Twentynine Palms reunited Curtis with guys he went through MP school with at Leonard Wood, guys his own age, and they got to be pretty tight, keeping each other entertained, driving to San Diego or TJ or Vegas on weekends. Damon always organized the Vegas trips: caravans of marines speeding across the desert, taking over whole floors at Circus Circus or the Plaza, semper fi’ing back and forth over craps tables and handing fistfuls of taxpayer dollars over to the girls at the Palomino and Glitter Gulch. Damon’s excursions always drew new faces, younger guys, marines Curtis had never met, and they all wanted to talk about Damon. Shit, they’d say, that guy’s the craziest MP in the Corps. But Damon wasn’t crazy. He always kept it together: pacing himself, quarterbacking, pulling the strings. Always in good working order when everybody else was throwing away their money, puking on their shoes.
On the last trip, they were moving in a pack through one of the big casinos—Caesars, or maybe the Trop, scaring civilians, razzing flyboys from Nellis—when Curtis felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find Stanley there. Stanley looked thin, even gaunt, but still dialed in tight; he was lithe and strong in Curtis’s awkward embrace. When Curtis asked what brought him to town, Stanley just gave him a funny grin that could’ve meant do you have to ask? could’ve meant you’d never guess. They talked for a minute about Curtis’s dad, about the Corps, about people they both knew back East, and then the conversation turned a corner and Curtis, maybe three-quarters drunk, found himself unable to keep up. Stanley was telling a story about a hand of blackjack he’d played at the Barbary Coast—about something that happened during it, or something it made him think of—and then about an English magician named Flood, and a famous trick he did in which unrelated objects moved in ghostly parallel, as if linked by invisible threads. Curtis kept expecting Stanley to explain how the trick was done, or to connect it back to the blackjack game, but he never did, and suddenly he was silent, watching Curtis, waiting for a response.
Now, sitting in the booth at the Gold Spike, sponging spilt yolk with folded-over toast, Curtis is shaken by the memory: it cools his blood, stifles his appetite. It’s hard to say why. Partly it bothers him that he could fail so completely to understand a man he’s known his whole life. But that’s not it, or not entirely. Something else is poisoning the recollection: a nightmare feeling, irrational and uncanny. A sense of menace hidden in plain sight. The presence of an impostor. As if it wasn’t really Stanley that Curtis met in the casino that night. Or, worse, that it was Curtis who was off, who wasn’t really himself.
At the time, of course, he didn’t feel any of this: it was just an awkward moment. He and Stanley stood there; Curtis looked down, shuffled his feet. Then Damon walked up, and Curtis introduced them.
And that was it: the first time the two of them met. It seemed like such a small thing then. Like nothing. Now Curtis can barely track what has followed from it.
The rest of that night is a drunken blur in his memory, but he retains one last lucid image: Damon sitting at a $25 table, bright-eyed and focused, smirking at his cards as Stanley hovered behind him, a hand on his shoulder, whispering into the shaven base of his skull.
So in a way, Curtis figures, all of this is his own fault.
6
The dayshift comes on at noon, and Curtis begins walking down Fremont, from the ElCo to the Plaza, stopping at every casino along the way. He talks to croupiers and dealers, waitresses and bartenders, floor people, security guards, and every pit boss or casino host whose ear he can bend. In each case he tailors his story to his audience, mostly blowing variations on I’m looking for a friend, he’s staying somewhere in town, I’m hoping to throw some action his way. Everybody gets Curtis’s cell number, and he drops a few double sawbucks where he thinks they might do some good. A couple of people say they’ve seen Stanley in the last week or so. Everyone over the age of forty seems to recognize his name.
Curtis was nervous at first about operating in the open, laying such thick spoor, but he’s over that now. If he’s not visible, then this isn’t going to work, not in what little time he’s got. He’s never been wired for cloak-and-dagger shit anyhow, which by now Damon should know. Sneaking around, in Curtis’s view, generally amounts to time-wasting; better to just say what you want, then own whatever comes with wanting it. If Damon has a problem with that approach, he could have called somebody else. Out here Curtis has done nothing wrong, has nothing to hide from. Not yet, anyway.
At each place he stops, he makes the same clockwise circuit of the tables, scanning the crowd for Stanley’s bald head, his narrow shoulders, his beaked nose. He comes up empty every time, but always feels like there’s something he’s not seeing. He’s rusty, and still doesn’t trust his eye.