Desert of the Heart: A Novel (23 page)

At the open doors of Frank’s Club, Evelyn did not even hesitate. She moved in with a crowd and was not aware of the change of atmosphere until she was well into the building. Then the cold air and the suddenly magnified noise struck her into a more defensive alertness. She was enclosed in the crowd. There was still gaiety in the eddies of movement between slot machine clusters and gaming tables, but the dominant tone had shifted to a stagnant sea of people intent upon maintaining the positions they had achieved. Evelyn let herself be carried uncertainly from the edge of one group to another until she was caught in a cul-de-sac behind the escalators. To her left an exaggerated Judy Garland, dressed in clothes like Ann’s, barked the comic results of the game she dealt to a roaring, delighted crowd. Evelyn was held there by her performance, unable to understand the game or to hear most of what she said, but aware of the skill she used in her certain entertainment. She was marvelous. Then Evelyn saw a change girl to her right, who seemed raised several feet above the ground on the waving hands of the crowd. She, too, had a kind of command of the chaos she was there to serve. Evelyn looked all around over the crowd to the change stations, but she could not see Ann anywhere. She could not imagine that she would ever really find her. She worked her way toward a cashier’s cage and stood in what seemed to be a line. If she could get to a cashier, she could ask for change for the opportunity of asking where Ann might be. The line did not move. Evelyn saw people feeding in from the sides of the cage and so worked her way again to a position which would inevitably carry her past the cage.

“Nickels please,” she shouted. The cashier did not even look up. “Excuse me. Could you tell me where I could find Ann Childs?”

“Who?”

“Ann Childs. She works here. A change girl.”

“Sorry,” the cashier said, shaking her head.

“Or Silver?”

“Silver? What kind do you want?”

“No, a person named Silver. I’m looking for a person named Silver.”

“Oh. Silver Kay?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“I think she’s up in the Corral.”

“Where’s that?”

“Second floor. Off the escalator, turn left.”

“Thanks.”

“My pleasure, love.”

It was not easy to get on the escalator and terrifying to get off, but, having achieved both successfully, Evelyn felt a relieved confidence. If she could find Silver, Silver would know where she could find Ann. And even in this crowd, Silver might be noticeable. Evelyn turned left, as she had been directed, and found herself in a room the size of a ballroom, crowded with slot machines and people, who moved about apparently quite unconcerned about the huge stage coaches that were suspended from the ceiling.

“Well, Our Lady of the Lake,” someone said behind her, “You’ve kept your promise after all.”

“Silver,” Evelyn said, more pleased than she could have imagined to see Ann’s friend. “I never thought I’d find you in this crowd.”

“Having a good time?”

“Well, not yet. I’m still trying to find my way around. Where does Ann work?”

“Right over there where I can keep an eye on her.”

“There she is!” Evelyn said, in her voice an unguarded surprise and delight.

“Doesn’t she know you’re here?”

“Not yet.”

“You’d better go over and let her know. I think she’s just about ready for her long break. She can show you around.”

“May I come back and see you later?”

“I’ll be right here, love, unless they pack me to the basement for overhauling.”

Evelyn did not go right to Ann’s ramp; she stood a little distance away, where Ann would not be apt to see her, and watched Ann work. She was incredibly quick and graceful; and, though Evelyn could not hear what was said to her or what she answered, she could read in the swiftly changing expressions of Ann’s face the fragments of concern, amusement, doubt, and authority that her job required. On the ramp, a little above and apart from the crowd, she was perfectly at home. Evelyn saw her reach for a microphone that hung just above her head, and then she heard Ann’s voice, magnified, call off the numbers of a jackpot from across the room. If Evelyn had once thought Ann’s job somehow degrading to her, she thought it no longer. She had a quite childish desire to say to the people standing near her, “Do you see that girl? I know her,” for everyone in the insignificant crowd must be a little in awe of the people who actually worked here, who understood and controlled the multicolored magic of the machines. Evelyn found her way into the crowd and finally took a place by a nickel slot machine at the end of Ann’s ramp. She opened the roll of nickels she had brought from the cashier and put one in. She pulled the arm and watched the wheels spin. Nothing happened. She put in another, then another. On the fourth nickel, she thought she heard a bell ring, and a great number of nickels spilled into the cup.

“A jackpot, girl!” said an affable man standing next to her. “Good for you!”

“What do I do?”

“Get the change girl. Here, like this. Just wave and whistle until she comes.”

Ann turned around at his sharp whistle and saw Evelyn. Evelyn grinned guiltily.

“The lady’s got a jackpot.”

“Don’t play it off, ma’am, until the key man comes.” Ann said, a warm amusement not quite hidden in her professional tone. She leaned over to see the machine number and said more quietly, “What the devil are you doing here?”

“I missed you,” Evelyn said softly and saw in the quick, direct look Ann gave her nothing of disapproval. “It’s fun.”

“I’ll be off in five minutes,” Ann said.

Ann’s relief arrived with the key man to pay off the waiting jackpots. Evelyn walked with Ann to her floor locker.

“Can I buy you a drink?” she asked, holding up the dollars she had been given.

“No, but you can buy me something to eat. When did you come? How did you get down here?”

“I walked.”

Evelyn watched Ann take off her apron, fold it carefully and put it in her locker. Then she brushed both hands together briskly and obviously before she turned the key and pinned it back on to her shirt.

“Why do you do that?”

“To show I have nothing in my hands. If you forget, you can be fired.”

They went together to the restaurant and ordered sandwiches and coffee.

“I think I’ll come down here every night,” Evelyn said. “It’s much nicer than waiting for you at home, and think of all the money I could win.”

“You can lose what you’ve won tonight,” Ann said firmly. “But you’re not to spend a penny more. It would be just like you to get gambling fever.”

“Do you think I’m the type?”

“I do, my darling, for fevers of all sorts.”

“I’m pretty safe. I don’t know how to play anything but the slot machines.”

“You’d learn. Anyway, you can lose enough to scare you without ever graduating to the dime machines. And I can’t keep an eye on you because you mustn’t play in my section. It’s against the rules for relatives, and I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone that we’re not related.”

“Of course not. We are.”

“Are you going to stay a while?”

“Until you’re ready to go home if you’ll let me.”

“Do you really want to?”

“Of course,” Evelyn said. “The noise was a little appalling at first, but you get used to that, don’t you?”

“In a way,” Ann said.

“And everybody’s having such a good time, almost everybody anyway. I love watching you work.”

“Well, you mustn’t do too much of that. I’ll start giving away all the House’s money.”

Evelyn did not go back to the Corral with Ann, feeling Ann a little uneasy at having her there. She was amused by Ann’s quite serious warning to her. Perhaps Evelyn felt safer in the Club than Ann did. She stayed on the second floor and began to watch roulette. It was not really a difficult game. She got a couple of dollars’ worth of chips and lost them almost at once. It was quite an easy game to lose. The crap table was much more complicated. Evelyn did not understand the betting at all; and, because people took turns with the dice, she felt nervous about standing too close to the game. Also there was a kind of intensity in the players and dealers that she did not feel elsewhere. The slot machines really were simpler and more fun. But, even near the slot machines, though the crowd had thinned a little, there seemed a growing tension. Fewer people seemed to be playing casually. There were not as many conversations as there had been an hour ago.

“I said cap these two machines,” an old woman shouted at a change girl.

“I’m sorry. There’s still too big a crowd to save machines.”

“Call the floor boss. I play here every night. I want these machines capped.”

“I’ll cap one, all right?”

Evelyn turned away from this argument only to find herself witnessing an even more unpleasant scene, a young husband trying to persuade his obsessed wife to stop playing two dollar machines.

“Honey, I don’t have any more money. It’s all gone.”

“Let me see your wallet. Come on.”

“I’ve got to have enough to get us out of here.”

“You were lying to me!”

“Listen, you’ve lost over two hundred. You’ve got to quit.”

“You’re a rotten spoilsport, tight-fisted, mean, stingy …”

“Honey, please …”

“All you ever think about is money!”

“All right, take it!” he said in disgust. “You make me sick.”

Evelyn turned away again. She wanted to go back to Ann’s section where everyone seemed to be having such a good time, but she could not. It was against the regulations. Perhaps she could find Silver, but Silver was gone. Where she had been, there was some kind of minor commotion. An old man in a clerical collar was shouting. As Evelyn drew nearer, she could hear something of what he was saying.

“There can be no divine faith without the divine revelation of the will of God! Therefore, whatever is thrust into the worship of God that is not agreeable to divine revelation, cannot be done but by human faith, which faith is not profitable to eternal life!”

“Get that crackpot out of here!” someone shouted.

Two uniformed men stepped up to him and began to move him through the crowd. Evelyn stepped back to let them through.

“There can be no divine faith without the divine revelation of God!” he shouted again. “This is Vanity Fair. Who judges me but Hate-good? Who are you, all of you, but Malice, Live-loose, Love-lust, Hate-light …”

Vanity Fair. Of course, she had heard of it all before. He was quoting Faithful’s final speech in
Pilgrim’s Progress.
Faithful was tried at Vanity Fair and died there. Crackpot the old man might be, but he knew his Bunyan, and he knew Vanity Fair when he saw it: “When they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them …” Evelyn heard him shout just before the elevator doors closed behind him: “I buy the truth!”

The money in her hand was suddenly distasteful to her, but she resisted being moved by an old man’s fanatic moralizing. She could get rid of the money by feeding it back into the machines it had come from, a solution that would free her from both the little guilt and the morality that threatened her. She started to put a nickel into the machine she stood by only to discover that it took dollars. Well, she had a silver dollar. It would be quicker. Evelyn put the dollar in the slot and pulled the handle. The wheels spun and jarred to a stop one by one. A light went on. A bell rang.

“No!” Evelyn said, appalled. “I don’t want it. Stop!”

But the silver dollars crashed into the cup and onto the floor, and a smiling change girl called the jackpot into the board. A key man counted out a hundred and twenty dollars into Evelyn’s reluctant hands.

“Will you play it off, please?”

Evelyn put a dollar into the machine, pulled the handle and turned away, but the machine spilled out eighteen dollars.

“I don’t have to play that off, do I?” Evelyn asked, frantic.

“Not if you don’t want to.”

She turned away, desperately wanting to get out. She would find Ann. She would tell her that she had to go home; but, when she arrived at Ann’s ramp, she was not there. Evelyn looked at her watch. It was after three.

“You’re late,” Ann said, standing right behind her in the crowd.

“Oh darling, I’ve done the most awful thing.”

“What is it?”

“I’ve won all this money!” Evelyn said, offering it up to Ann.

Ann looked down at the money, then at Evelyn, and began to laugh. Evelyn’s horror broke. It was funny. Of course, it was funny.

“It frightened me so for a minute,” Evelyn said, and then she, too, began to laugh.

8

A
NN HAD NOT EXPECTED
the Club itself to accomplish Evelyn’s conversion. She had hoped to keep Evelyn away from the Club entirely and to win her approval by means of a short course in the history of Nevada and a careful abstraction of the Club, revealing it as an ideal symbol of man’s industry in which Ann felt obligated to participate. Trained in the intricacies of defensive logic by her elaborately intellectual father but disciplined in emotion by the shrewd and cryptic wit of the practical world she lived in, Ann had organized an argument to be presented in impressive fragments, offered to Evelyn casually as entertainments, a sort of subliminal advertising for Ann’s own point of view until Evelyn would one day put all the pieces together with the love of coherence she had and speak Ann’s view as if Evelyn had discovered it. The plan had been working very well before Evelyn’s visit to the Club.

From the book Kate had given her, Ann collected stories of the hundreds of failures to settle the desert, the mining towns turned to ghost towns because the ore ran out or the railroad did not come through. Unionville was typical in its decline. First the church went, moved and converted into a saloon, the bell sold to call ranch hands in to supper. Then the railroad passed on the other side of the mountain, and the courthouse was lost to Winnemucca. Finally even the newspaper folded, and the largest mine closed, its owner claiming that he had spent three million dollars trying to live in Unionville. It was finished. And over and over again the same thing happened, the rush, the boom, the decline, the death. Nevada’s incredible wealth of gold and silver built not one city that could survive the desert and the mountains. Not one. It wasn’t really fair to count San Francisco, was it? Its wealth did not come from the actual produce of the mines but from stock speculation, and, when the last mines closed, San Francisco could feed on the fertile valleys and vast forests of California, on the sea. In Nevada, there were no great valleys, and even the sage, for miles around the mining cities, had been burned for fuel. There was no water. Elsewhere in the world the God of the Jews had brought forth in the desert spring water from the jawbone of an ass. In this desert, there boiled up nothing but the poisonous sulphur of hot springs. There was nothing to support civilization but the man-made railroad and highway, built not to reach the desert but to cross it.