Hush Hush (6 page)

“Hey,” the boy said. “He won’t hurt him.” He and the old man were walking over.

“He’ll scare the poor little fucker to death, Kato, what’re you talking about,” Bailey said. He affected a mocking, childish voice: “
He won’t hurt him
.”

The dog jumped back, yelling, a weird twisting cry that began in a growl and then raced into something higher pitched and plaintive. It backed away from the side of the car, looking confused, blood all over its face.

The boy was beside it, kneeling down to it, checking the dog’s eyes, talking, soothing it with his voice. He looked up at Bailey. “I’ve got a Magnum in my car,” he said. “You better get
that fucking cat out of here, cause I’m gonna kill it.” The dog started growling again.

“None of that,” the old man said, frightened. “None of that now, Davey. You’re not supposed to have that dog, you know? I haven’t said anything, but—”

“Go inside, Mr. Keys,” the boy said, his hand in the dog’s collar, restraining it.

“All right,” Bailey said. He slammed the passenger door shut and started around the car, then stopped and made a slow sweeping motion with his hand. “All right. Just get the dog away.”

The cat, under the far side of the car, lay limp on the blacktop, fast breaths heaving in its gaunt sides, you could see its lungs. Bailey dragged it out as gently as he could, opened the car door and set the cat on the back seat. “Way to go,” he whispered, getting into the car.

The blond boy shook his head and sneered. Bailey let the car roll backward out of the parking lot and drove away, thinking he would drop the cat on the next corner, and the next, and the next. But he didn’t; he took it home and locked it in his extra bathroom, with an ancient can of tuna fish and a plastic dishpan full of newspaper as a litter box.

•  •  •

The next day Bailey called in sick at work and went back to sleep until late afternoon. After a shower, he cashed Claire’s check at her bank and went by an ATM to squeeze what he could from seven credit cards, then got a soft drink at a drive-through and rolled out of town, headed for the coast casinos
with a little over five hundred dollars. He had won sometimes, it wasn’t always losing, but even quitting while you were ahead took a discipline that he couldn’t seem to maintain once he got inside the places.

Don’t eat ice, Bailey told himself, chewing. His teeth were cracked already, lines running up and down every one he looked at when he leaned in close to a mirror, which he did on occasion. It meant you were orally fixated, too, which meant something—you wanted to suck a tit, you were childish, or something. Got that right, Bailey thought. But a quarter of the population smokes cigarettes, which means the same thing supposedly, so it’s not so bad, being childish. If you weren’t oral, you were anal, was that any better? No way.

He tilted his cup up for more ice. No way, he thought. He had been in the car an hour now, and had another hour’s ride. Twilight was rising up ahead of him, orange and dark, reminding him of a place he and Claire had had once, a tiny apartment on one side of a lake with hills on the other side. The apartment had a balcony where they’d sit and watch the sun set behind the hills. One afternoon she said, I bet there’s a pile of big orange suns lying around over there somewhere.

Bailey laughed, raised his cup. He would stop in Gulfport, eat a comp steak at that fancy restaurant, then drive down the beach highway to Biloxi. He liked the dealers better there. Maybe I’ll make a couple grand and return her money the very next day, he thought. Here, baby, I appreciate the loan. In fact I’m buying you dinner. Bring what’s his name.

He had first come down here for a stupid sales education conference that he didn’t need, didn’t want, and a waste of two weeks of his time and two thousand dollars of the store’s money. The “rotunda concept” was what they were big on that year, get the stiffs walking in a circle, merch to the right, merch
to the left … Most of the great merchandising concepts were equally sly. He shook his head. The first time he had come down here he had won eight hundred dollars, like it was easy, like it was meant to be. He even won two hundred on a slot machine. Patterson was unhappy when he found out about it, but it had been the old man’s idea to send Bailey to the dumb sales conference.

They found out about everything. He remembered when he was hired, how he had been surprised that they knew Claire’s name, where she lived, what she did, how long they’d been together. They even knew that girl’s name—Dashy—that Bailey was fooling around with when he and Claire split up. “What’re y’all running, a department store or the C.I.A.?” he’d said, and none of them had laughed. They actually had a department called “Intelligence.” Patterson himself wasn’t so bad, just nosy. He paid well, and had done well by Bailey, shooting him up to the second spot in marketing in less than three years, him without even a business degree. Then when they sold the chain to a bigger chain, Patterson had become some kind of token figure, ceased to matter, near as Bailey could tell.

Then he’d started gambling, which was more interesting. It was a department store, who could stay interested in that? It was dull, although he liked the people who worked on the floor, all the clerks and stock people and the tech crew, the people that built displays, moved stuff around. The people who ran the place were horrible, piously stabbing each other for dimes and for the old man’s favor. The smart alecks and old drunks at the casinos were far better company. And you never knew, you might make a killing some day, and bye-bye, nine to five. Pay off all the damn bloodsucker credit cards.

He had his free dinner at the steakhouse on top of one of the casinos, and then drove down to Biloxi to another to play.
Two and a half hours later, even betting cautiously and not drinking, he was into his line of credit for a thousand dollars, with about half that left, twenty green chips lined up in front of him.

The dealer was some girl, not anyone he knew, lots of brown hair, very good-looking, looked like a magazine girl, with a magazine girl’s indifference. She looked about eighteen but she had two kids, said she was twenty-four. Bailey was thinking about trying another table, when she said, “Press,” quietly, and then, when he gave her a doubtful look, reassumed her indifferent expression. She hadn’t said more than a dozen sentences in an hour. Bailey stacked the chips, all he had, in one tall stack the way he had seen people do. It was always jerks who did it, but they always won. He pushed the stack onto his spot, and got two face cards and doubled his money. “Black out,” she called out for the pit boss, and gave Bailey black hundred dollar chips. He left it all on the spot and doubled it again. And again. And again. She was paying him in purple chips, five hundred dollars apiece. “Wait,” Bailey said, and reached out and settled his hand on the chips. The object, he thought, is to get out of this fucking place with some of their money.

The pit boss was standing sort of sideways behind the dealer, watching. Bailey looked up at the girl, who was waiting for his bet, her hand poised over the shoe, her eyes gently blank as if her whole consciousness was pulled back somewhere well behind them. “I don’t have the nerves for this,” Bailey said. Still nothing.

A Vietnamese man walked up to the table, set some bills down in front of him, looked at Bailey’s hand still resting on his chips, then at his face, and picked up the bills and walked away. The pit boss smirked, a chubby guy with stiff permed
gray hair and a name tag that said “Lucky.” “You’re on a roll,” he said. “Let it ride.” It was a dare, a taunt.

Bailey, sweating, looked at his utterly indifferent dealer again. “Bets,” the girl said. Okay, he thought. Once more. He shook his head and stacked all the chips on the round spot on the felt in front of him. “Be nice,” he said, and she dealt out the cards. He got a thirteen, an eight and a five, and she dealt herself a deuce. She looked at him.

“Dealer’s ace,” Lucky said. “Glad that’s not my eight grand.” He laughed, and glanced away, over at each of the other tables in the pit, as if this game were already over. “She could still break,” Lucky said, doubtfully, and laughed again.

Just a stupid thing everybody says about deuces, Bailey thought, but he didn’t like that the pit boss had counted his chips, or counted them so accurately. Or maybe they had it fixed. Players’ paranoia, he thought. Can’t mean anything. The dealer was waiting for him to play. Not this, he thought, shaking his head. It’s twelve against a three you’re supposed to hit. But he tapped the felt with his index finger twice, asking for a hit. She laid down a card, a three, now he had sixteen. The pit boss rocked, smirking. Bailey lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender, took a breath, rocking, too, a little, forward and back, he couldn’t stop the movement. “I’m good,” he said, and waved his hand flat above his cards. “I’ll stay. Turn it up.”

She turned up her down card, a queen, spades.

“That’s a start,” the pit boss said. “That’s a good start.”

The girl dealt herself another card, a deuce, and then a third deuce. It was taking forever. “Sixteen,” she said, and stopped, and a hint of a smile slipped over her face. Why wasn’t she dealing it? Bailey thought. Do it. “Twenty-six?” she said, and flipped out another card, another queen.

“Twenty-six,” Bailey said, breathing out, and he shook his
head sharply as he felt tears rising in his eyes. “It’s twenty-six. Dealer busts.”

“Misdeal,” Lucky shouted. And then, when he saw the look on Bailey’s face, “Little jokie.” And then he wandered away to a telephone and a computer at a stand in the middle of the pit.

“Color these up,” Bailey said, pushing his chips toward the dealer. “I can’t—” He shrugged. “—do this.”

He watched, wondering if he had figured it right, trying to recount his stacks himself as she counted up his chips and made stacks from hers, all purples, sixteen thousand dollars. Lucky was back, watching. “Sixteen thousand,” the girl said.

“Sixteen thousand,” Lucky said. “Okay.”

When she had pushed the chips across to Bailey, he took one and slid it across the insurance line to her and slipped the rest of them into his shirt pocket. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. His hands were shaking.

The girl took it blankly. “Thank you, sir,” she said, then called out, “Dropping five hundred for the dealers, for the boys and girls,” and slipped the chip into the toke box by her right hand. The dealers at the other tables turned to look.

Get out, Bailey thought, checking his pocket. Cash it all in. Don’t look at the slots. Don’t think. Walk to the cashier, he thought, and headed that way. At the main cage he asked for twelve thousand in a check and the rest in cash. The I.R.S. would hear, anything over ten. It only took a few minutes, but getting the chips cashed in felt like landing an airliner. He looked this way and that. Suddenly all the casino patrons looked like sleazy bit actors on
NYPD Blue
.

It wasn’t until he was in the car on the highway with the dark pine trees and bare fields passing by outside that he began to breathe easy again, and even then he kept patting his
pocket for the fold of hundreds and the twelve thousand dollar check they’d given him. And then he started laughing, quietly, to himself, but that made him self-conscious so he just shook his head a little.

He drove straight to Claire’s, but he didn’t get there until after midnight, and the windows of her apartment were all dark. Then he remembered the dinner he had been supposed to come to. Whoops, he thought. Well, I never said I’d be there. I’ll take her to dinner tomorrow, he thought. Take some roses, too.
Really
piss her off. So he pulled out of the parking lot and drove back to his own apartment.

He had completely forgotten the cat, which started yowling the moment his key went in the door lock and didn’t let up until he opened the bathroom door. “Jesus,” Bailey said, “shut up. You aren’t winning any friends that way.”

The cat sat on the edge of the bathtub, looking up.

Bailey let it follow him into the kitchen where he shuffled through the cabinets looking for something to feed it. “Looks like you’re out of luck, Slick,” he said. “That was my only can of tuna fish.” He took down a plastic bag of chocolate chip cookies and ripped it open.

“Here,” he said, and dropped a cookie on the linoleum in front of the cat, which looked at it. “Moist and chewy,” Bailey said. “And don’t give me any twaddle about this, as until yesterday you’ve been eating out of the garbage unless I miss my guess. I’ll get some Cheetos tomorrow.” He dropped another cookie beside the first one, and the cat set himself down to dinner. “That’s better,” Bailey said.

He went into the living room and lay back in the big chair, watching the kitchen doorway, waiting for the cat to come in and start hassling him again. He turned on the TV, but left the sound muted, and thought about the money that was still
in his shirt pocket, touching it every once in a while. It came to him that Claire wouldn’t care about it, not at all. She’d be happy to take her loan money back, but that’s all. He hadn’t done anything at all, the way she saw it. Just didn’t matter to her. He ran through some channels on the TV, settled on some talk show, set the control down. He touched his pocket, looked toward the kitchen. “Goddamn it,” he said, “get in here, you pest.”

•  •  •

It was a little after four in the morning when he went out and got in his car and started back over to Claire’s apartment. He wasn’t drunk. He’d had a couple beers to try to mellow out, but it hadn’t worked. There was no way he was going to be able to sleep with all that brand new money. There was something disappointing about it, anyway. It was like being a kid and doing something really spectacular about which no one cared, like getting all the way home through the woods without ever touching the ground, or hitting a home run in an empty ballpark, when it didn’t count.

Maybe they could try again, him and Claire. He didn’t feel about new women the way he had felt about her, that it mattered, that it could end well, that it might not end. You met a woman and even if you had more than fifteen minutes worth of talk in common, even if she could say something interesting or funny, you were thinking, when do we find out what’s wrong with her, what’s wrong with me that she can’t tolerate, how long before we find out. But he didn’t feel about Claire the way he felt about them, either, that weird sort of hunger
for them, for their faces, for their eyes. Claire’s eyes were beautiful but it wasn’t the same. You know me, you don’t know me, look, don’t look, don’t look away.