Fourteen

Billy

We'd driven west through seven states over a period of about three weeks before Dad brought up the first version of the whole"Billy Shooter" thing. We were just outside of Vegas. Some little parasite town in the desert filled with bottom feeders who'd been banned from most of the real casinos long ago. They were the true gamblers, Dad said, anybody in Vegas was just playing. For these folks it was a way of life.

I can't really say how or why we ended up there. I was still three at the time, so to me it wasn't any different than all the other places we'd been--except that the motel office had this loud arcade games that grown ups played and cursed at. Dad had worked a bit here and there as we drove, signing onto construction sites for the day or finding some kind of short-term contract work in the classifieds, but this was the first place where I got the sense that he wanted to stay. He let me pick out a hotel with a pool, brought our heavy jackets in from the car, and even bought some soap and shampoo at a little dirt-floor drug store.

It made sense though. Us being there. Looking back, I sometimes think we didn't drive there so much as we were pulled there, our desperation sucked toward all their desperation like two screwed up magnets. In retrospect, it was the perfect place to start all this crap. A town stuck between nowhere and everywhere, filled with hard luck and dumb money.

Dad had found an illegal black jack game in one of the local bars, and he'd already met a couple of the hardest luck cases. That's what gave him the idea. That and the fact that he'd just lost all the money he'd earned and was now ready to try anything.

We were sitting Indian-style on either side of the drooping motel bed, a plate of mostly ketchup with a few cold, day-old French-fries between us. "You know what a wager is all about son? "he said pulling a French fry out of the ketchup and dropping it into his mouth. "It's simple really. You can see it most clearly in the real hard cases though, the one’s who belly up to the table to send next month's rent chasing after this month's. It's not the promise of what they might gain that makes them do that; it's the threat of what they might lose."

He picked another French fry up, then threw it back into the ketchup, rolled to his side, and stood. "That's what they love. The same way a drunk comes to love the burn of whiskey, they love that nagging little sick they get in the pit of their stomach when they know they stand to lose everything." He was pacing now, glancing at his gray reflection in the dirty mirror over the TV. "I tell you, in a town like this all you'd need is a sure fire way for folks to bet their lives and you'd clean up. You see what I'm talking about here, don't you?"

I didn't. I just stared down into the plate of fries, unsure of what he wanted me to say, how he wanted me to look. That was back when I wasn't talking much, but even if I was, I wouldn't have known what to say. I hadn't seen the gun since we left home. He had it locked in the glove box I guess until he could figure out what he was going to do with me, but as far as I knew he wasn't ever going to let me shoot it again.

"It might be a long shot," he said, grasping me by the shoulders so that I looked up into his eyes, "but I'm thinking with what you can do with a gun, people will pay you to shoot them."