The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Barlow? Yes. J. J. Barlow, almost certainly. And also, perhaps, the player still fiddling with a pair of kowboys to the doctor’s left.

  His name was Edward Watrous. The Spences had identified him as Farewell’s most successful merchant, and fully half the evening’s conversational pauses had been preempted by what appeared to be a long-running verbal guerrila between him and the physician on the subjects of weight and girth.

  Watrous’s nickname—I would have offered long odds that it dated from grammar school—was Tiny, and it wasn’t the kind of thing that would ever need explaining.

  At first glance, from across a room, I had guessed him at 400 pounds. But closer inspection told me that was probably far too low. Tiny Watrous was the kind of fat man whose components are so totally in proportion that he takes on his true size only at close range—six feet two or three, I decided, and tremendously muscular under all the padding. If he’d been born in Japan, he might well have been considered for marriage into one of the better sumo families. In a town like Farewell, however, his size and bulk had probably been a social problem for him through adolescence and beyond, and he had evidently coped with it—as a few are preceptive enough to do—by casting himself in the easily acceptable role of Jolly Fat Man.

  I wondered how many people over the years had found out too late that there are no Jolly Fat Men.

  Galloping through their thumbnail sketches of my probable poker opponents, the Spences had mentioned that, in addition to owning Farewell’s only department store, Tiny Watrous was a silent partner in the town’s three indoor movie theaters, the 250-watt commercial radio station, six bars, a restaurant, and a rickety little dirt track where the local talent raced their stock cars every weekend during the summer. He was also a director of J. J. Barlow’s bank and a former three-term mayor.

  Jolly Fat Men do all those things, of course. But not by being Jolly Fat Men. Tiny Watrous might be only a fair-to-indifferent poker player—poor card sense and not enough concentration, a social player—but that didn’t mean he was a loser. His running word-battle with the doctor never seemed to distract him so far as to make him incautious with his bets. His forays into the third or fourth round were always based on solid hands. After the first hour or so I had decided to be careful about betting into him, and noticed that those who did were usually sorry, because it was almost impossible to drive him out of a pot once he had decided to go for it and because he won the big ones as often as he lost them. For the night, he was a little behind, but no more than he could chalk up to necessary business socializing.

  The player to my immediate right was another matter entirely.

  His name, according to the Spences, was Leonard Kenneth Pemberton, but he had been introduced as Deke, and I never heard anyone call him anything else. When they spoke to him at all.

  It wasn’t ostracism, exactly. Deke Pemberton seemed to be well enough liked. “But somehow you just never know what to say to him,” Jake had told me, and I could see what he meant. Some men seem to be old friends after a few minutes; big-town political chieftains and other truly dangerous confidence men have this faculty. With Pemberton, on the other hand, I suspected that a man could know him from childhood (at least two of the other players, I knew, could claim as much) and still be no more than acquaintances.

  Deke Pemberton, Jake Spence had said, was probably the smartest, most successful, and least appreciated lawyer in the southwestern United States. Law school graduate at twenty-one, sometime clerk to a Supreme Court justice, Pemberton had seemed well launched in a prestigious Wall Street firm when he suddenly resigned and returned to Farewell on his thirtieth birthday to take a low-pay job as assistant district attorney.

  “At first,” Jake said, “people around here assumed he had either gotten into some kind of trouble back in New York or had political ambitions back here among the homefolks. He’d been born rich, and politics would have been a logical goal. After a year in the D.A.’s office, he took another short-money job as US. commissioner—that’s like being a federal judge, only it’s not for life—and a couple of his opinions are in the law school textbooks now. Deke could never have been elected to anything. Too chilly. But he’d collected enough IOUs over the years to take his pick of political appointments.” Instead, Jake said, he had resigned and entered private practice.

  No one ever asked him why.

  Playing one night’s poker against him hadn’t answered any of the big questions, of course. But it offered hints. In this pot, for instance, he had backed an exposed jack-ten into the third betting round where he picked up a lovely queen to support the notion of an open straight. A solid betting hand if it was real, a solid bluffing hand if it wasn’t. And there was nothing pokerfaced about his expression as he waited for Tiny Watrous to come to a decision. As he sat it out, Pemberton’s face revealed as much as it ever did—a collection of unmemorable features in cadaverous repose.

  But there was a stillness.

  A listening.

  “Okay,” Watrous said at last, pushing a stack of blue chips into the pot. “See your hundred and up fifty.” He leaned back and took a deep, frog-grinning pull at what I knew was his seventh bourbon and soda. I think it was supposed to lull his opponents into a false sense of security.

  Pemberton didn’t seem to notice. Wordlessly, he tossed his possible straight into the discard and looked at nothing. No one seemed at all surprised.

  J. J. Barlow hesitated the briefest of seconds, glancing pointedly at the fat man’s kings before moving five blues into the pot.

  The deal was mine, and now I handed him what I knew was the last remaining jack. It was another heart.

  Tiny Watrous seemed unperturbed by the seven of spades that landed in front of him. “High pair bets,” he said unnecessarily.

  Barlow looked at his possible full house and finger-counted a double stack of blues. He had all the options; this was table stakes, and neither he nor Watrous was apt to run short. He waited for the fat man to make up his mind.

  “Hundred,” Watrous said finally, pushing ten blues into the center of the table without looking at Barlow.

  The banker hesitated only a moment before meeting the bet. I dealt the final concealed cards and sat back to watch. The possibilities were endless, but—never mind the cards—I would have offered side action on the man in the wheelchair.

  Tiny Watrous didn’t see it that way, of course. “Go for broke,” he said, counting twenty blues into the pot and grinning at Barlow.

  Barlow seemed to think it over.

  Despite Watrous’s high pair, his possible flush was a strong betting proposition, and I was sure he hadn’t failed to notice that one other king had gone into the discard earlier.

  “By God, you don’t make it easy, do you?” he said, fingering his chips again. “But I guess I’m in too deep to leave now.”

  His eyes never left Watrous’s face as he stacked twenty blues, placed another twenty beside them, seemed to think it over—and then moved all the rest of his chips into the center of the table.

  Watrous stared at the pile for a moment before leaning back to take another soothing sip of the bourbon.

  He looked at Barlow and he looked back at the table and he looked at his bourbon and he looked at his hands and finally he looked at his first two concealed cards…which told me what he was holding. Barlow had been right. At best, the fat man was backing a full house, kings over; at worst, two pair. Otherwise, he’d have checked out the last card when he got nervous.

  I wondered if Barlow knew it, too.

  But the banker wasn’t telling anybody anything they didn’t already know. His attention was fixed again on the far wall, and his hands were quiet.

  Watrous looked searchingly at him, and had a coughing fit.

  “Well, I be damn!” he said when it was done. “I be damn if you ain’t gone and trapped ol’ Tiny.” He turned his frog-grin at Barlow, who looked back blankly. “Yes, indeedy,” Watrous went on. “Trapped the ol’ fat boy fair an
d square. No wonder you banker fellers wind up owning half the county.”

  He turned his eyes back toward the table.

  “Well, sir,” he said, “well, sir, now! Reckon there ain’t much a poor boy can do but follow along, is there?”

  He grinned widely again and—oh, what the hell—made a broom of his hands to sweep all his remaining chips into the pot. He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in the chair, which uttered a minor shriek of protest.

  Barlow’s face finally came alive.

  Leaning forward, he used one hand to stack the fat man’s final bet and his own in parallel. When he was done, five reds remained. He raked them back to the empty spot in front of him.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s find out…”

  Watrous shrugged, still smiling. Almost offhandedly, he flipped over his first two hole cards to show a pair of sevens for a full house. A nice betting hand. And not too badly played.

  But Barlow’s was better.

  Nodding thoughtfully in the fat man’s direction, he flipped his first two concealed cards over to display a pair of fours—and then a final four he’d caught on the last round to fill a winning hand that I knew must have surprised him as much as it did everyone else.

  Even Deke Pemberton snorted.

  But it remained for Tiny Watrous to pronounce benediction. “You,” he said to Barlow, the emotion of the moment temporarily depriving him of the good ol’ boy accent and vocabulary, “are a conniving misbegotten low-life indiscriminate fornicator of swine!”

  Nobody seemed to want to go on playing after that, so we turned the chips back into money and left everything else for the club’s morning cleanup crew—which, I decided on checking my watch, should be arriving at any moment. Dawn was a little more than an hour away, and as I stopped off in the men’s room to put my right eye back where it belonged, it suddenly seemed time to remember that I hadn’t been on close terms with a mattress for nearly twenty-four hours.

  Suppressing a yawn, I refused with thanks an offer of transportation back to town, explaining that my rented wheels were waiting in the parking lot.

  Walking out to reclaim the car might have been a good time to go through the mental sorting usual to the end of a long game. Hardening the lines around the personalities. Noting mistakes. Secretly congratulating myself for correct decisions.

  But I didn’t do that.

  Just too tired.

  Which may or may not explain why I failed to notice that the car wasn’t where it should have been. Or, at any rate, had undergone some major alteration.

  The transportation I had rented in Amarillo was a black Camaro, and unfamiliar though it might be, I was morally certain that it had still been a black Camaro when I parked it beside Jake Spence’s aging station wagon at the far end of the club lot the previous afternoon. But the vehicle occupying that spot now was a new but battered Japanese-built pickup, its canary-yellow paint thickly spattered with the red mud of eastern New Mexico. It was the kind of vehicle that must surely contain a gun rack mounted beside the driver’s bench seat, and I could see it had one. And something to go with it.

  Leaning at ease against the open tailgate was six feet or so of B-picture country lout, gangling and dirty behind the standard equipment of green teeth exposed in a doggy grin. A nest of empty-and-squeezed beer cans on the ground nearby told me he had been waiting for quite a while.

  “Hidey-there, preacher-man,” he said, moving an inch or two to make sure I didn’t miss the mail-order brass knuckles fitted loosely over his right hand. “Lookin’ for something?”

  It was beginning to feel like a long, long night.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Some argue, of course, that this is all a part of God’s greater plan…part of the destiny that He has prepared for us, His children…

  FIVE

  Surprise parties can be embarrassing.

  Standing perfectly still and looking at my latest acquaintance in Farewell, I felt a momentary rush of shame and irritation—directed entirely at myself. Either I was getting old or I was getting careless or both, and that is the kind of thing that can be bad news for a man in my line of work. A poker player starves or prospers according to his degree of alertness and perception.

  I made a mental note to consider a refresher with our resident mahayana master when I got home.

  But I was fully awake now. Nariyuki no matsu…I turned my center still and waited with what I hoped was patience infinite while invoking haragi, the sixth sense that connects all living things. Greenteeth hadn’t come alone. Listening with the pores open at last, I could fill in a partial picture of two others—height, weight, position, even the emotional pitch of waiting to move in on me—while they remained out of sight behind the truck. I wondered if their mothers knew they were out.

  Greenteeth finally got tired of waiting. “That is sure a pretty suit you got on there, preacher-man,” he said.

  I just looked at him.

  “And a nice hat,” he went on when I didn’t react. “Stetson, ain’t it? You know, I always did want a pretty hat like that. Now, I wonder if it would kindly fit me. You reckon it would?”

  He reached toward me and I moved back a step, turning a bit to keep my blind right side toward the place where his friends were still hiding.

  “Aw, here, now,” he said, flashing the green tusks again in a beer-friendly smirk. “Where you goin’? I ain’t gonna hurt you for an hour yet.”

  He carried his right hand low but not out of sight, and I could see the fingers flex in the knuckle-duster. He was ready for business. And so were the other two.

  Well, okay, then.

  Having only one eye can be a frustration. It limits your perception of distance and cuts the effective field of vision by nearly a third. You have to turn your head to see things on the dark side. Still, there can be compensations. For instance, if you have learned to distinguish people and objects without visual contact, any action you take on the information can come as something of a surprise.

  “Sorry, friend,” I said, giving Greenteeth my brightest smile. “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m really far too tired to talk hats and haberdashery with you tonight. I’ll just go back and phone for a cab…”

  I started a turn to the left, back toward the distant clubhouse, and—who knows?—all things being equal, I might even have gone there and done that. Stranger things have happened. But no chance. As I’d expected, my retreat was a signal for Greenteeth’s two buddies to break cover…which put the first of them in perfect position for the hook-kick I’d started with the left turn.

  It connected with a satisfactory sound, and I felt its recipient’s wa flicker, stunned, before erupting into pain and astonishment. A nice moment.

  But not to be savored. Greenteeth had been almost as surprised as his friend. His brass knuckles were still fanning the space where I might have been when the final energy of the kick brought me back to face him. Now I moved forward, inside the danger range of his weapon, and grasped both sides of his shirt collar. He was about my height, so I didn’t have to bend in order to bring my forehead into violent contact with the bridge of his nose.

  Sudden white pain took away the breath he needed to scream.

  That left number three.

  I’ll say this for him: He didn’t hesitate. The blade in his left hand was about four inches long, and he carried it in the tight but flexible grip of affection and long acquaintance. His eyes were bright with something more than beer, and his expression was one of pleasurable anticipation as he feinted to the right and attacked to the left.

  I let him do it and waited for the low slash. When it came, I gave the movement a little help at the very end and managed a hard kite to the side of the neck as he went past.

  Result: zero.

  Whatever kind of controlled substance the little shitkicker was using, it didn’t slow him down and seemed to make him relatively immune to pain. Sometimes I really wish I’d been a concert vi
olinist like my grandmother wanted.

  Over by the tailgate of the truck, Greenteeth was gradually recovering his grasp on the world, and I could sense a few signs of life returning to the youngster with the damaged jaw. Well, hell already! Finesse is a fine thing, and I like to measure the dose as well as the next, but enough is too much and I really had been awake a lot longer than I wanted to be.

  “Hey, pussy,” I said to make sure I had the knife-fighter’s undivided attention. “Your mother still making it with the garbage man?”

  Bull’s-eye!

  The knife point came straight for the middle of my face, and the whole weight of his body was behind it. I hardly had to move a muscle to intercept, and the force of his rush made the twist that broke his wrist almost reflexive. The knife skittered away across the pavement as my right shin connected with his crotch, and the bright eyes clouded. All the same, it took a double blow to the base of the skull to be sure of putting him away. Just in time to say hello to Greenteeth, who had lost his knuckle-duster and quite a bit of blood, but not his nerve. He was probably the best of the lot, and it seemed almost a pity to kick his left knee out from under him and break his face as he went down. But I was beginning to lose patience with the lot of them.

  Two away, top of the ninth.

  The third clown was technically conscious but not really back in the picture yet, so I had a few moments to spare and used them to retrieve his buddy’s knife. When he was finally able to focus, he found the point less than an inch from his left eye.

  “Do you like games?” I inquired conversationally.

  The threatened eye rolled around the deserted parking lot, looking for erstwhile allies.

  “Your friends were sort of tired,” I told him, smiling with a lot of teeth. “They’re going to take a little siesta now, and we don’t want to disturb them, do we? No. Besides, they’re no fun. Not like you. How’s your jaw—working good? Hurt a little? Well, these things pass. You’ll see, week or two you’ll be good as new. Hey, you like games? Bet you’re a real whiz, right? I know what let’s do: Let’s play Twenty Questions.”