Listen, she says, I’m seventy years old, my husband’s gone, he left me peanuts and my kids aren’t getting a nickel.
I’m at Gold Strike Casino, a half-mile north of Hoover Dam. Her face is hard and blank as the dam. We’re playing quarters. I’m on Wild Cherry. She’s on Double Diamond.
This goddamn machine, she says, last week she loved me. This week she hates my guts.
Two weeks later, I drive old 66. Basalt ridges stretch like charred spines, Joshua trees twist skeletal against a calcium sky. This Mojave is pure bone. I come down into Bullhead City. The sun begins to drop behind the Providence Mountains, over Devil’s Playground and the Old Woman Mountains. Below me, what’s left of the Colorado River gleams amber. I cruise through town, past strip malls burning copper- rose in the dying light. Housing developments metastasize into the eastern hills. There are roads where, six months ago, there were none, and streetlights where once only cholla and mojave yucca shimmered at dusk.
I cross the river into a gazillion-watt kaleidoscope, emerald, silver, bright pink and gold, Colorado Belle, Pioneer, Golden Nugget, a cowboy two stories high waves day and night, and you open the door to your room with a computerized card. The sidewalks are thronged with old couples in matching pastel jogging suits. Old women lean on walkers. Old men lean on their wives.
I park my truck, grab my lucky bucket of nickels, and hustle toward the Golden Nugget. A hound-faced guy opens the smoked glass door. I walk through into a jungle. Impossibly turquoise water spills over polymer boulders. Parrots shriek. I smell river, Shinumo beach on the Colorado, coyote willow, tamarisk. Triple canopy vinyl trees arch over me. My heart pounding in my ears, and beyond the jungle, voices, shrieks and the get-over-here-now! clunk of dollar slot pay- offs.
A woman emerges from the dazzle. She wears a lime-green tunic appliqued with gold feathers, and a plastic mask strapped to her face, oxygen pouring up from a cylinder clipped to her walker. I wear battered hiking boots and rock-climbing tights, my still-dark hair tied back in a faded bandana. We both clutch a bucket of coins.
She nods. I smile. I guess she is seventy-five, maybe sixty, dessicated by what chokes her. We meet on the wooden foot-bridge over the spot-lit stream. She stops, leans on her walker, pulls the mask away. Listen, honey, she rasps. Wild Rose was good to me.
I’m in Piggy Bankin’, where three blanks on the centerline mean your bet gets dumped in a bank, and a piggy on the line breaks the bank open and dances to the sound of breaking crockery.
Listen, the woman says, I’ve been on this stinkin’ machine for two hours and the most I’ve hit is twenty. What the hell, they keep bringing me these wine coolers, so at two bucks a pop, I’m probably ahead.
She reaches out her hand. She’s wearing five rings, all gold, one a tiny cat with diamond eyes. Hi. I’m Rose. Isn’t this the wildest?
“It’s chewing me up and spitting me out,” I say.
A long-legged young woman in high-cut leotard and high heels sways toward us. “Careforadrink?” She passes us. I try to imagine walking in those shoes for five minutes, and can’t.
Can you imagine, Rose says, walking in those high heels for eight hours? Hey, she yells, wine cooler, honey. She drops five bucks in the girl’s tray.
“Jeez,” the girl says, “I mean, thanks.” She wanders away.
Rose shakes her head. They think old women don’t tip. She doesn’t know who I was.
It’s 3 a.m. I’m bleary-eyed, down a hundred eighty-three bucks. I’m wandering from machine to machine, old woman to old woman. I can’t stop. I see a seat open on nickel HayWire. I go. The old gal next to me is groomed to the teeth and she is losing. Steadily. She turns to me.
Listen, I wonder if I should’ve gotten started on this. I come here every day. My husband doesn’t know. He’s busy with his projects. Last week I used the Visa to pay the other two cards. We’re not those kind of people. I mean, we go to church and everything.
I keep coming back. I keep thinking I’m going to hit big, pay off what I’ve lost. It could happen. There. There she goes. Two double bars and a Wild Cherry Bar, four times sixty–that’s sixty dollars. That’s something.
She smiles at me. One thing I’ve always wondered, have you noticed this? Whenever we talk about the machines, we always say ‘She.’
“Listen,” I begin to say. Listen.
___
Mary Sojourner‘s short stories, essays and environmental columns, have been published in Story, Off Our Backs, Heresies, Writers on the Range, and Sierra magazine. She loves the Mojave, Black Rhino nickel slots, rain in Grapevine Canyon, wherever the tacky and glorious intersect.