In Joliet
In Joliet, I lost a lot of money, first in the bowling alley with my cousin, then in the casino. My cousin can bowl. Bowl and hustle.
“Your own flesh and blood?” I said.
“Why not?” he said and took a fifty off me.
At the casino, we met these girls, a bachelorette party. They wanted us to play blackjack with them.
“You don’t know how or what?” my cousin said.
“They know.” I could tell they were after us.
“We need help, I swear to God.”
The casino is a world where light shines through your tiniest nerves like they were solar pipes and all the voices you can hear say, “Hey, sport, big player, come on over.” Over and over and over. You can’t help it, you look around for Frank Sinatra, for somebody in velvet, for a never-ending highball. Almost as a relief. Anyway, the ladies faked like they were bad for a couple hands, then wrung us out. But not just with cards. I mean every, “I’m still thirsty,” and, “Let’s have another daquiri,” and, “Try this, it’s good.” Then they vamoosed.
“Fuck them.” He said it like he’d miss them anyway.
“I told you they knew what they were doing.”
“What was on their necklaces? It looked like pasta. They all had on the same necklace. Did you see that?”
“Penises.”
He cocked his head, scrunched his eyes half closed, then raspberried, “No fucking way.”
“It was a bachelorette party.”
Outside, it had begun to snow. Everything went on forever. Down the way, the Metra hooted and the cold sound rolled down the tracks like an avalanche.
“Let’s find a place for a bite to eat. I’m in the mood for some fries and a Reuben,” my cousin said.
“I can afford one cup of coffee.”
He stopped, leaned on a stop sign, tried to take out his wallet. “My hands are fucking freezing.” When he got the wallet out, he tossed it to me. “What’s in there?”
I flopped it open in my own freezing hands. His driver’s license, expired. Twelve dollars. A Sammy Sosa baseball card. I plucked it out.
“Look at this,” I said.
“For good luck.”
“Remember when your dad took us to Wrigley when we were, what, ten years old? First time at the ballpark.”
“Yeah. I loved going to Wrigley with my dad.”
“I never saw anything so green in the whole fucking world.” I put the card back, handed him the wallet. “You heard from him lately?”
“Fuck him.”
“Yeah,” I said, then, “I’m sorry.”
We wandered another block and another after that, both of us quiet, until we found a Golden Nugget. I told the waitress coffee for both of us, and that we’d probably sit awhile. She smiled. Nodded. “Be right back. Hot coffee coming up.”
“I’m supposed to grow up. Someday. We’re all supposed to grow up,” my cousin said.
“Yeah, but not today.”
“Someday, though.”
“Someday.”
“If I knew where he was, I’d tell the cops. I’d call the marshals myself. Tommy Lee Fucking Jones. I don’t give a shit.”
She came back, put the coffees down, the spoons, the cream. “Sugar’s there, if you need it,” and pointed to the sugar dispenser. To me, it looked like a crystal tower.
“Let’s say I have kids one day,” my cousin said, “What am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t scare me. Kids. Jesus.”
Just then, the girls came in, the bachelorettes, the blackjacks. They were holding up the bride-to-be by her elbows and she was laughing her ass off. They knocked over the sign that says you have to wait to be seated. They howled, then said they were sorry to the whole damn diner.
“Jesus,” I said.
When they saw us, they came over, squeezing and shuffling down the aisle and the girl who did the talking slapped our table. “You guys. I can’t believe it. It’s you.”
Boy, they were a lot of beautiful faces. And they smelled good. Like flowers en masse. Or a flock, a murder of beauties. We were surrounded.
“It’s us,” I said, “There’s room,” and scooted down and some of them sat down and my cousin inched closer to the wall on his side but not all the way and turned the menu over in his hands and one of them asked him what he was having.
“On you, you mean?” he said.
“Hell yes on me.” They all screamed and cackled and I cackled too and my cousin, knucklehead, said, “Everything, then. All of it. The waitress is nice. Jesus, I’m starving.”
Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021), The Realm of the Dog (J. New Books, 2024), Cult Life (Tenpenny Books, 2024), and Mercy (Walnut Street Publishing, 2025.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
