Stone Junction

by Jim Dodge

  It took him an hour to lose the second grand. In a pot with six players, Daniel raised himself all-in on the fourth card, which had given him a second pair to go with his aces, only to get beat on the last card by both a low flush and a straight.

  Bad Bobby chuckled behind him. ‘Now Daniel, remember what Ol’ Jake Santee used to say: “Don’t hurt to get it all in. What hurts is getting it broke off.”’

  Daniel took out the rest of his bankroll and called for three thousand dollars in black chips. Five hours later, having discovered a tell on a player named Frog Jorgenson and having caught some good cards, Daniel had twelve thousand dollars in front of him. When the player to his right busted out, Daniel was surprised to see Bad Bobby slide into the vacant seat and call for twenty thousand dollars in chips.

  Daniel played cautiously whenever Bad Bobby was in the pot. Bobby played his usual game, steady with erratic eruptions, though he juiced the action by betting the limit from first round to last. An hour before dawn, Daniel had about seventeen thousand dollars and Bad Bobby had doubled his stack. As word spread that Bobby was in town, players dropped by the Antlers to check out the action. When the sun came up, there were four times as many railbirds as there were players.

  Bad Bobby stretched lazily as the deck was shuffled. ‘Gentlemen, I’m only good for a few more hours. Any objection to putting some guts in this game and raising the limit to a thousand?’

  Everyone except Daniel immediately agreed.

  ‘Thousand it is, then,’ a player named Mad Moses announced.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Bad Bobby said mildly. He turned to Daniel. ‘How about you, Daniel?’

  ‘Hell,’ Mad Moses said, ‘he’s winners. If he don’t want to jack it up he can cash ’em out – there’s a whole herd of high rollers drooling to git in the game.’

  ‘No,’ Bobby said flatly, ‘that ain’t how it’s done. He’s been in the game over twelve hours, and if he says no, that’s all it takes as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘A thousand limit is fine with me,’ Daniel murmured. Twenty minutes later he wished Mott Stocker had been there to cut out his tongue.

  Daniel started with the seven of hearts in the hole and the eight of hearts up. Bad Bobby was high with the king of hearts showing and when the low man brought it in for the minimum hundred, Bobby raised a thousand. Daniel and three other players called. Daniel caught the eight of diamonds for a pair on the board, Mad Moses caught an ace to go with his offsuit jack, the two others didn’t visibly improve, and Bad Bobby caught the ten of hearts. When the bet reached him, Daniel raised a grand. Moses and Bobby were the only callers. Daniel caught the seven of clubs to pair his hole card, Moses was dealt the six of hearts, and Bad Bobby the trey of hearts, giving him, at best, a pair of kings or a flush draw. Bad Bobby, now low, surprised Daniel by betting the limit. Daniel raised the same. Mad Moses, after long deliberation, folded. Bad Bobby reraised a thousand dollars. Daniel hit it again. So did Bad Bobby. ‘I’m not stopping,’ Daniel said, pushing his call and another grand raise into the pot. ‘You’ve got to catch me and I love the odds on that.’

  ‘Well,’ Bobby said, ‘count your stack down and we’ll get it all in right now,’ cause I intend to keep raising you back.’ When he’d counted down what remained of his seventeen thousand and shoved it in the pot, Bad Bobby matched it. Counting Mad Moses’ money and the initial bets, there was over forty thousand dollars in the pot.

  ‘It’s up to the cards now,’ Bobby said. ‘Let’s take a look and see if I can snap your two pair.’

  The dealer turned up the jack of hearts for Daniel. Bad Bobby caught the queen of hearts. He had the ace of hearts in the hole. Heart flush.

  ‘Take the pot,’ Daniel said, trying to control the shocked disappointment in his voice. He smiled ruefully at Bad Bobby, who was stacking the chips. ‘You deserve it, Bobby, catching that queen with so many hearts out, raising all the way – that’s luck.’

  ‘No, Daniel, that’s knowing when.’

  ‘You want more chips, Daniel?’ the floor man said at his shoulder.

  Daniel started to rise from his chair. ‘I guess not.’

  ‘If no one objects,’ Bad Bobby said, ‘you can play ten grand off my roll.’

  There were no objections.

  Bad Bobby cashed out at noon, thirty-thousand dollars winners. Four hours later, his eyes stinging from smoke and exhaustion, Daniel cashed out twenty-one thousand five hundred, fifteen thousand of which he returned to Bad Bobby, who was still awake when Daniel got back to the hotel.

  ‘You come out, huh?’

  ‘I won sixty-five hundred.’

  ‘Good, but don’t forget you can lose.’

  ‘I would have if you hadn’t staked me that extra ten grand. Thanks for the confidence.’

  ‘Well shit, I wouldn’t have much of an opinion of myself as a teacher if I didn’t think you could hold your own in a little pissant game like that. Besides, you caught Froggy’s tell about ten minutes after I did. You might be relying a shade heavy on odds, but I suppose that’s my fault. Just remember that if you’re playing Russian Roulette, one chamber loaded out of six, about seventeen percent of the time you’re going to be dead. Technically, you know, you lost our side bet when I broke you, because if I hadn’t extended more credit, you’d be washing windows with your tongue. Now you have enough money of your own to do as you please. If you run short, you can play my money any time.’

  But Daniel, with his sixty-five hundred dollars profit, played his own, and he played it well. At the end of a year he had almost two hundred twenty thousand dollars, eighty thousand from a single pot in a Seven-Stud game in Albuquerque, beating Dumpling Smith’s four nines with a low straight flush in diamonds. Between games, as they traveled the circuit (what Bad Bobby called hard-assing the highway), Bad Bobby critiqued Daniel’s play. Aside from the lack of polish and occasional lapse in judgement, he saw only one major flaw. It wasn’t so much a repeated mistake as it was a general disposition – Daniel liked to gamble. He was seduced by the needle-thrill of action, the excitement and hope and abandon.

  Bad Bobby told Daniel that a friend, a famous stock-car driver, had told him what he considered the greatest danger of racing: ‘“When you’re driving hard out on the edge, and the love of speed comes over you so true and deep and real, you don’t want to slow down. You know you ought to. But you’re locked into something so awesome and consuming you can’t back off. It’s always the same – the faster you go the less you care about being able to stop. Ever.”

  ‘And that’s bad shit, Daniel. Don’t step in it.’

  But to sustain the high, thin edge of concentration gambling required was costly in itself. Along with the constant travel, there were days without sleep, an almost constant isolation from the natural world, adrenalin solos dancing on the blade. Against the discontinuities of the gambling life, Daniel developed portable routines. He read the paper with breakfast to remind himself daily there was a world beyond the cardtable. He took a long bath before every game. He wore, interchangeably, ten identical white shirts. The routines gave him a sense of stability, of a quotidian infrastructure that could survive the winds of chance. Occasionally he wanted a woman, and most often she was a five-hundred-dollar call girl. Daniel liked call girls. They were adventurous, usually independent, often beautiful, took pride in their erotic charms and understanding, and there were no complications.

  Daniel agreed with Bobby’s claim that the simple life was essential if you hoped to sustain the ferocious concentration cardplaying demanded. Bad Bobby practiced extreme simplicity. Besides the restored ’49 Caddy, his worldly possessions were his father’s straight razor and an old Ruger .38 that ‘Jack-’Em-Up’ Jackson had given him to discourage cheaters and highwaymen. Bad Bobby slept and bathed in hotels, ate in restaurants, and bought new clothes when he was tired of the ones he was wearing. He also bought books – he was studying history – but when he finished one he either passed it along to Daniel, if he was interes
ted, or left it for the room’s next occupant and the vagaries of chance.

  After fifteen months of steady playing, Daniel became restless and vaguely depressed. They were halfway into their Lo-Ball swing through northern California, and the familiar land forms reminded him of the clear balance of ranch life. Gambling also had its balance, but it was forever shifting, erratically brilliant. He was bored with the game. He’d learned what he could, and it left him strangely dissatisfied. He told Bobby he wanted to move on.

  Bad Bobby wouldn’t let him. ‘I’ve spent over eighteen months working with you, and I’m not done because you’re not ready.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve learned a lot. But I’m beginning to burn out.’

  ‘Daniel, that’s just when you learn things you’d never know otherwise. It’s that long, precise discipline that holds it together when it wants to fly apart. That’s when you develop some bottom to yourself, but you’ve got to be tough. You’ve got to patiently practice what you don’t enjoy if you want to make yourself a whole player. Like a wide receiver who’s the best there is going long, but who stays after practice every day and works on those three-yard outs that he has trouble with. That’s why they invented dues, Daniel – to pay ’em.’

  Daniel sighed. ‘I appreciate what you’re saying, but I can quit any time I want. Don’t make me do it.’

  ‘Actually,’ Bad Bobby grinned, ‘you can’t quit whenever you want, ’cause I got it on your honor that you have to beat me in a gambling game to call your own shots.’

  ‘Fine,’ Daniel shrugged. ‘Tomorrow. Five-Card Stud.’

  ‘You chose your strongest game, even if your timing is off. I just got a call from Stan Wurlitzer down in Gardena. Seems both Guido Caramba and Rupert the Limey are in town, and there’s heavy sentiment developing for a hundred-thousand-dollar freeze-out game if Stan can put it together. I’m supposed to let him know by tonight.’

  ‘How’s it set up?’

  ‘Everybody buys a hundred thousand, and you play till somebody has it all. You lose your buy-in, you’re eliminated; no second buys.’

  ‘The game?’

  ‘Lo-Ball Draw, exactly like we’ve been playing the last coupla weeks. I personally think Lo-Ball will eventually be your best game, because a big edge in that game is hitting it on the come and playing power position.’ Course, this will be no limit, and you don’t want to be raising too much to draw cards.’

  ‘Are you suggesting I could play in a game like that?’

  ‘That’s up to you. I’m sure going to, so I don’t really want to waste my energy whipping on you tomorrow. But here’s a proposition: If you win the freeze-out, you’re free to go. If you don’t, you’ll still have enough money left to take a shot at me later.’

  ‘Knowing your propositions, I assume the other players will be good.’

  ‘You got that right.’

  ‘So, if I’m the winner, I not only get to leave, but I take eight hundred thousand dollars with me.’

  ‘It’d be nice to tip Stan ten grand or so for holding the stakes and letting us use his facilities – unless, of course, you don’t mind being known as a no-class tight-ass.’ Daniel started to defend his tipping – generous by most standards, though hardly equal to Bobby’s extravagance – but Bobby rolled right over him. ‘’Course, you’re long odds to win. You’ve got to beat seven other players, and they include Guido, Rupert, and me. My advice is to start early and bring extra grub.’

  Daniel had known Bad Bobby long enough to sense a proposition. ‘What are you laying now?’

  ‘Even money you don’t make the final four. Your eight to my one that you’re exactly the third player eliminated. And twenty to one you don’t win it.’

  ‘You’re hurting my confidence.’

  ‘Can’t help it. Real is real, and I call ’em like I see ’em. And what I see is that you’re a damn good player, but not good enough yet.’

  They were sitting in Daniel’s room at the Eureka Inn. Daniel pointed at the phone on the desk. ‘Call this Stan guy and reserve two seats. And I’ll take a grand on the first two propositions, and five on the twenty to one that I win it all. So then you’d be out two hundred thousand plus change, and I’d be on my own.’

  Bad Bobby gave a number to the operator. He grinned at Daniel. ‘You’ll love Guido. He’s a character-builder all by himself.’

  The next morning, they left for San Francisco. As Daniel drove, Bad Bobby analyzed the players and discussed the strategy of no-limit Lo-Ball freeze-out. It would be a full game, eight players. There were only two Bobby hadn’t gambled with before.

  ‘Clay Hormel is a movie producer, lots of bucks, and Hollywood all the way. You’ve seen the type in Vegas – silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel, six pounds of gold chain, sunlamp tan. He may know how to cut a movie deal, but he don’t cut shit as a card player. His ego’s as big as his bank account, and I figure they’ll both get flattened some in this game.

  ‘Charley Li is an old Chinese guy, over seventy now I’d guess. Knows Lo-Ball as well as anyone and can be double-tough if he catches a heater. I think he may be a little too conservative for this action, a tad too predictable. But he’s solid, and he’s a real gentleman.

  ‘There’s two guys I don’t know, but Stan gave me a line on their play. First guy’s named Paul Schubert, known as “Rainbow.” Gather he’s something of a hippie, one of these new-age types with the ponytail and turquoise. Stan says he’s about thirty years old, and he’s either pretty high up in some drug dealing or there’s bread in the family,’ cause he doesn’t play well enough for the roll he packs. He’s probably an action freak, a good example of what I warned you about. Can’t pass up a big pot and makes terrible calls. Which means he’s hard to bluff.

  ‘The other guy is Johnny “The Rake” Russo. I’ve never met him, but I’ve heard a lot about him. East Coast guy. Got his first stake together lagging quarters in the Bronx when he was twelve – that’s the line anyway. He’s not much older than you – twenty-one, around there – and seemingly deserves his rep for being double tough. He’s not afraid to put chips in the pot. Stan says he plays a lot like me when I was his age. That means he’ll be too aggressive on marginal hands, bluff in the wrong situations, and not pay enough attention to position.

  ‘Rupert Mildow is a middle-aged English gent down to his tweeds and walking stick. Everybody calls him ‘Limey,’ which he thinks is vulgar, which is why everybody calls him that. If he has a weakness, it might be he doesn’t trust his instincts, especially the killer one. But if you beat him, you’ve beat somebody. He’s good.

  ‘Guido, though, is probably the best. He’s tougher than a junkyard dog, and since he came up from the bottom, he loves the top. He’s part Mexican and part Italian. He comes on like he’s got stones the size of boulders – and he does – but he’s also got fire and finesse. He likes to give you this exaggerated Mexican bandito accent to annoy you and twang any latent racism. Likes to make you want to beat him. An uncanny ability to find your weakness and show it to you for lots of money. Probably the best psychological player I’ve ever seen. Pay attention to his play and don’t listen to his mouth.’

  ‘So, how does he play?’ Daniel said.

  ‘Real good.’

  ‘You’re overwhelming me with helpfulness.’

  ‘It’d be foolish to say more. Guido plays the players, the chemistry, the mood, the rush, and the moment as well as he plays his cards. I’ve beat him a few times, but if this ol’ Caddy was full of the money I’ve lost to him playing Lo-Ball, the axles would snap with the load.’

  ‘Does he play Stud or Hold-’Em? I mean, you’re supposedly the best around at those.’

  ‘Well,’ Bad Bobby said, ‘I got enough of it back that I still have the car.’ He gave the horn a long echoing blast as they passed through a grove of redwoods, then smiled contentedly as he watched the road unwind.

  The players met Friday night in the lounge of Stan Wurlitzer’s cardroom to disc
uss rules and format. Except for Guido, everyone was there promptly at nine. He arrived twenty minutes late, accompanied by an entourage of four lovely young Chicanas, each in a white silk dress of alarming décolletage, and a thin choker of opals and pearls. The jewels were a proper complement to their skin, which had the sheen of melting caramel.

  Daniel stared, remembered he was going to play Guido, not them, and shifted his attention with difficulty.

  Guido was greeting the other players with gusto. He was a large man, well-bellied to the point of corpulence. His face was broad and swarthy, the cheeks slipping into jowls. It would have appeared frankly corrupt if not for Guido’s eyes, eyes the color and same hard gleam of obsidian. He was wearing a tuxedo and silk top hat. His cuff links were twenty-dollar gold pieces. Large diamonds sparkled from his wristwatch and rings.

  When Stan Wurlitzer introduced him to Daniel, Guido frowned. ‘Mr Wurlitzer,’ he said playfully, ‘there ess a leetle boy in the lounge who has loss hees momma. You find her queek to lead thees young one to safety.’

  Daniel, assuming that somehow Guido had heard about his mother’s death, said calmly, ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘So bold!’ Guido shouted, stumbling backward as if overwhelmed.

  ‘Really Guido,’ Rupert said dryly, ‘save it for the game.’

  ‘Ahhhh, but I can’t help it,’ Guido apologized. ‘I feel so wonderful thees evening. I jus feenish loving all my girlfriends and it makes me so happy to be there with them I am late being here weeth you. And you, young Daniel, I was only keeding, for I hear all over you are an hombre at the table, that even so young you already have the hairs on your ass and gallons of conjones. But’ – Guido’s booming voice dropped to a sad murmur – ‘I weel run over you like water runs over the lowlands.’

  ‘That’s why we’re playing,’ Daniel nodded, ‘to find out.’

  ‘Stanley,’ Rupert rolled his eyes, ‘may we proceed?’

  The rules were standard: open or out in turn; checks could call on the second round but not raise; you had to bet a 7–6–5–4–3 or any hand lower. The format Stan suggested was likewise agreeable to all: rotating deal; a five-hundred-dollar ante to begin with, increasing as players went bust; a half-hour break every three hours and an hour every six, with twelve hours a day limit on playing time. Stan collected the stakes, each player except Guido counting a hundred grand off their rolls or presenting, in Rupert’s case, a cashier’s check.