for the other to clock down. She was dumping quarters in a seemingly inexhaustible supply from a Dixie cup held in her left hand. There was a surrealistic presence to the woman. She was almost automated, not a flicker of expression on her face, the eyes fixed and unwavering. Only when the gong rang, someone down the line had pulled a jackpot, did she look up. And at that moment Kostner knew what was wrong and immoral and deadly about Vegas, about legalized gambling, about setting the traps all baited and open in front of the average human. The woman’s face was gray with hatred, envy, lust and dedication to the game—in that timeless instant when she heard another drugged soul down the line winning a minuscule jackpot. A jackpot that would only lull the player with words like luck and ahead of the game. The jackpot lure: the sparkling, bobbling many-colored wiggler in a sea of poor fish.
The thing in Kostner’s pocket was a silver dollar.
He brought it out and looked at it.
The eagle was hysterical.
But Kostner pulled to an abrupt halt, only one half-footstep from the sign indicating the limits of Tap City. He was still with it. What the high-rollers called the edge, the vigerish, the fine hole-card. One buck. One cartwheel. Pulled out of the pocket not half as deep as the pit into which Kostner had just been about to plunge.
What the hell, he thought, and turned to the row of slot machines.
He had thought they’d all been pulled out of service, the silver dollar slots. A shortage of coinage, said the United States Mint. But right there, side by side with the nickel and quarter bandits, was one cartwheel machine. Two thousand dollar jackpot. Kostner grinned foolishly. If you’re gonna go out, go out like a champ.
He thumbed the silver dollar into the coin slot and grabbed the heavy, oiled handle. Shining cast aluminum and pressed steel. Big black plastic ball, angled for arm ease, pull it all day and you won’t get weary.
Without a prayer in the universe, Kostner pulled the handle.
She had been born in Tucson, mother full-blooded Cherokee, father a bindlestiff on his way through. Mother had been working a truckers’ stop, father had popped for spencer steak and sides. Mother had just gotten over a bad scene, indeterminate origins, unsatisfactory culminations. Mother had popped for bed. And sides. Margaret Annie Jessie had come nine months later; black of hair, fair of face, and born into a life of poverty. Twenty-three years later, a determined product of Miss Clairol and Berlitz, a dream-image formed by Vogue and intimate association with the rat race. Margaret Annie Jessie had become a contraction.
Maggie.
Long legs, trim and coltish; hips a trifle large, the kind that promote that specific thought in men, about getting their hands around it; belly flat, isometrics; waist cut to the bone, a waist that works in any style from dirndl to disco-slacks; no breasts—all nipple, but no breast, like an expensive whore (the way O’Hara pinned it) and no padding…forget the cans, baby, there ‘s other, more important action; smooth, Michelangelo-sculpted neck, a pillar, proud; and all that face.
Outthrust chin, perhaps a tot too much belligerence, but if you’d walloped as many gropers. you too, sweetheart; narrow mouth, petulant lower lip, nice to chew on, a lower lip as though filled with honey, bursting, ready for things to happen; a nose that threw the right sort of shadow, flaring nostrils, the acceptable words—aquiline, patrician, classic, allathat; cheekbones as stark and promontory as a spit of land after ten years of open ocean; cheekbones holding darkness like narrow shadows, sooty beneath the taut-fleshed bone-structure; amazing cheekbones, the whole face, really; an ancient kingdom‘s uptilted eyes, the touch of the Cherokee, eyes that looked out at you, as you looked in at them, like someone peering out of the keyhole as you peered in; actually, dirty eyes, they said you can get it.
Blonde hair, a great deal of it, wound and rolled and smoothed and flowing, in the old style, the pageboy thing men always admire; no tight little cap of slicked plastic; no ratted and teased Annapurna of bizarre coiffure; no ironed-flat discotheque hair like number 3 flat noodles. Hair, the way a man wants it, so he can dig his hands in at the base of the neck and pull all that face very close.
An operable woman, a working mechanism, a rigged and sudden machinery of softness and motivation.
Twenty-three, and determined as hell never to abide in that vale of poverty her mother had called purgatory for her entire life; snuffed out in a grease fire in the last trailer, somewhere in Arizona, thank God no more pleas for a little money from babygirl Maggie hustling drinks in a Los Angeles topless joint. (There ought to be some remorse in there somewhere, for a Mommy gone where all the good grease-fire victims go. Look around, you’ll find it.)
Maggie.
Geneticfreak. Mommy’s Cherokee uptilted eye-shape. and Polack quickscrewing Daddy WithoutaName’s blue as innocence color.
Blue-eyed Maggie, dyed blonde, alla that face, alla that leg, fifty bucks a night can get it and it sounds like it’s having a climax.
Irish-innocent blue-eyed-innocent French-legged-innocent Maggie. Polack. Cherokee. Irish. All-woman and going on the market for this month’s rent on the stucco pad. eighty bucks’ worth of groceries. a couple month’s worth for a Mustang, three appointments with the specialist in Beverly Hills about that shortness of breath after a night on the hustle bump the sticky thigh the disco lurch the gotcha sweat: woman minutes. Increments under the meat; perspiration purchases, yeah it does.
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, pretty Maggie Moneyeyes. who came from Tucson and trailers and rheumatic fever and a surge to live that was all kaleidoscope frenzy of clawing scrabbling no-nonsense. If it took lying on one’s back and making sounds like a panther in the desert. then one did it, because nothing, but nothing was as bad as being dirt-poor, itchy-skinned, soiled-underwear, scuff-toed, hairy and ashamed lousy with the no-gots. Nothing!
Maggie. Hooker. Hustler. Grabber. Swinger. If there’s a buck in it, there’s rhythm and the onomatopoeia is Maggie Maggie Maggie.
She who puts out. For a price, whatever that might be.
Maggie was dating Nuncio. He was Sicilian. He had dark eyes and an alligator-grain wallet with slip-in pockets for credit cards. He was a spender. a sport. a high-roller. They went to Vegas.
Maggie and the Sicilian. Her blue eyes and his slip-in pockets. But mostly her blue eyes.
The spinning reels behind the three long glass windows blurred, and Kostner knew there wasn’t a chance. Two thousand dollar jackpot. Round and round, whirring. Three bells or two bells and a jackpot bar, get 18; three plums or two plums and a jackpot bar, get 14; three oranges or two oranges and a jac—
Ten, five, two bucks for a single cherry cluster in first position. Something…I’m drowning…something…
The whirring…
Round and round…
As something happened that was not considered in the pit-boss manual.
The reels whipped and snapped to a stop, clank clank clank, tight in place.
Three bars looked up at Kostner. But they did not say JACKPOT. They were three bars from which stared three blue eyes. Very blue, very immediate, very JACKPOT!!
Twenty silver dollars clattered into the payoff trough at the bottom of the machine. An orange light popped on in the casino cashier’s cage, bright orange on the jackpot board. And the gong began clanging overhead.
The Slot Machine Floor Manager nodded once to the Pit Boss, who pursed his lips and started toward the seedy-looking man still standing with his hand on the slot’s handle.
The token payment—twenty silver dollars—lay untouched in the payoff trough. The balance of the jackpot —one thousand nine hundred and eighty dollars—would be paid manually by the casino cashier. And Kostner stood, dumbly, as the three blue eyes stared up at him.
There was a moment of idiotic disorientation, as Kostner stared back at the three blue eyes; a moment in which the slot machine’s mechanisms registered to themselves; and the gong was clanging furiously.
All through the hotel’s casino people turned from their games to stare. At the roulette tables the white-on-
