Benign or Begone

            It’s likely I was part of the problem, coming over from the video arcade where kids there thought I was pretty nice not to kick them out if they snuck in a hip flask. Or else, half my age, they’d say stuff like, “Holly, you’re hot.” I don’t really mind being eyeballed, but the after hours stalking made me dread the place. I make about the same money at the bingo parlor, other side of town, selling grids and daubers and drinks. Sure, some geezers still flirt, but they don’t pester me. Besides, the vast majority are ladies with names like Madge and Bertha and Deseret, and they rule the roost.

            That is, they did before some of those high school dropouts found the action here more satisfying than the arcade. There, they lost pocketfuls of quarters from God knows where they got ’em; here, they stand to win that money back—gambling laws in this state don’t reach into bingo parlors. Granted, some have an age policy, but the one I work at doesn’t yet. Yet.

            “Hey Holly,” a punk named Justin called out the second he came through the door, “twelve rows and a whiskey sour.” His tagalong followed with a virginal, “uh, the same.”

            I waited until they worked up the guts to look me in the eye. “Twenty-four bucks, boys. Two sours without the whiskey would bring that to twenty-eight.”

            Justin uncrumpled three Hamiltons. “Keep the change, Hols.”

           

            Not many regulars marked more than four grids at a time—especially during the ‘lickity split’ rounds where the caller moved on to a new number every eight seconds. Typically, it was around twenty seconds, but then you had the ‘sleepers’ problem where folks would snooze through their win and claim it later, noticing their numbers on the bigboard. Teens came in with lightning eyes and swagger: they’d see the ping pong fall before being called out, even though they had more grids to scan for the previous number.

            They also bought the grids that were hard to sell—those with O-66, the ‘devil’s number’. Flunking math didn’t mean they’d throw away a 1.3% advantage, and God didn’t seem to punish the choice.

            But Ol’ Elroy did. He’d play with as much gumption as anyone, rum & coke by the quart and devil-be-damned on O-66. His near-sightedness prevented an early read of the ball, but he had a wicked memory for what had been pulled and the odds of what remained. No one could call ‘bingo’ before the caller vocalized the full number, of course, and the juveniles were warned, berated and penalized for doing so. Ol’ Elroy would be on that cusp, too, but his friends (including the caller) rather appreciated him standing up to the upstarts.

            Then Madge approached me the other day with a bunch of daubers at her bosom. “Here,” she says, “sell these to those kids when they come in. Earn yourself a dollar each.”

            “What’s the catch?”

            Madge leaned in. “They’re dead from use. I just lipsticked the ends to make ’em seem viable for a couple daubs.”

            “That’ll take them outta, what, one round?”

            “Not if you keep sellin’ exactly these.”

            So I did that for an evening, the cat-and-mouse paying off. Justin just grinned through it—his winnings from the past week would pay for a hundred new daubers from Costco, and the next evening he gave me one with a bracelet of smarties around it. We couldn’t prohibit people buying their daubers from elsewhere, but there was a bribery clause I could have activated. Truth told, I wasn’t taking sides anyway: the parlor could use a little drama.

           

            Duly supplied this afternoon. Justin and his gang were coming earlier now, as games were easier for them to win against the assisted-living crowd, who’d never stay past 6pm. That gave the kids more cash and time to “get wasted—c’mon, Holly, it’s on us.”

            “What is?”

            They’d laugh and say lewd things, and I’d point to the ‘swear jar’ I made just for such occasions, and they’d throw in a dollar or two each. They’d size up their own effect and brag, like chicken-shit roosters. Justin, even though he rarely cussed, threw in an amateur calling card with his number and profession: ‘fixer.’

            I assume Ol’ Elroy never got such a card, but he was insistent today that these kids had something to do with rigging the system—even pointed at me as their ‘emaybeler’—the quart of rum & coke slurring his speech. He was flustered especially after the caller mistakenly said “B-19” and Deseret voiced up, “you mean ‘I’, doncha?”

            “Sorry ’bout that, folks,” the caller cleared his throat, “the number is actually B-9.”

            “Bingo,” announced a teenager who had seen it clearly before the gaffe.

            “No!” Elroy fumed, “I had I-19 for a bingo first!”

            “But there aint any I-19,” the winner reminded.

            “You pipsqueak! Get outta my sight—” Elmer was red as his dauber, which he flung at the kid.

            Justin picked it up and urbanely walked it over. “You dropped this, sir,” he said.

            Madge put her big body in between them, mostly to settle Elroy down. He’d have none of that, though, swinging haymakers until he collapsed, clutching his chest.

            “You killed him!” somebody screamed, and all the teens but Justin fled. To his credit, though: he kept his cool and rolled Ol’ Elroy to his back and began to administer CPR. He moved the heels of his hands with athletic elegance, then opened Elroy’s mouth to blow in, back off, pump some more and blow some more. The old man’s breathing returned just about the time real paramedics burst in.

            “Thanks, man, we got it from here.”

            Nobody else said anything to Justin, if the looks were a measure of relief and ‘begone, like the rest of ya jackals’.

            I told him, “mouth-to-mouth aint so recommended nowadays.”

            He smiled, “was only thinkin’ of you, Hols,” and vanished.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2020)