Las Vegas for Vegans (22 page)

Olive cut her foot in the bathroom on a piece of broken mug. She dripped blood while she squeezed her eyes shut and thought, OK, the pain will go away. It won't last forever.
Promise, promise, promise.

She hopped along, to the third drawer down of the vanity unit, and pulled out the Band-Aids. She put one on the ball of her foot, knowing that it wasn't likely to hold very long. Not in that spot. She put on another six bandaids, wishing that they would stay on. She limped out of the bathroom and into the lounge.

Daddy was sleeping on the couch, half-naked and hairy like an ape. The television going. Some religious show from America was on, so he must have fallen asleep during the car racing. Which was earlier. She'd been asleep also but she'd had too much juice at dinner, strawberry milk and too much ice cream as well.

She wanted to go straight back to bed but she couldn't now that her foot was throbbing. From the bit of mug her mother had broken in the morning. Dropping it and screaming. And now Mum was in the hospital, and Dad was drunk. Because he was snoring and he never snored unless he was drunk or very tired.

That was something Olive heard her mother telling her friend Lesley on the phone. Talking about all the things wrong with Graham. That was her dad's name. Olive went to the fridge and opened the door. She sat on the kitchen tiles there by the open door, letting it make her feel cool again, because it had been so hot every night this week.

She liked the little light in the fridge, which made everything around it feel neat and clear. It was still a pretty new fridge. Nothing had gone bad in it, and it smelt like what she imagined white would smell like if a colour could have a smell. Nothing bad had ever happened in the fridge. But her mother had been crying about things her father had done that were bad. And she listened because she'd never really thought of them like that. Two people like anyone else out there on the television.

The bandage was starting to bleed through and drip again. Maybe she would need to go to hospital now as well. For stitches. She could be in the same bed as her mum. And maybe she wouldn't be so scared this time. Everything so sharp and in pain at hospital and everyone rushing over her and falling down.

The phone started ringing. Olive didn't move, because a phone ringing in the middle of the night meant Grandma had died or something like that. It couldn't be good because everyone should be asleep.

Her father got off the couch and picked up the phone, blinking into the fridge light as though he couldn't see Olive sitting there by its open door. He listened to a voice on the phone.

Olive could faintly hear the voice as well. It was similar to the sound a bee makes against the glass outside on a quiet day. He had tears in his eyes and there was a strange smile on his face, as he looked down at Olive—sitting on the tiles by the open door of the fridge. ‘How does it feel to have a little baby brother?' he asked her.

CIGARETTES & BALLOONS

A man drives up my street in a white van. It takes some vicious pulling and pushing at his steering wheel before he manages to make a U-turn. His side door needs to be facing my driveway. Maps and delivery details and invoices cover the top of his dashboard and his front seat.

He's been all over Melbourne—a city that sprawls great distances. No-one knows all of it. He gets out and lights a cigarette, consults a clipboard and tilts his head left and right, looking for my house number. Doesn't see me looking from my upstairs study. He opens the big door in the side of his van. I'm expecting to see a mess of tumbled-over packages. It's one huge bag in the back. He pulls on it, and it jostles but doesn't budge. He uses both hands and a foot on the side of his van to yank it out, violence in his fists. An immense nylon-mesh parcel, filled with vibrant colours, ready to burst or float into the dismal winter skies above. That'd be a sight. All those balloons let loose and floating free. It would be a quick glimpse. They'd get lost almost immediately in Melbourne's wide winter skies.

The cigarette is still burning in his mouth and I'll certainly give him an earful if one of the balloons bursts before he even gets it to my front door. Though, of course, I didn't order any balloons. It's not my birthday and there's no occasion I can think of that would warrant anyone buying me balloons. I've never received such a gift and I've never sent balloons to anyone.

I walk through the house coughing and blowing my nose, trying to think of who and why, but I can't come up with even one likely answer. Elation in all these possibilities as I move towards the unexpected surprise. I almost stumble down the stairs. I chastise myself for this silly burst of joy. What would I do with a big bag of balloons? How utterly useless!

Perhaps I'll release the balloons within the house. They might move from room to room whenever a gust from the heating or a door opening and closing nudges them along. Maybe they'll congregate in one particular room, and when I walk through they will sway with my movement. There will be all that colour clustered at my ceiling, nestling and jostling, like creatures ready to lead the way to liberation at the first opportunity.

When I open the front door, there's a smouldering cigarette on my doorstep. The delivery man has walked back to his vehicle and is shoving the immense bag of balloons back into his white van.

LAS VEGAS FOR VEGANS

I landed in Las Vegas yesterday and all I've done since then is spend hours looking out my hotel room window into the desert. I used to think a desert was a place where there was no life, nothing but a moonscape as far as you could see. There are yucca, cactus and grey thornbushes out there; there's hard green life, all of it clinging to the unyielding ground of the Mojave. I call up food and wine, and then call up a whore as though she's on the menu as well. She's very young. I ask to see her licence. She laughs and asks me do I want to fuck or not.

‘What's your name?'

‘Candy,' she answers. ‘I'm sweet. And you got a sweet tooth, I can tell.'

‘We don't call it candy where I'm from.'

She takes out a mirror, even though we're surrounded by mirrors—on the wall behind her, through the open door of the hotel bathroom and the wide reflective windows looking out across the evening desert. She dabs fresh colour on her lollypop-pink lips and that seems just as unnecessary. The little mirror in the palm of her hand snaps shut.

‘You don't have candy where you're from?'

‘We call it something else.'

She shifts her weight from one high heel to the other. ‘What should I call you?'

‘Hunter,' I answer.

Both of us could be making these names up. I'm not. I've read
Fear and Loathing
though I didn't love it half as much as my father and mother did.

Back in Brisbane I wouldn't have considered a prostitute. The women came from the suburbs and felt as though they were relations, or as if they'd arrived from Russia like wholesale mail-order brides. I always felt sorry, maybe even responsible for the circumstances that brought them to their knees.

In Las Vegas, Candy has a trailer-trash soul, and this is practically a respectable profession in her world.

‘So Hunter ….' She takes a step towards me, ‘I'll suck your dick if you want. That's how we could start. Or I could keep doing that for as long as you want.' She goes to her hands and knees in an easy motion. ‘Sometimes I have dessert for dinner,' she says, as she crawls towards me.

I look into the desert again. I don't ask how much it will cost. Candy tells me anyway and when she leaves I'm still here watching as the sun comes up, thinking that back home this same day is ending.

I walk down Flamingo to Del Frisco's Double Eagle Steak House on Paradise Road. Above the bar, set into the wood with gold-plated letters, is a slogan: DO RIGHT AND FEAR NO MAN.

The waiter asks me if I've been lucky and my first thought is that he means Candy so I stare at him and blink.

‘Best thing to do is move on from a place that hasn't got any luck for you,' he says. ‘There's plenty to choose from. You gotta trust your gut when you walk through the door.'

‘Thanks for the advice. But I reckon my gut can't be trusted on anything. And I don't want the menu. Get me the biggest hunk of meat you've got. I want to see blood when I cut it.'

The casinos are a waste of time. I've got no intention of doing anything other than profusely spending the money my parents carefully saved for over three decades. The Alzheimer's that destroyed my mother had taken a big bite out of my inheritance and my father's suicide afterwards tied up the rest of it for a while. When their graves began bristling with new blades of grass, their life savings finally poured into my bank account, and I thought Vegas was as good a place as any to find a hit man.

The silver Escalade coasts up the Strip and we've already settled on a price before he lights up another cigarette. I coughed through his first smoke and when I tried to open my window, found that it was locked. Joseph merely turned up the aircon. I'm sensitive to tobacco smoke. My throat hurts and I'm now coughing even harder.

‘Have you killed many men?' I ask.

‘I've killed enough.'

‘Enough, hey? Does that mean over a hundred?'

He chuckles. ‘Over a hundred? Vegas ain't a fucken war zone!'

‘Would you have a problem killing a hundred people? All at once?'

‘I'm not a terrorist.' Joseph turns up a Springsteen song on the radio.

‘No, of course not. To be honest, you don't even look like a regular kind of killer. What's with the shorts? And the sandals over socks? You're a suburbanite.'

‘Everyone lives in the suburbs in Vegas.'

‘They don't all look like fathers of four; loving husbands who wouldn't dream of forgetting to get the milk on the way home.'

‘I don't kill women or children.'

‘Why draw the line there? Some women do terrible things. And what's a boy but a very young man?'

‘Is that who you want me to kill?'

‘No. Just a regular man. Middle aged. Someone like me. I don't understand why it's okay to put a target on my back and not on a brat or some adulterous woman.'

‘If she's been cheating on you, we can fix her. Poison her lover and pin it on her. That can be done.'

‘What?'

‘Poison's the way women kill.'

‘No. There's no woman.'

‘Cherchez la femme.'

‘I'm suffocating. Open this window please.' I click the window button and cough. The Nevada heat rushes in along with the traffic fumes. ‘Look, maybe we should forget this,' I mumble. ‘Maybe I don't need a hit man.' I wind the window back up and look over at him. I blink when he looks at me. ‘I'll give you something for your time, of course.'

We continue up Fremont, drawling along with the traffic— passing Binion's Horseshoe, the Eldorado Club, the Golden Nugget and the Pioneer Club.

During the day all the lights are dead or drowned out by the desert sunshine and the whole town feels calm and clean, as though sleeping or catatonic.

Joseph chooses a long route out to my hotel and pulls up at the front doors as though we'd just taken a scenic drive of Las Vegas. He doesn't seem frustrated or angry with me for wasting his time. He rejects any notion of me paying him for the cruise in his silver bullet Escalade.

‘Let me know if you change your mind,' he says, and passes me a card. ‘Joseph Macela Enterprises' is printed in silver curlicue lettering.

There are postcards spread across the bed, all from Las Vegas and addressed to me. The Bellagio Fountains illuminated in full flow, the ‘Welcome to
Fabulous
Las Vegas' sign, the neon Cowboy with a smoke in his mouth from the Pioneer Club, aerial shots of the whole place lit up in blazing neon—each one of those cards a death threat, hand-delivered to this hotel room.

One of the postcards says, ‘A blade will find your heart and cut to black,' another says, ‘There will be a sudden fury of speed banging on your Coffin.' None of them is a simple message that actually uses the word ‘death', and some of the phrases roll around my head for days afterwards. ‘The lost souls of Utopia,' is scrawled on the back of a desert postcard with those cactus shapes that always remind me of a Looney Tunes landscape.

When I started writing those postcards to myself it was to leave proof behind that I wasn't a suicide. Over the weeks I've been here I realised there could be no possible motive for this kind of murder. It was a cinematic lie that let me play out my little drama. I'll have to destroy them as evidence of what I've set in motion.

A random act of violence is more believable. Living it up in Las Vegas. High rolling in Sin City. Speeding through my fall into a ready grave. It was a more believable lie, even if it was still a postcard holiday declaration. My children wouldn't stumble across the body. I think it's a good thing we bury the dead far from home. A suicide is only ever buried below the floorboards and the stink never gets better. It gets worse.

I have a blank postcard from the Casino Royale. On the back I scribble a phrase that's been going through my head for a while. ‘No Silence, just a Roar as the world Rushes away.'

I place it on the bed, sunny side up. A mosaic of Vegas images that fills the king-sized hotel bed. I got the idea from my mother, though that hadn't even occurred to me until I decided these postcards were evidence that needed to be destroyed. Even buying the postcards had been innocent to begin with. I had a stack of them to send back home but they kept piling up and I couldn't think of writing anything until I started using a thick black pen and slashing those poisonous words into the paper.

My mother collected postcards. She arrayed them on a wall in the kitchen. Sometimes they wouldn't change for years and then there would be enough for a whole new set of postcards. It was a cascade that reminded me of the letters on the destination board at airports that were in use when I was a child.