Once again I realized that we’d struck out in finding any useful additions to our colony. Since it was already late afternoon and there were no towns along the highway heading east for many hours, I took them up on there offer of staying the night.
As time ticked by and we chatted I saw just how unfit these survivors of the holocaust were for any purpose I tried to think of. Our talk descended to the most mundane trivialities. They didn’t even ask us about our colony though we mentioned there were others. At one point the card dealer asked us what the weather was like where we came from and then, with hardly a reply went off on a long diatribe about how hot it was here in the summer and how they had to sit nearly naked at their gaming table during the day, with no ice for their drinks. This was a picture I had no desire to visualize. They kept drinking and chain smoking the whole time we talked, repeatedly offering us drinks we kept politely refusing.
Before dinner the other woman went off and returned pushing a bar maid’s tray with plates, two boxes of stale crackers and a stack of sardine cans. To top it off, the dessert, the coup de grace of this fine culinary feast was a large unopened jar of dill pickles.
We ate right on the gambling table, most of us completely silent, the red-faced man pausing to remark at one point: “We don’t usually eat off plates.”
With dinner finished I freed the women from further social obligations by sending them upstairs to find us two suites. I asked them to take the guns to our camper and collect our night things and whispered to Sarah to climb the stairs to the very top of the hotel, for the best rooms and to distance ourselves from our hosts, as we could tell just by looking at them that none had ever proceeded above the second floor and never would.
Ted and I stayed a few more hours, it would be rude not to. We even partook a number of gin and tonics with them as we removed to the black jack table, the very one we first found them at and joined them in play, each receiving a stack of chips that had no value for a game that had no variation, talking little while we scrutinized our cards.
As I reflected upon this dismal scene I realized these people were little better than the drunk I’d found on the park bench in Oregon. They were hardly more sober than he was, keeping only enough wits about them to play the same card game over and over, smoking away, examining their hands and drinking their drinks from morning late into the night.
Being in a quantitative mood as I sat there I did the math. With our practiced dealer a hand took about three minutes. That would mean about twenty an hour and played for more than ten hours a day that would put the total to somewhere near a hundred thousand a year. In a decade that would put the sum at a million. What a waste of precious time.
I could see here something like a death march in motion. The constant smoking and drinking, going through the motions of a game, an activity with no relevance, gambling with chips of no worth on and on as seasons passed until one by one they passed away. I could see who would be the last to go, he was sitting next to me and seemed a little better than the rest though caught up in the spider web of their downward spiralling blindness.
When it grew dark he stepped out and brought back a dozen dim LED lights on stakes which were enough to light up our single table for play. He’d screwed leather straps around the sides of the table to hold them. They were landscape lights with solar cells on their tops. Placed in the sun each morning they refuelled their batteries and would last some six hours into the night. He told me he worked for several of the casinos nearby in landscaping, cutting grass, trimming bushes and maintaining these lights, his gambling addiction preventing any further advancement in his career before the fall.
I mentioned to him, in the brief pauses between hands when fresh drinks were poured, the approximate location of our farm north-west of Santa Rosa and that he’d be a welcome addition anytime, that the roads were safe and empty if he ever desired to drive away. My vivid imagination pictured him in this gloomy room dejected, all the others dead, no cards to play, the last man standing and still middle-aged. I dreaded the thought.
Soon after that Ted and I made apologies for our weariness after a long day’s drive and we politely retired for the night, slowly trudging up the winding staircase, with the sad lot of those below us forgotten and the thought of the arms of our lovely women waiting for us at the top beckoning us on, a stairway to heaven.
