The Hanged Man's Song

whiskey and drugs and gambling and women, because those things are for amateurs and rock musicians. I worked all the time—maybe dabbled a little in women. Unlike whiskey, drugs, and gamblingaddictions, I’d found that women tended to go away after a while. On their own.
    As did the political-polling business. I sold out to a competitor because I was losing patience with my clients, with my clients’ way of making a living.
    Politicians fuck with people. That’s what they do. That’s their job. Every day, they get up and wonder who they’re gonna fuck with that day. Then they go and do it. They’re not of much use—they don’t make anything, create anything, think any great thoughts. They just fuck with the rest of us. I got tired of talking to them.
    So the years went by, with painting and computers, and now here I was, talking to Congressman Bob. I wheedled and begged, even pled poverty, but eventually said I’d do it—truth be told, I needed a break from the fever dreams of my latest paintings, a suite of five commissioned by a rich lumberman from Louisiana.
    Then there was my love life, which had taken an ugly turn for the worse.
    Getting out of town didn’t look that bad. That’s why, for the past two weeks, I’d been working in the belly of the Wisteria.
    >>> THE Wisteria was a casino and hung off a pier on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, between Biloxi and Gulfport. Designed to look like a riverboat, it was the size of a battleship. Sweeping decks of slot machines, which would take everything down to your last nickel, sucked up most of the space. There were also three restaurants, two bars, and a poop deck for the low-return games.
    Muzak, mostly orchestrated versions of old Sinatra sounds, kept you happy while you cranked the slots, and gave the place itsclass. All of it smelled of tobacco, alcohol, spoiled potato chips, sweat, cleaning fluids, and overstressed deodorant, with just the faintest whiff of vomit.
    I was inside for six hours a day, thinking about painting and women, while throwing money down the slot machines. The job was simple enough, but I had to be careful: if I screwed it up, some bent-nosed cracker thug would take me out in the woods and break my arms and legs—if I was lucky.
    Or, I should say, our arms and legs.
    >>> MY friend LuEllen had come along. She actually liked casinos, and I needed the help. She was also doing therapy on me: she referred to my lost love as Boobs, and had worked out a complete set of verbs and adjectives based on that root word. The day before, in the Wisteria’ s fine-dining restaurant (“The best surf-and-turf between New Orleans and Tallahassee”), she’d held up a glob of deepfried potato and said, “Now there’s one boobilicious Tater Tot.”
    “You give me any more shit, I’m gonna stick a Tater Tot in one of your crevices,” I said, with more snarl than I’d intended.
    “You’re not man enough,” she said, unimpressed. “I’ve been working out three hours a day. I can kick your ass now.”
    “Working out with what? Golf? You’re gonna putt me to death?”
    She pointed a Tater Tot at me, a little edge in her voice. “You may speak lightly of my crevices, but do not say bad things about golf.”
    >>> THE JOB: Miss Young Republican Anita Nosere—who was, from the pictures I’d seen of her, fairly boobilicious herself—gother money from her mother. Her mother was managing director of a syndicate that owned the Wisteria. Congressman Bob had been told that the casino was skimming the take, thus shorting both the U.S. government and the state of Mississippi on taxes. The skim was one of those simple-minded things that are almost impossible to spot if the casino does it carefully enough.
    It works like this: the casino advertises (and reports to the tax authorities) a given return on the slot machines. If that return is even a little lower than the rate reported, the income increases sharply. That is, if you report that your machines will return 95 percent to the players, but you really only return 94 percent, and a million bucks a night goes through the slots, you’re skimming $10,000 a night. In a few months, that adds up to real money.
    Of course, you have to be careful about state auditors. For a politically well-connected company, in Mississippi, that wasn’t a major problem: “Them boys is crookeder than a bucket of cottonmouths,” Bob said.
    The congressman could have hired one of the big independent auditing companies