The cashier handed him the bills and he folded them into his wallet and drifted down a carpeted hall through a vaguely luminous darkness until he reached the Fish Bar with its huge round aquarium, slot machines spaced around it at intervals. The room was mostly deserted and he stood there for a long while, staring at the brightly glowing fish in the tank, following their flitting motions across coral and rocks, telling himself that he should leave and then telling himself that he should not. The machines around him periodically bleeped and warbled querulously. Go now, he said to himself. You need to leave right now. And yet he did not move, continuing to stare at the circling fish and thinking that were his fortune to hold for only a few minutes, he might double the meager fifty dollars he had been given, that the cash might thicken in his wallet, that when Mike came again to make the collection, he just might have the whole amount and could pay off his debt to Johnny Aguirre and be done with it forever, everything outside of the tight encasement of the room fading slowly into fiction, replaced with a sense of possibility. Under the acidic mixture of adrenaline and sweat and joy and despair, he was sure he could smell the felt of the gaming tables, and with that scent the machines in his vision seemed to pulse with lucency.
He told himself ten dollars. Ten dollars only. No more than that, moving back down that dark hall to the table games, and although he had fantasized that he might free himself of Johnny Aguirre, he was not even thinking that he would win now, not really, but only that it might pass some of the time between this moment and the next. And then, without any reason he could determine, he was thinking of the lion, not the lions he had seen on television but instead the only lion he had ever seen in person, a thin but still massive male on display at the MGM Grand across town, the first casino he and Rick had visited when they acquired their fake IDs from the men at the warehouse where Rick had worked and the only casino Nat had entered while Rick was in prison for those thirteen months. When they had first entered, Nat had not known there was a lion inside the casino and had happened upon the animal only because he was lost within the lower level, a cavernous video arcade filled with games and an ice cream shop and on one side of which stood a long line of families waiting to have their photograph taken with the lion. The animal was out of place, out of context, thin and lethargic and chained by the neck to a platform, and yet retaining some sense of its former power and grace, and Nat stood before it amazed.
That was the first time either of them had ever gambled, but Rick plowed ahead with abandon and Nat followed. For the rest of that summer they would spend many nights at the slot machines, high and chain-smoking and filling the machines over and over again with nickels and dimes. And sometimes Nat would fade away from the slots, would return to the arcade to stand before the lion, to gaze at it. Sometimes the animal would look at him, its eyes the color of African grasslands stretching out for miles, the pupils dark water holes draining back through the sand. As he watched, the attendant would lift a hunk of raw meat to wave in the air, the lion’s head rising for a moment, its eyes wide. And then someone would call, Smile! and there would be a flashbulb and the people and the lion would be frozen together, the raw meat already returned to the ice chest beside the stage and the great beast’s head dropping back to the platform, its eyes dimming out, and Nat standing there all the while, mute in that huge carpeted space, beyond belief, beyond understanding.
When he returned to the MGM after Rick was arrested in front of Grady’s the night they robbed the Quik-Stop, it was because he did not know how else to fill the vacant hours of the early evening and so he went to look upon the lion once more. Perhaps his return was only to assuage his own loneliness, to return to a place that reminded him of his absent friend. But when he entered the casino, he happened to see a calendar through the glass of the cashier’s booth, and realized with a start that it was October 23, the anniversary of his brother’s death. He knew he should call his mother back in Battle Mountain, knew too that she had probably tried to call him several times during the day, but he did not want to make a call in the clanging depths of the casino, not when its purpose was to acknowledge what and who they had lost, so he descended to the arcade, and he wondered, not for the first time, how his life might have been different had his brother still been alive.
There was no lion this time, only an empty stage in the corner, and Nat wandered back to the gaming floor because he did not want to be alone in the silent apartment and he could not think of anything else to do. Had he simply lost his money that night he might never have returned. But he did not lose. He had played only slots with Rick but that night he sat at the blackjack table, having already played the nickels for over an hour, and listened to the dealer explain how he could split a hand, what insurance was and when to use it, how to bet and hit and stand. And of course he lost the first hands but then he started to win and he left that first night with more money than he came in with, not quite doubling his thirty dollars but returning to the apartment with nearly a full day’s extra wages. He made minimum wage at the shop, lubing and doing oil changes all day for $2.75 an hour. Returning home with twenty extra dollars amounted to over seven hours of work. He could not believe it. He could not believe just how easy it had been.