The Wild Card

by Mark Joseph

  He could see the light dawning in Alex’s eyes, but the others remained unconvinced. He gathered the cards, shuffled in Sally’s manner, cut the deck, and rapidly dealt the next hand exactly as she had, six players with the winner holding an astounding five aces in five cards, Charlie’s hand.

  “Voilà.”

  “All the right cards were there in the first hand,” Alex said. “The ace and deuce of hearts, all of them. It’s true.”

  “God damn!”

  “I didn’t see how you did it,” Charlie said.

  Bobby scooped up the cards, shuffled nervously and said, “You’re not supposed to. It took me seven years to learn that trick, but she could do it when she was sixteen, and I believe she invented it on the spot. If she’d lived to play for real money, she might have been one of the great ones, but we’ll never know, will we?”

  The sting in Bobby’s tone cut deep into their shame and guilt, except for Nelson who shifted into cop mode and exclaimed, “This is outrageous. Let me get this straight. She cheated and you knew about it? Where’s that at, Kimosabe? You could have planned it with her when you were out by the falls.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant. I understand you have to ask, but no, it didn’t happen that way. I had no idea she was capable of stacking the deck and planting a hand until I saw her do it.”

  “When?”

  “On the very next hand. She was dealing seconds and pulling cards off the bottom, flick flick flick so slick it was greased.”

  “You didn’t tell us.”

  “No, sir, I most certainly did not. There was no way in hell I was going to blow the whistle. I mean, I was the beneficiary, right? She was cheating on my behalf, if not for herself. I was in absolute awe, and that’s what I meant when I said she blew my mind. She just blew me away, man, like nobody before or since.”

  Wham, the darkness. Bobby blinked rapidly and steeled his mind to remain in control of his body. He went on, “If she’d quit after the first hand, I might never have figured it out. You said she played with our heads, but Alex, she did it with the cards. We didn’t stand a chance.”

  “So why’d she deal me the winning hand?” Charlie asked.

  “Damned if I know, but she could tell you were gay. How? Got me. In those days you acted straight, and nobody knew about you except us. For God’s sake, Charlie, not even your parents knew. It wasn’t like today. And then along comes Sally out of nowhere with insight I can’t fathom, and she had us pegged the minute she stepped onto the boat and saw our tattoos. Dealing Charlie the winning hand and knowing what he would do was a game so out of our league, all of us, you never knew until now that you were had. Believe me, I’ve spent a thousand sleepless nights wondering what would have happened if I’d said something, but we’ll never know.”

  “So it wasn’t fair, after all,” Dean mumbled.

  “Not even close. Like your daddy said: nothin’s fair. Look, if she was the queen of hearts at sixteen, maybe if she were alive today, forty-eight years old, she’d be fat and grotesque, smoke too much and have an addiction to the ten-twenty Texas Hold ’Em table at Binion’s Horseshoe in Vegas.”

  “I’ve seen plenty of them,” Nelson said.

  “We all have. I make my living off of them.”

  “Ever catch one dealing seconds?” Alex asked.

  “I leave that to the pit bosses. Not my business. Besides, in casinos the players don’t deal. Only dealers deal for just that reason.”

  “What about private games?”

  “Like this one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I walk out. It’s happened a couple of times, not very often. Good players don’t need to cheat; but for some people, it’s their nature.”

  “Like Sally?” Dean asked.

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Are we gonna play or what?” Alex demanded.

  “Wild thing,” Charlie sang, a little giddy. “You make my heart go ring a ding ding.”

  “Ante up.”

  A wave of revulsion surged through Bobby like a tide. The room began to spin like a time machine, jerking him into the past, and he remembered how much he’d wanted to kill them. Before Alex could deal the hand, Bobby stood abruptly and swept the table with cold eyes.

  “I’m taking a break,” he announced and walked out of the suite and down the corridor to his room.

  34

  Lying on a hotel bed, eyes closed, a canvas bag containing $1.3 million for a pillow, he remembered the hand as if they’d played it only a few minutes ago.

  Holy moley, she was dealing seconds. What happened took no more than five seconds, so fast that in order to understand it he’d stretched the rapid events into a series of slow, frame by frame images. Scooping up the cards from the previous hand, sorting them, cutting them into the deck, the shuffle that looked impressive but only shuffled half the cards, the cut, the thumbnail chewed and ragged under a coat of chipped, red polish, the motion separated into the pass, the snatch and the deal. Sally had wrought a clinic in sleight of hand, a moment of perfection, a masterpiece, and over the years he’d compiled a long list of superlatives that celebrated her achievement but couldn’t answer the only important question: Why did she cheat? Why had she given him that last card, the king of clubs for the winning hand?

  He hadn’t asked and therefore didn’t know the truth but could only guess, a futile yet unavoidable exercise. Did she do it because she could or because she was a natural anarchist who hated rules? That was a good one. She made her own rules, but they were rules nonetheless. To succeed, cheating at cards required the precise timing and discipline of a concert violinist, so that wasn’t the answer. Sometimes he thought she did it for the thrill, the big jolt, the delicious home run feeling that came from working a scam and scoring. He’d known scumbags of that ilk. He could say to himself, well, she was a hustler and a cheat, anathema to every principle he’d ever held, and all his other thoughts about her were delusions. He’d never cheated at cards in his life. Once in the army he’d caught a soldier cheating in a barracks poker game and had almost beaten him to death. Why was Sally different? Because she was a girl, a sweet young thing who did it for fun? He didn’t know. There were no easy answers. All he knew for certain was that he’d loved her so much in half a day that he’d used up his lifetime quota of love.

  He hadn’t loved the army or Vietnam and he’d hated the war. He didn’t love poker, either—he needed it and that was different. He’d tried to love his wives, but he’d chosen women not for their own qualities but because they’d superficially resembled Sally, short blondes with quick wits. The marriages were doomed, and he didn’t really know his children. Oh, Christ. He’d loved Sally and one of those bastards killed her. Maybe all of them. He’d been cheated, all right, but not by the queen of hearts.

  Do the right thing? What the hell was that? Take the money and walk out? Kill them all and then stand off the cops in a fucking hotel room? He’d be on TV, oh boy. At any time over the years he could have learned where they lived, and killing them would have been easy. Long ago in another life he’d been skilled in weaponry and the ways of violent death. That was the nature of war, but he was no longer a warrior. He was just a card player who wanted justice for a girl long dead; he wanted them to pay, not simply with blood or money—he wasn’t a fool; he’d take the money—but with their hearts. First, he wanted the truth, and he hoped he’d be able to stand up to it, deal with it, learn from it, and find release.

  He wanted to see the light, if only for a moment.

  He remembered her touch, the softness of her lips, her delight in his body.

  He cried himself to sleep, and dreamed.

  35

  It was a memory recalled awake and asleep hundreds of times, the falls, the stars, the tent, and Sally. Erecting the tent was a hilarious fiasco, fumbling in the dark, the poles collapsing twice in heaps of canvas and laughter before they got it right.

  “Some Eagle Scout you are, city boy,” she cracked.

&n
bsp; Finally pitched twenty feet from the cool, black river, the tent sloped slightly downhill at the edge of the woods overlooking the strange rock formations and hissing falls. To this one-note melody Bobby added a primitive beat by whacking steel with a flat granite saucer. Sally knelt beside him, gently holding the stake while he struck sparks.

  “Steady … steady … okay.” Bobby wiped a trace of sweat from his forehead. “That’s the last one,” he said, brushing his hands together, workmanlike. “I think it’ll hold.”

  They remained kneeling side by side for a long minute, breathing the heady perfume of the great valley. The moon had disappeared behind the levee, and the only light was starlight from the universe revolving overhead.

  “Do you think we’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

  “We don’t have to be back for another couple days. You in a hurry?”

  “I was, but not now.”

  Not shy, Sally threw an arm around his neck and held him tight. Planting a big kiss on his forehead, she pressed against him cheek to cheek and looked straight up at the Big Dipper. Bobby’s attention was focused much closer than distant heavenly bodies. An inch from his lips, the downy hair on her arm was too close to resist. He licked her sweat, tasting her, and felt so dizzy he thought he’d swoon.

  “I bet you know the names of the stars,” she said.

  He thought: I don’t want to bet; I don’t want to think, I just want one hundred million years of biology to work its simple magic.

  “Which one is Andromeda?” she asked.

  Bobby glanced up at the blizzard of stars and explained, “Andromeda is a galaxy. Most stars don’t have names, like Polaris, the North Star. They have numbers.”

  “Numbers? Bobby, stars have souls. Everything comes from stars, even people, especially people. People are stars that can talk. That’s what we are, the eyes and ears and voices of our star, the sun.”

  Twisting sideways, he gazed into the silky face so close to his, unsure how to respond to this description of the cosmos never mentioned by Oppenheimer or Heisenberg, his favorite physicists. With no warning, at a moment when he was most vulnerable, Sally’s handful of words peeled away everything he thought he knew and precipitated the first spiritual experience of his eighteen years. Bobby’s consciousness bounced from gonads to brain and his mind opened like a sunrise.

  “People are stars? You’re a star?”

  “Yes, and so are you, and we can talk to other stars, but they’re so far away, it takes a long time before they talk back. It makes as much sense as talking to God.”

  At that moment Bobby fell in love.

  “You’re not so far away,” he said.

  She giggled.

  “How’d you come up with that? Talking to stars?” he stammered.

  “I don’t know,” she breathed with a nervous laugh. “I heard it from some people on the beach. They were Hindus or Buddhists or something.” Then she said, “I’m a virgin.”

  Taken aback, his mind reeling as his thoughts retreated to the swollen blood vessels between his legs, he blinked in surprise and said, “You could’ve fooled me.”

  “Sure, that’s easy,” she said with a grin. “I fool people all the time. I lie and tease and make up stories because I’m not an honest person, Bobby, at least until now. I think I told my first lie the day I learned to talk, and why not? Everything everyone ever told me was a lie, and they’re all liars except you, and I only met you today. That doesn’t matter because I don’t think you’d ever lie to me, so I’m telling you the truth. I don’t want to lie to you or be a tease, and I don’t want to be a virgin anymore, either.” She giggled again. “Are you nervous?” she asked, tickling his ribs.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “See? You can’t lie any more than I can. I’m nervous, too. I’m scared to death.”

  “You weren’t nervous at the card table.”

  “Maybe you didn’t see, but I was.”

  She reached behind her into her bra strap and came out with the ace of hearts.

  No longer surprised by being surprised, he mumbled, “Jesus, you’re too much.”

  “You can never have too much of a good thing,” she said, laughing.

  “Sally, you—”

  Putting her finger to his lips, she whispered, “Don’t say anything, you didn’t see anything, just believe that I wanted you to win and you did. There now, that’s one fine tent, ready and waiting like a little house in the wilderness.”

  The breeze carried the faint sound of the boys rollicking drunkenly on the boat at the other end of the island.

  “Do you think they’ll leave us alone?” Bobby wondered aloud.

  “I don’t care,” she said, pushing through the opening of the tent. When he hesitated, she urged, “Well, come on.”

  Sally turned the radio on softly. Inside the tent it was dark and smelled of canvas and must. He heard Sally rustling close to him, unrolling a sleeping bag. Suddenly he smelled her powerful odor of lemony Jean Naté cologne, river mist, and ripe young woman. He felt woozy and high, and as he lay down, reaching for her, he felt the skin of her belly, warm and aquiver. She’d already unbuttoned her shirt and unhooked her bra, and she pressed his hand against her breast. He could feel her heartbeat, and her intense heat sent colors rocketing through his brain, infrareds and ultraviolets and colors without names. He felt as though the stars had burned through the tent and bored inside his head. A supernova exploded only a few light-seconds away, and Bobby felt himself being drawn into the primeval light, the source of life itself.

  He kicked off his shoes and tore at the buttons on his jeans. Wolfman Jack reached across the ether and played a rock and roll love song.

  “Oh, Bobby,” Sally said. “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, wish I may, wish I might, grant this wish—”

  36

  He woke up drenched in sweat, unwilling to risk living through the night on the Feather River again, even in a dream.

  “Stars that talk, Christ,” he uttered aloud, laughing at himself, pleased the dream hadn’t robbed him of his sense of humor. “Jesus, I’m still talking to stars.”

  Awake, he could remember their lovemaking and what it felt like, the tug of her cherry, her forceful, determined pelvic thrust that burst the membrane, her tiny scream of exultation, legs locking behind his back and how they both came and came all night, their entire bodies convulsing in a prolonged orgasm of cosmic, perfect sex—but he couldn’t really capture the reverie of his few hours with Sally unless he was asleep; then, as often as not, the dream went on too long and turned into a nightmare.

  Sometimes he saw her hovering lifeless underwater staring blindly at the fishes; other times she was a cheerleader fucking the football team in the locker room with Alex, Charlie, Dean, and Nelson in shoulder pads and jerseys. Once in a while he and Sally rose fresh and bright the next morning, returned safely to San Francisco and lived happily ever after. When that cruel version of the dream woke him up choking and sobbing in rage, wives and girlfriends always thought he was having a nightmare about the war. He never told them otherwise.

  As time went by the nightmares disappeared for as long as a year, yet for reasons he could never discern they always returned, and he suffered until he stopped the horror with booze and dope. In the beginning, disguising his condition in Vietnam was easy; crazed, drunken junkies were indistinguishable from crazed soldiers who were stone cold sober. After the war, the army took care of its own, smothering and concealing the foibles of Sergeant McCorkle, genuine hero, for ten years until he retired. When the nightmares descended on Bobby McCorkle, civilian poker player, he binged, often for months until he was sick or broke or both. Tap city—reduced to living on his pension—he dried out, cleaned up, and started playing cards until the cycle started anew. Although he believed in the power of the game to keep him alive, in his heart he didn’t feel his life could change, and he wasn’t convinced he wanted it to change. He lived on the br
ink of oblivion because he liked it. Playing for keeps gave him a thrill. He’d come to San Francisco with the frail hope that hearing the truth from his old buddies would end the nightmares. No such luck. Lying on the bed in the Palace Hotel he shouted, “Wrong!” and laughed at himself again.

  After listening to bullshit for twenty-four hours, his slim flask of hope had run dry. Knowing the exact cause of Sally’s death could only make the nightmares worse. The truth—that elusive bugaboo—was that the boys from Noë Valley were afraid of their dirty little secret, millions of dollars worth of afraid, but a fat bag of money would only buy him a few months until he spent it or gave it away or lost it in Biloxi. Alex and the rest were pathetic bastards who believed money could buy respectability and solve their problems. The sad part was that in their world they were usually right, but he didn’t live in their world. Money couldn’t solve his problems or significantly alter his life. He, not Alex, was supposed to have been the professor, and he easily could have become a cop like Nelson or run a business like Charlie or even lived as a quasi-outlaw freak like Dean. As it happened, it didn’t turn out that way, and he couldn’t blame his choices on them any more than he could chart his life by the stars. Neither karma nor fate nor destiny nor any other form of nonsense was responsible for his life. He was. Every time he sat down he had to play the hand he was dealt. One time the deck was stacked against him and he lost. Sally, with all her skills, never got to play her cards, forever aces and eights, the infamous dead man’s hand.

  If there was anything to chastise himself about that night, it was that he hadn’t exactly fallen asleep in the tent—he’d passed out dead drunk. In the middle of the night he’d gone back to the boat for more beer, found Charlie and Nelson asleep and Alex still playing five stud with a sulking, glowering Dean. No one had said anything. He’d simply grinned and shrugged, grabbed a six-pack and split. At that point his memory faltered. He remembered fragments of more sex, more drinking, and more talk before he passed out. When he woke up a few hours later four of the six beer cans were empty and Sally was dead.