Eddie liked to gamble, mostly on the Westside but sometimes at the El Capitan, at the back when the tables were slow. Negroes weren’t allowed to gamble on the Strip or downtown, they weren’t allowed in the shows, no matter who was playing. Once in a while, someone came in and said he was a friend of Eddie’s, and then Del told Leo just to seat him in booth nine, where he and June sat. Del got away with these things. They were done quietly, and he had grown up here, so he had a little room in which to work.
And, of course, women liked Eddie. Sometimes he liked one of them long enough to bring her to dinner or for a drink after the show. They would sit in a private room at the back of the bar, June and Del and Eddie and whoever-she-was: a Jewish woman, a white man, a Negro singer, a colored woman. They would sit there, laughing and trading stories and sipping one another’s drinks, and maybe that’s why June didn’t understand how things really were in Vegas; what it really meant to be Eddie or the girlfriend or any of the people working in the back of the El Capitan.
June overheard the doorman say that Vegas was the Mississippi of the West; she listened when the California tourist told his friend that even Pearl Bailey and Sammy stayed in a boarding house off the Strip, but she didn’t pay them much attention. Del had grown up here, and his closest friend was colored; he and Ray Jackson had lived on the same block on North Third Street, had gone to the same elementary school, had worked the same job hauling wooden crates at the back of a downtown casino when they were about twelve. When she and Del married, at the county office in the middle of the night, laughing and excited and with a little whiskey to make them do it, Del had stopped to make one phone call. June figured he was calling Cora, but he had called Ray, and Ray made it there while they were still filling out the papers, with a ring of his wife’s that he said June could borrow as long as she liked. So what the tourist said, what the doorman thought, it wasn’t the whole story. She knew for herself that Vegas was not as simple as that.
Usually June’s new home made the rest of the country seem slow. Hung up. Here there was money and music and gambling and sex and drinking late into the night. And all of that was the center of town, was the domain of the prosperous, was what the town celebrated; it was out in the desert sunshine, not in the backroom alleys and dark bars of New York or Chicago or LA. To June, this world felt free and fast and stripped clean of the conventions that had closed in on her in New Jersey. Hollywood stars came to Vegas to play. The richest and the newest and the most beautiful, and they were there every night; they flocked to the big casinos, and they came to the El Capitan pretty often too.
Las Vegas was the future. She saw this in the entertainment, in the way people lived, in the way the town kept growing; the future was there in the atom bombs and the magnesium plant and in the dam south of town. To see that dam, one drove a winding road up the side of a steep treeless mountain, and when June looked out the car window, down a thousand feet to an angry Colorado River, she imagined the people who had come to this desert before her: the ones who had taken the measure of Black Canyon, narrow and deep and forbidding, scorching hot, and decided that they could stop that river, they could turn it aside, they could conquer these sheer rock faces, pour three million cubic yards of cement in a raging river’s path. It was extraordinary, it was inspiring—surely humans could do anything. That was the lesson June learned from her new home.
But then what about the Negroes? Cora said the bad times for colored people started when that dam got built, during the Depression. Workers poured in, from all over the country, but especially from the South: sharecroppers and farm laborers, some Negro and some white, and all dirt poor. Southern white folks brought their ideas about colored folk with them. A quarter century later, if you were Negro, you shopped and ate on the Westside, your kids went to schools without windows or floors or chalkboards, and you worked in the back of a casino as a driver or a maid or a janitor. Or your band played in a casino, for huge money, but you couldn’t spend it in Vegas, because there was nothing you were allowed to buy, no place you were allowed to go. It was 1957, and some people thought things were changing in the country, but in Vegas it had gone the other direction.
Anyone could make it in Las Vegas, anyone could be a winner, just by being smart and playing the game the Vegas way. And most of the time, the Vegas way left tired old ideas in the dust, but not when it came to Negroes. When it came to Negroes, Vegas was worse than New Jersey, and June did not understand how that could be.
But even so, she and Del and Eddie did pretty much what they wanted in their own casino.
3
Three months after Marshall was born, June and Del flew to Cuba. They brought along Cora, and she watched Marshall as June learned the mambo from some dancers she met at the Tropicana, and Del talked business. By day, they sat next to the pool at the Sans Souci, or on striped loungers dug into the white sand of the beach. The air was moist and salty, and the baby was happy in his little cave created of an umbrella and a towel. People called Havana the Latin Las Vegas, and Del was thinking about the growth of the El Capitan; to June, the whole world seemed open and lovely and possible.
When they returned, Marshall got sick, and June stayed home with him and did not go to the casino at all for a week.
Del walked in mad on Thursday.
“Eddie didn’t get the house.”
“What? I thought it was already done.”
“Owner backed out. Said his kids had gone to school with the neighbors’ kids, and he just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sell the house to him.”
“Can he do that?”
Del didn’t answer. Eddie wanted his own house. He was sick of paying rent for a shack made from wood stolen from Nellis Air Base; for the same money, he could own a new house almost anywhere in town. But every time Eddie tried to buy a house in another part of the valley, it went off the market. All his money couldn’t buy Eddie a house with hot water, or an indoor toilet, on a street that didn’t turn into a muddy creek in the August rains. “Negroes like to live together” is how June heard it said. Del said, “Negroes’d like to have hot water and a decent school.” But that’s all he said.
It had looked like Eddie was finally going to get a house. He’d told the owner he wasn’t the fathering kind, wouldn’t be having any kids to send to the schools, and maybe that’s why the guy had considered it long enough to tell Eddie he’d sell it to him, long enough for Del and Eddie to get the cash together. Cash deal. High dollar. But it still hadn’t worked.