Rick Moody - The Diviners

After dinner, Ranjeet and Jeanine head for the gaming pit.

There’s a whole method to selecting a proper table at which to play blackjack, according to Ranjeet, and this method involves divination. The first requirement is that there can be no other player at the table. As they are in Las Vegas on a Wednesday night, and as they have arrived at the pit with little left to say to each other, they go in search of the table that has no players, where the cards are fanned out in front of the dealer like plumage. However, Ranjeet can’t find a dealer whom he likes. He doesn’t want to reckon with a white dealer because, he observes, in a strophe of remarkable bile, the white dealers have contempt for immigrants. “There are a billion of us from India in the world,” he says, “and there are more than a billion of the Chinese persons. Do these salaried employees not think that we are going to come here and overrun this land? We are coming to overrun it, and we are going to remake it in our image, with our beliefs, our ethics. Why do you think there are so many Japanese here in the casino? And so many Chinese? Here in the casino? Because we are coming for your country. We will dispossess you because it pleases us to do so.” And he’s right; the rest of America, those who are not in a private suite with Mercurio or Lacey, looks like the rest of the globe. Ranjeet walks nervously around the tables reserved for blackjack until he finds the one African American dealer, the dealer avoided by the rest of the players, the dealer with the gleaming skull made perfect with some waxy stuff, and then Ranjeet sits in the fifth seat and he lays down the complimentary chips, failing to offer even a single chip to Jeanine. They wait for the dealer to finish his ritual of shuffling.

Jeanine says, “It’s time for me to tell you the thing I meant to tell you.”

A fantail swept out in front of the Sikh.

“This happened when I was a teenager in Arizona. Believe it or not, I was a really rebellious girl, and there was nothing that my parents could do to keep me in the house. I wasn’t like I am now. I was running around with my friends, in their parents’ cars. We’d go driving in the desert. We drove east. Less civilization. North and east there was nothing but the reservations. We thought we had more in common with the Indians than we did with our parents. Used to spend nights out there. We’d lock the car doors, push the seats back. It made my parents mad, of course, and I’d get grounded for a month. Then I’d go right out there and do it again. I liked the reservations, especially the Navajo reservation. From the road, it was empty as far as you could see.”

The dealer asks Ranjeet to cut the deck. They are ready for gaming. Ranjeet bets the minimum, which is fifteen dollars.

The dealer draws twenty-one on the first hand.

“You don’t want to be out there in late summer, because if you’re out there for very long you’re just going to cook, you know. There are stories about people who leave their baby in the car in the summer. They go into the convenience store. They come out, and the baby is like a piece of dried fruit. Or dogs. They forgot to leave the window open a crack for their dogs, and now their dogs are sun-dried tomatoes. Everyone is trying to avoid fire. You can hear it on the radio. ‘Today the alert is code red.’”

Ranjeet draws fifteen, takes a jack from the dealer, goes over. At this rate, he will last seven or eight more hands. He looks at Jeanine, pleading, as if by pleading he can get her not to tell the story. She waits and then she continues.

“I was going out with a boy named Philip. Philip was not a good boyfriend. My parents didn’t want me to go out with him and they didn’t like how I dressed with him or how I did in school when I was with him, and they didn’t like anything else about him. Philip had planned this party for Saturday night, and we were going to drive north, to Skull Valley. Up near the Bradshaws. Just grasslands as far as you can see. Not as dry as the lower elevations, but the fires are just as dangerous. Up in the mountains you have the pinõn and the ponderosa, and those make for good fuel. It didn’t stop us. You go through there into horse country, and then you go beyond all the horses, and then you’re in Skull Valley. We found a place off the road, where Philip and his pal Ryan and Ryan’s girlfriend, Skye, got out and set up a couple of tents.”

Of the next three hands, Ranjeet wins two. Then he doubles down with two sevens, wins one. Suddenly he’s feeling kind of good about things. He bets forty-five dollars on the next hand, loses, and just as quickly he’s exhausted half of the stake.

“Who wants to cook? We had some trail mix and we had a lot of beer and dope and some hummus that Skye brought. She worked at a health food store in town that nobody really patronized except us. She was always in there reading books about crystal magic. So Skye brought the only food we had, which means that we probably didn’t have as much as we should have. The first thing we did was start drinking the beer and smoking a lot of dope. Philip and Ryan started saying a lot of stuff about how they wished that Skye and I would start kissing, because they wanted to watch. Actually, I never really talked to her much, because Skye didn’t really talk. I told them that they should just lay off of Skye, but they didn’t lay off. They’d probably set the whole thing up beforehand; that’s what I think now. Let’s get the girls drunk. They had some adolescent idea that they were going to set up an orgy on this big camping trip, but obviously they didn’t know us too well.”

“Could you please,” Ranjeet says.

“I want to finish.”

He bets forty-five again, draws thirteen, the number that gives every amateur blackjack player chest pains. He takes one card, and then another, and manages to work himself up to twenty, after which Jeanine watches as the dispassionate and professional African American dealer draws a six at fifteen, for twenty-one.

Ranjeet says, “I need more funds.”

“You’re welcome to use any funds that you have at your disposal,” Jeanine says.

“I don’t have any funds at my disposal.”

“Call your contacts at UBC.”

Ranjeet says, “Let me have the credit card.”

“Why should I give you the credit card? You’re playing like my grandmother.”

“I am very sorry. Please finish your story.”

He bets the rest of his chips. A whippet-thin guy with gin blossoms and a martini approaches the table, and Ranjeet waves him away.

“I figured I should find a way to escape with Skye. So we told the boys we were going to go out into the brush to get comfortable with each other and they should come along in a few minutes, like maybe they should come along in fifteen minutes, and we would be more comfortable, we would be native girls in the brush. And then we ran off. It was dark, you know, and we could smell the campfire even while we were running away through the fields, running as far as we could, out into the prairie, and I remember thinking that I was a little worried about the campfire because of the warnings that summer. Even if the fire alerts never stopped us before. We were drunk and high, and I remember that I saw Skye smiling and laughing for the first time. We thought we would circle back to the road, laughing the whole way. We thought we knew the direction of the road, but as far as we went we didn’t see any road, and we didn’t see any cars or even any lights. We’d thought we’d hitch a ride, because no one was going to leave two girls by the side of the road at night. But we couldn’t find the road.”

Ranjeet holds out his hand for the credit card.

“The story is finished, correct?”

“Incorrect. Go negotiate a second mortgage on your house. That’ll give you liquidity.”