Still, the couple was able to save about twenty thousand dollars during the four years they lived in Texas, and Jed and Babs were now convinced that their conjoined life had strong aspects of boom and bust to it, and since they seemed to have just gone boom (the success of the last four years) and now bust (Babs losing her job and a heifer stepping on Jed’s right foot and crushing three of his toes) they believed they were due for a change of fortune, and this is why Jed planned to take every penny of the twenty thousand they had in savings and put it down on either red or black at one of the Vegas casino roulette tables. (Since Deadwood wouldn’t be legalizing gambling for another twenty-two years, a Nevada casino was their only bet.)
The big decision: red or black?
“That’s all we need, Pops,” said Jed. “Just tell us: red or black?” Lorna and I had driven down to Las Vegas from Butte in early March to take a break from the harsh Montana winter, with hopes of using the additional face time with my stepson and stepdaughter-in-law to talk them out of this potentially ruinous idea.
The four of us were having dinner at the Dunes’ Dome of the Sea restaurant. Lorna had the veal kidneys Berrichone. Jed and I had steaks frites and Babs had the quiche Lorraine, which she said tasted just like the bacon and Swiss cheese pie that a prostitute friend of her mother’s — Betty, the Natural Irish Reddie — used to make in the Dumas brothel kitchen in Butte.
“You wanna gamble?” I asked. “Take a hundred dollars — take two hundred dollars to the table. That won’t cut too much into that nice little nest egg the two of you’ve built up. Don’t you want to have children? To buy a house somewhere?”
“We can’t have children,” said Babs. “There’s something wrong with me down there.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you down there that I care about!” said Jed, looking lovingly and a bit hungrily at his wife’s crotch.
“Oh, they love each other so much,” sighed Lorna, holding a bite of veal kidneys Berrichone in midair. “Mike, isn’t there something that Jed can do with State Farm?”
“Selling insurance would be like a death sentence for me, Mom,” Jed burst out. “Sorry, Pops, but I have to be outdoors. If I’m not building or wrangling something, I go buggy. You’re the same way, aren’t you, Punklin? Didn’t working for Dr. Edder have you crawling the walls?”
Babs nodded. “Although some of the children had interesting stains on their teeth from the dental fluorosis.”
“I don’t just want a house, Pops,” Jed continued. “I want a ranch — my own ranch. Our own ranch,” he corrected himself while looking into his wife’s blue eyes, and then slightly down at her crotch again, and then back to her eyes. “I can’t buy a ranch for twenty thou. Not around Butte at least, which is where we want to wind up. Now forty thou — that puts us a heap closer.”
“What about zero, son?” I persisted. “Because there’s that possibility, too. How many years do you think that would put you away from achieving your dream? Why do I have to tell you this? You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”
“Everything in life is a gamble,” said Jed, looking at his watch. “The show’s about to start. Let’s go see the show, okay?”
The “show” was the Dunes’ Casino de Paris Review starring Rouvaun, a thirty-five-year-old singer who was virtually unknown only a month before, but was now headlining a one-hundred-person extravaganza that sold out at every performance. (Career: boom!) I didn’t know at the time that Rouvaun wasn’t European — though his stage name gave one to imagine Caruso or one of the other continental greats. The “Vocal Vesuvius,” as he was later dubbed, was born Jim Haun in Bingham, Utah. That’s right: boom-and-then-bust Bingham, Utah.
As the four of us sat listening to Rouvaun singing the hopeful “Somewhere” from West Side Story while a bevy of sequined, extravagantly fledged showgirls strutted and dipped behind him, Jed leaned across his mother to whisper into my ear, “Peace and quiet and open air wait for us…on the Montana plains.” A moment later, Babs, who had imbibed one too many Blue Hawaiis, summoned the attention of one of the dancers on the stage, whose name she told us was Siam Pam. According to Babs, Pam had once worked with Babs’s mother at one of the Mercury Street bordellos in Butte. “It’s a small world after all,” marveled Babs.
The next morning over breakfast, Lorna and I tried one last time to talk Jed out of putting all twenty thousand dollars down on either red or black at the roulette wheel. We also appealed to Babs, but she was no help. Her head was killing her and even though she admitted that of course she didn’t want her husband to do such a foolish thing, he had his heart set on it and she loved Jed more than she loved money, and by the way, had we decided yet whether he should go for red or black?
“Why should we be the ones to make that decision, dear?” asked Lorna of her son. “That would be a lot of guilt for us to have to carry around if we happened to choose wrong.”
“Still,” said Jed, “I trust the two of you more than anybody.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Jed,” I replied in exasperation. “It’s all chance, whether I’m picking the color or you are. Life may be a series of choices — choices based on knowledge or experience or skill — but life is also made up of a number of haphazard events over which a person has absolutely no control. Zero. Zilch. This is such an event. Boom or bust doesn’t apply here.”
Jed thought about this for a moment, and then he said, “I understand. I’ll just have to ask somebody else. I’ll ask a bunch of somebody elses. Excuse me. I’m going over to Caesars Palace and stand by the big fountains and pose my question to folks who walk by.”
This he actually did. He reported back that afternoon that twenty-three people had said “red” and twenty-five people had said “black.” He discounted three of the people who had said black since they were, racially, black, and obviously exercising a prideful ethnic bias. He discounted another man who said “black” when he admitted that “red” to him carried Communist undertones. A different man, the professorial type, corrected the question: “You mean The Red and the Black. Stendhal’s 1830 psychological classic. An excellent read, my boy.” This man’s companion was equally unhelpful; his answer to the question “Red or black?” was “Red when I play checkers, but I do like my coffee black.” The final adjusted count was Red: 23, Black: 21. Red it was.
At first I was torn. I wanted to be there to support Jed, but I knew that it would probably end up being the most difficult couple of minutes of my life. Lorna couldn’t bear it. Neither could Babs. They escaped that evening to Sultan’s Table to hear Arturo Romero and his Magic Violins. I couldn’t leave Jed to face this life-altering event alone, so the decision was made for me.
We approached the table. There were a couple of busty blondes there who were all smiles and apparently doing well, and a glabrous-globed older gentleman who looked choleric and probably wasn’t doing well at all. I told the croupier what my stepson wanted to do. The man summoned the pit boss and the two spoke for a moment with backs turned. The pit boss ended up shrugging. Looking right at Jed, he said, “It’s his money.” But I could have sworn that he said, “It’s his funeral.”