What You Have Left (13 page)

Of course, the fact that they were going broke didn't keep Holly out of the video parlor. The more she lost, the worse she felt, and the worse she felt, the more she gambled. By the time Billy unlocked the door on that May morning, she'd gone through most of what was left of their savings, money Lyle had insisted they set aside for emergencies, a nest egg he'd managed not to disturb even when the credit card
bills began to pile up. After she got change, Holly headed down the smoky hallway to a corner room where she found four other gamblers already nudged up to their touchscreens like cows at a feed carrel. Billy had put the
OUT OF ORDER
sign on her machine so nobody else would take it. She proceeded to chain-smoke and play five-card draw for three hours straight, hemorrhaging money at a buck twenty-five a hand, but it was a small price to pay. So long as she sat at that machine concentrating on straights and flushes and jackpots, she didn't have to think about the money she wasn't making at the antique mall, the house and all its half-finished projects, the expensive new mahogany bed where she and Lyle slept facing away from each other; she almost even managed not to think about their savings, the last fifty dollars of which now sat in a plastic bucket at her elbow.

By noon, Holly was down to five quarters, enough for one more hand. Anybody who plays video poker can tell you it messes with your head. You start out hoping to get rich, but before you know it, you've dug a hole so deep that it doesn't matter whether you're winning or losing; it's easier to keep digging than to climb back out. The most important thing— the only thing—is not to stop. Holly had seen old ladies win thousand-dollar jackpots and keep right on playing without batting an eye.

On her final hand, she found herself with a belly draw. Instead of the seven she needed, she drew a deuce.
GAME OVER
, the screen said. She blinked at the machine through a haze of cigarette smoke. Once, she'd seen a television show about AA in which they used the phrase “moment of clarity,” and she waited for that now—waited to see herself in such a hard, bright light that she'd have no choice but to confront her so-called demons. But it didn't happen. All she could
think about was getting caught, the hurt and disappointment on Lyle's face.

Naturally, she panicked. She had to win back the money. She rifled her pockets for stray bills and then stuck a finger into the coin-return slot, finding only a lump of chewing gum. Slipping from the stool, she searched the shag carpet, feeling for loose change and hatching wild plans to sell her old pickup and tell Lyle it had been stolen. How, she wondered, could this even be happening? When she looked up, Billy Pecan was hesitating in the doorway with a basket of popcorn. “You hungry, Holly?”

She stood up. The air felt thick as moss in her throat. “No, Billy, I'm broke.”

He studied the popcorn. “You want a ride to the ATM?”

“I'm broke, Billy. I don't have any money to
get
from the ATM.”

The steady electronic clicking of touchscreens ceased as the other players turned on their stools to look at Holly. All of them were regulars: Tim and Ray Fletcher, retired twins who cashed their army pension checks at the front counter each month; Janie Darling, a teller at Carolina First who should have known better; and of course Beatty Chapman, Lyle's foreman, who'd recently sunk so low that he pawned a diamond ring he'd inherited from his uncle, DeQuincy Arnold, the first black man elected to the state senate this century. For the past several months, this was the company she kept. They all took long lunches, told their spouses they had to work early or late, got caught in fictitious lines at the Winn-Dixie or the post office. Sooner or later, they all found a way to get to Fortunes. Now the four of them were looking at Holly the way two-legged people look at an amputee.

“Fine,” Holly said. “Piss your life away, all of you. See if I care.”

Janie sighed, a little impatient. “Here you go, honey,” she said. “Now be a dear and let us piss ourselves in peace.”

She was holding out a handful of quarters, five or six dollars, shiny new coins fresh from her drawer at the bank. Holly could feel the others watching her reflection on their screens, silently making odds, wishing she'd either take the money or leave, but as much as she wanted those quarters, she couldn't accept a handout in front of that crowd. She turned and hurried from the room, jarring loose the coins from Janie's hand and clipping Beatty's ashtray, sending an avalanche of ash onto his trousers.

Billy followed her all the way to the exit, where he stood holding the popcorn. “Holly, what time you coming back?”

Sooner or later, Lyle would find out. Holly understood this as she stood in the parking lot at Fortunes, letting hot air out of the cab. No use trying to hide it. She could either tell him the truth or wait, and she couldn't wait, because the waiting would be agony. Better to get it over with. In fact, she
wanted
to tell him, because once he saw how miserable and sorry she was, she knew he'd forgive her, and then she'd be out of trouble.

She fumbled through her glove box for a tissue and then pointed the pickup toward the statehouse. Lyle was too good for her, really. For more than a year now, he'd been patient and supportive while she played at being an antiques dealer, and instead of working harder or finding steady work or going back to school (she'd long since given up the idea of
being a vet), she'd rewarded his faith by spending her days at Fortunes. And the money she'd lost had been more than just a nest egg; it had been insurance against the thing Lyle dreaded—having to go begging to his father.

As the football stadium and fairgrounds slid past, she kept telling herself this was all a blessing in disguise: If she hadn't lost their money, she wouldn't be ready to confess to Lyle, and if she didn't confess to Lyle, she'd never stop gambling. He'd probably suggest she see a psychologist, maybe give Gamblers Anonymous a try, and though she lacked his faith in professional help, she wouldn't object; she would do whatever it took to show him she wanted to get better. At the stoplights downtown, she bit her lip and tried to keep a steady hand. She was dripping Visine all over her cheeks.

When she parked on Main Street, Holly could hear the rumble of bulldozers and backhoes churning up what used to be the statehouse lawn. They'd started a forty-million-dollar renovation the previous fall, and now the project was well on its way to being a sixty-two-million-dollar albatross. Construction workers maneuvered dump trucks past bundles of rebar and mountains of sun-baked dirt. As she picked her way across the site, she saw Timothy Covey standing at the foot of the massive marble steps, staring up into the sky like he was waiting for some brain cells to fall down and hit him. When he wasn't blowing his paycheck at Fortunes, Covey worked on Beatty's crew with Lyle. Their job was to dig a trench around the statehouse and then retrofit the foundation with shock absorbers to protect against earthquakes. It was slow work. During the war, Sherman had burned the original blueprints, so now the crew had to creep along five feet at a time, never knowing what they'd find. At the base of the building, beneath the line of gray
stone where the Caterpillar machines had bitten away the earth, red brick stood exposed for the first time in a hundred years.

“Have you seen Lyle?” Holly said.

When Covey didn't answer, she shaded her eyes to see what it was that had him so spellbound. The dome was cocooned in scaffolding except for the copper crown and the flagpole with its three flags—one for the United States, one for South Carolina, and one for the Confederacy. High against the sky, a lone worker was scaling the crown. Only when he began to shimmy up the flagpole did Holly understand something was wrong. The plans called for a major restoration of the dome. Eventually they were going to fix the leaks, restore the skylights, and replace all the copper plates, removing them to Charleston, where somebody with a lot of patience was going to make templates so each individual piece could be reproduced. According to a stipulation in the contract, all of this was to be done without disturbing the flags. But the man on the pole had other plans. From the look of it, he was now attempting to saw the Confederate battle flag in two with a pocketknife.

“Hey!” Covey yelled, shaking his fist at the sky. “Hey! Don't touch that flag!”

Holly had been hoping it wasn't Lyle up there, but of course it was, and of course she knew why: He intended to burn that flag.

Shortly after Holly had rented the booth at the antique mall, she and Lyle had found Cal's Confederate flag neatly folded inside a cedar chest atop a box of Christmas ornaments. Though they couldn't afford to finish the attic like they'd
been planning to do, they'd been cleaning it out anyway, deciding what to keep and what to sell. She'd seen Rebel flags bring twenty dollars at flea markets, but before she could put it in the “sell” pile, Lyle suggested they burn it.

“Burn it?”

“Do you really want to make money off this thing?” he said, holding it out like a dirty sock.

It never would have occurred to Holly to destroy the flag, but the more she thought about it, the more she liked Lyle's idea. She kicked a box of old
Playboys.
“If we're going to burn the flag,” she said, “we may as well burn these, too.”

Soon they had a small pile in a clearing out behind the dairy building: the flag, Cal's magazines, a
RE-ELECT STROM THURMOND
button, an Aunt Jemima apron, a pincushion picturing a cartoonish black man with the word
OUCH
embroidered across the bottom, and the awful Hawaiian shirt Cal used to think made him look sporty. Lyle doused the pile with lighter fluid and Holly tossed a match on top. As smoke rose into the branches, the tree frogs and crickets began to trill. Holly and Lyle watched the flames cast shadows against the whitewashed concrete.

“Doesn't it make you feel good?” Lyle said. “Doesn't it make you feel clean?”

Holly was no sap. She knew that burning those things didn't make her a saint. At most, she and Lyle had made a modest sacrifice in the name of good taste. And to be honest, she wasn't sure she'd do it again; they could have used the money that stuff would have brought at the antique mall. Still, in a way, it
had
made her feel good. She'd married a man who stood up for what he believed in.

But this time, Lyle had gone too far, and Holly just didn't get it. Risking his life for a flag? This was how you got lynched in South Carolina; this was how you got pistol-whipped by the cops. She'd always figured that if the state wasn't smart enough to take it down, fine, whatever, let it fly—they all deserved the embarrassment. Now she watched in disbelief as Lyle finished cutting away a corner of the flag, slid down the pole, and disappeared into the honeycomb of scaffolding. It was like watching a stranger.

Somewhere somebody in a cement truck began to honk the horn, and Holly noticed several of the men had stopped working. They were dropping their shovels, pulling off heavy gloves, climbing down from bulldozers and cranes. They seemed to be migrating toward the east end of the building. Holly fell in behind three men who'd been breaking up some concrete with a jackhammer. She heard the shouting even before she made it around the corner. A tight knot of workers had gathered near the base of the scaffolding, beside a pile of seismic beams. Holly pushed her way through the crowd until she caught a glimpse of Lyle. He was down on one knee, T-shirt taut across his back, a slender curl of smoke already rising over his shoulder.

Holly got a shiver when Lyle stepped back and she saw the piece of flag on fire. No matter who you were, if you grew up in South Carolina, that flag was in your blood, love it or hate it. That winter at his desk, trying to ignore the pile of bills, Lyle had been writing letters to the editor of
The State,
blasting Governor Beasley for his support of the flag, demanding a voter referendum. The newspaper hadn't published any of them, and in March, Lyle had given up both his letter-writing campaign and his video-poker boycott. “What's the use?” he'd said. For Holly, this had been a relief, especially
the end of the boycott. By then, almost a quarter of the state's retail businesses had video-poker machines, and she and Lyle had nearly run out of places to shoot pool, eat barbecue, and buy gas. Yes, she still had to listen to him cussing the newspaper, but she'd thought he was starting to lighten up a little. Until now.

Covey was trying to get at Lyle, but two bigger men were holding him with his arms pinned behind his back. “Fuck you!” Covey was saying. “That's the flag! That's our flag!” A faded tattoo of the very same flag peeked from beneath his sleeve. The veins bulged in his skinny arms and neck as he ranted about state heritage and the blood of his ancestors. Lyle just stood there. All Holly could figure was that her husband was drunk, or delirious from the heat. How else to explain it? When two site managers marched into the crowd and ordered everyone back to work, Lyle didn't even try to slip away. He caught sight of Holly as one of the managers stomped out the fire. He looked surprised, and a touch embarrassed, like the look he got when he smuggled home an old pickax or musket ball.

“Should I call a lawyer?” Holly said.

Lyle shook his head as the managers led him away. Holly felt a hand on her shoulder. “It's okay,” Beatty said. “They won't want the police involved.”

She watched as Lyle was ushered into the white trailer that served as the construction office. When the door clicked shut, Beatty removed his hard hat and hollered for every-body's attention.

“Okay, fellas,” he said, passing the hat. “Time to pony up.”

One by one, the workers began dropping cash into the hat. A collection for Lyle: Holly could hardly believe it. It was like a movie, like her husband was some kind of folk
hero who'd done what everyone else only wished they had the guts to do.