From time to time, surrounded by the swirl and stir and smoke of this new life, June’s former life would come back to her: the look of low-slung clouds as she walked down the block to school; her mother singing the blessing on Friday night, her father’s hands over her head; later, the way her body had melted into Walter’s, and how for a while they would couple over and over, and she would wonder if everyone could see this, in her gingerly walk if nothing else.
When she moved to Las Vegas, she was free of her marriage, free of certain expectations (not just those of others, but also her own)—free of a past she had never fully shouldered. And it was Vegas in the fifties, when it was a small town and a big town, when no one she had ever known would be likely to visit, when a young woman who enjoyed men and adventure and the casual breaking of conventions was something of a community treasure. For a while, this life had been entertaining—entertainment was high on June’s list of values—and when it had become less so, when June started to notice the long, slow slide that some of the older women had embarked on, Del was there waiting. Persistent, loyal, unlikely Del, someone you wouldn’t notice on your first pass through a room, but who lingered in the mind later—who showed up at unlikely moments, and always with the right drink, the right idea, the right equipment for the task—his charms grew on her.
Also, Del had a plan. He was hell-bent on running his own casino, and he knew how to make it happen, and for some reason, June was part of his vision. They would revamp one of the old casinos, right at the center of the Strip. They wouldn’t try to compete with the new places, but their games would be fast; he had a way to run some tables without limits. Certain gamblers looked for these joints. He would talk to June about it, a bit flushed, excited, exposed in a way she never saw him exposed to anyone else. It caught her attention.
Little by little, Del’s dreams became her own. Perhaps Del was right that they could make one of these joints go, perhaps she would be good at it. She knew what people liked, she knew the atmosphere they wanted, she knew what they were trying to escape and what they wanted Vegas to be. This desert, this odd town; maybe they were June’s future too. It wasn’t what she had imagined for herself, but then, what had she imagined? Did lives look sensible if you were outside them, and startling if you were in? Or was it that some people stayed in the groove in which they were born, while others skittered and skipped and slid unexpectedly into a new groove? She, June, was one of those.
June and Del gave the El Capitan everything they had, and by the second year, it was growing faster than their wildest early hopes. Not every tourist was hot on the new carpet joints: the Dunes and the Flamingo and the Sands. Some liked the old-time feel of the El Capitan, especially now that she and Del were cleaning it up, now that Eddie Knox was as good as it got when it came to nightclub entertainment. Yes, Eddie. Eddie had made the difference.
She and Del had known what good entertainment would mean—how a really great act could draw people in, create the right buzz—so they had gone to Jackson Street to see who was singing in the clubs. At the Town Tavern, a pretty good singer named Earl Thurman had invited his friend Eddie, just in from Alabama, to join him onstage. And Eddie had come up, soft-shoeing across the floor, and before he had opened his mouth, before a single note came out, he had swung his hip, a small move, in perfect erotic time to the horn behind him, and June’s private parts had clenched, and she had known. Known that Eddie Knox would make them all rich. She grabbed Del’s hand and squeezed. This was it.
And then, the voice.
People started whooping, calling out, a woman stood and lifted her arms above her head; he wasn’t even through the first verse.
After he finished singing, June and Del waited while he was introduced around. June saw the women watching Eddie, noticed that he had his arm around one and was keeping her with him even before he had stopped meeting folks, even while Earl the pretty good singer was back at another tune, and nobody was listening to him, because all the energy in the room—all the hope and buzz and sex—was already around Eddie Knox. That’s the kind of impact he had.
But June and Del were there first. The only white folks in the place. The first in town to hear him. Del said he would like to talk to Eddie. They had a nightclub at El Capitan, they were looking for a regular act; could he stop by the next day? And Eddie said, “Sure, that sounds good,” but June knew he might not come, because he was brand-new to town, he didn’t know the lay of the land, and how could someone like Eddie Knox not know that plenty of offers would come his way, of one sort or another?
So she named a figure. An amount per week. Plus a percentage. She could feel Del about to protest, so she pulled his elbow tight into her rib, and they were friends enough, real partners, that he trusted her even though her number had surprised him. She added: “The offer lasts twenty-four hours. Come tomorrow if you want it.”
June Stein. Barely twenty-seven years old. Too pretty and too featherbrained to have managed such a thing. In a crowded room, on the wrong side of town, with nothing but chutzpah to make her think she could do it. But then, she had also dived headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge.
And Eddie was there the next day.
They pulled Mack off the kitchen, which badly needed renovating, and they put nearly the whole budget into the nightclub, into the lights and the sound and the velvet-backed booths around mahogany tables. June handpicked the girls who would serve the drinks, served some herself the first months, wearing a ten-inch silver skirt and a studded headband and a sort of bra made of a thousand tiny mirrors.
The first time Del saw her in the outfit, he drew in his breath, and the sound of that breath played in her mind for months, even years after, because she could hear the desire in it, and because it told her that Del could feel that for her, that he could be knocked off his reasonableness, his deliberations, his kindness; if she had not been in the middle of the casino, with employees around, she could have had him on the floor, right there, her way.
And they had all made money.
The figure she named for Eddie was doubled in six months. Plus, he had a take. Which was easy because they liked each other. Sometimes it even seemed like Eddie was in it with them, that he was just as much a part of the place as she and Del were. They spent so much time together, into the dawn hours after his show closed, and at dinner, which was more like breakfast for Eddie, before the act started up again.