Don Winslow: While Drowning in the Desert

It would mean an extra day of babysitting an old man who had a seemingly endless repertoire of old jokes.

I started to slide out of the booth.

Shit, I thought. Shit, shit shit.

I signaled the waitress, ordered a scotch rocks and sat back in the banquette.

What’s another night? I thought. I had a lot of them and Natty Silver probably didn’t.

“Guy says to the dog, ‘You never behaved this way before.’ ”

Natty Silver looked very much alive as he teased the punch line.

“Dog says, ‘I never had money before.’ ”

Hope was right: Natty Silver was very funny.

“You want what?” I asked natty as we left the Flamingo and headed back to the Mirage.

“Chocolate cake,” he said.

“It’s ten-thirty at night.”

“What, chocolate cake disappears at ten?” he asked. “There’s a law, all chocolate cake has to become angel food cake by ten-fifteen? We’re run by chocolate-cake Nazis now?”

I wasn’t sure I even wanted to contemplate the image of a chocolate-cake Nazi, so I just sighed. “Where can we get chocolate cake?”

“You’re the detective,” Nate snapped. “Find some.”

“I’m not a detective.”

“No, you’re an ‘escort’ with no bazookas.”

I was about to say, given the cantilevered architecture of Hope White’s build, that he had more than filled his bazooka quota for the day, but I decided he’d have a punch line for that and I didn’t want to hear it.

I decided to take a professional approach.

“Look,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go get your damn chocolate cake. Then we’re going back to the Mirage and then we’re going to bed. Then we’re going to get up early and catch the first flight back to Palm Springs. No booze, no broads, no pastry. Got it?”

He looked at me with those little bird-eyes.

“No breakfast?”

It did sound a little harsh.

“We can have breakfast,” I relented.

“What?”

“What ‘what’?”

“What ‘what what’?” he asked. “What’s for breakfast?”

“I don’t know,” I moaned. “Bacon and eggs.”

“Eggs?!” he snapped. “What, are you trying to kill me?”

I hadn’t been, but the concept didn’t entirely lack appeal at the moment.

But assuming it was a rhetorical question, I didn’t answer.

“And bacon?” he asked indignantly.

“What’s wrong with bacon?”

Apparently giving up on talking directly to me Nate mumbled to no one in particular, “He wants to feed bacon and eggs to an old Jew with a heart condition.”

“I didn’t know you had a heart condition,” I said.

“I’m eighty-six years old,” Nate answered. “That is a heart condition.”

“Look, you can have gefilte fish and matzo balls for breakfast. I don’t care.”

“What about the chocolate cake?”

“For breakfast?”

“Now.”

I knew that. I was just giving him back a little, you know.

“I have an idea,” I said.

“Excuse me, but I’m skeptical.”

“Why don’t we go back to the Mirage and order the chocolate cake from room service?”

“What are you, crazy?” he asked. “Room-service prices?”

I didn’t care. I had the company’s gold card. With an American Express Gold Card in Vegas you could get a whole cake and someone to jump out of it if you wanted.

Anyway, that’s what we did. (No, not the jumping-out part, just the cake part.) I could tell he was wearing out, so he didn’t give me too much of a fight. And on a Sunday night it was no problem extending his room. So Nate sat in his underwear eating his cake and watching old movies on TV while I called Karen.

“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Knitting.”

“The only thing I’ve ever seen you knit is your brow,” I said.

Which was not overly bright on my part, but I was starting to get annoyed with the baby thing.

“You can be such a jerk,” she said.

“I know.”

“Don’t think admitting it is going to get you off the hook,” she said. “And I’ve been thinking.”

Maybe, I hoped, she’d been thinking that getting pregnant right away was a tad premature and that we should wait until we’ve been married two or ten years. And that she was knitting me a sweater or a scarf or something.

“What have you been thinking?” I asked as gently as I could. You know, to let her ease into backing down.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “that you’re not okay with parenthood because you never knew your own father and your mother was a heroin-addicted prostitute who didn’t nurture you and that you haven’t really dealt with your suppressed rage sufficiently to surrender your own childhood and adopt adult responsibilities.”

Oh.

“So you want me to come in every Tuesday, Doctor?” I asked.

“See, there’s that hostility.”

“Christ, I don’t know why I’d be hostile!” I yelled.

“I think it’s healthy that you’re working out your anger,” she said casually.

“I am not working out my goddamned anger!!!” I screeched.

“You don’t have to get mad,” she said.

And hung up.

Without taking his eyes off the television Nate said, “I went to a child psychiatrist once.”

“Kid didn’t do me any good at all,” we said at the same time.

Nate looked at me with renewed respect.

Okay, not exactly respect. Call it affection.

All right, he looked at me with a near absence of total contempt, let’s put it that way.

Nate looked at me with a renewed near absence of total contempt.

Then he fell asleep.

I took the plate and fork off his lap, lay his head back on his pillow and covered him with a sheet and blanket. Then I set the alarm and climbed into the other twin bed.

Nurturing, I thought. Suppressed rage. Surrender my childhood, accept adult responsibilities.

We hadn’t even had the kid yet and already I felt exhausted.

I told myself to forget about it and just go to sleep. Sleep would be good. Sleep would be great. All I had to do was lie there and not worry about suppressing or surrendering or accepting anything.

Just sleep.

Then Nathan started snoring.

I have heard snoring. This might be ungallant, but in the interest of honesty, Karen snores. Especially in the winter when she pulls the blankets completely over her head and makes a noise that is not so much a snore as it is a pre-suffocation death rattle. I wake up and open an air hole in the blankets for her and the snoring stops.

But I hadn’t ever heard anything like Nathan’s snoring. I had never heard a sound like that before in my life. It wasn’t even a human sound, nor a sound that resembled any currently recognized species. No, it had a sort of unnatural resonance to it, kind of like the bellows of hell opening and closing, or as if Bigfoot had somehow stolen into the body of an old man and fallen blissfully asleep.

As Nathan was.

He didn’t have the blankets pulled up over his head, either. Although I thought about arranging it, and maybe forgetting about the airhole.

I didn’t, though. I just lay there awake thinking about babies and stuff.

After a refreshing twenty minutes of sleep I got up, showered, and changed into yesterday’s stale, sweaty clothes. Then I woke up Nathan.

“You snore,” he said. “I hardly slept a wink.”

“Good morning,” I said.

I ordered room service again for breakfast. I didn’t want to take a chance that Nate would meet some other old love while gumming his oatmeal in the coffee shop.

The dirty rotten old bastard ordered two eggs over easy, bacon, a cinnamon roll, a Bloody Mary, tea, and dry toast.