Lone Star Noir

by Bobby Byrd

  The cards were cold that night too. The game was nolimit Texas Hold’em, but nobody could seem to get any traction, not even Cherry. Then, a little before the witching hour, one of those freak hands came along, and two kings and an ace flopped. Jackie Fats bet $200 and Cherry raised him $500. Jackie smiled—which was a rare thing for the cranky bastard—and called even. Cherry smiled right back at him. This sudden heat caused everybody else to fold, and the next card was the king of spades. After that, Cherry knew the die was cast, even though the rest of us didn’t find out until a couple of minutes later. Fats bet $1,000 and Cherry raised him another $1,000. The last card was the seven of clubs, which neither helped nor hurt either of them. Jackie Fats smiled again, and with all the confidence in the world, he laid down twenty brand-new hundred-dollar bills. Cherry didn’t even hesitate. He called and raised $2,500, which only left him a couple of hundred on the table. For all practical purposes he was all in, a move that should have made Jackie Fats study the situation over for at least a few seconds. But Jackie was a natural bully, one who was always eager to stomp down on somebody, and he fell all over himself pushing the call into the pot. Eddie Junior, who was dealing that hand, said, “Showtime, boys.”

  Jackie Fats had made the last call, which meant it was Cherry’s obligation to show his cards first. But Jackie was hungry for blood. His eyes were bright and gleeful, and his face was positively vulpine as he reached down with his short, once-plump fingers and flipped over his hole cards to reveal an ace and a king, which gave him an A-A-K-K-K full house. “Can you beat that?”

  Cherry didn’t even bother to answer. He just casually turned over his cards to reveal the other two aces for an A-AA-K-K full. As I said, it was a freak hand.

  Jackie Fats gaped at the cards for the longest time, his face getting gradually redder and redder. A drop of spittle dripped off his lower lip and hung by a thread as it made its slow way down to the table. Then he bellowed like a wounded bull and lunged to his feet. That’s when the revolver appeared in his hand. Which surprised no one. It was considered the worst of manners to come armed to another man’s place, but etiquette had never been Jackie’s strong suit.

  “Get up,” he said, waving the gun wildly under Cherry’s nose. “I’ve never killed anybody who wasn’t on his feet.”

  Cherry was unperturbed. “I don’t think so.”

  “I said, get up!”

  “No. I’m comfortable where I’m at.”

  Jackie Fats licked his lips. He’d never had a man refuse one of his “requests” when he was pointing a .357 at his head. It was a new experience for him. Combined with Cherry’s utter calm, it rattled him. “I want to know how,” he said.

  “How what?”

  “How you always win.”

  “He don’t,” Bob Robbins said.

  “Shut up, Bob,” Fats said without much rancor. “I’ve paid the price here tonight and I want an answer.”

  Ever the gentleman, Sam had left his piece in the car, but now he regretted it. He was beginning to realize just how long he’d been deeply annoyed with Jackie Fats and just how much he wanted an excuse to smoke the man. Still, he said as diplomatically as he could, “Let it pass, Jackie. It’s not worth gunplay.”

  “I’ll be the one to decide that,” Jackie barked. “And this bastard is going to tell me how he does it.”

  “There’s no reason—” Bob Robbins began.

  “Seventy-two percent,” Cherry said, interrupting him.

  “What?” Fats growled. His face was almost purple, and he was gripping the gun so tightly his knuckles were white and bloodless. Cherry was as calm as a mortician.

  “Seventy-two percent,” Cherry repeated. “That’s how much of the time I know what the cards are. It’s always been that way, though I only started to gamble in the last few years.”

  Jackie Fats was baffled. “What are you saying?”

  Cherry sighed a tired sigh. “You wanted to know how I do it, and I just told you.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Okay, then try this. We sit down and somebody deals a hundred hands. In roughly seventy-two of them I’ll know what everybody has.”

  “You mean you guess right almost three quarters of the time?” one of the other players asked.

  Cherry shook his head firmly. “There’s no guess to it. Some hands I don’t have a clue, but most of the time I know. And I’m never wrong. I either know for sure or I don’t know anything. It’s either the whole hog or nothing with me. That’s just the way it works, but I’ve got no idea why.”

  Sam was more alert than the others. “How did you get that precise figure?” he asked. “The seventy-two percent, I mean.”

  “I was tested in the Rhine experiments in ESP at Duke University.”

  “But that was …” Sam began, then tapered off in confusion.

  “About fifty years ago, Sam.”

  “Damn! You can’t be that old.”

  “Why can’t I?” he asked. Then he turned and looked at Sam, and his face was full of weariness. For a fleeting moment, Sam thought he saw something in Cherry Coke’s eyes that was deep and dark and ancient beyond knowing. Then Cherry blinked and it was gone, and he was once again the same bland, fortyish fellow Sam had known for a year, staring back at him out of a face so plain and undistinguished that it could hardly be remembered.

  Cherry got leisurely to his feet and stood looking across the table at Jackie Fats. “If you’re going to shoot me, go ahead and do it,” he said.

  Sam looked across at Jackie Fats. For some reason, all the fight had gone out of him, and he wasn’t in a shooting mood anymore. His hand trembled a little as he slowly lowered the gun. His gaze was riveted to Cherry’s face, and his expression was unreadable. Sam reached out and took the .357 gently from Jackie’s hand and tucked it in his belt. Cherry slowly and carefully stacked his winnings and slipped them into his inner jacket pocket. Then he looked around the table and smiled. “It’s been a real pleasure,” he said. “You were fine fellows to be with.”

  When Cherry walked out, Sam MacCord followed him. The air was cold and bitter and full of a fine mist. In the parking lot Sam came abreast of Cherry and asked, “If what you said in there about the Rhine experiments is true, then …” Sam let his voice taper off.

  Cherry didn’t look at him. He just kept walking, but he said, his voice resigned, “Then what?”

  After a moment’s thought, Sam decided not to push the matter. “Nothing,” he replied with a shake of his head.

  When Cherry got to his car, he turned and stuck out his hand. “I’ve enjoyed knowing you, Sam,” he said. “I’ve always liked having friends, but it’s never paid me to try to hold on to them too long.”

  A few seconds later the Marquis whisked softly off into the night. That was the last time Sam MacCord ever saw Cherry Coke, but he heard stories. About a year later, a couple of regulars at the Lufkin game took their wives out to Las Vegas on vacation. One evening they left the women parked at a show and took a cab over to sample the delights of the Mirage. That’s where they saw Cherry at the five-dollar-minimum blackjack table, still clad in his dark pants and sand-colored sport coat. Whatever warm reunion they might have expected wasn’t forthcoming. Cherry was civil but unsmiling and distant. After a couple of aborted attempts at reliving old times, they gave up and left him there amidst the clatter of chips and the whir of the slot machines, a loner in a lonely land. Six months after the game, Jackie Fats Reed was found sprawled on the living room floor of his Houston apartment with a .22-caliber bullet hole in the center of his forehead and an expression of pure amazement frozen on his ugly face. Speculation was that Cherry Coke had extracted his revenge for that dreadful night in Lufkin, but Sam MacCord knew better.

  After he heard about Cherry turning up at the Mirage, Sam made a point of asking everybody he knew who went to Vegas about him. Word filtered back to Texas that the man had become a minor legend on the Strip, a sort of silent specter who never won heavily but who ra
rely lost, and who moved from casino to casino taking a thousand or so a week away from the tables—enough to live on reasonably well but never enough to annoy the Powers That Be. Then he vanished.

  It was several months before Sam managed to shake loose from his affairs long enough to travel out to Nevada and try to run down the story. The trail led to an elderly Texas road gambler named Diamond Red Nash who now worked as a gaming consultant for one of the casinos. He and Sam had always liked one another, and their reunion was cordial. Sam quickly learned that Diamond Red had been Cherry’s only real friend in Vegas. He also learned that Cherry had left town on his own.

  “Didn’t nobody run him off or do nothing to hurt him,” Red said. “He just told me that he hadn’t seen Europe in a long, long time, and then he was gone.”

  “Europe?” Sam asked in surprise. “Why there?”

  “Well, he claimed he wanted to revisit some old memories. And he said he intended to try the baccarat at Monte Carlo.”

  Sam nodded and looked out the window into the desert air shimmering in the bright noonday sun and thought back to that cold, rainy night when he’d last seen Cherry. It seemed a whole world and a lifetime away, and for the first time he felt the full weight of his sixty years. “What was your estimate of him, Red?” he finally asked.

  “I think he was the best blackjack player I ever laid my eyes on.” Then he grinned. “And I believe he loved good pork sausage more than anybody I ever knew.”

  Sam smiled and nodded. “And … ?”

  “I really liked the boy, Sam. I believe he’d do to ride the river with.”

  “I thought so too, Red. I thought so too …”

  Sam shook the old man’s hand and caught a late-night flight back to Dallas. The next day he called in a marker with a couple of local detectives who stayed a few hundred in debt to his book year-round. It wasn’t long before one of them phoned to tell him that a Richard Coke had flown from Las Vegas to Atlanta and then on to Munich, where he had leased a brand-new BMW from a German agency. After that, there was no trace of him.

  Sam decided to drop it. He considered Cherry a friend, and friends were entitled to their privacy. He also did his best to put the matter out of his mind. But from time to time, especially when he awoke in those lonely hours after midnight and sleep wouldn’t return, he found himself thinking about Cherry Coke. He finally decided that besides being the best gambler he’d ever met, the man had been a consummate actor who could convince anybody of almost anything. That’s what he believed because that’s what he wanted to believe. The only other explanation that fit the facts led down a dark road that Sam MacCord did not want to travel.

  PART III

  BIG-CITY TEXAS

  Lips so sweet and tender, like petals falling apart …

  —Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys

  MONTGOMERY CLIFT

  BY SARAH CORTEZ

  Houston

  Every time I looked at him I saw Rosalie’s first husband. The same thin shoulders. Pupils too dark to read their meaning. He felt me staring at him as I asked the same question every morning before I walked to work.

  “What you doing today, son?”

  “My lesson’s at two.”

  Another one of Rosalie’s dreams. That her son Monty would be a singer. She had found a man to tutor him at the small Catholic college in the neighborhood. Her son loved voice lessons and we found the money. Sometimes Nichols, the voice teacher, came into the hardware store I’d worked at since arriving to Houston in the late ’40s after the war. I knew his face from a concert program Monty’d brought home and left in the kitchen. The man, about forty-five years old, was well fed, but only talked in a raspy whisper. The potential of his strong body was not borne out in his oily muttering.

  I drained the last bit of coffee. “What else you doing today?”

  Monty pulled his eyes up to meet my face for the first time that morning. “Practice. I have a piano studio reserved beginning at ten.”

  “Make sure you do your chores first.” You’d think I wouldn’t have to remind a boy fixing to begin college about his responsibilities. But this one—her son—had as much common sense as a domestic rabbit. All ears and big teeth. He was as useless as the movie star she’d named him after—that little shrimp, Montgomery Clift, with the dreamboat mug he sold for money so he’d never have to work a day in his life. Just pace around decked out in fancy suits and leather dress shoes while getting smooched by a beautiful actress. Montgomery, no kind of name for a man.

  I glanced at the few keepsakes I displayed as decoration in my repair space at Southland’s. A black-and-white photo of our squad before getting shipped out to the Pacific, all smiles and bravado. A keychain doodad of tubular, see-through plastic, about three inches long. Three red rings floated in the clear fluid. The game was to place all three thin rings onto a woman’s lone leg extended in the liquid. Rosalie’s gams had looked like that when I married her. The long line of perfect white skin extending up and up from her dainty knees. With her illness, the blood got throttled in her legs’ thick blue veins and splotched her thin skin with a thousand red lines like smashed spiders. Just looking at them gave me the heebie-jeebies.

  I had just put out the nut driver and wire cutters for the first job I had to tackle when Officer Linehan came in through the back entrance off the parking lot. His usual entrance for his usual coffee. Today, he was rushing.

  “Morning, officer.”

  “Hey, Otto. I need some D-cell batteries. Five of them. Quick. They got a dead body under that railroad trestle on the bayou near the rice silos.”

  I handed him a pack. “Pay us tomorrow.”

  “Thanks. These damn runaways. You’d think they could get themselves killed somewhere else. You know, like Dallas. This girl’s supposed to be young—maybe fifteen. They’ll never find out who she is.”

  I watched him scuttle back to his patrol car. Not even eight a.m. and we were all sweating.

  Later that day, Linehan shook his head back and forth. “That poor kid. She was as scrawny as a half-starved pullet. Whoever killed her did it good—back of the skull crushed.”

  “What did they use?” I asked, setting out a screwdriver to take apart a clock radio.

  “Who knows? Who cares? Looks like she ran off to be a free-love hippie. Dripping with love beads and peace symbols. What a bunch of crap.” He smiled into his afternoon coffee. “The only good thing about this flower-power B.S. is that none of them hippie chicks wear bras. Makes for some good visuals when they ain’t dead.”

  My younger sister Lilly had run away to follow that handsome city dude. Before she left she had tried to confide in me. But I’d refused to listen, angry with her for always causing problems. Why couldn’t she follow the rules of the household, like I did? I had enough problems of my own; I didn’t want to listen to hers. She wasn’t out of high school yet, although none of us were a book-learning family. It broke my momma’s heart that we never knew for sure what Lilly did or where she went.

  “Lost,” Momma would murmur, eyes tearing. “My daughter’s lost.”

  That evening when I got home from work, I went into Rosalie’s bedroom first, as I always did. She lay under the faded yellow bedspread with pillows propping up her head.

  Her dark eyes flickered open. “Hello, Otto.”

  “Hello, Rosalie. How you feeling today?”

  “All right. Nothing better; nothing worse.”

  “I’ll get your dinner after a while. Where’s Monty?”

  “Montgomery.”

  “Where’s your son?”

  “Practicing at St. Thomas.”

  “Okay.” No point in continuing. The little strength she had, she used for her son—like all those phone calls to find a voice teacher, whose lessons I had to pay for. “Did he do his chores today?”

  A small smile lit her thin lips. “I told him to go ahead on to practice. He couldn’t wait to get out of the house.”

  I patted her hand and made sure my
voice didn’t show the anger I felt. “I guess I’ll rustle up some dinner.”

  Monty came home after I’d fed Rosalie and me, washed dishes, and was sitting on the screened-in front porch waiting for the July evening to cool off.

  He sidled in the screen door.

  “You missed dinner.”

  “I … I ate already.”

  “Where?”

  “At Mr. Nichols’s house. He … he had extra and he invited me.”

  “You need permission to eat dinner elsewhere. You know that. Why didn’t you call?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Don’t forget again.”

  He sucked in air through his wide-spaced front teeth, a childhood habit never broken, “Yes, sir.”

  The next day, Monty’s voice teacher Nichols came into Southland’s while I was waiting on customers up front. I knew who he was, but the man didn’t know me from Adam and barely glanced in my direction as I asked him what he needed.

  “Pipe wrench.”

  “For what size pipe?”

  “Residential work. One-inch pipe.”

  “Follow me.”

  Walking down the aisles made me happy. Boxes neatly arranged on top of one another, edges as precise as finely honed knives. Nichols was whistling between his teeth, following me. When we got to the pipe wrenches, he picked a big one up and held it, balancing the weight in his hand. The clean angles of his blond crew cut meant he had a good barber. The hippie fever for girlie curls on men hadn’t got ahold of him. But I’d bet those hands were soft on the palm side—not the hard-working hands of a real man.

  A few weeks later, Linehan came in later than usual. I almost missed him because I was caught up on repairs and he was near the front register. He was angry at missing his early-morning coffee with us. “Man, we got another homicide last night. They sent me to hold the scene. White female, about sixteen, ice pick. She had more holes than a sponge. Homicide had better get busy and find the S.O.B.”