Desert of the Heart: A Novel Read online

  “What a title for the little fish!” Silver said, shaking her head. “So we’ll go shopping tomorrow afternoon, and, as a reward, I’ll take you home with me tonight.”

  “Why not make it tomorrow night? I’d have to pick up some clothes to go shopping.”

  “We can stop by your place in the morning, and, if you’re very good, you can stay tomorrow night, too.”

  “I don’t know about both nights, Sil.”

  “It’s the last weekend we’ll have, love. Remember your principles.”

  “Oh yes, my principles, my honor.” Ann frowned.

  “I’ll get my hat and meet you at the locker.”

  Joyce was already at the locker, remaking up her eyes and smoking a cigarette at the same time.

  “Silver tell you about our hero?” she asked as Ann reached in for her hat and apron.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Good for Janet.”

  Ann looked at Joyce sharply. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I lost every sou I made last week; so I’m doing the landlady’s laundry and cleaning this week to pay the rent, and I borrowed for the groceries,”

  “You’re a fool,” Ann said.

  “I like sympathy.”

  “If you get hooked, you might as well quit.”

  “Well, if the old boy would like to fire me for five or six thousand, I might just consider it. Too bad I don’t have a kid with heart trouble.” Ann’s anger rose slowly enough so that she did not have time to reply before Joyce added, “Mine’s a healthy little bastard.”

  “How old?”

  “More or less just out,” Joyce said, grinning. “He’ll be six weeks on Monday.”

  “No wonder you had a rough first night!”

  “I meant to thank you for that, you know?” Joyce said. “I could have lost the job.”

  “Let’s go, girls,” Silver said, standing at the end of their row of lockers. “We don’t want to get there after all the money’s gone.”

  They were all in the Corral for another week, but Ann worked her ramp alone. Joyce had taken Janet’s place under the covered wagon. Ann looked over, missing Janet who always doled out change as if she were giving the neighborhood kids money for the Good Humor man, her natural generosity threatened by a frugal frown, which had been her perpetual expression. She worried about people. Ann wondered how she had taken old Hiram O.’s generosity. She had probably wanted to refuse it, but her pride and principles would not have been as strong as her concern for Ken. That was the saving grace of morality, even the strongest sort. It always gave way to need or love. Ann heard Evelyn’s voice, asking, “Are you talking nonsense on purpose?” Janet might have asked the same question. Hers, like Evelyn’s, was a Purgatory logic, seeded in a pious mother by the gentle guilt of a father, born into a small town, brought to crippled fruit. … Ann’s silent rhetoric hurt her guts. Neither of them would ask that question now. Conversion, in one form or another, was inevitable. Perversion in one form or another? “Take. Eat,” said the serpent, a communion with good and evil. She and Walter had looked up “evil” in the dictionary one night and had found, among other things: “That which hinders prosperity and diminishes welfare.” Whose prosperity? Whose welfare? Ann looked down at her hard-working customers, paying off in seconds that two-and-a-half-year-long death. “Frank’s Club thanks you also for its oil fields and community concerts, its gold-paved driveways and its scholarships, its private senators and its public laws. Frank’s Club thanks you.” But Janet never will. The best thing she knows how to do is pray for you. How many want to be saved? There were hands up on all sides of Ann, signaling luck, waving bills for change. An argument broke out at one end of the ramp between two men over the right to a machine. Ann settled the dispute without having to call a key man. Her wit and ease, her success, lifted her mood out of wry, private uncertainty into a more peaceful assurance. If she ever got tired of being a change apron at Frank’s Club, she could certainly do well as a playground supervisor, for men had to be bandied just like children or dogs. You had to evaluate a situation quickly, choose to interfere or to ignore it. The one mistake was to stand and watch it, for males of all ages and species have to fight in presence of a female. Ann walked back to the center of her ramp, superior as if the height it gave her were her own, benign with power. It was not until she went down to the other end of the ramp that she noticed the missing slot machine.

  It was not possible! Slot machines did occasionally disappear, but never from the second floor, never from Ann’s section. She looked around quickly, over toward the door, but through that crowd six men could carry a coffin without being noticed.

  “Did you see the workmen take this machine?” she asked customers nearby.

  “Broken,” one said. “They must have took it to the basement.”

  No slot machine was removed without her permission. “Wise woman. Teacher among children. Idiot!” She reached for her microphone and called her emergency code number to the board. Perhaps the theft had already been seen and stopped from above. Ann looked up to check the mirror position, but her own face reflected there turned her hope to guilt. It was her responsibility. A key man and a relief change apron were with her almost at once. And she did not know how many, among the new customers approaching the ramp, were plainclothesmen. She stepped off the ramp as she saw Bill approaching.

  “A put-up fight at the other end,” she said to him. “I thought it was the real thing.”

  “Why didn’t you call a key man then?”

  “I thought I could handle it.”

  “You know that isn’t your job.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  She did not resent his anger. It was a matter of pride as well as importance to keep anything of this sort from happening. He was no angrier with her than she was with herself. She answered his questions as accurately as she could, repeated her answers, admitted discrepancies of detail. She even tolerated suggestions that she might, in fact, be involved in the theft. Bill knew her better than to consider the possibility, but it was a routine part of his job to be suspicious. The fact that he had loved her and that she had hurt him made him only a little more brutal than was necessary.

  After talking with Bill, after reporting to a security officer, Ann was allowed to return to her position. She had missed her long break. The crowd was heavy, almost as heavy as on a Saturday night; and, as Ann walked back and forth, both rushed and nervously alert, her back burning, she felt an undefined hostility in the crowd. Demands for change were curt. Jokes had an edge of malice. And faces, unless she could look directly into them, were sinister and grotesque. Something in the peculiar, artificial light, in the coolness of the air conditioning, distorted the suntanned, summer sweating skin of perfectly ordinary people. They were perfectly ordinary people, Ann reminded herself again and again, countering this new mistrust which was sometimes close to fear. It was not even extraordinary that, in a crowd of this size, there were crooks. Some hospital attendants stole drugs. Some bank managers embezzled money. There were aldermen who helped themselves to the collection plate. Why did she try to defend the Club? It was an argument she had lost half a dozen times with Frances. “Take an ordinary man,” Frances would say, “better still, take a man honest enough to walk three blocks to return too much change to a clerk in a drugstore. What would he do in Frank’s Club?” And Frances was right. He’d have no compunction about trying to cheat any change apron out of a few dollars. Part of the excitement for the tourist was his feeling that he had crossed the moral boundary of society as be crossed the threshold of a gambling casino. The fact that the reputable casinos were operated on a code of honesty more rigid than in any bank made no difference. No public relations scheme would ever destroy the myth that a gambling casino is run by gangsters, staffed by petty criminals whose only purpose is to trick a man, to cheat him, to steal his money. “And who’s to say they aren’t gangsters?” Frances would demand. “Who’s to say you aren’t a petty c
riminal?” Frances would say Ann got what she deserved. Any man had a perfect right to trick, cheat, and steal back as much as he could get.

  “That was a ten I gave you.”

  Ann held up the bill folded around her middle finger. It was a five.

  “They ought to put you in the floor show for sleight of hand.”

  “This is the bill you gave me, sir.”

  If pressed by a customer, Ann would have to offer to have her apron emptied. A cashier would count her money. If she had five dollars over the amount of her IOU, the customer was right. On a Friday or Saturday night, only luck let you balance any time in the evening. Everyone made mistakes. And even the automatic coin rollers were not absolutely accurate. A nickel could get into a roll of quarters. But the mistakes were eighty per cent of the time in the customer’s favor. If you held your job, you learned not to make mistakes in the Club’s favor. The Club could not afford it. But the myth persisted. Gambling, condemned generally, reluctantly condoned occasionally, had to be evil.

  “This goddamned machine is fixed! They’re all fixed!”

  “Yes sir, they are. The Club collects fifteen per cent. If you play long enough, you’ll lose. The odds are for the house.”

  “That guy across the way got three jackpots. How much of it is he giving to you?”

  Ann was used to these accusations, made angrily or amiably, and had a selection of replies to suit the customer’s mood. She was not usually worried by them. But tonight she had to guard against answering accusation with accusation. They were perfectly ordinary people, coming from all parts of the country into the evil desert, home away from home of every big time gangster in the States, legal headquarters of illegal syndicates, where honest politicians could still be dropped down old mine shafts and never found again, where alley murders were reported with the church news every Sunday. They were perfectly ordinary people, free at last to be fearful, malicious, greedy. Then home they’d go to the good, green, well-watered plains of the Lord to tell what they had seen, the coarse women, the obsessed men, the deserted children, never guessing that these picturesque inhabitants were tourists like themselves. They were perfectly ordinary people. You had to love the whole damned world to love anyone at all.

  “Hear you’re giving away slot machines tonight,” the relief said as she stepped up on to the ramp.

  “Only to old customers or relatives,” Ann answered.

  “I’ve got five extra minutes for you if you’ll give me a share in your cut.”

  “You can have everything I get out of it.”

  “Sold. Take your time.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ann passed Silver on her way to her floor locker.

  “You didn’t have to do it,” Silver said in a quiet, conspiratorial tone. “Joe and I don’t even want one. It would ruin the high-class decor of my living room.”

  “It’s the thought that counts,” Ann answered.

  “Don’t worry about it, love.”

  “No,” Ann agreed tiredly.

  It was hard to get through the crowd. Ann moved both cautiously and impatiently, trying to protect her money and her painful back. Once free of the weight of her apron, Ann felt no more than a slight, physical relief. She wished she did not wear a uniform and could for a few minutes disappear into the crowd, talk with or stand silent with, feel with these people who had suddenly become the enemy. But her white, ten-gallon hat and her frontier clothes made it impossible. She was even branded with a name. She had no hope of anonymity. At the bar, drinking tomato juice, she wondered if she was being watched. It was ridiculous! Just because a couple of sharp, professional crooks had taken advantage of her, she didn’t need to get a third-rate case of paranoia over it. She must relax, think of something else. If she decided to go home tonight with Silver, she should call Evelyn. She did not have time. She had to get back.

  Again on duty, Ann put her mind to the problem of the night. She had not said definitely that she would have a drink with Evelyn. She would be asleep. Or Ann could tell Silver that she had to go home and would meet her tomorrow. But it was Silver’s last free weekend. And Ann was not at all sure she wanted to go home to Evelyn.

  “Change!”

  God, they could take a whole row of slot machines and she wouldn’t notice. She must concentrate, not on Evelyn, not on the negative nature of the universe, not even on this peculiar, human population, but on money, machines, and mirrors. The noise raged up at her, filling her head with a pounding, useful emptiness.

  Ann checked out her apron at quarter past three, but she was not allowed to leave until she had answered more questions and signed a statement. Silver was waiting for her in the employees’ lounge.

  “Well, how does it feel to be a big-time gangster?”

  “Lousy,” Ann said. She was too tired and discouraged to joke.

  “It’s not important,” Silver said, trying to comfort her. “They just make a big thing of it. Do you remember the time that drunk unscrewed the money box on my blackjack table? They asked me how long I’d known the guy. When I told them he was my manager, they put it in the statement and asked me to sign it. Jesus! It’s their job to keep the slot machines and money boxes screwed in, not ours. Just screw them.”

  “Yeah,” Ann said.

  “Do you want to go back to your place?”

  “I don’t know, Sil. I don’t know what I want to do.”

  “You need a drink.”

  Ann lay on her stomach on the carpet in Silver’s living room, silent, playing with the ice in her glass. Silver was finishing a T-bone steak she had cooked for herself.

  “You know, Hiram O. is going to survive the loss.”

  “Sure, I know. It just made me feel funny, as if the whole crowd was … I don’t know. Do you ever get tired of it? Do you ever wonder why you work there? Do you ever … think about it?”

  “Not much. You think too much.”

  “I remember once I found moths in my closet, holes in everything. Everywhere I went I kept thinking of those moths, eating away there in the dark. I couldn’t stop thinking about them.”

  “What’s eating at you now?”

  “I don’t know. Just things in general.”

  Silver got up and walked over to Ann. “Come on. Roll over and give us a foot.” Ann rolled over on her back and offered her right boot to Silver. “Now the other one. You know, you could live with Joe and me if you wanted to.”

  “What?”

  “But you don’t want to, I know.”

  “I’ve got a place to live.”

  “To eat and sleep.”

  “And work. That’s all I want.”

  “I’m going to tell you something, love,” Silver said, kneeling down beside Ann and beginning to undo her belt. “And you’re to shut up until I’m finished.”

  “I’m not promising. Look out for my drink.”

  “I’m looking out. You’re the one who ought to be looking out. You’re about to get hooked, little fish, hooked and landed. I want you to make damn sure the bait you swallow is what you want.”

  “Look who’s talking about getting landed.”

  “I’m talking because I know,” Silver said with real fierceness. “You need somebody, whether you know it or not. I watched you play around with the idea that it might be Bill. He’s a nice guy. I was sorry for a while that it didn’t work out. Then Joe said to me, ‘He isn’t smart enough for her. She’d ruin him in a year.’”

  “Thank Joe for me, will you?”

  “Sit up,” Silver said. She had unbuttoned Ann’s shirt and was about to take it off. “Now it’s this Evelyn Hall. I haven’t anything against women, and I don’t know her. But I know you. Lie down.” Silver took hold of Ann’s trouser legs and pulled. “How smart is she?”

  “Very.”

  “How good is she in bed?”

  “Well …”

  “And how disappointed were you when you found out that she really wanted to go to bed with you after all?”

 
“What do you mean?”

  “Love, when little boys want to marry their mothers, they have a hard enough time of it, but they manage. When little girls want to marry their mothers …”

  “I thought you said you charged for analysis. How much is this going to cost me? I want to be sure I think it’s worth it.”

  “Fierce,” Silver said softly, “very fierce. If you want a woman, have a woman, but remember you’re a woman. You need some man-handling. How many women do you know who can …”

  “One,” Ann said, letting her body go with a strange reluctance, almost like grief, desire answering skill, will answering love, without really wanting to.

  They slept until after noon, and Silver would not be hurried with cooking or eating. Then she had to dress herself for the occasion of shopping in Hollywood-blond lavender, Cinderella slippers on her long, tan feet. Ann watched her put on her jewelry. She decorated herself as Frances decorated a Christmas tree, hanging great, bright ornaments everywhere. Finally she turned to Ann for approval, the clattering of metal on metal like a muted nickel jackpot payoff.

  “You’re marvelous,” Ann said.

  “Got up like a common whore,” Silver answered, mimicking an unknown, ideal, female enemy.

  “I wonder if I ought to take time to change.”

  “I’m certainly not going to go into Magnins with you looking like that.”

  “All right, but we’d better hurry.”

  “I’ll put my clothes in the car. We can eat downtown and change at the Club.”

  It was well after two when they arrived at Ann’s house.

  “Are you coming in with me?”

  “I am,” Silver said, exaggerating a real determination.

  But Ann, in her own preoccupation with meeting Evelyn, did not realize until she was introducing them in the upstairs hall that Silver had, of course, had a real female enemy in mind. There was a moment of tension in which Silver seemed to hesitate between the extremes of hauteur and crudity, in which Evelyn recovered from a shock her expression serenely concealed.

  “I better change,” Ann said.

  “Come in and have a cigarette with me, Silver, while you wait.”