Bad Men

Then he would be gone, his departure ignored by the dealer, and eventually someone else would move to take his place at the table. It didn’t pay to complain too often, though. There were a lot of girls ready and willing to take your place if you got a reputation as a troublemaker or as a woman who couldn’t handle a little attention from the men happily throwing away their savings for a couple of complimentary, watered-down bourbons.

Marianne had been born into a family in the town of Tunica, in the cotton country of northwestern Mississippi, close to the Arkansas border. She was raised almost within sight of Sugar Ditch, where slave descendants had lived beside open sewers a couple of blocks from Main Street. Her father ran a little diner on Magnolia Street, but Tunica was so poor it could barely support this meager enterprise. The bank took over the diner and covered its windows with wooden boards. Her father fell apart, and his family fell apart along with him. He grew depressed, then violent. On the day after he struck Marianne so hard across the head that she was deaf in one ear for a week, her mother packed up their things and moved her two daughters to Biloxi, where her own sister lived. They existed close to penury, but Marianne’s mother could squeeze a nickel until the buffalo shat, and her daughters received schooling and, eventually, found places of their own. Later, she and her husband were reconciled, and he came to live with his wife and her sister for the last three years of his life, a pathetic man destroyed by bad luck, poor judgment, and an inability to stop drinking before the bottle ran dry. He was buried back in Tunica, and two years later his wife was buried alongside him, but by then Tunica had changed. Casinos had brought wealth to what had once been merely a staging post on the way to better things. There was now a carillon clock that played hymns on the hour in a little park downtown, free garbage pickup, even street signs (for in Marianne’s youth Tunica could not afford to extend to visitors the luxury of a formal indicator of their whereabouts, a situation of which the late Harry Rylance would undoubtedly have disapproved). Marianne had been considering moving back there to escape Biloxi, for there would be work in Tunica’s casinos and the quality of life was considerably better there than on Marianne’s stretch of the Gulf Coast, until she met Edward Moloch.

The nature of her father’s disintegration, and the sights that greeted her each evening in the casinos, had made her wary and intolerant of those who drank even moderately, but Moloch didn’t drink liquor. She asked him for an order as soon as he sat down and placed his chips carefully upon the table, but he refused the offer of a cocktail and instead tipped her a ten for every soda she brought him. He played seven-card high-low stud quietly, declaring high and low more frequently than any other player, and at least tying each way three times out of five. His clean white shirt was open at the neck beneath a black linen jacket without a single crease. He was a big man for his height, with broad shoulders tapering to a slim waist, and strong thighs. His hair was dark, with no trace of gray, and his face was very thin, with vertical creases running down from each cheekbone and ending on the same level as his mouth, like old wounds that had healed. His eyes were blue-green, with long, dark lashes. Marianne wouldn’t have called him handsome, exactly, but he had a charisma about him. He smelled good too. He wore the kind of aftershave that made women pause as they passed him, so that it slipped in under their defenses. And he came out ahead, not so far as to draw attention to himself, but sufficiently above the average for the house to breathe a light sigh of relief when he surrendered his chair. Due in no small part to his generosity, Marianne finished her shift that night with $200 in bills tucked into her purse. It almost made up for the drunks and the maulers.

When her shift finished, she decided to walk home in order to stretch her legs and allow for a little time to herself. Marianne was an attractive woman, and had learned to play it up on the casino floor but to tone it down for the streets, so she drew few glances as she headed toward Lameuse Boulevard and Old Biloxi.