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blocked out most rainfall. If you liked sunshine and dirt, Nevada was the place for you. But you had to share it with the lizards, snakes, and scorpions because they were the only other takers.
    Two hours up the road she got off the bus at Beatty and found a medical doctor-veterinarian in a flat-top adobe near a weathered, bullet-holed sign that said GATEWAY TO DEATH VALLEY.
    â€œI slammed a car door on my finger,” Betty told him. Her hand was swollen. He gave her a curious look, but didn’t ask questions as he set and bandaged her hand and gave her a couple of pain pills.
    She caught the next bus heading for Reno. An old prospector, too old to work in the mines, too poor to live in a town, sat next to her all the way to Tonopah. Like everyone else in Nevada, he was looking for pay dirt.
    â€œIt’s all free,” he said, gesturing out the bus window at the endless sagebrush desert. “The federal government owns ninety percent of the
state and they don’t even want it, ’cept for a little piece to test their bombs on. The rest is up for grabs. You can fence in a thousand acres and nobody would notice.”
    He smelled like many old men who spent their last years walking across the desert to the mountains in search of a mother lode, the smell of Prince Albert pipe tobacco, dust, and dried sweat. His salt-and-pepper beard was nicotine stained around the lips and down one side from chewing tobacco. The old-timers smoked Prince Albert because the slender red tin can fit in their shirt pocket and could be used to stake out a mining claim. When a prospector was sure that the mother lode was under his feet, he’d fill out a claim form, stick it in the tobacco can, and bury it under a pile of rocks on the spot.
    â€œWhat do you do with a thousand acres of dirt?” she asked, knowing the answer. “You can’t grow nothing on it.”
    â€œWhen I hit it, I’m going to build me a house out here just like the Taj Mahal in India, close enough to the road so everyone can see it when they drive by. I’m going to build you and that little fella there a house, too.”
    She slipped him twenty dollars and told him her name when he left the bus at Goldfield. Who knows? Maybe he would find a vein of silver as big as a house. And then her and Zack would be on easy street. She’d heard about a waitress who had that exact thing happen.
    Whenever the bus made a stop along the way—places like Goldfield, Tonopah, Mina, Hawthorne, each a dusty little desert town with Highway 95 as its main street—Betty slipped off the bus to try her luck at the three or four slot machines found in every bus waiting room. Her hand hurt like hell.
    By the time the bus rolled down Reno’s Virginia Street and under the big lighted sign that announced “The Biggest Little City in the World,” the two hundred dollars the thug gave her was almost gone. She was down to twelve dollars. Leaving the bus depot, she hoofed it with Zack in arms to the most famous gambling casino in the world, Harold’s Club. Not far away was the spot where new divorcees stood at a bridge over the Truckee River and threw their wedding rings into the river for good luck. With only twelve dollars in her pocket, she could use some of those rings and a pawnshop. She was hungry and hadn’t eaten anything since morning in Las Vegas. But a dollar for
food meant a dollar less to feed the slots and that much less chance of hitting a big one.
    She couldn’t take the baby in, so she sat him down against the wall next to an open door where he’d be in view while she played the nearby slot machines. It was common knowledge that the clubs liked to put their loosest slots near the entry doors so people walking by would be lured in by the sweet music of jackpots. She never had had any better luck with those machines than any other player but she believed in the rumor and always went to slots at entryways when she was