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Keeping Faith with the Hope Giver
The RIDER will take your bet and peddle a dream, relates William T. Vollmann, and that's what makes him an unlikely hero
By MEENAKSHI GANGULY

Gary told his wife not to ask too much about what he did—not that what he did was bad, only illegal. She didn't want to know; nor did he himself reflect upon his livelihood as much as grapple with it—another reason for silence. You see, Gary played the numbers just like everybody else, always hoping for the big score. (He asked me to choose three digits; maybe as an outsider I'd bring him luck. I didn't.) He hated to see poor people throw their money away—possibly because he himself so frequently lost. Over and over he'd say to me: "If I knew what was going to win, I'd hop on my bike and ride all over the island, buy up that number everywhere, just go go go all night! I could make 4 million pesos ..." But that precognition had never come and never would. On balance, his affirmation of his product lay as pale as a road in the night: it was wrong, but then he got his wages.

Frankly, I think Gary was too hard on himself. Gambling, drug taking and love can all be classed as rituals of hope. That these three habits often prove illusory is one reason our heaven-sent Inquisitors like to make them illegal. But other kinds of hope also suffer from unlikeliness, almost by definition; for when the getting is easy we find small cause to wish for anything. I don't bother to hope to get over this cold; I expect it. But I sure hope the aching in my testicles isn't VD. Shall we then alter the Marxist line? Hope is the dope of the masses. Or should we hail hope pushers? Better to let their clients lose 99% of the time (maybe even 100% of the time) than to take away hope.

As I said, Gary did what he did without wallowing in notions about the rightness of it. He was a rider, just a rider. He made 250 pesos a night, which was good money for that island. He did what he did, the motorcycle headlamp shining before him like a miner's helmet, leading him speedily down jungle passageways to the rich veins and mother lodes of coordinators whose tally sheets he had to harvest for Freddy, the manager on the other side of the mountain.

The game of jai alai, so they say (and by "they," I mean above all Gary), is rigged. That is, the archangels, great figures, supposedly join together to decide which players will win the matches played in far-off Manila. I do not know this allegation to be a fact, and its veracity seems of little importance. Suffice it to say that the game, like so many other enterprises in the Philippines, gives off the sour odor of corruption and that, with the exception of a few piously misinformed souls and prepaid mouthpieces, nobody minds. Jai alai itself is illegal now, banned eight months ago to make room for the state-sponsored lottery. But it is still played underground, and tip sheets, sold on the street for 50 centavos, are still legal. The "street ushers," who are often children, flower-girls or the like, come and go like prostitutes—not flagrantly, in other words, but it is still pretty easy to pick them out: look, here comes a small boy, selling hope! Three old ladies giggle and twitter like virgins as they buy three portions. When I bought mine, I didn't have to worry about being arrested, although whenever somebody caught sight of it he'd grinningly shake a finger. Why? I possessed the road map, but I did not yet own hope, which is to say the use of the tip sheets. Yes, technically that's problematic, because betting on jai alai is as illegal as it is widespread.

When somebody gambles on the outcome of a game, he plunks down a minimum of 100 pesos in mildewed bills. The street usher gives him a betting stub, pockets a 25% commission for his pains, and records hope's number onto a handwritten tally sheet. The usher then remits these, along with the remaining 75% of the money, to a coordinator, so-called. (Yes, numbers runners can be bureaucrats, too!) The coordinator is but the householder or innkeeper who collects what the usher brings and stores it secretly until nightfall when Gary the dispatcher comes riding his motorcycle up the jungle paths.

And now I have a little more to relate about Gary. He had established himself in this island's society, I don't know how many years back. Whites of long-term residency in one Asian country or another are not exactly lacking, whites who get local friends and colleagues, sweethearts, even wives. But the majority wear psychic spacesuits which they take off only upon entering their little moon bases, in which they can breathe the oxygen of their own upbringings. Gary, however, wore psychic shorts. He blended in, speaking Visayan even at home with his family, none of whom seemed comfortable in English. With the tourists at the local resort he spoke a strange English from nowhere, so at first I took him to be Australian, then Canadian or maybe South African. It was as though he'd installed in his larynx one of those electronic voice-disguisers that continuously encoded him in new accents, like a spook's hand twiddling a radio dial to make this station or that station fade out, adding good one, mate, and aye and O.K. like mutually exclusive call signals to confound the enemy. (Wiry and small with a pockmarked face, he would have made an inconspicuous operative.) I could hardly believe it when I learned that he was American. He'd visited my failing country not long since to see about a job, but within a couple of days he drew his pay for good. "Over there I'm nothing," he said. "I'm lower class, and I get no respect. I'd be so poor I'd have to live in a bad neighborhood and send my kids to dangerous schools. Over here, people know me and maybe look up to me a bit because I'm a family man and I've made a home. By local standards I'm getting old but that's O.K. My kids will take care of me when they grow up. I'm respected." But to me the most remarkable badge of his assimilation was that he'd become a rider. His white face stood out in the jungle night, but he'd managed to do it. He said that the benefits were great—meaning, I think, the drugs.

I hung out with Gary, and he was one of the best teachers I ever had. When it came to technical matters he was incredibly clear. He was patient, too. If it took me 10 times to get something right when another student could figure it out the first time, he'd go through it 10 times, and then an eleventh. Let's say he taught me skydiving, although it wasn't that. Because skydiving had certain bad associations for me, I sometimes found myself afraid, but he made it easy, like a potbellied old cop I once met in Sacramento who'd been deadly accurate shooting his .45 one-handed; and at the shooting range he showed me how to hold my own pistol better, with my index finger not touching the grip but parallel to it, and the three lower fingers squeezing like a vise—an unnatural, punishing way to keep that tool in hand; that day my hand was sore, but I got much better target groups. I've shot in that style to this day. What I remembered and respected most was the relaxed way that old cop stood and moved and carried himself. He had mastered his skill and felt correspondingly easy and joyful about hitting the bull's eye time after time. So I felt relaxed, too, and became a better shooter. This was how Gary taught. It was as if he'd been, say, my scuba instructor and had brought me deep underwater, then sat smiling and winking at me on the sandy bottom, let the mouthpiece of his regulator float away, exhaled calm bubbles, and then slowly pivoted his right arm, brought his fingertips down, found the regulator hose by feel, traced his hand down to the mouthpiece, inserted it back into his mouth, finished exhaling to clear it, and then took the first breath. Now it was my turn. This was for me a kind of gambling. I knew that if I let my mouthpiece go and couldn't find it again, I would be in big trouble. Maybe I'd drown. But Gary had just showed me it could be done without looking. He'd smiled at me. If something went wrong, he would help me. I was afraid, but I let the mouthpiece go, reached up to my shoulder, found the hose, found the mouthpiece, inserted it, took a deep breath—and choked on the seawater I'd forgotten to clear with an exhalation. For a second I almost panicked, but there Gary was, his eyes huge and calm behind his mask—underwater everything looks 25% larger—and so I coughed the water out, hit the purge valve with the mouthpiece just at my lips, and took a breath, which was effortless and silky and nourishing. Now I understood. Now I could do it. With Gary I always believed that sooner or later I'd get it right.

He expected me on time for lessons, or better yet, five minutes early. Being like Trotsky, a dutiful schoolboy, I did arrive on time every day except one, when I was three minutes late. For a moment he pretended not to see me. With him everything had to be just so. Once he lay staring at a wall of his house which had been plastered in an improper fashion, and although his wife told him not to torture himself, the lacuna swelled before his hyper-focused eyes until he couldn't withstand the imperfection anymore. Leaping up, he smashed it and replastered it himself. This is, in a sense, a hellish way to be, but please remember that he didn't rely on gambler's hope to make the wall better; he took charge. I respect that.

One afternoon at the end of a class (it was, let's say, a jungle-orienteering course), we'd stripped off our boots and soaked them in the bleach tank, we'd washed out our canteens and placed the black anodized compasses back on the shelf, and now it was just Gary and me in the classroom. Somebody had left a map unfolded on the table; someone else had placed two sheets of paper askew, and an orphaned pencil lay out of kilter—intolerable were these phenomena to him, just as wet cloud stains in an otherwise featureless midnight sky might enrage some astronomer. Swearing, he straightened everything. I wanted to help but he refused, I'm not sure whether because he didn't want to put me to any trouble or because only he could arrange the classroom in the way that God demanded. He was a funny one. No, he was perfect for his job, which was perfect for him. When you teach, let's say, a demolitions course, everything had better be just so.

Gary frequently spoke to me about his wife. (The one time I met her she seemed old, sad and silent, perhaps because they were having money troubles.) He told me how much he loved her and respected her. He said that he wanted to be a good father to his children.

When he went on the job at night, the jungle seemed not unlike the tropical sea 50 feet down, where cliffs studded with vein branches, brown aortas and immense fungoid organs loom out of the blue murk; the jungle was as densely strange as that, the full moon (richly yellow) as remote and alien as the surface of the ocean seen from below, a lashing, writhing mirror of transcendence. As dreamlike to go deeper into the jungle as it would have been to go to the moon! Gary stepped on the gas. Every mechanical thing that he did, he did perfectly. He was going very fast down the bumpy path but he knew it by heart and at night it was almost empty—oh, every half hour or so he might see a couple of young girls out for a promenade (and, speaking of young girls, Gary remained scrupulously faithful to his wife), or an old lady coming home late with a sack on her back, but these pale figures so suddenly trapped in his headlights never shocked his unswerving alertness. He left the town behind, and past the bus station parked the bike in a tongue of mud between immense trees. The night was wet like the sea, neither hot nor cold.

Gary walked down a hill, down a field, down a steep wet slope and across an irrigation ditch in the pitch-blackness. A light was on. He took off his shoes. This is Freddy's place.

Freddy was the manager he worked for. Freddy was the one he had to bring the tally sheets back to. Freddy was the one who gave him great benefits, firstly the reefers (Freddy's cabinet never ran out of excellent grass dried brown), and secondly the ice, which is a liquid white concentrate of methamphetamine said to be dangerously addictive, like gambling; our Inquisitors declared the same thing about heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, caffeine and sugar, and they were always right, which is beside the point, because Inquisitors take away hope. The spermy drop vaporized upon the sheet of foil folded lengthwise; smoke rose, its bitterness more milky, less defined than crack smoke, into the glass tube, then descended throats, reached lungs, and at once it was as though a gentle hand had elevated the brain from behind, making it more buoyant within its meningeal sac, more happy and steady and watchful. This was why Gary so frequently came to Freddy's at night when he started work, just to be blessed with those aforesaid benefits.

The house was quiet at that time because they were still out selling numbers. Only Freddy, Freddy's boy and another Filipino were there, the boy a little feverish that night. Ripe smoke descended, hazing a lightbulb around which moths flitted like white sparks. On the wall hung two lacquered puffer fishes, faded to the color of wood, not silver anymore as in the fabulous sea. The men lit up, and the evening became big-headed and pleasant.

Freddy had some greenish Ming porcelain that he'd dug up out of cemeteries, and a Spanish silver coin from 1820 that he'd found in a bulldozer's wake. He showed them to me and then we sat listening to the crickets. A spider crawled upon the ceiling. Gary was worrying over the tip sheets, trying to pick the lucky number that would make him rich. It surprised me at first that he would fall for this, but, after all, why should it matter one bit to the rank and file whether the game is rigged? If none of the bettors can predict the outcome, then the bets are fair.

Now for the palm trees and empty dark road. Now for the dark puddles and bogs, the thick black mud. To Freddy and the other man and the boy, Gary said goodbye in his quiet way, put his shoes on and ascended the jungle to his motorcycle. He was the hope artist, the one who might conduct anybody on this island to heaven if the passenger had only bought the right ticket.

He was flying down the road now at the maximum speed commensurate with safety and skill, lit by the red glow of his cigarette. He told me later that when he was doing this job he didn't think of anything but the motion and the velocity. Sometimes, the trail was so narrow that I, riding behind and against him with one hand on his shoulder, could touch foliage on either side. He was as kind to me as always, but I knew that I was interrupting him. He usually wore headphones to fill him full of music just as he filled himself with happy smoke.

He rarely had problems with the police. Once there had been a crackdown on gambling, and, glimpsing a checkpoint ahead, he'd made a tight U-turn and taken another way, which required him to carry the motorcycle up a steep flight of a hundred steps near the church. They hadn't caught him then. Another time they had, and Freddy got him out. It was nothing personal on the cops' part. They wanted some squeeze, so Freddy's riders got the shakedown. That was business, not the Inquisition. Speaking of business, Freddy and his people got 40% of the take, which after the ushers' 25% left 35% in the pot to pay riders, coordinators and, naturally, any winners; that night the cops had been the winners. That was years ago. Since then, the protection that Freddy bought had stayed fresh and good.

Following dark fence-skeletons, Gary pulled up in front of the first coordinator's place, which was a rickety jungle cafE infested with drunken smiles. They greeted him cordially. From their air of detachment I guessed that they themselves didn't bet, merely collected and deducted. For them, the rider exemplified not so much hope as steadiness.

He came quickly back to the motorcycle with the tally sheets under his jacket. The next place was a shack halfway up the mountain. A man came out. I heard a baby whimpering inside. The man had also discovered a Spanish silver coin, this one with a date of 17-something. He was very proud of it. In the moonlight the coin, which had been well polished, seemed astoundingly bright. Gary took the tally sheets. And the man, who was already rich in hope thanks to his piece of silver, which might bring him millions, stood gazing after us with excited gratitude. Gary offered him still another possibility, just in case the silver coin didn't pan out, and if Gary didn't pan out tonight, then maybe he would tomorrow night. Isn't anticipation the purest pleasure of our lives? Now we sped down a very bumpy road which almost dislodged me, but the ice I'd smoked gave me strength.

Gary's daughter was at Girl Scout camp. Last night he'd stopped to visit her, but tonight as we went by we heard group singing and saw upraised torches, so Gary figured that she was probably too busy to be embarrassed just then. I don't think I have ever met anybody who more calmly and certainly loved his kids.

There was a night carnival park in the next place, and Gary disappeared behind a tiny glowing grocery stand. The place after that was a skinny alley at the back of a house. Then it was time to go up the mountain. Brilliant lightbulbs in thatch houses trembled past like numbered chances, and then the humidity of transpiring banana trees swallowed the rider. Again it was like rising to the surface of the sea as we neared that coolly swimming moon. There was a bend near the last coordinator's house where Gary always stopped to light up a reefer. The jungle was gently alive all around. This was life—Gary's life, at least, although, like all of us, he occasionally disparaged it, felt trapped, felt oldness creeping on him, was tired of this job and the other job, wanted to accomplish great things, wanted to be rich, wanted to make his wife happier. Call him incomparably wealthy in dreams and schemes. Although I'd disappointed him by refusing to smuggle his excellent heroin into the U.S., that notion wasn't over and never would be until Gary died. What he had won, I thought, was his destiny, his quiet life of secrets which hurt no other gambler who did not pay to get hurt, his chance to mount his gas-powered horse, don the earphones, turn the key and make every night his own, controlling the details, flying here and there, always trusted, always vivifying people with beneficent illusions. Yes, he'd won; his hopes befriended him with eternal druggy dreams.

He came back into Freddy's, took off his shoes in the low back kitchen where the boy was lighting a mosquito coil and handed over the tally sheets. He flicked on the lighter (actually that required several flicks). He put a cigarette in his mouth. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table and spoke quietly in Visayan with a gentle-looking man who kept breaking off bits of some dirty rock in his long fingers. Each rock was the size of two fists. I wondered what it was, but they wouldn't tell me.

In the front room where the real business was going on, hope peddlers were working with a calculator and a stack of tally sheets. A lean man stretched his arm across his knee, gazing and watching. There were three at the table: the boy with the calculator, and two men with pens wiggling. All the sheets were crammed with tiny numbers under the columns of those magic 10 digits. So that made four, including the watcher, and a fifth man sat facing the wall, slowly summing by hand upon a yellow pad. The radio sang softly, it not being time yet for the game results; hope's accountants murmured together, moving forefingers down the columns, the boy clicking calculator keys while glittering black beetles crawled between their toes.

Gary didn't usually stay around for all that; it wasn't his job. Besides, his wife would worry if he were late. He would go back to the house that he had built with his own hands and reread an old paperback or maybe even Reader's Digest because he had read everything he could get his hands on; books were hard to come by in his kingdom. Three times now he'd read some story by David Foster Wallace, torn from The New Yorker; he gave it to me to read, too, but the cabin I was renting offered only one 25-watt bulb and I didn't feel like standing close to the light straining my eyes while the mosquitoes bit me. Freddy had just finished reading Papillon. He offered that to me. I had never read it and would have liked to, but the same mosquito-logic applied, and anyhow I hated to deprive him of it. Freddy was a kind man, and so was Gary. They wouldn't take any money for the drugs they gave me.

Gary put on his shoes and said goodbye. The motorcycle buzzed down the road, its headlamp making a progressively smaller slice of luminescence, until it vanished abruptly in the jungle.

In the morning he'd learn that the two numbers he'd betted on had lost again.

William T. Vollmann is the author of numerous books, including Butterfly Stories and, most recently, the novel Argall

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