Shore Leave: The Boardwalk
Atlantic City, November 1996
The Boardwalk
They came over the causeway at eleven with the bay black on both sides and the whole city lit up ahead of them like somebody had spilled a jewelry box on the edge of the ocean.
Hazel slowed down to look at it. She couldn't help it. Towers of light along the waterfront, gold and pink and green, signs as tall as buildings spelling names in letters that ran and flashed and changed color. One of them had onion domes on top, lit purple. One of them was shaped vaguely like a castle. Down at the bottom of all of it, between the towers and the sea, the Boardwalk ran along the dark like a long lit fuse.
"Look at it," she yelled over her shoulder.
"I'm looking."
"It's so ugly!"
"You love it."
"I love it so much!"
They parked the bike in a garage off Pacific Avenue that charged eight dollars and smelled of piss and exhaust, and walked out to the Boardwalk through an alley full of seagulls who were asleep and didn't like being woken. Then the alley opened, and there it was: the boards, gray and worn in a path down the middle, running off in both directions further than Hazel could see, and on the left the casinos, lit up like the inside of a pinball machine, and on the right the dark beach and the ocean, invisible except for a white line where the waves broke.
It was cold. The wind came straight off the water and smelled of salt and fried dough, and it found its way through Hazel's jacket and into her hair, and she stood at the rail and let it.
"Smell that," she said.
Sophie smelled it. "Fish."
"That's the ocean."
"The ocean smells like fish."
"The ocean smells like the ocean, Stinky." Hazel turned around and leaned back on the rail with both elbows and looked up at the casino in front of them. It was called the Grand Marquis and it was built to look like a French palace, as imagined by someone who had never been to France but had seen a picture of a cake. White columns. Gold trim. A long row of glass doors at the top of a flight of steps, all of them blazing, with a doorman in a red coat and a little round hat standing in front of them, stamping his feet.
The doors were the problem. The doors were bright and the Boardwalk was dark, and there were twenty feet of lit steps between them.
Hazel watched people go up the steps for a while. A couple in matching windbreakers. Three old women with pocketbooks. A tall man in a camel-hair coat on his own, who took the steps two at a time. The doors swallowed each of them in a gust of warm air and noise.
"Run it?" Sophie said.
"Run it."
They went up fast, laughing, Hazel ahead, as if they were two girls racing each other out of the cold, and the light hit her on the third step and the dark came after her up the stairs in a long greasy smear and the doorman was looking at Sophie, because Sophie had picked that moment to trip on the top step, very nearly into his arms, and say, "Oh! Sorry, sir! I'm so sorry," with her eyes huge, while behind her the shadow let go of Hazel with a snap and lay down flat where it belonged.
"Careful, miss," said the doorman, and held the door.
The Door
Inside there was another set of doors, and between the two sets, in the warm air, a podium.
Behind the podium stood a security guard in a gray blazer with the casino's gold crest on the pocket. He was in his fifties, heavy, with half-glasses on a cord around his neck and the patient face of a man who had looked at ten thousand driver's licenses and believed none of them. A small sign on the podium said that the State of New Jersey required all persons on the casino floor to be twenty-one years of age, and that identification would be requested.
"Evening, ladies. ID, please."
Hazel had known this was coming. She'd planned for it. She'd taken the card out of her wallet in the parking garage and checked it, the way she used to check a rifle before a job. Pennsylvania driver's license. Her own face, smiling. A name that wasn't hers, a street in Fishtown she'd never lived on, and a date of birth: March 9, 1970.
She'd checked it. It was fine. She handed it over.
He put on the half-glasses. He held the card up next to her face, then tilted it under the light to look at the little state seal, and then held it next to her face again. He looked at it a long time.
Hazel stood there. She had stood still under a lot of looks. She had stood still under looks from men who wanted to kill her. This was a man with half-glasses in a casino lobby, and she discovered that something about it was much, much worse. Her hands wanted to go in her pockets. She didn't let them. Her face felt like it should be getting hot, and it wasn't, because it couldn't, and the fact that it couldn't somehow made it worse.
"Date of birth?" said the guard, without looking up.
"Nineteen forty..." said Hazel, and stopped.
He looked up.
"Seventy," she said. "Nineteen seventy. March ninth. Sorry. Long drive. I've been thinking about my mother all day. She was forty-one when she had me, and she, ah. She keeps telling me."
The guard looked at her over the half-glasses.
"Telling you what?"
"How old she was," said Hazel. "When she had me."
There was a pause about a hundred years long.
Beside her Sophie held her own card out on the flat of her palm, like a kid offering a sugar cube to a horse, and said, very sweetly, "Mine's a Pennsylvania too, sir."
The guard looked at Sophie's card. Sophie's card said she was twenty-two. Sophie looked about seventeen. He held the card next to her face. Sophie smiled at him, with her scar and her braids and her very polite eyes. Hazel would have bet anything she owned that he was about to say no.
He gave them both back.
"You girls have a good night," he said, already looking past them at the next couple. "Cage is on the left if you need chips."
They walked through the inner doors onto the casino floor. Hazel did not look back. She walked twenty feet, around a pillar, behind a row of slot machines, and put both hands on top of one and her forehead on her hands.
"Nineteen forty," said Sophie, beside her.
"Don't."
"Your mother."
"I panicked."
"She was forty-one when she had you?"
"It was the first number I thought of."
Sophie put a hand on her back. "Girlie Pop," she said, with deep affection, "you are the worst spy in the world."
The Table
The casino floor was the size of a city block and had no windows, no clocks, and no corners. Hazel noticed the corners first. There weren't any. The room went on and curved and turned into more room, and every direction you looked there were more lights and more machines and more people, so that you couldn't see where it ended or how you'd gotten in. The ceiling was mirrored in long gold-framed panels, and up in the mirrors there was a whole second casino hanging upside down, the tops of everybody's heads going about their business. The carpet was red and gold and blue in a pattern that hurt to look at for long.
And the noise. The slot machines played music at you, little runs of bells, and when someone won they rang and rang and dropped coins into a metal tray with a sound like a car wreck in a piggy bank. Somewhere a man was shouting on a microphone about a keno draw. At a table nearby a whole crowd went ohhh together and then groaned.
Hazel turned around once, in the middle of the aisle, slowly, taking all of it in.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. Okay okay okay."
The light was the best part. It was everywhere at once, from everywhere, bright and warm and even, coming down from the ceiling and up off the mirrors and out of every machine, so that nothing on the whole floor cast a shadow worth having. Hazel's own was a faint gray puddle around her boots, like everybody else's. She'd never stood in a room so bright for so long without having to think about it. She felt like taking her jacket off.
She took her jacket off.
They got chips at the cage. Hazel bought them with a stack of hundreds from an envelope in her inside pocket and didn't count them first, and the cashier counted them twice. Sophie got a plastic bucket of quarters for the slots and carried it off down an aisle of machines decorated with cartoon cherries, and Hazel went looking for the loudest thing in the room.
The loudest thing in the room was the craps table.
It was a long green table with high padded walls, like a bathtub somebody had covered in felt, with numbers and boxes printed all over it in white and yellow. Around it stood ten or twelve people shoulder to shoulder, leaning on the rail, all of them yelling. In the middle stood a dealer with a long hooked stick, raking dice back across the felt. At the far end a man in a white shirt was rolling, and when the dice hit the far wall and came back the whole table went up like a stadium.
"Eleven! Yo-leven! Winner!"
Hazel squeezed in at the rail next to a little old man in a plaid sport coat with a cigar he wasn't allowed to light. He looked up at her. She grinned at him.
"Hi," she said. "How do you play this?"
The old man looked at her the way men had looked at her across bank counters in 1965: up and down and back up again, and somewhere in the middle of it filing her under nice. "You don't know how to play craps," he said, "and you came to the craps table."
"It's the loudest one."
He thought about that and seemed to find it reasonable. "Put your chips on the pass line. That line there. Shooter rolls seven or eleven, you win. Rolls two, three or twelve, you lose. Anything else, that's the point, and he's gotta roll it again before he rolls a seven. Simple."
"That's simple?"
"Simplest thing in the world, sweetheart. The rest is just side bets for people with too much money."
Hazel put a hundred dollars on the pass line.
The old man's name was Benny and he came down from Newark every second Saturday. He'd been playing at this table since it was a different casino with a different name, he said, and before that he'd played in back rooms in the Ironbound where you rolled against a wall, which was the same thing but with more knives. He explained the odds bets to her, and the come bets, and what the boxman did, which was sit in a chair in the middle of the table and look at everyone like they owed him money. He explained why you never said the word seven out loud at a craps table while somebody was rolling. He was very sure about all of it.
Hazel listened with her chin on her hand and her eyes wide and asked a lot of questions that made Benny laugh at her, and lost three hundred dollars in twenty minutes, and laughed about it, and the dealer with the stick started calling her Red.
She wasn't bad at it. She wasn't good. She could follow the table and she understood the odds Benny gave her, mostly, and every now and then she could see a roll coming the way she could see a man about to step out of a doorway, in the set of the shooter's shoulders. Mostly she just bet, and yelled, and lost, and bet again. None of it mattered, and that was the whole point of it.
At some point she found herself looking up at the ceiling.
The mirrored panels went all the way across. Behind them, every twenty feet or so, there was a darker glass bubble, smoked, set into the gold frames. Cameras. There'd be a room somewhere in the building full of men in short sleeves with coffee, watching all of it on rows of little black-and-white screens. Watching the dealers and the dice and the players' hands and the chips, and the cage, and the doors.
She'd been looking at the table the same way, she realized. Like a job. Where the dealer's eyes went when he raked. How long the boxman looked away when he counted. Whether the old dice went back into the bowl or into the dealer's pocket. She could think of four ways to put a thumb on the scale of this table, and probably a fifth if she watched another hour, and she'd have done any of them without a flicker if she thought they'd work.
She looked up at the glass bubbles again. She didn't think they'd work. Somebody had built this room to stop exactly what she was thinking, and they'd had a lot more money and a lot more time than she did, and they'd done a good job. She knew a covered approach when she saw one. You didn't walk into a covered approach just because you wanted the shot.
She hated it a little. She put another hundred on the pass line and yelled at the dice instead.
Sophie came by an hour later with her bucket half full of quarters and a plastic cup of free ginger ale she wasn't going to drink.
"How are you doing?" she said.
"I'm down six hundred dollars," said Hazel happily.
"I'm up eleven."
"Eleven hundred?"
"Eleven dollars." Sophie rattled her bucket. "The cherries like me."
"The cherries are a scam."
"The cherries are very fair, Hazel."
Two seats down the rail, the tall man in the camel-hair coat from the steps had shown up at the table and was watching Hazel instead of the dice. He was in his forties, good-looking in a sanded-down way, with a nice watch and a nicer haircut, and he caught her eye across the felt and raised his glass a half inch. Hazel grinned at him and raised an imaginary glass back. He laughed.
Sophie looked at the man. She looked at Hazel. She leaned in very close to Hazel's ear and said, in a whisper with no mercy in it at all, "He wants to roll your dice."
"Go away."
"He wants to see your point."
"Go play the cherries, Stinky."
Sophie went to play the cherries, slowly, looking back over her shoulder twice with her eyebrows going up and down, and Hazel turned back to the table with her face exactly as hot as it could no longer get.
Then the dice came to her.
The dealer pushed five red dice across the felt with his stick, and she picked two, and Benny leaned in and said, "Hit the back wall. Both of 'em. They gotta hit the back wall or it's no roll."
She rolled an eleven.
The whole table yelled. Benny slapped the rail. The man in the camel-hair coat put a hundred-dollar chip on the pass line next to her stack and said, "I'm with the lady," and two other men did the same, and Hazel picked up the dice again and rolled a seven.
"Seven! Winner! Pay the line!"
She rolled a six. That was the point. She had to roll another six before a seven. She rolled a nine, and a four, and a ten, and the table bet the numbers and won on all of them. She rolled an eight. Somebody had put money on the eight and screamed. She rolled a five. Benny had stopped talking. Benny had put everything he had on the pass line and was gripping the rail with both hands and his unlit cigar had gone limp in his mouth.
She rolled a six.
The table went up like a building coming down.
She didn't stop rolling. She held the dice for forty minutes. A crowd came over from the blackjack tables to watch. The boxman sat up straighter in his chair and stopped looking like anyone owed him money and started looking like he did. Somebody brought her a drink she didn't touch and somebody else brought her another one. The man in the camel-hair coat put his hand on the small of her back once, lightly, to lean past her and bet the hard eight, and left it there one second longer than he needed to, and she let him. Benny had tears in his eyes. "Red," he kept saying. "Red. Red." The dealer called every roll like it was the last minute of a game in overtime.
When she finally rolled the seven, the whole table groaned together, a long, happy groan, like the end of something good. People clapped. Benny hugged her. He smelled of cigar and Old Spice and he was surprisingly strong.
Hazel looked down at the rail in front of her. Her chip tray was full. Not neat. Heaped. Black chips and purple chips and some kind of orange chip she hadn't seen before, all in a pile, falling over the edges.
"What," she said, "is an orange one?"
"A thousand," said Benny, reverently.
She'd started the night with three thousand dollars. She didn't know how much was there now. She'd have to count it. She didn't want to count it. She wanted to roll again.
The Flash
The photographer found them in the lounge.
It was a little bar off the casino floor, up three steps, all brass and red velvet, with a piano that played itself and a lot of mirrors and a lot less light. Hazel had come up the three steps carrying her chip tray against her chest like a baby, and felt the dark gather on her the moment the brighter light of the floor fell away behind her. She stopped under a lamp until it settled. Sophie found them a booth in the corner under a wall sconce, and they sat in it, and Hazel tipped her chips out on the table and started stacking them by color, and the shadows lay down quietly in the corners and behaved.
"Count," said Sophie.
"I'm counting."
"You're stacking."
"Stacking is counting."
The photographer was a woman in her thirties with frosted hair and a black vest and a camera on a strap around her neck, the big boxy kind that spat out pictures. She went from table to table smiling at couples and asking if they'd like a souvenir from their night in Atlantic City, ten dollars, in a lovely folder with the casino's crest on the front.
"Ladies," she said, stopping at their booth. "Look at all that! Somebody had a good night. You want a picture with your winnings? Something to show the folks back home?"
"Yes," said Sophie instantly.
"No," said Hazel.
"Yes," said Sophie, and put her arm around Hazel's shoulders and pulled her in, cheek to cheek, and pushed the heap of chips into the middle of the table with her free hand.
Hazel thought very quickly. The lounge was dim. The sconce over them was dim. She was settled. A flash was light, but a flash was fast, and it was only for a moment, and her shadow didn't like to move fast. Maybe, she thought, if she held very still, it wouldn't move at all.
It was the wrong thing to think. She realized it in the half second before the flash went off.
The light came all at once from everywhere, white and total, and in that instant everything in the booth went bright: the brass rail and the velvet and the chips on the table and Sophie's grinning face and Sophie's braids and the mirror behind them. Everything except Hazel. Her shadow didn't move for the flash. It didn't even try. It simply stayed where it was, on her, around her, a dark that hung on her face and shoulders and hair while the whole world around it went white. For one blink, she sat in the middle of the light in a hole of her own.
Then it was over. The lounge came back, dim and red. The camera whirred and stuck its tongue out, a square of slick white card.
The photographer frowned at her camera. She shook it, and looked through the viewfinder, and pulled the picture out and peeled it and held it under the sconce while it came up.
"Huh," she said. "That's weird. The flash must've..." She looked at Hazel. She looked at the picture. "I'm so sorry. That's never happened. Let me take another one, no charge."
"No," said Hazel, too fast. Then she smiled, a big one, the bubbly redhead smile, the one that had walked her past the boxman for an hour. "No, you know what, it's fine. It's perfect. It's late. I look terrible anyway."
"You look fine, honey," said the woman, uncertainly. "It's just dark. It's like you're standing in a..." She stopped. "Well, I can't charge you for this."
"Charge us," said Sophie, holding out a ten. "I want it."
The photographer gave her the picture and the folder and took the ten and went away to the next booth, and looked back once, and then didn't.
Sophie held the picture up between them.
It had come out bright. The chips were bright, every color. Sophie was bright, her face lit up flat and white by the flash, grinning so hard her eyes were half shut. The velvet behind them was a deep wine red. And next to Sophie, cheek to cheek with her, inside Sophie's arm, there was Hazel: a dim shape, a face you could just about pick out if you knew it was there, red hair gone brown and then black, as if she'd been printed on a different piece of paper and the night had gotten into it. The only bright thing in all of it was her teeth. She'd smiled. Two little points of white.
"Oh," said Sophie softly.
"Throw it away."
"No."
"Soph."
"No, Hazel." Sophie slid the picture into the folder, and the folder into the inside pocket of her jacket, and buttoned the pocket. "It's the first picture anyone ever took of us."
Hazel opened her mouth and found she didn't have anything to say to that.
The Window
They went back to the table. Of course they went back to the table. Benny was still there, and the dealer called her Red and the boxman sighed, and the man in the camel-hair coat had gone, but he'd left his room number with the dealer for her on a cocktail napkin, which made Sophie laugh so hard she had to sit down on the floor.
Hazel lost a thousand dollars and won two thousand back. Sophie went back to the cherries. The bachelor party found them around then: seven young men from Scranton in matching T-shirts with a cartoon of a ball and chain on the front, already very drunk, who came down the aisle of slots in a pack and stopped in front of Sophie's machine.
"Ladies," said the one with the most hair gel. "Ladies, ladies, ladies. You look thirsty. My man here is getting married Saturday and he needs a drink with two beautiful girls."
"No thank you," said Sophie. "I can't drink."
"Why not?"
Sophie turned on her stool and looked up at him with enormous, serious eyes. "It upsets the spiders," she said. "They live in my bra. When I drink they get very excited and they start to move around." She put a hand on her chest. "Do you want to see Mildred?"
There was a silence in which the seven young men from Scranton looked at her hand, and Hazel looked at the ceiling, and somewhere on the floor a slot machine paid out in a long, mocking jingle.
"She's very friendly," said Sophie. "She likes men."
The bachelor party left. They left at a brisk walk and then something faster, and the groom looked back over his shoulder once, his face the color of cottage cheese, and Hazel would remember that face for the rest of her unlife.
"Was Mildred in there?" she said, when they were gone.
Sophie fed the machine another quarter. "Where else would she be?"
It was a while after that when Hazel looked down at her chips and thought: we should probably be going.
They had a plan. The plan had been made in the hotel room in Washington with a road map spread out on the bed. Leave Atlantic City by three. The Expressway to the bridge, the bridge to Delaware, down through Delaware into Maryland, three hours on the bike. The campground had cabins, and someone was holding one for them, and it had a door that locked and no windows worth worrying about. Leave by three.
She had no idea what time it was.
She looked around for a clock. There wasn't one. She'd known there wasn't one; she'd noticed it the moment they came in, and thought it was funny. She didn't own a watch. She'd never needed one. The night had always told her what time it was. She could feel the shape of it, mostly, the long middle and the slope at the end, the way you can feel stairs in the dark. In here she couldn't feel anything. In here it was the same night it had been when they came in, bright and warm and loud, and there was nothing to say it had moved at all.
She went and found Sophie. "What time is it?"
Sophie looked at her. Sophie looked around. Sophie didn't have a watch either.
They asked a cocktail waitress. The cocktail waitress, who had been on her feet for eight hours, looked at her own wrist and said, "Ten to six, hon."
Hazel walked. She didn't run, because running in a casino gets you looked at, but she walked fast, with her chip tray clamped against her chest and Sophie behind her with the bucket of quarters, through the cherry machines and the blackjack tables and the keno lounge and around the curve of the floor that went on and on without a corner, and out through the inner doors past the podium, where the guard in half-glasses had been replaced by a younger one reading a newspaper, and to the outer doors.
She stopped at the glass.
Outside, over the ocean, the sky had gone gray. Not dark. Gray. A long pale band of it lay along the bottom of the sky where the sea met it, and above that the dark was already thinning, and the stars over the water were going out one by one. The Boardwalk lights were still on, but they looked small now and yellow and tired. Down on the beach a man with a metal detector was walking slowly along the waterline, sweeping it back and forth, a black shape against the gray.
Three hours to Maryland. Forty minutes, maybe less, until that gray went pink.
"Hazel," said Sophie.
"I know."
"Philly's an hour."
"I know."
They stood at the glass. Behind them the casino rang and jingled and played its little songs, exactly as it had at midnight, and would at noon.
"Hotel," said Hazel. "There's a hotel upstairs. There's a hotel on top of every one of these things."
They went to the front desk. The clerk was very sorry. It was a Saturday in Atlantic City. They were completely booked. Every casino on the Boardwalk was completely booked; she knew because she'd been calling around all night for other people. Maybe something out on the Black Horse Pike? A motel?
The Black Horse Pike was a twenty-minute ride away, into the sunrise.
Hazel thanked her. She walked back to the middle of the lobby, to a spot under a huge chandelier, and stood there with her chip tray, and for a second she couldn't think of anything at all.
Then she could.
"Down," she said.
"What?"
"Not out. Down." Hazel was already looking past the front desk, at the wall behind it, at a plain door painted the same cream as the wall, with a little brass plate on it. EMPLOYEES ONLY. "Every one of these places is a city. They've got kitchens. They've got laundry. They've got basements, and the basements have got basements, and nobody goes in most of them for days. Somewhere down there there's a room with no windows that nobody needs till Monday."
"How do we find it?"
"We walk until we do."
Under
Behind the cream door the casino stopped being a palace.
The corridor was concrete, painted gray to shoulder height and green above, and lit with long tubes that buzzed. It smelled of bleach and cigarette ash and fried food. There were carts everywhere: room service carts, laundry carts piled with damp sheets, a cart of dirty glasses stacked in racks. People went past in uniforms, waiters and maids and cooks and men with tool belts, all of them moving fast with their heads down at the end of the night shift, and none of them looked at the corner of the corridor where Hazel walked, because as far as any of them knew, there was nobody in it. Sophie rode in Hazel's shirt pocket as something small and still, about the size of a beetle, and didn't move.
They went down a stairwell and found the kitchens, which were full of people. They went down another and found the laundry, where huge machines turned over behind round windows and the air was wet and hot as a mouth. They went down a third flight of stairs, narrower, where the paint was older and the tubes buzzed louder, to a corridor where nobody was.
The doors along it had numbers stenciled on them. Hazel tried them one at a time. A room full of folded chairs. A room full of cardboard boxes of paper napkins with the casino's crest on them. A locked room with a hum behind it, maybe electrical. And at the end, a door that said 0-17 SLOT REPAIR / STORAGE in black stencil, with a padlock on the hasp that was hanging open because someone had forgotten to close it.
Inside it was dark. She found the light switch, and a single bulb came on.
Slot machines. Thirty or forty of them, maybe more, standing in rows like gravestones in a cemetery, cabinets open, glass cracked, some of them with their insides pulled out and lying in plastic bins at their feet: reels, coin hoppers, coiled wires, little lit-up tops shaped like bells. Along the back wall were rolls of carpet, the same red and gold and blue pattern as upstairs, stacked like logs. The air smelled of machine oil and old dust. There was no window. There was a vent high in one wall, with a fan behind it turning slowly.
"This," said Hazel.
She went down to the back, behind the last row of machines, where the carpet rolls were stacked against the wall. There was a gap behind them, a couple of feet wide, dark, out of sight of the door. She put the chip tray on the floor. Sophie climbed out of her pocket and was a girl again, rubbing her arms, pale and shivering.
"It's cold," said Sophie.
"It's cold everywhere."
"It's colder here."
They pulled two of the carpet rolls a little forward to close up the gap, and lay down behind them on the concrete floor in the dark, Hazel on her back, Sophie on top of her with her face in Hazel's neck. Hazel pulled her jacket over both of them. Above their heads, through two floors of concrete, she could feel the building humming, the long low hum of a thing that never slept, the laundry machines and the kitchen fans and somewhere very far above that the bells and jingles and the dice.
She'd forgotten to turn the light off. It didn't matter. Somewhere outside the sun was coming up over the ocean and the man with the metal detector was standing on the beach in it.
"Hazel," said Sophie into her neck.
"Mm."
"How much did you win?"
"Don't know. Didn't count."
"You didn't count."
"I stacked."
Sophie laughed, very quietly, and then she was gone, heavy all at once, the way she always went, like a light switching off. Hazel lay under her and stared up at the dark between the carpet rolls and the ceiling. She had time to think one more thing. She thought: Benny's going to be telling people about me for ten years.
Then the day took her.
She came up out of it like someone dragged up out of deep water by her hair.
Something was wrong. She knew that before anything. Something was wrong and the wrongness had reached down into the dark where she was and pulled, and she was coming up because of it, slowly, much too slowly, every inch of her heavier than sand.
A sound. Metal on metal. A latch.
The door.
She tried to open her eyes and couldn't. She tried again. They came open a crack, and the crack was gray and blurred, and through it she could see the underside of the carpet roll, close to her face, and a strip of bulb light beyond it, and Sophie's braid lying across her chin. She couldn't see the door. She could hear it, though. It had opened. Footsteps had come in, heavy work boots on concrete. A man, whistling something through his teeth. Something tuneless. He stopped whistling.
She tried to move her hand. Her hand was by her side, under the jacket, under Sophie. She tried to move one finger of it. It took everything in her. The finger moved an eighth of an inch and lay still.
The boots came down the aisle between the machines. Slowly. Stopping. A cabinet door creaked open, and something inside it rattled. The man muttered to himself. "Where'd you go. Where'd you go, you little..." The cabinet door slammed. The boots came on. Closer. Another row.
On top of her Sophie didn't move. Sophie was gone, all the way down, a weight on her chest like a sack of wet sand, her face slack against Hazel's throat. There was nothing in her at all. There wouldn't be till dark. If the man pulled the carpet rolls aside, Sophie would lie there and look up at him with her eyes half shut and do nothing, and so would Hazel, because Hazel couldn't do anything either. She couldn't reach the knife in her boot. She couldn't hide. Nobody can stay unseen while they sleep. She couldn't even turn her head.
She could hear him breathing. He was in the last row now. The row right in front of the carpet rolls.
He stopped.
She lay there with one eye open a crack and Sophie's braid on her chin and the long red carpet roll an inch from her face, and she did a thing she hadn't done in thirty years. She didn't decide to. It just came up out of her from the bottom of somewhere, in her mother's voice, in the kitchen in Queens with the radio going: the old prayer, the one for the hour of our death. She didn't say it. She couldn't move her lips. She just went through it, the way you'd walk through a house you hadn't lived in since you were a girl, and found every room still where it used to be.
A cabinet creaked open, right in front of the carpet rolls. A clink. A grunt.
"There you are."
The boots turned around. They went back up the row, and the next row, and the door. The door shut. The latch clicked. The man started whistling again, out in the corridor, and his whistling went away down it and up a stairwell and was gone.
Hazel lay there with her eye open a crack until the crack closed by itself, and she was gone too.
Dusk
She woke the second time the normal way, all at once, with the night arriving inside her like a train pulling into a station.
Sophie was already awake. Sophie was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to her with her back against a broken slot machine, her braids half undone, holding the Polaroid in both hands in the light of the bulb nobody had turned off.
"Somebody came in," said Hazel. Her voice came out hoarse.
"I know." Sophie didn't look up from the picture. "I smelled him when I woke up. Machine oil and coffee. He was right here." She pointed at the cabinet in front of the carpet rolls. Its door was hanging open, and there was a gap in its insides where a part had been.
"I couldn't move."
"I know."
"I couldn't do anything, Soph."
Sophie looked up at her then. "Me neither," she said.
They sat there for a while. The fan turned behind the vent. Far above them the casino was getting ready for Sunday night, and the hum of it came down through the floor and into the soles of Hazel's boots.
Sophie held out the Polaroid. Hazel took it.
It looked worse under a bare bulb. Sophie was bright and grinning and every chip on the table shone. Next to her, in the curve of her arm, there was a woman made of shadow, with her face just about there if you knew where to look and two small white points where her smile was.
"I look like a ghost," said Hazel.
"You look like a pirate."
"I look like a pirate who's a ghost."
"Well," said Sophie, and took the picture back, and looked at it again for a long moment before she put it in its folder and the folder back in her pocket and buttoned the pocket shut. "Good thing that's what we're going as."
They walked out through the casino floor at six in the evening like two guests coming down from their room, Hazel with her chip tray against her chest and Sophie with her bucket of quarters. The floor was exactly the same as it had been at midnight, bright and loud and full, the same songs coming out of the same machines. The light was warm and even and made no shadows, and Hazel walked through the middle of it with her jacket over her arm and didn't have to think about her shadow once.
At the cage, the cashier counted her chips. She counted them twice, and then called a supervisor, who counted them a third time. The total came to fourteen thousand six hundred dollars. The supervisor asked Hazel to fill in a form for the IRS. Hazel filled it in with the name and the Fishtown address from her driver's license and a birth date of March 9, 1970, which she got right on the first try, and the cashier counted out a stack of hundreds that didn't fit in her envelope and had to go in a plastic casino bag with the gold crest on it.
Sophie cashed in her quarters. She'd won fourteen dollars and fifty cents.
At the inner doors, the guard with the half-glasses was back on the podium. He looked up as they came past, going out, and his eyes went over the two of them and over the plastic bag and away, to the next couple coming in, without a flicker.
"Night, ladies."
"Night!" said Hazel.
Out on the steps the Boardwalk was dark and the wind was coming off the ocean, and below them, on the bottom step, there was a little old man in a plaid sport coat lighting a cigar he was finally allowed to light. He looked up at the sound of the door and saw Hazel coming down the steps with her bag, and the cigar fell out of his mouth.
"Red!"
"Benny!"
"You're back! You came back!" He grabbed her hands. "Where'd you go? I looked all over for you. Come on. Come inside. The table's hot tonight, I can feel it."
Hazel looked over her shoulder at Sophie. Sophie, at the top of the steps with her bucket, raised both eyebrows very slowly.
"Benny," said Hazel, and squeezed his hands, and let go. "Benny, I gotta go to Maryland and be a pirate."
He stared at her. Then he started to laugh, and he was still laughing when they reached the bottom of the steps, and still laughing, somewhere behind them on the Boardwalk, when they reached the garage, and the gulls in the alley woke up and complained.