The Numbers

Eddie Morales rode the morning bus from Sparks into Reno on a Wednesday in February 1938, the windows fogged on the inside and the world outside the color of old tin. He wore a clean white shirt under his coat and his cashier’s eyeshade tucked into his coat pocket. He was twenty-four years old and he worked the day shift at the Bank Club on North Center Street, behind a brass cage with a marble counter, and he had not been late once in two years.

The bus ran the same three-mile route the streetcar had run, when there had been a streetcar. His father had ridden the streetcar to work for years, a wooden car with iron wheels that hummed on the rails between the two towns from 1904 until June 1927, when the bus replaced it. Eddie had been thirteen the year the streetcar stopped. He remembered the last week of it, his father taking him along on a Saturday morning, the way the conductor had looked at the boy and shaken his head and said, “You won’t see another like this.” His father, Carlos Morales, had stood on the running board and given the conductor a dollar he could not afford to give and they had ridden the line end to end one final time, Sparks to the Truckee River and back, and the next Monday the bus had been there instead and the rails had begun to be lifted out of the pavement piece by piece.

Eddie thought about the streetcar most mornings on the bus. He thought about it the way a man thinks about a thing that is gone but has been replaced by something that does the same job, more or less. The bus was warmer in winter, that was true. It also did not run a fixed line on its own steel; it could go anywhere the road could take it, and that flexibility was supposed to be progress. But it lacked the sound. The streetcar had hummed. The bus only ground its gears and complained.

The bus crossed into Reno on Fourth Street and Eddie got off at the corner of Center, two blocks south of the railroad tracks. The town was quiet at that hour. The casinos stayed open all night but the volume came down toward dawn and at seven in the morning Virginia Street had the flat, slept-in look of a place still gathering itself for the day.

The Bank Club occupied the basement of the Golden Hotel and an annex up on the corner of Center and Second, and Eddie went in through the side door on Second the way the staff did. The night cashier, a man named Roy who had been at the cage since before the law changed, nodded at him from behind the bars. They counted the drawer together. Roy poured what he had into a leather sack and handed it across the counter and Eddie took the seat and put on the eyeshade and adjusted the lamp and the day began.

He liked the cage. He liked the geometry of it: the brass bars, the marble counter polished to a soft sheen, the steel lockbox under his right hand, the green ledger and the pencil sharpened to a point. He liked the work. The work was numbers. A man came to the window with chips and Eddie counted the chips and counted out the money and the man took the money and went away, and another man came, and Eddie counted again. The numbers added up at the end of the shift to a figure he could explain in a single line of the ledger. There was no ambiguity. The chips were chips. The money was money. The shift was eight hours.

His mother had not wanted him to take the job. She was Rosa Morales, who had cooked at a divorce ranch in the twenties and had worked the kitchen at the Golden Hotel through Prohibition, and who believed that work that produced food was real work and that work that handled other people’s money was not. Eddie had not argued with her. He had simply gone to the cage every morning and come home every evening and put a portion of his pay in an envelope on the kitchen table, and after a year of it she had stopped saying anything.

His uncle Miguel, who had worked the Sparks roundhouse since 1904 when the Southern Pacific had moved the division point from Wadsworth and brought the houses on flat cars behind it, had been more direct. “Cashier is a job,” Miguel had said. “Railroad is a calling. You will see the difference one day.” Eddie had not yet seen the difference. He thought he might never see it. The cage paid better than the roundhouse and the work was cleaner and at the end of the shift he was not covered in coal dust or grease.

A woman from one of the divorce ranches came to the window at ten o’clock with a stack of chips and a cigarette in a long holder. Eddie counted the chips. The total came to forty-two dollars and seventy-five cents. He counted out the bills and pushed them across the counter and she thanked him and tipped him a quarter and walked away. He put the quarter in the small tin he kept under the counter for that purpose and made the entry in the ledger and went on to the next person.

At noon he ate his lunch in a back room with Roy and a second-shift man named Hubbard, the three of them eating sandwiches their wives had packed and not saying much. The room smelled of old smoke and machine oil and the particular dryness of a building basement.

“Quiet day,” Hubbard said.

“Quiet day,” Roy agreed.

Eddie nodded and finished his sandwich and went back to the cage.

In the afternoon the Bank Club filled up the way it always did. The chips went out and the money came back. He counted, and counted, and counted. By six o’clock the soles of his feet ached against the wooden floor of the cage and his eyes had the dry, fixed feeling that came at the end of a long day of looking at small numbers under a lamp.

At seven he closed out. The drawer balanced to within a dollar, which was within tolerance, and Roy came on for the night shift and Eddie hung the eyeshade on its hook and went out the side door into the street.

Virginia Street was lighting up for the evening. The neon was on. The crowd was thickening. Eddie walked north along Center to the bus stop and waited with three other men for the eastbound to Sparks. Across the street the lights of the Bank Club shone steady and white. The marquee said BANK CLUB in capital letters and beneath it, in smaller letters, the names of the games.

The bus came. Eddie boarded and paid his fare and took a seat by the window. The bus pulled away from the curb and turned east on Fourth Street and rolled out of the casino corridor toward the railyards. Through the glass he watched the lights of Reno fall behind, and ahead, in the dusk, the lights of Sparks beginning to come on, the long low arc of the roundhouse where his uncle was finishing a shift, and beyond it the dark line of the Sierra catching the last of the day.

He had not seen the difference yet. He thought, watching the railyard lights grow, that perhaps one day he would.

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