By Dwight Livingstone Curtis
Featured Art: Static and Distance by John Sabraw
The tweakers who live in the tent next door are looking for something. I can hear him opening and closing zippers, and she’s whispering at him and getting angry. I hope they find it soon.
It’s like this every night. Quiet hours in the tent city are from 10pm to 6am, but the tweakers don’t care. The overnight security guard, Sean, has stopped enforcing the rules. When the tent city opened in January of last year they had a day guard, a night guard, and a social worker from the Poverello Center. Now it’s just Sean. He spends the nights outside the fence, ignoring the awful sounds that come from within our borders.
I try to work through math problems in my head but am continually distracted. It makes me so angry. I try to set boundaries for myself, like: I won’t freak out unless they touch my tent. Then one of them stumbles over the guyline that holds out the corner of my rain fly. A flashlight beam shines across my wall, and then another beam crosses in the other direction. They are fighting with their flashlights. But I won’t freak out. I won’t freak out. I put in my ear plugs and take out a book from my milk crate. I shake out the square of wax paper I have hidden in the spine. It’s Glasgow, cut enough times that it won’t quite kill me.
The flashlight fight is getting closer, and someone trips over my guyline again, and my whole tent shudders. My hands shake as I unfold the wax paper and get out my straw, and then someone is shoved against the outside of my tent, stumbles into my shoulder, and falls. I nearly burn the wall with the lighter. Sitting cross-legged, I lean away from the wrestling taking place on the collapsed half of my tent, the grunts and heavy breathing and the scratching against my tent amplified by my earplugs. I won’t freak out. A flashlight drops to the ground and rolls against the ripstop fabric where it stares at me with a yellow eye, like a boxer on the mat or a shot deer or the person at the bottom of a gangbang.
I won’t freak out. The tip of my glass straw glows red hot and I touch it into the crease of wax paper where the crumbs and dust have collected. Instantly the straw fills with white smoke. As if by magic the wrestlers roll away and the flashlight is picked up and I’m left in the dark, exhaling and collapsing.
Morning in the tent city is like morning anywhere, with sick people moaning, and drunken laughter, and the sound of piss on metal, and someone leaning against a chain link fence brushing his teeth. There’s the scrunch of bungee on tarp and the clatter of recyclables as crackheads get their bike trailers ready for the day. On the other side of the group fire pit a woman is yelling and throwing her belongings at Sean. This is an eviction. Instead of maintaining an adequate living arrangement per the rules of the tent city, she whored from tent to tent while her stuff got rained on and dogs got in her food. She lasted three days, though it was clear from the beginning that she was unfit for communal living. By tonight she’ll be back in the Walmart parking lot where she belongs.
I don’t join the group by the fire and I stay far away from the eviction proceedings. I use a brick to re-stake my guylines and I toe garbage from my campsite back across the property line into the tweakers’ campsite: a soda cup from the Holiday, an empty can of butane, and the blue plastic pieces and spring and batteries from a broken flashlight. I keep the batteries.
I am out of floss. It’s a long walk to Walgreens in the snow but I make it shorter by doing math in my head. If you have five dice and need to roll five of a kind your odds are one in six to the fifth times six, for each possible combination: ones, twos, et cetera. One in six to the fifth times six is one in six to the fourth, which is one in twelve ninety-six. Most bars have two pots and give you two shakes for a dollar. That’s two in twelve ninety-six, which is one in six forty-eight. If the sum of the pots is greater than six forty-eight then you should shake.
I don’t like shoplifting because it’s a nasty little crime, but in this case it’s a necessary evil. At Walgreens they won’t chase you. There are things I need more than floss but it’s a work day and I have a renewed sense of purpose. I pick out the most expensive unscented floss, which comes in a two-pack, and walk to the end of the aisle and put the package in my pocket. The woman at the counter, who is the only employee, is not looking, which I know because I can see her in the big curved anti-shoplifting mirror on the ceiling.
I just walk out.
The casino at which you are most likely to find a certain kind of business traveler at ten AM on a Tuesday is Lost Horse, so that’s where I go. It’s attached to a mid-priced hotel with a gym and a strong-smelling outdoor pool and a gastropub. It’s located on the edge of the part of town where, if you want to party, you can find someone to party with.
Sure enough there’s a guy in a polo shirt sitting at a machine with two empty rocks glasses and a basket of mozzarella sticks on the table next to him. He’s betting a dollar and has three hundred credits in the machine. The casino attendant is in the liquor store stocking bottles and I move slowly so she won’t notice me. I touch a couple of screens, then put my arms on the back of the big swivel office chair next to the guy.
“Machine’s about ready to blow,” I say.
He grunts.
“It’s amazing they let her work here,” I say. “After what she did.”
He grunts again. He’s betting fast and is about to finish his drink. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the casino attendant notice me and start hurrying over.
“Listen,” I say quietly. “I’m about to pick up. You want me to grab you something?”
He stops hitting the button and swivels toward me as the gal shows up holding her empty drink tray in front of her stomach like a shield.
“Excuse me,” she says to me. She has a fat little face and pigtails. “Are you playing a machine?”
“No, no,” the guy says, hitting the button one more time for emphasis. He’s playing on max speed and the numbers populate almost instantly: five out of eight plus two horseshoes for sixteen dollars and ten free plays.
“He’s, uh—” The guy waves his hand in my direction. “He’s a friend of mine.”
If looks could kill.
“Another drink?” she says to him, and he nods, waiting for her to leave. She turns to go.
“Nothing for me,” I say, but she keeps walking.
He waits for her to leave the room and then he sighs heavily. He reaches into the pocket of the coat hanging on the seat behind him and takes out a wallet and a fifty-dollar bill. When he hands it to me he holds onto it for an extra second.
“You’re not going to bring me some jacked-up bullshit?” he says.
“Come on, partner,” I say. “Neither of us has time for that.”
He looks down at my shoes and at my tucked-in t-shirt and up at my face. Then he lets go of the bill.
“How about a fresh rig?” I say.
He nods.
“Might as well,” he says, and he hits the button to play the first of his free games.
I cross Brooks carefully because of the berms of plowed snow and the deep ruts of slush. In the Albertson’s parking lot I wander around keeping an eye out for exhaust. Before long I find what I’m looking for: a silver Grand Marquis at the edge of the lot, the engine running, with a Baby On Board sign suction-cupped to the inside of the rear window. I go and stand by the taillight with my hands in my pockets and after a minute the window rolls down.
I wait while he inspects the fifty with a UV flashlight. He studies it from both sides, then presses the bill against the windshield to look at it against the sunlight.
“There’s a yellow band,” I say. “You saw it.”
“Naw dog,” he says, sliding the bill around on the inside of the windshield. “S’posed to be pink.”
“It’s pink on the hundred. Fifty it’s yellow. Look, see, there’s the face. Do the blacklight again.”
But now his UV light isn’t working. He shakes it and clicks the rubber button and it flickers on for a second and then goes out.
“Yellow, right there,” I say. “See? It’s a good bill. Come on, man, it’s cold out.”
“S’posed to be pink,” he says.
“It’s supposed to be yellow,” I say. “The hundred is pink, and the twenty is green. You got a different one? Look and see.”
He hesitates.
“Broke ass,” I say.
“Man, fuck you,” he says. “What you want.”
I tell him.
“Throw in a pipe, too,” I say.
“Give me five.”
“I don’t have five, man,” I say. “Just throw it in. I’ll probably be back anyway.”
“Five,” he says.
I stare at him, shivering, my breath fogging up the bottom half of his cheaply tinted window.
“Where’d you learn business,” I say.
“The streets, my dog,” he says.
“It’s called a loss leader. How’s a guy supposed to party without a pipe?”
“Party ain’t free.”
I put my hand over my eyes and survey the parking lot. I spot an idling Honda Civic with cardboard over the rear window.
“Hey, look, it’s Anna Montana,” I say.
“Man, take your cheapass pipe,” he says.
At Lost Horse I give the man his drugs and wait behind him while he inspects the bag. He doesn’t seem to care that the pigtailed casino attendant is watching us from the doorway. Probably he thinks he’s tipping her well enough. But he’s not. He hasn’t been leaving her anything for his drinks and he has a ticket for $165 and another for $300 on the table, and he’ll leave her the five. He taps the baggie with his pinky fingernail and then opens it up and sniffs it. I don’t know what he expects to smell.
“That’s what fifty bucks’ll get you?” he says. “Or did you take some off the top?”
“That’s all fifty. And there’s a clean pipe for you, too.”
“So what do you want, a sniff?”
I shake my head. “No way, man, that’s not my style. But, hey, are you going to cash those out?”
He looks down at the tickets on the table.
“I’m thinking about it,” he says, and grunts.
I nod my head at the girl and she comes over. I walk away and give them space. I believe you should be allowed to tip in private. When she crosses back to the cashier’s window, she’s holding a five.
I stand behind him and he holds out a five to me.
“It’s not like that,” I say.
“What’s it like, then?” I can hear in his voice that he’s impatient to get high. He’s hitting the button hard and jiggling his knee.
“Lend me a twenty,” I say. “I’ll pay you back tonight. Say, five o’clock? Find you back here?”
“Alright, alright, alright,” he says. He’s already got the RESERVED sign on his machine. He gives me a twenty, and then he’s gone.
I’m walking again, up Brooks. The door to the UPS store jangles when I open it. The kid is in the back trying to get a huge package out the door on a dolly.
“Just a second, I’ll be right with you!” he shouts.
I was going to ask nicely to borrow some tape, but now I don’t have to. I just take a roll and leave.
It’s a long way to the Barn Stormer. Maybe two miles on Brooks, which is the hypotenuse of the triangle formed by Bancroft and 34th. Two miles squared equals the sum of Bancroft squared plus 34th squared. Four over two is two, root two is a little less than one and a half. Save a mile and it’s a prettier walk. The Barn Stormer is one of three casinos left in town with a Keno King Multi Game machine, and the other two are out on the highway. It takes me half an hour to walk, and my shoes and socks are soaked from the snow, and my shirt is soaked with sweat. My breath comes out in plumes. Someone honks at me and I ignore it. By the time I get to the Barn Stormer I’m thirsty and my heart is pounding in my chest. It hurts to breathe and my nose is running. I go straight to the bathroom and the bartender follows me in. I don’t recognize him and I wonder if he’s going to confront me. I’m in the stall with the door closed, drying myself off with toilet paper. After a second I hear him peeing in the urinal. Now I stand and pee, as loud as I can, and together we pee, and I hope he finishes first. He does, and he zips up and washes his hands for a long time. I’m done peeing and now I flush. Finally he leaves.
I inspect the twenty. It’s crisp enough. I take out the dental floss and draw out a long piece and pluck it off. I wrap a thin strip of tape around the bill with the floss underneath it. Now I have a twenty with a piece of floss taped to it. I roll it all up carefully and go to put it in my pocket, but my pocket is wet. So I just hold the bill as I exit the bathroom and I make a beeline for the Keno King.
I watch the bartender out of the corner of my eye as I sit down at the machine. I’m the only person in the casino. Right away, he comes over. I hide the bill in my hand so that one clean corner is sticking out, the “20” visible, and I start poking the screen.
“Hello, sir,” the bartender says.
“Mmph,” I say, moving back and forth from Keno to Reel to Poker games, looking thoughtfully at the options. I can see the end of the floss hanging out the bottom of my fist. I cough into my hand and then shove it, bill and all, under my thigh.
“Would you like something to drink while you play?” the guy says.
“Mm-mm,” I grumble, not looking at him. “All set thanks.”
“You sure?” he says. “We have beer, wine, seltzer, soda, coffee, tea, water, juice—”
“Not thirsty, thanks,” I say. I have now toggled back and forth between Keno, Reel, and Poker games five or six times. The calibration is off by a quarter of an inch. I navigate once more to the Keno menu. I am being watched closely. All that remains is for me to put money in the machine, but I don’t have any regular money. I am out of options.
“Good day to be inside,” he says.
“Mountain Dew,” I say.
“Pardon me?”
“Please could I have a Mountain Dew.”
“Changed your mind!” he says, apparently delighted. “Right away.”
“No ice,” I say.
I reach toward my pocket, though I have no wallet in there, and for another second, the bartender hovers behind me, waiting. I slide my hand slowly into my pocket, as though I am contemplating how much money I will spend. I hear him breathe in to speak.
“Would you like a straw?” he says.
“Yes, of course,” I say.
He smiles even wider. “I’ll be right back with it,” he says, and leaves.
I have only a few seconds.
I uncrumple the bill, which is now damp with sweat. I rub it against my thigh, straightening it and drying it, careful not to disturb the tape. I hear chunk-hiss of the CO2 kicking on behind the bar.
I lean down to the bill accepter and feed in the clean end of the bill.
Keno King Multi Game machines were built in the eighties. The company that made them went out of business in the nineties. The bill accepter unit, which the casino manager pulls out of the machine every morning in order to collect the cash, slots into a groove on the inside wall of the main housing. The unit is aluminum and the groove is aluminum but the little wheel that finds the groove is plastic. After twenty or thirty years, these plastic wheels started breaking, causing the bill accepters to jam. There was no replacement part available, but the technicians who worked on the machines discovered that if you just took the broken plastic wheel off, the whole thing worked fine, except that there was a little extra play in the bill accepter once it was seated and locked. So they went in and removed the broken plastic wheels and the unbroken ones too, since sooner or later they were going to break anyway.
Inside the bill accepter unit is a little axle with two rubber wheels on it. Those rubber wheels grab the bill and position it over the reader, and once the bill is read, they advance it past the reader and into the bill stacker.
That little extra bit of play between the accepter unit and the main housing means that it is possible to jostle the bill accepter, and if you jostle it while it is accepting a bill, the rubber wheels that advance the bill lose contact, for a moment, with the bill itself.
You can tell if a Keno King Multi Game machine is missing its plastic wheel by curling your fingernails under the lip of the accepter unit, pressing, and lifting.
When I first feed it in, the machine spits my bill. I feed it in again, and again it hums, churns, skritches, and spits the bill. The bartender is crouched behind the bar, rummaging for something, and then he stands up with a box of straws. My hands are sweating and I do my best to dry them off before removing the bill and straightening the leading corners. It is still damp. My hand is shaking as I touch the bill to the green blinking mouth of the bill feeder. The bartender has gotten the carton of straws open and is now walking back toward the gap in the bar. I feel the bill feeder engage. With the fingernails of my left hand curled under the lip of the accepter unit, I feed the bill forward into the turning wheels, and the bill pulses forward into the slot. I let the floss run through my fingers. The green blinking plastic mouth turns solid blue, and I feel the footsteps of the bartender crossing the floor. Inside the machine, the axle whirs and two rubber wheels position the bill across the reader. One Mississippi. A white light flickers inside the machine. Two Mississippi. The bartender catches his foot on the carpet and stumbles, spilling some of my Mountain Dew. The white light goes out, and a second axle engages. Three Mississippi. The bill advances, and, just as the floss begins to run through my fingers, I lift with my left hand. The tension on the bill slackens. I pull the floss, sliding the bill back across the spinning axles, over the rubber wheels, and out through the blue-lit mouth of the bill feeder. The bartender’s shadow crosses behind me. I close my fist around the bill and straighten up in my seat as my credits appear on the screen.
The bartender is an idiot. I wait patiently as he fumbles with the keys to the cash drawer, and wait patiently as he miscounts and recounts my money. His fingers are dry and he has trouble with the bills, which are fresh from the bank and stick together. He grins stupidly when I tip him twenty and again offers me something to drink, and this time I say yes to a cup of coffee because that will keep him busy for a while. Back at my machine, I feed in a real twenty, and then the rigged twenty, and then the rigged twenty again, and again, and again, until my coffee is ready. Now I stash the rigged bill in my sock and play for a little while and the bartender stands awkwardly behind me, watching, and I realize he is drinking a cup of coffee as well.
With the bartender watching, while betting a dollar, I get into the bonus on Little Devil Keno. I earn ten free plays and then another ten free plays and now I hit six-for-seven with a multiplier and win two hundred and six dollars. This is a happy accident.
The books will clear in the morning. The discrepancy won’t show up until the end of the month, when the bookkeeper runs a full report, and then he or she will have a month of dailies to comb through, looking for an arithmetic or transcription error, before, maybe, determining that the money really is missing. At that point, they can look at my friend the bartender, the only one here today with access to the bill stacker, or at the surveillance footage, which will show a guy playing Keno, or they can call the technician. If he’s old-school, he might have an idea, but he won’t say anything. A hundred dollars is nothing, and a lot cheaper than replacing the machine. Maybe it offsets another error somewhere else in the books. Machine malfunctions void all pays and plays. These things happen.
On my way out, I stop at the bar to check on the Shake-a-Day. The bartender is delighted. He rolls the dice out of the cup onto the bar in front of me, and I wince—this is bad luck. But I’m still curious.
“What’s the pot?” I say.
He checks a piece of paper taped to the wall behind him.
“Three-oh-four for the first pot,” he says, “and two-two-two for the second. Good luck!”
I smile. “Not necessary,” I say, “but thanks.”
It’s a long walk to Cabela’s and I make it shorter by doing math in my head. Eighty numbers on a Keno board and twenty draws. Each number has a one-in-four chance of being drawn. To go six-for-seven, you have one over four to the sixth, times three quarters… but then there are different combinations of six-for-seven. Something factorial. I can’t keep track of this right now, though I’ve done it before. I’m passing Fred’s now. One lap dance at twenty bucks plus a five-dollar tip for the dancer plus a five-dollar Coors Light plus a two-dollar tip for the server is thirty-two dollars a dance. How many dances an hour? I hate strip clubs. You don’t get anything for your money except a hard-on and I can get that for free in my tent. I don’t like to. Casts a silhouette on the wall. The Mountain Line comes every twenty minutes. If I stop here and wait, one twentieth of the time I wait one minute, and one twentieth of the time I wait twenty minutes. The driver pulls over and slows down but I wave him on.
We are on the western edge of the Mountain Time Zone, and you can imagine the earth as a beach ball, and the time zones as stripes on the beach ball. It’s dark by the time I return to camp, and I give Sean a curt nod as I enter through the front gate. Sean is smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer out of a paper bag and he has on a big black puffy jacket over his guard uniform, which is untucked. Some of us like to joke that we are saving Sean a campsite for when he finally takes the plunge. He nods back at me and spits in the snow and does not perform the required inspection of the large package I am carrying over my shoulder. I skirt the edge of the group gathered around the communal fire and carry my package straight to my campsite. Someone has tripped on my guyline, tearing out the tentstake and spilling an order of French fries in my yard. My tent is partially collapsed and covered in a dark fluid that is… root beer. There is laughter coming from the tweakers’ tent and from the shadows cast by the butane torch I guess that there are five or six people inside. Perhaps these are the new residents of the tent city, who have moved into the spot abandoned by the onetime whore and already made friends with my neighbors. Someone is playing music on a phone—a shortlived luxury, since we have no power outlets here. I will not freak out. I worked hard today and plan to enjoy the fruits of my labor.
It takes me an hour, hammering stakes with my brick in the frozen earth, but no one bugs me or takes any notice. They are used to me, or used to ignoring me. Finally I have my fence up, a taut perfect square, tracing at chest height the boundary of my campsite. From within my tent, where I have run the main wires, after sliding into my sleeping bag and dimming my headlamp for indoor use, I load D batteries into the housing. This is the “Grizzly” model, for grizzlies presumably. It puts out 7,900 volts, and when I connect the ground and the positive wire I hear or imagine I can hear all 7,900 of these volts pulsing in a tight perimeter through the cold, dry, black night air.
Although most of my clothing is still damp with sweat, the top of my sock, where I have folded it over into a kind of pouch, and the floss container inside, and the drugs inside of that, stayed dry. I tap out the spine of my book and unfold my wax paper and combine my stashes and lay a little tightrope for myself that I stare at lovingly as I wait for the tip of my straw to heat up. I turn off my headlamp, and the glass glows red, tracing a waterfall that fades to purple as I lower the straw like a beak to the hit. Outside, my fence buzzes, and I try with everything I have to stay awake and enjoy the suspense although what I have, everything, is, at this moment, collapsing to a pinpoint. I close my eyes, darkness on darkness, and relax.
Dwight Livingstone Curtis received his MFA in fiction from the University of Montana. His stories have appeared widely in print and online. He works as a fishing guide in Missoula, MT.
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