by Sean Stewart
“Get your money and leave the table,” Ace said. “That’s the best advice I’ve got.”
THE Gold Room was a roar of clinking glasses and drunken song. Ace followed Sloane in, leaned close to her ear and murmured, “Knowing the Rake, he might just wait out front to beat his money out of you.” After the next song Sloane slipped down the hallway to the kitchen and the back door. A moment later Ace followed.
As they stepped out of the cool, dry, air-conditioned interior and onto the back lawn, the Galveston night closed over them like a warm bath. A pavilion tent strewn with bunting sat gaily where the piggery should be. Throngs of people chatted and set off firecrackers and mingled beside the swimming pool. Sloane looked longingly at the pool.
There was no henhouse against the back fence, and the generator shed was still a detached garage. The two Lexus engines that in Sloane’s world provided power for the house, here were still inside functioning automobiles. There were no washing lines strung up from tree to tree, no stench of slops, no dusty buckets and pails waiting below the gutters for any precious rain. What a clever girl I am to come to this Galveston.
She followed Ace out the back gate of Ashton Villa and found herself standing on a level sidewalk next to Ford Street. The road was in good repair, with cars parked along it. The Rosenberg Library loomed across the street. In Sloane’s Galveston it had become the headquarters for the Krewe of Togetherness. Here it housed only books. Well, check that. After twenty-four years of Carnival, it probably held things considerably stranger than books.
Ace began to amble south along the sidewalk. Sloane fell into step beside him. “Thank you for your advice. You even managed to make up for my mistake.”
“Reckon the advice was worth a cut?” He didn’t meet her eyes.
“That, sir, was not part of the deal,” Sloane said. “It was all for chivalry, I thought.”
After a long silence he said, “I’m starving.”
“That’s better.” She found that Sly had an arch, bantering tone when she spoke. “Don’t try to bargain with me. Just appeal to my abundant generosity.” She held out a few bills, but pulled them lightly away as Ace tried to take them. “No, no. What’s the magic word?”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Sloane laughed. “Much better.” She took his hand and closed his fingers around the money. “Pride heals,” she said.
AN hour later she was sitting with Ace on the edge of the Seawall, each with a plate of barbecue bought from a stall in the busy Stewart Beach fairground. On the sand below them carnies and hucksters worked the crowd. A plume of flame flared briefly and then disappeared down a fire-eater’s gullet. Revellers milled and joked through the fairgrounds, buying food and beer from the makeshift stalls, trying their luck at skittles or ringtoss or the shooting gallery, staring at the peep shows, singing, or just wading in the warm Gulf water. Light from the fierce moon glinted off the swell, making brief planes of shifting pewter in the night. Ghosts of foam glimmered and guttered on the sea’s back, or ran hissing onto the sand.
“You need to know which hands to fold and which ones to play.” Ace said between mouthfuls of charred brisket. “And you need to know it before your first bet. I hope you don’t mind if I talk a bit. If I eat too fast I’ll get sick.”
Sloane sucked on the end of a rib, idly swinging her feet so her heels kicked against the Seawall. “Why did you want me to fold with a pair one hand and raise with nothing the next?”
“Nothing ace high, with a paint scare card showing,” he corrected her. “Position. On the first hand, you had to bet before everyone else. You’re telling them you have sixes right off the bat. With a small pair and not much of an off card—it was a three, wasn’t it?—you’re going to be chasing all the way on a hand like that. An animal like the Rake will raise and raise and raise, punishing you for staying in with bad cards. Nearly any pair out there is going to beat you, not to mention any drawing hand.” He licked his fingers. “Straights or flushes, I mean. Trips are your only hope, really, and with a bad off card it’s just not worth the gamble.”
Sloane grinned. “And my ace high nothing?”
“There you got to bet last. Everyone else called or folded, so we knew nobody had a premium pair. Plus the Rake was out of the game. You had a scare card showing and pretty tight players left, so I figured we’d be able to limp into Fifth or Sixth Street with a lot of possibilities. They didn’t want to raise and get reraised, so we got two free cards—free card is when you get to draw without having to bet to pay for the privilege. We got free cards on Fourth and Sixth streets by being aggressive on Third and Fifth. You drew out your tens—” He shrugged and cut another piece of brisket with his plastic utensils. “Hey, presto.”
Sloane found herself smiling. “You care about your cards, I see.”
“Not anymore.” The gaunt man beside her licked his fingers. “But I still know the game.”
“So why are you starving? Can’t you make a living playing cards?”
“Nobody will play with me. There are always games in Mardi Gras, dozens of them; but there’s only one left that I am welcome to join.” He glanced over at the manager’s hut at the back of the amusement park and fingered his mutilated ear. “But the stakes are high.”
“It doesn’t seem…manly to bar someone from a game just because he’s good.”
“Lucky. Not just good. Lucky.”
“Sounds like a nice trait to have.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Ace finished his barbecue. He held the plate between his hands for a long time.
She laughed. “Go ahead. Lick it. I can tell you want to.” He regarded her. Sly didn’t give a damn. “Pride heals,” she said.
THEY walked out onto one of the long stone jetties that stuck into the ocean. Built as a storm-protection measure at the same time as the Seawall, the jetties were made from giant blocks of granite. When they reached the end, with the warm water of the Gulf boiling away below them, Ace said, “You don’t live here.”
“Pardon?”
“You don’t live in the Mardi Gras. Most people here can’t get out, but you can.”
“What makes you think so?”
“You have the tells. In the Mardi Gras it’s always night, but your skin is tanned. You could be a new arrival, but I don’t see any changes on your body. Your mask is just a mask. There’s no magic been spilled on you, nothing funny about your hands or feet or hair. You walk in the street by habit, instead of on the sidewalk, and you walk like a tourist, staring. I can see you comparing this Galveston to the real one.”
Sloane whistled. “Good eyes.”
Water crashed and hissed dully around them. The moon hung directly over the fairground, like a giant white spotlight. Ace said, “When I was a young man, before the Flood, I spent a year in Peru teaching English. I met a bunch of Americans there. Eight or nine. And the would-be travelers passing through, the Around-the-World-on-a-Shoestring types.” Ace studied the sea. “You don’t pack up and hightail it to the ass end of nowhere on a whim. Every one of them was running from something. Maybe a bad marriage. Maybe they didn’t like themselves and were hoping to change. I met one guy who’d had a brain tumor removed. You could see Fear standing behind that old boy with a whip. Him thinking maybe he could just outrun that cancer…” A wave broke just below them, forcing spray out of the cracks in the rocks.
“And you? What were you running from?”
“Never did figure it out,” Ace said. “The Flood hit just after I got home.”
A cloud drifted in front of the moon, and for a moment the world around Sloane grew darker. “You think I’m on the run, too, is that it?”
“That’s none of my business. But you had better know.”
A dim suggestion of movement caught Sloane’s eye and she looked around. There was a man sitting on the side of the jetty with his feet in the water, perhaps ten paces away. No. Not a man, exactly. A tall figure with a sad face and long undersea whiskers that drooped
to his waist. Bulging eyes and armored skin. The veil of cloud slid across the moon and the white light returned. The creature clambered down among the rocks and slipped into the sea. A moment later a faint reek like the smell from a bucket of shrimp came to her on the steady Gulf breeze. Sea boiled and ran over the place where he had disappeared.
A Prawn Man. She had heard Odessa talk about them.
“I’ve got nothing against running,” Ace said. “Weak players hold on to hands that better ones throw away.”
Sloane couldn’t tell if he had seen the Prawn Man. There had been something very quiet in the creature’s face. And sad. Or rather, something akin to sadness: the feeling Sloane got staring across the salt-grass flats at the end of the day. The loneliness of all things. No one knows anyone, not really. Each of us is locked inside our own skin, a creature marooned in the secret salt sea of the body.
The wind from the sea felt cold and she shivered. She knew she should shake off the vision. It was such a Sloane thing to feel; nothing about Carnival at all. She would feel better when she forgot it. And yet…these moments of apprehension, where she saw things, fragments of disappointment or doubt that her mother never seemed to feel; these moments seemed to Sloane more real, more true of her, than her whole busy public life as a Gardner. As if acts and words were only things, like clothes, that might reflect but never define her.
This is stupid. She turned her back on the place where the Prawn Man had been.
Ace said, “I have a proposition for you. I need to eat and you have quick eyes. If you reckon on staying here, in Mardi Gras, I can teach you to play cards and win. I wouldn’t want all your take, or even half. Just a cut.”
Sloane felt her lips curl into Sly’s smile. “I might be willing. But only so long as it amuses me.”
“There’s a nice little five-ten game going at the Railroad Museum if you want to get your feet wet.”
No! said the dreary dutiful voice inside her. What about Mother?
Sloane smiled whitely. “I’d love to,” she said.
AFTER the railroad station had closed down and been converted into a museum, someone had decided to populate it with statues. In the real Galveston, there were seven or eight of them, mostly dressed in the fashions of the 1940s and ’50s, sprinkled about the wooden pews in the lobby as if waiting for their trains to be called. Sloane recognized one of them the moment she and Ace walked into the station, an old black man wearing a slouch hat and reading a newspaper, who seemed so real she had to knock his arm to be sure it was stone. “He sure looks bored,” she said.
Ace shrugged. “He’s been waiting a long time.”
Sloane laughed.
“They’re playing in a Pullman car out back,” Ace said. “There’s no percentage in going into the finer points of poker until you have a better feel for the game. For now, I’ll just give you two good rules. First is, fold nearly every hand. If you can fold a hand, if the cards let you, do. Then watch how the other folks play.”
“And rule two?”
“If you’re in, bet. Raise, don’t call. Drive out all the weak hands early so they can’t limp along for free and then draw out a straight or a flush at the end.” He took a breath. “Well, those fellas won’t let me near the table, so you best go on. I’ll be waiting in the diner,” he said, jerking a thumb back to the station cafeteria.
She walked out the back door of the Railroad Museum and followed the sound of laughter and the smell of cigar smoke to a luxuriously appointed Pullman car that had once been used by the infamous Will Denton, Jr. The air was thick with the smells of liquor and Havanas. Sloane played for a long time, losing only a little more than she won. At last she took a break to stretch her legs, walked back to the station, and found Ace at the counter in the diner, as he had promised. The statue of the old black man sat on the stool beside him, poring over a menu. Sloane reached out and tapped it on the hand. Cold stone and still as death. “I’ll be damned,” she said.
She talked over a few plays with Ace, the two of them walking around the marble lobby while crowds of revellers flowed around them, laughing and joking and peering at the museum exhibits. Then Sloane went back to play some more.
She did her best, and her best wasn’t bad. Finally, after a pleasant win which brought her back near even, Sloane’s thin bubble of exuberance popped. She felt as if she hadn’t slept for days. When she found herself drowsing between bets she knew it was time to stop. She excused herself, stepped down from the smoky Pullman car, and walked back across the crunching gravel to the station entrance, yawning her head off. The dreary nagging sense of guilt that haunted Sloane in the real world seemed to be getting stronger as tiredness wore down the fine, high, blank hum that was being Sly.
Momus! Damn. I was supposed to see Momus. She had forgotten again. Another yawn gripped her. Well, she was far too tired to do anything about the Lord of Carnival now. That confrontation would have to wait for one more night.
Ace was nursing a cup of coffee in the railway station diner. “Leaving Mardi Gras?”
“Duty calls, I’m afraid.” She yawned again. “Bed, too.”
“When you come back, look for me here. If I’m not around, I’m playing with Momus, but that’s a game you aren’t nearly ready for.”
She kissed him, something Sloane would never do. Then she took off the mask.
THE hum and buzz of Mardi Gras stopped as if chopped off with a knife. She was alone in sudden silence, standing in the empty foyer of the Railroad Museum. Grey light was just beginning to creep through the plate glass doors. Beside her, back in his accustomed pew, the weary old black man read his newspaper in the gloom.
She had failed again.
The knowledge twisted like a snake in her belly. She hadn’t faced down Momus. She hadn’t used the mask as she was meant to. Instead of helping her mother, instead of making Odessa proud, she had frittered away another precious night playing cards. All she had to look forward to was another morning of sneaking into her house like a disgraced teenager. Her mouth was dry and her throat raspy with cigar smoke. Her knees were weak with exhaustion. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “What am I doing?”
All right. All right. She had screwed up again, she hated herself, fine. There would be plenty of time to hate herself in proper detail later. Right now she had to get right, she had to be able to do her work, to help her mother. She had to be able to get through the day. Another dose of that damiana tea, I think. She started for the museum doors. The sound of her shuffling steps echoed in the empty station.
She walked up from the Railroad Museum to Joshua’s house, trudging past the sign that read, “We report all suspicious activities to our police department,” and wincing as she saw a neighbor or two staring at her from behind lifted curtains or Venetian blinds. Lord only knows what his big friend Ham would say about me showing up like this. She imagined lewd stories circulating along the docks, and finally making their way up to her mother’s ears—all gossip did, sooner or later. Ugh. Sloane kept her eyes on the ground, trying to ignore the stares as she climbed Joshua’s front steps and knocked on his door.
Movement rumored from inside. “Visiting hours start at—Christ,” Joshua said. “It’s you.”
“I’m happy to see you, too. Can I come in?”
The apothecary stepped aside.
Sloane was so tired her ears were buzzing with white noise and her eyelids felt as if Odessa had spelled them to stillness. “I’m hoping you have a bit more of that tea,” she said, fumbling in her purse for the last of the money she had gotten for her Rolex.
“Where have you been?” His eyes narrowed. “At the Mardi Gras, of course.” She could read the contempt in every line of his body. “You don’t even know, do you?”
Dread bloomed inside her. “Don’t know what?”
“Do you realize you’ve been gone four days?”
Sloane gasped. She actually fell against the wall. “It gets better,” Joshua said coolly. “While you were off partying, your mother
died. They buried her yesterday.”
A whiteness like the stare of the moon filled Sloane’s head. Her blood ran backward. Everything was wrong, impossible, perverse. “No,” she whispered.
“I hope it was a hell of a party,” Josh said.
Part Two
Chapter Eight
INSULIN
JOSH grabbed a canister of damiana tea from a shelf in his tiny front room. When he turned to show Sloane Gardner into his kitchen, she was gone. He stepped out onto his front porch, thinking to see her running for Ashton Villa, but the streets were empty. Sloane had vanished without a sound. He clattered down the porch steps, looking in the parched herb beds and even around the corners of his little house, in case she had passed out from shock or booze, but there was no trace of her. If it weren’t for the smell of cigarettes and alcohol that lingered in his doorway, she might have been a mirage.
Josh came back inside and dithered, wondering what to make of it. Finally he hung the CLOSED sign from his front doorknob and walked down to the docks, hoping to catch Ham before he left for his day’s work. He found his big friend at Pier 21. Ham was fussing with his company boat, an aluminum runabout with the Gas Authority’s blue flame talisman painted on the bow. Ham’s thick fingers probed delicately at the innards of the runabout’s little Mercury 9.5 hp outboard motor.
In the early days after the Flood, it had quickly become clear that Galveston’s best option for powering the city was to run hot taps off the natural gas pipelines that snaked in from the Gulf of Mexico to the crackers and refineries in Texas City, and the vast Dow Chemical plant north of La Marque. Most of the surviving houses in Galveston had the gas laid on anyway. Using the machinery in the local auto-body shops, Ham’s father and dozens of mechanically minded survivors like him had patiently retooled automobile carburetors to run on methane. Throw the car up on blocks in your backyard, and every house could have its own small generator. Joshua’s childhood home had been powered by a trusty Toyota 4Runner engine, but in recent years he hadn’t had the money to buy the more reliable imports. He was currently running a Ford Taurus that had been reconditioned twice already and would probably crap out within the year. Ham, who cared more, ran a 2001 model Delta 88. Like most white guys, Ham was a Lincoln/Olds fan. Galveston’s blacks preferred Caddy engines, when available, or Buicks otherwise, particularly the Regal, whose turn-of-the-century models had been unusually reliable. The Hispanics all swore by Chevies. “They’re shitty cars for a white man,” Ham said one time, “but they run like velvet for the damn Mexicans.”
