King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  “Sure,” I said curtly. “Meet me at the house at seven.” I barely got the words out, then quickly got up from the table and walked toward the door.

  Back at the house I staggered into my room and fell on the bed. I wanted to sleep and forget it all, but there was no chance of that. Only weeks ago I had told myself that this was my real home, that these people were going to be my family, and now, now all of it was evaporating in front of my eyes.

  I got up, walked to the window, and looked at the cracked swimming pool outside. Leaves had collected in the deep end, under the board, and two pieces of patio furniture floated in the shallow end. I couldn’t believe it. Val was going away. I wouldn’t see her anymore, wouldn’t be able to hold her. The thought was inconceivable.

  Then there was a knock at the door, and for a second I thought it was Val, but instead the Babe walked in.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. How’s Eddie’s head?”

  “He has a concussion,” she said, then lay down on the bed. “I was scared, really scared. I told the doctor he was drunk and fell down the basement steps.”

  She stared up at me. She had on a pair of powder blue short shorts, and her chubby pink legs were spread wide open.

  “What were you just thinking about, Tom?” she said.

  “Nothing much,” I said.

  “Yes, you were,” she said. “You’re thinking about Val and how much you’re gonna miss her.”

  “You know she’s leaving?” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s a shame, Tommy. I liked you two together. I mean I knew it was a fucking disaster from the jump, but I liked it anyway.”

  “You knew it was a disaster?” I said. “Well, I wish to hell you’d told me.”

  “Would it have made any difference?” she asked.

  “No, I suppose not,” I said.

  “No. You’ll be sick for a while, but you’ll get over it,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I wanted to show you something,” the Babe said.

  She sort of slithered around on the bed, and for a second I thought she was going to suggest we have a conciliatory fuck. Instead she pulled something from her back pocket.

  It was a paperback book. Henry James’s The Ambassadors.

  “You’re reading that?” I asked, completely surprised.

  “Uh-huh,” the Babe said. “And I really like it. I just want to say I’m glad you moved in here, Tom. You really have brought the whole level of the place up a couple of notches.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not knowing what else I could possibly say.

  “The thing is,” the Babe said, “I wanted to ask you a question about the way this story is told.”

  “The point of view in The Ambassadors?’’ I mumbled, dazed.

  “Yeah. See in the introduction of the book James says he sees everything through this guy Strether’s eyes, but I read a lot of chapters where old H.J. seems to be sort of cheating on his technique.”

  “He does?” I asked, flabbergasted. Only a few hours ago I had dropped a body into the Severn and now I was having a literary discussion on point of view in Henry James with a hillbilly sex queen from Glen Burnie, Maryland.

  “Sure he does,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of scenes in the novel that old Strether couldn’t have known anything about at all, so ole Hank James cheats, huh, Tom?”

  “Yeah,” I said as if I was talking to a spaceman, “I guess he does.”

  “I gotta tell you, Tom, it sorta shocks me,” the Babe said. “I mean I know everybody cheats. I just didn’t think great artists did. I mean I guess I sound like a hick and stuff, but they’re not supposed to, are they?”

  It was the “are they” that got me. It was so damned sweet.

  “No,” I said, “they’re not supposed to.”

  “Oh, well,” she said as she got up from the bed. “Another illusion shattered. I guess in the end everybody pulls whatever shit they think they can get away with.”

  She put her arms around me in a sisterly way.

  “Listen to me going on about all this when you’re still upset from us offing that scuzzball and Val leaving. Geez, I always did have a lousy sense of timing. Anyway, I love you, Tom, and if you want to go out and get shitfaced ‘cause your heart’s broken, just let me know, okay?”

  “That sounds great,” I said like a man in a trance. “Terrific. I will.”

  “Cheer up, Tommy,” she said as she walked toward the door. “Ole Baltimore’s filled with pretty girls, and they all love artists.”

  She winked at me and started for the door, then turned, looked at me, and slapped herself in the head.

  “I almost forgot,” she said. “Rudy Antonelli called today. Around ten.”

  “He did?” I said, and my voice cracked a little.

  “Yeah, but relax. He just wanted to know where Jeremy was. I told him he was in Virginia looking for potential customers. I thought that would cool him out.”

  “Did it?”

  “Sort of. Though he wanted to know exactly what schools Jeremy is trying to get to buy our cards. I mean, I loved that ‘our’ stuff. Like are we really in business with him?”

  We are, I wanted to say. Oh, brother, are we. But I didn’t bother with it.

  “Did you tell him the names of the schools?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t see that I had any choice in the matter. It was okay though. He sort of calmed down after that. You think these little calls are going to be a regular thing from now on, Tom?”

  “Until we pay him back,” I said, trying to sound optimistic.

  “Boy,” the Babe said, “let’s pay him back quick then. I gotta tell you this whole connection has been kind of a bummer. That guy Johnny, whoooo. Very nasty.”

  She shook her head and shut the door.

  Right, I thought, a bummer. Murder. Yeah, I guess that would classify as a major bummer. But even though she annoyed me, I marveled at the Babe. In her world, all experiences had a kind of democratic equality, the same emotional weight: dead goombahs, busted hearts. To dear old Babe it was all light fare, and I knew that whatever happened here, she and good old Eddie would survive. Somehow that cheered me, for they were true downtown Glen Burnie Baltimoreans. They had grown up in used car lots, served time in Pentecostal churches, gone to rotten schools, been busted by moronic sadistic cops, the list of their abuses was endless, but they were saved from emotional ruin by their deadeyed knowing slant on it all.

  They expected nothing, and they had each other, though it was sentimental bullshit, I envied them a little. They wouldn’t fall on the ruin of their own oversized expectations, like Val, Jeremy, and me.

  Val arrived at six, and when she did, what was left of my confidence crumbled. She looked so breathtakingly beautiful, as though she had made herself up with just a little extra effort so she would be sure to really break my heart. She wore a bright red Spanish blouse with ruffled sleeves and a scooped neckline, pink ballet shoes, and tight black capri pants, which showed off her fabulous muscular calves. Her red hair was clean and shimmered, and her face was shining and bright.

  Seeing her looking that good just about killed me and badly threw off my hastily improvised game plan.

  I had fantasized that we would spend the entire evening, night, and morning in bed making love and that I would convince her by my sheer Lothariolike prowess that she should stay with me forever. But now that she was here I found myself absurdly trying to act cool. So I watched the local news on the old battered black-and-white TV and drank a jelly tumbler full of Wild Turkey.

  “You want a drink?” I asked, staring at our local black news anchor, dapper Ralph Murray.

  “No, I’ll have a joint,” she said.

  “Very, very hip,” I said with a childish malice in my voice. “Well, I’ll have a drink and a joint.”

  I smiled in agony as Murray talked with a woman reporter at a downtown street fair.

  Val smiled right back at me.

  “Well, I’ll have
a drink and a joint and some speed,” she said with a poker face.

  “Oh, really,” I said. “Well, I’ll have some speed, a drink, a joint, and five bottles of codeine-laced cough syrup.”

  Val nodded sagely and shook her head. Her hair was so alive it caused a pain in my crotch.

  “Okay, Mr. Hipster,” she said, giving me a killer smile and flashing a little thigh. “I’ll have all of the above and throw in massive electric shock.”

  This was not how I planned it. I wanted soft music and whispered nothings, but I couldn’t back down. I stared at the TV as Murray took us to Glen Burnie to show us a stolen-car ring.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll plug right into your electric shock and add land mines and self-immolating flamethrowers, not to mention the joint, the whiskey, the cough syrup, and a whole bottle of biphetamines.”

  She said nothing for a second to that, and I smiled thinking I had topped her in our little self-destruction contest.

  “You give up?” I said.

  But she said nothing else, only stared at the television.

  “Hey,” I said, “earth to Val. You still here, honey?”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, Jesus.”

  I looked up at the television set. Ralph Murray was talking with a remote reporter named Ned Meyers. Meyers was wearing a trench coat and was standing by a riverbank somewhere. Behind him were divers in wet suits; behind them there was a corpse being hauled out of the water.

  I heard Meyers’s commentary as if I were underwater myself: “The body was found by amateur scuba diver Earl Sands this morning around 9 A.M., as Mr. Sands and his son scuba dived down on fashionable Cape St. Claire. Tell us about it, Mr. Sands.”

  Earl Sands weighed about three hundred pounds, and he wore a battered Baltimore Oriole hat, a ratty terry-cloth short robe that didn’t quite cover his huge belly, which hung over dark shorts with little white hard crabs on them. “Well, my family was out here inna houseboat, which I bought and fixed up inna ‘58. Got me a real good deal on that sucker, too, down Ochun City!”

  He smiled and Meyers nodded and pointed to the body that was now being laid on a stretcher just behind the two of them.

  “The dead man, sir?” Meyers said. “Could you tell us?”

  “Oh, yeah, him,” Earl said. “Well, he is real dead. That’s for sure. Way it happened was my son Earl, Jr., and me was diving a little, heard there might be some old sunk British ships down in this part of the river. Even heard there might be treasure. You heard that, have you?”

  “I don’t know about treasure, sir,” Meyers said. “The body? Could you please tell us about the body, sir?”

  “Heck, yeah. See, uh, Earl, Jr., he was down on the bottom looking, always dives faster ‘n me. Anyways, I submerge to say thirty feet and he’s all excited, pointing and a jumping up and down, and damn, I look down there and there is this real honest-to-God dead guy down there. Just like old Mike Nelson would find on “Sea Hunt.” Hell, this guy was all messed up. Had a big anchor round him. Some mess, I’ll tell you.”

  They cut away from him then and move over to the gurney, where two police officers were pushing a white-sheeted Johnny Martello into an ambulance.

  Ned Meyers came back on the screen. He looked sincere, grave.

  “Police say that the dead man is Johnny ‘Hands’ Martello, a known soldier in the crime family of local underworld figure Rudy Antonelli. It’s not known at this time how he died, but Police Chief Don Hoffman tells us that it looks like a gangland slaying. This is Ned Meyers for ‘Action News.’ “

  I fell back in my chair and felt my heart pound through my chest.

  “What time did they say they found Johnny?” I said.

  “Nine this morning,” Val said. “We better call Jeremy.”

  But I wasn’t hearing her anymore.

  They found Jeremy’s car charred black in a deep ditch just outside of Fairfax, Virginia. The Virginia State Police said that the driver must have fallen asleep at the wheel and gone over the embankment. The car had rolled at a high speed down a steep hill and hit a grove of oak trees at the bottom. There it had turned three or four times and burst into flames. There was a gasoline explosion. A farmer named A. C. Deal had heard it a mile away, but by the time he had called the police (he didn’t bother to look himself; a man had his chores), there wasn’t much to work with.

  They knew it was Jeremy Raines because they found his burned and still-smoldering I.D. card, which said simply Jeremy Randall Raines, president, Identi-Card Products, Baltimore, Maryland.

  Val fell apart when the police came with the news. It was a subtle thing though, no screaming or crying or gnashing of teeth. Instead she just became smaller. Her voice was tiny, she hunched her shoulders so badly that she looked almost comical, and in bed she regressed into the fetal position. She didn’t say much, only that she wouldn’t be going to the funeral and that she didn’t want to talk about it.

  Which was all right by me. I was busy getting blind drunk with Eddie and the Babe, a three-day bender, which up to a point made me somehow seem more sober, more awake, and agonizingly clearheaded. It was as if I had actually achieved what Jeremy’s mad father had raved about—I’d seen through the screen to the opaque, clear, brilliant white space.

  My friend was dead. Raines, Jeremy Raines, was dead. There had never been anyone like him, no one more brilliant, no one more energetic, more greedy, more generous, no one loved life half so much, no one was more confused, no one was more manipulative, no one was more of a liar, more of a saint, more fun, more impossible. I guess I babbled all those things to Eddie and the Babe and to Val when she would stagger down from her room and join us, sullen and bleary-eyed. The old white kitchen table at Chateau Avenue became some kind of liquor-filled, joint-smoking altar, and one by one, we all testified to Jeremy’s sheer shooting-star intensity.

  And it occurred to me through my stoned haze that he was both disease and doctor, purveyor of the all-American bullshit of hype and slayer of it as well, Jeremy Raines, flak maker, flak killer.

  Oh, drunk and in mortal agony, I probably made him out to be a combination of Christ and Lucifer rolled into one, though that was surely overdoing it.

  But what better person to overdo it about?

  He was like no one else I had ever met, and even then, I knew that I would never meet anyone who was as fully alive.

  Among the million things I was wrong and confused about, I was right and clear about that. No one has ever come close.

  I remember calling my father, crying like a baby, and crawling out to the front yard, where a naked, loaded Lulu Hard well was swinging into the cloudy Baltimore moon.

  And I remember an endless discussion of how he died. Was it an accident? After all, he was exhausted and was the worst driver in the free world. Or was it possible that Mr. A. had gotten to him, pushed him over the edge?

  There was even talk that it wasn’t Jeremy in the burnt wreckage. After all, the body was too charred for identification, and his aunt—his only living relative, as it turned out, and the first one notified—had his remains prepared by the undertaker and placed in a closed coffin, so an autopsy was impossible.

  Through her tears, Val talked of going to the police, but quickly saw the folly of that. We had no proof of any misdeeds, and if we opened that can of worms, there would be a very nasty little investigation into the disappearance of one Johnny Martello and all of us could end up serving time down at the “Cut,” Jessups Prison.

  I had one other thought, which I shared with nobody. I kept seeing Jeremy’s haunted eyes the morning that we’d come back from his estate and I kept hearing the questions he’d asked me: “What would you have me do?” and his other words, spoken in such a small, unsure voice, how he had always known he was destined for something, but that it was still out there, just barely beyond his grasp. And that final look he’d given me, naked, lost, as he pulled the battered Nash away from the curb. And I thought, did he know that it was over?
That the party had ended and he had to follow his father to the other side to finally see all the way through the screen? Did he, in some exhausted, impulsive moment of weakness, twist the wheel just enough to miss the curve and go plunging down the embankment?

  But of course I would never, ever know.

  No, in the end we were like all mourners in the face of tragedy—desperate, lost. All we had was one another, and though it didn’t feel like anything close to enough, we somehow staggered through those first horrible days. And in the end Val decided to go to the funeral after all.

  The day was bright and sunny, a perfect afternoon to sell a few cards, hustle a few drinks, get stoned, get laid, but it was a lousy day to watch my best friend get put into the earth.

  Still, as it turned out, Jeremy had one final joke to play.

  The funeral was held in St. John’s Church in fancy WASP Roland Park.

  In this great stone church, with its deeply recessed naves, towering cupolas, and statues of the Virgin, two distinct sets of mourners were present and sat on opposite sides of the main aisle. On the right side was a gray-suited, bereaved-looking Farlow. He accompanied Jeremy’s aunt, Alice, who wore a black satin mourning dress and a black lace veil. And behind them, in row after row, were all the WASPS from Jeremy’s past, the men dressed in their perfect pinstripes, the women in expensive plain dresses. Seated with them were various old shifty-eyed Baltimore politicians, ancient, gray-haired and gray-faced deans from many of the local colleges, including our old friend, A. Taft Manley, of Johns Hopkins University. Outside, when we were all milling around, he noticed me and said, “Well, Whirley, isn’t it a terrible, terrible thing.” And it was all I could do not to burst into hysterical laughter.

  Also sitting there alone on the WASP side of the church was Dr. Spaulding. He wore a blue pinstripe suit and a blue-and red-striped rep tie, and he seemed so composed that he looked like a statue.

  There were so many things I wanted to say to him, apologies I wanted to make. God knows, I had been wrong when I made that terrible outburst in his office a month back.

  And yet, I still felt some inner fury at him, some deep-seated and twisted emotion that I couldn’t translate into sentences, so I merely nodded to him as I took my seat.