The Buyout

Diane Kellerman had dealt cards in the same downtown block for twenty-one years, and she found out the whole block had changed owners the way she found out most things now, from a coworker on a smoke break, secondhand, after the fact. Marnie leaned against the cold wall by the employee door with her collar up and said, you hear they bought the other two, and Diane said, who bought what, and Marnie said, the Eldorado people, they bought out the partners, we’re all one house now, you, me, the Legacy, the tent next door, all of it one owner. Diane pulled on her gloves against the November cold and thought about that. Twenty-one years and the ground had shifted under her and nobody had thought to tell the people standing on it.

She had started on the felt the year the Silver Legacy opened, 1995, when the great silver dome was new and the fake mining rig under it rained fake silver dollars on the hour and the town still believed a big new place could save it. The Legacy had been built by two houses together, a joint thing, and one of those houses had sold to a bigger one and that one to a bigger one still, until the far partner was a company out of Las Vegas that owned casinos in cities Diane had never seen. She had never once thought about any of it. A pit was a pit. The cards did not care whose name was on the deed. But now the last of the outside partners had sold its half, and the family that ran the Eldorado two doors down had bought both the Legacy and the circus tent on the corner outright, and the three of them, joined already by the enclosed bridges people walked between them without ever going outside, were one property under one roof under one name.

The joke of it, she thought, working her way in through the back halls to the pit, was that after all the years of the town’s places getting swallowed by companies from somewhere else, the ones who had done the swallowing this time were a Reno family. The old man had opened the Eldorado in 1973 and run it himself and handed it to his sons, and now his sons had gone and taken in the two big houses on either side of them like a man buying up the lots next to his own. She could respect that. Her own people had done a smaller version of it a hundred years back and lost it all in the crash, the saloon on Virginia Street her great-great-grandfather Otto had opened when the town was mud and railroad men, the soft-drink parlor her grandfather had kept the front of clean and the back of wet all through Prohibition. There had always been a Kellerman standing behind some counter downtown taking the town’s money and handing back its pleasure. Her grandmother Helen had carried cocktails across the floor of the Mapes on the night it opened, the tallest thing in Nevada then, gone now, imploded into the river twenty feet from where Diane parked. Diane dealt blackjack. It was the same trade grown a hundred years older, and she was the last one in the family still in it.

She took her table and tapped in and started the shuffle. The floor was thin for a Friday. It was thin every night now and had been for years, ever since the tribes down in California had built their own palaces an hour off the interstate and the Sacramento crowd that used to drive up the mountain to Reno had stopped bothering to. You did not need to come all this way to lose your money anymore. Diane had watched the towers across the street go dark one after another in the bad years and come back, some of them, as condominiums, the felt torn out and the windows cut open and people living where the pits had been. The town had bottomed out and was climbing again but it was climbing on something else now, on the plants going up in the desert east of Sparks, on the money coming over the mountain from the coast, not on the tables. The tables were the old religion. She was one of its last priests and she knew it, and she dealt clean and fast anyway, because a thing being old was no reason to do it poorly.

Her first players were a young couple who did not know what they were doing and a heavy man in a work jacket who did. She pitched the cards and paid the winners and swept the losers and the young woman laughed every time she busted, delighted, the way people did when the money was not really the point. Somewhere over Diane’s head, three floors up and four floors up and out across the enclosed bridge to the property that had been a rival house yesterday and was family today, the same night was going on under the same new ownership, dealers she had never met pitching cards to strangers, all of it one thing now on the books in a way it had never been one thing on the floor. She wondered if they would keep the silver dome. You could not run the mining rig forever. Somebody in an office would do the math on it eventually, the way somebody had done the math on the Mapes, the way somebody always did.

The heavy man doubled down on eleven and caught a ten and grinned at her like they had done it together. She paid him and he tipped her a green chip and she rapped it on the table and dropped it and thanked him, and it went on like that, hand after hand, the old motions, until her break came and she pushed back from the table and let the relief dealer slide in behind her without the game so much as pausing.

She walked out through the back and then, because she wanted to see it, went up and out onto the enclosed bridge that ran above the street from the Legacy across to the Eldorado, the glass tube full of carpet and slot machines where you could cross from one casino to the next a hundred feet over Sierra Street and never feel the wind. Below her the town went about its Friday, the cars and the neon and the Arch throwing its red and gold light down the middle of Virginia. She stood in the bridge a while with the slots chiming around her. Yesterday she had worked in one house and this bridge had led to a rival. Tonight she worked in one house and the bridge led to the rest of it, and it was the same bridge, the same carpet, the same view, and only the name on the paper had moved. She finished her coffee and dropped the cup and started across to see the part of the family she had just been given, walking east above the street her people had stood on for a hundred and forty-five years, going to shake a stranger’s hand.

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