below, cars on the freeway sound like slot machines in the night wind. It is a
sound I cannot escape, and it is twenty-four hours a day. This ramp has signs
that read no entry, and I think of mirrors with bad lighting in Las Vegas hotels.
They murmur, You’ve gotten old, you’re going to fail. Because you came to Las
Vegas to lose.
I am sitting poolside at the Sahara Hotel with Jackie, a receptionist at Mark
Moreno’s office. She called me earlier with the information that her husband had
shot himself to death three months ago. She tells me she writes poetry and keeps
a journal. She says it keeps her alive.
The gardens surrounding the pool are sleepy and shaded. The only noise comes
from mockingbirds hopping through olive trees. Jackie has soft red hair and
green eyes. She is 31 years old. Jackie quietly shows me pictures of her two
sons, Matt and Chris, aged ten and eight, respectively.
“David and I got married in 1981. He was a captain in the U.S. Army. We did a
lot of traveling like army families do. You make your home where you hang your
hat. We used to say that. Then David was affected by the military cutbacks in
1991. He was passed over for major, then the army sort of let him go. He was
devastated. This happened in Pittsburg, Kansas.”
Jackie lights a cigarette and puts on her sunglasses.
“We had been here on a trip and thought it was paradise. So first my mom and
sister moved to Las Vegas, then I sold the house in Pittsburg and moved the boys
and myself out here. David was in Germany, teaching. We got an apartment at
Desert Shores. The boys couldn’t wait for their dad to come back. You know,
David was an extremely confident man.”
Jackie lowers her sunglasses and looks at me.
“I’m sure he was very confident. He was an army man,” I say.
“Exactly. I got a job teaching, but it wasn’t much pay. When David came home he
thought a job would be a piece of cake. First, David had a job working on
commission for an insurance firm. A sales-and-suit job, he called it. It didn’t
work out. David came home from a military physical in 1993 with a note saying he
was severely depressed. He threw it down on the kitchen counter and laughed. I
didn’t pay any attention. Jesus. David wound up working as a security guard, the
night shift, and he hated it. Can you imagine? A captain? He had become so
horribly . . . disappointed.”
“You had no idea?” I asked.
“None. David killed himself on December 7. Just like that. The boys and David
and I were playing a family card game in the kitchen before they had to go to
school. It was David’s day off and he had a new-job interview late that
afternoon, so I asked my mom, Jean, to babysit the boys. I remember David made a
big point of walking me to the front door and kissing me when I left for work.
Then he tried calling me at work but I couldn’t talk. I was busy.”
Jackie goes on to explain they’d had an eviction notice delivered that day, the
second in a month. David had planned his suicide for at least three months.
Jackie remembers wearing a red dress and red shoes to work. She came home from
work to be met by her mother, who was running late. The boys were at a
neighbor’s house. On the front door was a letter addressed to Jackie’s mother.
It was in David’s handwriting. The first sentence read, “Dear Jean, please don’t
be angry with me but I have taken my life.”
Jackie says there was a moment that was indescribable.
As Jean continued to read the letter, Jackie became hysterical. Jean called 911.
In the letter, David detailed exactly where his body would be found: on a corner
lot of Charleston and Apple, not two blocks from their home. And about two
hundred yards in from the street. Jackie also discovered David had left her a
letter, a letter to each of their sons, and a videotape.
“David shot himself through the head with a pistol, military style, pointing the
gun up, at an angle beneath his right ear. He knew what he was doing. It was a
neat, clean shot. We were able to show the body at the reception.”
Jackie’s voice begins to crack. She lights another cigarette. I notice she has
two wedding rings, theirs, molded together on a gold chain around her neck.
“With his left hand he was holding a picture of the boys, and a picture of him
and me in dressy clothes. I was in a white dress. We were going to renew our
vows in a wedding chapel on the Strip in February 1994. . . . He killed himself
at sunset, facing Red Rock Canyon. He loved Red Rock.”
Jackie remembers running from the apartment those two blocks, seeing the police
helicopter with its searchlights, seeing the body bag being put into the
coroner’s wagon, and thinking, “This has got to be some kind of joke.” She
remembers screaming at a policewoman who made a disparaging remark, and that her
mother had to hold her back.
“Then I had to go home and tell my sons. You try telling two young boys their
father has just shot himself through the head. You damn well try that on for
size.”
Jackie begins to cry. She buries her head in her hands. I excuse myself, telling
her I need to use the rest room, and she nods her head knowingly. Inside the
men’s room at the Sahara Hotel, halfway between a pool and a casino, with a Las
Vegas widow outside, I turn toward the mirror to connect, however briefly, with
myself, but the mirrors have been removed. I begin to shake and hold onto the
sink. I don’t cry. There is no point.
It is dusk. Jackie lights one more cigarette as I sit down. Her eyes are dry,
focusing on the now-lit pool.
“It’s pretty here,” she says quietly. The Sahara sign begins its blue-and-white
blink. All the false moons are lighting the sky over Las Vegas.
“I’ll tell you who I blame. I blame the army for turning men into officers. And
Las Vegas. What a joke.” She shakes her head. “I’m moving the boys and me to
Pittsburg in May.”
This conversation takes place on the third of March, 1994. A Thursday evening.
Tonight, my last night in Las Vegas, I will not be able to sleep, and at four
o’clock in the morning, I will begin to drive.
In Los Angeles, several months later, I call Jackie’s apartment. A man answers
the phone. I sound bewildered. Jackie, he states, is getting the boys ready and
packed, the apartment cleaned out, she’s still working at the law office, she’s
busy. When I ask this man who he is, he laughs.
“Who, me? Friend, I’m the new husband.”
Jackie waves to me as she pulls her car onto Las Vegas Boulevard. The slot
machines inside the Sahara’s casino are chattering like drugged children. I feel
unclean, as though I have been bitten by something contagious. At the casino’s
doors I turn and look at the city beyond. It burns a blue not unlike a gas
cooking-flame turned down, barely touching its own air, until it is only a hiss.
This Las Vegas blue is the neon of the Stardust Hotel lit each evening. It is
the blue of the darkened Congo Theater before Kenny Kerr performs, and the blue
leftovers of sunsets that attend suicides. It is how poverty creates its own
blue skies, hoping God will be kind in a town leaving nothing to chance. It is
the whispered question before the trigger is pulled, the last blue moment when
all we can ask is why.