Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

Out on the floor, it rang and buzzed. Saturday night. Ugly people looked beautiful in the soft smoky light, it all smelled of perfume and B.O. and cigarettes and anxiety. People dressed up, people dressed stupid, people dressed lucky, people dressed slutty, people dressed just like they dressed for any old thing. There were elderly people who had that careful evaluative expression they wore to scrutinize the early bird specials at the restaurant, or in the cantaloupe aisle at the cantaloupe store. There were young people taking evident pleasure in throwing their money away. It was all a game to measure something about yourself.

He went and he found the couple he’d comped. They were still down, but they looked happy. They had no chance, but they did have fresh drinks, and the opportunity to enjoy watching their money disappear. No chance: the dealer moved so quickly, so smoothly; Argenziano could see them studying him with evident awe, as if they’d only had to pay once to watch the spectacle. But you never paid just once: you paid and paid.

The man spotted him and toasted him with his drink. Argenziano gave him a thumbs-up.

“End of the day for you? Going to get this place out of your system?”

“I never get it out of my system,” said Argenziano. “I hear it all night, it stays in your head. The noise, the bells, the talking, the excitement. You enjoy your evening, now.”

It was a lie. Every night, as soon as he left, as soon as he got on the elevator and went up to his suite, he forgot. There were no lingering aftereffects of the casino environment. That was for the players, coming out and crapping out in their dreams. Him, he just got undressed and watched a movie, then went to sleep. No sense at all that this moneymaking machine churned on all night twenty-three floors below. The place was actually very well constructed, he thought, with pride.

TODAY

It got dark while they were driving down a two-lane stretch of Route 115. Groups of motorcycle riders kept overtaking them, impatiently buzzing close behind them until they could pass, and then opening up, bursting out of and then back into loose formation as they swept into the opposing lane and rocketed ahead. Twenty-five miles northwest of Leatonville, Kat pulled into the lot of a Big Boy. Their waitress appeared to be in the middle of a private crisis, dropping their menus on the edge of the table and rushing off, evidently about to cry. The place was pretty empty and the other waitresses gathered behind the counter near the kitchen door and talked intensely and quietly among themselves. The three of them apparently agreed to cover her tables because one brought water and took drink orders, the second took their food order, and the third brought the food. All superattentive. For Kat, the objective became to stay until the sad waitress reappeared. Kat felt a powerful need to see her. Eventually, she did reappear, as Kat was considering ordering a piece of pie, sidling out of the kitchen door in street clothes, eyes red, hair down. One of the other waitresses stopped her, putting a hand on her forearm. They talked for a moment and then hugged. The sad waitress seemed diminished, smaller; she carried this tragically faded lavender pattern — printed backpack. Kat could see it all, the rusted-out Dodge Neon waiting in the lot with the two crusty child seats in the back, the crap scattered on the front lawn; her whole life, right here, no place at all, and now it was making her cry, finally. She popped a nicotine lozenge instead of the pie.

“Aren’t those silly,” Mulligan said. They’d talked very little throughout the meal. He could tell that Kat was riveted by whatever drama was going on behind the scenes here; had no idea what it was, exactly, or why she was responding to it.

“The nicotine snacks? Beats smoking.”

“But you don’t really think so. How could you?”

“Beats dying.”

“You’re going to die anyway.”

Kat focused on him, shook her head, pushed her hair out of her face. “What are you, sixteen?”

They paid and went back out to the pickup. Two crows squabbled over some spilled fries in the lot. Mulligan began to tell Kat a story he was inordinately fond of. He’d heard it from a friend who’d heard it from someone. A couple had decided to make a joint project of quitting smoking. The plan was to take the money they consequently saved and put it aside for travel. It added up surprisingly quickly, and within a few months they were taking their first trip. After a couple of years they’d identified a specific mutual enthusiasm — roller coasters — and decided that with their savings they would go on a single, extended pilgrimage to each of the tallest, steepest, fastest roller coasters in North America. They visited many rides, blogging about them and attracting enough of an online following that they were featured in several newspapers and interviewed on network television. Then, aboard the Iron Flyer at a theme park in Ohio one evening, the woman’s lap bar sheared off as the car she was riding in began its descent from one of the ride’s peaks: she had been straining against it, her arms upraised, screaming enthusiastically. She plunged more than one hundred feet, hitting a steel crossbeam on the way down, and was killed.

“I always wondered if the guy started smoking again after that,” said Mulligan.

“Why would he?”

Mulligan was driving. A mist had settled low on the road, drifting and twisting in the headlights. Here and there were the eyes of deer, haunting the shoulders.

“I guess he wouldn’t.” Mulligan sounded slightly annoyed. “Life is so fragile, et cetera bla bla.”

“So cynical. Suffer a loss, why not throw out everything else. Sounds familiar.”

“Apart from the fact that I don’t think smoking cigarettes is a total repudiation of life, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s opted to hit reset.”

“Well, that’s not me,” said Kat.

“Is that a fact?”

The speed limit dropped abruptly to thirty miles per hour. They were going sixty.

“They mean it,” cautioned Kat. Mulligan braked and she watched the needle drop. A sign encrusted with the faded emblems of the Lions, the Kiwanis, the FFA, the K of C, the Rotarians appeared, welcoming them to Leatonville. Someone had blasted the sign with buckshot, and its lower left corner was pitted with holes. An intersection loomed ahead. At its four corners were a gas station, a post office, a country store, and a Methodist church, respectively. All closed.

“Make your first left after that signal.” Kat leaned forward as the road rose and curved and she sensed the nearness of the turn. “Here,” she said.

They passed a wooded area and then a fenced yard where two penned elk stood watching the road.

“Where’s the reservation?” asked Mulligan.

“We just passed into it.”

Mulligan soon lost any sense of where he was. Kat directed him to turn three, four times before they entered a street scattered with low boxy houses. They passed the house she’d grown up in and she watched it go by. There was a light in the front window. Becky’s place was three houses down.

“It’s up there, where the truck is parked,” said Kat. Mulligan pulled up behind it and they got out. The house was dark.

TWO DAYS AGO

Argenziano used a key on his ring to permit the elevator to travel to the first subbasement. It stopped at the lobby and he froze a cluster of guests waiting to board in their tracks, holding up one hand to halt them and pointing downward with the other. The door closed on their tourist faces and the elevator started down. He exited into a deserted service corridor, its walls lined with circuit boxes and with the latticework of various kinds of piping running overhead, and stopped at a door with a laser-printed sheet taped to it that read MORELLO CONSTRUCTION. He used another key to open it. Inside, he took a pair of heavy duck coveralls that hung from a rolling rack and climbed into them, then selected a yellow hard hat from a shelf. With a third key, Argenziano opened a locked metal cabinet from which he removed the keys to a pickup and a small Deere backhoe.