The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  THE PREACHER

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2016 Ted Thackrey Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1941298931

  ISBN 13: 9781941298930

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  Also by Ted Thackrey Jr.

  Aces & Eights

  King of Diamonds

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A SERMON

  Dear friends,

  Our text this morning comes from the Book of Isaiah, fifth chapter, eighth verse:

  “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place.”

  There is more to this verse—one final phrase, and I’ll come to it before we’re done—but for now let us consider only the first part.

  The prophet speaks here to the children of Israel, telling them of the Lord’s judgments on various sins. He warns not merely of the pitfalls of greed itself but also of the error of coveting the substance of others—depriving them of the richness of the earth and of the space upon it that God has appointed and ordained for each of his children.

  He speaks to his own time, to the people of that time.

  But he can also speak to us…

  ONE

  The game of poker is one of the great undiscovered tools of psychological investigation. You get to the core so quickly. Play seven-card stud with a man for seven hours, and you will know more about his basic character—about the springs that turn his clock—than his wife, his girlfriend, or his tax consultant will ever know. Played competently and with an ear for the language of the game, it can be a number one way of sorting potential friends from probable strangers. And it can provide a reliable lever for removal of the latter.

  Which is what I was using it for now.

  The chubby, surly boy in the thousand-dollar cowboy boots and eighteen-dollar blue jeans had been losing—and drinking—at a steady pace for about three hours, betting into me when he should have folded, dropping out when he had the cards to stay, and generally poisoning the atmosphere for one and all with his complaints. Now he had folded three kowboys on the third raise and watched me rake in the biggest pot of the evening on what I was careful to let him see was nothing more than a busted flush.

  A grown-up or a gambler might have handled it by dropping out of the game or tightening up his play or at least going a little easier on the bourbon-rocks. But this was a smart-mouth richboy from east New Mexico, a tall-grown child of purest ray serene, and I wasn’t too surprised when the nickel-plated .380 automatic I’d noticed earlier that night in a holster attached to his tooled-leather belt came out into the circle of friendly players and floated, wandering just a little, about an inch from the end of my nose.

  “Hol’ it right there,” he said.

  I just looked at him, past the wavering barrel, and wondered how he had lived so long.

  “You nothing but a card mechanic,” he went on when I didn’t reply. “Cold-decking us all night long. Goddamn thief.”

  He blinked and he swallowed, and that checked it to me. I had spent the last hour bearing down on the little nose-picker, trying to ease him out of the game. But now he was trying to make up his mind whether to cry or shoot, and I didn’t feel lucky enough to take a chance on which way he would go.

  I had two options: He was either drunk enough or dumb enough to be holding the .380 within eighteen inches of my right hand, and I hadn’t noticed him jacking a shell into the firing chamber. One quick move would either take the piece away from him entirely or break his trigger finger if he decided to be stubborn. It was tempting.

  But it was no-go. Drunk, dumb, and obnoxious as he might be, this kid was the home team. Of the other five poker players at the table, all or more had probably known the boy since the day he was born, while I was a stranger—someone they’d never seen before tonight. They would live the rest of their lives with this youngster and his kin; me they could forget.

  That left option number two.

  “Why, hell and fireflies, son,” I said, giving him the slow country-boy smile and keeping my hands rock-still on the table, “there’s nobody around here done any cheating on you tonight. Never had to.”

  Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. I could feel some of the tension go. But the gun stayed put and so did he.

  “Okay,” he said, not ready to back off in front of witnesses, “go on…Let’s hear you lie your way out of it.”

  “Plain truth,” I said, still smiling and keeping track of the .380 out of the corner of my eye. “You’ve lost money tonight, and quite a few other nights, too, I imagine, not because you got cheated but because you purely cannot play the game of poker—or gamble at all, come to that—for sour owl shit.”

  “Yes, Lord!” the balding, owl-faced car dealer to my left mumbled, and there was a subdued rumble of agreement from one or two others. That shook the boy a little. He hadn’t expected opposition from the five-dollar seats. But he still wasn’t ready to quit.

  “Liar,” he said again. “I c’n play poker as good as any man in this room, and a damn-sight better than some.”

  I shrugged and took the chance of moving my hands, which were holding the cards. Never taking my eyes from his, I shuffled twice, cut, shuffled again, trimmed the deck, and set it in the middle of the table.

  “Maybe I’m a liar, and maybe I’m a mechanic,” I said. “But if you want to prove you’re a gambler, I’ll give you a chance to win back everything you lost to me tonight—and more. How about it, son?”

  He blinked again, and I knew I had him.

  “Liar,” he said, licking his lips. “I bet you stacked that deck when you shuffled just then. I seen you…”

  I kept smiling, though it was getting to be an effort. “Just a simple test,” I said. “One simple wager to prove that you don’t know how or when to bet, and never will. What do you say? You ready for this?”

  He snorted, which probably meant yes.

  “How much you got left on the table?” I asked.

  He counted it with his eyes, forgetting to watch me and forgetting the pistol in his hand. It sagged away
to point at the player to my left, who didn’t like that at all.

  “Two thousand,” the boy said finally. “Maybe a hunner more.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Then here’s the deal…” I set the deck down, ace of spades looking up, in the middle of the poker table. “Sitting right here, just the way I am,” I said, “I will bet you my whole stake—everything on the table in front of me against everything you’ve got left—that I can touch my right eye to that ace of spades without moving the deck or the table or my head. How about it, boy? Bet?”

  I had him.

  He took a full sixty seconds to think it over, looking at me and looking at the deck and looking at the money on the table. But I knew I had him. He’d seen me bluff that last pot, and he knew I was trying to do it again, and this time he was going to show me up. For sure, for sure.

  “Okay,” he said finally.

  I looked around the table.

  No one had anything to say.

  Fair enough.

  “The piece,” I said, looking back at the boy and nodding at the .380 he still had in his hand. “It’s part of your stake. Put it in the pot.”

  He didn’t like that.

  “It’s mine,” he said.

  “It’s in the pot, or no bet,” I said.

  For a moment, I thought he might back out. In that part of the world, richboys start carrying guns about the time they get their first wheels—which is usually too early on both counts—and he was going to feel virtually undressed without it. But in the end, as I’d hoped, the chance of showing up the out-of-town tinhorn was just too much. And besides, how could he lose?

  The .380 thumped down atop the cash.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll call you, bluffing sonofabitch. Let’s see you do it—touch your eye to the cards without moving your back.”

  He grinned, knowing he’d caught me.

  “Smart city boy,” he said, thumping back down in his chair. “Smart sonofabitch in that preacher-black suit and string tie. Gambler man, gonna rook the country boys. Now looky here! Someone finally called him, and ain’t that a pure-dee shame?”

  He probably had more to say and was getting ready to say it, but I’d heard it all before, and I decided the rest of the players around the table had probably heard enough. Time to show openers.

  Without a word—and being careful not to move my back or my head—I reached up and removed my right eye.

  It’s a good prosthesis, very lifelike, and I do my best to help people think it’s a real eye. The richboy gunsel wasn’t the first who’d failed to spot the counterfeit because he was paying too much attention to the preacher-black suit and string tie, which are a carefully selected part of the illusion, and not enough to things that count.

  He sat stock-still now, frozen in mid-sneer, as I moved the eye across the table and put it down atop the ace of spades.

  “All right, sir, then there, now,” I said, slowly raking his money—and the .380—into the pile of cash and chips in front of me when I decided he’d had enough time to gape, but leaving the unsocketed eye out there in full glare. “All right, now, here’s another bet for you: How about the papers to that shiny new Cadillac of yours, the one with the cow horns for a hood ornament and six-shooter door handles, that I saw out in the parking lot. You want to bet that car against my pile, that I can’t do the same thing with the other eye?”

  The boy thought it over.

  You could see him want to go for it, and you could almost feel sorry for him, because there was no way in this world that he could make himself take the chance. The nerve simply wasn’t there, and neither was the intelligence. After a long, silent minute he simply stood up and walked out of the room, not looking at anybody.

  There were a few more moments of silence after he was gone, and I filled the time sorting money and stacking chips, waiting to see what the other poker players would decide to make of my play with the little gun-pointer.

  He was a snotty, arrogant little customer, and I had moved deliberately to force him out of the game as a distraction from serious play, expecting no general outcry. But you never can tell about a thing like that, especially in a strange town, so I felt just the tiniest sense of relief when the prosperous-looking party across the table—Savile Row turnout slightly disordered by the wheelchair to which he seemed totally accustomed—eased back and began to laugh.

  That set the tone, and in a moment or two the rest of the poker players were shaking hands, slapping thighs, and hooting. I had guessed right.

  “You reckon Bobby Don will go tell his granddaddy?” someone asked.

  “If he do, his granddaddy’ll surely kick his no-good ass from here to Amarillo!”

  “Dog! I like to be there when it happens.”

  That set off another round of good ol’ boy cackling. I was careful to stay out of it, but the man in the wheelchair had evidently decided I was worth keeping.

  “I think we all owe you a bit of thanks,” he said. “Bobby Don’s been nothing but trouble since the day he was born, and having him in the game is enough to sour a man on poker. Maybe losing that bet tonight will finally convince him that he’s no gambler.”

  Ú“Maybe so,” I replied. “But that first bet wasn’t the one that really proved my point.”

  That called for an explanation, so I went on.

  “Anyone could lose a proposition like that,” I said. “Betting on another man’s game proves nothing but a lack of experience. The situation where the boy—Bobby Don?—really demonstrated his lack of talent for poker was when he failed to take me up on the second bet, the one where I offered to do the same trick with my other eye.”

  I had everyone’s attention now.

  “A poker player’s whole stock-in-trade,” I said, “is his ability to think clearly under pressure. If Bobby Don had been able to do that, he’d have realized I could not possibly have been playing cards all night with two glass eyes. After all, the deck isn’t marked in Braille. And I didn’t come in here with a Seeing Eye dog…”

  That took a moment for digestion and a few minutes for more hooting and snorting. A couple of the players sent out for fresh drinks. The car dealer lit a new cigar. One or two of the players headed for the men’s room. But the man in the wheelchair never took his eyes from my face. And when he finally moved, it was to extend his right arm across the table, rising slightly from his chair to make the gesture.

  “J. J. Barlow,” he said. “My apologies, sir, but I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name when the game began.”

  I stood up to take the hand he offered. Its grip was surprisingly strong.

  “They call me Preacher,” I said.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  We live in a world of spaces—emotional as well as physical—and those spaces are there for a reason. They are a lubricant. They keep us from intruding too deeply, from grating one upon another, in our daily lives.

  Without that lubricant, that space, civilization would not merely be more difficult.

  Without it, human society could not even exist…

  TWO

  We finally got back to playing poker a few minutes later, and the little scene with Bobby Don the baby badman had achieved just about the kind of effect I’d thought it might. The players had figuratively—and in one or two cases, literally—loosened their belts, settled down in their chairs, and shucked their shoes off. They still didn’t know me, and they still had all the reservations natural to pack members trying to decide about a newcomer, but the first true eye contact had been achieved and nobody had blinked. I might be an alien, but I was neither a whiner nor a fool, and that can go a long way in establishing credentials for the closed circle of small-town acceptability. Until and unless I did something really outrageous, I would be looked upon as a potential acquaintance and ally. Innocent until proven guilty. An asset. Which would have gone heavy on my conscience if I had one.

  For I was in the game—and in the town—under color of fraud.

>   To get there, I had been as up-front as possible: Before the first hand was dealt, during that shuffle-and-scratch time of getting organized, counting out chips, exchanging the latest home-folks gossip, and responding to friendly insults, I had told them as much of the truth as I thought the traffic would bear. I was from California. I was in town on business. My business was playing poker, and there would be no hard feelings if they didn’t feel like having a professional in the game.

  No one seemed to mind. I hadn’t thought they would.

  Poker is a game with a southern accent, and the watchful hospitality for which that region is famous extends generally to players from near and far, professionals included, as long as they are moderately honest, moderately courteous, and vouched for by an accepted member of the community.

  My sponsor was about as accepted as you can get.

  He had spent the past dozen years among them, tending the faithful as rector of the town’s only Episcopal church and picking up added luster as organizer of charities, mainstay of Rotary Club meetings, four-handicap regular in Saturday-morning country-club foursomes, and enthusiastic leader of the town’s biggest Boy Scout troop.

  Later on, someone might take time to wonder how he came to be acquainted with a professional gambler and why he had made a point of introducing him to the local poker crowd before fading back into the woodwork. Later on, he might have a good bit of explaining to do, and I was glad it was him and not me who was going to have to do it.

  For the moment, however, it was enough that I was accepted on faith for long enough to get into the game, size up the players, and have that carefully calculated run-in with poor, dumb Bobby Don.

  A gamble, sure, but you can’t win the money if you don’t buy the cards, and while I might now be attracting a little more covert attention and speculation than I generally find useful, it was the kind of friendly attention and amused speculation that goes with acceptance. I was in.

  And that was a dirty trick, because I had come to town and joined the game to prove one of them a thief. Or a killer. Or both.

  This was to have been my slob season.