King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  “How kind of you,” I said, not ready to give an inch.

  He shook his head and sighed deeply.

  “No, it’s not because I’m so kind. I just love Val and I don’t want to see her fuck herself up, so when I met you, I thought, here’s the guy for her, honest, sensitive, a student of literature.”

  “What?” I said, completely incredulous. “You’re trying to tell me you set us up?”

  “Exactly,” Raines said, smiling at me openly now, but it wasn’t a gloating smile. No, he looked sweet, happy to have been of assistance. Still, I didn’t believe a word of it.

  “But that doesn’t make any sense at all,” I said. “I met Val in the stacks over at the Calvert library, and you weren’t anywhere around.”

  “You mean the day you were sniffing the books?” Raines said, smiling again in his most charming manner.

  “No!” I shouted, my head swimming. “You weren’t there. She told you about it and now you’re just pretending that …”

  “Treasure Island was my favorite book, too,” Raines interrupted, pulling the car next to the sidewalk, across from the Washington Monument. “When you picked it up and sniffed it, I was sure I had made the right decision. Only a man who thinks for himself, only a man who loves and values books, would do something so foolish and so endearing.”

  I felt a flush of tenderness for my friend. And yet, I simply couldn’t accept it. If he was telling the truth, he had been playing me like a harp since the day I first spoke to him on the phone.

  “She could have told you about Treasure Island, too,” I said. “You could have told her to remember everything and …”

  “You’re right,” he interrupted. “It’s true, I could have, but what reason would I have? Why would I do it?”

  As I sat there staring out the window at the children running around the great white marble fountain in the square, I actually felt the seat beneath me grow hotter.

  “Well,” I stuttered. “Because … you’re mad and you have to control everyone around you and … I don’t know why …”

  He shook his head and banged his big fist on the dashboard.

  “Paranoia,” he said. “Suspicion and pain and paranoia. My boy, these are the true diseases of our age. You’re acting as though you were caught in some evil design of mine. I can understand that. And it’s true, I did manipulate you … a little. I waited until you left your house that morning, then I sent Val over to see you in the library. I had her invite you to the poetry reading. That is all extremely manipulative, and I apologize for it. But it seemed to me that the ends justified the means. After all, if you and Val hit it off, then I had found her a charming and worthy companion, and if not, well, you go your way, she goes hers. What harm’s been done?”

  Everything he said was rational and perfectly well-meaning. I saw that then. But for some reason, I still wanted to give him a shot to the jaw.

  “Yes, but a person doesn’t want to think that his romantic chance encounters are all part of somebody else’s design,” I said. “That takes all the romance out of it.”

  “Really?” he said, smiling at me in that damned knowing manner of his.

  “Really,” I said.

  But, of course, I wasn’t sure of that. After all, in some way that I couldn’t articulate at the time, Raines’s whole wild tale made my meeting Val somehow more romantic.

  “Well, I apologize,” Raines said, starting the car and lurching forward a little. “I hope you’ll come to forgive me in time. But you have to admit, it’s not exactly a Machiavellian scheme.”

  “Jesus,” I said, so stunned that I scarcely knew what to say at all. “You’re impossible. I mean I don’t know how I feel about all of this, whether to thank you or punch your lights out.”

  “You’ll figure it all out in due time, my boy,” he said. “That’s the beauty of being young. We have all the time in the world.”

  “Well,” I said. “Since we’re making confessions, I have one of my own to lay on you.”

  “I already know,” Raines said, “The University of Baltimore pictures look like modern art.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just didn’t get the camera stuff right, the exposures and all. You know, we have got to be a lot more professional than this. You should hire some pros.”

  “I know,” he said, sighing sadly. “I had hoped we could keep the whole business strictly among friends, but it looks like we’re going to have to make some concessions to the real world. That’s why I’m adding a new man to the staff today, a friend of Eddie and Babe’s, supposed to be an ace photographer. He’ll keep us going until the Kodak funds come through. Then we’ll take stock of our situation.”

  He smiled sweetly at me and bashed the car into a gasoline truck directly in front of us. I saw the word Flammable in great red print and shut my eyes.

  For the next few days, there was almost an air of professionalism about the home on Chateau Avenue. Hogg’s promise of a grant from Kodak had made us all rather proud of ourselves, and over breakfast there was a kind of confident, buzzing chatter. Handless Eddie even started using the word account, as in, “Yes, I think we just about have the Morgan College account sewed up.” He was answered by the Babe, who said, “Yes, there was no doubt about it we were headed up the ladder and in a couple of weeks we would be out of the red.” I was faintly surprised and embarrassed by this sudden conversion to the cocky language of salesmanship. How had these beatnik weirdos who lived on the margins of polite society even learned of such things? It was almost as if the language of business was some secret, mythic, subconscious poetry that flowed in the hearts of all Americans, straight or bent, a somehow sobering and near tragic thought. I had always assumed that the subconscious life was one of Freudian weirdness, a swamp of wild incest and strange primeval longings. But what if this was not so? What if the real secret language of tongues under every American’s heart was some kind of lame business chatter? But at the time, these were not thoughts I wanted to have. And so I thrust them down down down into the great gaping hole of unwanted observations. At any rate, our new seriousness seemed to manifest itself most obviously in our newest business partner, Timothy Donnolly, Eddie’s friend, the “ace photographer.” A tall, handsome quiet man in his late twenties, he seemed the very essence of professionalism. His clothes were pure Ivy League, purchased downtown at Eddie Jacobs, the finest men’s clothing store in the city, and he smoked a very handsome pipe. Indeed, Donnolly looked like a country squire, relaxed, judicious, the kind of man who inspires confidence in his co-workers. On a tour of the Hole, he looked over the huge embosser (iron ore) machine, the laminator, and the cameras and took out a small pad of paper on which he made copious notes. Having done this, he rubbed his chin, nodded to himself, and silently gave the notes to Raines.

  Then he nodded sagely and said as much to himself as anyone else in the room: “Do-able, very, very do-able. Yes, indeed.”

  Whereupon he took out the pipe, a leather pouch of tobacco, filled up, and struck a match.

  We all stood around staring at him, and it seemed to me then that Tim Donnolly was the answer to our ragtag group’s prayers.

  And for a week it seemed we would make it all come true. The reshoot at the University of Baltimore went well, and Eddie and the Babe managed to get them all embossed and sealed in their little laminated covers without making one mistake. Meanwhile, Donnolly was bringing in new equipment (paid for on the King’s already bloated credit cards) and conferring with Jeremy Raines in his quiet and consummately professional way.

  And by the end of that week, we had finally done it, handed the cards to a smiling Hawkins, who in turn handed me a check for fifteen thousand dollars. By God, we were learning how to make this thing work.

  That night, after a wild party and an even wilder love-making bout with Val, I dreamed of Jeremy Raines wearing a crown of I.D. cards and conferring with none other than Benjamin Franklin himself, that original inventor of the American dream. Yes, I thought, s
miling as I awoke and looked at Val’s breast glowing in the Baltimore moonlight. Yes, it was true, Jeremy was some drugged-out hipsterized version of that old American gentleman, and I thought of him in his bedroom with Miss Lulu Hardwell, the crazy queen slut nun, and I remembered old Benjamin F., his very own bad self in France, taking those powdered wigs off the wives of the frog dukes and duchesses and lifting their silken dresses and I said, “Yes, yes, yes, score one for America, score one for the true democracy of blood and muscle and ambition and wild screaming eyeball-popping ejaculations in the black Baltimore night.”

  All of these memories flooded through me as I sat there in front of what had been our old house on Chateau Avenue, but now I stopped and looked up at the fat man with the pink alligator shirt. He was peeping at me in a curious way, and now he lay down his lawn rake and walked to my car.

  ‘“Cuse me, buddy,” he said, “but you got some reason for staring up at my house for the past three hours?”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry.”

  He gave me a look that said he wasn’t fooled.

  “Look, you may as well just admit it,” he said. “You’re one of them goddamned speculators from over in Washington, D fucking C, isn’t that it? Well, I can tell you, pal, we don’t got no intention of selling ‘es here place. We are not the kinda people that cares about living with a few niggers.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Because I don’t want to buy the place, okay?”

  “Yeah, ‘at’s what you say now. But I seen you staring up at it. But you can kiss ‘es place good-bye, ‘cause we like living here. Niggers or no niggers. Truf is I get along wif ‘em fine.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  He looked at me hard, then kicked the side of the rented car.

  “Now get the fuck outta here,” he said. “Go back to the nation’s capital, where youse belong.”

  “Right,” I said. “Will do.”

  I turned on the key, hit the gas, and shot forward into the street.

  I had been dead wrong about him. He wasn’t a yuppie, but a Baltimore redneck trying to become a yuppie and, in his own confused way, a liberal. He was probably up from hillbilly Glen Burnie, and in his own set, he was a radical who would dare live “with the niggers.”

  The thought made me smile. It was the kind of complicated irony Jeremy would have appreciated.

  I drove down the block, took a right and then a quick left into the old alley just behind Craig Avenue. There in front of me was the old softball field Val and I had found one stoned night, a night we’d smoked hash and lay out on second base, and as we made love, she’d screamed out “Safe,” and we’d fallen into hysterical laughter.

  I got out of the car and smelled the sweet odor of the honeysuckle, which grew wildly over the black tar garages, and I walked down behind the garage and looked out at the old field, half-covered with weeds and wild vines now. I thought how lush Maryland was and how, though I had never been a nature lover, I had come to take the wild smells of flowers and vines for granted and missed them in New York.

  I sat down now on an old log, knowing that eventually someone else would come and tell me to move. That was the world we were in now, here and everywhere else, strangers were trouble, dangerous, and it seemed to me like a memory from another world that we slept at Winston Avenue, and even later at Chateau, with our screen doors unlocked.

  Yeah, soon they’d be coming to move me again, but I sat there anyway and smelled the flowers and watched the black kids bouncing the ball off the old garage doors and dreamed on.

  Those few weeks after we had hired Donnolly were full with promise. We were on our way, going up, up, up, into the wild blue yonder of fast greenbacks and comradely love. I remember it all now, like some movie montage: Eddie handing a tray of perfect cards to Donnolly, who smiled and passed them up the steps to a radiant Babe, who took them to the car. Jeremy clanging out the numbers on the old iron ore machine, as we all laughed and shared beers and joints, Val and Sister Lulu swinging like sisters on the tire swing, the two of them trading stories about where they would travel when the big money started coming in. And Jeremy telling me late one night that what he wanted to do most of all with his part of the dough was to start building a clinic, a place that would allow for new, radical treatments for the mentally ill. “By the time I’m through my postgraduate work, it’ll already be built and we can attack these diseases in a new way, get to the patients before the goddamned hack therapists make them worse.” Yes, the old house on Chateau was positively abuzz with the promise of success and money. There was no stopping us.

  Then Hogg called.

  As it so happened I was down in the smoking Hole overseeing a lamination job, a tricky business actually, because the lamination machine tended to overheat. When that happened, the graphite rollers, which spit out the long rolls of plastic-enclosed cards, would begin sending the cards through at some monstrous temperature, burning holes in the plastic, twisting them into some kind of strange plastic origami. Faces and noses were burned beyond recognition. That had already happened once a week ago, but luckily Tim Donnolly had been on the scene and quickly fixed the temperamental machine.

  On this bright day, however, things were running smoothly, and I was sitting in the great new overstuffed armchair we had managed to get from a yard sale just down the block. Indeed, with money in my pocket, and the cards oozing out of the laminator in one long continuous flow, I was able at long last to get back to my reading of Henry James. In fact, as the call came in, I was thinking how old Hank James would approve of the I.D. King’s quest. After all, many of his own heroes, Lambert Strether of The Ambassadors, for example, were none other than self-made men who, having made their fortunes, strived for more, for a touch of the higher spiritual and artistic life in Europe. But I had decided I was not interested in Europe. If I ever dared talk to Dr. Spaulding again, I would tell him that when I had money, I would try and really discover our own culture right here in funky old Bal’mere, and I would do it with my visionary company of poets, lovers, friends. Oh, yes, that day I was in a pure Utopian mood, and as I saw the faces of the happy students rolling smoothly inside the plastic, I began to smile back at them. It seemed to me then that each and every identity in those little cards was a potential friend, all of them part of myself, and I thought suddenly that all cards were one card and that God himself was the great wise Photographer in the sky.

  Then the phone rang. I picked it up and answered cheerily: “Identi-Card Systems.”

  “Hello, Jeremy?”

  “No,” I said. “Mr. Raines is out on an important call. Can I help you?”

  “Oh, I know who this is. It’s wild and jealous Tommy Fallon, right?”

  “Hogg,” I said, my good mood not disturbed one whit by his crack. “Good to speak to you. Coming to town?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. Then I noticed it: There was something in his voice, something strained and tentative beneath the forced English bonhomie.

  “No?”

  “No. Well, I don’t know exactly how to tell you this, so I’ll just give you the good news first.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m moving to San Francisco. Isn’t that just knockers?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I suppose …”

  “Oh, it is, old son, believe you me. Haven’t you heard? There’s wild things happening there in a section of town called Haight-Ashbury. You know I was upset for a while when I got the news, but then I got to thinking, I’m not really made for business. I mean, buying and selling one another, I don’t think that can be good in the end. Hell, I may not even be a capitalist.”

  “I see,” I said, shifting in my seat. “You were fired then?”

  “Ah, you Americans,” Hogg said, “masters of understatement and diplomacy. But why not call a spade a spade? I’m afraid yes, I was, but only technically. I’ve simply been doing things so assed backwards because I hoped they would fire me, you understand, Tommy? They say I was self-destructive.
I say I am on the very first leg of a journey to free myself from all of the business hustle and bustle. I mean, who needs it?”

  “We need it,” I said bluntly. “We’ve made purchases on credit. We have to have that grant. It’s still coming, isn’t it?”

  There was a long pause, and I heard him suck in a breath.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said.

  “You don’t understand, Thomas,” he said. “You’re into the old capitalist mind set. You just have to step outside of it and …”

  “Fuck you, Hogg,” I said. “We have to have that grant. Can’t whoever is taking your job get it for us?”

  “I’m afraid not, old boy,” he said. “You know how it is, the new man doesn’t want any of my projects to succeed. It wouldn’t reflect well on him.”

  “Don’t come to Baltimore,” I said to him, “unless you want me to kick you a new asshole.”

  “Hadn’t intended to,” Hogg said. “Give my best to Jeremy. And kisses and hugs to Val, friend.”

  Furious, I slammed down the phone and watched the plastic cards curl up like a live twisting snake in front of my feet.

  That night we all waited on the front porch—silent, glum, forlornly sipping iced tea like a band of abandoned children, waiting for our foster father to take us back to the stone cold walls of the Orphans’ Home.

  Finally, somewhere around nine, Raines drove up in his battered Nash. Indeed, the car now seemed to be some otherworldly vehicle, something designed by a race of post-nuclear radioactive mutants who only vaguely remembered what cars of the twentieth century must have looked like. There was only one front headlight, and the right front bumper was peeled back to reveal the balding right front tire itself, a strangely unsettling sight, like a man who had lost his lips in a fire and now walks around with his naked incisors fanged loose at the world.