The driver is looking at the hitchhiker but his mind is somewhere else, somewhere very far away from the casino. Only after he feels the soggy cigar paper between his own lips does he recall the hitchhiker’s look of pure insistence. Why had the driver capitulated so easily, not just now, but at everything the hitchhiker suggested?

“I owe this sonnofabitch nothing”: his warped, internal voice.

“There. Not so bad, hey?”: a voice from beyond.

The cigar is supposed to be the best, imported from a hard-to-reach hacienda up in the mountains of Cuba. To the driver, it tastes like he is smoking the moldy carpet below. In fact, he would rather do just that.

The driver’s face must be the illustration of aghast. He considers running back through the rows of machines and tables, down the stairs, out the grand entrance, past the ridiculous-looking doormen, getting into his pickup and flooring it all the way to Michigan. He wants to, but his feet can only follow in the direction of the two men.

He berates himself for a lot of things, and thinks: if I wanted the extra money so bad, I should have robbed and killed this sonnofabitch when I had the chance and dumped his body in the desert. It would at least have served as good practice. Now he finds himself lapping along like a puppy, and sucking on the foulest thing he had ever put in his mouth.

A few shallow inhales and he impales the cigar in the first ashtray. The man who gave it to him does not care. He is a few steps ahead, with the hitchhiker leaning in close, no doubt drinking in whatever bullshit the man has been so kind to puree and strain for him in advance. This man – the one who wears a suit that looks like it has recently been exhumed from a corpse, and who goes through the trouble, or worse, pays others to go through the trouble, of carefully shaving his head to the last whisker and waxing it to a sheen- is supposed to be a sixth or seventh founding member of America’s gambling haven. That would make the hitchhiker an elected councilmember. The driver does not regret that he is incapable of letting his hold on reality loosen to the point where any of this would make sense.