupied by his revolution-crazed cousin Aleida, who had beautiful eyes but farted like a foghorn.

Bennie surveyed the room and spied a half-full bottle of Don Q rum on the dresser, which he could reach without having to stand up. Two healthy swigs settled him somewhat and he considered the situation. Calling the police was out of the question. They’d snoop and his bosses weren’t fond of snooping. So he called Joey, his pit boss at the casino — he’d know what to do — and waited for him to show up.

It took Joey three hours to get to the motel. When he saw the cook lying on the carpet, his first words were Holy fucking shit. Orlando’s face had acquired a blue pallor and rigor mortis was beginning to set in, no matter that it was damn cold in the room. Those were Joey’s second words: It’s damn cold in here, followed by, What was your fight about?

Fight? Bennie kept to himself the fact that he heard Mercedes screaming just before he found the cook. Joey, he said, I didn’t kill Orlando. He was my friend.

Friends kill each other all the time. Why didn’t you take the knife out of him? The longer he’s dead, the harder it’s going to be. And next time, put a shower curtain under him. That way the blood won’t get on the rug.

You do it, Joey. You take the knife out. I couldn’t even watch my mother kill a chicken.

Didn’t they teach you anything in that damn country of yours? Fucking Latin lover can’t get his hands dirty.

Joey looked long and hard at Bennie, then he kneeled next to Orlando and jiggled the knife handle. Blood’s pretty much set. We won’t be needing the curtains. And before he’d finished saying the word curtains, he had the knife out and was holding it next to his head. It was a huge nasty thing. For an instant Bennie had the image of the blade entering Orlando and causing massive damage to his inner organs. The thought made him shiver.

This is a job for the rough riders, Joey said, and made a phone call. In ten minutes two men showed up, a tall slim guy in a gray suit and a short heavyset one in a blue shirt and beige linen trousers. Bennie noticed that the short man had a tomato sauce stain on his right pant leg. The men looked at dead Orlando on the floor and proceeded to ransack drawers, pulling them out of the dresser and upending their contents on the body. When they were done with the drawers they took the bed apart, then started on the closet and rifled through Orlando’s clothes, discarding them this way and that and making a huge mess. Finally, one of them turned to Bennie, who was now standing in a corner of the room, and said, Where’s the money?

Money? Bennie asked, trying to be as sheepish as possible. Now the three men were looking at him, waiting for an answer. I don’t know about no money. Bennie’s legs were shaking and his throat was beginning to tighten as it did every time he was nervous, making him cluck like a chicken.

We better cut him up, one of the men said. It’ll be easier that way.

Bennie made a move for the door.

Where you going? said the man in the blue shirt.

I live upstairs, said Bennie. I just thought I’d lie down for a while. I work tonight.

You staying right here, Jack. He turned to the man in the suit. Bring the tools.

Bennie needed to sit down but the mattress was up against the window leaning over the two armchairs. The only other chair was on the opposite side and he’d have to step over Orlando. He looked at Joey, who shrugged.

Joey, please, he implored him, I don’t want to watch this.

I don’t either. They’ll do it in the bathroom.

But I can hear.

Cover your ears.

After the two men carted Orlando’s pieces wrapped in wax paper and tied neatly with butcher string out of the room, they came back in and stood on either side of Bennie and asked again where the money was.

Bennie’s lips were shaking so badly they couldn’t meet to form words, to say simply, I don’t know, I didn’t take it. Despite the very real danger he was facing, however, there was a spot of coolness inside him that kept him from falling apart. It surprised him. He’d always thought of himself as a coward. That coolness led him to conclude with absolute certainty that Mercedes had taken the twenty thousand but he wasn’t about to tell these guys that. Right now every little bit of knowledge he kept from them was to his benefit.

Then Joey saved him. Guys, he said, Bennie don’t know anything. He’s a stupid Cuban. All he knows is dealing cards. Leave him alone.

The two men looked at each other, then back at Joey. The small one said, We don’t take orders from you.

Listen fuck-head, Bennie here doesn’t have the money. And if Archie gives you any grief, tell him I answer directly to Meyer and he can go suck a moose.

The men grumbled some curse words at Joey and left to drop pieces of Orlando all over the desert. Bennie asked Joey what was going on. Either Joey didn’t know or he didn’t let on. Later that night, as the two of them shared a six-pack of beer, Bennie asked Joey how he knew these thugs.

I got some juice in this town, Bennie. Me and Meyer grew up on the same block in the Lower East Side. You can’t fuck around with Lansky. He owns everyone in Vegas, including me. He owns you, except you don’t know it. Orlando tried to pull a fast one and he paid for it.

What did he do? Bennie asked.

I’d like to know that myself. The whole thing’s unsavory, I know, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Joey used the word unsavory with great delicacy, saying every sound as if it were a precious jewel. You sure you don’t know anything about that money those guys were talking about?

Bennie shook his head.

I have a feeling you do, Joey said. He finished his beer and left.

Bennie didn’t see Mercedes for two weeks, and every day of those two weeks one of Archie’s men came by asking about the money. Joey’s so-called juice was the only thing between Bennie and the butcher’s block. It was the loneliest period of his life. He worked, he ate, he came home, and he sat by the door to his room until it was time for bed. Day in and day out without a holiday, not even Christmas, on which he worked a double shift and made five hundred dollars. The money didn’t matter that much to him. He had nothing to spend it on. He didn’t like whores and had no need for a car. He paid a full twenty dollars a week for his room. His work clothes were provided for by the casino and he had no family to care for, not in Vegas or Miami or Cuba. As he pondered his sorry state, cursing the day he ever decided to leave the island, he heard a knock at his door and Mercedes’s plaintive voice asking to be let in.

Where have you been? he asked.

I was in Mexico but I’m back now.

I can see that, he said. What happened between you and Orlando?

He tried a nasty thing on me, ese cabrón.

You didn’t have to kill him.

He wouldn’t stop. There was a knife there. I just try to scare him but he kept coming and so I hit him with it. I just try to scare him.

By now Mercedes had grown very agitated. Her eyes were wide open and her lips were spread into a grimace, like those Mixtec goddesses you see biting into the hearts of men. Hijode la chingada, she grumbled.

Bennie wanted to shut the door on her and forget she ever existed. What about the money? he asked.

Mercedes was silent for a moment and grew meek, hunching her shoulders downward and looking up at him with beseeching eyes.

I didn’t steal it. I just found it.

Oh, to be back in Cuba right now, he thought. Communism had to be better than this.

Mujer, are you crazy? You know half of Vegas is looking for you? What did you do with it?

Mercedes was silent.

If you don’t return that money to its owners, they’re going to grind us up into picadillo. You understand?

Mercedes straightened up and narrowed her eyes into fierce slits. Let me tell you three things, she said. First, the money is hidden; second, I ain’t giving it to nobody; third, you are a big pendejo.

Why do you come here? You are incriminating me, he said to her, which was stupid, considering he was incriminated the moment he landed at the Vegas airport.

I miss you, güerito. I want you to go away with me and we can be rich together.

That’s when he took her by the arm, shoved her out of the room, and slammed the door. When he turned around he saw a letter-size white envelope lying on the dresser. Bennie sat on the bed and stared at it, not knowing whether to pick it up and count it or flush it down the toilet or simply ignore it as if it were never there. He did the latter for a few hours until his fantasies got the better of him and he started thinking of everything he could do with the money. He could buy himself a fancy car. That would draw the women. He could buy a house. That was a smart thing to do. Or he could escape Las Vegas once and for all. Go to Miami, open up a barber shop, run a small book on the side, marry a nice criolla who would give him lots of children.

What about Mercedes? After all, she was the one who had killed Orlando and took the money. She worked incessantly, the poor woman, doing laundry, cleaning houses, and selling herself when the opportunity availed itself to lonely men like him who lived in cheap motels without a hope in the world. Most of what she made from her menial labors she sent to her family in Mexico like a dutiful daughter. At least she said she did. Eventually Bennie’s sense of fair play won out. Mercedes was foul-mouthed and overweight but not a bad sort. If he squinted really hard, he could see traces of María Félix in her features. If she killed Orlando she did it in self-defense. How many women would not have done the same under similar circumstances? The more he stared at the envelope the more he thought, Mercedes, Mercedes with that singsong Oaxacan accent of hers and hair like black milk and ever-so-dim resemblance to the most beautiful actress of all time.

He called in sick to work and sat on the bed consumed by an idyll he had never before experienced. He imagined himself in Mexico, owner of a hacienda surrounded by acres and acres of maguey and a distillery bearing his name, Benjamín Rojas, Producer of Fine Tequilas. He imagined a stable of black paso fino horses and a herd of gleaming prize zebu cattle that were the envy of every ranchero in the comarca. He built a whole architecture of fantasy with him at the center: cars, women, presidents, prime ministers, cardinals, all currying his favor. What Mexico needed was a Cuban with balls, coño, who would create an empire of liquor that would rival the great distilleries of the world — Bacardi, Jack Daniel’s, Hiram Walker — and with those twenty thousand dollars Mercedes had given him, by God, he could do it.

That’s when someone knocked at the door.

Bennie picked up the envelope and stuffed it into the back of his pants. He looked through the peephole and saw that it was Joey.

Jesus, Joey said as he walked into Bennie’s room. It’s freezing in here. You’d figure Cuba was in Siberia the way you guys like the cold.

It’s on its way there, Bennie said.

Joey sat on the bed and lit up a Cuban Churchill, every puff of smoke round and sweet and perfect.

You have the money, Joey said. As a matter of fact, I’m willing to bet my left testicle you have it on your person even as we speak.

Bennie felt his throat tightening. He sat on the armchair, took out a handkerchief, and blew his nose. The cigar smoke was getting to him. How about Mercedes? he said. You know, the Mexican.

Yeah, the one you wiped your sword with. A man needs that every once in a while. Joey blew a puff of blue smoke up toward the ceiling. You fucking Cubans can sure make cigars, he said. It’s about the only thing you’re good at. Mercedes is taken care of. Twenty G’s is pocket change for Meyer, but he just hates to be swindled. Why don’t you give me the money, spare yourself?

Bennie hesitated. All those dreams of women and paso finos and thousands of acres of maguey plantings going up with Joey’s smoke. He reached behind him and handed Joey the envelope.

I’ll make you a deal, Bennie. I keep fifteen and I’ll give you five. Call it a reward for a job well done. Just between you and me. Nobody else has to know.

Joey counted out the five G’s and passed them back to Bennie, who took the money without hesitation and put it in his pocket. As he did so he felt his blood thicken and his heart slow a few beats.

After Joey left, Bennie pulled the shades shut and lay on the bed. He tried to summon up his fantasies but all he could think of was the money in his pocket. What was fat Mercedes to him anyway, and Orlando with that eggplant face of his? Five thousand wasn’t twenty but it was enough for a down-payment on a small house. The wife and the book operation would come eventually. So would the juice. Without his realizing, the coolness inside had turned to ice.

Bits and pieces by Christine McKellar

Green Valley

The grinding rumble of heavy construction equipment awakened Madison Feldon an hour before her alarm was set to go off. She swung her short, muscular legs out of bed and stumbled into the master bathroom of her two-bedroom condo.

“Those rude bastards,” she grumbled as she sat down on the padded toilet seat. “It’s not even 7 o’clock and already they’re at it.”

Madison sat for a few minutes moodily contemplating the day ahead of her. She was a fitness trainer at a prestigious private club in Green Valley, a burgeoning upscale suburb of Las Vegas. She had a small but steady clientele. Madison was disciplined and very knowledgeable about nutrition and physical therapy. “It’s the social shit I can’t get a handle on,” she muttered. She sighed as she stood up, then went to the sink to wash her hands.

The face reflecting back at her from the mirror, the only mirror in the condo, wasn’t necessarily attractive even on a good day, much less after a night of restless tossing and turning. Madison’s brown eyes had puffy bags beneath them and were slightly bloodshot. At twenty-nine years of age, her skin had a mottled look from too many summers in the dry, windy desert. Madison was stocky and compact. She was the only child of Louie and Rachel Feldon. The Feldons had carved a niche in the Las Vegas Valley in the real estate market. Along with their good friends, Al and Lois Clavell, they also owned a small local casino that was a virtual cash cow.

It was spring in the high desert, and Madison had left her sliding bedroom door open to take advantage of the cool night air. Now, mingled with the noise of the machinery, she could hear the occasional shouts and curses of workers on the construction site. With much more force than necessary, she went and slammed the glass door shut. Madison stood, hands on her hips, glaring at the men in hard hats. Clouds of dirt rose and swirled in the air like masses of swarming angry bees. A chorus of muted honking began as commuters vented their frustration over the congestion caused by the project.

Madison could feel the tic begin in her eyelid. She could never see it when she looked in the bathroom mirror. But it was there, she knew it. She could feel it. Just like she’d felt every nuance of her father’s subtle and not so subtle criticisms. It was his short, micro jabs that had caused the most damage. Not the clean, hard thrusts or stabs that Madison could — and did — parry or fend off.

“It’s not my fault I’m not the son he wanted,” Madison mused out loud to the oblivious construction workers. “He would forgive me even that, I suppose, if I looked like Mother. At least he’d have a showcase daughter he could marry off to some money.”

Madison looked like her father. Short, stocky. Brown nondescript hair and eyes, an overly large nose, and a slightly receding chin. Her mother was tall and had a willowy figure that looked elegant even under the worst of circumstances. Madison couldn’t recall one single time when her mother looked anything less than composed and perfectly coiffed.

Her father, on the other hand, was loud and obnoxious. Louie seemed to revel in exemplifying the typical Jewish tycoon. Everything was a crisis to him. And he was merciless when it came to picking on his only child.

“You want that I should spend fifty grand on a bat mitzvah for you when you look like a schlump?” he’d screamed at the chubby, prepubescent teenage girl. As always, her mother seemed to fade gracefully into the background during one of Louie’s tirades. Louie laid down the law. There would be no rite of passage for Madison, not until she lost twenty pounds. Madison lost the weight. That was when the tics started.

Later on, one of her therapists expressed her horror at what went on for years at the Feldon home. While Louie and Rachael were wined and dined most evenings, the housekeeper strictly monitored Madison’s diet. Every morsel she ate had to be accounted for. Every carb and every calorie. Madison attended a private school and her humiliation was without measure when her father showed up at the dean’s office. Madison was called from class and had to sit in an agony of embarrassment as Louie made it loud and clear she was to eat only the meager lunches provided by her parents. The cafeteria was off limits.

Her stomach growled and Madison noticed one of the hard hats across the street seemed to be looking into her second-floor window. “Eat this,” she sneered, and flipped him the bird. She brushed her teeth and went downstairs to the kitchen. Madison ground fresh coffee beans and began brewing a pot of coffee. Then she opened the refrigerator door and stood looking thoughtfully at its contents.

Madison was unaware that the tic had moved from her eye to her upper lip. The refrigerator was stocked, like the tiny pantry, almost to the point of bulging. Unopened packages of deli meats, cheeses, and bagels and cream cheese in all flavors were crammed inside. There were pints of yogurt, bottles of chocolate milk, and doggie bags full of uneaten meals. Madison poked through the contents of the refrigerator before pulling out the only item that wasn’t covered in mold, curdled, or decayed: a carton of egg whites.

As she scrambled the egg whites in a Teflon-coated pan, Madison thought about the new client she was to begin training later that morning. He was a walk-in referral. Garvey Kendall sounded nice enough over the phone. He’d actually seemed a bit nervous. Madison smiled as she measured one and a half ounces of egg onto a paper plate. She had a mental picture of Garvey: tall, geeky. Probably wore glasses and was eager to put some muscle on his skinny frame.

Her cell phone rang, its shrill intrusion into her breakfast moment causing her to drop a plastic forkful of egg onto the dirty parquet floor. “Damnit!” She glanced at the caller ID. Her stomach relaxed when she saw it wasn’t her mother calling. It was her shrink’s office. Dr. Golob’s secretary briskly informed her that tomorrow’s appointment would have to be rescheduled. The doctor had a family emergency.

Partly due to her mother’s insistence, but also partly due to simply needing someone to talk to, Madison had been in therapy for years. In school she hadn’t been that popular to begin with, then word had gotten around about her father’s dietary directive. She became the constant source of entertainment for her creatively cruel classmates.

The strict diet she was forced into seemed to interfere with her pubescence too. While other girls her age were whispering and giggling about bra sizes and tampons versus pads, Madison remained flat chested and untouched by the monthly curse. It wasn’t until she was fourteen that she got her first period. Even so, she remained ridiculously unendowed with breasts.

It was Dr. Golob who’d suggested Madison study nutrition and fitness training. He’d pointed out she could modify her body type with a regimen of a proper diet and exercise, so why not make a living out of it? “People will have to talk to you, Madison. Actually, your clients will be counting on you. Trusting you to help them improve their bodies. You really need the socialization. Consider it part of your therapy.”

Her last session with Dr. Golob hadn’t been a fruitful one, to say the least. She’d been complaining about the construction surrounding her. Vegas was booming. Old familiar buildings and hotels were being imploded and demolished. High-rise condos and towering casinos were vying for space in the once clear blue sky of the valley. Lake Mead was like a gargantuan bathtub with a faulty plug and a bad case of ring-around-the-ninety-foot rim.

Madison had moved to the suburbs six years ago to escape the congestion. Now the Green Valley area was pretty much a metropolis of its own. “Did you know, Dr. Golob, that years ago on Tomiyasu Lane there was a vegetable farm owned by a Japanese man named Mr. Tomiyasu?”

Her stomach growled again when she remembered plump red strawberries and sweet ears of corn that the housekeeper would bring home. Madison was so hungry all of the time back then that her sense of smell had sharpened considerably. She would imagine that by drawing in deep breathes through her nose she was actually tasting the fresh produce. This was something she never shared with the therapist.

Nor did she share with Dr. Golob how deeply affected she was by the constant cycle of destruction, then resurrection, surrounding her. Even at night, machines were digging and scraping away at the soil, leaving deep scars in the million-years-old earth. Machines that in the yellow lights used by the construction workers looked like something from a Martian collective.

Cold and relentless, they jabbed and dug and poked; just like her father had jabbed and dug and poked at her, Madison would think. Then the builders would come and layer by layer cover up the blemishes and pockmarks. They would be followed by the landscapers who planted trees, bushes, and flowers that really had no business in the arid soil of the Nevada desert. So, too, had Madison built walls of concrete around her, and layered her façade with cosmetics and apparel foreign to her nature.

“Oh no! Gotta go!” Madison, lost in her mental ramblings, was running late. She quickly showered, then dressed in her usual training ensemble: blue shorts, white shirt, socks, and Nikes. Her short curly hair needed only a dab of mousse to keep it in place. She applied mascara to her sparse lashes, a hint of blush to her cheeks, and some lip gloss on her narrow mouth.

Madison strode purposely to her old BMW, then inched her way out into the traffic on Silver Springs Road. She wasn’t too concerned about upsetting her client with her tardiness. She knew she could blame it on the construction work surrounding the area.

Lately, Madison was blaming everything on the construction, from her lack of sleep when she woke up drenched in sweat as the machines chewed and gnawed their way through the night (she never did remember the nightmares about her father) to her increasing desire to eat the food she would only allow to rot in the refrigerator. (Her stomach seemed to rumble more and more each day in a synchronized cacophony with the backhoes and loaders.)

Madison pulled into the club parking lot and got her gym bag out of the trunk. Three women dressed in short colorful tennis skirts walked by, bright sunlight flashing off the diamonds on their fingers. They were laughing, oblong bags slung across their backs. Thin, blond, and full-breasted, they passed by Madison without so much as a glance.

Garvey was waiting by the water cooler in the gym. To her surprise, he wasn’t tall and skinny. He was short and stocky like her. His hair was black and longer than the current buzz-cut fashion. He had shy brown eyes and perfectly unblemished olive skin. She soon found out his mother was Latina. His father was Caucasian and owned a concrete-mixing company.

Madison eased Garvey through the usual trainer’s monologue. What were his goals? How committed was he to meeting those goals? What were his eating habits? Where did he want to see the most improvement? She weighed him in and calculated his body-fat index, then took him through thirty minutes of a light workout on the weight machines.

Two clients later, Madison was ready to call it a day. On her way home she decided to stop at Starbucks for her one indulgence in life, a caramel macchiato. Hot beverage in hand, she picked up a copy of a local alternative weekly and wandered out onto the patio.

“Miss Feldon?”

Madison squinted into the bright light. Garvey Kendall was smiling shyly down at her. He had a cardboard cup in one hand and a small brown bag in the other. He shifted nervously from one foot to the other.

“Mind if I join you?”

For a moment, she did mind. She minded, all right, because she could smell the cinnamon coffee cake with its thick sweet icing that was nestled in the bag he set down on the round metal table. She minded because she didn’t appreciate him intruding on her solitude. She minded because he was a client, just an eighty-dollar hour, of which her cut was only forty percent. She minded because he was a man, and Madison knew from past experience that men didn’t like her.

Five years ago, Madison’s only friend, her cousin Sarah, had come to Las Vegas to celebrate spring break, and that was when Madison had lost her virginity. The cousins were the same age, born just weeks apart. Sarah had a clear complexion, long brunette hair, and sparkling blue eyes that matched her upbeat personality. Sarah was the darling daughter among three sons. Sarah’s family lived in Chicago.

A new hotel-casino had opened not far from Madison’s condo. It was the vivacious Sarah who suggested they should go to dinner at the hotel. After dinner, the two women went out onto the casino floor to play poker. Madison found she was actually enjoying herself. The pile of chips in front of her was gradually increasing.

One of the seats at the table opened up and was quickly occupied. Madison glanced at the newcomer, then almost knocked over the cocktail at her elbow. She’d seen him at the sports club many times. While she couldn’t remember his name, she certainly remembered how he looked while he was working out. (Muscles taut and straining under his glistening, tanned skin.) Madison felt a flush of warmth as she recalled how she enjoyed surreptitiously tracing with her eyes the vinelike pattern of pumped-up veins along his hard body.

The handsome man was sitting beside Sarah, and the two were obviously flirting with one another. The chips in front of Madison began to dwindle. She was paying more attention to the action between her cousin and the bodybuilder than to the poker game. Madison had just asked the bored-looking Asian dealer to cash her out when Sarah stood up and motioned to her.

“Let’s go to the nightclub downstairs. Bradley’s going to join us.” Bradley was looking at the two women, but his eyes passed right over Madison. He nodded at Sarah as if to signal he’d be joining her shortly.

The club was packed. Madison and Sarah had to wait in line for ten minutes. Bradley caught up with them, but the only place the trio could find to sit was on one of the large divans on the sprawling outdoor veranda. Bradley seemed to know everyone. Martini after martini began to appear. Madison quickly got drunk enough to attempt small talk with Bradley. Her cousin seemed to have lost interest in the bodybuilder once he’d introduced her to a mangy-looking rock-star wannabe.

People were thronging around the patio. Soon total strangers were sitting or reclining on the divan — laughing, drinking, kissing, and fondling their partners. Madison was pressed against Bradley. The close contact with him again sent a heated sensation throughout her body.

When Madison stood up to go use the powder room, she was unsteady on her feet. She was vaguely aware of Sarah shaking her arm and pointing to Bradley. The next thing she knew she was home — and Bradley was with her. Sarah had cajoled him into driving Madison to the condo.

Madison wasn’t simply home with Bradley. She was in bed with him. His breath reeked of vodka and vermouth. His kisses were sloppy, and he was groping at her thighs. Madison didn’t remember taking off her clothes, but she was naked. Bradley was wearing only his shirt. She could feel his bare muscled thighs against hers.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” The ceiling seemed to spin. “Brad, I think I’m going to be sick.” Madison struggled to move out from underneath him.

“No you’re not.” His words were slurred.

He was lying completely on top of her, his weight pressing her down, down, down.

Brad managed a drunken laugh. “Shit, girl, you really are flatter’n a pancake.”

Madison felt bile rising in her throat, but she managed to suppress the gag reflex. Bradley was now fully between her spread legs, and he began to position himself to move inside of her. Madison had read enough romance novels in her years of isolation to expect that her first time with a man would be somewhat painful. (Later, she would reflect that romance novels, like everything else in her life, were filled with nothing but lies and bullshit.)

When Bradley forced himself into Madison, she cried out. She was a fairly strong woman, and she pushed at his shoulders and thrust with her legs. She almost succeeded in bucking him off. Bradley stopped the invasion of her body for a moment. “Oh shit. You a virgin?”

Madison began sobbing. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to have sex with him. But this was supposed to be her moment. Her first time with a man was supposed to be seductive, romantic. The man who deflowered her was supposed to be gentle, compassionate, and bring her slowly from orgasm to orgasm. Not treat her like some blow-up doll.

Madison managed to say yes to the man looming over her. A man whose face she could barely see in the darkness of her bedroom. A man who said to her with obvious annoyance in his voice, “Oh well. Let’s just get this over with then.” And he did. And that was it.

At the gym, Bradley didn’t avoid Madison; he simply ignored her. It was as though they’d never met. Madison didn’t tell Sarah what happened that night. She never even told her shrink, Dr. Golob. Sex was one topic Madison Feldon avoided at all costs. She never picked up another romance novel at the grocery store, either. Now here she was being invited to sit intimately and alone with a man.

“Hey, are you all right?”

Madison detected a note of genuine concern in Garvey’s voice. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She motioned with her hand. “Go ahead, have a seat.”

“I don’t mean to bother you. I just wanted to tell you that I know I’m in good hands.” His smile was simple and genuine.

“Thanks. I appreciate clients who appreciate me.” She smiled back.

A cement truck lumbered by on the congested street, bits of rock bouncing out of the revolving drum and skittering along the sidewalk near the coffeehouse. Madison winced and let out a harsh, irritated breath. She could feel the minute twitch begin in her left eye. Her uninvited guest didn’t seem to notice her distress. He kept rambling on about the importance of fitness and nutrition.

Garvey opened the brown bag and offered to share the coffee cake with Madison. Now her eye and her lip were twitching. She looked at everything but the tempting pastry and the man sitting across from her.

“I hardly think that’s nutritious. It’s all empty calories and major carbs, you know.” Madison’s mouth flooded. She clenched her hands under the table.

Garvey laughed. He had a good laugh. It was light and easy, almost infectious. She found herself responding to the sound. Madison Feldon giggled.

Two weeks later, Madison was at the gym with Garvey. He was a dependable client. He hadn’t missed a single one of his tri-weekly sessions. He was eager to please and quick to pick up on the nuances of working with weights. They were both sweating when the hour ended, and Madison hurried to the showers in the women’s locker room.

No one at the club had ever seen her naked except for Bradley, but then he didn’t really see her That Night, and he certainly never saw her again. Wrapped in a big towel, Madison kept her eyes averted from the potpourri of nude bodies around her. Fat, lean, wrinkled, smooth, young, old; from the corner of her eye she glanced at them, these naked females who moved unself-consciously through the rituals of blow drying their hair, moisturizing their bodies, and chatting on cell phones.

Garvey was waiting for her outside the club entrance. He asked if she’d like to meet him at Starbucks. Madison shrugged. “Only if you promise not to buy any junk food.” Again, that easy laugh of his.

Over coffee, Madison shared her thoughts about the growth and construction in Green Valley.

“These developers are eco-rapists. They don’t care about the environment. They don’t design or plan with any thought to water conservation or traffic flow.” Madison scowled. “When I first moved to Green Valley, you could hear coyotes yipping and howling at night. Now all I hear is the beep-beep of backhoes and loaders.” She looked at Garvey. “Where do you think the coyotes have gone?”

“I don’t know, Maddy.”

Madison flinched at his use of the nickname. Only the Feldon’s housekeeper had ever called her that. Despite having been designated as the enforcer of Madison’s diet, Mrs. An-son was kindhearted. On occasion she would treat the ever-hungry young girl to something special: a frozen Popsicle or a sorbet. They had to be careful since Louie Feldon demanded that his daughter weigh herself in his presence every morning. Her whole body twitched at the memory of the invective Louie would rain down on her naked body if the digital scale reflected so much as a gain of one ounce.

Garvey was shredding a paper napkin into a little pile in front of him. “I think you’d be surprised at what goes into the building process. Everything follows a plan. Water, sewer, gas pipes have to be laid down. Houses have to be wired for phone and electricity.”

He pushed the torn bits of paper onto his palm, then dumped them in the unused ashtray. “I don’t know if I mentioned it but I’m taking classes at night in architecture at UNLV.”

Madison murmured a polite response.

“My dad’s cement company has the contract for a new housing tract up in Roma Hills. Want to go there with me this weekend? Maybe if I explained the construction process to you, you’d better appreciate it.”

Madison stood up abruptly. “We’ll see. I’ve been busy with a project at home. You have my cell number. Why don’t you give me a call Saturday or Sunday?”

She was gone before he could respond. Back at the condo, Madison looked around the combination living room/dining room with sudden distaste. Unopened copies of the Las Vegas Review-Journal were scattered about. An assortment of gym shoes and dirty socks lay abandoned near the couch and around the base of the dining room table.

She went to her messy bedroom to change into sweat-pants and a T-shirt. Madison had long ago given up the habit of making her bed in the morning. The project she’d told Garvey about lay in bits and pieces on her dresser. Madison swept everything onto a tray and carried it to the living room. Her stomach told her it was dinnertime, but she knew that if she drank lots of water and got busy with her hands, she could put off the inevitable for another hour or so.

Madison had taken up beading as a hobby. She would sit, focused for hours, stringing different shapes and shades of glass and crystal beads along thin wires. She made necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. Bit by bit, piece by piece, she created objects of beauty. Strands of sparkling cosmetic jewelry were strewn all over the condo; they hung from the windows; they lined the counters and tabletops. They were in the bathroom, in the shower, on all the doorknobs.

They reflected light just like her first and only formal gown at her lavish bat mitzvah. Louie Feldon had been louder than usual that night. The party wasn’t so much about presenting his young daughter as it was about showing off his wealth. The rite of passage and elegant celebration had been a blur to Madison. She was severely anemic at the time, but no one was aware of it.

When she could no longer ignore the hunger pangs, Madison set the beading aside. She didn’t even bother to open the refrigerator. She went straight to the pantry and pulled out a can of powdered whey protein. Breakfast is the only importantmeal of the day. Carbs at night are unnecessary. Carbs and caloriesmake you fat. Louie’s voice was loud in her head. Of course, it wasn’t really her father’s voice. Louie Feldon wasn’t talking to anyone these days. Louie Feldon had died of a massive heart attack a few months after Madison fled the family home and moved out to the suburbs.

“He ate and drank himself to death,” Madison told the unconcerned reporter on the television. Her mother, Rachael, had seemed unfazed by the passing of her husband. But then, she’d had a lover keeping her company during her thirty-five-year marriage: Prince Valium and his court of Soma, vodka, and prescribed diet pills.

With Louie gone, Madison’s mother no longer had to keep her diary updated.

It had been Rachael’s assigned duty to keep a daily record of every morsel Madison put in her mouth. It was also her job to report nightly to her husband every act of misbehavior on their daughter’s part. Whether it was that Madison hadn’t used her napkin properly, or that she’d sat with her legs slightly apart and not crossed at the ankles, Rachael had logged every malefaction.

Garvey phoned Saturday while Madison was at the gym with a client. Madison left the messages, unheard, in her voice mailbox. The construction behind her condo seemed to have increased in urgency. The crew was working night and day in a frenzy to complete yet another high-rise condominium complex.

Madison had called the county office to complain. She was told the developer had a permit to work at night. She quit grinding coffee beans in the morning. The grating sound of the blades reducing the hard little beans into fine grounds seemed to be a mocking echo of the outdoor machinery shredding her nerves.

Madison noticed Sunday afternoon, when she began to work on a necklace for Garvey, that she’d developed a tremor in her hands. She’d never designed a necklace for a man, and she’d been looking forward to the challenge. However, instead of gliding onto the long wire strand, the black and silver beads rolled from her useless fingers and onto the mottled carpet.

Madison’s cell phone beeped incessantly in the background. Her mother could go for weeks without contacting her daughter, then she’d get manic and speed dial Madison. In a salute to the departed Louie, Rachael would demand to know Madison’s weight and if she were sticking to her diet.

The doorbell rang and Madison froze. Aside from the occasional annoying salesperson or Jehovah’s Witness, no one came to 5555 Silver Springs Road. Madison looked through the peephole. She was fisheye to fisheye with Garvey Kendall. Should she pretend she wasn’t home? Should she step outside and send him away? Should she, could she, would she just let him in?

Madison opened the door a crack.

“Hey, Maddy, I hope I’m not bothering you, but you haven’t answered your phone and I was wondering if you’re all right.” That shy smile and those cocker spaniel eyes.

“I’m fine, Garvey. How’d you know where I live?”

“I saw you turn in here after we left Starbucks the other day. Your name’s on the mailbox ledger.”

Thoughts and images raced through Madison’s mind. Louie, Rachael, Mrs. Anson, and Bradley all vied for her attention. She jerked her head as though to fling them out of her consciousness. Finally, she opened the door for Garvey to come in. He didn’t seem to notice the dirt and the clutter. Rather, he noticed immediately the strings of scintillating beads that adorned the small condo. The sunlight seemed to capture and magnify the many facets, sending little rainbows dancing around the drab interior.

“Nice. Did you make all of these?” His voice was admiring.

Madison nodded. She offered him a bottle of water. They talked for some time about the role of progress versus environment. Garvey shared with Madison some of the conflicting thoughts she had inspired in him regarding his father’s livelihood and its impact on the Las Vegas Valley. Garvey took one last swallow of water and stood up.

“Do you still want to go out to the site with me?”

He may as well have been asking a much younger Madison if she wanted to sit on her abusive father’s lap. Her lip, her eye, even her shoulders began to twitch.

“What’s wrong?” Garvey looked at her in alarm. “Madison, what’s with you?”

“Nothing, nothing. I’m just a little anxious. Look.” She bent over and picked up a length of twisted wire and a few black and silver beads. “I was making you a necklace, Garvey, but the noise out back began bothering me.”

Garvey stepped closer. He took Madison’s face in his hands. “You’re such a different kind of girl.”

Was it her imagination or did his eyes flicker on her flat chest?

“Madison, your face is like one big teardrop just waiting to fall.”

She pulled back abruptly. Teardrops, fear drops. So, it showed. Her life was written all over her homely face. Out in the open for everyone to see. Something inside of her burst like a festered boil. She could actually feel all twenty-six feet of her intestines relax. Madison smiled at Garvey with a look of gratitude.

“I’m going to finish this necklace for you. Turn around so I can measure your neck.”

That night Madison made dinner. She set the dining room table with linens, her mother’s fine bone china, and candles. It didn’t matter that the baked potatoes had wormy little sprouts poking out of their fat, warm skins. It didn’t matter that the salad leaves were black and slimy.

Madison began to carve the slightly warm meat. The sharp knife slid cleanly through tissue, then gristle, then bone. She was a vegetarian, but that didn’t matter. Madison wasn’t about to partake of this feast. This was the feast of atonement. This was the blood sacrifice for sin. Just as her Hebrew ancestors centuries ago had offered up the blood and flesh of goats, so too was Madison going to petition God for His mercy. This was Madison’s Yom Kippur.

The knife grated on something hard. Madison sighed in exasperation, then plucked a silver bead from the gory mass in front of her. Everything was in order. It was time for her to go. Carefully, she began to roll bits and pieces of Garvey into remnants of the filthy carpet she’d also sectioned up. There were six construction sites in her neighborhood alone.

Madison had to make four trips to her BMW. Two legs, two arms, one torso, the surprisingly heavy head. The midnight sky reflected the beam of the giant Luxor pyramid thrusting its shaft of light heedlessly through the dark womb of stars and galaxies above. Madison drove out of the parking lot without thought, without feeling.

Early morning found Madison not far from her condo. She didn’t remember where she’d been, but she knew she had one last stop to make. Madison stood among broken soil, a heavy blood-sodden lump of carpet cradled in her arms. The eastern sky was beginning to brighten into a jaded pink. The lights of the Las Vegas Strip seemed to wink at her.

Madison was poised before a slab of semi-hardened concrete. Silent pieces of heavy equipment surrounded her: hulking dark masses that loomed against the backdrop of the dawn sky. Reverently, she knelt on the cold foundation and laid her burden down. Madison wondered briefly if the cement contractor would appreciate the sacrifice his son had made.

From the valley below, the slow hum of machinery warming up began to fill the air. Bit by bit, the thriving city came to life. Madison rose to her feet and picked her way carefully back to her car.

Safe and secure in her condo, she began to methodically gather every strand of jewelry she’d ever made. Piece by piece, Madison fed the necklaces, earrings, and bracelets into her garbage disposal. Perhaps now the tics would stop. Perhaps now Madison Feldon could move beyond the shadow of her bullying father.

Madison was training one of the tennis women she so admired from afar when a detective came to see her the following week. Detective Nick Latkus’s face looked like an orange that had been left too long in a fruit bowl. His freckled skin hung in folds of crepe around his deeply lined mouth. His hair, mustache, and eyebrows were a faded red. Tall, thin, and stoop-shouldered, the only remarkable thing about the man was his eyes. Beneath droopy lids, they were as green and knowing as a feral cat.

He waited patiently for Madison to finish with her client, then asked where he could speak to her in private. Detective Latkus followed Madison upstairs to the club café. After exchanging a few pleasantries, the detective abruptly asked her if she was aware she was missing a client. The local media had been in a frenzy for the past week over the discovery of body parts at construction sites throughout Green Valley. The victim had been ID’d as Garvey Kendall; Madison’s client.

Even a seasoned veteran like Latkus would never forget, when he arrived at the first crime scene, the agonized mask that was Mr. Kendall’s face. The cement contractor was actually cradling the severed head in his arms. He’d refused to relinquish what was left of his son, his only child, until the screams of the newly arrived Mrs. Kendall pierced the air.

“Ms. Feldon, we traced several calls from Garvey to your cell phone last Sunday. He was first reported missing the following morning when he didn’t come home. Did you see him that day? Mind telling me what you talked about?”

Madison looked steadily into the detective’s eyes. Nothing twitched. Not her eye, not her lip. Even her heart felt as though it was on standby. She was as placid as the waters of Lake Mead in the early-morning stillness of high summer. Madison sighed.

“Garvey was a true loner, detective. He had a serious self-image disorder. And that’s why he came to me.” Madison shook her head in much the same manner as her mother would after one of Louis’s tirades. “Garvey was obsessed with his diet. He wasn’t comfortable in his own body. He wanted me to help him reinvent himself. He was also consumed with a need to impress his father.” Madison smiled sadly. “I did see him Sunday, detective. He came over to tell me that he’d had an epiphany.”

“An epiphany?” Nick Latkus’s splintered alley-cat eyes bored into the dull brown of Madison’s.

“Yes.” She dropped her eyes to the stubby fingers that were folded primly in her lap. Madison noted her ankles were neatly crossed; her mother and father would have approved. For the first time ever, she felt composed, assured, and completely in control of her environment. “He told me he knew he could never measure up to family expectations.” Madison leaned forward and looked earnestly into the detective’s face. “Garvey realized he had to stop his father’s madness. He simply needed someone to show him the way. There had to be atonement, you see. Garvey was special. He was worthy of sacrifice. I set him free.”

Latkus snorted. “So you decided to cut this young man up into bits and pieces as a favor to him?”

Madison nodded. Her eyes seemed to glaze over. She had no doubt she would soon be behind bars. Only she was aware she would be in a reverse form of prison. Madison was already dreaming of the indulgences behind thick concrete walls, away from prying eyes and nagging voices. Three hot meals to be eaten every day. No digital scales to haunt her. No construction noises to interrupt her sleep. Madison arose, and like a small child, obediently allowed the detective to escort her to his unmarked white car.

After all, she thought, gazing out the window as the tree-lined streets of Green Valley flashed by, once I get some time by myself to pull myself together, there’s always the possibility ofparole. A cloud of dust from a back loader drifted across the road. Madison Feldon smiled.

Crip by Preston L. Allen

Nellis

They called him Crip, and you could find him at night seated on his throne outside the Gold Man’s Gentlemen’s Club.

He wore a mustard-colored suit and a ruffled party shirt. His round-eyed shades were mustard-tinted, and his narrow-brimmed hat was mustard too. He carried a gold-tipped cane. But he was a nobody, just a big, ugly coal-black man with a twisted face and a brain that divided the world into absolutes. Black and white. Right and wrong. Loyal and disloyal. What he like and what he don’t like.

He was not exactly a bouncer, but he was. He was not exactly a valet/bodyguard, but he was. He was not exactly associated with the Gold Man’s Gentlemen’s Club, but he was. What he was, was a man with a face so ugly that the Gold Man himself found him useful and kept him around for special assignments.

Usually he just sat outside the entrance with his hat and his cane in his lap, keeping watch over things. Making sure the college boys didn’t start any trouble when you turned them away for being underage. Making sure the flyboys from Nellis Air Force Base weren’t too drunk already before they went in. Making sure nobody tried too hard to put the moves on Candy Apple, the pretty little thing who checked IDs and collected cover at the door. Yeah, there was a security guard out there, little Josh Ho the Hawaiian, all decked out in his black-on-black uniform — but everybody knew the real power was the Mustard Man. Crip never said much. He never had to. He just had to stand up and walk over to you. He loomed well over six-foot-five — and he had to be pushing three hundred pounds. The twisted, scarred face. The unsettling mustard tints. If he told you, “Get to steppin’,” then you did, no matter how drunk you were pretending to be.

He had a work ethic that was admirable. He never called in sick. He never caught a cold. He never took a night off. The only time you didn’t see him on his throne was when he went to take a leak or refill his drink. Bourbon on the rocks, with not too many rocks. When he wasn’t in that chair it signaled trouble for somebody, big trouble, because the Gold Man had summoned his Mustard Man upstairs.

So that night he left his throne and went upstairs, where Snake told him, “Gold Man wants you to babysit.”

Crip nodded and went into the nursery. Crip was surprised to find an actual child sitting there, because it was not really a nursery. It was where they held you and sometimes worked you over to make an example of you. He took his seat next to the child. She didn’t look like trouble, so he relaxed and rested his cane and hat in his lap, and waited for the Gold Man’s door to open.

Through the walls, he heard the Gold Man say, “Her? Don’t worry about her. She’s okay. For now. It’s you that you should worry about.”

And the nursery door swung open. A beet-red face, the child’s father, peeped in. Got a good look at his precious little one sitting next to the big mustard suit. That black skin. That twisted face. Then the door closed. Through the walls, Crip could hear Snake’s cruel laughter. Then he heard the Gold Man laying down the terms. The other voice, the sobbing voice, that was the girl’s father.

The little girl said, “How’d you get so black? I’ve never seen anybody so black.”

“Huh?”

He looked down at her. Usually he tried not to look at them, unless they seemed like trouble. He looked down at her, and she was staring up at him as though she expected an answer. Well, little blond-haired, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked child, one day I took a paint brush and dipped it in a big can of black and slapped some more on my face because I didn’t think I had enough problems already. Instead of answering, he scowled at her, trying to scare her, but she kept staring at him until he turned away.

Through the walls came, “Scumbag. Degenerate. You piece of shit. I want my money. I want my money or I will do bad things to you. Very bad things.”

The little girl said, “I like the color of your suit, though.

It’s pretty. Where’d you get it from?”

Hand tailored. A gift from the Gold Man. Got three more just like it at home. One of them’s double breasted. One of them’s got tails. One of them’s got a matching vest. Got an image to uphold. I am Crip, the Mustard Man. He felt something on his knee. The little girl’s hand. He glanced at her. Her smile was gone. Tears were rolling out of her eyes, down her cheeks into the lacy collar of her nightgown. The kid was probably in bed dreaming about sugar plum fairies when Snake and Radney and Goggles went to collect her and her old man. The kid was leaking tears, but she was quiet about it — just a sniffle here and there. A brave little girl she was for eight or seven.

The Gold Man’s voice: “If I don’t get my money, I’m gonna lose my temper. I haven’t lost my temper yet but I will.”

“The payment plan,” the father sobbed. “I’ll stay on the payment plan this time, I swear it.”

“You’ll stay on the payment plan, you’d better. Five hundred every five days.”

“Ohmygod. God. God.”

“Five hundred every five days, and you don’t owe me seven grand anymore. Now you owe me ten.”

“Ohmygod. God. My daughter.”

“I’m done talking to you now. Snake, Radney, show this bum the door.”

“My little girl—”

“Show it to him hard.”

The little girl had her hand in his lap and tears in her eyes and he took her hands in both of his and said to her, “I painted it on.”

She sniffled, “Painted what?”

“I painted on an extra coat of black.”

She smiled. “You can’t paint yourself. You’re lying. People are born with skin.”

“And I grew the suit from pumpkin seeds.”

She was smiling, sniffing back sobs. “No way. That’s silly. You can’t grow suits from pumpkin seeds. You buy suits in a department store.”

He winked at her with his twisted face. He made his bug eye jump in the socket to spook her. The little girl wasn’t afraid of it at all. She was holding his hand when Goggles came through the door and called him over, whispered to him: “Gold Man says to pack her up.”

“What do I know about kids? I never done a kid before.”

“Pack her up is what he said.”

“What do they eat? What do they drink? Kid’ll end up dead living with me. Do they drink bourbon? All I got is bourbon.”

“With a father like what she’s got, this one’ll probably end up dead anyway. He’s into us for a lot of dough. He’s in over his head.”

Crip looked over at the little girl in the cotton nightgown and she looked back at him, rubbing the redness out of her nose with her little hands. He said to Goggles, “Well, I’ll figure it out. It can’t be that hard. We was all kids once, right?”

All night he thought about the kid. At 5 in the morning, things had slowed down enough for him to get off the throne and head on home. He went upstairs to collect her. She had fallen asleep in the chair. Her hands and feet were bound, and she had duct tape over her mouth. There was no need for that, but the Gold Man was trying to send a message. This is not kid’s play. People could get hurt. The stripper who had been assigned to watch her was snoring in the other chair.

He shook her awake. “Did she eat? Does she have any other clothes? What do you feed a kid like this?”

He pulled out his blade and cut the bonds on her little arms and legs. He checked her neck and face for bruises, and he was glad when he saw that there were none. She awoke as he was removing the tape from her mouth. She looked about to cry, but they made eye contact, and he told her with his eyes, Don’t cry. She held it back. She was a brave kid. She didn’t cry.

He gave the stripper a hundred to follow him home. Crip lived, if you could call it that, on the second floor of a distressed property in the 1400 block of Vegas Valley Drive, in the shadow of the South Maryland Parkway, and not too far from the hospital where he sent a lot of the people who owed the Gold Man money. Degenerates who borrowed more than they could ever pay back. Like this Air Force boy from Nellis with the pretty little daughter. The scoop he got from Goggles was that the boy was typical. A country boy from Tennessee. Second year in the service. Stationed in Las Vegas. First time in Las Vegas. He gambled more than he could afford. He moved up to borrowing from the high interest check cashers, one of which was owned by the Gold Man. When he couldn’t pay them back, he started writing bad checks. When his CO found out about it, it was too late. The Air Force has its standards. The best the CO could do was to arrange an honorable discharge. So now the kid is cut loose. He gambles, he wins. He gambles, he loses. He’s got a baby he left back home from some girl he knocked up in high school. The girl gets killed in a car wreck. The sickly grandma ships the poor little orphan off to Las Vegas to be with her military man daddy — only he’s not in the Air Force anymore, but is too ashamed to tell anyone. The Gold Man gets tired of waiting for his money and calls the boy in for a little chit chat. So the Mustard Man gets to babysit the collateral until the Gold Man gets his dough. Typical. Typical stuff.

Crip opened the door to his apartment, and both the stripper and the little girl gasped. There was a mattress with a pillow on it. That was it. Other than that mattress, there was no other furniture. No TV. No bookshelves. No tables and chairs in the kitchen area. Nothing on the stove. If you opened the cabinets, nothing in the cabinets, no plates, no glasses, no forks and spoons, nothing. If you opened the refrigerator, you’d find a bottle of water and two bottles of bourbon. There were two bedrooms in the apartment, and both the doors were locked from the outside. At the moment, he was not babysitting anyone except the girl, but it was his practice always to keep those doors locked. There was stuff in there that maybe you didn’t want to see. There was one closet, the hallway closet; if you opened that door, you’d find his clothes in it — his other suits and underwear and shoes and whatnot. But that door was locked too. There was stuff in there that maybe you didn’t want to see.

The stripper set the bag of groceries and other supplies down on the kitchen counter. Now she understood why they had gone to the twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart and bought a fry pan and paper plates. A bottle of Crisco. Crip led the little girl to the mattress and made her lie down. There was a clean sheet on the mattress, and he covered her with it.

The stripper, who was called Sapphire, threw up her hands. “Shit. I’m gonna need more than this. I’m gonna need lettuce and apple juice. Some cups. Some milk. Some of everything. Shit, you got nothing in here, Crip.”

He gave her three more hundreds. “Get whatever you need. Get it quick and get back here. And don’t curse in front of the kid no more, you hear? Don’t make me hafta smack you around a little bit.”

While the stripper was gone, he sat down on the floor next to the little girl on the mattress. He listened to her sweet, innocent breathing.

He said to her, “Sleep, little girl. Sleep.” Poor thing, to have a father like that. Poor little thing. Bad parents was one of those things Crip put on his Don’t like it list. Owing money was one of those things he put on there too. Hurting kids? Well, that was at the top of the Don’t like it list. But that was one of those things he had control over because this time, it was he who was the babysitter.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, he had a mother and a little sister and a babysitter who was not in her right mind. He would watch her do things to his sister that he should have told his mother about, but didn’t. He loved his baby sister Ta’Shana and he did not believe the woman when she said that she was Ta’Shana’s “other” mother, but he didn’t do anything about it. All day long the babysitter would keep changing Ta’Shana’s clothes, dressing her in outfits that she had snuck into the house in her bag and asking him, How does she look now? Doesn’t my baby look nice now? And he would say, She looks fine, and go back to watching cartoons with a heavy heart. When the babysitter opened her shirt and pulled out her creamy peanut butter brown breasts, he would feel a coiling of his privates in his pants. She would sit there with her shirt open tugging her thick brown nipples and asking him how they looked. Were they big enough yet? Did they look big enough to suck on yet? He would say, They look fine, and not do much else because he really did not know what to do about it at six or seven. Then she would pick up Ta’Shana and push one of the thick, wrinkly nipples into her mouth, and say, There, there now, my baby, as Ta’Shana sucked. This troubled him so much that he would go into his room and stand in the corner like somebody had put him on punishment.

He always blamed himself for what happened the day the babysitter’s boyfriend came over, because he should have told his mother about all the other stuff, he should have told her, he should have told her, but he didn’t.

The babysitter’s boyfriend, who was not supposed to be there when his mother was not home, had snuck over many times before to be with the babysitter, so he was no stranger. This time, like all the others before, the boyfriend and the babysitter took their clothes off and got on top of each other on the couch and started pumping and huffing and growling and panting and screaming and laughing and shouting profanity.

Crip, who was called Leon back in those days, had seen it all before so he went into the room he shared with Ta’Shana and closed the door. A few minutes later, the boyfriend and the babysitter burst into the room and started punching him and slapping him around, accusing him of being disloyal and spying on them, and they said they knew all about his plans to tell his mother on them, but they knew a way to punish his black ass, Oh, they knew a way — they would take their baby and leave him behind. He cried and screamed and pulled at them and begged them not to take his sister, as they grabbed Ta’Shana from her crib and dressed her in a sailor suit and red shoes the babysitter had in her bag. They laughed at him and slapped him some more. He ran into the kitchen and came back with a butcher knife. He was going to stab them and save his sister, but the boyfriend snatched the knife from him, then picked him up and threw him against the wall three times. It could have been more than three, but after three is when he blacked out.

When he woke up, he was in a hospital. There were police there. There was his mother crying hysterically. His sister was gone. His body was broken. His face. His legs. A few years later, his mother was gone too. Out a window.

Two nights in a row, Crip got to his throne four hours later than he normally did. On the third night, he did not show at all. On the fourth night, when he got there four hours late again, Snake was waiting for him.

“What the fuck?”

Crip said, “What do you mean, what the fuck?”

“I mean what the fuck when I say what the fuck. Where you been? What’s been happening to you?”

“The hell with you. What are you, my mother?” Crip pushed past him and sat down on his throne, and set his hat and cane in his lap. He scowled at Snake, which usually would have been enough to scare him off. But tonight, something was missing in his scowl. Snake stood his ground. Crip grumbled, “What do you think has been happening, man? What do you think? I gotta take care of the kid. I gotta feed her. I gotta make sure one of the girls is there with her while I’m here. Last night, the kid was sick. Had a temperature of a hundred and one. Sapphire was supposed to come sit with her. That bitch Sapphire never showed up. I’m gonna wring her neck when I get ahold of her. I got this kid, what am I supposed to do? Leave her there watching TV all night?”

“You got a TV now?”

“Yeah, I bought a TV. And a VCR with tapes. Cartoons and stuff. Yeah, that’s right. Is that a problem? What am I supposed to do? She’s a kid.”

Snake said, “You should just tie the brat up like you do the rest of ’em. She’ll still be there when you get back.”

“She’s a kid. You think I’m gonna tie up a kid?”

“I would.”

Crip’s voice was cold as ice. “I would fucking tie you up, Snake. I would tie you up real tight. So tight you couldn’t breathe.”

This time the scowl was working. Snake backed away with his hands raised in surrender — he backed all the way into the club. It was only when Snake was gone and Crip sat back down that he realized he had stood up out of his seat as though ready to go after Snake. Little Josh Ho the security guard and Candy Apple were staring at him. They had never seen him talk so much. He gave them the scowl too, and they went back to doing their jobs.

On the fifth night, he had to get there early, he just had to, but he got there late once more (Sapphire didn’t show again — he had to wait for Diamond to show up, but she showed up high, so he had to wait for Ebony Rainbow, who was drunk, but what the fuck, he had to get to work), and just as he got there, lucky break, he saw the father go into the club. Crip put on his hat and he gripped his cane, and he waited. When the father came back out, with a blackened eye and a kerchief against a bleeding nose, Crip gripped him by the arm and took him around back where the cars were parked. He drove off with him in his Lincoln, took him to an alley that was nice and dark. He said to him: “You know you have a sweet kid. Do you know what you have?”

The father whimpered, “Ohmygod. What have you done to her? What have you done?”

“I’ve done nothing to her,” Crip said. “What have you done to her? She’s got no mother. She’s got no grandmother. And you, you, look at you. She’s got no father. Do you realize the Gold Man will kill you? He will do it. I’ve seen him do it. I’ve helped him do it. He will kill you, and then what’s gonna happen to your kid? Look at me. I grew up with no mother, no father, no beauty to me at all, and this goddamn limp. The world is an ugly place. Your beautiful girl will become a whore, I can tell you that. She will suck dick and take it up the ass from the ugliest forms of life you have ever seen, and I know because I have seen these ugly forms of life. I live with ’em. I’m one of ’em. We’re like this goddamn city. We’re all dressed up, and we twinkle with all these bright lights, but behind it all we stink rotten like a sewer. You’re her father. You’re supposed to protect her. You’re supposed to give her a chance at the good life. This kid, you know what she tells me she wants to be when she grows up? She wants to be a nurse. I tell her, Nurse? Why not be a doctor? She says, Okay, I’ll be a doctor. I can be anything I want to be, she says. And she can be, but not if her father is throwing away every penny he has in these goddamned casinos. Casinos are for suckers and men who want their daughters to sell ass. I don’t wanna see that happen to that kid, do you hear me?” At that point, he had the father by the collar and was shaking him. The bloody kerchief fell from his nose. “Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

The father whimpered, “I hear you.”

And Crip released him and patted down his shirt, which he had rumpled up in his rage. The father’s eyes were the little girl’s eyes. He was a man with beautiful eyes, despite the shiner. They were teary eyes. Crip said to him, “I got something for you. I got some money for you.”

“What?”

Crip reached into his mustard jacket and pulled out the envelope with the ten grand in it and pressed it into the father’s hand. “It’s all there. It’s everything you need. Give this to the Gold Man the next time you come. Then be a father to your daughter.”

“Ohmygod,” the father said, looking at the thickness of green bills in the envelope. “Ohmygod. Thank you. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. I gotta get back to my life. Babysitting kids is way too hard.”

On the sixth night, Crip got there on time. Slap her around a little and Sapphire not only stays off the weed real good, but she shows up where she’s supposed to show up and on time. Crip was happy. In a few nights, it would all be over. The father would pay the Gold Man and the kid would be free to go on and grow up to be a doctor. Plus, it was a nice crowd tonight, no troublemakers, no college guys, mostly tourists, men in their fifties and sixties wanting to see the titties dance, wanting to maybe get a little bit of the old special treatment in one of the back rooms.

When Goggles came out, Crip was on his throne, sipping his bourbon like the way it used to be, with his hat and his cane in his lap. He smiled at Goggles trying to put the moves on Candy Apple, riding his hand on her ample buttocks during a slow spot in the line. Candy Apple was a good kid, working her way through college. A man like Goggles was not her type. Thank God.

Goggles caught Crip smiling at his failed attempt with Candy Apple and sauntered over to the throne and slapped him five. “What are you smiling at, old black man?”

Crip grinned his lopsided grin. “Smiling at you, no-game white man.”

“So you didn’t go with ’em, huh?”

“Go with who?”

“Snake and Radney.”

“Go with ’em for what?”

Goggles lowered his voice. “Shit. They didn’t tell you about that asshole? The father?”

Crip’s heart sped up. “Whose father? The kid’s?”

“Asshole went into the casinos last night and blew a big wad. Huge. Then he packed up his shit and caught a plane outta the country. One-way ticket to Germany or some shit like that. Don’t look like he’s planning to come back—”

Crip jumped out of his chair and hobbled as fast as he could to the parking lot to his car. He knew the deal. He didn’t have to stick around to hear Goggles say the rest: “—so the Gold Man sent Snake and Radney to deal with the collateral.”

If all they were going to do was deal with her, then, well, her old man did owe the money, and a debt is a debt. You gotta pay back your debts. But she was such a pretty little girl, and Snake was not called Snake for nothing. Crip punched the accelerator and the Lincoln roared through the glittering nighttime streets. He was praying the only prayer he knew — “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” — and sustaining himself with a vision of the girl all grown up and wearing all white with a stethoscope around her neck and a name badge on her chest that said Doctor.

When he was a boy, he had wanted to be a doctor, but he had grown up in the streets and become a killer. Maybe it had something to do with the seven foster homes he had run away from. Maybe it had something to do with how ugly he was. Maybe it had something to do with the babysitter who had stolen his sister and caused his mother to give up on life and jump out of that window. He had hate in his heart, a hate uglier than his face. A doctor is not much good if he has hate in his heart. And the only thing this pretty little girl had in her heart was hope and courage and good wishes for everybody, all the things that make a good doctor. And the only chance she had was him.

When he got to the house, the light was on inside and Radney was standing guard outside, which meant Snake was alone in there with her. Radney watched him as he lumbered up the stairs. Radney had his gun hand under his coat and fear in his eyes.

Crip just wanted to get close enough to him before he took that gun out. He was half-way up the stairs when he waved at Radney and said, half-joking, “What? You guys start without me? What, you break into my house when I got the key right here? You’re gonna pay to fix my door, I swear to God.”

Radney, showing his teeth, withdrew the gun hand from the coat. “Don’t blow a fuse. It’s Snake. He said we hadda do it now. He outranks me.”

Crip was at the top of the stairs with Radney smiling at him. Crip smiled back and shoved the blade between Radney’s ribs, stepped over him when he fell, and pushed through the front door. In a flash, he took it all in. The TV was on. He could hear Sapphire locked inside one of the bedrooms, pounding on the door and screaming to be let out, probably because of what she saw in there. You didn’t want to be locked in one of those rooms, alive or dead. Snake was on the bed — there was a bed now. And the girl was on Snake’s lap and his hand was under her shirt and his other hand was pointing the gun straight at Crip, who lurched forward because there was nothing else he could do. He was her only hope.

The first shot ripped through him, though he didn’t feel it much, but his blade was gone, so maybe the shot through his ribs had caused him to drop it. But he wasn’t worried too much about that because his hands were around Snake’s neck now. Trying to muster his strength. Rolling on top of Snake on the bed. Trying to snap his neck. He was slippery as a snake. The second shot, that one he felt. That one went through the guts, zapped his strength. The girl screaming. Sapphire pounding to be let out. The TV on too loud. Snake was slippery as a snake. Trying to stop Snake from raising the gun. Snake was trying to shoot him in the head. He lowered his head. Face to face like he was kissing Snake. His stinking gold-teethed mouth. The pervert. The child molester. He found his strength. He felt it and heard it loud when Snake’s neck snapped. It felt like his own fingers had snapped too. He lay on top of Snake like a lover and caught his breath.

Crip called the girl over, told her to stop screaming, stop crying. She was a brave kid. She stopped crying. He told her, Take this key, go to the closet, close your eyes, don’t look inside, there’s stuff in there I don’t want you to see, get on your knees, feel around for shoes, there’s something in the shoes feels like a wad of paper, bring it back to me. She did as she was told and she came back with all the money he had left in the world. He took the money, four grand in hundreds, and rolled over on his back next to Snake. He told her, Now take the key, go get Sapphire out of the room, then close back the door, don’t look inside, tell Sapphire to come here.

A moment later, the pounding and pleading to be let out stopped. When he opened his eyes, Sapphire was looking down at him. He handed Sapphire the money. “You gotta get her back to Tennessee. You gotta get her there now. She’s got a grandmother. You can’t find her grandmother, find somebody. An aunt. An uncle. Somebody. She has to have somebody. What money’s left over, you keep.”

Sapphire said, “Gold Man is gonna kill me. What about Gold Man? What about him, huh?”

“Come here,” he said to Sapphire. “Lean down.” When she leaned down, he grabbed her by the throat and slapped her around a little bit. “Get the kid outta here. Get her back to Tennessee. You hear me? She’s just a kid.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Okay,” said Sapphire, hollering and crying.

Then he called the girl over again and shoved a couple hundred in the pocket of the pants he had bought her. “Run,” he told her. “Run. Soon as you get a chance, run. Grow up and be a doctor. Save lives.”

Then he scowled at her and made his bug eye jump in its socket to make her laugh one more time. She hugged him around his face as he died.

A nobody.

Just an ugly, coal-black man who didn’t take kindly to people hurting kids.

That was back in the early ’90s, about fifteen, twenty years ago. You look around Las Vegas today and you’ll see the casinos are more lavish, more prosperous, and the gamblers are even more desperate. They still don’t have a state lottery in Nevada, only casinos. And they still got that Air Force base at Nellis. Still got problems with the boys stationed there and their gambling. The Gold Man’s Gentlemen’s Club is still doing good business with those who like to see the titties dance, though the Gold Man himself is partially retired because of his stroke. He has a son who runs the place now. The son has a degree in business from UNLV, but he’s just as cruel as his old man and just as slimy as his brother they used to call Snake.

Of course, the Mustard Man is gone, and if you want to see the only sign that he ever existed you’ve got to know what you’re looking for and you’ve got to look real close to see it. It’s right outside the Gold Man’s Gentlemen’s Club. Barely perceptible. Four smooth grooves in the polished marble tile where a throne used to rest.

Well, there is one other sign that a coal-black man with a twisted face and a tender heart once did exist, but you’d have to fly to Tennessee to find it.

She’s a young, very pretty pediatric physician who’s married to another doctor, a general practitioner by the name of Dr. Eli Yates McKitrick.

They named their firstborn son Eli Mustard McKitrick.

Not too many people know why they did that.

Three times a night, every other night by Lori Kozlowski

North Las Vegas

His guitar was out of tune and he was fiddling with the strings when he heard her voice.

“It’s my wedding and I’ll curse if I want to!” the bride growled, flipping her veil behind her, whipping her new father-in-law in the face.

Wally recognized the voice. His head began to hurt, and he rubbed his temples, touching his calloused hands to his unruly sideburns.

A wedding party paraded into a dark-walled Irish pub inside a locals’ casino on Tropicana Avenue, which was crowded at that hour — bustling with quick-handed dealers and green gamblers who couldn’t count.

Brenda, the bride, was carrying her train in one hand and a bottled beer in the other. She took two more steps and then murmured, “Isn’t that right, baby?” nuzzling her face into her new husband’s neck. The groom just smiled, gazing at her, pushing up his wire-rimmed glasses, saying nothing.

The wedding party took seats in the middle of the room, so they could see the round stage. She placed herself front row, center.

Wally Whittaker, the Irish singing wonder who played three times a night, every other night at the pub, eased out from behind a heavy burgundy curtain. He cleared his throat. The lights dimmed, though she remained glowing. She was a big stark white reminder in the middle of the room.

“Tonight’s a Wednesday, folks, and all the good people of Las Vegas have come to see me. We’re gonna have some fun, my fellow drinkers. Why don’t I tell you a wee story about a girl I used to know,” he began, strumming his guitar, sitting on a wooden stool. “There once was a girl named Sherry. But Sherry had no cherry. I said that’s okay, hun. We can still have fun. Cause the hole still works where the cherry came from!”

Some people giggled. Some blushed. Wally guffawed at his own limerick, then immediately burst into song. His laugh was phony, and his voice was off, but he was getting through the verses.

He looked at her.

The bride was clapping with her mouth open. She was a shade too tan for that time of year and a little too pudgy for her dress. Bright orange swells of skin for arms squeezed out of short white satin sleeves. She yelled “Baum, baum, baum” into cupped hands as a vocal representation of the horn section in Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” And as Wally serenaded her, singing, “The good times never seemed so good,” the bride cannoned back, “SO GOOD! SO GOOD! SO GOOD!”

They caught each other’s eyes. She raised a drawn-on eyebrow. He looked away.

He had slept with Brenda just once. She was nothing like his Linda. But that’s what drew him in. She was just a fun party girl he thought he could enjoy for a moment and soon forget.

She tipped well, wore low-cut tops and piles of shiny gold jewelry. She drank until sun up, chain smoked, and a never-ending heavy metal concert played in her head.

Several years back, she began attending all of his performances, every other night, wherever he played in town. Sometimes she wore green plastic leprechaun hats. It was almost as if she wanted to be Irish. He thought she was strange and annoying at first. She often lingered around the pub too long, trying to get his attention. After he played, she always wanted a hug. She was his biggest fan.

Usually he just smiled at her, acknowledging her support of his music. He was always friendly to his crowds. From the kids to the kooks, he thought he knew how to read people. Give them what they want. Sometimes she was so into his whole act, he’d sing directly to her. It was just good showmanship.

But as he saw her more, her allure grew. On Tuesday nights, she showered him with compliments that made him feel taller, smarter, and like the musician he wanted to be. Sometimes she brought him gifts. Heart-shaped ashtray. Engraved silver hip flask. Tortoise shell guitar pick with his initials embossed on one side.

She wanted to be possessed. He was willing to surrender. One too many Jack-and-Cokes, and he willfully fell into bed with her. He hadn’t seen Brenda since their coital encounter two years prior.

Sabrina “Brenda” Marie Rosetti. She was a busty blond Italian who said her father was so-and-so in the Mafia. Wally never paid much attention to her mob talk at the bar. Who in this town didn’t think they knew something about the mob? He had heard it all. It was always a cousin of a friend who had some small encounter in some obscure place. Everyone was fascinated with bodies buried in the desert and mysteries of the city’s history. Everyone thought they really knew particulars about the Bugsys, Tonys, and Moes.

Whenever she spoke, he hardly listened. Wally was never interested in her for her mind, and could care less about who she thought she knew. He just shook his head, pretended that she was significant, and continually drank the whiskey she bought for him.

Brenda was tattooed all over her back in navy and emerald inks. There was a snake over her left shoulder and a dragon covering her right. He knew her tattoos well. He had counted them once, tracing that inked back with cold fingers.

When he had taken her to his apartment nearby, he thought of Linda the whole time. Closing his eyes.

Brenda was wild, as he knew she would be. She kept laughing at odd moments. Halfway through, as she was being her most obnoxious, Wally heard a dull clank as car keys fell onto taupe carpet. He had peered up from the bed and saw Linda standing right there. He swiftly pushed Brenda away, stood up, and reached out in one big panic. “She means nothing.” He scrambled, pulling pants over himself, and knocking Brenda to the floor. Linda just stood there, stiff. Her eyes welled up, but tears did not fall.

As he practically crawled after her out the door, Brenda lay on the rug, bruised and watching him. She clenched her jaw.

When Wally moved on to his next number, Brenda kicked both feet up onto a chair and sucked on a cigarette, blowing the smoke out of her nose. Right then, she appeared much like the dragon on her shoulder, who also puffed fire and flames. The two reptiles peeked out from behind her headdress. Snake, dragon, snake, as the veil swept back and forth on her back.

There was something about it. Her veil, the tats, the thrashed blond hair. Her raspy laugh. He was attracted all over again.

Brenda was showing off — shimming and shaking up and down the front row. Tanned bust, shoulders, and back. Wally was trying his hardest not to find her sexy. But he was watching her every move. She put her bare feet in the groom’s lap. Her toes are fat, Wally thought. Fat-toed Brenda. That’s what he would think of her. Who would want to be in bed with those fat toes anyway?

Surrounding the couple, the wedding party made a collective toast. The maid of honor was covered in tattoos of lime tree frogs, the best man was stamped with a giant house fly.

The groom just sat there, so plain and placid. Run-of-the-mill tux, standard dull black shoes. He could be a computer programmer or an insurance salesman, Wally thought, as he strummed his guitar a bit harder. He could be an associate named Tim at Coldwell Banker. He could be a tax accountant. Counting Brenda’s fat toes.

He looked as straight-laced as they came. But when he embraced the bride, it was obvious: She captivated him. Cold-well Banker Tim couldn’t help himself either.

The crowd continued to grow, and Wally scanned the blooming room. This was just one of several Irish pubs he played around town. Locals’ casinos had become hot spots for the egalitarian atmosphere they provided. Warm enough for grandmas playing penny slots, dark enough for serious drinkers, and raucous enough for everyone in between. The rumor was that the casino pubs were actually authentic, broken down in the U.K., imported in large boxes, and then reconstructed. The walls were made out of old ships. The floorboards and the scaffolding from Celtic drinking halls. The décor had become familiar to him, but that night, Wally could feel the spell of the ancient — ghosts in the ship wood, eyes in the floor. A thousand dead soldiers swaying to his song.

Wally pulled at the collar of his buttoned-down plaid shirt. He couldn’t get comfortable. His neck was tense, his old knee injury was flaring up again. He tried to adjust himself on the stage, and still feign the merriment. His cheeks were sore from smiling. He scratched at his itchy sideburns. Taking off his velour jacket, he kept clearing his throat and looking around, noticing half-drunk highballs and the eager audience waiting for him to play on.

Three hollow-eyed dealmakers sat at a corner table. They appeared to be there simply for business — leaning in, making plans. They wore gray suits. They did not tap their toes. Wally thought for a moment that the one in the middle was glaring at him. His paranoia grew.

As a lounge singer, Wally saw hundreds of faces. All sorts of late-nighters. Those drowning their sorrows usually sat in the back. The real partiers always took to the middle of the room or the front row so that they could hear him better. On really rowdy nights, Wally could hardly hear himself because the crowd was singing along so loudly. He liked that, when it happened. His voice was lost among voices and it was as if they were the ones singing to him. Sometimes there was a stand-out, a personal singing telegram just for him.

That night, Brenda was the overpowering Siren. Her voice was distinct — half like a baby doll and half like Mae West. It wasn’t even 10 p.m. and she was already drunk. She spilled brown ale on her lavish wedding dress. The gown was all iridescent sequins and baubles and loops of lace, and there were ashes on the edge of the train where she was flicking her Marlboro.

Wally trembled. The one woman he thought he’d always have was gone, and in her place was the one reminder of his loss. Brenda was back and this time he was scared. As he sang each tune, he threw out jokes and put on the same faux smile that he smiled every night, but his shivering continued. He thought he saw Linda’s face in the round wall clock. She was mine, Wally thought. What he loved most about her was the way she walked. Slow and deliberate like she had a secret between her legs.

But Linda wasn’t in the pub.

Brenda was in her place, and she was doing an Irish jig all over his scar tissue, ripping him open with every heel-toe. He knew that she had come to the pub just for him. To rub it in. To show him that someone wanted her enough to marry her. She kept eyeing him. Winking or twirling a finger around a perfect yellow ringlet, when she caught him looking.

His palms were sweaty. And for the first time in a long while he felt nervous as he played.

“All right, lassies and gents, why don’t we take a wee break, so I can wet me whistle,” he finished.

He strolled past the wedding party, giving Brenda a cordial nod, trying to be polite without getting too close. Her eyes were surveillance, recording him. She was smacking purple gum.

Sitting at the bar, the singer coughed and ran a hand through his chestnut hair before sipping his pint. Wally thought more about Linda and how if she were there he would be having a drink with her right now. He would be smelling her clean hair, instead of standing alone at the corner of the bar in the middle of a crowded room. It amazed him how alone he felt in crowds of people. Though he was an entertainer — and not half bad, he thought, compared to the other hundreds of flimsy acts in town — when it came time to be part of the group, the circles of people around him made him dizzy. The feeling was always difficult for him, yet with her there he could usually get by, taking in her stories about work, how her day went, who she saw, what she bought. But now the lounge singer was alone in his own arena.

The middle man in the gray suit was examining him closely. Wally started to perspire through his clothes.

He wanted to leave. No one’ll notice if there’s no second half, he thought. But who was he kidding? It was packed for a Wednesday night. And even though he could afford the night off, he couldn’t lose this gig. The manager would never have him back if he left midway through a show.

Swallowing down his black and tan, he could feel the thickness of the room: the ad-hoc drinking songs and the clinking of shot glasses and the ringing of bells when someone hit the jackpot on the dollar slots.

He tried to concentrate on his beer, focusing on the top of it, thinking how by now Linda’s bright pink lipstick would be pressed onto the rim of the glass. He secretly liked the taste of her lipstick, and when she wasn’t looking he would drink specifically from that part of the glass. She could make an ordinary beer into a first-rate cocktail, he thought.

But now there was no kiss on the side of his glass, and this beer was just like every other beer. Just a beer. Nothing more.

He gulped down the rest anyway, flicking two dollar bills onto the bar.

He turned around to see the bride standing behind him.

“Hey, lass. Congratulations on your day,” he offered, leaning away from her.

“Yeah, thanks, man. You’re the bomb.”

“You too, hun,” he said, not quite knowing what the bomb was, wishing she’d go away.

Her French-manicured acrylic nails became claws closing in on her glass. She smiled, looking up at him. Right then, she actually seemed sweet in her fancy gown, her eyelashes curled and black. He remembered how much she used to adore him. He missed being adored.

“You know, I’m not really Irish,” he said, softening.

“That’s okay, I’m not really blond.”

They both laughed. Her giggle was fake. His chuckle was nervous.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he asked.

“Because I can. Because I wanted you to see me in my pretty white dress. Don’t you think I’m pretty?” she said, leaning over her drink, tipping her cleavage out even further.

He hated her right then, but he was attracted too.

“You’re a cruel woman.”

“It’s part of my charm,” she smiled.

“I like your lipstick.” He couldn’t help himself.

She bit her bottom lip just slightly.

“The color is called Tempt. Are you tempted?” She smiled wider, then walked away, looking over her shoulder. She wiggled.

He told himself that he had to quit this jester-like job and find better pay doing something more normal. He was tired of cover songs and dark walls. He was tired of running into shades of his past. He wanted to emerge on the other side of this a better man.

He stared at Brenda’s train as it slithered away on the dirty floor. Not marrying Linda was the biggest mistake he’d ever made, and he knew it right then. Graceful Linda with long limbs and blue eyes. She left him and Vegas. He had heard she was with a wealthier musician now. Probably touring around Europe. Eating French cheese from the hands of that rich man. Bathing with him in an Alps-sheltered chateau.

Wally was stuck in the same pub, and he had one more set to play before he could pick up his paycheck on the fourth floor, drink a Guinness for breakfast, and then walk out of the well-lit casino into the 6 a.m. sun.

He exhaled, moving back to his half-moon stage, feeling more himself as he stepped away from the pack of people.

The middle man in the gray suit came to the stage with a twenty-dollar bill for the tin tip jar. Wally swallowed.

Middle man had long fingers and big teeth. His hair was white and slick.

“What would you like to hear, my friend?” Wally asked.

“Why don’t you play ‘Danny Boy.’ I like that one,” the old drinker said, straight-faced.

“Oh, yeah, sure. It’s my favorite,” Wally lied.

He quickly belted out the old hymn, not concerned if it was perfect or even if it sounded good. He was sick of singing and sick of being there and sick of seeing Brenda jiggling her parts all over the pub. That middle man was making him nervous, and he knew he had to get out.

Ending just after 11 p.m., he no longer cared if he left early. He grabbed his guitar case and stumbled off the stage, hurriedly heading up to the fourth floor to grab his check. Rushing through the tawny casino, a million little lights all around him. Cigar smoke rising. The face of a huge masked joker bolted to the wall. Bold baccarat signs and spinning roulette wheels. G-stringed cocktail waitresses sauntering through the aisles. Pit bosses sternly standing by, arms folded. One-armed bandits stealing money left and right. Cherry, seven, six.

He stabbed at the elevator button, wanting to hurry up and run out of the whole place. Out of the casino, out of the parking lot, and maybe out of town.

As soon as he got into the brassy elevator, he was locked inside a private funhouse. The mirrored interior gave Wally eight different images of himself. He hated every one. He stared at the floor. Grotesque casino carpet was better to look at.

His head was bowed. His heart was near his knees. It was a long ride. As the elevator ascended, for a moment he wondered if you go to hell, do you feel like you are going up instead of down? The devil’s parting trick.

Finally floor four came, and he dashed out down the hall to human resources. He had reached the end of the hallway when he heard a steel door click shut, then a swishing behind him. He turned around and at the other end of the hall, near the stairwell, he saw her.

There she was in all her tan and white glory. Psycho, fat-toed Brenda. The deranged harpy was up on the fourth floor, she’d followed him up there. Holding out the sides of her wide dress as wings.

“What are you doing?” he uttered, scurrying toward an emergency exit.

“Shut up.” She grabbed him and then kissed him hard and dramatically, jolting her head and her veil from side to side. She tasted like cheap rum.

She pulled up her white dress and unzipped his trousers in what seemed like one swift movement. His back was against the long beige wall. Sure, he had already had her. But this. The veil. The virginal white. He was overtaken. She tilted her head back, and as she did, Wally noticed the elevator doors opening. Out walked the three men dressed in gray suits.

“Sabrina! What in the hell are you doing?” the middle man yelled.

“Daddy?”

“I never took my daughter for a tramp!” he said, yanking her from Wally.

The singer slid from the wall to the floor, trying to inch away. He thought of every bad thing he’d ever done. Every one night stand, every unreturned phone call, every cheat, every lie. False hope handed out, cigarettes stolen, rent money gambled away. He wanted to confess. He wanted to plead.

Brenda looked at him cowering on the ground and grinned. She flipped her veil, hitting her father in the face.

Johnny growled.

“And you! You sick son of a...” Johnny Rosetti didn’t finish his sentence and he didn’t care. He was a man who did not like his principles marred in any way. He leaned down, grabbed Wally by the collar, and pistol-whipped him in the side of the head.

Dazed, Wally edged down the hall, still trying to escape.

Slowly, Johnny walked over to the singer’s body. His wingtips squeaked, and Wally cringed as he heard each footstep, closer and closer. The mad father looked down upon him.

With one open eye, Wally could see Johnny’s angry face. Those big teeth grinding together. Possible punishments ran through Wally’s mind. His detached head rolling down the hallway like a bloody bowling ball. Eyes plucked out with the antenna of a rusty car. Meat cutter through his middle. Thrown from the hotel roof. Legs sawed off. Something worse?

For all the fantasy, all Johnny did was reach for his gun. The quickest way was a lead projectile. Johnny harrumphed at the cowardice he saw below, then he shot the singer point blank.

Wally bled into the carpet, making the red parts redder, staining the gold squares. The amber hallway lights grew softer, and as he lay there, he watched Johnny address the other two suited men: “Get this cleaned up.”

Then the man turned to his daughter, disgusted.

Johnny grabbed Brenda’s arm, squeezing her thick tricep and the white satin wrapped around it.

Disappear by Jaq Greenspon

Sunset Park

The best place to watch the sun set in Las Vegas was at the east end of the airport, just underneath the landing jets. Staring west, as the sun slipped behind the Red Rock Mountains, the obsidian, angled shape of the Luxor fell into sharp relief against the stretched-out orange glow. Sundown in the desert beat out any other geography, hands down. On the water the sunset would linger, bouncing on the waves, but in the desert there was nothing for the light to hold on to, nothing to trap it, bribe it to stay any longer than absolutely necessary. It ran, fled after the day like a scared rabbit. It was my favorite time of day. I loved it out here, for however long it lasted. I thrived in the liminal time, the gray area between light and dark. Playing with shadows was how I made my living.

And it was a good living. Most nights, after watching the sun go down, I’d be getting ready to earn that living. I’d be filling my pockets with cards, setting coins, writing predictions which I knew would come true later in the evening. A few years ago I’d be doing all this in a tuxedo, but not anymore. Now the uniform of choice, what the casinos wanted, was the street look. Dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and loose-fitting coat, sporting a few days growth I wasn’t exactly comfortable with, I fit in well with the tourists at the Manhattan Resort and Casino. They didn’t suspect a thing until I walked up and asked them if they’d like to see something amazing. Then I’d amaze them for a few seconds with a magic trick I learned when I was still in high school — nothing any of them couldn’t do with the right book and three minutes of practice — then send them back to the casino floor. But not tonight. I was off tonight, asked for it special.

I lit a cigarette. I watched the glowing cherry at the tip of my Turkish Camel. If I timed it right, the light from the sun would vanish, leaving just the glowing ember to illuminate my face. I waited for it, slowing my inhalation. The dark overtook me, the red glow giving my face a Stanley Kubrick look. I sucked in, drawing down to the filter. Smiling, I flicked the butt out toward the landing lights of the next plane coming in. I turned left and started to walk toward the park. I had an appointment to keep and I didn’t want to be late.

In reality, I couldn’t be late. She wasn’t going anywhere until I got there. She was waiting for me. I knew it, even if she didn’t know I knew.

Her name was Raven, though she didn’t acquire the name at birth. She hadn’t been ushered into the waiting arms of loving parents who took one look at her and decided then and there what to call her. No, she was pushed out and virtually abandoned into the apathetic arms of grandparents who had no desire to raise another screaming, ungrateful child. But they did the right thing and took in Baby Girl Miller, which is what they called her for the first six months of her life. They had figured if they didn’t give her a name, they couldn’t get too attached, and then, if it all became too much, who would really miss a Baby Girl? But like it always happens, the prospect of another life to ruin became too much of a temptation to resist. Of course, that’s not how they see it, but then, who really ever sees the damage they cause? By six months they knew they would keep her, at least until she turned fourteen and left on her own accord, with their blessing, and, it must be noted, to their great relief. With this realization, though, came the following thought, that Baby Girl might be fine for now, but wouldn’t see her through her teenage years. Instead, they’d need a name that would sum up the unusually quiet little girl who had been born with a massive shock of dark hair and a preternatural fascination with shiny objects. A day trip to the Grand Canyon via helicopter to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary introduced them to Indian mythology, and by the time they’d gotten home and retrieved Baby Girl from the neighbor, they had decided to call her Raven.

I knew her as well as anyone, I guess. She’d jumped boxes for me back when I did that kind of thing. I’m sure if I ever went back to the big illusions, she’d be there for me. That’s probably how she knew where to find me. I had a warehouse nearby, a place for storage and rehearsal. I shared it with a couple of other guys, workers who had scored nice variety act spots when the big production shows started closing down. It was a good deal for all involved and it was walking distance from where I was now, albeit in the opposite direction.

This was my area of town. This was where I lived and created, where I prowled and hunted. She had come here looking for me. I determined I wasn’t going to be hard to find. As I sauntered into the park I saw her. Even in twilight that figure was hard to miss. She was looking in the other direction. I could easily have ducked behind a tree or jogged to the playground. Hell, I could have just sat down at a picnic table and she would have kept staring right through me. But no, I wanted to get this over with. I stopped short and just stood still, inhaling the ozone-filled desert air. It would rain soon, the clouds were making their way east even now. Tomorrow I wouldn’t be able to see the sun as it went down behind the gray, threatening sky. But then, depending on how this meeting went, it might not matter what the sky was like. There was a very good chance the sunset I had just enjoyed might be my last.

Eventually, she saw me and headed in my direction. She smiled like she caught me unaware. This was the difference between an amateur and a professional. In magic, it was marked by the outs. I never screwed up a trick, even if it didn’t come out they way I had originally intended. No matter the situation, I had an out. But then, I’m a professional. An amateur, they have no outs. They only have one way to do something and if things don’t go as planned, well, that’s when the fur starts to fly. And I didn’t want that to happen. Not yet at any rate. So I fought my instinct and closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. It wasn’t often Vegas had that wet smell permeating the air. I concentrated on breathing and stood my ground, letting her do this her way. I didn’t want her thinking she had no other options. Without options this wouldn’t turn out well for anyone.

She walked up to me and stopped a foot away. Her head tilted up to look me in the eye. Her face was illuminated by the distant glow of the basketball court lights. Where we stood, by the picnic tables, was meant only for daytime use.

“Hi, Remy,” she said.

I nodded. I wasn’t going to make it easy for her. I had some ideas as to what she was doing here, I knew she was looking for me, but there was no sense diving in when I didn’t know how deep the water was.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

I nodded again. Magic is all about what the mark thinks they see, not what really happens. So one secret to a great trick, then, is knowing when to talk and when to let the audience make the connections for themselves. This was the latter. Whatever was really happening was secondary to whatever Raven thought was happening, and since I wasn’t sure of either, I kept my mouth shut.

“Things have gone a bit pear shaped,” she laughed nervously. Her eyes reflected the far-off light, giving them a depth they didn’t actually possess. It made her look thoughtful and contrite. I didn’t buy it. Not for a second.

“Do tell,” I countered.

“I fucked up.”

“That much I know. I was there for that part.”

“No. After that.”

“There was an ‘after’?” Now we were getting somewhere.

“I thought everything was clear.”

“Everything was clear. All you had to do was walk out of the building without touching anything. If you could have done that, walked past the pretty rocks and kept your hands to yourself, everything was clear. But you couldn’t do that, could you?”

The tears streaming down her face glistened in the half-light. “How was I supposed to know they were counted? They were just there, sitting out, like fruit in a bowl or a candy dish at the dentist’s office. How could they miss a couple?”

“I told you they’d miss them, that’s how you were supposed to know.” I shook my head in disgust. I had trusted her with my secrets but she couldn’t control herself, and now... I stopped. I still didn’t know why she was here. If they wanted me, she would have taken me out already. Or at least she would have tried. I wouldn’t have let her get close if I didn’t think I could protect myself, but they would have known that. That was why I let myself get caught. I figured she was just a messenger doing what it is messengers do. I would listen, nod wisely, and then dispose of the body.

I wasn’t prepared for this. It seemed like she was asking me for something but wouldn’t come right out and say it. And I couldn’t parse it.

A plane went by overhead. I didn’t dare look up, not with her standing so close. But she couldn’t resist — she glanced at the underbelly. I knew she would and now I had a decision to make with not much time to make it. I opted for the safer of my two choices and stepped in toward her. I closed the distance between us and reached out with my left hand to grab her right arm. Pulling quickly, I spun her around and into me. My right arm wrapped around her chest while my left continued to hold her arm tight behind her back. To anyone walking through the park now, we looked like two lovers enjoying the nighttime amenities of the dark and the grass. I held her and placed my face close to hers, peaking over her shoulder like an evil Jiminy Cricket. We’d held this position many times before under much more pleasant circumstances. I breathed in deeply, letting her scent carry me back in time, just for a moment. My mind wandered old, worn pathways of almost forgotten emotion... but my hands held firm. I resisted the temptation to kiss her. Almost.

“Remy,” she pleaded.

“What did you do?”

“They found out.”

“They were diamonds, for god’s sake. Their diamonds.”

“But that’s all.”

“Those little rocks are money and blood and power and energy. They are never ‘that’s all.’”

She turned her head just enough. Our lips were barely separated. Our cover was a breath away from becoming reality. “Remy.”

My arms instinctively tightened around her, a Pavlovian response to her whispering my name, at least that’s what I told myself.

“You’re hurting me.”

“What did you do, Raven?” She smelled good. I could taste her scent on the back of my tongue. Jasmine and honey and the wetness of the air all mingled as I looked into her eyes. I didn’t want to let her go. I didn’t want her to stop hurting. I didn’t want her. “Why are you here?” I held her tighter. She clenched. Her body’s weight seemed to rest on my arm. Her eyes flinched but they never left mine.

“I need you. I need your help.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the only one who can make me disappear.”

I faltered and relaxed my grip. She started to fall forward. I caught her and lowered her to the ground. She wasn’t going anywhere and I knew she wasn’t an immediate threat, so I lit another cigarette. She needed time to breathe. My coffin nail would give it to her. The smoke and nicotine I sucked deep into my lungs took her scent with it. She peered up at me and I knew I had to look away. In the distance, a late-night pickup game of basketball was just getting started. I watched the “skins” beat the “shirts” until I had smoked down to the filter.

In the silence, she had decided to tell me everything. I could feel her move around, turning so her back rested against my legs. Neither of us looked at the other anymore, yet I didn’t know if we’d ever been closer. The first time I kissed her had been here, at the park. And the second. It held memories of us in the blades of grass and the pocket knife — carved picnic tables. It felt like the park was reclaiming us for its own.

“They caught me.”

“And sent you to get me.”

“No!”

I turned at the urgency of her denial.

“No,” she continued, softer, still staring off into the distance. “They don’t know about you. They asked but I didn’t tell them.”

“I’m sure they did more than ask.”

“I got away.”

I didn’t want to know what she did to get away or what it cost her. It wasn’t any of my business. What was my business was what she was doing here and why she needed me to make her vanish. Her motives were crystallizing in my mind. She hadn’t told them about me. No matter that by giving them my name, she would have been in the clear. She could have simply looked them in the eye, told them “Regal Remy” had done it, had orchestrated the whole thing, given back the diamonds she stole, and her path would have become miraculously unblocked. Of course, as penance, they could have sent her to get me, which is exactly what I figured had happened.

Evidently, I was wrong.

She stood up and took my hand, leading me toward the trout-stocked lake in the middle of the park. It was a favorite for late-night lovers, consummating passions under the watchful eye of the Easter Island statue ensconced on a spit of land in the center. Our illusion was complete.

“They figured it out a few days ago. I was at work, like you said. I was casual and relaxed, making tips and laying low. Pierre came in. I didn’t think nothing of it. He’s been in before, you know?”

I did know. Pierre Charon was the “personal assistant” to Scott Wyld, hotelier extraordinaire. He was a former enforcer on the local minor league hockey team who found work much more in line with his calling in life after a career-ending fight took him off the ice. He was also well known at the higher end of the local strip club spectrum. I know because we used to go together. We were together at one of those clubs the night I first met Raven.

I’d been hired to work the smaller room in one of Wyld’s casinos. It wasn’t a bad gig and I was mostly filling 250 seats a night, six nights a week. I’d been working with a girl called Catherine, blond and pretty, and she knew how to jiggle when I needed her to distract the audience. But there was nothing there. She was passable as an assistant, but she was a lousy actress. No one bought it when she looked at me lovingly. I was surprised when the audience thought she even liked me. I was a job and nothing more. When she asked for a week off, I gladly let her go. Charon suggested we get Raven to fill in for her. He had a thing for the exotic-looking stripper, and since he worked for my boss, I took his suggestion with a little more seriousness than maybe I should have. He went with me when I asked her to be my assistant.

“Really? I’ve never done that before. I don’t know if I’d be any good.”

“Sure you would, sweetie, it’s easy. Anyone can do it,” explained Pierre.

That wasn’t exactly true, but the reality wasn’t far off. It took looks, the ability to move and smile and point in the right direction at the right time — this was the heart of helping out a magician. Sure, there were others, partners, who did more, who knew more, but what I was asking this girl to do was climb in a box and wiggle her toes at the right time. It wasn’t brain surgery. She looked at me for confirmation. I nodded and smiled my approval.

“Yeah, I think you’d be perfect,” I said. She never looked at Pierre again.

We met up the next day to rehearse. After an hour I knew she’d be able to handle the gig. After two I left a message on Catherine’s machine telling her not to come back. Raven and I played it big. Her looks and my magic had us turning ’em away at the door.

Eventually, though, things went the way they’ve always gone with me. I found myself spending a little too much of my paycheck on the tables before I could get out the door. Then it was more than my paycheck and I found myself doing odd jobs for Wyld himself, paying him back by using sleight-of-hand skills honed in years of practice to fuck with big casino winners or illusions to make people believe things which couldn’t possibly be true. And through it all Pierre was there, protecting his boss’s interest. Evidently, those interests included going to see Raven at the club the night before last.

Raven was still talking, still putting the whole story together for me. I guess she thought she owed me that much. “So he comes in and I see him and smile, right? Like always. I was hustling a little bit, over by the bar. I figured I’d wait a few songs and then go say hi. When I looked back, though, he’d been taken to a table in the back, away from the stage.”

I shook my head. “He always likes to be close to the action.”

“That’s what I thought. But Cinnamon took him to the back table and then she came over and whispered in my ear that he really wants to see me. The way she said it, I knew he meant now. So I went over.”

“Those are dark tables. Anything can happen back there.”

Raven smiled. She’d been part and party to a few of those anythings.

My first thought, however, was anything but sexy. Those back tables were the strip club equivalent of a dark alley. You never knew what was waiting for you. Usually you had the bouncers to watch your back, but when those guys worked for the guy who wanted to see you, you had no outs.

And yet she was here, walking and talking.

“I went up to him. I could barely see him, sitting all the way back in the booth. He asked me what I was doing there, now that I was rich.”

I would have expected that. It wasn’t in his nature to waste time. She continued her story. I stopped listening to generalities. I just wanted to know the details. Charon knew about the diamonds. He took her out the back door of the club, cutting her shift short. She ended up in the rear of a van, sucking on a .45 while good ol’ Pierre told her they knew she was in on it. They knew she wasn’t alone, that she couldn’t have done it alone. She was hurt at the insinuation but couldn’t refute it. He never explained how they had pinched her and she never told them it was me.

According to her, my name was on a laundry list of possible masterminds, all minor operators and petty thieves, and she didn’t give up anyone. There was only one other name on that list, besides mine, that was of any concern. I figured that name was the reason I was still alive. Paul Robbins was a thief, and a damn good one. He worked all sorts of odd jobs. I only met him once and he stuck me for the bill. I didn’t think he knew Raven, but then, I wasn’t sure who she knew. All his name told me was they didn’t know for sure I was in on it and there was no profitability in taking out one of your best on a hunch.

“How did you get away?”

“He threw me out the back of the van.”

“Just like that?”

She paused. “He fucked me first, gun still in my mouth.”

That also sounded like him.

“While he did it, he said he was going to do the same thing to whoever helped me.”

I thought about it. I had to ask the question. “And you decided to come to me? They already think I’m guilty, why put me in the thick?”

“They don’t think you’re guilty. They think it was Paul. They just threw your name in to scare me. Pierre never liked you.”

“He liked me fine.”

“Not after we started working together.”

“That why he fucked you?”

“That’s why he didn’t like you.”

I let it sink in. According to her, I was in the clear. I could keep working like nothing ever happened. “So what do you need from me?”

“I told you, I need you to make me disappear. Just because they let me go doesn’t make me free.”

She had a point.

“You make me vanish and I’m gone for good. No one’s the wiser.”

I turned around.

“Remy?”

I could hear the shake in her voice, the need.

“Remy, please.”

“Not here.” I started walking away. I could feel her scamper up behind me. “The warehouse.”

The warehouse was in an industrial area about a quarter-mile from Sunset Park. We shared a block with a custom furniture place, a photographer, and an Internet porn company. I opened the plain front door and let Raven in first. She turned on the lights. I locked the door behind us.

After David Copperfield built Butchy’s Lingerie, the false storefront to mask his warehouse, all the magicians in town wanted to do the same. Unfortunately, we didn’t have Copperfield’s money. I shared the warehouse with two other magicians, both of whom used it primarily as a storage facility. It helped pay the rent. The front office at our place looked like a fabric shop, but that was because it was where we did all the sewing. No hidden doors or electrified toilet seats here. We had the front office, complete with conference/cutting table, a ratty green couch along the wall, and a mini-fridge that was almost never stocked with anything Raven wanted. She looked anyway.

“Still drinking that crap, I see.”

“Help yourself.” She took out a bottle and tossed it to me. It was an old ritual, one we fell back into easily.

I opened the door to the rest of the building. The back area held a decent-sized space filled with props, illusions, some tools, and, tucked away in a far corner, a stage for rehearsals. It was crowded but not packed. The walls were covered with show posters, autographed pictures, and pin-ups. It made the place look smaller than it really was. I turned on the stage lights rather than the work floods. No need to really light the place.

Raven walked around as if reacquainting herself with an old friend. “It’s been awhile.”

She looked good, slipping in and out of shadows amongst the illusions. It had indeed been awhile. Too long. She walked up to the “Artist’s Dream” and stopped. I sipped my beer and watched her. It was a simple illusion, a way to produce an assistant. On the front panel was a picture of the girl. It was briefly covered and then, just like that, the girl was standing there and only a silhouette remained on the panel. Very Galatea... or My Fair Lady. Either way, the artist was bringing to life the girl of his dreams. I smiled as she pulled down the front panel. It was still set with her photograph. I hadn’t done the trick since she left. I think that pleased her.

Raven and I had stopped working together, professionally, about a year and a half earlier. The jobs dried up for the big shows in town and I really didn’t want to work the ships. They weren’t my kind of crowds. They were looking for safe and I equated that with boring. At least doing what I was doing, hustling tourists to give them the “street magic experience,” gave me the opportunity to keep my close-up chops. Doing nothing but boxes on a cruise was death to me. Besides, the ships didn’t really approve of you laying a week’s salary on red. So I didn’t go and Raven quit being my assistant. We stopped seeing each other personally not long after. Seems I wasn’t fulfilling potential, was only hurting myself, and she was tired of supporting me and my bad habits.

That’s the thing about habits, though, everyone has them. And I was Raven’s. Just because we’d stopped dating didn’t mean she wasn’t available for a quick fuck whenever I was in the mood. We had something together neither of us had alone, and for her it was a driving force.

“Do you have an idea?” she asked without looking at me. She had made her way to the stage. It was the first time I’d seen her completely lit in months. She still took my breath away. Did I have an idea? There was a mattress propped against the wall behind the stage. It wasn’t clean but it was more comfortable than the floor.

“I might.”

Maybe she could hear my thoughts in my voice. Maybe she knew me as well as I thought I knew her. Maybe it was all part of the game we were both playing, but she turned and stared across the room at me. She smiled. A sad smile. “I like fresh sheets these days, remember? It’s not like it was.”

We’d been on that mattress more times than I could count. It was what we did during rehearsals, after shows, before breakfast. But she was right. It wasn’t like it was. She was in trouble and I was here to help. She wanted me to be her white knight, but I was rusty. I drained my beer. The right lubrication can ease any passage.

“Did you give back the diamonds?”

She looked at me like I was a black man at a Klan meeting.

Of course. Charon pegged her for the body, not the brains. I wanted to laugh. The layman realizes how little the illusionist actually does, though. The magician dances out his choreography while the assistant does all the work, squeezing and running and hiding while the props move around them. One false move and it’s the girl in the box who’s getting impaled while the magician wields the blade. “Charon didn’t know you took them.” It was the only explanation. “And he didn’t know anything else was gone.”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a handmade velvet bag. I’d seen it before. She got it when she bought a necklace from a beach vendor in Santa Monica. She used it to keep her valuables.

“And now he knows either me or Paul has ’em and I’m sending you away?”

“You can have half.”

“I’m covered, thanks. I got what I was after.”

She turned toward the back door. “This was a mistake.”

I could have let her go. I could have let her walk out the door and face whatever was beyond it. That would have been the smart thing to do. “Wait.” I was never that smart.

She turned back, grateful. I didn’t move. She crossed the floor and into my arms, hugging me hard. I didn’t want to but I hugged back. It was a reflex. “Oh, Remy,” she whispered in my ear. “Thank you. I was so scared...” The words trailed off as I turned my head. Her fears melted into passion. Just another emotional outlet.

I lifted her up, her lips still locked with mine, and set her on the “Impaled” table. The floor would have been more comfortable. The bottom half of “Impaled” was the receptacle. Perched above it, Murphy-bed style, was a rack of sharp metal spikes. Real ones. It was part of the gag. The magician would prove the spikes were real while the assistant was being chained to the table. A light would be positioned behind her and a thin curtain in front, so the audience could see her struggling. There was a time limit, artificially imposed, something to add more drama to the situation. When the clock ran out, the spikes would fall, and if the girl was still there, well...

At just the right time, though, the light went out, the spikes fell, and the girl reappeared someplace else, safe and sound. It was foolproof. There was a safety catch so the spikes couldn’t fall if the girl was still chained up, and she had a foot switch to release the spikes when she was in position. It looked dangerous and evil. It was the kind of illusion I could never perform on a cruise.

It was a new prop in the warehouse and I’d never before used it for this purpose. It supported our combined weight nicely, creaking and groaning along as if it were an active participant in our lovemaking.

Afterwards, we lay there in each other’s arms, slowly becoming aware of the cold metal table beneath us. She laughed as I shivered.

“Can you really get me out of here?”

I held her face in my hands and looked directly into her eyes. “I’m gonna get us a blanket first.”

She laughed again when I rolled off the table. I bumped my hip as I got to my feet. I looked over at her. She was beautiful. For just this moment, it was like it was. I went into the front office to grab a blanket. Raven had rolled over, away from me, when I returned. She was still naked.

I stopped and looked at her, wishing she didn’t have to go away. But I knew there was no other choice. If she was still here it was dangerous for everyone involved.

As I approached the illusion I hit the foot release.

I made myself watch as the spikes came down.

She turned her head at the sound, but there was no chance to get out of the way. She didn’t even have time to scream. With an illusion, there’s no point in a slow death. Of the forty spikes, no more than six or seven hit her, but it was enough to do the job. The rest slid into their proper channels with a sickening metal-on-metal grate. The blood channels, built into the table for show, worked just like they were supposed to, draining the red flow away from her body and collecting it in a basin at the foot of the table.

I threw the blanket I was still holding over the whole mess. I got dressed before I retrieved the diamonds from her pants pocket. I had plans for the little beauties.

The blood was overflowing, dripping on the floor. The basin was never really meant to hold anything. I grabbed a rag to sop it up.

The back door opened. Pierre Charon stepped in, cell phone in his hand. “She called me.”

“When?” I asked, not looking up.

“Now.”

I went to the other side of the table and lifted the blanket. Her eyes were still open, still filled with shock and horror. Her cell phone was in her hand, the connection still open.

“She fingered you from the beginning.”

“It had to be one of us.”

“You made the right choice.”

I stood up and tossed the velvet bag to him. It was caught and pocketed in one motion. I was on my honor they were all there.

“We good?”

He looked from the bag in his hand to the dead body and back again. He had the diamonds and someone to blame for it. “We’re good,” he said.

“Now what?” I asked.

He tilted his head toward Eastern Boulevard. “Eden Memorial. We’ve cashed in a few favors.”

By the time the hole was filled, the sun was just beginning to rise. Sunrise in Las Vegas is something to behold, the way the rays reflect off the gold and brass of the Strip hotels. With no way to know from which direction the light is really coming, there’s no way to set your compass. I lit a cigarette and basked in its directionless glow.

All about balls by José Skinner

East Las Vegas

People in other academic disciplines made fun of American Studies. The joke went: If you check “undecided” one too many times as your major, they put you down for American Studies. Ortiz was in his fifth year as a graduate student in American Studies, and he still hadn’t decided on a topic for his master’s thesis. He hoped Professor Philippe Talon, the ethnographer, might become his thesis advisor, but he’d have to impress the man in some unusual way to earn this honor.

Dr. Talon, a burly Belgian, was the author of numerous studies of aboriginal peoples throughout the Americas. Talon was fond of debunking other anthropologists’ accounts of the innate peacefulness of native peoples — to him, violence was a constant universal, and he was full of tales of aboriginal violence. Rumor had it that he had eaten human flesh with cannibals in the jungles of eastern Peru, that in Venezuela he had been forced to take part in a ritual castration of a Yanomami captive, and that he had fathered a child among a war-loving, Stone Age people in Brazil. Students who had been to his home reported seeing a shrunken head on his mantel. Ortiz had never spoken to him at length, though whenever the redoubtable professor happened to be in his office, and Ortiz happened to pass by, he invariably glanced in to behold the man buried among his papers and journals, his thick, blondhaired fingers stabbing at his keyboard, his neck spattered with the red tattoo of some indigenous ceremony he’d participated in in the Amazon rain forest.

In that fifth year of his graduate program, Ortiz decided to go to the annual convention of the American Culture Association. The ACA conference was the main gathering for the American Studies crowd. Ortiz believed a couple of days listening to panel discussions by eminent figures in his field might inspire him to finally decide on a thesis topic. If he got lucky, some of those people might invite him to a few after-sessions drinks; the thought caused him to nibble the ends of his long hair with excitement.

The conference was being held that year in Las Vegas at a hotel-casino on the Boulder Strip in East Las Vegas called ¡Viva! a brand-new place with a Latin theme: dealers in sequined matador jackets, waitresses topped with fruit headdresses à la Carmen Miranda, that sort of thing. Ortiz had to go on his own nickel — his university would only pay for his trip if he were presenting a paper, which he wasn’t. But Las Vegas was just half a day’s drive from L.A., and he planned to stay at the Lucky Cuss, a cheap motel on the Boulder Strip not far from ¡Viva!

It had stormed in the Mojave that spring, and as he drove up I-15 the flowering desert spread vast and golden before him like the carpet of ¡Viva!’s casino floor, which he’d seen on an Internet virtual tour of the place. The air smelled fresh and washed, very unlike casino air, but he kept the windows of his vintage Mustang closed because his hair tangled easily.

His glossy black hair and high cheekbones occasionally led people to mistake him for an Indian. “Native,” he corrected them, and didn’t disabuse them of the notion. No doubt he did have Native blood, on his Latino father’s side. His mother was English, but his father’s people had been in California since the mission days, and their blood had surely commingled with that of some long-lost tribe. Even better, he might be kin to some still-existing group, one of these tiny tribes with its own casinos and whose members were all millionaires. Maybe he could take a DNA test to prove the connection. That would be something.

He drew his Vegas street map from his satchel — a satchel made of Moroccan leather, yet old and worn enough to be worthy of an academic — and smoothed it over his steering wheel. He liked studying things when he was driving long stretches — maps, articles, even books. He played a sort of game in which he kept his eyes on the text as long as he dared before snapping them back to the road. He found that while the danger often prevented him from immediately comprehending what he was reading, it had the strange effect of stamping the information photographically in his mind, and afterwards he could recall, in what psychologists called anamnesis, whole passages verbatim: a nifty trick for impressing colleagues.

The way to ¡Viva! was simple enough: Continue along I-15, then hang a right on Tropicana and keep going east to the Boulder Highway. ¡Viva! stood midway between Sam’s Town and the Lucky Cuss. Sam’s Town had an Old West theme, complete with something called a Western Emporium and a nightly laser show called the “Sunset Stampede.” Vegas! No wonder the American Culture Association loved meeting here.

He followed the directions he’d memorized and headed east on Tropicana, surprised at how run-down some of the neighborhoods became, jumbles of low-slung bungalows and mobile homes faded in the sun. Obviously not everybody in Vegas was a lucky cuss.

Curious about a particularly shabby-looking neighborhood, he hung a right onto a street with a paintball store on one corner and a liquor store on the other. He followed the winding street past some more trailers and a dried-up park. Going slow now — the street was full of potholes — he opened his window. The warm air carried odors of raw sewage, boiling corn, and burning rubbish. Farther along, a truly foul scent hit his nostrils and he saw a dead Chihuahua in the gutter, bloated to the size of a dachshund. He rolled his window up fast.

The street turned gravelly and petered out at a hodgepodge of trailers and cinder-block huts. In one area, the dwellings were arranged around a kind of courtyard, bare earth save for a dusty elm tree. A compact man dressed entirely in white squatted beneath the tree, hewing, with quick strokes of his machete, a length of wood. The blade of the machete was worn to a wicked thinness: It looked like a long dagger. Behind the man, half-hidden in a doorway, stood a young woman in a white dress colorfully embroidered at the square neckline, biting her knuckles, her black eyes following Ortiz. Two other men, also dressed in white, ducked ghostlike into a squalid alley and disappeared.

The squatting man looked up. Ortiz waved hesitantly, and the man raised his machete in an aggressive salute. Ortiz followed the line of the machete to its tip, and there, as if speared by the blade, he beheld ¡Viva!’s red neon sign, its letters curved into the shape of a chili pepper.

There didn’t seem to be any direct way through the wretched little neighborhood to the casino, so Ortiz headed back the way he’d come. But somehow he got turned around in the maze of dirt roads, and found himself driving in a circle. Once again he passed by the dusty square, and once again the young woman’s eyes followed him, and the man with the machete watched him too, this time without greeting. Ortiz clutched the steering wheel with both hands, and noticed that the hair on his arms had risen on end. The stench of the dead dog, and the heat, and the pounding brightness of the light made him want to puke.

He finally found his way out, and merged with relief into Tropicana’s fast traffic. A few minutes later he arrived at ¡Viva! where the noise and bustle swallowed him up. He followed the ACA signs up the wide staircase to the mezzanine and registered for the conference. A harried fellow graduate student gave him a canvas bag containing a name tag, a pen, a refrigerator magnet in the shape of a horseshoe, and a book-length schedule of presentations and events. The letters of his last name stood impressively large on the name tag. It was the first time he’d ever had a name tag. He pinned it carefully on his guayabera, above his heart.

Professor Talon wasn’t listed among the presenters, but this came as no surprise; when Talon left campus, it was to penetrate little-known parts of the world and encounter their peoples, not attend academic conferences. Talon was the real thing: the utterly fearless ethnographer who knew that fieldwork was everything.

Ortiz headed to a panel on masculinities. Masculinities Studies was hot; there were six masculinities panels at that year’s conference. The one about to start was called “All About Balls” and it offered three presentations: “‘You’re Not a Eunuch, Are You?’ Pirates of the Caribbean’s Postcolonial Masculinities;” “The Leisured Testes: White Ball-Breaking as Surplus Machismo in Jackass”; and “Huevos and Balls: The (Fr)agilities of Maleness in Latino/a Discourse.”

“All About Balls” was held, fittingly enough, in the Pancho Villa Salon. The audience was well-represented by what Ortiz had come to identify as the various academic types: the jovial older male professor, silver-bearded and bearlike, comfortable in his tenured professorship; the anxious junior faculty member, needing that next book to clinch tenure, building her CV by sponsoring panels at the conference while realizing that all this conferencing was cutting into her writing time; fellow graduate students dressed in solid black, ironic and cool, prepared to declare the whole scene a fraud if they found they couldn’t finish their dissertations. During the presentations, the older male professors laughed a lot, the assistant professors listened intently, and the grad students feigned jadedness. Afterwards, a few people from the audience, including Ortiz, went up to the front to introduce themselves and chat with the speakers, all professors from various institutions.

“That took some balls,” Ortiz told the huevos-and-balls man. He was a pint-sized Chicano in a sports jacket and tie. Trim mustache. Ortiz had to stoop to meet the humorless gaze behind the man’s rimless glasses.

“I’m not sure I follow you,” said the professor, eyeing Ortiz’s name tag.

There were certain people who took an immediate dislike to Ortiz, and this guy was evidently one of them. They didn’t care for Ortiz’s lustrous hair or his height or his colorful guayabera shirts or his authentic huaraches. They took him for a poser. Ortiz, in turn, pegged the guy for a former Chicano activist turned academic. Those types were always bitter and hyper-critical. They could never take a joke.

“I mean, like, all of it,” Ortiz stammered. “The panel.”

“Well, it’s all about balls, right?” the man said dryly.

There was nothing on Ortiz’s name tag to identify him as a lowly graduate student and thereby unworthy of such animosity. The name tags gave only the bearer’s name — sans title — and school. The professor hailed from a college Ortiz had never heard of. Perhaps, Ortiz thought, he felt threatened by Ortiz’s far more prestigious university.

“What’s your work on, Dr. Ortiz? Mr. Ortiz?” said the professor.

“Mr.,” Ortiz said. “Oh, different things.” It was flattering to be taken as having a doctorate and “working on” something.

“Ah, different things.”

“I work with Philippe Talon,” said Ortiz.

“Never heard of him,” said the assistant professor, turning away.

Heat rose on Ortiz’s face as his testicles rose to his body. He stalked from the room and tromped down the stairs. That was bullshit! Everyone knew of Dr. Talon.

Down in the gaming area, Ortiz bought a bucket of nickels and played an old-fashioned one-armed bandit, depositing the coins and pulling the lever fiercely, looking up occasionally to observe the dealers at the card tables absurdly done up in spangled matador’s jackets. Weren’t the players aware of the irony of being dealt to by “bullfighters”? Didn’t they know, stupid bovines, that in the end, the matador always wins? Some people just didn’t get irony. Wasn’t it incredibly ironic that a professor who had just given a talk on the follies of machismo should act so macho?

His coins soon gone, he got up and roamed the depths of the casino. Sure enough, just as pictured on the ¡Viva! web-site, the waitresses sported ridiculous Carmen Miranda headdresses made of what appeared to be real fruit. The bartenders wore billowing white shirts and wide red sashes around their waists, like the men who ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Mariachi trumpeters blasted away from a corner of the bar.

A display near the hotel check-in desk caught Ortiz’s eye. It was a series of life-sized dancing, grinning skeletons carved of wood, the male figures wearing wide sombreros, the females in lacey granny dresses, their bony limbs comically akimbo.

A voice came from behind him. “Viva la muerte!”

Ortiz turned and beheld a young bellhop pushing a cart of luggage toward the elevators.

The bellhop brought his load next to Ortiz. “Pretty wild, huh?” he said. “It’s like Day of the Dead stuff.”

“Yeah. Who makes it?”

“Some kind of Mexicans. Not your regular kind of Mexicans. I mean...” The kid’s pimples disappeared in his flush, and he looked away. “Here, I think we got some information about them.”

Ortiz followed the bellhop to the brochure rack. Not your “regular kind of Mexicans,” were they? Well, he was just a kid. Learning how easy it was to fuck up when you talked to people. Ortiz could sympathize.

The bellhop produced a brochure about ¡Viva!’s collection of south-of-the-border folk art and handed it to Ortiz. “Enjoy!” he said, moving his cargo along.

Apparently the hotel-casino had a whole gallery somewhere full of colorful ceramics and squat onyx figurines and more of these dancing skeletons. The skeletons, according to a brief blurb, were carved by an indigenous people from the remote lowlands of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. The Mictlanos were famous for their wood carving, which they executed entirely with machetes.

Could the odd barrio he’d stumbled across earlier that day be a community of transplanted Mictlanos? Certainly in L.A. it was possible to find neighborhoods of indigenous peoples from specific regions of Mexico or Guatemala. Why not Las Vegas?

The Mictlanos — that wasn’t what they called themselves, but the name bestowed upon them by surrounding peoples. Mictlán, in Aztec mythology, was the ninth circle of the underworld, or something like that. Ortiz tried to remember what else Dr. Talon had said about them in his lectures. Weren’t they the group Dr. Talon had referred to as having particularly “attractive” but “dangerous” women, a remark that had brought complaints from some of the female students? Ortiz recalled Talon describing with relish some kind of ritual confrontation between two Mictlano men over a woman, something about a midnight machete battle following a stylized exchange of insults, and a grave dug ahead of time for the loser.

Ortiz whipped out his laptop and Googled Mictlan and Las Vegas and got zero hits. So: If this truly was a group of Las Vegas Mictlanos undiscovered by ethnographers, what a find. What a fucking find! Now that was something he could write about — something that might impress Talon.

Ortiz abandoned the casino to discover that night had already fallen. The darkness hung thick beyond the lights of the Boulder Strip, as if the Mictlanos (if that’s what they were) had brought the black jungle night with them. He hesitated. Maybe he’d better wait until the next morning before he ventured back into the barrio. But had Talon ever hesitated to go anywhere on the face of the earth? Of course not. The man had balls. Ortiz had balls. He had to check out his discovery one more time before going to his motel.

The odor of the putrid Chihuahua guided him to the square. His Mustang bounced along the rutted road, its headlights brushing up and down the tree the man had been sitting under earlier in the day, carving his wood. Ortiz came to a stop under the tree and shut off the engine. Silence and darkness rushed in on him.

A man’s gruff voice erupted suddenly in the quiet, followed by a slapping sound. Another slap and a woman’s cry: “Ay, ay!” A lull; and then another slap, another sharp “Ay!” It was impossible to tell where exactly the commotion was coming from. Ortiz expected to hear weeping or sobbing, but no: Only a stoic silence followed.

Ortiz waited for a moment, drowning in the blackness, before starting his engine and taking off. Whatever was going on in that shack, he told himself, it wasn’t his place to interfere. To do so would ruin his research before it even got off the ground. Anyway, there was no telling what was really happening. Rough sex? A ritual driving out of evil spirits? Whatever it was, he had to respect these people’s culture and remain neutral.

Just as he suspected, the Lucky Cuss Motel was not for truly lucky cusses, but it wasn’t bad, either. Unfortunately, the only room they had left smelled as if a dozen chain smokers had rented it for a week. He peeled the sheets apart and looked for hairs, but the bed seemed clean enough. He lay on it and contemplated what he’d heard: the gruff male voice, the slaps, the woman’s cries. But again, there was no need to jump to conclusions. All he knew for sure was that he was one lucky cuss to have that community of transplanted Native Mexicans to do some real fieldwork on.

But his sense of good fortune didn’t prevent him from falling into a restless sleep full of snarling dogs and dancing skeletons and screaming women, and the next morning he woke up groggy and headachy. The sun glowed with hellish intensity bright behind the heavy golden curtains. He showered quickly and threw on a fresh guayabera and khaki pants. He grabbed a large coffee at a 7-Eleven and headed once again to what he already dubbed Little Mictlán. The coffee and crystalline desert air cleared his head. By the time he got to the barrio, he felt better.

The dead dog and its stink were gone. The cluster of trailers and cinder-block shacks, bare of any adornments, were hardly cheery, but the morning light had evaporated the previous night’s sinister feel. Ortiz pinned his name tag to his shirt and strode to the first hut and knocked.

The young woman he had seen standing there the previous afternoon opened the door. She wore the same kind of white dress, embroidered at the square neckline with strangely elongated animal figures. She was small-boned and pretty, her hair woven in a single long, thick braid — hair lustrous and black as his own. She glanced at his name tag. He was glad he’d thought to put it on — it identified him as in some way official.

“Hola,” he said. “Yo soy investigador? Ortiz es mi nombre?”

His Spanish wasn’t great, he knew, but “investigador,” police-y as it sounded, was Spanish for “researcher,” he was sure of that.

“Investigador?”

“Sí.” No need to complicate matters, just yet, with explanations of what kind of investigator he was. He asked if he could enter.

The woman hesitated, then stepped back. Ortiz ducked inside. The room was unfurnished except for a straw-bottomed rocking chair and a long, rough-hewn — machete-hewn, no doubt — bench running along one wall. Aluminum foil covered the one window; an incandescent bulb burned nakedly in the ceiling.

The woman remained standing near the open door, keeping herself visible to the outside.

“Ustedes son Mictlanos, no?” he asked, giving his friendliest smile.

“Sí,” she said faintly.

Bingo. He had his people.

“Qué hacen aquí?” The question — “what are you doing here?” — came out more brusque than he wanted, but his Spanish wasn’t good enough for polite subtleties. He kept his smile, the bright smile an ex-girlfriend had once called “innocent,” and asked if he could have a seat on the bench. She nodded. He motioned for her to sit as well, and she obeyed, taking a spot at the end of the bench where she could still be seen from the street. The sunlight coiled silver along her braid.

Spanish was clearly not her first language either, but he managed to ascertain that her husband and the rest of the men in the community worked construction jobs as well as carved the comical calacas, as she called the skeletons, for ¡Viva! That was where they were at the moment, at their construction jobs — they’d be back later, she said, though she was unable to specify exactly when. It occurred to Ortiz that these men might make better informants, to use the anthropological term — and his was an anthropological investigation, was it not? — than this hesitant young woman.

Ortiz had a weakness for women’s legs; the sight of a well-shaped female leg made his own legs literally weak, gave them a heaviness. This woman’s brown calves were perfectly shaped, as if turned on a lathe, and her small foot arched nicely in her sandal, a sandal very similar to his huaraches. Her toes were small and round. She was certainly no India patarrajada, no “split-footed Indian,” to use the most common anti-Native epithet in Mexico, the equivalent perhaps of calling an African American “nappy-headed.” He flicked his own Native hair behind his shoulders with both hands.

Slowly, discreetly, she bunched her dress in her hand, drawing it up along her leg. He swallowed, and watched. There, beginning about mid-thigh, she revealed to him a gigantic bruise, yellow-tinged on the edges and shading into a deep, mottled purple.

“Jesus!”

She jumped to her feet and smoothed her skirt. “The men will be back later,” she repeated. She stepped out of the house. It was clearly time for him to go.

Ortiz made his way back to ¡Viva! and the conference in a kind of daze. He attended another panel presentation, but all he could think about was the young woman, and her bruise, and the way she’d inched her skirt up to reveal it to him. He fantasized tending her injury, applying Native-style poultices made of wild herbs and macerated cactus fruit they’d gather together in the flowering Mojave, and his own legs grew weak again.

He found the gallery of Mexican folk art and contemplated the Mictlano calacas there. The skeletons in this display wore formal dress, the females in furs and gowns, the males in tuxedos. One of the male calacas was a dapper little guy in glasses who reminded Ortiz of the rude professor from the day before.

Ortiz returned to the barrio around 5, when most of the conference-goers were heading off to their wine-and-cheese receptions for this new program or that new journal. Good for them. He, Ortiz, had fieldwork to do. And the balls to do it.

He found a group of Mictlano men under the elm tree, drinking Bud Lite. Two of them were still dressed in their work clothes — tar-stained jeans, sweaty T-shirts, cement-smeared work boots. The other three had changed into clean cotones, which was the term Talon had taught him for the loose white clothing Mexican peasants favored. One of the men dressed in white was the man he’d seen the day before; again he sat wielding his machete against a block of wood, which had taken the wide, lobed shape of a pelvic bone.

Ortiz shook hands all around. Their faces were impassive and their handshakes surprisingly limp for men who work with their hands. They glanced mistrustfully at his name tag. The man from the day before was a full head shorter than Ortiz, but stocky. His face was broad and his eyes small and very red. A dirty cord bound the machete to his wrist. According to Professor Talon, it was customary among men in remote parts of southern Mexico to tie their machete handles to their wrists so they wouldn’t misplace them. These folks were the real thing, no doubt about it. Ortiz’s research into their ways and how these ways were affected — or not — by their living and working in Las Vegas was going to make a great, great study. Soon enough he himself was going to be tying his satchel to his wrist so as not to lose the invaluable information he gathered.

“Usted es el investigador,” the man with the machete said.

“Sí,” Ortiz replied. He didn’t like the continued looks of apprehension on the men’s faces. It was time to be straightforward about what kind of “investigator” he was. That was the only way to get them to be forthcoming about their lives. He certainly didn’t want them to think he was with Immigration or something.

“Soy estudiante,” Ortiz said. And in a gesture meant to put them further at ease, he unpinned his ACA name tag and tossed it into the clutter of empty beer cans.

“Ah,” said the stocky man. “Estudiante.”

Ortiz didn’t care for the man’s slightly mocking tone. Still, everyone seemed to relax at the revelation that he was just a lowly student, and that was good.

Ortiz then made a gesture they found very funny. He drew his thumb and forefinger along his mouth and made a twisting motion, as if locking his lips. Whether they took this to mean that the secret of their existence was safe with him or that he was asking them to be discreet about his visits, he would never know; he himself didn’t know what he meant, exactly. Both these things, he supposed. In any case, they guffawed, and popped him a beer.

The men’s Spanish was a good deal better than the young woman’s — perhaps they weren’t indigenes, like she, but mixed-blood mestizos. Still, he understood only a fraction of what they said, and none of the jokes, though he laughed when they laughed. He made a mental note to bring a tape recorder next time he visited so he could go over everything as many times as it took to decipher it all.

The beer and the talk relaxed him, and every now and then he cast a glance at the hut where he’d found the young woman that morning. He wished she would open the battered door, or at least peel away the tinfoil on the window and peek out, so he could know she knew he was there.

The stocky man, who’d introduced himself as Vicente, continued hewing his wood; now he was working a longer piece, a femur perhaps, striking long slivers from it. He uttered something in a guttural language that was definitely not Spanish. He kicked the wood aside and stalked to the hut, smacking, with the side of his machete, the dog lying in front of it. The dog yelped and scurried away, tail tucked. The man entered the shack and slammed the door.

The other men shifted their feet and sipped their beers quietly. Ortiz could feel their discomfort. He’d blown it somehow. Had Vicente caught him glancing at the shack where the woman — apparently Vicente’s woman — lived? In any case, it was time to leave. Darkness was descending, that impenetrable Mictlano darkness that was like a repudiation of the rest of Vegas’ gaudy brightness.

He shook hands with the men. When he got to the last one, a tall, gaunt man with deep-set eyes and thin lips, the guy seized his upper arm and said, “Hay baile el sábado.”

A dance next Saturday? Aquí?

“Sí, aquí.” The man moved his hand down and squeezed Ortiz’s forearm firmly with his long fingers. Clearly this was an invitation. An invitation to one of their festivities!

“Cuándo?” asked Ortiz.

The man raised his bony finger to the growing darkness. “En la noche.”

Ortiz skipped the rest of the ACA conference and returned that same night to L.A. He was eager to tell people, especially Dr. Talon, about his discovery, but knew he had to refrain; for now, they had to remain his secret.

Still, he could not keep himself from visiting the professor the day before he was to return to Las Vegas and attend the Mictlano fiesta. That the professor kept his office hours on Friday afternoons was a signal that he didn’t really want students dropping in on him, since this was the time of the week when they were least likely to do so. Nevertheless, Ortiz crept down the empty hall to the professor’s office and knocked on the door.

“Open!” Talon boomed.

The only decorations on the professor’s walls were a spear-thrower and three arrows. He sat entombed in his piles of papers and journals, fixed Ortiz with his glittery blue gaze, and waited for him to state his business.

“I was thinking about writing my thesis on the Mictlanos,” Ortiz said.

“Mictlanos, ey? What do you know about the Mictlanos?”

“Not much. That’s why—”

“What aspect? What in particular do you want to write about?”

Ortiz hadn’t really thought it through. But he’d been thinking about the slaps he’d heard that night in Las Vegas, the woman’s cries, the bruise she’d shown him, Vicente’s piggish face, and so he said, “Gender relations?”

“Well, that would be fashionable,” Talon said. “Easy, too. Gender relations among the Mictlanos basically revolve around the cinchazo. Do you know what the cinchazo is?”

Ortiz allowed that he did not.

“The cinchazo is the blow a man gives to his woman with the flat side of his machete. It pretty much settles everything, at least from the man’s point of view. It’s very difficult to get the women to talk about it, even to other women. If you intend to do fieldwork on that, you’d best be very, very careful.”

Talon drew from one of his piles of papers an article he’d written about the Mictlanos and gave it to Ortiz. Apparently it was a detailed account of the ritual fight between the two Mictlano males that Ortiz had already heard about in Talon’s lectures. Ortiz tucked the article in his satchel, thanked the professor, and took his leave.

The next day, Ortiz took off for Las Vegas feeling elated. So the famous Professor Talon had a hard time getting Mictlana women to open up to him. Well, as far as Ortiz was concerned, the young Mictlana woman had already opened up to him by revealing her bruise. She wanted to talk about it. Perhaps that was because he himself was Native, or looked it. Or because he simply inspired trust. Talon was, let’s face it, a loud, aggressive European. It was surprising any Native peoples at all had ever confided in him.

Pleased with the thought of someday surpassing Talon as an ethnographer, Ortiz hadn’t yet bothered to read the article the professor gave him, but as he drove he plucked it from his satchel and began his reading-on-the road game. As always in this game, the meaning of the text wasn’t going to sink in immediately; the fun would come later when the words, carved in his mind by the danger, came back to him verbatim, as if out of nowhere, triggered by some stress.

Ortiz glanced up just in time up to see a deer or an antelope bounding — no, flying — across the hood of his car. Some kind of hoofed thing, anyway: The cloven hoof came down on his exterior rearview, shattering it. Holy fucking shit. Behind him, the creature continued bounding across the desert in great leaps.

Ortiz stuffed the article in his satchel and took the wheel with both trembling hands. Enough foolishness. He kept his eyes on the road the rest of the way to Vegas.

The sun had already set by the time he got to the city. With a frisson of professional satisfaction, he turned his car away from the lights of the Strip and headed into the dark barrio of his study. The only things he could see were what his headlights illuminated: the potholed street, and at the end of it, the elm tree.

The tree had been hideously lopped, its stumped limbs raised in supplication to the heavens. Who would do such a thing to a tree, especially here in the desert, where shade was so needed? But again, it wasn’t his place to pass judgment on these people. They needed the wood for their carvings, after all. Or maybe they turned it into charcoal for cooking, as people did all over the Third World.

Speaking of charcoal, the two men digging behind the huts were no doubt preparing a barbeque pit for the fiesta. That meant the food was a long ways from being ready. Maybe this was to be some sort of drawn-out, all-night fiesta; Ortiz regretted not having gotten something to eat on the road.

Nor should he be drinking on an empty stomach, but already the man who had invited him to the baile had thrust into his hand a big plastic glass of chicha, the traditional Mictlano fermented corn drink. So okay, cool, let the party begin.

The man ushered him to a rickety metal table set up in one corner of the dusty courtyard. Two other men joined them. Another metal table had been set up in the corner opposite. The only illumination came from a dim kerosene lamp suspended from a wire running from the roofs of two of the huts. But it was enough to allow Ortiz to see Vicente’s squat body take a seat at that table opposite.

A four-man band emerged from the shadows and struck up vigorous binary rhythms on an accordion and chicken-scratch strings. The men at Ortiz’s table urged more milky chicha on him. The drink was cool, if a bit acid. Probably quite nourishing. He drank and listened to the homely music and smiled at his friends. The red neon ¡Viva! sign shone bright in the distance.

Then, as if choreographed, a group of women assembled themselves in the fourth corner of the courtyard, all dressed in colorful skirts and blouses. Among them was the woman with the bruise. She glanced at Ortiz’s table, then at Vicente’s, then dropped her gaze to the ground.

Men from both tables began taking women to dance, though not before first asking the woman’s husband or boyfriend for permission. Ortiz watched the dancers shuffle in the dust, and loved them. He felt deeply connected to them, to these people whose ancestors — and his, on his Native side — had crossed the Bering Strait and made that immense and brave journey down into Mesoamerica, where they had built vast empires. Now they had returned back north, to the great Nevada desert, where he was ever so fortunate to be witness to their ancient rites.

Okay — maybe he didn’t love Vicente so much. Vicente remained at his table, sipping his chicha morosely and refusing to look in Ortiz’s direction. Ortiz supposed he should have gone to his table right off and greeted him and the other men seated there. Well, he could do that now. He would drink with them. He would win them with his smile.

He stood, swaying slightly. The men with him pushed their chairs from the table. The band struck up a fast-tempoed tune. Ortiz made it halfway across the courtyard when someone pressed a machete into his hand.

And that’s when, in its exact wording, Talon’s text came to him, as if written in the dark air before him:

It was funny. If they wanted him to, he could recite it for them right there in the middle of the courtyard, as if he were addressing an audience of academics. The litany of gibberish might amuse them. But already the lantern was smashed, and the scene, just as Professor Talon’s article said, was plunged into darkness.