The Conversion

Diane Kellerman had been dealing blackjack in downtown Reno for eleven years, long enough to have learned that a casino floor tells you nothing about the weather and nothing about the year, and so it was only on her breaks, standing in the employee lot behind the Silver Legacy in the spring of 2006 with a cup of coffee going cold in her hand, that she could see what was actually happening to the town, which was that it was turning the places people used to gamble into places people were supposed to live.

You could stand in that lot and count them. The Sundowner had gone dark two and a half years back, one tower already crawling with a crew that was going to make it into apartments and call it something with an Italian sound to it. The old Golden Phoenix down the way had closed for good over the winter and a developer had bought it and started gutting it to the bare columns, twenty floors of hotel scraped out to be sold as condominiums. The Comstock had quit being a casino years ago and was the Residences at something-or-other now. And down on the river, where the movie theater used to be, they were topping out a brand-new tower, thirteen stories of it, condominiums with a view of the Truckee, going up new while the old ones came apart, so that from the employee lot Diane could watch the town demolishing and building the same idea at the same time in two directions.

She dealt for people who lived in Sacramento and Roseville, mostly, now. That was the part the tourist board did not put on the billboards. Somewhere out past the Sierra the tribes had opened casinos of their own, big ones, close to the coast, and a man who used to drive four hours to Reno for the weekend could now drive forty minutes, and so the numbers that had carried this town since her great-grandfather’s time had started, quietly and then not so quietly, to go the other way. Nobody on the floor said it out loud. But a dealer feels the count the way a farmer feels a dry spring, in the thinness of the tables on a Tuesday, in the way the boss watched the drop, in the fact that the answer the town had come up with was to stop asking people to gamble here and start asking them to buy a one-bedroom.

She was a Kellerman, which meant she had a longer view of it than she wanted. Her grandmother Helen had dealt the other side of this same trade, cocktails instead of cards, and had carried a tray through the Mapes on the night it opened in 1947 when a high-rise hotel-casino was the most modern thing in America, and had walked the Mapes again empty the night before they blew it up, and had died a few years after that with the whole downtown skyline she had worked in mostly gone or going. Before Helen there had been a Kellerman saloon on Virginia Street, a soft-drink parlor through Prohibition, a hardware store after the banks failed. The family had made its living for a hundred and thirty years off the simple fact that people came to this stretch of desert to do things they could not do at home. And now the coast could do them at home.

“You watching them tear up the Phoenix again,” Marnie said, coming out for her own smoke. Marnie had dealt craps at the Sundowner until it closed and had landed at the Legacy the way a lot of them had landed, sideways, grateful, one house short.

“They took the sign down this week,” Diane said.

“They’ll put a nicer one up. Granite countertops.” Marnie lit her cigarette. “My cousin’s trying to buy in one of them. Says in five years you won’t be able to touch downtown for what they’re asking now.”

“Your cousin ever been down here on a Saturday night?”

“That’s the pitch. It won’t be like this. It’ll be nice.” Marnie said nice the way you would say a word in a language you did not speak. “Restaurants. People walking dogs. Like it’s a regular place.”

Diane drank the cold coffee and did not say what she was thinking, which was that she could not decide whether that was the saddest thing she had heard all year or the only sensible plan anyone had, and that the two might be the same thing. A regular place. Reno had never once in its life been a regular place. It had been a river crossing and then a railroad and then a divorce mill and then a neon canyon full of people losing money on purpose, and every one of those had been somebody’s whole livelihood and every one of them had ended, and maybe the town was only doing again what it had always done, which was quit the thing that stopped paying and become the next thing before the bank noticed. Her grandmother would have known which it was. Her grandmother had watched the Mapes go from the newest thing in the country to a hole in the ground and had never once, that Diane heard, called it a tragedy. She had called it the business.

“Break’s up,” Marnie said, and ground the cigarette out under her shoe, and they went back in through the loading door and up onto the floor where it was always ten o’clock at night, into the noise and the cold recycled air and the light that came down through the great fake mining rig under the dome, and Diane took her table back from the relief dealer and washed her hands in the air out of habit and picked up the deck.

There were four of them waiting to play. A young couple who looked like they were on a package, an older man in a Giants cap, a woman by herself who had the careful patience of somebody making a small amount of money last a long time. Diane knew all four of them without knowing any of them. They had come to the desert to do a thing you could still, for now, only really do here in the old grand way, at a felt table with a stranger’s hands moving the cards, and whatever the town decided to become when it grew up, whatever they built out of the gutted towers, tonight it was still this, and she was still the one dealing it.

“Change a hundred,” the man in the cap said, and laid the bill on the felt.

Diane spread it flat, called the color out to the pit the way she was supposed to, and stacked his chips in front of him, red and green in the false light, and set the cards down at the edge of the table for him to cut.

“Good luck, folks,” she said, and pitched the first hand out across the felt, and behind her, three blocks off, in the dark inside the old hotel, the crews went on quietly turning the town into somewhere to live.

---