Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  The Gentile shuffles and deals quickly and angrily, listing what he loves in the world he has left—espresso, plots in Donald Westlake novels, the flavour of chipotle chilies—and Cooper keeps watching the deal. If he accuses The Gentile and he is wrong, he forfeits a thousand. ‘Just a thousand,’ Axel says. ‘Normally if we are falsely accused, we pick up a handgun and blast your shoulder off. And don’t forget— if you win this evening, Lina is beyond the door. I’ll sleep in the tent. Probably howl like a wolf in jealousy. But a deal is a deal. I told her, and she approves of the stakes, by the way. I read of a similar bet in a Faulkner story.’ ‘Don’t distract me,’ Cooper says. ‘I am distracting you. You missed two corrupt shuffles, during the story about Tolstoy. You were listening, there was content there, there was a maze-like thought there. You have to forget the content, think about the wheel… .’

  Two in the morning. Cooper rises and marks his losses on the chart that’s tacked to the varnished door. There is utter frustration in him. He thought he was skilled. ‘Do you know what the best line in a movie is?’ The Gentile asks, still in his seat.

  ‘You can tell me that tomorrow,’ Coop says. ‘Good night.’ In the other room Lina says, ‘You lost, right?’ He doesn’t know whether she really is aware of the absurd stakes proposed by Axel. She takes his hand. ‘Great hands. So Axel tells me. Good night.’ Cooper treads through the darkness, enters the tent, and is asleep instantly. A few minutes later he wakes to their loud laughter.

  The two of them break from cards one night and walk with Lina for hours along a dry riverbed. They clamber to higher ground, where it is even darker, there’s hardly a moon, and Coop feels barely attached to the earth. Lina comes alongside him, and her hand takes his so their fingers intertwine. For Coop, who has been solitary so long, it is full of intimacy, a secret gesture. She turns in the darkness, looks at his profile, and says, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ and moves out of reach. ‘I’m sorry, it was a mistake,’ he hears her say, as she goes farther away from him.

  She keeps reminding him of Claire. This woman who has been saved from a mistakenly chosen life by Axel. She has an abundance that emerges from her farm-girl’s face. When Cooper leaves a few days later to catch the bus to Bakersfield, she offers a shy farewell. He kisses the plaid shirt by her neck. Then her temple. And Axel, who has rarely touched him in all his time there, gives him a bear hug.

  He has, in any case, learned everything he came for. He has won only a few games against The Gentile, but Cooper knows— although his teacher doesn’t say it—that he can now deal a pack of cards to the Supreme Court and get away with it.

  In the half-light of the night bus he studies his hands, turns them over. The Gentile’s hands looked like a girl’s, like those of a princess. Coop, travelling to meet Dorn and the others in Vegas, suddenly feels unready. He realizes he has been living within intricate and private conversations with a possible madman, around one small light, at one small card table in an Airstream. He is a risk to himself as well as to the others. He looks up when the bus approaches Vegas, where the sky above the desert city seems to be on fire.

  The Gulf War begins at 2:35 a.m. during the early hours of January 17, 1991. But it is just another late afternoon in the casinos of Nevada. The television sets hanging in mid-air that normally replay horse races or football games are running animated illustrations of the American attack. For the three thousand gamblers inhaling piped-in oxygen at the Horseshoe, the war is already a video game, taking place on a fictional planet. The TV screens are locked on mute. There are floor shows, cell-phone hookers, masseurs at work, the click-clacking of chips, and nothing interrupts the reality of the casino where the ‘eye in the sky’ looks down on every hand played on the surfaces of green baize. Simultaneously, in the other desert’s night, orange-white explosions and fireballs light up the horizon. By 2:38 U.S. helicopters and stealth bombers are firing missiles and dropping penetration bombs into the city. During the next four days, one of the great high-tech massacres of the modern era takes place. The Cobra helicopter, the Warthog, the Spectre, and its twin, the Spooky, loiter over the desert highway and the retreating Iraqi troops, pouring down thermobaric fuel, volatile gasses, and finely powdered explosives, to consume all oxygen so that the bodies below them implode, crushing into themselves.

  Dorn, his girlfriend Ruth, Mancini, Cooper. The four of them talk in the River Café. It’s one in the morning. Mancini wants to be in on the actual game against The Brethren. ‘I can’t trust you,’ Dorn says. ‘You’re a good actor, and then sometimes you’re translucent. We need The Dauphin to be the innocent, and he’s gone. So it will have to be me.’ Dorn has taken charge.

  Do I drive, then? says Mancini.

  No. Ruth drives. It’s best if you sit down with Coop for a few days and work on the hands, timing, the moves. All that.

  So, The Speech Therapist drives. And I’m translucent. Thus, I am not on the floor at all… .

  You can’t be, they’ll smell a crew. In fact, be somewhere else that night, another casino. How much have you discovered about Autry? Does he have a mechanic?

  Sidekicks always play with him, so it’s difficult to identify who is responsible. The cardsharp drifts from person to person, I think, every few hands.

  Cooper interrupts. Then I suggest we just blow them all out of the water.

  Then you’ll never have an afterlife in this town. If they are corrupt, they will recognize corruption. The reason you went to The Gentile was to make what you are doing invisible.

  I don’t care.

  I care, Ruth says. This is our world. We work here.

  Dorn and Cooper step from the elevator onto the mezzanine level and walk down the flight of stairs into the swamp of card tables. The section of the casino where The Brethren always sit is a small room off the main poker floor where, beyond a blue rope, there is a single table. While strictly overseen by the eye in the sky, the hand-dealt games here have the dangerous air of an old faro game. No one is fully safe with the human element, but they have all been warned. Dorn, in a canary-yellow Hawaiian shirt, sips a glass of scotch and watches The Brethren hunting down a civilian. Autry gestures a welcome into their game. Dorn and Cooper hesitate. This is expected of them; normally they are gun-shy with the Born-Agains. They mime having another drink and signal a possible return, then continue their walk around the casino. An hour later, when they do eventually step over the blue rope and sit down with Autry and the two thieves, one on either side of him, it’s quickly established that this will be a private game, there will be no house dealer. And it’s Texas Hold ‘Em. This is how The Brethren play.

  In the first hand Dorn wins a thousand. It’s the expected hook from The Brethren, and Dorn shows modesty. He leans forward with his long unwashed hair and his big smile. Autry begins a monologue about the state of the world, this desert, that troublesome desert. The hands go back and forth for more than an hour, the good hands essentially cancelling each other out, a familiar rise and fall. Whenever it is Coop’s turn, he cuts the deck faithfully. The players are all watching the movement of hands, the buried habits. Coop notices where the player on his right habitually cuts the cards, roughly the same spot every time. The talk around the table is constant, interesting anecdote and data, but Cooper thinks of the wheel. He knows someone will make a move soon. ‘Don’t riffle-stack for just a minor haul,’ Mancini has told him. ‘Save the work for when everything has escalated.’ So Cooper waits.

  The plan is for him at some point to double-duke, creating two great hands during the course of the shuffles—one for Autry and a better one for himself. He will place this riffle-stacked slug of cards beneath a crimp, about where the player on his right usually cuts the cards. If the man cuts at the crimp, there will be no need for Coop to hop or shift the deck secretly; they will be able to bet everything on the known fall of the cards. Whenever he is ready to do this he will signal Dorn to provide shade so there will be some distraction.

  The game began in mid-afternoon, and
it is now seven. Autry’s right-hand thief continues dealing Texas Hold ‘Em. Shortly after this, Dorn suggests raising the blinds to make the game twice as big. There will be two hands before Cooper gets to deal again. He and Dorn have won and lost hands but have scraped through. A real assault against them has not yet taken place.

  Dorn now describes some news footage he has watched of the massacre in the ‘troublesome desert’—with American planes pouring down ten thousand rounds a minute onto a crowded highway of escaping soldiers. ‘That’s the news, as of yesterday,’ he mutters. ‘We’re dropping five-hundred-pound antitank cluster bombs that spew out razor shards into the air at four thousand feet per second. We’re burning up those bodies from a biblical height. The highway, they say, is like Daytona Beach during spring break.’ ‘Stop it!’ Autry explodes, but Dorn doesn’t. ‘It’s Resurrection Day.... Everything there, they say, is more or less charcoal.’ Cooper completes his shuffle sequence and slips in the slug, low in the deck. A silence round the table. Dorn gives more details of the attack on the Republican Guard, until Autry puts his hand up and requests silence. Cooper takes back the deck, showing rapt attention as Autry remembers a conversion he witnessed in which a girl of six began speaking whole pages out of the Old Testament.

  Cooper deals out the first round of cards—two face-down to each player. This goes on the table:

  Cooper asks Autry to continue his anecdote, diverting him from the surprisingly good hand he has been dealt. Dorn bets and Autry raises him. Cooper stays in and the two thieves drop out. Coop sits back now and relaxes. The fate of the entire dealing sequence has been set up during the shuffles. All he has to do is play out the hands. He burns the next card, discarding it as he has to, before dealing the next three communal cards, the flop, face-up.

  Dorn has little of value but bets, and Autry, who now has three aces, raises. Cooper begins to sing quietly, ‘You’re gonna run to the rock for rescue, there will be no rock …’ and calls Autry’s bet. Dorn folds. The game has been slowed to a crawl.

  Cooper burns the next card before dealing the fourth street. It’s an inconsequential card—an eight of diamonds—which doesn’t alter the strength of the hands; it will simply create another round of betting.

  Got any family? Autry asks Cooper. He has been X-raying the young man’s nature.

  No family, Cooper says quietly.

  Got a girl?

  Haven’t got a girl. No, sir. Cooper clicks his tongue. You a married man?

  Yes, I am.

  Autry makes another large bet. Coop contemplates, shuffles his chips. Contemplates some more, and calls. It is about nine-thirty, and there is almost $100,000 in the pot, with nearly that amount again sitting in front of the two remaining players. Now even Autry is silent, and Coop deals out the last card—the River—his mind whispering it as he begins to turn it over. He will burn down Autry, humiliate him, with this humble seven of hearts.

  Along with the communal cards, face-up on the board, Autry now has a full house, three aces and two sevens. He goes to town and moves all his remaining chips into the pot. Coop calls him. They put down their hands, Coop revealing his sevens. Voilà, he says.

  Autry recognizes the dragon full of mockery. Coop pulls in the roughly $300,000, then stands up slowly.

  Sit down, son, Autry whispers, a deeper voice.

  Sit down, Dorn echoes.

  Cooper stays standing, gathering the chips. He looks up at the eye in the sky that he knows is watching them, that he knows never captured what he has already done, and waves to it.

  ‘You fucking idiot, you’re a child,’ Dorn says. Cooper, catching his real anger, looks at him. Then he walks to the cage and cashes out, watched by them all. Mancini is at the mezzanine railing, looking down.

  Cooper bangs the button for the elevator and travels to the eleventh floor, gets out, and takes the stairs down to the parking garage, and searches for Dorn’s car. Headlights blink silently and he walks towards the vehicle. Ruth is sliding over onto the passenger seat. ‘It went okay?’ ‘Yes.’ They drive out of the darkness of the garage into a world of swerving desert electricity. In twenty minutes they are out of the city.

  There is war news on the radio all night. Ruth leans against the passenger door, watching him. Cooper, usually a person of humble acts, already feels foolish about his excess. She taps him on the shoulder with her finger, and he wakes from his focus on the road.

  You know Sophie’s Choice? Ruth says. The book? I heard the guy who wrote it, on the radio, once. They were asking him what he was working on, but he wouldn’t say. Then, at some point during his excuse for not saying what he was doing, he said, ‘You know, I think I have already written the most intimate and profound book I will ever be able to write. I don’t think I can go as far as that again. From now on I should try comedy. Comedy is not easy, I know. But at least it is not the same road.’ I loved that about him, what that writer said. And I read everything of his after that, but of course there was never to be a comedy. And of course you can’t go back again.

  I know that, Coop says quietly, so that she hardly hears it.

  Then Ruth sleeps, knowing she has to drive back to Vegas by early morning. Cooper turns the radio knob, looking for further details of the war, but they are paltry. He is aware he has ended his career in Vegas and even Tahoe by winning so blatantly, with so much bravura. The Gentile, in his first lesson, warned him against flamboyance and unevenness. As a mechanic, Axel was of the Naturalist School, with the desire to always give the illusion that nothing was happening. And what occurred with The Brethren was not luck. Dorn will probably have to fan out the flames for himself, staying in the casino tonight, behaving in a manner that suggests anger towards Cooper. And Ruth, he knows, will slide the car back into the parking garage before dawn and be free of The Brethren’s suspicion.

  They stop for a drink in a roadside bar. Once back in the car, Cooper separates the money equally into four piles, and puts his in an old Northwest Airlines bag. Then they drive again, the last leg, with the windows down, the highway breeze sideswiping him. At one point he slows the car to a halt and she says, ‘What is it?’ There is an owl on the road, apparently unwilling to leave the heat of the highway, and Coop drives around it and continues. When they reach the bus depot at Tonapah, he sits a moment longer, his hands on the wheel, as if there were still miles to go. They get out and Ruth comes around to the driver’s door and they embrace. Coop is going to disappear. He will never see these friends again. He pulls out the Northwest Airlines bag and walks away from the car. Ruth starts it and a moment later drives past him—a tap on the horn, her hand out the window—but he doesn’t acknowledge the second farewell. He has already become a stranger.

  At seven-thirty the next morning, when Dorn and Mancini arrive for breakfast at the River Café, Ruth is sitting alone in the slightly chaotic restaurant. Four waitresses in rubber boots are wading in the artificial river that has flooded, searching under large rocks in order to find the pump plug that malfunctioned during the night. ‘River’s in mourning,’ Mancini says. They are aware that Cooper, their ‘heir,’ is the one blackballed for life, certainly from all the big casinos. They also know that the three of them are in some way permanently linked to him. But rather than talk about it, they watch the waitresses, who are now laughing and beginning to enjoy themselves, splashing in the water.

  Le Manouche

  She was following a path of gorse, her face and fair hair in the litter of light from the high branches of oak above her; she was moving at a fast pace ever since the incident a few days earlier when she had encountered the four men with their guns and dogs. They had been standing at a small crossroads in the woods, arguing, all barking at one another, and as she came near, the men threw out suggestive comments in French that she had understood but pretended not to. The atmosphere of threat had unnerved her. In spite of the episode, Anna had refused to give up her afternoon walks. She would take the forest path, come into the clearing, and then follow th
e river until she reached the paved road a half-mile from the village of Dému. It was a walk on the edge of a run. In Dému she bought groceries, put them in her backpack, and then turned home. At that speed she was there in an hour and a half. The house was a manoir, and she was a temporary tenant in the place. She had thought at first that it might be a château, but it wasn’t quite that. She had never stayed in a French château, just as she had never seen a hunting dog until that afternoon with the belligerent men.

  Most days Anna worked indoors at a kitchen table, reading the manuscripts and the handwritten journals of Lucien Segura. The manoir had once been the writer’s home, and she found herself in some modest contrapuntal dance with him. So that when she looked up from her work, it took a moment to recognize the same doorways and the room around her—she had until that moment been immersed in unearthing and cross-referencing a detail from this French writer’s life, delving below the surface of his work. A phrase among one of her colleagues described what she was doing as ‘sweeping the translator’s house.’ And she knew if she ascended the flight of stone stairs and turned left she would be in his bedroom, could look down onto the branches of the large oak tree the way the Frenchman might have done as he dressed by the window generations before.

  Once a week Madame Q arrived with her husband. She dusted the house silently, while Monsieur Q surveyed the garden and gathered branches and clarified the flower beds. He was also the postman for the village. They would stay the length of the morning and then leave. When no one inhabited the house, the couple came more often and behaved like full-time caretakers. As it was, they would step from the blue Renault 4L and bring news about the world, about local politicians, about various wars. Monsieur Q would look across a field and decide he could get away with leaving it for another week, while Madame Q attempted to teach Anna the basics of cooking a rabbit stew, assembling one large dish that would save her from making lunches for three days.