Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Get me to Vegas, one of those five star casinos with five buck slots, and I’m putting that bucket to work for me.

Maybe it’s the bucket that’s lucky. Maybe the shiny contents. Or maybe it’s me.

One thing’s for certain — I can’t lose.

Not tonight, anyway.

I’ve got to get to Vegas.

Before my luck runs out.

Mitch owned a couple of clubs in San Francisco, hole-in-the-wall joints in the Mission District. He started out on the cheap, backed only with a little bit of an inheritance from his dad, and there wasn’t anything fancy about either place. Just a come-one-come-all attitude, a half-dozen beers on tap, clean glasses, and live music a couple nights a week. Mitch said that the secret to his success was throwing a good party every night. He definitely knew how to do that.

We’d been friends for a long time — since high school — and I was real happy for him. But mostly I wished I could be real happy for me, too. I’d been making my living as a writer for the last five years, but mine was a strictly hanging-on-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth kind of existence. I was more than a little tired of worrying about the rent, and the credit card bill, and the beater of a car that had been rolling atop four balding tires for the last five thousand miles. And I was sure enough sick of eating bologna sandwiches for dinner.

I knew that in a lot of ways I was luckier than most. I sold everything I wrote. Four published novels under my belt, and a fifth on the way. Every one of them had garnered good reviews, and I had a drawerful of laudatory quotes from writers I admired.

But I’d never come close to making the kind of score I wanted to make. No publisher had ever shot the big advance my way, or offered to send me on tour, or put a single penny into publicizing my books. No Hollywood bigwigs had optioned any of my novels for the movies. People I respected told me that I had a bright future and that financial success was just around the corner. But I’d been hearing that for so long that it annoyed me more than anything else.

People told me other things, too. Like money isn’t everything. Of course, it was my considered opinion that people who spoke about money in those terms slapped filet mignon on the barbecue grill whenever the mood struck them and fed the scraps to the dog. To put it plainly, they hadn’t eaten a bologna sandwich in many many moons.

My stomach growled. There was a popcorn machine at the end of the bar. Popcorn was free if you were buying a beer. I helped myself to a bowl.

I glanced at my watch. It was a little past eight o’clock. Mitch must have gotten lucky. The tourist crowd at the saloon was starting to thin out. Plenty of barstools stood vacant, and the clatter of the slot machines was practically nonexistent. Roy was chatting with a few local alcoholics who appeared glued to their stools, but his heart sure didn’t seem to be in it.

No such problem with Big John Dingo. He waited behind the barroom doors, the cassette tape rolling endlessly, spewing his rattler-rough come-on for just one more quarter.

A guy wandered up to the mechanical gunslinger. He sure didn’t seem like the type. He looked as trail worn as Big John himself, and he wore a T-shirt that proclaimed: TOP HAND AT THE MUSTANG RANCH.

The T-shirt was black, but the material was so faded that it couldn’t disguise several angry smears of machine oil. I wondered if the guy was a biker. He looked the part. I was just about to congratulate myself for my keen observational skill when he produced a key from a ring chained to his belt, unlocked Big John Dingo’s change box, and pawed a mound of quarters into his hand.

The take wasn’t much more than what Mitch fed the machine a couple hours earlier. The greaseball wandered over to Roy and stacked quarters carefully on the bar. He slid two stacks to Roy and kept the other for himself.

“Fucked up way to make a living,” the guy said.

Roy stared at the greaseball. Or maybe he was staring at the greaseball’s T-shirt. Because what Roy said was, “There’s worse ways.”

The words sent an uncomfortable shiver up my spine. For a second I thought there might be trouble, but the greaseball only shrugged and pocketed his quarters. He wandered over to one of the slot machines and fed the one-armed bandit until his money was gone. Then he glanced around the room, like he was waiting for someone.

I knew how that felt, the same way I knew that this guy had made a mucho grande mistake — he’d shot his pathetic little wad and come up short one beer in his hand, so he didn’t have an excuse to hang around.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and his shadow followed him outside like a thirty-weight stain.

“Wonderful,” Roy said.

I finished my popcorn and wandered around the saloon. The slots were old, not the electronic gizmos you find in Reno, Tahoe, and Vegas. Some of ’em, I could imagine dusty miners pulling the handles. After all, the Bucket of Blood Saloon had been open since 1876.

My boots made muffled thuds against the weathered floorboards. A silver-haired lady smiled at me from behind the cashier’s cage. “Try your luck?” she asked. “How about a roll of quarters?”

I shrugged and looked down, embarrassed by my empty pockets. Then I spotted it, on the floor in front of a quarter slot machine. A single quarter, gleaming in a pool of soft yellow light.

I looked around. The greaseball was long gone. I sure wasn’t going to chase after him. Maybe he’d dropped the quarter. But maybe he didn’t. I’d watched several people play the slots in the last few hours. Any one of them might have dropped that quarter.

I picked it up and slipped it into the slot machine.

I pulled the handle.

Three plums spun into place.

The one on the right shuddered a little.

Then a buzzer sounded, because the plum held firm.

“I’m thinking maybe another bar is the way to go, ” I say. “If my luck holds in Vegas, I’ll go in on it with you as a partner. Of course, it would be your show…”

I glance over at Mitch, but he doesn’t say a word. His head hangs low. He s staring into the brimming slot bucket between his feet.

“Yeah, ” I say, backtracking in case I made a mistake. “Maybe that’s a bad idea. You’ve already got two bars. That’s nothing new for you. What we need is a challenge.”

I drive on, through Tonopah. I’m not stopping. Not for anything. All I want is Vegas, another casino, a big one with acres of slots.

Dollar machines. Five dollar machines. Ten dollar machines. ‘Movies,” I say. ‘We take one of my short stories. Do the damn thing ourselves. I write it. You produce it. We find a director who’ll get the motherfucker right. ”

I slap the steering wheel with my hand. Yeah. That’s a hell of a good idea. Mitch has the connections, too. There’s a pack of youngun movie guys who hang out at one of his clubs.

Man, I’m not even cold anymore. I honk the horn, long and loud.

I step on the gas.

I played the quarter slots for an hour. And then the dollar slots for two. Finally I ended up at a big monster of a dollar machine called THE BUCKET OF BLOOD.