Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

Yet the present is always the secret encampment of unintended consequences. Sedate as a neutered tomcat, it never occurred to me to rue the day, as the saying has it. Yet to rue the day doesn’t begin to cover it. One would have to rue every day, every one that came before and every new one as it arrives and all those to come in anticipation. Only in death is there time to rue life as fully as life deserves. But I get ahead of myself.

OUR MONEY CAMEfrom two streams. The original of the two was a laundry operation. Money from illegal sources was painstakingly changed into legal winnings. This took time, and patience, and it was not ideal, since the winnings were subject to taxation. Naturally, the government’s lawful share was found, on the scale of dreams, to be disproportionate. Whose dreams? What dreams? Dreams of capital flowing unfettered, unimpeded, from its dreamy sources to the parched and dreamy basins it filled and brought to blossom. The everyday dreams of people everywhere. Does taxation ever find a place in those dreams? Does even the most liberal of minds, in its uninhibited moments, dream of higher taxes? These are rhetorical questions. And there were other, unofficial tariffs; doubtless you can easily imagine all the ways in which various officials were induced to turn a somewhat myopic eye to our activities. It was Bobby’s job now to increase our margin. His solution was simple: he began to make money disappear during the minuscule interval when it has stopped existing. There is always an instant, as money changes hands, when it slips into limbo. It nearly always reappears, recognizable though slightly redefined — mostly in terms of whose property it has become — but its bardo is a moment of opportunity for those who know how to enter it. Why should Bobby and I have been afraid of the space between money’s death and rebirth? The sanctity of property rights, of generally accepted accounting principles? We’d killed people; laughed at the concept of the immortal soul. This was nothing. It was a coin trick.

Yet what I felt when I went into the cage was that it was I who made the money take form — I made gestures, I spoke words, and the money was suddenly there, body and blood. And with that miracle in my mind, I toted it back to New York, puffed up as any magician. To spend it, to steal it — that never entered my mind, not once. Not only because it would have been impossible for me to be disloyal to Bobby, but because it was pleasure enough to have created the money, to have brought it out of the shadows of its liminal existence. But Bobby didn’t see it this way. As far as he was concerned, the money was always money, as good as what it could buy. It belonged to no one, it belonged to luck, it passed into and out of various hands, and to put it in the hands of South Richmond Consultants, to call it theirs, suited Bobby, at first. Everyone was satisfied, even the Indians. Bobby’s suits, his car, his privileges at the hotel, improved, as did mine in their faint echo of his.

IT MAY INTERESTyou to learn that Indians, Native Americans, have a long and rich history of gambling, and that, contrary to certain strands of received wisdom, the advent of casinos on Indian land and under Indian management and supervision is hardly another unwelcome instance of outside culture intruding upon and perverting Native American ways. Games of chance, guessing games, games involving hoops, sticks, bones, dice — fortunes, almost necessarily consisting of the most personal of belongings, including wives and children, were lost to these games; Indian folklore relates numerous tales in which bereft losers, men down on their luck, as the saying has it, seek out or benefit from supernatural intervention in order to recover these lost chattels. And, often, more: that’s the familiar element to these stories, the one that resonates with the contemporary sensibility: the winners want more ; that famous and apocryphal Indian who wants for nothing because he only takes what is enough, who gives according to his abilities and receives according to his needs, is nowhere to be found in these authentic tales of being human. All this and more, the Indian says, having regained his beloved wife, his daughter: he takes the other man’s wife, even though he thinks she’s ugly, he takes the other man’s daughter and puts her to work, he takes his saddle horse and hides and baskets and beads and shells; the Indian’s supernal virtue is absent from these stories, if it ever was there to begin with. In them, the Indian stands forth as human: an appetite, a desire for intoxication of all kinds, an erect penis. Only a nation Puritan to its very roots could, once the living threat at the edges of its settlements had been vanquished and pacified, cast that threat in its own image: the Puritan Indian, the self-denying Indian, the Indian who happily goes without is America’s first great literary invention, one never to be topped.

Yes, and so Bobby — who hadn’t the slightest interest in table games, who felt that to stake money on the outcome of a game of chance was to be a fool — had no difficulty finding people — Indians — willing to accept his bets on collegiate sporting events, particularly Division I football and basketball games. Bobby did not consider himself a gambler, and had contempt for those who were. He described his betting as recreational. And yet more and more frequently I found myself accompanying him on his visits to an Indian man named Wendell Banjo. Wendell Banjo lived in Petobego, in a mobile home set amid the weeds on a patch of ground before an old frame house which had fallen into an advanced state of decrepitude. On the way there and back, Bobby would invariably deride the interior of Wendell Banjo’s mobile home, which apparently was filled with whatever furniture from the collapsed old house had been able to fit inside it, comparing it to what he declared was the beautiful environment of Manitou Sands. Bobby’s belief in the beauty of Manitou Sands was tantamount to certain knowledge; to him it was inconceivable that anyone at all might find it to be gauche or overdone or unrefined. Bobby had managed to develop good taste, but his taste had its limits, as any useless and vain affectation should. More to the point, he had tremendous confidence in the beauty of Manitou Sands, and believed that it inspired confidence in the guests. His dismay at Wendell Banjo’s evident lack of pride appears to me to have been his way of expressing his confusion over the very reality of a Wendell Banjo in his life, a life that he had elevated so as to be in daily proximity to such beauty, to such a beautiful environment ; confusion over the fact that he needed to take Wendell Banjo, his dealings with him, as seriously as he did. The larger the amount he owed to Wendell Banjo (which I was able to gauge only by the fullness of the plastic bag from the casino gift shop that he carried with him), the more bitterly Bobby complained about Wendell Banjo’s lack of ostentation, his disinterest in style or fashion or what Bobby sometimes referred to as the finer things . He would always conclude by insisting that he had laid his last bet with the man. But within the week we would again be driving to Wendell Banjo’s mobile home with the ruined house behind it.

One day, before we were to drive to Petobego, Bobby called me into his office and asked me to close the door behind me. He sat with his arms folded across his chest for a minute and then reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a semiautomatic pistol. He passed it to me and I checked the magazine and the chamber and then put it into my pocket. He did not carry a plastic bag from the gift shop with him on that day. When we arrived at Wendell Banjo’s place, Bobby asked me to get out and stand beside the car while I waited for him. He went inside and I waited. After a short time Ryan Labeots, one of Wendell Banjo’s employees, came out of the mobile home. I’d spoken to Ryan on several occasions, but that day he just sat on one of the steps and watched me. I leaned on the fender of the car and returned his look. I would not have hesitated to use the gun had I thought that Bobby was in any danger. As I settled into staring at Ryan, he seemed to grow nervous and uncomfortable. He was not a formidable person; he was a big, fat boy who wore oversize clothes and affected a sparse mustache on his upper lip. I was aware that I knew very little about the protocol that obtained there under such circumstances. I could shoot Ryan and then shoot Wendell Banjo, and Bobby and I could leave without troubling ourselves further, but I didn’t know what would happen after that. I trusted in Bobby to guide me; he seemed to be at ease, to have done well, surrounded by the finer things in the beautiful environment that made him so proud. I didn’t think to implicate Bobby, nor did I question his dubious decision to bring, in place of the customary plastic shopping bag filled with cash, a loaded firearm. Finally, Bobby emerged from the mobile home. Ryan moved a little to make room for him as he started down the steps, an unconsciously considerate gesture that utterly dissipated the implicit threat his presence was supposed to convey. As Bobby walked toward the car, and me, Wendell Banjo came through the door and stood silently on the top step to watch us go.