King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  “Yes, I see. And do you and this ruffian always make it a habit to manhandle visiting business associates?”

  “Absolutely not,” Val said. “But this neighborhood has seen a small crime wave of late and given the secret nature of our product, we can’t be too careful now can we?”

  She smiled her 360-watt smile and took his arm in hers. Then, with a wink to me, she walked him into the house.

  A few minutes later, Val had Hogg seated comfortably on the old maroon couch, a Scotch and soda in his hand. As he sipped, she gave me the high sign and excused herself for a second. I followed suit and met her in the kitchen, which was cluttered with last night’s dirty dishes. She handed me a piece of paper with two phone numbers on it.

  “Call Jeremy,” she said. “We’ve got to keep Hogg here and happy, or he’ll report back to Kodak that we’re just crazies.”

  “Right,” I said. “But what if he wants to go downstairs?” “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll make sure that never happens.” Suddenly the Val I had spent the night with—the warm vulnerable, poetic girl whom I had fallen head over heels with—was gone and in her place was a tough businesswoman, the kind of person whom you see wandering around Towson, Maryland, in tweeds with a sign that says Houses for Sale in her hand. A sharp-eyed, flinty-voiced business sharkette.

  She had already turned and was heading back into the living room and the clutches of Alan Saxon-Hogg, but I grabbed her arm and pulled her to me.

  “Just a sec,” I said. “What do you mean by that?”

  She looked at me with an almost pitiable gaze and patted my arm. But her voice was rock solid.

  “I mean I’ll do whatever’s necessary. Leave me alone, Tom. You’re drunk and you’ve almost blown us out of the water with that John Wayne act.”

  She pulled herself away from me and headed back into the room. I reached up and grabbed the telephone. Now more than ever it was imperative to get a hold of Jeremy. I dialed the number Val had given me, but there was no answer. Then, before dialing the second number, I peered from the kitchen into the living room. Everything seemed in order. Hogg was sitting back on the couch, and Val was three or four feet away from him. Both of them were laughing and talking, but it was all very civilized, until one second later, as I watched in horror, she slithered toward him.

  “You look very tired Alan,” (ALAN!) she said. “You really should relax.”

  I watched in disbelief as she knelt down in front of him and started untying his shoes.

  I jumped back into the kitchen and dialed the second number. A woman with a voice like a trash compactor answered.

  “Irma’s Greek Acropolis,” she said.

  “I’m looking for Jeremy Raines,” I said.

  “You and the IRS,” the woman said. “I’ll see if he’s here. Who’s this, anyhow?”

  “Tommy Fallon,” I said, “and it’s serious.”

  “It always is, honey,” Irma said.

  A second later Raines came on the phone.

  “Tommy,” he said, “that you?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “Good,” he laughed. “I thought it might be Dan the Trucker. Lulu and I are just having dinner.”

  “You wish it was Dan the Trucker,” I said. “The jig is up. The Kodak rep is here.”

  “In the house?” he asked. I was amazed at the coolness in his voice. It was as though he were asking whether the sun was shining or not.

  “Yes, in the house. You had better get back here. Val’s trying to divert him. He hasn’t seen the Hole yet.”

  “And he must never see it,” Jeremy said. “Let me talk to Val.”

  I put the phone down and walked out to the living room. To my complete horror, Val was cozying up to Saxon-Hogg. She leaned on his shoulder and looked up into his eyes as though she were some worshipful bimbette.

  “You must get to travel all over, Alan,” she said, purring. “You’re so lucky.”

  “Well, yes, I do get around quite a bit, luv,” Saxon-Hogg said. He put his arm around her, and she ran her tongue around her lips.

  “Phone for you,” I said in my happiest and bitterest voice.

  She got up slowly, letting him get a full view of her terrific torso, and she shook her derriere like Bardot as she sauntered into the kitchen.

  “Overdoing it a bit, aren’t you?” I said through clenched teeth.

  “No, I am not,” she said, baring her teeth at me, “but you are acting like a jealous square.”

  She turned her back to me as she picked up the phone.

  “Jeremy, I suppose Tom told you the worst,” she said. “But don’t worry, I’ve thought of something.”

  “Thought of what?” I wanted to yell but said nothing. Then, seeing that I was hanging on her every word, she took the phone into the little alcove next to the refrigerator.

  Minutes later, she was off the phone and headed right by me, back to the living room. But I grabbed her arm as she marched by.

  “Did Raines tell you to … did he tell you to … did he instruct you to …”

  I am afraid the rest of the sentence was a terrible gagging sound.

  “No,” she said. “Nobody tells me what to do. I do what I think is appropriate. Now let me get back in there before Hogg flies out of here and makes a full report to Kodak.” She rolled her eyes at me, pulled her arm from my grasp, and headed back into the living room.

  My heart raced madly. She was right, so damned right. I was a complete square. She was only going to tease him a little. I was acting like a fool. I took a deep breath, felt my blood pressure drop, then looked around the kitchen door into the living room.

  But there was another small problem. They were no longer in the living room.

  “Not to worry,” I said to myself, “just out for a walk.”

  Then I heard laughter, sexual giggling, there was no doubt about it, and it came from above me. They had gone upstairs.

  I ran through the living room, turned to go up the steps, just in time to see them disappear into Raines’s bedroom.

  I started up the steps, then sat down hard midway up. What would I say? I would merely look like a bigger fool. I shook my head and made a weird moaning sound, like a turtle who has just had his shell pulled off by steel tongs.

  She couldn’t be … it was impossible. She wouldn’t, couldn’t. Then I thought of her poems. Hell, she had made love to old Nikos just for the fun of it. For dear old Jeremy, there was probably no sexual variation that she wouldn’t perform, ropes, pulleys, bananas, anything to keep the Kodak contract.

  I didn’t know her at all. But I had to find out. I had to see with my own agonized eyes, just what treachery she was capable of.

  I threw open the front door, raced out to the porch, tripped over the glider, and ran down the porch steps and around the side of the house.

  There above me was Raines’s window and a warming light. I saw the thick ivy growing right up to the narrow little rooftop. I knew, yes knew, as the Apostle Paul knew when he was thrown off his ass by a burning Godly sunbeam, that this vine had been divinely placed here in order for me to climb.

  I grabbed onto the ivy and dug in a right heel. I started to climb, right heel, left heel, grasping and grabbing. Upstairs, I could hear laughter. My hair was on fire with jealousy.

  Oh, I was no hipster. But I was capable of hideous, square-guy sexual revenge.

  Saxon-Hogg would pay, pay, pay. I would cut off his British cock and throw it to the Chesapeake Bay crabs.

  I kept climbing, climbing. I could see my way brilliantly. They were going to be so very surprised. Val was going to be thrilled by my fury.

  I was climbing assuredly, stability provided by the jet-fueled rage inside of me.

  Then the bedroom light went out. I was in the dark, trapped on the side of a very large house, fifty feet above terra firma.

  Upstairs I was certain I could hear springs bouncing. I could hear Hogg hogging her.

  I had to push on. I reached my right hand up ano
ther notch and grasped into the dark ivy. Something large with nasty insect teeth bit my right hand.

  I screamed “Traitor” as I fell.

  When I awoke, the insect had crawled into my eyes and was busy eating away portions of my brain. I said, “Oh, Lord.” The sound echoed through the dark hallways inside my head.

  Then there was light and something cool on my brow and Val was staring lovingly down at me.

  “How do you feel?” she said as tenderly as Florence Nightingale.

  “Like Brer Rabbit,” I said. “Zippety do-dah.”

  “You poor driven creature,” she said.

  I sat up and looked around. Hogg, Jeremy, and Lulu Hard well stood a few feet away. They held drinks and smiled at me. Hogg was smoking a joint. His shirt hung out of his pants. He had his hand around Lulu—who smiled at him with her big sexual teeth.

  “Lump on the head and you’ve got a nasty bruise on your back, old man,” Hogg said. “Other than that, you look fine. Just fine. Nasty business though, wall climbing. I expect you were going to play a little joke on us.”

  “No,” I said, “I was going to kill you for fucking my girlfriend.”

  “Oh,” Hogg said, “well, here’s to passion, then!”

  He lifted his glass and drained it. Jeremy smiled, poured him another, then brought a drink to me.

  “Looking much better, my boy,” he said.

  “I’m not going to die yet,” I said. Val put a hand on my arm. For a second I wanted to knock it away, but it was a warm hand, a concerned hand.

  “Going downtown for a little ride,” Jeremy said. “Thought you might want to come along.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Oh come on, sweety,” Lulu said. “It’s going to be fun.”

  “Really?” I asked Val. “Fun for who?”

  “As a student of literature you owe it to yourself to come,” Val said.

  “Right,” I said. She helped me up. The insects were still eating my cerebellum so I had another drink.

  As we left, Hogg gave Lulu a little kiss and she reached around and rubbed his ass. I looked over at Raines, who smiled like a choirboy and walked to the car.

  We drove through the black Baltimore night. There was singing from Lulu Hardwell—she had a surprisingly wonderful country voice—and there was harmony from Hogg, who looked like a decent guy to me, but I was still in a foul mood. As Raines drove in and out of traffic, I found myself hoping that we would crash and there would be massive damage to Hogg’s penis.

  But there was no such luck, only Lulu’s sweet voice and Hogg’s drunken confessions: “Could have been a Romantic poet. Yes, wrote like Shelley they told me at Oxford, but there came this corporate opportunity and I took it and yet … yet … one never knows, and one never will know if one doesn’t risk all. Isn’t that right, Jeremy?”

  And Jeremy only smiled and said, “There’s time to do it all my friend. Time for money and time for poems.”

  I turned to Val, who sat cozied up to me. She smiled and gave me a little kiss on the cheek.

  “I do love you, you know,” she whispered.

  And I felt she was telling me the truth, but I wasn’t yet ready to forgive her, so I turned and stared moodily out the window.

  She smiled sadly and held my hand.

  “There is so much you don’t understand,” she said.

  And I looked down at her and back up at Raines and saw him nodding and laughing and Lulu Hardwell kissing Hogg in the front seat, and it seemed to me then that Raines was a spider, yes, some smiling tarantula who had trapped us all into his sticky little web, and where oh where was he taking us—down St. Paul, past the B and O railroad with their old dead engines standing out under the Baltimore moon. Down past wino streets and ghosty Poe-like doorways, down along Pratt Street past old Pier 1, where my grandfather Cap Fallon shipped out on the old tanker the SS Barnacle and sailed down that blackbird buoy line to Tolchester, and Betterton and Salisbury, and I was thinking perhaps that’s what I needed to do: get on a boat and sail away from all of this. The whole life had become too fast, too confusing, and I was shedding too many skins at once. Who the hell was I? Lit man, con man, new man, old man, all of them undulating under the same squirming skin. Suddenly my reveries were broken by a tremendous thud, for right there at Pratt and Charles Street, Jeremy smashed into a telephone pole, and we all rolled around like rats in Raines’s cage. Then we opened the doors and tumbled out onto the redbrick street, in front of some old ghost tankers tied up on the tin can docks of the rusted, bombed-out Baltimore pier.

  I looked over at Raines, who smiled at me, and lifted his head toward the sky. I did likewise and gave out a gasp of pure surprise. For there above us was a huge fifty-story black obelisk-shaped office building on the very top of which was a huge red pulsating neon sign with but one word that glowed triumphantly in the night—RAINES!!!

  At that moment I was so astonished by the sheer audacity of it all that I forgot my bitterness and doubt and let out a cheer, along with everyone else.

  Then Jeremy said: “Well, Mr. Hogg, how do you like our new building?”

  Hogg pulled himself from the long blue fingernails of Lulu Hardwell and opened his arms as if he wanted to make love to the place.

  “Amazing, amazing,” he said. “When do I get the full tour of the plant?”

  “Afraid that’s got to be on a later trip,” Raines said. “We are just getting situated in there. But don’t you think Kodak will approve of our newest acquisition?”

  “Absolutely!” Hogg said. He smiled and looked back at the building.

  “All this with bloody I.D. cards,” he added. “America is a great fucking place.”

  “True,” Lulu said. Then she put her arms around him and squeezed. Hogg’s eyes lit up like the cardboard fat lady in front of the fun house tunnel.

  I looked at the amazing, impossible Jeremy Raines, and he gave me an almost imperceptible wink.

  The rest of that evening was devoted to entertaining Hogg, for which the ex-nun, Miss Lulu Hardwell, was sublimely equipped. As for myself I waited for a decent interval, then went upstairs to my room, leaving Val to revel with the revelers.

  I fell asleep and had a strange dream. There was a giant building, much like Raines’s skyscraper, but the sign on top didn’t say Raines. Rather, there was a huge puppet of Raines himself; he was dressed in a court jester’s uniform with foolscap and bells and green pointy felt shoes. His face was painted black and white, except for the lips, which were clown red. His other features were indefinable, stretching like old Plastic Man’s from my comic books days: now short and stubby, like some old Mick cop, and now long and wrinkled, like a sweet potato with hair. Pasted all over his body were identification cards, cards with giant nostrils and huge blinking eyes. Suddenly I was up on the roof with him and we were looking down on all that finny traffic, cars swimming by like great metallic fish, and he was smiling and beckoning to me to come to the edge. Oh, Lord, it was the most reassuring smile in the world, and yet, yet I knew that he wasn’t to be trusted. Still, I felt compelled to walk toward him. There didn’t seem to be any alternative. And I felt a wild and exhilarating fear and walked like a zombie to the precipice, watching his face changing again. It seemed to be the face of an old woman now, some kindly old grandmother, then it changed again, some sweet baby face, so pink and trusting only the hardest heart could resist. Once at the edge, he smiled and opened his palm and pointed to the street below and the winking lights of the passing cars and then he handed me a shimmering, silver I.D. card, and I looked at it like a child looks at his first bauble, with wonder and pure pleasure. For the shining card had my own picture on it. I looked young and happy; I was beaming. But then suddenly, I began to fade; my eyes and nose disappeared like old watercolors in the rain. All that was left was my mouth, the mouth of some retard escapee from the nut farm, open and drooling, and it terrified me that this was my real mouth, the mouth beneath the smiling mouth that the bright world saw,
and I felt such a fear in my heart that I turned to Raines for reassurance, but he was laughing at me now. Oh, Lord, he laughed and laughed and I started to laugh with him, the mouth of an idiot drool baby, and then suddenly we were both screeching, and I was doubled over with rib pain. Then in a lightning gesture, he flicked the card out of my hand, and I blinked in astonished fear (but deep down knew, had always known) and tried to grasp it back. But his hand was gone. In its place was a bony skeleton, and he threw my card out into the sweltering, humid black air.

  Then, as I watched it go, Jeremy Raines the jester, pushed me off the edge.

  I screamed as I fell into open yawning space. And looked back up to see his smiling clown face and his long rubber fingers waving good-bye.

  And then I awoke, and Val was there above me holding a cold towel on the big hot bump on my head.

  We said nothing for a time, but then I put my arms around her and held her to me.

  “I was nuts tonight,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you were jealous,” she said. “I don’t blame you, but there’s a couple things you should know. One, I didn’t screw him. I was just giving him a massage in the dark.” She looked at me with such sweetness, such innocence in her face, that I had no choice but to believe her.

  “What’s two?” I said.

  “Two,” she said, looking down at the tangled sheets. “Well, two is harder. There’s something you must understand. I would do anything for Jeremy.”

  “Well, I don’t understand that,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows.

  She sighed and pushed me away from her and got out of the bed. When she walked next to the window I could see her in silhouette, her perfect gymnast’s body illuminated by the great yellow moon.

  “I didn’t quite tell you the whole story the other day. There’s more to it, I’m afraid.”

  “You mean about your past?”

  “Yes. I didn’t tell you because I was afraid how you would respond. You see, I met Jeremy when I was a patient at Larson-Payne.”