The News of the World by Ron Carlson Page A

jockey’s miseries would get in my way or sometimes I could only see some old horse standing on a rocky slope in his old age waiting to be fed. So I went back up to Vegas, felt my way around for a while, and found that I could make a lot of money playing craps. I tried to be careful and only slipped up once toward the end of the three months I was banking it away. I got a little sick of the town, sick of my motel on Fremont, and I wanted to send Allen and Irene the money and be done with the West and its vistas, so to speak. I hopped on the hardways one night at the Union Plaza and hit them so cleanly that the pit boss took over the stick and then some folks gathered around, but I didn’t care, them calling me “Lady Luck” and following me on the hard eight, the hard ten. I made my last bet under the eyes of the manager—nine hundred on boxcars at thirty to one. I saw them a full minute before all twelve dots rolled fatly up to everybody’s eyes. There was a cheer that shut the place down. When the manager handed me the slip for my winnings, he touched my finger and I saw his forehead through the windshield of his Seville off the Searchlight highway in a ditch. Since I’d broken all my rules about using the vision that night anyway, I said to him: “Stop drinking, you’re going to kill yourself.”
    That article was in the paper too, about “Lady Luck,” this mystery woman taking forty thousand out of the Plaza, but they didn’t have a picture, so I was okay. I sent the clipping and most of the money to Allen. In the note I said, “I’ll always love you,” because it was true, and because I could see his good face when he read it. So, then I was clear. I just had these terrible eyes, but no one else, no one to hurt or to complicate with hurt the rest of my life.
    I used my money staying away from people, traveling first class where you don’t have to touch, and staying in the best hotels where you’re basically paying for everyone to stay away from you. I didn’t want to hand some bellboy a dollar and see him raping his sister. I didn’t want time to have its way with me.
    In the winter, some years later, I was in Toronto on the third floor of the Toronto Hilton when I saw Anwar Sadat killed. I was in the bathtub taking one of the many baths I took every day, not reading, not listening to the radio, and I saw the stands and the parade and the truck coming.
    I got dressed, went down to the bar, and picked up a professor from the University of Ontario who was at a Joyce Carol Oates Conference and took him to my room for a day and a half until he had to deliver his paper. It was the first sexual experience I had had since Allen, and it was fine in that it filled me with nothing but this professor and the ten million student papers he was going to read poorly the rest of his career, but when he went downstairs to address the multitudes, I turned in the bed and saw the truck, the parade, the stands.
    I left Toronto. Do you see? I didn’t know what to do.
    I worked in a Wendy’s in Birmingham, Alabama, for almost a month. What a joke. By then I needed the money, but the people would come to the counter and I’d hand them their order. Talk about fast food. I didn’t do it on purpose. I’d turn to them thinking they had already asked for chili and a double cheeseburger with everything on it and a medium-sized Dr. Pepper. I’d hand it to them before they had said a word and I’d say that will be $5.47. I mean, it troubled the customers. The manager put me on the drive-up window, but it was the same there, worse maybe, because I could lean over and see into their cars, and if you want to see people’s futures, just take a peek inside their cars. You barely need the gift.
    The day they finally killed Sadat, I was let go by Wendy’s and I realized the world was playing hardball with me then. No more this woman will never