The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 32

Walt Garrity takes a sip of ice-cold Maker’s Mark and gazes around the vast gaming floor of the Magnolia Queen. Most casino boats are floating barns filled with slot machines and few table games, but the Magnolia Queen is magnificent, harkening back to the days of the floating palaces that cruised the river after the Civil War. The Queen has a three-hundred-foot salon built in the style known as steamboat Gothic, with Gothic arches, stained-glass skylights, gilt pendants, and eight massive chandeliers. There are hundreds of slot machines, yes, but there are also table games of every type.

Walt spent the first part of the evening putting on the same kind of show he’d given on the Zephyr last night, making a spectacle of himself at the craps table and tipping everyone beyond all reason. He’s stayed with Nancy because since their scene in the RV they’ve had a certain understanding about the sexual component of their relationship that he doesn’t want to explain to a succession of prostitutes.

She stands a few feet away, losing wads of Penn Cage’s money at the blackjack table. Nancy doesn’t seem to mind Walt’s frequent absences, so long as the flow of chips and alcohol continues uninterrupted. She probably assumes that a man of his age is making repeated trips to the restroom. In fact, Walt has conducted a casual but very thorough inspection of Golden Parachute’s floating casino. This is the second time they’ve been aboard the Queen today. They first visited it after lunch, then spent some time on both the Zephyr and the Evangeline. Walt was glad to learn that the opulence of the Magnolia Queen would justify J. B. Gilchrist’s spending most of his time in Natchez aboard her, and not the lesser boats.

During his first visit, Walt twice saw Jonathan Sands-the first time coming down the escalator from the upper deck where Walt now knows Sands’s office is, and the second in the cashier’s cage, talking to some employees. Despite his bespoke suit, Sands moved like an alert and graceful animal padding through a herd of less sentient creatures. Most of the gamblers on the boat blunder around like shoppers in a mall, their eyes on the slot machines, the tables, or the young women that seem so plentiful. Sands’s eyes miss nothing. He actually made eye contact with Walt long enough to register that he was being watched as he descended the escalator. Even after seeing Sands only twice, Walt knows the Irishman will be a difficult man to outwit, much less capture.

Walt has paid some attention to the women as well. Several of the younger ones are Chinese, and from their behavior he guessed they were prostitutes. Nancy confirmed this when Walt asked about them and showed more than a little jealousy when she did. Apparently this perk of the Magnolia Queen is becoming well-known to out-of-town businessmen, who don’t seem to mind that the girls speak little or no English. Walt understands the attraction. As a young soldier in 1953, he fell in love with a young Japanese girl during an extended R&R in Kobe, Japan. Most of the women he’d met in Korea were prostitutes, but Kaeko was a nurse he met by chance in a restaurant. Walt had married his high school sweetheart before shipping out, and he’d sworn to be faithful while he was overseas. Kaeko had tested his vow to the limit, not physically so much as by slowly and completely inhabiting his soul.

The Chinese girls on the Magnolia Queen look different from Kaeko, but their resemblance is enough to trigger a feeling in Walt that shames the twinge of lust he felt when Nancy bared her bottom in the van.

“Why do you keep running off?” Nancy asks. “You’re tired of me, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m just taking it all in. I’ve been on a lot of boats, but I haven’t seen one like this in many a year.”

Thus reassured, Nancy begins chattering mindlessly, but Walt suddenly becomes aware that several people are looking up over his shoulder. When he turns, he sees one of the most beautiful women he has ever encountered descending the escalator. She looks like a princess being carried down steps in a royal litter. She wears a jade green dress that lies close against her petite body, and her hair is long and straight. What strikes Walt, though, as it must have the other watchers, is the sense of self-possession radiated by the girl. Reaching behind him, he takes hold of Nancy’s cheap dress and turns her so that she can see the escalator.

“Daddy, I’m playing,” she protests. “Hit,” she tells the dealer. “Stay.”

“Do you know who that is?” Walt asks.

“Who?”

“That girl on the escalator.”

Nancy turns and stares for a few seconds. “No, I never seen that one before. She looks like she thinks her you-know-what don’t stink, though.”

Nancy’s harsh voice intrudes on Walt’s reverie like the squawk of a crow startling a man contemplating a pristine dawn. He cannot imagine that the girl on the escalator could be for sale. If she were, the price for a night with her would have to be ten times that for a night with the Nancys so common on the boats. But Walt knows one thing: If her time is for sale, he intends to buy as much as he can afford.