Made in the U.S.A. (9 page)

And there, just above the article, were last year’s school pictures of Lutie and Fate McFee.

By the time Lutie reached the Strip, any feelings of guilt she had about leaving Fate had disappeared. He was, she figured, old enough to take care of himself in a library.

Besides, she was relieved he wasn’t following her around, glad she didn’t have to worry about finding him food. But most of all, she was happy not to hear his constant rattling on with his knowledge of trivia.

She had the day free. Las Vegas. All to herself.

As she headed for the Strip, she walked streets unlike those she and Fate had marveled at yesterday. Here she passed ratty little motels and rough-looking casinos with names like Easy Money and Finders-Keepers; liquor stores—Vegas Village Spirits and the Celebration Bottle Shack; adult bookstores and movie houses—Hard Reads, Tickle Your Fancy, Stroke Your Curiosity, and Sizzle Films.

She brushed by people pushing grocery carts, luggage pulls, rolling suitcases, a bicycle missing rubber on both tires—anything with wheels—all piled with plastic bags, filthy pillows and blankets, bottles of water, and toilet tissue, their detritus bound with belts, rope, neckties, chains and padlocks, bungee cords—whatever they could find to imply ownership.

One toothless man with a gray ponytail pushed a baby stroller filled with just about everything except a baby. A mutt, looking just a little less mangy than the man, was tethered to the handle of the buggy by a pink rhinestone–studded dog leash.

“Girlie,” he said as Lutie passed, “can you spare some change? God will bless you if you can.”

“Sorry, but I’m broke myself.”

“Cunt!” he yelled over and over as she hurried away. “Only a cunt would refuse a man ’nuff money to feed his dog, ain’t that right, Princess?” The dog, hearing her name, barked—seemingly in agreement.

Lutie passed all kinds of businesses for the down-and-out: Pay Day Liquor, Vegas on the Vine; AA Acceptance & Loan, Quick Cash; Big Al’s Bail Bonds; pawnshops, their windows displaying jewelry, electronics, furs, musical instruments, guns, baby shoes, handcuffs, and Western boots of alligator and rattlesnake.

At a shop called Sexual Pleasures, Lutie went inside, partly because she was curious and partly because of the black lace thongs in the window. The clerk, a heavyset woman with purple hair, looked up when Lutie walked in, then went back to a book she was reading. Lutie walked the aisles, examining sex toys, hard-core DVDs, exotic lubricants, leather whips, wrist constraints of fake fur, flavored condoms, garter belts, and a black lace thong like the one in the window. But the minute she reached for the thong, the clerk was at her back.

“Twelve ninety-five,” the purple-haired woman said, “and we don’t bargain.”

“I’m just looking.” Lutie returned the underwear to the shelf.

“Yeah? Show me someone who’s not.”

As she left the shop, Lutie came to the conclusion that shoplifting in Vegas was going to be a bit harder than it was at the Wal-Mart back home.

When she reached the Strip with its flash and glitter, bright neon and sparkling waterfalls, dazzling buildings, thick tropical gardens, and gorgeous boys with bronze tans, she knew this was going to be a golden, unforgettable day in her life.

At a tattoo parlor called OUCH! she went in. A man at the counter with a split tongue, rings in his nose and lips, heavy earlobes hanging halfway to his shoulders with liquid glass tusks embedded in them, smiled when she stepped up to the counter.

“Hi,” he said. “My name’s Eddie. Can I help you?”

“Is it okay if I just look around?”

“Absolutely. Take your time.”

The shop was, for Lutie, a complete surprise. In Spearfish, she’d had her ears pierced by a classmate in the girls’ bathroom. Here she’d expected a dingy, sour-smelling room with crudely drawn biker tattoos taped to the walls, a trashy place where germs hid in bloody gauze and moist needles.

But this “studio of body maintenance,” according to Eddie, glistened with bright blue tile floors, freshly painted walls hung with Asian art, pots of live plants, soothing sitar music, and the intoxicating aroma of hazelwood incense.

The body art room was furnished with a doctor’s examination table covered with clean white paper, a tray with hand sanitizer, gauze, cotton balls, and swabs, and a table with herbal teas and bottles of distilled water.

“Are you interested in body art?” Eddie asked. “Tattoos?”

“Well, yes.”

“Would you like to see some of our flash cards?”

“What are those?”

“Here.” Eddie led her to a shelf containing books with laminated pages of lovely designs.

Lutie flipped through pages, then said, “What I’ve always wanted is a pair of kissing lips right here.” She pointed to a spot at the fleshy part of her neck, two inches above her collarbone.

“Like this?” he said, turning to a page of sketches, one exactly as she had described.

“Yes! That’s it. In red. No, coral. How much would that cost?”

“I could do that for seventy-five dollars.”

“I’ll have to wait until payday.”

“Here. Take one of my cards.”

“And what do you charge for piercing, up here?” She ran her finger under the rounded loop at the top of her ear.

“Oh, the helix. We call that a cartilage piercing of the outer helix. I charge sixty dollars a pair.”

“That’s what I want, but . . .”

“I know.” He grinned. “You have to wait until payday. But tell you what, I’ll do your body art and the helix piercing for a hundred and twenty-five dollars. That sound about right?”

“Great. I’ll be here.”

“Look forward to it,” he said, shaking her hand.

At the next corner, while she waited for the light to change, she saw an Elvis impersonator, more makeup than sweat rolling down his face as he signed autographs, posed for pictures, and took the tourists’ money.

In an outdoor courtyard where vendors were set up selling T-shirts, maps of Las Vegas, ices, purses, beer, knockoff cologne, cheap jewelry, pretzels, and sunglasses, Lutie saw the pair she wanted: silver with black moons and stars on the earpieces.

The booth was crowded with teenagers, all pulling glasses from racks, pushing for space at two small mirrors . . . and being watched by only one clerk, a small Indian woman dressed in a gold-and-green sari, with a
bindi
on her forehead. She was having a difficult time watching her stock and was yelling at a boy, apparently her son, who was more interested in a girl with gigantic breasts bouncing beneath a sheer tank top than he was in helping his mother.

Lutie waited until the Indian woman was making change for a sale before she slipped the glasses into her purse, then turned and strolled away.

After a short walk to the Imperial Palace, she went into the ladies’ room, where she let down her hair, freshened her makeup, and put on her new glasses.

They looked so fabulous. She felt so cool. And for one of the few times in her life, she believed she was pretty.

She hurried into a stall to pee, anxious to be back on the street, where one of the bronze boys might notice her, but while fumbling with a paper seat cover, she discovered a laptop sitting on a shelf above rolls of toilet paper.

She froze, waiting to hear some woman’s desperate cry of loss or a frenzied pounding on the door or the face of a policeman peering at her over the wall of the next stall. But when she realized that the toilet was empty and quiet, she slipped the laptop into the front of her drawstring pants and pulled them up, yanked down her turtleneck, stepped out of the stall to check herself in the mirror, and then scooted from the bathroom and out of the casino, hardly able to keep from running.

At Diamond Jim’s Pawn, she slid the laptop across a counter to a man with a beard and a crossed eye. He skipped any kind of greeting as he examined the case. He opened the laptop, checked it out in less than three minutes, then said, “Two hundred dollars. Final offer.”

Lutie felt her knees turn to rubber, imagined her face drain of color, and said in a weak voice, “I’ll take it.”

“You have sixty days to redeem it. After that, it’s mine.”

Lutie signed the card he handed her, using the name Norma Neal, the girl who had pierced her ears in the school bathroom. She took the receipt and the money in twenty-dollar bills, which she crammed in her purse as she left quickly, without looking back.

In exactly nine minutes, she entered OUCH! And grinned at Eddie, saying, “Payday came earlier than I expected.”

Even though the Clark County Library was three times the size of the public library back in Spearfish, Fate had, by eleven o’clock, learned the layout of the place and spent time in every section from the children’s collection to government publications. He’d seen black, white, and brown patrons, had heard people speaking Chinese, Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, Japanese, and two other languages not even the librarians could identify for him.

He’d listened to a dark woman wearing an old-fashioned nurse’s bonnet and cloak reading a story about Florence Nightingale to a quiet huddle of children sitting on the floor. In the basement, he’d watched a blind man reading Braille; on the main floor, tucked into a corner, he’d seen the author of a novel signing copies of her books. And a young man wearing a uniform embroidered with Nature Preserve smiled at him as he led a group of young people into the special collections room.

Shortly before one-thirty, Fate had, as far as he could tell, outlasted everyone who’d been waiting with him that morning for the library to open.

He’d seen the woman with the wagon leave the browsing area first, followed not long after by the peace-shirted man, who had checked out several books on water management.

The Hispanic woman and her child had spent almost two hours in the young people’s library before they left with three more Dr. Seuss books, which the child carried like found treasures.

When Fate went searching for the redheaded teens, he’d found them in curriculum materials where he’d handed the boy, Josef, a copy of
The Dictionary of Idioms
he’d discovered in the reference department. He learned that the brother and sister, from Poland, had been in the states for only three months, brought to Las Vegas by their parents, who were both structural engineers.

Josef, delighted by Fate’s kindness, hugged him tightly, using every form of “thank you” at his command.

By three, Fate had amassed a stack of books at the table, where he’d remained for most of the day, books titled
One-Letter Words
;
This Is Your Brain on Music
;
The Selfish Gene
;
Why People Believe Weird Things
;
Parallel Worlds
;
The Little Book of Scientific Principles
,
Theories & Things
;and
The Book of Maps
.

He was just getting into
Mind Wide Open
when the rumbling of his empty belly sent him to the water fountain again, believing liquid could quiet the growl in his gut. Minutes later, he made a trip to the bathroom, where he peed and washed his hands.

Back at his table, “his place” for the day, he found in addition to the books he’d been reading a brown paper sack folded over neatly at the top, a sight that caused the hair on the back of his neck to rise. He looked around, the note left on Floy’s car last night very much on his mind. But he saw no one nearby except for the library patrons at other tables, all of whom he’d noticed before his trip to the men’s room.

Finally, he sat down. And with trembling fingers, his breath coming shallow, he opened the sack and peered inside.

The bag contained a package of peanut-butter crackers, an orange, and a small carton of milk, which did not have a photograph of a missing child, a boy named Fate McFee.

Lutie couldn’t seem to get past many windows along the Strip without stopping to check out her reflection, thrilled with the image of the girl who stared back at her. A girl with coral lips tattooed on her neck, new studs in her ears, golden highlights in her hair, an airbrush tan, and a French pedicure done in black and white to match her newly “acquired” sunglasses.

As a silver stretch limo passed and parked at the curb beside her, she enjoyed a short-lived fantasy that it was stopping for her. Moments later, jarred out of that movielike reverie, she imagined that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie might step out, followed by their new children, who would parade by her like a row of ducks and ducklings. But when the chauffeur opened the door, a gaggle of giggling Paris Hilton wannabes spilled out and sauntered into Luxor, not one famous face in the whole bunch of them.

Though she’d gone the entire day without thinking of food, she was suddenly struck by the gnawing of her stomach. Down to her last two dollars and change, she decided to go into the next casino she came to, order whatever she wanted, then walk the check, as she’d done the day before.

But inside the Tropicana, she ran into a wedding party— a young man and woman wearing grass skirts, leis, and necklaces of conch shell beads, both barefoot, moving across the casino floor toward the escalators. The bride wore a bikini top of ivory silk designed to match the garland of flowers encircling her head and the bridal bouquet she carried.

They were followed by the bridesmaid, quite obviously a sister, and the best man, both dressed in island getup. After them came the wedding guests, which Lutie estimated to be nearly a hundred.

Guessing the ceremony would include a reception, Lutie decided to go for the food that would be available rather than take her chances downstairs at one of the restaurants, so she “hid” herself in the crush heading upstairs.

The Island Wedding Chapel, palm-thatched, blanketed with tropical foliage, included a waterfall and recorded Hawaiian music playing softly from concealed speakers. The chapel filled quickly with a few guests—including Lutie, standing at the back.

After the “I do’s” and the traditional kiss, the bride’s father invited everyone to a private dining room a short distance down a hallway for a reception honoring his daughter and her new husband on “this very special occasion.”