The Hanged Man's Song

to do his research, but that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Me, he could get for free, and get a good idea if the charges were true. If they were, then he’d hire the big auditing company, do the research, and hang the Noseres, momma and daughter together, all in the name of truth, justice, and the American Way.
    >>> EXACTLY what we did was, we dropped dollars—and quarters and nickels—into slot machines and counted the return, and then ran the results through a statistics package. We wanted 98percent confidence that we were less than half of a percent off the true return. We therefore needed to take a large random sample of machines and had to run enough coins through each machine that we’d get a statistically accurate return on each.
    I’d chosen the target machines the first night, using a random numbers program in the laptop I carried. We’d been at it ever since, dropping the dollars, quarters, and nickels, doing the numbers at night, avoiding crackers with bent noses, and generally dancing around the possibility of acts of unfaithfulness, if that’s what it would have been.
    Can you be unfaithful to a mood, to a sense of guilt? I mean, the woman was gone. . . .
    But Marcy’s departure had driven me into an emotional hole. A number of good women have walked out on me, and there’s no way that I can claim it was always, or even usually, their fault. When the first bloom of romance fades away, they begin to pay attention to my priorities. Sooner or later, they conclude that they’ll always be number three, behind painting and maybe computers.
    They might be right, though I still hate to think so. There was no question that as I got older, I’d become more and more involved in the work. I’d sometimes go days without talking to anyone, and become impatient when a woman wanted to do something ordinary, like go out to dinner.
    That was not a problem with LuEllen. I’d known her for a decade, spent hours rolling around in various beds with her, and still didn’t know her real last name or where she lived. I knew everything about her but the basic, simple stuff.
    At this point, we were not in bed. I don’t know exactly whatshe was doing, in her head, but I was just drifting along, dropping coins, thinking about painting and sex and listening to the rain fall on the casino roof, the car roof, and the motel roof, thinking about getting back to St. Paul and the serious work.
    >>> L U ELLEN and I were staying in separate rooms at the Rapaport Suites on I-10, one of those concrete-block instant motels with a polite Indian man and his wife at the front desk, a permanent smell of cigarette smoke in the curtains, and a dollar-a-minute surcharge on the telephone. The place wasn’t exactly bleak, it was simply nothing. I can’t even remember the colors, which were chosen not to show dirt. My room was a cube with a can, a candidate for existential hell. And we couldn’t get out.
    Rain had been falling since the day we arrived. A hurricane was prowling the Gulf, well down to the south, but had gotten itself stuck somewhere between Jamaica and the Yucatán. The storm wasn’t much, but the rain shield was terrific, reaching far enough north to cover half the state of Mississippi. We’d been kept inside, Noseres to the grindstone.
    And life was looking grim for the mother-daughter duo. The numbers said they might be skimming two percent.
    >>> WE HAD just finished a three-hour session with the slots, and after freshening up—taking a leak, I guess—LuEllen came down to my room, pulled off her cowboy boots, and sprawled on the bed to read Barron’s.
    She’s a slender dark woman with an oval face, a solid set ofmuscles, a terrific ass, and a taste for cocaine and cowboy gear, to say nothing of the odd cowboy himself.
    “Numbers?” she asked, without looking at me.
    “Yeah.” I was sitting with my head thrust toward the laptop screen, the classic geek posture, and my neck felt like it was in a vise. “How about a back rub? My neck is killing me.”
    “You haven’t been very attentive to me and I’m not sure a back rub would be appropriate,” she said. She turned a page in Barron’s. “Or any other kind of rub.”
    “You wanna do the fuckin’ numbers?”
    “I’m not getting paid the big bucks.”
    “Yeah, big bucks . . .”
    She sighed and tossed the Barron’s on the carpet; she was basically a good sport. “All right.” She popped off the bed, came over and went to work on