Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Carla told no one — not even her opinionated brother — that her first choice (quickly dismissed) had been Oklahoma!’s “It’s a Scandal! It’s an Outrage!”

Few knew what a wicked sense of humor Carla Willard had.

Life’s a gamble. I learned this in ’46 when I married Lorna and took on her three kids by her former deadbeat husband like they were my very own, and voilà! I’m an instant dad and everything that goes along with that drops itself heavily into my inveterate bachelor’s lap, and whether or not I am up to the task is anybody’s guess. But it’s like Nescafé coffee. Some people try instant coffee and they like it, you know, instantly . Me, it took a while. But the kids did start to grow on me over time — Jed especially. Jed was born in 1938, the same year as the Nescafé company and the same year as this little convict-in-embryo who grew up down the street from where we lived in Butte, Montana: Robert Knievel. (More to come about Bad Boy Bobby.)

Now if you don’t know Butte, I’ll probably be doing you a terrible disservice by trying to sum it all up for you in a few sentences, so please forgive me. Butte from its earliest days was a wild and wooly mining town — one of the most notorious of the copper boomtowns. But Butte was luckier than most boomtowns, which seem to have an annoying habit of eventually going bust. The reason: Butte was diversified. She had zinc and manganese and lead and molybdenum and silver and gold and brothels. Big business, those bawdy Butte brothels.

That’s where Jed’s wife Babs was born. An unwed sporting lady by the name of Sicilian Cicely (most of the “soiled doves” of The Line, Butte’s red-light district in those days, had clever, geographically suggestive nicknames) was her mother, and it’s anybody’s guess who the father was, although I’d put my money on a favorite customer of hers named Bingham, which, coincidentally, is also the name of a copper boomtown in northern Utah that hasn’t fared nearly as well as Butte. Its ever-expanding open pit has literally been eating the town alive for years. And in 1971, the two dozen or so folks who were still left voted to disincorporate and get the hell out. It’s a bona fide ghost town now.

Jed didn’t mind that Babs, whom he married in 1958, was the daughter of a whore, and it wasn’t something that Lorna and I would ever hold against a person. Like I say, Jed was my favorite among my three stepkids (although I know that dads, and stepdads, for that matter, aren’t supposed to play favorites).

Now, I was talking about boomtowns, so I should make mention of Deadwood, South Dakota, which is where my stepson and his wife Babs moved in late ’58. Deadwood, as you might know, had a gold rush (1874—boom) and then a smallpox epidemic (1876—bust) and then a fire that wiped out nearly the entire town (1877—double bust). And that boom and bust pattern persisted into the twentieth century, as well. Right after Jed and his new bride got there — Jed was offered a job by a building contractor friend — there was a second big fire (1959—another blazing bust) that destroyed much of the town and sent the couple off on an interesting road trip. From 1959 into early 1962 they must have lived in about ten different western communities, Jed the itinerate laborer and Babs taking part-time secretarial work where she could get it. Their luck changed in 1962 when they wound up on a ranch outside of the little north Texas town of Summerfield, which coincidentally used to be called — I am not kidding— Boom . Jed worked construction and punched cattle, and Babs was employed as a receptionist for a dentist in nearby Hereford who took early retirement in late ’66 in large part because Hereford’s water supply has a high level of naturally occurring fluorine, and so few of the residents had much need for a dentist.

Still, the couple was able to save about twenty thousand dollars during the four years they lived in Texas, and Jed and Babs were now convinced that their conjoined life had strong aspects of boom and bust to it, and since they seemed to have just gone boom (the success of the last four years) and now bust (Babs losing her job and a heifer stepping on Jed’s right foot and crushing three of his toes) they believed they were due for a change of fortune, and this is why Jed planned to take every penny of the twenty thousand they had in savings and put it down on either red or black at one of the Vegas casino roulette tables. (Since Deadwood wouldn’t be legalizing gambling for another twenty-two years, a Nevada casino was their only bet.)

The big decision: red or black?

“That’s all we need, Pops,” said Jed. “Just tell us: red or black?” Lorna and I had driven down to Las Vegas from Butte in early March to take a break from the harsh Montana winter, with hopes of using the additional face time with my stepson and stepdaughter-in-law to talk them out of this potentially ruinous idea.

The four of us were having dinner at the Dunes’ Dome of the Sea restaurant. Lorna had the veal kidneys Berrichone. Jed and I had steaks frites and Babs had the quiche Lorraine, which she said tasted just like the bacon and Swiss cheese pie that a prostitute friend of her mother’s — Betty, the Natural Irish Reddie — used to make in the Dumas brothel kitchen in Butte.

“You wanna gamble?” I asked. “Take a hundred dollars — take two hundred dollars to the table. That won’t cut too much into that nice little nest egg the two of you’ve built up. Don’t you want to have children? To buy a house somewhere?”

“We can’t have children,” said Babs. “There’s something wrong with me down there.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you down there that I care about!” said Jed, looking lovingly and a bit hungrily at his wife’s crotch.

“Oh, they love each other so much,” sighed Lorna, holding a bite of veal kidneys Berrichone in midair. “Mike, isn’t there something that Jed can do with State Farm?”

“Selling insurance would be like a death sentence for me, Mom,” Jed burst out. “Sorry, Pops, but I have to be outdoors. If I’m not building or wrangling something, I go buggy. You’re the same way, aren’t you, Punklin? Didn’t working for Dr. Edder have you crawling the walls?”

Babs nodded. “Although some of the children had interesting stains on their teeth from the dental fluorosis.”

“I don’t just want a house, Pops,” Jed continued. “I want a ranch — my own ranch. Our own ranch,” he corrected himself while looking into his wife’s blue eyes, and then slightly down at her crotch again, and then back to her eyes. “I can’t buy a ranch for twenty thou. Not around Butte at least, which is where we want to wind up. Now forty thou — that puts us a heap closer.”

“What about zero , son?” I persisted. “Because there’s that possibility, too. How many years do you think that would put you away from achieving your dream? Why do I have to tell you this? You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”

“Everything in life is a gamble,” said Jed, looking at his watch. “The show’s about to start. Let’s go see the show, okay?”

The “show” was the Dunes’ Casino de Paris Review starring Rouvaun, a thirty-five-year-old singer who was virtually unknown only a month before, but was now headlining a one-hundred-person extravaganza that sold out at every performance. (Career: boom!) I didn’t know at the time that Rouvaun wasn’t European — though his stage name gave one to imagine Caruso or one of the other continental greats. The “Vocal Vesuvius,” as he was later dubbed, was born Jim Haun in Bingham, Utah. That’s right: boom-and-then-bust Bingham, Utah.