Everything's Eventual

There was a one-armed bandit—just that single one—in the lobby of the Rancher's, and although Darlene had never used it during her five years of work here, she dropped her hand into her pocket on her way to lunch that day, felt the envelope with the torn-off end, and swerved toward the chrome-plated foolcatcher. She hadn't forgotten her intention to give the quarter to Paul, but a quarter meant nothing to kids these days, and why should it? You couldn't even get a lousy bottle of Coke for a quarter. And suddenly she just wanted to be rid of the damned thing. Her back hurt, she had unaccustomed acid indigestion from her ten o'clock cup of coffee, and she felt savagely depressed. Suddenly the shine was off the world, and it all seemed the fault of that lousy quarter . . . as if it were sitting there in her pocket and sending out little batches of rotten vibes.

   Gerda came out of the elevator just in time to see Darlene plant herself in front of the slot machine and dump the quarter out of the envelope and into her palm.

   "You?" Gerda said. "You? No, never—I don't believe it."

   "Just watch me," Darlene said, and dropped the coin into the slot which read USE 1 2 OR 3 COINS

. "That baby is gone."

   She started to walk off, then, almost as an afterthought, turned back long enough to yank the bandit's lever. She turned away again, not bothering to watch the drums spin, and so did not see the bells slot into place in the windows—one, two, and three. She paused only when she heard quarters begin to shower into the tray at the bottom of the machine. Her eyes widened, then narrowed suspiciously, as if this was another joke . . . or maybe the punchline of the first one.

   "You vin!" Gerda cried, her Swedish accent coming out more strongly in her excitement. "Darlene, you vin!"

   She darted past Darlene, who simply stood where she was, listening to the coins cascade into the tray. The sound seemed to go on forever. Luckey me, she thought. Luckey, luckey me.

At last the quarters stopped falling.

   "Oh, goodness!" Gerda said. "Goodness me! And to think this cheap machine never paid me anything, after all the quarters I'm stuffing it with! Vut luck is here! There must be fifteen dollars, Darl! Imagine if you'd put in tree quarters!"

   "That would have been more luck than I could have stood," Darlene said. She felt like crying. She didn't know why that should be, but it was; she could feel the tears burning the backs of her eyeballs like weak acid. Gerda helped her scoop the quarters out of the tray, and when they were all in Darlene's uniform pocket, that side of her dress sagged comically. The only thought to cross her mind was to think that she ought to get Paul something nice, some toy. Fifteen dollars wasn't enough for the Sega system he wanted, not by a long shot, but it might buy one of the electronic things he was always looking at in the window of Radio Shack at the mall, not asking, he knew better, he was sickly but that didn't make him stupid, just staring with eyes that always seemed to be inflamed and watering.

   The hell you will, she told herself. You'll put it toward a pair of shoes, is what you'll do . . . or Patsy's goddam braces. Paul wouldn't mind that, and you know it.

   No, Paul wouldn't mind, and that was the hell of it, she thought, sifting her fingers through the weight of quarters in her pocket and listening to them jingle. You minded things for them. Paul knew the radio-controlled boats and cars and planes in the store window were as out of reach as the Sega system and all the games you could play on it; to him that stuff existed to be appreciated in the imagination only, like pictures in a gallery or sculptures in a museum. To her, however . . .

   Well, maybe she would get him something silly with her windfall. Something silly and nice. Surprise him.

   Surprise herself.

She surprised herself, all right.

Plenty.

   That night she decided to walk home instead of taking the bus. Halfway down North Street, she turned into the Silver City Casino, where she had never been before in her life. She had changed the quarters—there had been eighteen dollars' worth in all—into bills at the hotel desk, and now, feeling like a visitor inside her own body, she approached the roulette wheel and held these bills out to the croupier with a hand entirely void of feeling. Nor was it just her hand; every nerve below the surface of her skin seemed to have gone dead, as if this sudden, aberrant behavior had blown them out like overloaded fuses.

   It doesn't matter, she told herself as she put all eighteen of the unmarked pink dollar chips on the space marked ODD