“Okay, just try to be reasonable this week? I need help. The hotel’s booked solid for the holidays, and Ronni wants to visit her dad, who’s sick. We’re short everywhere. If you feel like going through the applications in the office, maybe we could get some folks started this week.”
“Hmmm. All right. If you’re sure I can’t help Mack hammer at things. Baby and I love hammering.”
June reached up to give Del a kiss, her belly snug into his, and he distractedly returned it. He didn’t notice her puzzled gaze, or the way she walked with a slightly duller step toward the office.
Cora was already there. She was sitting at the table where June usually did the books, with one cigarette between her lips and another smoldering in an ashtray, her long legs stretched out in front of her—an old lady who looked as if she had once been a showgirl.
“You looking for people to hire too?” June asked.
“Odell’s single-minded. How ya feeling?”
“Fat. Bored. See if I let your grandson knock me up again.”
Cora smiled at June. Her language, her sultry ways, did not bother her. These were the qualities that had left June needing Odell. And without June, Odell’s life would be different in ways that Cora did not want it to be. Cora had given up a lot for her grandson. She didn’t regret it. When her son and his no-account woman had dropped Odell off the last time—his bottom covered with neglect sores, and the marks of someone’s fingers on his thin arm—Cora didn’t waste any time making her choice. She and Nathan had picked up what they had, locked the door on the little Texas house the Dibb family had lived in for ninety years, and headed to Vegas. There was a railroad job there for Nathan, and a new world for Odell. She and Nathan had done some things well and some things poorly, but in the end, the only thing worth taking out of Texas was a two-year-old child.
June was even prettier pregnant. Everything about that girl was pretty. Her hands, her feet, her skin, her hair. When she spoke, her voice trilled as if she were about to laugh. You listened to her in the same way you couldn’t stop looking at her. Cora figured that if everything went to pieces, June might stand in as the club’s entertainer. If she could sing a note, she’d make it.
Entertainment was why the El Capitan was a success. That was why she and June were going to spend the afternoon reading through letters—pages and pages of them, some handwritten, some done up on an Underwood (with all the n’s and l’s faded to a slightly lighter gray), some folded around photos. All these people, young and old, wanting to start a new life in Vegas. Yep, the El Capitan was a hit. And it was the showroom that brought people in—or more to the point, Eddie Knox. Eddie Knox and those atomic bombs.
There had been a bomb detonation every five days all summer and fall. Operation Plumbbob. June called it Operation Plumbrich. Tourists flocked from all over the country, from Canada, from Mexico. People who wouldn’t have come to Las Vegas otherwise. But everyone wanted to see an explosion. Ever since National Geographic had described a bright pink mushroom cloud turning purple and then orange, spraying ice crystals like an ocean surf in the sky, people had been coming. They drove up the dusty road to Charleston Peak and leaned against their cars to watch the white dawn burst against the night, or they crowded into tiny Beatty and asked the locals if the air was safe.
Afterward, they returned to Vegas, to the air-conditioned hotels and crystal-clear pools, and giddy with the awesomeness of the power they had witnessed, with the strange menace of invisible rays, they gambled more than they might have, ordered another round of drinks, splurged on a second show. When the showgirls came out wearing mushroom-cloud swimsuits and headdresses that looked like explosions, they hooted with glee, and cheered when Eddie ended his set, dead silent, and then one word: Boom.
It was fun and dare and newness. If danger lurked, the Russians, a nuclear bomb, polio, distant nations and foreign religions and dark skin, then there was also the thrill of a mushroom cloud, the sound of doo-wop, Lucille Ball, the clickety-tick of dice rolling on a craps table, feather and sequin and mirror, red lips, breasts, Mae West onstage with muscled men in loincloths, anything goes, anything went, a small town in the middle of nowhere, and already, eight million people a year coming to see what was happening.
Cora herself had little to do with the El Capitan’s success. Odell and June were doing it on their own. She would help them out by going through a few applications this week, but for the most part, she stayed away from their business and their marriage. She liked her little apartment downtown, liked her habits there, and if she had learned one thing from her own son, it was that it would be better for her to leave June and Odell alone. There would be no option to rely on Cora Dibb when things got tougher.
They would get tougher.
Cora could see this already.
June didn’t seem to see it. How could someone so quick not see what was coming?
Well, life was hard. For pretty much everyone. June Stein had made her bed long before she married Odell Dibb. And in the long run, marrying her grandson was going to be the best decision June ever made. Though it might be awhile before she understood that.
“I’m going to find Del. I need a backrub.”
Cora thought it unlikely that her grandson would stop what he was doing to rub June’s back, but he might. She hoped he would.
June left the office and headed upstairs to the casino floor. Del might be there, but she wasn’t really looking for him anyway. She liked to spend time in the casino, watching the players, listening to the dealers calling for chips in, tracing the pattern of lights that swirled against the hard surfaces as the machine wheels spun dizzily. She could wander around there for hours, her stomach wobbling in front of her—a little startling to the patrons that did not know who she was—and it was good for business, her wandering. She noticed which dealers got the best action, or when a customer headed off to the bathroom at an odd moment, and whether or not the girls were getting drinks to the right gamblers.