Free On the Back Roads by Bill Graves

to promote its games. If it takes a carnival ride for the kids to get their folks in the casino, the kids will get their carnival ride.
    The Macini casino/motel complex now has a movie theater, a swimming pool, a twelve-lane bowling alley, a mini-mart, a video-game room, and an RV park. To call it an RV park, really, is stretching it. It’s a parking lot with utility hookups behind the casino. But I stayed there a couple of days. I thought it might get noisy and maybe wild at night, but it never did.
    The keno game at Casino West has aged well, considering its hardware may have been used by the game’s inventor: two spindles, a hole punch, a lighted display board, and a spinning wire barrel that blows out numbered Ping-Pong balls.
    Take off his red tie, white tennis shoes, and jelly-donut-size belt buckle that read Casino West in sterling, Sal Pezzino could be an orchestra leader or college professor. He’s got that look of intellect. While most proper keno games operate with a minimum of three people—manager, writer, and runner—Sal is a one-man show. On his feet most of his four-to-midnight shift, he never takes a break. His dinner is delivered, when a waitress gets to it. He runs to and from the men’s room. Facing Sal’s corner dominion were a row of empty chairs and a table. Even with no apparent players, he kept running games as if all Nevada were watching. “I’ve got multi-race tickets,” he explained. “You can play up to five games ahead.” Sal is seventy-three and a widower.
    A lady all in pink, including hair and eyeglass frames, gave Sal a flirtatious greeting and filled out a chair. One hand, heavy with yard-sale jewelry, was black as coal from rubbing money. Sal appeared neither to have the time nor the interest to give her much attention. She played no keno and soon left.
    At the table, a lady about thirty-five in a glittering Uncle-Sam outfit called herselve Sage Saber. “That’s my professional name. Do you want my real name?” she asked me.
    â€œNo, one’s enough.”
    Sage explained that she is a psychic, astrologer, and numerologist. She also con ducts seminars on Eastern medicine and holistic health. Today, she was here running a bazaar.
    Sage is hard to miss in her tall, sparkling gold hat rimmed with a red, white, and blue banner. I ran into her later seatedin front of a slot machine. She was losing big time. For you or me, it would simply be bad luck. For a fortune-teller with her credentials, it must calamitous.
    A side-street building, which over the last century has been everything from the city morgue to a poodle parlor, is now the Hitchrack Deli. A burned-out Merrill Lynch broker from Boston, Joe Arnote, runs it. He came here in 1987 cause “Nevada is the cheapest place in America to open a bar.”
    â€œSmall towns are great. When I opened this place, even my competitors sent me flowers,” Joe said, as he pulled out a sheet of aluminum foil to wrap a “to go” sandwich. “I can tell you right now,” he stopped to look at his watch, “who is in Dini’s, what they are drinking, how many they have had, where they are sitting, and probably what they have on.” Joe laughed. “What’s that tell ya about a small town?”
    â€œHabits die hard, I guess.”
    He handed the sandwich to a waiting customer.
    â€œSmall-town people.” He paused. “They accept you for what you are. What you once were doesn’t matter. There is no pretending or fake stuff in this arena. A phony won’t last six months here. This town is too tight a circle.”
    Joe said that many come to his place from the casinos after they have lost their twenty bucks for the day. “This has become a gamblers’ refuge. I don’t see them much when they win. So I see them a lot.”
    I spent my last night in the hills above Yerington at a new but almost empty RV park overlooking the old