by Mark Teppo
Whitcombe broke the paralysis. With a quick intake of air, he leaned forward and plucked the page from the table. Eyes tracking back and forth as if he were reading a short grocery list or a series of rhyming couplets, he scanned the page. The last line transfixed him, and for a moment, his vision went white. Everything vanished from his sight but the scribbled handwriting. “I've got—” His voice cracked, and his hand trembled as he set the page down. “I've got no problem with this bet,” he finally managed.
Clio looked at Mistral, whose mouth turned down as if he had swallowed a mouthful of acrid syrup, and she folded. Mistral did as well, and while their distaste for the Poet’s play was clear, folding instead of stepping away from the game was tacit approval of the unorthodox bet.
Whitcombe, his upper lip vibrating, counted out two hundred dollars in poker chips, and stayed in.
“Okay,” Ralph said. “That's it, then.” He reached for the last card on the board. “Let's see the river.”
It was the Queen of Spades.
Across from him, Deke flinched and muttered something under his breath that only Mistral seemed to hear.
Ralph read the board. “A pair of fours, three of hearts, eight of diamonds, and the Black Lady.” The bookie nodded at Whitcombe. “What have you got?”
The gallery owner turned over his hole cards. “Eights. Gives me two pairs.”
The Poet smiled, and turned over one of his cards. “I have the Bedpost Queen’s red-hearted friend. That gives me a pair of ladies and a pair of fours.”
Ralph flipped over his cards triumphantly. “Three of a kind, king high.” He leaned forward, eager to claim the pot.
The Poet cleared his throat noisily, and Ralph froze, his hand almost touching the page. The bookie’s eyes—as were everyone else’s—were captivated by the single card next to the Poet’s hand. His other hole card.
It was poor etiquette to slow roll the table like this, but Whitcombe couldn’t help but admire the manner in which the Poet had focused all attention on himself. Always playing the room and never the game, he thought.
“Sorry,” the Poet said. “I wasn’t finished.” He toyed with the edge of his remaining card for a second before turning it over. “Now, the Queen of Hearts is never alone; she always has a friend.”
His other hole card was the Queen of Diamonds.
The Poet had a full house—queens over fours.
The bookie looked like a deep water fish who had been yanked out of the water: staring and gasping and shaking. He couldn’t decide if he should speak, breathe, or sit down; as a result, he did nothing as the Poet swept the mass of chips away from him. What finally freed him was the lines on the page.
His eyes ceased their frantic gyrations as the Poet retrieved the piece of paper, and a small groan slipped from his mouth. Ralph sat down in a rush, his face flushed, his throat working quickly. Whatever complaint he had wanted to voice, whatever prize he thought he had won, they were no longer in his mind. He had been wiped clean by the sight of the Poet’s handwriting, and all that throbbed in his brain was the afterimage of those words.
Whitcombe surreptitiously wiped his damp palms on his trousers. “Shall we, ah—” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Maybe the page can stay in the game,” he said. His hands started fluttering as if their motion could strengthen his words. “As a sort of transitory marker for a bet . . . its value would be whatever was deemed . . .”
None of the other players would meet his gaze. None of them said no either.
XV
Vilmo removed the Poet from the game an hour later when he won his first hand. It was an accident, a blustery round of misdirection and feigned slight-of-hand that went nowhere and left Vilmo’s pair of tens as the high cards. The pot was $940, and when he added it to the $170 remaining in his stack, he found he was up more than hundred dollars for the evening. Just like that, luck gave him a brief kiss, arresting his descending spiral.
The Poet’s page was part of the winnings, and when he read what was written there, he was so distracted he didn’t realize the deal had passed to him.
XVI
Mistral felt a small tremor in the wind as the Poet placed his final bet. It whispered across the narrow mouth of the beer bottle in front of Vilmo, and it sighed as it stroked the edge of the Poet’s page.
The stranger’s hand stiffened suddenly as he was counting out a stack of blue chips, and he looked at Mistral. Mistral hadn’t said a word, and he shook his head. Just once, but it was enough for the gambler. He let go of his chips and folded.
Ralph saw the exchange, and confused, he looked back and forth between the two men for a moment. When Deke wouldn't look up, he focused on Mistral. His eyes were dark, filled with the relentless desperation driving his play all night. Mistral gave him the same impenetrable shake of the head, but the motion meant nothing to Ralph. The bookie blinked, and his face compressed itself into a scowl as he realized he had just given away his bluff. He folded too, throwing his cards into the muck with disgust.
In another minute, the hand collapsed and the Poet was out. “Finally,” he sighed as he pushed his chair back from the table. “I can lead my horse to some water.” He wandered out of the room, whistling an out-of-tune version of a popular song.
Mistral began gathering the empty bottles scattered about the table. “Anyone want anything?” he asked.
Vilmo was lost in the Poet’s page and hadn’t noticed Ralph leaning back in his seat so as to read over the butcher’s shoulder. Whitcombe, feigning indifference to the two men reading, finished off his beer. Mistral took the bottle and looked over at Deke. The gambler nodded at his drink. “I’m okay.”
Clio stood up and stretched for a second. “I’ll give you a hand,” she said, absently picking up the Poet’s empties.
They took the glass upstairs to the recycling bins in the back storeroom, where they separated the brown imports from the yellows and greens of the local brews. They sorted quietly, and Mistral listened to the unconscious rhythm of their breathing and the tiny clink-clink of glass-on-glass. Clio’s arm brushed his, and he could feel the goose bumps on her bare skin.
“What is it?” she asked.
He shrugged. “It’s just a piece of paper.”
He heard the physiological change in her: her lungs tightening, her teeth grinding, her heartbeat quickening. “No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
An ache blossomed in his chest, a sympathetic reflection of her tension, and he reached for her arm.
She pulled away. “Don’t patronize me,” she said. She shivered suddenly. “I want it to be news from Duke, but I’m afraid of what it will say if it is. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting it.” Her voice was tiny and weak.
He nodded, and the ache in his chest blossomed further, painfully squeezing his heart.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “It’s probably just a half-written limerick or a couple of paragraphs from a novel he’ll never finish. There can’t be anything of value written on the page.” She ran a hand through her short hair, and then repeated the motion as if she were trying to brush cobwebs from her skull. “It’s the heartache of not knowing, isn’t it? What did he say? Is there enough wonder? Holy Mother, Mistral, what kind of question is that?”
“It’s just a question,” Mistral said, trying to defuse her panic. “It has no value. Not unless you—”
“Unless I give it some. Right?” Her eyes were bright. “But I have. I can’t stop myself. How does he do it? How can he twist me like that? It’s just a fucking piece of paper.”
“It’s all he is,” Mistral said. “It’s his life, written down. He doesn’t know how to do anything else but put his blood into his ink and stain the world with it.”
“What is it?” she asked him again. Her voice was hard now, no longer fearful, discovering some anger. “What do you think is on the page?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, fixing his gaze on the last bottle in his hand.
She grabbed his
arm. “Don’t lie to me, Mistral. I know you well enough. It does matter, and you’re afraid of it too. Tell me. Tell me what you think it is.”
There was a sound behind them, and they turned to see Deke standing in the doorway, an empty bottle in his hand. “Ah, one more,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt.”
“It’s all right,” Mistral said, extricating himself from Clio and taking the offered beer bottle.
Deke hesitated for a second. “It might not be any of my business,” he said, “But I think the lady’s question wasn’t answered, and—” he fought an internal battle for a second before allowing himself to finish, “—I’d like to hear the answer too. If you don’t mind.”
“I told the Poet a story once,” Mistral said as he put the final two bottles in their respective bins. “We were drunk, and he wanted a story, so I gave him one. He
might have believed my story, in which case he probably wrote it down.”
Clio touched his arm, and this time he didn’t pull away. “A dirty little secret?” she asked, some levity in her voice. Trying to defuse the tension in the room. “We all have them, Mistral. You can’t hide them forever.”
“No,” Mistral said. “It’s—what if it is true? I mean, I told him it was just a story, that it was something I made up on the spot. But what if he thought that was the lie, and the story wasn’t.”
“Why does it matter?” Deke asked. “If the story isn’t true, then why does it matter what he thinks?”
“Because, What if I was protecting myself, that it wasn’t him I was lying to? What if the story really is true? If so, then I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t—. I’ll know, do you understand? I’ll know something that I should never have to know, and what will that do to me?”
“It can’t be that bad,” Clio whispered. “Mistral, you’re not making any sense. You’ve turned this inside out too many times, and it doesn’t—”
“But why take that risk?” Mistral said. “As long as I don’t look at what’s written there, I don’t have to know. I don’t have to know if it is inside-out or outside-in or whatever reversed dimension it has become. Maybe it just won’t matter, as long as I don’t see it.”
Clio’s faced tightened. “And what? You’ll just float along, never knowing? Caught in this . . . this twisted limbo forever. That’s good enough for you?”
“Floating is better than sinking,” Mistral said, his voice an agonized whine.
Clio slapped him. “So’s swimming,” she said, and her words were a metallic echo in his ears long after she stormed out of the room.
Deke waited by the door, his hands in his pockets, his tongue working along the inside of his jaw. “She’s right,” he said, finally. He sighed, and Mistral heard the sea rush out of him. “She’s right.” He ducked his head once, and went back to the game.
Mistral stood quietly in the storeroom, his hand idly rubbing the stinging skin of his cheek, wondering who Deke had been referring to with his last statement. It hadn’t been Clio; he was talking about a different woman. Too many echoes in his voice, and it was hard to say if they came from the sound of the ocean or the sound of coins.
“Why did you leave me?” he asked, but there was no one to hear him. No one but the wind, who didn’t answer. Who hadn’t answered any of his questions since the night he had fallen into fire.
XVII
“Once upon a time,” the Poet began, “there was a man who made precious stones.” No longer distracted by the cards, the writer fell prey to his natural inclination.
“He wasn’t a jeweler, nor did he work in a mine. He was an itinerant carpenter who traveled from village-to-village, job to job, neither restless nor restrained by the warp of wood that required his ministrations. His hands were rough and calloused from the work, and his skin had been burned dark by the sun. When pressed, he knew a few common jokes and could sing a song or two if ceremony required, but mostly he kept to the work: carts and cabinets, doors and dormers, roofs and railings. Wooden animals for the children who would watch him throughout the day.
“What no one knew about the carpenter was how his tears dried. When he cried, the tears welled up in his eyes, and as they rolled down his cheeks, they solidified into oceanic azurite. And it wasn’t just his tears, it was any sort of fluid: when he spat, the liquid cracked into coarse diamonds, needing only the delicate touch of a jeweler’s hammer to transform them into polished light; when he bled, it was rubies that clustered on his dark skin; and when he ejaculated, he came in a clatter of salt-water pearls.”
Ralph guffawed. “I’m surprised he ever left the house.” Clio gave him an icy stare, and the Poet saw a dusky flush coloring the bookie’s neck.
“Anyway,” the Poet continued. “The secret of his body was a secret he could not keep forever. Eventually, someone witnessed the miracle. He cut his hand on a saw, he witnessed the burial of a drowned child, he met a woman whose skin and mouth tempted him to make jewelry for her: it may have been all of these events or only one of them, but—like all secrets we try to keep—he was betrayed by his flesh.
“A feudal lord—grizzled by interminable border wars and the persistent failure of his wives to deliver suitable heirs—heard about the wondrous carpenter, and he ordered his men to bring the miracle maker to his castle.
“He imprisoned the carpenter and began to milk him for his riches. The lord made the simple man bear witness to every sort of tragedy imaginable, and his slavish jewelers harvested the blue stones that rolled off the carpenter’s face. He put the man in an iron maiden and listened to the rattle of rubies against the bottom of the metal case. He brought in painted whores trained since birth, and they gave him mouthfuls of silky pearls. The feudal lord grew rich from stolen fluids, and the prisoner dwindled more every day until he was a husk of a man, dry inside and out.”
The Poet stopped, a sad little smile on his face.
XVIII
“That’s it?” the bookie asked. “That’s the whole story?”
The Poet sighed and lifted his shoulders apologetically. “Not every story is finished. I’m still working on that one. I’m having a little trouble with the end.”
Vilmo casually coughed into his hand to cover the response he had started. He had felt the other man’s breath on his neck when he had first won the Poet’s page, but he had been too busy reading the words to tell the bookie to stop crowding him. How quickly they turn, the butcher thought, shaking his head gently. An hour ago, his distaste of the Poet was palpable. Now, he can’t help himself.
The page was lying face-down next to him, and when he glanced down at it, Vilmo was surprised to see a pencil sketch on the back. It was blank, he thought as he tried to make sense of the faint graphite lines, when I first looked at it. It had been . . .
A ragged picture swam across the page, a line drawing of a bearded youth hung on a cross of rough wood. Thin cuts along his ribs spewed faceted stones into large, floating cups. Two cherubs, their faces slack and dull with feigned ecstasy crouched beside the crucified man’s crotch.
“You know how stories are,” the Poet said softly, and Vilmo flinched as he realized the young man was watching him intently. “When they’re young and free, they have an honest roughness, an unfinished texture that hasn’t been burnished and buffed to a pristine shine. But when they are captured, chipped into tablets or hammered into soft metals, they lose some of their luster, don’t they? Their passionate individuality, that singular ecstasy of their expression, is smoothed away, and they become cold strings of words. Dead tales, preserved for cataract-riddled academics to argue over for the next hundred years. Where’s the life in that?”
Vilmo shuddered and scattered a stack of his chips across the page in an effort to obscure the image, but not because the sight frightened him.
XIX
Clio smiled at the Poet. “Tales become dead things,” she said, “When they get written down.” Mistral wouldn’t look at her, and she realized she had wanted his approval, some sign that he, too
, knew this secret. But he didn’t. Their conversation in the storeroom had shown her his heart, and she had recoiled from the emptiness he had shown her. There was nothing he could give her.
Even though he knew her secret, he wasn’t responsible for it. Neither was Dee. She wasn’t beholden to him or the Poet, or anyone in the room. Maybe that’s what he meant, she thought. Maybe what matters is what I already have.
Her smile broadened, a flower blossoming from a tight bud. Without bothering to look at her cards, she shoved her three stacks toward the pot. “I’m all in,” she said. “It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred dollars.”
Maybe what matters is what I want.
Mistral matched her bet, and she wasn’t as surprised by the move as she expected. Regardless of his own inner turmoil, he could always read other people, and his bet was the act of a man throwing himself around a rock in a stream. Grabbing an anchor so as to arrest his uncontrolled course.
Deke folded, and the bookie stayed in. The rush was on him, and even though she was on the other side of the table from him, she could feel his leg dancing.
Whitcombe wrestled with his own decision for some time, caught between the thrill of playing Clio for her last chips and the need to protect his money so as to fight for the page. He can’t stop thinking about it, Clio thought, watching the unconscious movement of the gallery owner’s eyes toward the chip-covered page next to him. Finally, a guttural porcine noise rising from his throat, he folded out of the hand.
Vilmo had dealt, and the variant was five card. “How many?” he asked the remaining players.
Clio: “Four.”
Mistral: “Two.”
Ralph: “One.”
After the draws were dealt, Clio hesitated, her fingers lightly touching their slick backs. The bookie took a quick peek at his new card, a tiny flick of his thumb against the curling edge. Mistral, on the other hand, followed her lead; he slipped his two beneath the three he had kept and squared them up.
