Lily In Darkness

— for Al Neipris

ON THE DAY that Hot Springs, Arkansas, became an underwater city, I got up at about ten in the morning and heated some leftover spaghetti for breakfast. I was living in a furnished corner flat that rented for two hundred a month, utilities paid, above Prince Electronics and was pleased to have my own bathroom and also a small kitchen for the first time in a period of extended itinerancy. I have fond memories of this apartment, even though the landlord did not rent to “coloreds,” and it was the hottest apartment I’ve ever known, and I was unexplainably sick much of the time. I read a lot of books in those rooms, listened to a lot of rain. This was in 1990, and I bought my first computer there, a souped-up 286 upon which I composed many novels that exploded on me like joke-shop cigars. 

Dizzy Reeves, who worked with me in the kitchen of the Arlington Hotel, came over about two that afternoon to discuss our plan to go to Las Vegas in a month and become millionaires. Dizzy was a barrel-chested, balding ex-con in his early forties, about five foot nine, with only two and a half fingers on his right hand (printing-press accident) and glasses so thick the lenses distorted his blue eyes. Looking into them was like staring into an aquarium. Dizzy had won the state eight-ball championship in 1985 and was still regarded by many as the best pool player in Arkansas, even if he looked, with his thick specs and amputated fingers, to be about the last guy in the room who could play.

He fell into one of my two big armchairs and lit up a Camel.

“You want some spaghetti?” I asked, shaking out one of his cigarettes for myself. “Or coffee?”

“Coffee.”

“Instant all right?”

“Long as it’s hot.”

From his shirt pocket he produced a scrawled-upon napkin that he treated with great care, as if it held the formula for the transmutation of base substances into gold. It was actually a ten-team parlay table. For the nongamblers: a ten-team parlay is a sort of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire betting ladder in which all the seed money and profit of each bet — in this case on a football game — is placed upon the next until you’ve won ten games in a row and have a million bucks or you’ve crashed in a fuming heap like a Conestoga wagon gone over a cliff, which is all he and I had managed to do so far.

Dizzy had spent most of his life in and out of foster homes, juvenile courts, reform schools, detention centers, youth camps, jails, and finally two state penitentiaries — the first in Raiford, Florida, setting of the novel Cool Hand Luke, and the second in Bentonville, Arkansas, where his “perspective got revolutionized” after he saw a fellow inmate brutally murdered. Dizzy’s crimes had mostly involved theft. He’d made it a point never to hurt an “innocent,” he said. The mantra of his rebellious youth had been that he did not care. Now, disgusted with his life, he claimed he was unafraid to die — indeed, he welcomed death, which is all you really need to know about a ten-team parlay.

Dizzy had one son, Junior, and I’d once spent a whole night talking Dizzy out of getting a gun and going to Louisiana to kill a man who was threatening his boy for having welshed on a bet. Dizzy lived in various rooming houses, never staying long in one, because he was always broke or getting into fights. Sometimes I tagged along to watch him play in local tournaments or the ten- and twenty-dollar games he’d rustle up for his own entertainment down at the Hide A Way or Gator’s or over at Tommy Boatwright’s place.

I fixed him his coffee and sat down in the recliner opposite. My computer was on, and Dizzy stared at the screen’s amber glow as he sipped from his cup.

“You got your table refined yet?” I asked.

“I’m getting it.” He studied his napkin while I studied his pasty complexion and the band-aid on his forearm, covering a cut that hadn’t healed in three weeks. He had gained considerable weight in the previous months. In tournaments he had trouble making balls off the break. Dizzy’s sister was diabetic, and I should have guessed that he was diabetic, too. But I didn’t worry about his health. He was too young to die, I thought. We were all too young to die.

THE SKY WAS CLOUDLESS as Dizzy and I came down the stairs from my apartment and out the screen door into daylight. We walked down Ouachita Avenue, a hodgepodge of bars, nightclubs, antique stores, and rooming houses full of pensioners, horseplayers, and drunks. A notorious gambling resort for a century, Hot Springs had once been a haven for such underworld luminaries as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. The latter had kept a year-round suite on the fourth floor of the Arlington Hotel, where we were heading to work. Gambling was the passion of many who migrated here, Dizzy and myself included. Besides regular pool tournaments, poker games, and a major racetrack — Oaklawn Park — there were at least a dozen storefront bookmakers operating throughout the city, and we’d managed to lose thousands of dollars to them with Dizzy’s cockamamie scheme of ten games in a row or bust. It rankled me that we’d sometimes hit five or six in a row and still end up with nothing. I was not accustomed to losing thousands of dollars on football bets, or any kind of wager, but Dizzy had won and lost hundreds of thousands in his high-stakes hustling days, and each time we walked away empty-handed, he was ready to “fire another barrel at them.” I don’t know how many times I said, “Dizzy, do you realize how much money we could make if we just bet these games straight?”

I’d recently announced to Dizzy that, after the current football season was over, if we still had made no dent in anyone’s pocketbook except our own, I planned to go to Las Vegas and try my luck there. His pale eyes had gone wide behind those fishbowl lenses, like the eyes of a child who has taken Jesus into his heart, and he’d vowed to come with me.

Now Dizzy and I turned up Bathhouse Row, and the twin towers of the Arlington Hotel loomed feudally before us. We clocked in, picked up our uniforms, changed in the basement locker room, and ascended the stairs to the cavernous hotel kitchen. We were early, so we went to the break room for a cup of coffee.

A few minutes later Lily, a sweet, uneducated woman of twenty-six who worked in the pantry, came in and sat with us. Lily had two boys, six and eight, and her husband was in the slammer for dealing drugs. A few months earlier I’d learned that she’d never eaten lobster, so I’d cooked her some in tequila, cream, and tangerines, and she’d liked it so much she’d given me her recipe for “pudd’n.” I’d called her that ever since.

“Your hair is all wet, Pudd’n,” I said.

“It’s raining outside,” she replied, opening wide her brooding, heavy-lidded eyes.

“Well, tell me something new,” drawled Dizzy, for it rained just about every day in Hot Springs, sometimes three or four times a day.

“Must be raining pretty hard,” I said. I knew that Lily’s aunt, who watched her children while she was at work, dropped Lily off right out in front of the hotel.

“It is,” she said, swiping a wet lock of hair out of her face. “That sky just opened up, and it all busted loose.”

Dizzy described Lily’s husband as a “turd.” He hated drugs and drug dealers and thought that, since I liked Lily and her husband had abandoned her, I should move in with her and help care for the kids. Dizzy’s mother had turned him over to the state when he was seven, and he didn’t even remember his father. I suppose that’s where his chemistry-set concept of a happy family had come from: just add parents.

I liked Lily; that much was true. In the beginning I had admired her as one admires anything vital and graceful, and for a while I had angled for her favor — though the tricky business of her children, her convict husband, her poverty, her confusion, her bad luck, and her underlying sadness had all gotten in the way. My recently developed moral theory was that if you sacrificed your principles for the acquisition of some desired item such as money or “love” (and I had seen plenty of “love”), all you were left with when it was gone was the memory of the ignominious deed by which you’d procured the goods. So I’d determined it was infinitely better, as corny as it might sound, to be an upright lad.

Lily was a hard worker, and I’d recommended that she be promoted from the dish room to the pantry. I felt pretty good about myself for this, and also for the time I’d given Lily forty dollars to buy Christmas presents for her boys. Once, just after her husband had been locked up, Dizzy and I had brought groceries over to her apartment, and we’d played with her kids. There was a lot of good feeling all around, but it had made little essential difference in Lily’s circumstances, and I wanted to make a difference. So Dizzy and I had made the bold decision to invite her and her boys to come with us to Las Vegas and share in our get-rich-quick scheme, and, after much persuading, she had agreed. Lately, however, she seemed to be having second thoughts.

Personal. Political. Provocative. Subscribe to The Sun and save 55%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE