The Silver Legacy

Diane Kellerman stood at her blackjack table in a casino that had not existed a year ago and waited for them to let the people in.

The felt in front of her was so new it still had the smell, and the chips in the rack were bright and unhandled, and above her, above the whole enormous floor, hung the thing everyone had come to see, a dome the size of a small sky with a mining rig built up into the middle of it, a hundred and twenty feet of iron and timber and moving parts that would, on a schedule, come to life with ore buckets and a story about a silver baron who had never lived. His name was Sam Fairchild. They had made him up in an office. The awning over the Virginia Street door said 1895 in gold, and none of it was true, and it had cost somewhere north of two hundred million dollars, and it was, Diane thought, magnificent in the way that only a thing built entirely on purpose can be.

She was thirty-one and she had dealt in three houses downtown and this was the biggest job she had ever had, or the biggest anyone had had in this town in a long while. Outside, on the street, a fireworks crew was setting up, and the Reno Philharmonic was tuning under a canopy on Virginia, an orchestra playing for a casino, which told you something about the size of the bet. The Silver Legacy was two companies at once, she had learned in the weeks of training, the Eldorado on the south side and Circus Circus on the north, two rivals who had decided that the only way to hold the ground was to build together and wall in the block, and they had run enclosed bridges over the streets so that a person could walk from one house to the next to the next without ever touching the outside air or the cold or the empty storefronts a block away. The whole downtown was pouring itself into these three buildings because the rest of it was going quiet.

Her grandmother had not come. Diane had offered to bring her, had offered twice, and Helen had said, at seventy-six, from her chair, that she had opened one casino in her life and once was the correct number. Helen Kellerman had worked the floor of the Mapes on its opening night in December of 1947, a girl of twenty-eight carrying cocktails through the first high-rise hotel and casino in the whole country, the pride of the town, ten stories against the Sierra with a supper club on the roof. She had worked the Mapes almost the entire way down, the Sky Room and then the lobby and then the years when the newer places outgrew it, and she had walked out of it for the last time when it closed, and it stood empty now three blocks from where Diane was standing, dark, its windows dead, waiting for the town to make up its mind whether to love it or be rid of it. Everyone said the wrecking ball was coming for the Mapes. Everyone had said it for years.

There was a symmetry in it that Diane tried not to look at directly. Her grandmother had opened the last great house of the old kind, the one a family had built and put its name on and lost, and here was Diane opening the first great house of the new kind, the one two corporations had built together with a made-up baron in the ceiling. The Kellermans had always been where the money changed hands. Old Otto had run a saloon on this street when the town was three years old. His son Frank had kept it going through Prohibition by calling it a soft drink parlor and selling something else in the back. Helen had carried the trays. Now Diane cut into a fresh shoe of cards under a plastic sky, and it was the same trade it had always been, she supposed, the house against the stranger, only the house kept getting larger and the family kept getting smaller inside it.

The pit boss came down the row checking tables, a serious young man with a clipboard and an earpiece, and behind him the floor supervisors took their positions, and the dealers stood a little straighter. Diane squared her rack. She thought about her grandmother in the chair at home, who had said one more thing as Diane was leaving, had said, they will love it for about ten years, dear, they always do, and then they will build the next one, and she had not said it unkindly, only the way a person states the weather. Diane had wanted to argue and had not, because Helen had opened the Mapes when the Mapes was the future and had lived to watch it become the past, and a person who has done that has earned the right to a flat prediction.

Somewhere out on Virginia the fireworks started, a muffled thud and then another, and through the doors Diane could hear the orchestra come up under them, brass and drums, playing the town into its future the way a town plays itself into anything, loudly and hopefully and with the bill to be figured later. The competition was coming and everyone knew it. The California tribes were talking about casinos of their own, the mountains between Reno and the coast were about to stop being a wall, and this whole silver palace was in part a race against that, a bet laid down before the odds turned. But that was next year’s worry and the year after’s. Tonight there were fireworks and a hundred and twenty feet of pretend mine and a room full of new felt.

The doors opened. Diane heard them before she saw them, the change in the air, the swell of voices coming across the acres of carpet, and then the first of the crowd was flowing in under the dome with their faces tipped up at the rig and their mouths open, the way people’s mouths go open under anything built to make them feel small in a pleasant way. A man in a good jacket peeled off from the current and dropped into the first seat at her table and set down a hundred-dollar bill and grinned at her, and Diane grinned back, because that part was real, that part was always real, and she spread the bill flat on the felt for the eye above to see and called out the change and reached for the cards.

Play it out, the pit boss said behind her, to no one and everyone. And she did.

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