The Grand Tour (16 page)

Vance shook his head. “There is a point, you just haven't found it yet.”

Near Bakersfield they got on I-58 to Barstow, then I-15 after that. The sun was just starting to set behind the car, soft-lighting the desert and the mountains of the Mojave Range like an aging actress's face. The sky was dotted with little cruising cumulus clouds; when one would momentarily pass in front of the sun, a shadow hundreds of miles wide would cast itself across the valley. The leading edge of the shadow passing over the car felt like a judgment from God. They made Nevada in bruised twilight, and it was pitch black as they crested the final hill and Las Vegas appeared, a near infinity of kilowatt-hours blasting away the almost-mythological gloom of the desert basin.

Driving down the Strip, Vance tried his best, and failed, to look unimpressed by the casinos, the lights, the hordes of people, the scale of everything. Richard thought about when he and Eileen used to come to Vegas, how they would bring a hundred dollars to gamble with. Even in the nineties, with Carole, you could get by spending around a thousand over a weekend visit. Now you had to mortgage your house. They passed a casino advertising twenty-dollar-a-hand blackjack, as though that was a bargain, which it probably was. The people who ran Vegas, he thought, should install a system at the airport whereby, upon exiting the plane, you would be tranquilized, vacuumed for cash and other valuables, and then immediately dumped back on a departing flight. It would make everything a lot simpler.

Their room was at the MGM Grand, an obsidian megaplex that squatted like a giant, malevolent dog in the middle of the Strip. They parked, traversed a vast, purgatorial parking garage, and trundled their bags into the Boschian chaos: past the smoldering sportsbook; past a street gang of bejeweled, bejowled middle-aged women howling with laughter, enormous plastic tureens of margaritas dangling beneath their overtanned wattles; past a blackjack table crowded by beefy young men, a dense thicket of tattooed biceps (more Chinese characters than a Bruce Lee movie) bulging from the sleeves of ornately filigreed white T-shirts; past a pair of security guards with assault rifles wheeling away a metal lockbox containing the collectivized hourly production of dozens of croupiers, whose alert and expressionless heads dotted the sunken red-carpeted plain of the pit like minor demons working the rim of hell. Richard and Vance walked under a transparent walkway where, above their heads, a lion took a long, steamy piss, an act of entirely justified protest faithfully recorded on a flip phone by the presumptive head of a large clan of hooting Okies. The youngest, and probably smartest, of them peeled off from the group and began walking alongside Vance and Richard. The mother yelled “Darnell!” and the child stopped, looking up at them with mournful eyes that seemed to rue his entire life in advance.

Waiting in line at the front desk, Richard looked up and noticed the ceiling. It recalled the child's eyes, a disquieting robin's-egg blue. Probably scientifically determined as the color that makes people spend the most money, he thought, to remind you of the time right before dawn, when the party's almost over. No doors in the place, no windows, no clocks, just the eerie blue overhead recalling that old big-band number—
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.

At the desk, the clerk found their reservation and said, “Mr. Lazar, the management has you in the Presidential Suite.”

“That's a mistake, we booked a double.”

“No, sir, I have it right here.”

“How much is that? I've only got thirty grand in the bank.”

The clerk laughed drily to himself. “It's compliments of our executive manager, Mr. Arthur Freedlund.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“Well, okay. Tell Mr. Arthur Freedlund thanks.”

“Yes, sir. Just leave your bags with us, and Milton will show you up.”

Milton, a terrifyingly efficient bellhop with cheekbones that could have been used to pry off bottle tops, seemed to appear from out of nowhere. He put their bags on a valet cart, which he wheeled over to a massive elevator bank. In the elevator, Milton used a key dangling from a wrist bracelet to access a row of floor numbers behind a sliding metal panel. He pressed number 30, and they rose with a soft exhalation of air.

“The Presidential Suite, huh?” said Richard. “Is that where presidents stay when they come here?”

“Yes, sir,” said Milton.

The elevator doors opened to the room itself, or “room.” It was the size of a house—a small one, granted, but still. Milton showed them around with brisk élan. Every visible surface in the room seemed to be made of either gold, Italian marble, lush animal fur, or some combination thereof. Richard ran his hand over the back of a chic sofa—upholstered with the sheeny, lustrous skin of some creature in single-digit endangerment—which sat in a loose cluster of sofas in front of a movie-screen-sized TV. The entire right side of the suite comprised floor-to-ceiling windows that looked down on the gaudy bedlam of the Strip. On the left side, there was a fully stocked bar and a billiards table, a video-game console, and multiple pinball machines. A small, oblong infinity pool murmured to itself in the corner. It was a nice room.

Milton showed them to their individual bedrooms, arranged their bags, and accepted a ten-dollar tip that seemed completely insulting, given the surroundings. There was a note on Richard's bed, handwritten on MGM stationery. It read:

Dear Mr. Lazar,

I heard we have the honor of hosting you during your brief stay in Las Vegas. Your book is an important contribution to our country's dialogue on the always relevant subject of military intervention, with its accompanying rewards and perils. Please accept this room as a show of gratitude, from one serviceman to the other (325th Airborne, '69–'72). Yours, Arthur Freedlund

Richard walked back out to the bar, where he considered pouring himself a quick succession of scotches while Vance was occupied in his bedroom. He hadn't had a drink in four days, besides the two beers a day he'd been prescribed in the hospital to wean him down. There was more liquor here than at the Tamarack, four glittering shelves of it in all its colorful splendor, the entire visible spectrum of booze: red schnapps and pinkish Campari and burgundy sweet vermouth; orange Cointreau, amber bourbon, and yellow cordials; a cool, wooded lake of green and blue gin; vile-looking purple stuff in a bottle shaped like an antique grenade or the head of a royal scepter. Colorless vodka representing the infrared. And a small row of dark, sinister digestifs, for what would come after.

Instead, he grabbed a bottle of “Artesian water from the Alps”—whatever that meant—from the refrigerator and took two of his pills. He scrolled through the names in his phone's contact list, which had, with the addition of Vance and Cindy, swollen to four, and dialed his daughter. The voicemail picked up immediately, confirming his suspicion that she would avoid any potential communication while he was in town. “Hey, Cin.” He gazed out the enormous floor-to-ceiling window that constituted one side of the suite and provided a panorama of the blazing city below; she was out there somewhere, living her strange life. “It's your father. I'll be at the Vegas Convention Center tomorrow at one, over there by the Hilton. I'm staying in the Presidential Suite at the MGM, if you can believe that. The view is pretty unbelievable, if you feel like having a look, but you probably don't. You're probably working, you work nights. See, I remembered? Anyway, hope you can make it.”

From a distant room, Vance emerged holding a fruit basket.

“I've never even seen some of these before.” He picked up a bulbous orange and green fruit shaped like a cross between a banana and a telephone. “What is this?”

“The high point of your life, soak it up.”

“Why did they give us this room,” said the kid, and Richard handed him the letter. Vance read it and handed it back.

“Spoils of war,” said Richard, settling in front of the TV.

An hour later, Vance was still roaming the suite, agog. He had taken a dip in the pool, and his hair dripped onto the notebook, in which he cataloged the amenities for future reference (though, he felt, no one would believe it if he told them). His bed, for example: What was larger than king size? Sultanate? Imperial? You could roll six times in either direction without falling off, and when you did, you landed on a plush fur carpet. Richard seemed characteristically impervious to the room and was watching TV, an old movie with Steve McQueen looking cool and unhealthy.

Someone knocked on the door to the suite, and Vance answered it. It was a small, compact man, around Richard's age, with titanium-rimmed glasses balanced on a commanding nose that seemed to enter the room as he stood where he was. The man extended his hand and said, “Arthur Freedlund. Is your father here?”

“He's not my father,” said Vance, and pointed to Richard, who was making his way to the door, still holding the remote control. Mr. Freedlund entered, and Vance remained by the door watching as the two men shook hands and spoke, feeling a bit like a valet in one of those BBC versions of Jane Austen that his mother, but mostly he, liked to watch.

“Thank you for sparing me a minute or two of your time,” said Freedlund.

“Well, thanks for the room, it's pretty nice.”

Freedlund laughed and perched a haunch on the back of the sofa. He had the self-assurance only obtained by people who tell other people what to do all the time. “Well, you read my note. I'm a fan of the book, and I wanted to extend our hospitality to you.”

“That's very kind,” said Richard.

“I wanted to say that while you might be catching some flak for what you did, I think anyone who was over there could relate to some of the feelings you detail. It was a distressing time, a bad situation. Many of us did things we regret.”

“Yes.”

“I was also curious, did you happen to know Mike McGrath?”

“No.”

“He's a friend of mine, head of security at Harrah's.”

“Okay.”

“He was infantry, stationed around Bao Loc the same time as you. Camp Meyers.”

“Really.”

“You don't say exactly in the book, but I assume that's where you were. I showed him the relevant passages, and he swore by it. He would have been there same time as you, early 'seventy-one.”

“I mean, a lot of guys came in and out of that camp. Not to mention, I was smoking about a pound of Thai a week at that time.”

Freedlund's polite smile mastered the distaste that flashed in the crinkling corners of his eyes. “Yes, well. At any rate, let us know if there's anything we can do to make your stay here more comfortable. This is the number of your personal concierge and assistant, should you need him.” He handed Richard a card.

“I don't know. Maybe if you have a spare koala or something.”

Freedlund rose from his half-seated position, and walked toward the door, then stopped. “If you don't mind my saying,” he said, “it does seem to me you convey a feeling of total regret. That your service had no value.”

“It didn't.”

“But the experiences you relate, weren't they formative? I mean, surely they were, or you wouldn't have written the book in the first place.”

“So what? Maybe I would have worked on a dairy farm, instead. That would have been formative. I could've written about that. Or nothing, that would have been fine, too. I don't think being in Vietnam had some inherent value past what I assign to it.”

“And you don't think serving your country has some inherent value?”

Vance noticed that Richard's knuckles had gone white where he clutched the remote control. It was not hard to imagine Richard striking Mr. Arthur Freedlund in the head with it over and over.

“No,” he said. “I don't, I'm sorry.”

He shook hands with Richard again, and said, “Well, I do. Thank you for it, and enjoy your time with us.” He walked out. On the TV, McQueen rode a motorcycle across rolling green farmland, the Alps looming in the background. As black waves of Nazis crested the hills, he gunned his bike back and forth by a barbed-wire fence, like a restless jungle cat pacing in captivity, then he hit a large hill and cleared the fence, framed in a solitary moment against the Panaflex sky.

They were situated beside a craps table, and Vance was on a heater like Richard had never seen. The kid had a ritual—he would grab two adjacent dice from the croupier's stick, shake them a few times while mumbling inaudibly to himself, and skip them lightly across the expanse of green felt so they stopped just after touching the opposite wall. He hit seven over and over and over. And after he made eight as the point, he hit that, and the table cheered. The performance had attracted bettors, and now the table buzzed with bonhomie as only a craps table can. Richard had started with a couple of twenty-dollar chips and was now working several hundred. The sparkle-vested cocktail waitress asked Richard for the sixth time if he wanted anything, and for the sixth time, he ordered a Coke for her to forget to bring.

Vance rolled a seven again, then eleven. Even the croupier was grinning as he pushed the chips around. Richard said, “You've really never done this before.”

“My dad showed me how,” said Vance, and once more he launched the dice.

Richard scooped up the chips pushed toward him and said, “Your dad showed you how to shoot winners at craps?”

“He used to take me to the Indian Casino in Bellhaven when I was little. He said I was good luck.”

“I guess he was right.”

Vance threw an eleven, a seven, seven, seven, eleven. He established a ten point, then rolled hard four, hard six, hard eight, ten. There was a feeling at the table that it would never end. They would all grow old and wealthy together, a pack of billionaires camped out around the table. He rolled a ten, to a delighted chorus of
Hey shooter, all right shooter!
There is no joy on earth like the joy of free money. Eleven, eleven, seven. A guy wearing a tattered Crimson Tide baseball cap and earbuds approached and put two twenty-five-dollar chips down on the don't-pass line. Vance passed the dice to the guy next to him and collected his chips. He said, “Come on.”