And so he returned, returned to the MGM—the old lion was once again on its platform—and returned too to the blackjack table. This time he did not win, but even in losing he felt a kind of electricity running through him. What he thought then was that he had tapped into the life force of the place in which he now resided in some miraculous way, that he had become, for a moment, finally part of it, part of the world in which he lived. The truth of it went beyond anything he had ever felt in Battle Mountain, at least since Bill’s death, and certainly beyond anything he had ever felt in Reno, because it was not the playing and it was not even the winning that drew him in, but the chance of something happening. Anything. And over the course of that week and the next, he saw the manifestation of that chance two times. The first occurred when an Asian man in a tan suit stood before a slot machine, alarms howling all around him and the number $100,000 flashing above. Nat read later in the newspaper that the man had flown into town from Japan and played only a single dollar before winning the jackpot. The second had been an old woman with a white poodle in her arms. The jackpot that time had been a quarter of a million dollars. She leaped in place over and over again and the little dog yapped in rhythm with her motion. He saw people drop a hundred-dollar chip on a single hand of blackjack. Sometimes they won. Sometimes they did not. There was a lion in the arcade, but this felt like that lion wide awake and free, stalking a herd of gazelles through the carpeted expanse of the casino.
In his memory, the man and later the woman who had won those two jackpots stood as if in the imagined world beyond this one, their bodies adrift in the thin clarity of empty air, the ringing and clanging of the casino’s bells fading into a slow reverberant silence and their bodies shining. He sat up late, thinking about how their lives must have changed after such an event, the golden moment that rotated them out of wherever they had been and into a world so unexpected they could never have imagined its geography at all. Lives made incandescent in an instant. The world around him was filled with separation, each object different from himself: unknowable, unknowing. And yet forces were at work that could pluck one individual name from the faceless luckless masses. The entire town an advertisement that made the possibility into a kind of promise: every casino, slot machine, poker game, barroom wager, like throwing coins into the same dark impossible sea in hopes some leviathan might, of its own free will, loft itself upon the shore.
But all of that had been before. Now he sat at the green felt of a blackjack table, and he actually won for a time. Within twenty minutes he had doubled the paycheck advance Milt Wells had approved, but then his luck turned as it always did. The remainder of the hands had been busts and he had doubled down repeatedly, losing his winnings at twice the rate he might have otherwise. And yet even in this, his despair was lined with a faint ripple of electricity, each new card spelling out a destiny he felt he could almost see into, the hole card facedown in front of the dealer, the players—two others beside him—staring down at their two cards as if they might, at any moment, change value. The fat man next to him laughed every time he lost, as if there was some joke that Nat did not understand.
The dealer’s up card: an ace of hearts. Insurance or even money? she asked him. She was pretty, blond-haired and thick-lipped. He wondered where Rick was. Then Susan.
His cards totaled eighteen. Yeah, let’s do that, he said.
One dollar, she said.
He slid the chip over and she moved it into the insurance line, where it sat just above his cards. She flipped her card over, showing a ten of diamonds.
Blackjack, the dealer said. Two to one on the insurance. She took the two chips he had bet on his hand from the ring before him and then slid two chips back toward him from the insurance line.
Damn, the fat man said. I shoulda done that too.
Nat shrugged. Sometimes it works, he said.
The dealer cleared the table and dealt the cards again. Nat was dealt a ten of spades, which he could hardly look at, so complete was his excitement and terror. He laid two one-dollar chips before him, the last of the ten he had decided to bet, although his pocket still held the remaining forty in cash. When the dealer flipped the next card faceup in front of him, it was an ace of clubs.
Hot damn, the fat man said.
Backdoor Kenny, the dealer said, smiling. Blackjack.
Nat was smiling now too, face slick with sweat, mouth dry. It felt so close sometimes, so close to the bone that he could hardly stand it, as if some essential or elemental or animal part of him was on the verge of shaking out of his skin. As if he had been circling something he could not even recognize but knew was perfect. And somehow he felt like he was in control of what was happening—even though he also knew that the idea of it was absurd and impossible—and yet he could not remember any other moment in his life where he had felt such a thing. Not ever. Here, at least, there was a sense of possibility. Outside the glass doors of the casino was only a narrow path that he already knew led nowhere at all.
She slid the chips in front of him. Six dollars. He had bet two and had he bet fifty he now would have a hundred and fifty. But he had only bet two dollars, the table’s minimum, and so now he had six and was still down four. How quickly fortune could change.
On the next deal he bet ten. The fat man next to him said, Now you’re talking.
Nat glanced at the woman on the other side of him but she did not return the look, instead staring down at the table, her eyes like glass pressed into the bruised gray meat of her face. Below them ran that perfect plain of green felt, like a grassy field spread out to float above the floor on a layer of thin cool air.