The Casino

Hugo S. Simões

ROCKHAM COUNTY

There used to be an airbase up in Rockham County, near where you’ll now find a place called Jackie’s, if you go snooping around (Jackie is a fine lady, and she keeps all things discreet). From the West-facing windows of Jackie’s, ironically close to the strip, you can see its defunct apparatus shrouded by a mess of chest-high weeds – a sight, I expect, not much for romance. But Jackie’s wasn’t always the mainstay of Rockham County (Rock’em, not Rock-ham), where fun tends to be a scarce commodity. Before it, when there was certifiably nothing to do, we had only the vague promise of Rockham Air Force Base. Those of us inclined to boredom saw in it a realm of possibilities, just out of reach. I myself would have never made it through that infamous gate if it wasn't for Stevie Hawthorne.

I have no recollection of meeting Stevie. Sergeant Hawthorne – a bald, effusive man with a speaking voice like a blown-out bullhorn – was an air force pararescuer and a friend of my father’s: Stevie, his only daughter. While for most of the year they were absent from our daily life, in the summer (at the beach, at the counter of the ice cream parlour or under a passing rock) Sergeant Hawthorne was everywhere, and with him – I tended to hope – Stevie. 

On most days, stranded on my beach towel, I would turn my back on the sea and wait to catch the Sergeant’s glistening top peeking over the white wall which concealed the parking lot beyond, hoping that Stevie’s red mane would be in tow. Often I was greeted only by the Sergeant’s booming laughter and painful slaps on the back, but on the fewer occasions in which Stevie showed up – slugging along with her hands in the pockets of her khaki shorts, her hair in her eyes – I was over the moon. While the Sergeant stood by my father’s side howling like a jolly drill instructor, while they talked and talked and talked, Stevie and I would run off, returning only for an occasional ice-cream treat. 

During our escapades, Stevie would rail against the drawbacks of the beach: it was, above all, a place ripe for fascism. You couldn’t leave without a ride and you couldn’t hide from the elements. So it was that Stevie’s pale skin was always doused in sunscreen, her opinionated button-nose particularly daubed – a fact she resented (she was no wimp). The sea, too, wasn’t much in her line, and I went to great lengths each time I wanted us to go for a swim, if only for a casual glimpse at Stevie out of her khakis (for a while I thought they might be glued on). 

It often occurred to me, dawdling along with Stevie through the wet strand, that if anything I was tolerated: her ginger brows were perpetually knit, and her rants against humanity seemed perfectly fitted to target my unjustifiable confidence:

“I hate hypocrites. And liars. And stuck-ups.”

And whatever Stevie hated, I’d consider avoiding. But despite my best efforts I did not conquer her immediate affections, but the Sergeant’s. Struck by my closeness to Stevie, and perhaps swooned by my willingness to swim, the Sergeant came to find me a robust model of sunlit nimbleness – just the thing that Stevie lacked – and would often hark and haw to that effect, shaking me by the shoulders. My father, knowing of frequent strandings, would glance up from his book and smirk. He was equally placid whenever the Sergeant offered to take Stevie and me for an after-beach meal – which granted him book-time and lifted the burden of supervision. While at times we grabbed only a quick slice of pizza by the parking lot, others I was lucky enough to cross the threshold of the Oceanview Island Grill, conveniently situated atop a towering hill, smack in the middle of Rockham Air Force Base.

Those were not, the Sergeant often told me as he drove us past the sentinels, the glory days of Rockham airbase: a time in which the complex housed not one, but three Base Exchange facilities (BX), a large Commissary, a film theatre, a sprawling outdoor pool, and frequent themed parties were thrown at both the Officers’ and NCO Clubs (I was shown pictures of burly men in hula skirts and elaborate geisha outfits). Those days, the Sergeant claimed, had been and gone, and the Base was now working at a comparative half-speed. Looking around me, however, it seemed far from having lost its grandeur. Riding in the Sergeant’s car past finely trimmed lawns with Stevie by my side, I was always in an ecstatic daze.

The Oceanview Island Grill, our frequent final destination, was a fairly popular joint. Its name was the first in a series of tasteful fibs. To wit: the plateau the Grill stood on made things such that the view was not so much of the ocean but the adjacent parking lot, and there were also no islands to be spoken of for a fair number of miles, though this was part of a wider attempt at evoking a Pacific feel – a kindness.

The Grill’s aesthetic concerns were also thwarted by its interior decoration: a faintly mottled, pearly tile which clung faithfully to the floor, a light wooden paneling half-way up the textured walls, and an array of diner chairs and tables which matched the tiles just barely. But these things failed to put me off. Sitting just in front of Stevie, the Sergeant to our left, waiting to be called on to grab either an Oceanview Double Decker with a side of crinkle-cut fries or a slice of pepperoni-meatball pizza, I was transfixed by her presence, by the dark asphalt lot through the window behind her, by our styrofoam cupfuls of red Hawaiian Punch. 

Our trips to the Grill were part of a larger dream of cartoon foods and puppy dog love. But Stevie poked moodily at her steak-cut fries; she slouched over her punch and tinkered with her unused straw. And whenever the Sergeant went to the trouble of arranging for my entrance to the BX’s (a lengthy, troublesome process involving indeterminate amounts of stamps), my enthusiasm was offset by the way she’d cross her arms. The large, metal scaffolds full of technological trinkets; the long grey shelves covered in a rare wealth of the usual products (and all variations thereof); all of these things which I beamed at seemed to not only displease Stevie, but offend her – moral and aesthetically:

“He’s being a show-off.”

Or,

“Friggin’ fascists.”

My father too, walking me home (a handful of tootsie rolls stretching the fabric of my trunks pockets), would ask me to tell him, as I usually did, about “the choppers and humvees and fighter jets”, and while I raved, gesticulating wildly, eyed me with a condescending ease. He did not agree, however, that the Sergeant was a show-off: 

“Tom,” he’d say, raising his hand and pointing his bookmarked tome upwards, “is primarily a man of peace.”

“Primarily,” I would ape in an uppity tone, and laugh as he boxed me in the ears.

Rockham too was primarily a place of peace, and though I was far from militaristic, this seemed to do it little good. Peace, it seemed, had made for cracked brick homes, chipped concrete sidewalks and empty patchwork streets. Imagination ran so thin that no one in the local high school football team had ever thought of anything close to “Rock’em, Sock’em” for a slogan (it was, tragically, “Let’s kick it!”). There were days in which a passing car at noon was the height of hysteria. A hoot. So while I did my best to accommodate Stevie’s moral principles – mostly by keeping quiet – I couldn’t hide my love for the Base: it was excitement for the rest of the year. Nowhere else in Rockham could I step close enough a foot near a pool hall or slot machine den, but at the Base the Sergeant would keep guard as I ran a diagonal, entrance-to-exit spree through the plus 21 lounge of the NCO Club.

It wasn’t that Stevie was squeamish. Or dull. The cuts and bruises we sustained on a regular basis from romping through jagged terrain did nothing to ease her climbing. More often than not, she’d reach high ground with her feet unblemished before I, lagging behind, skipping to spend as little time as possible on the snaggletoothed ground, joined her on aching stumps. Stevie’s contempt for the airbase, I reasoned, was a question of familiarity rather than a high-held principle. The fact that she lived within the confines of the airbase stripped her of the yearning needed to share my enthusiasm – excitement abounded.

But the Sergeant too had a nagging refrain: that however good I thought the Base to be, I wouldn’t see it at its prime – a claim he always backed up with masquerades and fighter jets, and the ground trembling under colossal tankers. And while I continued to spend the better part of each year closing my eyes trying to conjure up visions of the Island Grill and Stevie come past the parking-lot wall, the idea of the long-lost fantasy airbase made me hope for better things.

*

On the day my father came into my room to wake me with news of budget cuts and closures, my left leg was still dotted with spines. Early that summer, at the beach, I had dared Stevie to come swim with me to an otherwise inaccessible cluster of rocks at the foot of a nearby cliff. At the cluster, and after a while of knocking us around, the strong current proved the slippery, moss-covered rocks impossible to climb. I waited for Stevie to throw in the towel before allowing myself to give up. Returning to the shore, I first noticed her limp quietly onto the strand, and then my father – bookless, his hands on his hips – facing me some feet away from his chair, closer to the shoreline. He signaled to the Sergeant, who came galloping away from the ice cream stand, scooped Stevie up into his arms and carried her to her towel. Before me, my father pointed down towards my feet. He said:

“How’s your leg?”

I looked down at my left leg and saw a colander-like circle on the side, about the size of a fist. Blood trickled down my thigh. I said:

“I didn’t even notice.”

My father walked me carefully to his folding chair, and I was faintly aware of affecting a sort of peacock stride, hitching up my trunks on the left side to impress any passing onlookers. He nudged me into the chair and, crouching beside me, said:

“That’s a sizeable sea urchin you’ve been courting.”

A few feet away, the Sergeant had somehow produced a pair of tweezers and was going to work on Stevie’s feet, one of which, while not bleeding, was covered in spines. I heard an “ow!”, and was filling up with a distinct feeling of superiority when my father, who had accosted the lifeguard at needlepoint and now returned with it duly disinfected, began to jab and prod at my leg. I was able enough to reach for my sunglasses, but if they didn’t give me away, the loud, blubbering bawling did. Lying on her towel witnessing the spectacle, Stevie’s face, I thought, seemed worried – but above all, dry. 

While I wasn’t allowed to stay in and sulk for the rest of the summer, I consistently avoided Stevie and the Sergeant at the beach, heading for the water at the slightest hint of danger. My exchanges with the Sergeant were perfunctory, and I turned down his dwindling offers to visit the airbase – and the Grill. Stevie strolled with her father, and I noticed her slowly taking to sunbathing. On the one occasion she joined me in the water to ask me along somewhere, I mumbled an excuse and slugged away, eyes fixed on my bright blue trunks. 

So when my father came into my room in the days when I still found urchin spines in my bed, carrying news of closure and realignment, the tragedy seemed appropriate. 

*

Even though the shutdown was not meant to be immediate, by the following summer – before I had time to backtrack on my denials – it was complete. The installations were vacated, the civilian employees let go, the military personnel divvied up among the wealth of remaining bases countrywide. Those of the civilians who attempted to stay in Rockham soon went the Sergeant’s way – and Stevie’s. The day he came to our house, alone, to say his goodbyes, I stayed in my room. My father did not give me away.

Years later, a man who called himself “the Engineer” (real name Max Pecker), known for sauntering through building sites in a ten-gallon hat, told me that no one knew the “sorry state that airbase’s in, and it such a wonder”. Only he, due to special permissions and secret engineer intel, knew the truth. He went off on a string of corroded Quonset huts and an empty, desolate runway. I feigned surprise, but I’d seen it too.

From Jackie’s Pleasure Dome.