Crooked Hearts

by Patricia Gaffney

  “Shut up.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Just shut the hell up.”

  She bristled like an angry cat. “What on earth is the—”

  “What the hell kind of a woman are you?”

  She began to sputter, completely bewildered. “What’s wrong with you? Have you gone crazy?”

  “Don’t you have any conscience? Hell, of course you don’t, what am I saying? But—Jesus Christ, Grace, doesn’t anything mean anything to you?”

  She hauled back to punch him, but he grabbed her loose, harmless fist and flung it sideways. With the most pained, most tortured look on his face, he jerked her to him in a steely, unbreakable embrace and kissed her. His body was hard and angry, his hands almost violent, until the moment when he sensed her perfect willingness. Then his mouth softened and his kiss turned unbearably gentle. He still had her arms pinned down, so all she could hold onto was his hips. A thought skittered through her addled brain—This makes no sense whatsoever—but she didn’t let it distract her. All that mattered right now was Reuben’s mouth, and his restless hands, and the lean, hard feel of his body against hers. Starving, weak with wanting, she took what he could give her, and gave him everything she had.

  Even though she’d been half expecting it, she still gasped when he let her go, suddenly and not very gently, holding onto her arms but pushing her away from him. “What are you doing to me?” he had the gall to ask.

  “What am—”

  “What kind of man do you think I am, Grace?” He shook her—shook her—and demanded, “Do you think I’ll settle for this?”

  Gnashing her teeth, trying to strain out of his grip, she made an anguished sound in the back of her throat. Then the damn tears started, turning his face into a blur.

  Immediately his hands softened. “Ah, Gus,” he whispered, “don’t do that.”

  Gus? He could call her Gus after what he’d done? The name nobody ever called her but him, the name that called to mind all the—the sweetness between them before he’d betrayed it because—because—she had no idea why!

  “Don’t call me that,” she cried, and his arms fell away. “Don’t ever call me that again or you’ll be sorry.” His face turned into a rigid mask; he made a grating sound that was supposed to be derisive laughter. No point in trying to hit him again; he was expecting it. “I don’t understand you,” she threw at him—her final insult. She backed away to the garden path, spun around, and ran.

  15

  Misery loves company, but company does not reciprocate.—Addison Mizner

  REUBEN STOOD PLANTED IN the middle of the sunny terrace, staring around with angry, jaundiced eyes at the weather-stained furniture and the great tubs of flowers and herbs. In his mind, he seized the nearest chair and smashed it against the stone railing, upsetting a giant pot of begonias. Clay shattered; black dirt scattered everywhere. He imagined grabbing another chair and battering it against the table until nothing was left but a stump of wood in his hand. He picked up the table next (an impossibility; it must weigh two hundred pounds) and heaved it through the closed glass doors to the living room. Crash! Glass everywhere, a million fragments glittering in the sunshine.

  A miniature lemon tree sat in a tub on the terrace steps. He saw himself yanking it out by the roots, tramping inside, and smearing the ball of muddy dirt into the carpet with his bare feet. No, not his bare feet—there was broken glass everywhere. With his boots. Back outside, he dropped into one of the two remaining chairs and plunked his muddy boots down in the other. He was exhausted.

  Imaginary mayhem was a trick he’d used to cope with frustration for years; since childhood, really. It always helped. It helped now—he didn’t want to wring Grace’s neck quite as much—but he wasn’t cured. What he needed was a drink.

  The house was dim and cool; the thick, glass-free carpet felt pleasant on his bare feet. A library table against the left-hand wall of the living room served as a liquor cabinet; he’d seen Henry mix himself plenty of drinks from it, but this would be the first alcohol that he, Reuben, had drunk since before his injury—Ah You’s orders. Whiskey, rye, sherry, gin—aha, bourbon. He found a glass and poured himself a generous three fingers, ignoring the pitcher of water.

  “Good God, man, it’s ten o’clock in the morning! Pour me one, will you? No good to drink alone.”

  Reuben whirled, spilling bourbon on the floor. Henry sat with his feet up behind a cluttered-desk in the far corner of the room, a pen in his hand, engaging grin on his handsome face. No disguise today; he wore a collarless pink shirt with the sleeves rolled up, navy striped trousers, and tartan plaid braces. Reuben peered at him for a long time, debating whether to make him a drink or challenge him to a duel. If he challenged him to a duel, he might choose swords. Splashing bourbon into another glass, Reuben marched over and smacked it down on Henry’s desk.

  “Thanks.” Henry lifted his glass for a little toast, but Reuben ignored the gesture and swallowed down a big slug of liquor, setting his throat on fire. When his eyes stopped watering, he saw a crafty look come over Henry’s features. “Want to see something?”

  He shrugged.

  Henry took his feet off the desk, unlocked the knee-hole drawer, removed a square tin box, and opened it. It was full of money.

  Reuben went closer, sat down on the edge of the desk. “Well, now,” he said cautiously.

  Henry cackled. “Nice, huh? All tens. Four hundred of ’em. Here, have a feel.”

  Surprised, he took the bundle of bills Henry handed him. “Very nice,” he said perfunctorily, and was about to hand it back when something about the heft of the bundle arrested him. Too light. He peeled off the top tenner and held it up to the window. A reluctant smile twitched at his lips. “Not enough cotton,” he judged, squinting. “The inking’s good, though. Nice seal work, nice corners. Who did it?”

  Henry took the money back, a little peeved. “Fellow named Smith.”

  “Ah, Smith.”

  “It’s not bad, though, for a first effort.” He sounded defensive.

  “Not bad at all. Grace know about this?” Reuben asked casually.

  “Hell, no, and she’d kill me if she found out. This isn’t her sort of thing. No, not her sort of thing at all.”

  “Why not?” he asked, but he hated hearing Henry talk about Grace; hated the intimacy of the things Henry knew about her and he didn’t.

  “Too risky. Plus she’s against anything that might involve the government. I try to tell her that’s un-American, but she won’t listen. Cigar? Why don’t you sit down in a chair?”

  Reuben hesitated, then took the proffered stogie. What was going on? Henry acted as if he wanted to be friends. Out of the question. Under different circumstances, maybe. Possibly. He wasn’t all bad, after all; in fact, he had a few undeniably good qualities. Funny how, up to a point, Reuben felt most comfortable with people he couldn’t trust. He knew where he stood with them, and they didn’t excite any unrealistic expectations. Then again, he’d been attracted to Grace in the beginning for that very reason—that he couldn’t trust her—and look where that had gotten him. Life was getting too damn complicated.

  Two hours and four shots of bourbon later, life seemed a lot simpler. Take Henry, for example. True, he’d stolen Reuben’s girl—sort of; actually, Reuben had stolen her from him before he’d stolen her back—but still, once you got to know him, Henry was a helluva fellow. He’d been employed in Reuben’s line of work for better than thirty years, and he knew everything. He was a master, and Reuben, by contrast, was a journeyman apprentice, a mere acolyte. It was fascinating to sit, figuratively speaking, at the master’s feet and listen to his rich confidence lore, stories of brilliant bunco successes interspersed with his philosophy on greed, gullibility, and the art of flim-flammery. In a vague way, Reuben had always known that his life’s work was an art, but somehow Henry raised it even higher than that to something mysterious and sublime, something … metaphysical. Then again, maybe it was the bourbo
n.

  At noon, Reuben declined a sixth shot and suggested they have lunch. He’d been about equally hoping and dreading that Grace would join them; when she didn’t, he couldn’t decide if he was sorry or relieved. After the meal, the men returned to the living room, where Henry told Ah You they were out of bourbon and Reuben asked for a cup of coffee.

  “You play cards?” Henry asked innocently.

  He might be nursing a sleepy afternoon hangover, but Reuben wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t recognize that tone of voice. Hadn’t he used it often enough himself on a hundred greenhorn sheep? “Oh, a little,” he answered, nonchalant.

  The battle was on.

  Henry’s game was “Flinch,” a form of liar’s poker for two that Reuben knew by the name of “Bull’s-eye.” Same game, same exhilarating opportunities to cheat. Hand after hand they played to a draw, until Reuben’s eyes started to cross. “How long have you known Grace?” he heard himself ask during a lull.

  “Six years? Seven years? Something like that.” Henry lit a cigar and blew smoke at the ceiling. The only sign that he’d drunk a pint and a half of liquor in three hours was a slight glassiness of the eyes; otherwise, he was unimpaired.

  “So she was—?”

  “Sixteen. And already pretty as a picture.”

  “But just a child,” Reuben pointed out, scowling.

  “Oh, I doubt if Grace was ever much of a child. Not the way she was raised.”

  “How was she raised?”

  “Badly.” Henry scowled back at him. “I hate to think what would’ve happened to her if I hadn’t come along.”

  Reuben fired up his own cigar. “Don’t you think you’re a little old for her?” he asked bluntly.

  “Old for her? Certainly not. We complement each other—my wisdom and her freshness. My experience, her nerve. My—”

  “Got it.” He slid lower, till the edge of the chair cut into his backbone. “You dealing or what?”

  The afternoon wore on, with Reuben unable to summon the energy to get up and do something useful. Like what? The only useful thing he could think of would be to pack up and get out. He’d been here too long already. But this time he’d spent with Henry had accomplished one thing, at least: when he said goodbye to Grace, he’d say it without anger. Only sadness and regret. It wasn’t her fault she was devoted to Henry. If there was blame anywhere, Reuben deserved it, for mistaking her open, affectionate nature for something deeper than friendship.

  Then too, that extraordinary night at the Bunyon Arms had disoriented him, clouded his judgment. Grace had a free, clean, generous sexuality you didn’t find in many women, but to read more into it than what it was only guaranteed misunderstanding. Out of the whole sorry mess, he could think of only one consolation: that he’d never said anything to her about how he felt. Anything of a personal nature, that was. So he could leave her with his pride intact. Bloody cold comfort.

  “Hey, Grace, come and join us,” Henry called out unexpectedly, causing Reuben to fluff a shuffle. “Where’ve you been all day?”

  She stopped in the doorway, looking trapped; obviously she’d intended to sneak past unseen. “Around.” Even from here, Reuben could tell she’d been crying. His chest tightened like a fist.

  “Well, come on in,” Henry boomed. “Come on, you weren’t doing anything.”

  “I was going to help Ah You with dinner,” she temporized.

  “He doesn’t need any help. Come on, we’ve never tried this game with a third.”

  She was about to refuse. Reuben saw it coming, and stood up. “Won’t you join us?” he said formally, pulling out the chair between his and Henry’s. “We’d both like it if you would.”

  She stared at him for a long, tense minute, scrutinizing his face, clearly trying to figure out what kind of mood he was in this time. Don’t worry, he wished he could tell her, you’re safe; her tragic, red-rimmed eyes had taken the last of the fight out of him. But he’d never intended to hurt her. Even at his angriest, he’d never intended that.

  Grace continued to hang back, wondering what to do. Henry was beginning to look puzzled, and she had no wish to draw his attention to her problems with Reuben. Reuben looked … oh, who the hell knew how Reuben looked? Sad, she’d have said, if that weren’t so outlandish. As if he’d lost something, and had no hope of getting it back.

  “Grace?” he said quietly. Hopefully.

  Disconcerted, she gave a careless shrug and came in.

  The game was Flinch, and it took only a couple of hands to figure out that both men were cheating. The mood between them surprised her: she’d thought they didn’t like each other, but here they were, chuckling at each other’s jokes, interrupting each other’s sentences. Once she’d hoped they could be friends, but it didn’t matter much anymore. Now their jocularity just made her feel cold inside.

  “Flinch,” Reuben crowed, two tricks into the third hand.

  Henry reached for his discard. “You crimped that deuce,” he said admiringly, holding it up to the light.

  Determined to join in, to sound lighthearted if it killed her, Grace heaved a humorous sigh. “I’d get a new deck, except it wouldn’t make any difference. You two would have it defaced in ten minutes.”

  Henry looked flattered. “Look who’s talking,” he said proudly. “I taught her everything she knows.”

  “That’s so?” Reuben said neutrally.

  “Absolutely. You’ve seen her in action—isn’t she something?”

  “She’s something.” He started to smile at her, but she glanced away.

  Henry tapped her wrist. “Did you tell him about the time you convinced half of San Francisco you were Andrew Carnegie’s daughter?”

  “No.”

  “We cleaned up on that one,” Henry gloated. “She got loans so big you wouldn’t believe it, on promissory notes with forged signatures. Offered the gulls twenty percent interest, see, and repaid the borrowings early to make sure they came back for more. She—”

  “Flinch,” she said loudly, plunking her cards down. “Tell him about the train you invented.” She made herself look at Reuben directly. “It could do a mile a minute, and it ran on water.”

  Henry raked in the cards and started to shuffle. “Ah, that was a sweet one,” he reminisced. “I called it the Silver Pronto. The shares went like hotcakes at ten bucks a pop. I had diagrams, photographs—I told ’em it had a ‘vibratory generator with a hydro-pneumatic-pulsating vacue machine.’”

  He and Reuben chortled, and Grace sat back, glad when the conversation shifted to swindles in general, not ones she’d participated in in particular. She listened with one ear while Henry bragged about his rash youth, when he’d sold fake death warrants for Salem witches to hobby collectors, bogus lottery tickets, nonexistent real estate, fake jewelry, phony stocks and bonds, windfall inheritances contingent on a small preliminary fee. The conversation turned philosophical, with the two men arguing over which human frailty benefited the confidence artist more, greed or vanity. “Every man I’ve ever swindled had larceny in his heart,” Henry declared, “and the easiest sheep of all is the one who thinks he’s helping you fleece somebody else.”

  “That’s the truth,” Reuben agreed heartily.

  “People don’t like to be fooled, but they dearly love to fool themselves. They don’t even hear you when you start your patter. They go into a dream.”

  Reuben said, “That’s it, that’s right,” in perfect understanding.

  “And they dream of all the money they’re going to make and how they’re going to spend it, and they’ve signed on the dotted line before they come out of the dream.”

  “Right, exactly right.”

  She stopped listening, because the light brown hairs on Reuben’s forearm had her complete attention. Nobody she knew slouched the way he did. He sat low on his long spine, dusty bare feet propped on the fourth chair, sipping warm beer in his shirtsleeves. His cheroot had gone out, but he kept it clamped in his strong white teeth. There was
something so neat and clean about him, and she thought it was partly the way his hair grew out at his temples and the back of his neck, some vigorous, youthful strength in his profile. The set of his shoulders excited her, and the way he held his cards near his chest, the arrogant curl of his nostrils when he was bluffing …

  “Your play,” Henry repeated.

  She flushed, and drew a card.

  Ah You poked his head in the door. “Missy Waters come in buggy, boss.”

  “Lucille?” Henry’s face lit up. He threw his hand in and shoved back in his chair. “Well, this is a surprise!” he exclaimed, and hurried out into the hall.

  Out of habit, Reuben checked Henry’s cards. “Pair of jacks,” he informed her. “Who’s Missy Waters?”

  “Mrs. Lucille Waters,” Grace said tightly. “An old friend of the family.” The day had started off badly; why shouldn’t it go completely to hell?

  Reuben was looking at her. She busied herself with shuffling the cards. She was a grown woman, too old by now and surely too mature to still be jealous of Lucille Waters just because she was perfect. But Henry was the only family Grace had, and for six years she’d lived in fear and dread that the beautiful, accomplished Lucille would take him away from her.

  “She’s a widow, she lives in town,” she explained for Reuben’s benefit, keeping her eyes on the cards. “She and Henry … keep company. She won’t marry him till he gives up all his confidence games, and he won’t marry her because he’s not ready to go straight. It’s a standoff.” She looked up to see Reuben’s arrested face slowly break into a smile, and then a delighted grin. “What?” she said. He looked as if he’d just won the lottery.

  “You mean Henry—you and Henry—you—”

  Before he could get out whatever he was trying to say, Lucille and Henry swept into the room, arm in arm, beaming with goodwill. Grace stood up and greeted Lucille as civilly as she could, responding politely to the questions about her month-long stay with her “cousins in Santa Barbara” (the story Henry had cooked up to explain her absence while she was out soliciting for the Blessed Sisters of Hope). But it was no use: Lucille always made her feel like a surly child.