Part 3 — Card Number Two
The monitor showed a woman at a machine in a green dress, laughing, with a glass of tea beside her. She was not alone. A man sat on the stool next to her with his arm along the back of her chair, in a ballcap with a rig company patch, and every time the reels turned he leaned in and kissed her cheek. The supervisor paused the picture. “That is Friday night, 11:20,” she said. “The card of Odell Simms was in the machine.”
Wade leaned in first, and I saw his face change as the supervisor enlarged the picture. “Duane,” he said. Not a question. Duane Hebert, his driller on the platform, his best friend since the second grade, the man who had been best man at his wedding and who had stood beside him at the funeral of his father. Duane, who was supposed to be on the rig that Friday night, because Wade was on the helicopter and Duane had told him he would cover the shift. My son sat down on the casino carpet.
I knelt beside him. At seventy-six my knees objected, but I did it. I put my hand on the back of his neck, as I had when he was a boy with a fever. The casino, to its credit, did what a good house should. A security man in a gray blazer set a chair beside us, and a young woman in a vest brought a paper cup of water. Nobody stared. The whole bank of machines seemed to hold its breath.
Crystal said nothing at all. She had put both of her hands in her lap, with the jackpot ticket crumpled between them. She looked less like a villain than like a woman who has been at the table too long and cannot find the clock. When the supervisor asked if she wished to say anything, she shook her head. Duane was found that same night in his truck in the parking lot of the casino, with the engine running, trying to decide whether to leave.
The rules of the Gaming Control Board are old and sensible. A jackpot belongs to the registered holder of the card in the machine, and when a second account has been created with false papers, the board investigates it and cancels it. The second card, in the name of my dead husband, had been made with a forged death certificate attached to a forged application. The board paid the jackpot to me, as the registered holder of the first card, since I had not wagered a dollar, and held nothing against me.
It was, then, my money, forty-eight thousand two hundred and twelve dollars and fifty cents, and I did what a farm woman does with an unexpected sum. The payday loans, $3,500 at an interest rate that should be against the law, were cancelled by the lender after a letter from a lawyer, because they had been taken out in my name by electronic signature from a laptop in my own house. I paid the hospital the part of the pneumonia bill that insurance did not cover. I set aside a sum for the property bill, and the rest I put in the cedar quilt chest, under the Army blanket of Odell, out of habit.
Crystal was charged with forgery, identity theft, the fraudulent sale of the tractor, and unauthorized use of a gaming account, and she pleaded guilty in the spring. The judge sentenced her to probation, a period in a program for compulsive gambling, and a restitution order of $9,000, which she paid within the year by selling the SUV she had financed with the other money. Duane was charged separately with conspiracy and forgery of the documents. His employer dismissed him from the platform.
Wade filed for divorce in the winter. He did not do it in anger. He did it quietly, with a lawyer in Shreveport, and he asked only for his half of what was honestly theirs. He came to my kitchen on a Sunday and sat across from me with his hands around a cup of coffee. “Mama, I should have asked,” he said. “You asked,” I said. “You asked on the telephone at midnight, and you came in a helicopter. That counts for a lot.”
Lamar Pickens delivered the tractor himself on a flatbed one cold Saturday in February. He had been honest to the penny: he sold it back for what he paid, and when I tried to add a little for the trouble, he put his hands in his pockets and shook his head. The green John Deere 4430 came down the ramp in the yard with the old rumble, and Wade climbed onto the seat, and I stood with my arms folded and tears running down my face, like a woman at a wedding.
It would not start at first. Odell had always said she wanted a minute to think about it. Wade pumped the throttle, and cleared his throat, and finally the engine caught, a hoarse and wonderful cough, and she began to idle in the yard with the smoke rising straight up in the cold air. I put my palm on the fender. It was warm. I had not touched that tractor in almost a year, and the paint was exactly as I remembered it.
A good tractor and a good marriage are alike in one respect: neither of them starts well after a long silence, and both of them run for a lifetime if they are looked after. I thought of Odell in the south field, in June, with the engine idling under him, and I was not afraid.
Now, on Sunday evenings, Wade and I sit on the porch with the tractor visible through the open doors of the shed, and watch the soybeans move in the wind. The new player card that the casino sent me as a courtesy I cut in half with the kitchen scissors, and Wade held the pieces while I dropped them in the stove. He asked what I was going to do with the rest of the jackpot money in the end. I said I thought I would buy him a good set of tools. He laughed. It was the first time since the casino.