The Closure

At midnight the pit boss came down the row and told them to color up and cover the tables, and Diane Kellerman, who had dealt cards in this town for twenty-six years and had never once seen a table covered that was not broken, did what she was told and did not understand it until the cloth was on.

The governor had said it that evening on a television bolted to the wall of the break room. All of it. Every casino in the state, every one, the strip in Las Vegas and the Row downtown and the Atlantis where she stood and the sad little places out on the highway with six slots and a bar, shut, at midnight, for thirty days, because of a thing in the air that nobody on her shift had known how to be afraid of yet. The floor had been thin all evening. Then thinner. By eleven there were more dealers than players, standing at their tables with their hands folded the way they were trained to, in a room that had never in its life been quiet and was learning how. She had dealt her last hand to a man from Fresno who had a ten and a six against her seven and had hit it and busted and had laughed and said, well, that is the end of the world then, and tipped her a red chip and gone up to his room.

Now the cloth was on. Green felt, and the cloth on top of it. Down the row she watched the other dealers do the same, one table at a time, the lights still on over all of them, so that the whole floor looked like a house where someone had died and the furniture had been draped. The slot machines were still lit. Nobody had figured out yet how to tell a slot machine to stop. They stood in their rows blinking and singing to nobody, and Diane took off her apron and walked out through them to the parking garage and drove home, and did not go back for eleven weeks.

Her grandmother Helen had worked the Mapes from the night it opened, and had told her, when Diane was young enough to think it was a warning and not a promise, that a casino was the one building in Reno that never closed, that the whole idea of the place was that the lights stayed on, that when Helen was a girl in the war the town had been full of soldiers at three in the morning because there was nowhere else in the state a man could go at three in the morning and be treated as if it were noon. Diane had believed her. Everyone had. It was the one thing about the town nobody argued with. You could argue whether the money was good or the people were, but you could not argue that the doors closed, because they did not.

For eleven weeks they did.

She drove downtown twice in that time, for no reason she could name, and found it the way she had been told it would be and still had not been ready for. The arch lit over an empty street. The Row dark. The big glass doors of the Eldorado and the Legacy with paper signs on them and nothing moving behind the glass. She parked on Virginia and walked in the middle of the street, because there was nothing to stop her, and stood under the arch, and it was so quiet she could hear the river.

Harrah’s was on the corner. It had been on that corner since before her grandmother was old enough to work, since a man named Harrah had come up from California with a bingo game in the thirties and had built it into the thing that had made the town, and Diane had never dealt there but had walked past it every working day of her life. Its doors were papered like the rest. The difference was a second sign, smaller, that she had to go up close to read, and that told her what she had heard in the break room in the winter and had not paid attention to at the time: that the building had been sold, before any of this, to people who wanted the building and not the business. There was talk it would not come back. She had thought the talk was the kind you always heard downtown and never believed. She stood there a long time. Then she went back to her car.

The reopening was the fourth of June. She was on the floor at seven, fifty-six years old, with a mask on her face and a sheet of plexiglass bolted to the edge of her table and a rule that she was to say nothing to a player she could say with her hands. The room came back slow. A dozen people at first, then more, blinking in the light, standing too far from each other, unsure, the way people are in a church they have not been in for years. Downtown, she had heard on the drive in, the Row had opened its doors at the same hour and the Nugget over in Sparks and the little places on the highway, all of them, every casino in the state lit and dealing again on the same morning. All but one. Harrah’s had stayed dark. It had closed on the same midnight as everything else in March and had simply not been given a morning. Eighty-three years, and it ended on a Tuesday with a cloth on the tables, and nobody had known to look.

A man sat down at her table, alone, older, in a windbreaker, and put a hundred-dollar bill on the felt and looked at her over his mask and said nothing, and she said nothing, and changed it, and dealt.

He had a nine and a five. She had a queen showing. He tapped the felt. She gave him a seven, and he stared at it, and then began to laugh, quietly, behind the mask, and shook his head and put another twenty down.

“I was in here the night they closed,” he said. “I told the girl it was the end of the world.”

“It was not,” Diane said. She squared the deck. “It was a Tuesday. Place your bet.”

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