Bluff

by Michael Kardos

  “You still gonna have a trick for me by Monday?” he asked.

  Shit. I’d totally forgotten.

  When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “So no charity work anymore, is that it?”

  “Give me a break, Jack.” Fifteen years ago, my mother used to drop me off for lessons with Jack so she could steal an hour with a man who wasn’t my father. Jack knew it, and so did I, and maybe that’s why the two of us had worked so hard on the magic.

  I wanted to tell him why my mind was elsewhere. Wished I could explain that money had suddenly become very important. I blinded a man last night, and I’m terrified, I would’ve blurted out if I weren’t a coward, and if Jack weren’t the one magician—the one human being—I didn’t want to disappoint more than I felt I already had.

  “No, I understand,” he said, scrunching up the rag in his hands. “Go ahead, make some scumbag with a decent bottom deal look like Houdini and Jesse James and Sigmund Freud all rolled into one.”

  “I thought it would be interesting, is all,” I said.

  “Pornography is interesting,” he said. “A dead dog in the street is interesting.” He frowned. “You of all people ought to be aiming a little higher.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Come on, Natalie. You have the chops of a top magician.” He shook his head. “Or at least you used to. You owe the profession.”

  “I owe the—?” My laughter was sucked away by the carpeted floor and the dark velvet curtains behind the display cases.

  Magicians with far less technique than mine made DVDs. They did steady corporate gigs for real money. They played Caribbean resorts, not Newark hotels. They landed the prime performances at conventions. They made a living. Not many, but some.

  “Just do me a favor—do yourself a favor—and don’t spotlight some cheat,” Jack said.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said.

  He was already back to wiping down the countertop, so I headed for the door, thinking that he was right about one thing. I was a real magician, and a real magician furthered her craft however she could, learning from anyone and everyone. In that way, I was a purist, too.

  I had almost reached the door when Jack couldn’t help himself. “I swear,” he said, “you’re getting to be as bitter as your old man.”

  But Jack had never met my father in person and knew him only from my selfish teenage grumblings. And that was near the end, when my father was spiteful and self-defeating. “My father did the best he could,” I said.

  “Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night,” he said.

  “Really not interested in your pop psychology, Jack.”

  “No, you never want to hear anything.” As I opened the door, he added, “I happen to know a cheat or two, but you won’t get their names from me.”

  “Don’t need them!” I called out as the door jangled shut behind me.

  5

  Sitting alone in my car outside the shop, the engine running.

  You have the chops of a top magician. Or at least you used to.

  Damn you, Jack.

  Either I had missed the eight-inch Styrofoam target because my throw wasn’t as sharp as it once was (because I’d been temporarily enraged; because Lou Husk had been tall) or I had hit my target—the lawyer’s smug face—exactly as I had meant to. Either reason proved Jack right. I wasn’t the magician I had once been.

  I had tried to sound tough in front of Jack because he’d put me on the defensive, but I didn’t feel tough. I felt the opposite of tough. I felt the irrational and pointless yearning for my parents to swoop in and bail me out.

  I tilted the car’s rearview mirror and examined my face. In not too many years, I would be the age my father would always stay. I looked more like my mother—I had her thick hair, thin nose, and sharp jawline—but I had my father’s green eyes and, more and more, the bags under them. Lately, when I saw myself in mirrors, it was my father who looked back.

  Get-rich-quick guys who never get rich are a dime a dozen, but my father had been a rarer breed: he actually got rich. But then he got poor again, which was worse than back to zero because loss carries its own burden. He lost $108,000 in a single night—in a single instant—despite never having been a gambler or risk taker before, proving that the risk-taking impulse can lie dormant until a sufficient stake comes along.

  Before any of that, he had worked for the Flowers Corporation, putting his accounting training to use. Then, one sunny spring day, he got fired for the crimes of being honest and decent. I was only eight at the time, so it was a number of years before I thought to consider the resentment he must have felt. Yet I don’t remember him ever complaining.

  Needing money, he went back to delivering pianos, something he’d done to pay for his college courses. And for the next four years he worked hard and came home each night, and sometimes after dinner he would sit down to play our own piano, a used chestnut upright, courtesy of his employee discount. He lacked finesse, and his hands looked all wrong on the keys with his fat fingers and swollen knuckles, yet his touch was light. He’d play bits of Bach’s “Minuet in G” and the beginning of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and the end part of “Layla.” Sometimes, after a couple of beers, he would sound out something he had heard on the radio, and if he didn’t remember the lyrics he’d make some up.

  I tried to remember him that way, mucking around the keys and singing. But we don’t get to choose all our recollections, and mine invariably drifted toward the accident and what came after.

  I was with him the day he crushed his hands. I went with him sometimes to the warehouse—to help, I always assumed, though by now I realized it was so my mother could have me out of her hair for a while. On that day, the day that mattered, my father wasn’t supposed to work, but another man had called in sick and we lived closest to the warehouse. It was a Saturday and a Rangers game was on TV—tied in the third period, I’d always remember, one more reason not to be pulled away from the house on his day off. By the time my father’s shoes and coat were on and we were backing down the driveway, he was in a rotten mood, and I was in a rotten mood, too, though it had nothing to do with the hockey game and everything to do with being twelve.

  At the warehouse he pushed the dolly with the black baby grand piano on it toward the elevator and asked me to carry the bench. “Don’t even say it,” I said. That was the common refrain at school that year. I didn’t know where it came from, had never bothered to wonder. It was just what Lisa Morrow and Kim Duluth and Gina Kasem and all the girls were saying.

  How’d you do on the test?

  Don’t even say it.

  What about Andrew Wasserman? You think he’s hot?

  Don’t even say it.

  My father shook his head. “Then carry the toolbox—you’re no weakling.”

  I was already a ridiculous five feet, eight inches. The junior high basketball coach kept stopping me in the hallway to remind me about school spirit. I weighed barely a hundred pounds but could channel all of them into being a brat.

  “Don’t even say it, Dad,” I said without so much as a glance in his direction.

  When we reached the freight elevator, he set down the piano bench and the toolbox so he could pull open the steel doors, which opened the opposite way from most elevators—one door went up, the other down. He carried the bench into the elevator and stepped out again.

  “I need both hands free to get the piano over the gap and into the elevator. So please, Natalie, my dearest”—his voice was soft, his closed-mouth smile oozing sarcasm—“pick up the goddamn toolbox.”

  Here was the world’s easiest request. I was standing three feet from the man and carrying nothing.

  “Don’t. Even. Say. It.”

  I stepped into the elevator, leaving him to fetch his own toolbox. Again he exited, leaned into the piano, and heaved it across the gap and into the elevator.

  One thing I always liked doing was pulling the canvas loop that hung from the
freight elevator’s ceiling in order to shut the steel doors. I hadn’t been tall enough to reach the loop until that year, and even then it was hard to pull. But I could hang from it and slowly float to the ground like Mary Poppins with her umbrella. As I did, the two parallel, horizontal doors would close—one coming down from the ceiling, the other rising out of the floor. The two steel doors met in the middle with a satisfying clang.

  As I reached up for the loop, my father snapped, “No!” as if reprimanding a dog or a small child. Evidently, my punishment for being a brat was to be deprived of this simple pleasure.

  Feeling wronged and disrespected, I kicked the piano leg.

  Immediately I regretted it. The piano looked expensive and belonged to someone. What if I had dented it? What if it got my dad fired?

  My father glared at me. “What the—” He didn’t need to finish.

  I almost said sorry. I was sorry, but I couldn’t make my mouth form the word. Feeling regret was involuntary, like a sneeze. Voicing an apology took effort and would make my shame public.

  Really, though, my decision not to apologize was barely a decision at all. It was split-second and, I assumed, inconsequential. Already my father was shaking his head again, clearing it of me, and reaching up for the canvas loop. He gave it a strong pull—too strong, because the loop tore and detached from the top of the elevator.

  “Son of a—” He threw the canvas strap to the ground, then reached up, gripped the bottom of the upper door with both hands, and yanked, hard, with all of his 275 pounds.

  He must have ridden this elevator hundreds of times. Surely he knew that as the upper door came down, the lower door was simultaneously rising out of the floor, and that the two doors would slam together in the middle. But I had angered and distracted him. His attention was directed toward me, and not the steel doors, which slammed together with his hands, palms up, still between them.

  In the weeks and months that followed there would be surgeries and pins and rods and casts and heavy narcotics. When all that was over, my mother would remain his driver and his therapist and his hands in all things mundane and intimate. Can any marriage survive that? Maybe some. But not many. Not theirs.

  Besides collecting workers’ comp and disability, my father filed a lawsuit to cover medical bills and pain and suffering. By the time he received the settlement check, a whole year had passed. His crushed hands had been reconstructed but remained mostly useless—would always be mostly useless—and by then he was becoming a different man: bigger, for one thing. He had swelled to well over three hundred pounds. Once the physical therapy was over he rarely left the house during the day, and his eyes took on a permanent squint. He went out at night and started becoming familiar to the hospital ER staff and local police. Nothing major in the grand scheme: a couple of drunk and disorderlies, a couple of bar fights he had no chance of winning. But it was enough to land him in the local police blotter. And I would read the blotter and know my role in it.

  It was late afternoon the day my father called me downstairs to open the envelope containing the settlement check from his lawsuit. My mother was at work. I loathed being alone with him. I couldn’t stand to see his hands. After a year, they didn’t look so bad anymore—a stranger might not notice—but they still horrified me. And I couldn’t look at his face, either, because in it I saw the simple understanding that on an ordinary hockey Saturday, I had ruined him.

  “Set that check on the table,” he said, “so we can both see it.”

  One hundred and eight thousand dollars wasn’t an amount I could fathom. We were suddenly rich. But my father shook his head. “Jesus Aitch,” he said, “that right there is all they think I’m worth?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I knew the they in his sentence referred to the company he used to work for, and to the insurance agent he was always yelling at over the phone, but I knew it also referred to the whole world that had conspired against him, and that included me.

  “I’m gonna go back upstairs, okay?” I said.

  By then my mother had started taking me to Jack Clarion’s magic shop a couple of afternoons a week so she could spend a secret hour with the man who ran the secondhand furniture store at the end of the strip mall. When I was at home I would hide out in my bedroom for long stretches, listening to CDs and practicing card flourishes and coin drops. Some were the moves Jack showed me. Others came from the books he convinced my mother to buy for me—Modern Coin Magic, The Royal Road to Card Magic—dense books that confused me but filled me with wonder over secrets that felt as deep as the earth. The books, like the practicing, took me someplace safer, someplace else. I would read and practice, practice and read, and hope that my parents had forgotten I was in the house. I would hear the rise and fall of their voices—commands, rebukes, apologies, the choked-back sounds that contained deeper truths—but I’d be afraid to raise the volume on my CD player, afraid to remind them that the root of all their troubles was one flight up the stairs. Sleight of hand is a quiet activity. Playing cards make a gentle riffle like birds taking flight. Sponge balls make no noise. Even a dropped coin lands softly on thick bedroom carpet. I balanced a small mirror on my bed and watched my hands learn new moves that I would repeat over and over, hundreds of times, and then it would be dinner and then it would be bedtime.

  On the night my father’s check came, I stayed up in my bedroom until the pizza arrived. In the kitchen, I put two slices onto a plate and carried it back upstairs with me. Then I remained in my room until after I heard my mother come home, when my father called me downstairs to see the limousine parked out front.

  “Put your shoes on, Natalie,” he said. And to my mother: “Just me and the kid.”

  “What is this?” my mother asked.

  “It’s a car,” he said. “Natalie, get your coat.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Honey, please. I said just me and Natalie.”

  He took me to Atlantic City. By the time we arrived it was late but no part of me was sleepy. At the Showboat casino he told the security man, “She’s my hands.” He had me reach into his pocket for the check and show it.

  “So what do you think of that check?” he asked once we were inside the casino.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean anything other than what I asked. What do you think about it?”

  I knew I was supposed to say something, so I went with the obvious. “It’s so much money.”

  He shook his head. “No. That’s where you’re wrong. It isn’t nearly enough. But I’ll bet my lawyer has a new summer home.”

  I followed my father to the chip counter, where, after speaking with several employees, he was allowed to exchange the check for chips. He told the attendant to put them into one of the white buckets stacked on the counter. “Carry this for me, Nat, will you? That’s my girl.” He smiled at me, a real smile, and my whole body warmed up. I didn’t understand exactly why we were there, but his smile, so rare these days, was worth the whole trip.

  In the middle of the vast room, where machines bleeped and buzzed and sang all around us, he bent down to my level—I was still several inches shorter than he was—and put his head so close to mine we were almost touching.

  “Being a grown-up,” he said to me, “means being willing to commit to a thing. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. He waited a moment, maybe hoping for more, but I had no more.

  “The way I figure it,” he said, “I’m due at least twice this much.”

  Although I’d figured out by then that he drank too much and picked fights with other men because it was his way of hurting himself—even a thirteen-year-old could figure that out—I wouldn’t fully understand until much later how badly he needed to prove to his only daughter that he remained a man of action and strength, a hero who fought on. I knew then only that his breath smelled like pepperoni pizza and his green eyes were pleading with me to agree with him.

  “Definitely,” I said, my hea
rt beating almost as fast as it had a year earlier, in the moments after the steel doors had slammed home. “You’re right, Dad,” I said. “You’re owed at least that.”

  I had no idea what the hell I was talking about, but my words must have been the right ones because my father’s lips curved into a satisfied smile. “I’m glad you feel that way,” he said, putting his arm around me. I felt the warm weight of his ruined hand on my shoulder, and I didn’t even mind it. Together we walked up to a mostly empty roulette table. The woman standing by the wheel wore black pants, a tuxedo shirt, and a red bow tie. She smiled at us.

  “Good evening,” she said.

  “Well, that’s exactly why we’re here,” my father said, returning her smile. “For a good evening. I want to place the whole bucket of chips on …” He turned to me and winked. “So what’s it gonna be, kid? Red or black?”

  6

  Back at the apartment, the birds were cooing. You can’t tell a dove’s mood by its vocalizations, if doves even have moods. But their paper needed changing. The mini-mart supplied me with free day-old newspapers, and as I started to clean the cage I came across this headline: ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL WITH VICTOR FLOWERS.

  After a long and successful career—several of them—in the private sector, my father’s old boss was now turning his attention to politics and running for the U.S. Senate. Until he declared his candidacy last month, I’d done an admirable job of not thinking too much about him over the years. Now that he was suddenly in the news, I was struck by how seeing his picture or even his name could still send a nasty jolt through my body. I stopped myself from reading the article, deciding it was better off underneath my birds.

  I washed my hands and removed Bruce Steadman’s business card from my wallet. It was already past four, and I figured I’d leave a message for him and hear back after the weekend or, more likely, never. But he picked up on the second ring. I told him who I was and why—I hoped—he would remember me. And then I laid out the article I wanted to write.