Free The Rescuer by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

to warn them The house always wins. That is the point of casino gambling.
    They’d have liked me less, if I spoiled their excitement with such warnings. Maralena would not swoop upon such a dour boring person and wetly kiss the corner of her mouth.
    Within minutes, however, the girls had lost money at blackjack. Precious five-dollar tokens, swept away by the Hispanic dealer with the thin mustache. There had been the expectation—(maybe I’d felt this too)—at least, the childish hope—that being exceptionally pretty “sexy” girls with an obvious if unacknowledged rapport with the blackjack dealer, that they would have a better chance of winning than more ordinary players of whom most were middle-aged white men with raddled jowls.
    There had to be some special reward in Atlantic City, if not elsewhere, for looking like Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes.
    “You play with us, Lyd’ja! C’mon, girl! We got to get back what we lost, can’t go home broke!”—so they plucked at my sleeves.
    “I don’t think so,” I said faltering, “blackjack isn’t my—game,” but they laughed at me, not altogether pleasantly I thought but as you’d laugh at an exasperating relative slowing you down by dragging a paralyzed leg, or a blundering blind relative—“We gon pay you back, Lyd-ja—long before we headin home. But you got to help .”
    So I stood with them at the blackjack table. I was a hesitant player, destined to lose. At least at the slot machine my failure had been less conspicuous. Blackjack was an exhibitionist’s game—you had to expect to win, or your instinct was to stand mute, and withdraw your tokens. To lose a bet publicly —this was hard.
    But we lost. And we lost again.
    “Fuck!”—Maralena’s voice was not so musical now but New Jersey nasal and flat.
    When we drifted from the blackjack table at which we’d lost the blackjack dealer didn’t so much as glance after us. Two rowdily inebriated couples pushed in eager to take our places.
    Abruptly then we left the classy Borgata, which my companions bad-mouthed as a stuck-up shitty place. They’d bypassed craps, roulette, baccarat—these games intimidated them. Even blackjack took too much thinking. My companions thought of gambling as an opportunity to win.
    The remainder of the Friday evening we spent at Trump Taj Mahal on the Boardwalk. Here, amid a sleazier sort of glamour, the girls seemed to feel more comfortable. The crowd was younger, less well dressed, with less money to spend; louder, brasher, more conspicuous drinkers. Despite its prime location on the Boardwalk, the Trump Taj Mahal was visibly run-down. (The famous Boardwalk itself was run-down, too. Homeless men were camping on benches and in doorways trying to shield themselves from the chill wind off the Atlantic Ocean; some of them looking so still, stiff and cold, wound in filthy blankets like mummies, Mercedes was moved to giggle nervously— Them ain’t corpses are they? ) But inside the garishly lit casino roaming men were attracted to the girls, bought them drinks and “bankrolled” them so that they could continue gambling.
    This was the purpose of coming to Atlantic City, I realized. They’d made the trip before. They’d “gambled” here before. The prizes of the evening had to do with free money, so to speak, plucked by the girls like overripe fruit on a tree.
    I did not mind being sidelined, watching. Like a chaperone, though I wasn’t much older than my friends. Out of my black handbag which was nothing like the small glittery evening bags the girls were carrying I drew a half-dozen pages of the Eweian manuscript printout to read, or try to read, despite the dim lighting that made everything seem undersea.
    Infanticide. Ritual cleansing. Not an act against the infant but an act of desperate self-survival. Involuntary, instinctive.
    I thought this must be so. In a long-ago era before God entered time with His strictures of human moral behavior.
    Yet, there were other