Rick Moody - The Diviners

Ranjeet walks away from the table, mumbling to the dealer that he will return in a quarter hour. Jeanine takes a drink from the first scantily clad waitress who comes by and she tips this waitress generously, feeling bad about the outfit and the hours. When Ranjeet comes back, he is furious and he is clutching a number of hundred-dollar bills. He says, “Are you happy now? I did not want to use these hundreds of dollars, because a Sikh does not form dubious associations or engage in gambling, and because these are the last dollars in my bank account, and I was saving them for the expenses relating to my son. Even if I am here and I have degraded my marriage with you, it does not mean I do not love my son, who I think will be an honorable man.”

He places the hundred-dollar bills on the green felt, and the dealer calls over his supervisor to oversee the exchange of bills for chips. Immediately, Ranjeet bets a hundred.

“We’re out in the middle of some prairie that should belong to someone. But we don’t see anyone or any ranch house. There were wild burros out there, according to the signs, and I was starting to think about wild burros, and I was starting to think about other animals of the mountains, you know, bobcats or javelina. I didn’t know; I was kind of worried. It was getting late. And we started calling for the boys, but we weren’t hearing anything. We weren’t hearing anyone calling back to us. I think Skye was really scared. She told me how she didn’t have any family in Arizona, how she had come out west to go to school and then she dropped out of college right away and started working in the health food store and living behind a gas station. We called out some more, and no one answered our calls.”

He wins the first hand, and then he wins the second.

“We figured we were going to have to stay put for the night, so that in the morning we’d be able to see where the road was and then we’d find our way back to town. We thought we needed a fire to keep the animals away from us. There could easily have been snakes out there, you know. Skye had a lighter because she smoked. If we had a fire, someone might find us, too. If people saw fires burning in the night, the fire department would get notified, and they’d come out and dowse them. So we tried to make a little campfire circle and we went looking for twigs and sticks, and all the time we were calling out to each other so we wouldn’t lose each other on top of everything else.”

Up a thousand dollars! A miraculous thing! A God-given thing! A thing that prepares the way for tomorrow’s work, which will involve taking photographs of the locations they are going to use for the Las Vegas episode!

“I’m not done,” Jeanine says. “I was telling you about how we made the little campfire circle, and then when we had the little campfire, we lay down beside it and we told each other stories, like I’m telling you a story right now, and we thought we would keep each other awake, telling stories, so that we could be sure to keep an eye on the fire, or in case the boys saw the fire, or if someone else did and called the fire department.”

Ranjeet puts down five hundred dollars with a flourish. At which point the dealer deals himself an ace and a face. With a studied calm, the dealer remarks, “Bad luck, sir.”

This is followed by two more top-dollar bets, desperation wagers. With the remaining five hundred, Ranjeet moves down to one-hundred-dollar increments. Of these, he loses three, wins one, and loses two more.

“You know the ending? You already know the end, so I’ll just tell you the end, which is that I woke up to hear Skye screaming. The wind had blown up, which is the special requirement of a wildfire, and Skye was screaming. I was wearing a nylon windbreaker over a halter top, and I don’t really remember what Skye was wearing, because at the moment when I woke up, Skye was already in a lot of trouble, with the campfire having blown out of the campfire ring. Skye’s clothes were on fire, and I ran over to help her. I remember thinking that we didn’t have anything at all that would be good for putting out a fire. We didn’t even have any water. We were just a pair of stupid girls who didn’t have anything and who hoped our boyfriends would turn out to be better guys than they seemed. We didn’t have any water and we didn’t have any shovels, and I could see that Skye was trying to pat the fire out on her arms and back, and I jumped on her, and I was trying to put out the fire on Skye and I could feel that I was not really getting the fire, that something was making the fire burn brighter, and maybe that was my nylon jacket burning, but I didn’t have time to pay attention to it because I looked up and I saw that there were flames all in the night to one side of us, like the night itself was burning up. Before I could even deal with Skye, I said, ‘We’ve gotta run, we’ve gotta run,’ and we were both running, and I was patting down my arms, and I remember that I was trying to put out the jacket and I was trying to figure out if I could pull it off, but I couldn’t pull off the jacket because it had already melted. The only good thing about all of this was that we could hear the sirens in the distance. We could hear where the road was, because that was the direction that the sirens were coming from, and we were running toward the sirens, and Skye was wailing, and I was running as fast as I could, and finally we got to the road, and that’s where I passed out or went into shock. And I just want to tell you, in case you ever wondered about trauma, that I didn’t forget how I got to the hospital, or the first skin grafts, and I never did forget the fire. I wake up a couple of nights a month feeling like I’m running from fire. That fire burned four days. My name was in the papers, and everybody knew what Skye and I had done and what the boys had done, which is that somehow we started the Skull Valley Fire, and after that I never went outside to a party ever again. As soon as I finished school, I came east to New York to get away from the Skull Valley Fire, from the horses in their paddocks who died because of me, because of my stupid teens. If I came east, maybe no one would know how I felt about what I had done.”

When Ranjeet has lost the last of his money, they get up from the table, taking leave of the new dealer, an Asian man with none of the complicated style of his predecessor, who is now gone on his break. It’s only when they’re passing through the maze of slots that Jeanine takes a quarter from her clutch, throws it into a one-armed bandit, pulls the lever, and waits as the alarm goes off crazily on its summit, indicating a major payout. The coins tumble into the tray below, more coins and more coins and more coins, until the tray can’t begin to contain the scale of the payout. Thousands! More than thousands! Ranjeet looks around, stunned, waiting for the uniformed employee. Jeanine says she can’t believe it, but somehow she can. Sometimes this is how it goes. Can he wait here for a second? She really has to go to the bathroom, just wait, just wait. And while he’s waiting for the money, she heads for the elevator, for the room, for the car key. It’s only four or five hours to Phoenix.

Sagebrush, creosote, ocotillo, waving fields of parched grasses uninterrupted to the horizon. The occasional juniper like a blemish on the emptiness. Even the tumbleweed doesn’t seem stagy, doesn’t seem added for effect; that’s how Vanessa knows she’s where she’s supposed to be, in a place where the wind on the rails really does howl, where the freights do rumble through the crossings for the rest of the day, where the best bar in town can’t afford a neon beer sign, where the one dilapidated market has an entire aisle of tortillas. A swirl of dust blows up around you, as if the range has a quarrel with you for cluttering its absences. You startle an antelope or a deer when you go out walking, but you shouldn’t go out walking, because no one does.