by Alan Trotter
He could win by betting like that, I’d seen him do it a couple of times, but only because the people he’s playing with are too scared to beat him. When they fold to a raise it’s not because they think he’s got them outmatched, it’s because they think it would embarrass _____ if they called him and he had to admit a dud hand, and they think the chips are not worth whatever _____ might do to someone who embarrassed him.
So instead _____ begins slowly, he plays even good hands gently, until they come to believe he’s a man who can control his temper, who won’t go all in on a jack high and a sore head, but can wait for the cards and then play them the way they deserve.
_____ plays cards like a saint.
*
I sat outside and shared some silence with Bernard while _____ was in talking to Fylan. By now Bernard’s nose was only ribbed with thin, slightly bloodied strips of bandage, a raised ripe scab down its crooked middle. At one point he looked almost like he was going to offer me a cigarette, which was white of him.
_____ came out with our instructions and we walked four blocks to a hotel called the Elmwood, though only an ‘m’ still clung to the wall outside, the other letters readable in the embarrassed, clean spaces they had left behind. We got past the desk and up to our floor without difficulty.
_____ took his butterfly knife from his pocket. He flicked his hand and the blade opened out and then was clinched again at the base by the two sides of the handle. Before he moved toward the door I asked if maybe he minded if I had a go picking this one. _____ pursed his lips for a moment, not like he was really considering, and then explained that he was better at this than me, which was true, and what if I botched it and then the guy comes in, not an unsuspecting sap but alert and on edge, with every chance to get a rod out?
I thought about how was I ever going to get any better at it without a chance to practise? But this was a conversation we’d had before and I was not in a mood to go through it again. It would end, I knew, with mention of one occasion when my frustration led to a door being kicked from its frame.
So _____ got the door open and we went in.
The hotel needed better maid service or better guests. Clothes caked the two chairs, the desk and the floor, a towel was drying on the bedsheets and an ashtray overflowed onto the pillow at the head of the bed.
_____ looked around and then removed his homburg and tucked himself in behind the curtain with a gesture to follow. The curtain was already drawn over the window. You could see his shape extruding from it—a man in outline, hat held to his chest, and below the curtain, a pair of shoes. But two pairs of shoes under a curtain is no more conspicuous than one, so I crept in alongside him.
We stood and we waited. Maybe _____ could make some claim to being hidden—only because I was acting as a tent pole, sheltering him: I was a big dumb ghost in a sheet, with a smaller ghost hiding in his skirts. It got dark.
Our sap came in and flipped on the light. We waited for him to spy the newly risen mounds in his curtain. With the light on we could see him through the material, and he was singing a show tune to himself. He had to see us. We couldn’t have been more visible if we’d been nude. If we’d been alight. If we’d had stage names and faces from the paper and spotlights trained on us.
But he tossed his jacket on a chair, spun a merry spin on the balls of his feet, and finished his song with his hands on his hips, his back to the window and his head in easy reach of _____’s blackjack.
So _____ reached.
We snapped bracelets on the unconscious sap, slung him in a chair and waited some more.
*
_____ smoked a cigarette. The sap hadn’t paid enough to get a toilet of his own so I pissed in the sink, in a swirling, difficult manner. It all risked the kind of mistake that would have been taken out on the sap’s cheap hide, but I stayed dry and he got lucky.
The phone rang and _____ glanced at his wristwatch and ignored it. We let it ring for as long as it cared to. In the chair, the sap slept soundly on.
We kicked our heels until the phone rang again. _____ checked the time and picked up the receiver, and spoke without waiting, telling them to send him up. I took a guess that ‘him’ would be Fylan.
_____ considerately took the ring off his right hand and slapped the sap’s face back and forth a couple of times, and I took the opportunity to get rid of the rest of a glass of water by throwing it over him. The sap’s head lolled side to side and his mouth began chewing on vowels and letting them drip off him with the water.
*
The sap’s eyes were just agreeing to work together in the pursuit of common goals when they located Fylan, and an amount of fear shot through them that it’s not an easy thing to earn. I felt impressed with Fylan, his ability to incite this wide-eyed animal terror in the handcuffed man. I already knew I liked him. The impression he always gave—in the way he moved and the way he talked—was one of nothing being wasted, not a movement, or a thought, or a mercy.
He asked us to leave the room. I’d reached the door and had it open when I realised that _____ wasn’t behind me. He was peering over Fylan’s shoulder at the sap. It took Fylan turning around and looking him in the eye and asking again before _____ understood that it wasn’t just big lugs like me that had to wait outside.
*
In the corridor, _____ and I talked about how we’d hidden behind the curtain with the blackjack. We discussed how unlikely it was that even a dumb sap like the one we clearly had on our hands would miss us. Would miss us and then wander directly over to the curtain, and then obligingly turn, as if presenting his hatless crown for the blackjack. We had started to talk percentages and odds when Fylan opened the door and called us in.
He said there were a couple of things he had to check out, and depending on how well informed the man in the chair turned out to be, he might have a few follow-up questions to present to him.
And then Fylan breezed.
*
I sat on the edge of the bed and watched as _____ tipped back the brim of his homburg and started to light a cigarette. But just as he had his hand cupped around the flame, he stopped, shook out his match and put the pill away again. He said we should have a bet, put a fin on it.
He went over and snapped his fingers in front of the eyes of the sap in the chair. ‘Buddy,’ he said, looking to see if he was awake. The sap was awake, but struggling at it. _____ clicked his fingers a couple more times. When the sap had begun to pay attention to him, _____ lay his blackjack across his head, knocking him cold.
Then _____ knelt down in front of the again-unconscious sap, unlocked and removed his handcuffs. He picked up my hat from where I’d left it, shoved it at my chest and told me to come on, then we hid behind the curtain again.
We must have waited back there a half-hour, our bodies shaping the curtain like we were lying under a cover, our toes chilling themselves in the room, before a groaning came from the chair. The sap rubbed his head where he’d been twice laid out by the blackjack. He kept groaning and was saying some pretty restrained things about the Almighty, considering, when he seemed to realise that rubbing his head like he was meant he wasn’t in bracelets any more, and all at once he leapt from the seat. _____ jabbed at me with his elbow, edging over so he could see better through the split. The sap looked around the room. Then he opened the outside door and looked both ways along the corridor. Not so much as a curious glance at the shapes in his curtains. Then, filled with resolve he ran over to his jacket, grabbed it from its chair, threw it on, seized his hat, and stood in front of us with his hands on his hips looking around for anything else he might have needed. _____ reached forward with the blackjack.
We came out and stood over the sap, looking down on him like a mouse who’d been given a maze to run and was curled up at the start gnawing its own leg.
I handed _____ a fin, and we dragged him back to his chair, put him back in the cuffs and waited for Fylan to return or for the phone to ring.
*
One night they were joined in their card game by a scrawny kid, making four of them: _____, the apartment manager, Lydia, showing me her hands, and this kid.
The kid was talking plenty to begin with. He was not saying much, but he was talking. He was the sort that holds a cigarette only in ways that don’t quite make sense, like they’ve over-thought the whole exercise and now worry it won’t be impressive enough just to hold a cigarette.
It was a friendly game and accordingly the chips were pretty sociable, passing the time with everybody in turn—but when this kid won a stack, pride would colour his face and his back would straighten right out. It was his dignity standing to attention. It was like seeing a corpse jump to its feet and give itself a round of applause.
Whenever this happened, Lydia would tell a joke, distracting from the display, because she’s a good one and because it was embarrassing, watching the kid win. If you give yourself a parade every time you take a hand, it’s a cinch you’re not the kind of person it’s hard to read. Win like that, no one with any sense has to watch it happen too often.
And then the kid started getting bad hands and kept playing them. It was clear they were bad because he gummed up. He was still okay in chips, but he wasn’t even laughing at Lydia’s jokes, and she tells a dirty joke as well as anyone you ever knew. But he kept raising, and losing, and when he lost his back crimped up.
You could have beaten him at cards dead drunk in a dark room so long as you had a protractor to take the angle of his spine.
*
The kid became a regular. He also had a name—Holcomb. He played cards and he drank and he never seemed to get any better at either. And he talked, which he could do. Sometimes he talked like he was sitting at his own deathbed, reminiscing with himself. Sometimes he talked about girls he’d bought, and directed the worst of it at Lydia, as if he thought he could drive her to a fainting couch. Sometimes he talked like he was the first man to discover unhappiness and was deeply proud of the achievement.
There was one hand late in an evening where Holcomb was almost out of his chair with excitement right from the deal, but the apartment manager was too drunk to notice. No one else wanted anything to do with the hand. Lydia had one arm across her belly, the other pressing a black cigarette to her lips, the lips much more red than normal. She was in a mean mood: sometimes the day after a mood like this and with her husband on a drunk, you’d see him wondering what he’d done to get almost markless but painful wounds on his arms, and on one occasion a cigarette burn in the centre of his back up between his shoulder blades, right where he couldn’t reach it or quite see it properly, that had him running out his door whenever he heard feet on the steps to get someone else to take a look and give him word on what exactly was back there.
So Lydia began laughing at the apartment manager as he kept raising. The kid Holcomb is helium at this point. And of course it ended as a big win for Holcomb. Though it’s less a win for the player than it is for the cards, in this instance. He raked the chips to himself and then lighted a new cigarette, and as the next hand was being dealt he gave a wave over his part of the table like a magician over a coin trick that meant he wanted dealt out.
While the other three played the hand, and for the next couple of hands as well, he started to talk about the story of Red Riding Hood, which I’d heard, and the Grimm brothers, who he seemed to think were quite the deal but were news to the rest of us. And he said that in the story of Red Riding Hood a little girl has been sent through the woods to visit her sick grandmother. And a bad wolf knows this, because he speaks to Red Riding Hood, and for some reason she gives him the straight tip on it. And the wolf goes ahead to grandma’s house and eats the old lady and dresses in her old lady nightclothes and climbs into her bed and waits for Red Riding Hood.
Lydia showed me the low pair in her hand and then folded it to a modest raise from _____. She picked up her cigarette and said that she didn’t know about the rest of the table but she’d had a childhood and parents and—(she drew a circle with the smoke to say, and so on). She seems older when she’s in a mean mood. She tells fewer jokes, though they’re just as funny. I was thinking I might take a glass of milk and go get some sleep.
Holcomb took a long draw on his pill and piped the smoke from the corner of his mouth, first in a thin stream, then, as the smoke kept on, in little rhythmic darts that still kept coming until it seemed the breath must have been spent, and then there was another squirt of smoke, and all the time his eyes fixed on Lydia. Finally he was done, and he continued his story.
According to the Grimm brothers, Red Riding Hood arrives and admires the wolf’s eyes and ears and teeth, and the wolf eats her up, and then a hunter comes by. And the hunter cuts open the wolf with a scissors and gets Red Riding Hood and the grandma out, and piles rocks into the wolf in their place, and then sews the wolf up again. And it’s having a belly full of rocks that does for the wolf in the end.
But, Holcomb says, the wolf’s still lucky. Even the wolf in the next story, that no one remembers, the wolf that ends drowned in grandma’s gutter chasing the sausage smell of cooking water is lucky. Because a twist like Red Riding Hood is always going to find a story to be a part of—some characters just have adventures thrown at them—but what’s so special about a big, dumb animal with big teeth and big claws and no sense? And the grandma—if she didn’t have Red Riding Hood as an affectionate, selfless granddaughter, what are the chances she’d get to be in any stories? She’d just be an old woman, sick and bed-bound, alone in the woods.
So, another version of the story, Holcomb says: Red Riding Hood’s on her way to grandma’s, and the wolf talks to her and then goes on ahead and devours grandma, but Red Riding Hood is distracted by another adventure, another story going on in the other direction through the woods, with a witch, or brothers turned into swans, or some bears instead of a big cruel wolf. So the wolf waits in bed, in grandma’s nightclothes, with the grandma’s sheets pulled up to its neck, but Red Riding Hood doesn’t come, and the wolf keeps waiting.
‘And after waiting for so long in the too-small bed,’ he goes on, ‘the wolf’s back begins to hurt, so as he scours the shelves of the house for something to eat, he finds that he’s begun to walk with a stoop. And as winter draws in, his feet are always sore and he has to rub them before trying to stand. And the wolf’s big eyes are no longer as good for seeing anything with, and the wolf’s ears can barely hear the wind whipping at the walls of the cottage, and the wolf’s teeth hurt whenever he bites anything, and he’s glad when one would fall out. And soon the wolf has no appetite at all and the nightclothes that used to bind his legs they were so tight, well, they hang loosely on him. And the wolf comes to think of himself as living in another wood, a wood within the cottage within the wood, an interior wood where each tree is another ache somewhere in his old body, and all the trees grow unnoticeably bigger day by day by day. And still his granddaughter hasn’t come to bring him some cake or a bottle of wine. And his hair is matted and thinned, and sometimes in the morning he finds clumps of it in his bed, which he carefully tidies, because it’s important to keep the place, even if no one is coming. And still the forest of aches in the wolf grows bigger and its branches more elaborately entwine, and he forgets ever living anywhere but amongst its dull pains and occasional sharp agonies in his small cottage, as his memory fades and dims.’
And he blew smoke from his cigarette, a man whose mirror would never weary of admiring him.
*
Fylan gave _____ the name of a debt. We were to put a scare into him.
We tried his front door as a start. Cain was the name we were after and it was listed as the basement apartment. We got no response. There was an office where we could have enquired but we wouldn’t have wanted to trouble anyone. _____ sized up the building, then we walked around the side. We had to climb a wall. _____ had me make a ledge with my hands and hoist him over. Then I found a trashcan and achieved the same using it.
The back of the build
ing was more promising. _____ lifted a grate and dropped in beside some half-moon windows that looked into the basement apartment. He took off his hat but then returned it to his head and told me to pass him mine. He put his hand inside it and punched a hole in the window, then traced the frame to get rid of the remainder of the glass. He shook the hat and handed it back to me. Then he pushed his legs in the window and slipped inside.
I was pretty convinced my shoes would fit through the window—I wasn’t so sure about the rest of me. Still I climbed into the trough and fit the grille back in place above my head, and started measuring myself with a small half-moon-shaped window. Feet in first, then legs, then as if I was wearing the window as a belt a couple of notches too tight, but I made it through. I had to hold my arms straight above my head and fall into the room like that. It didn’t do my back much good, being bent out of shape and raked by the bottom of the window frame, and my mood wasn’t in great shape either by the time I reached the floor, my feet crunching on glass, my mitts high, like I was surrendering to an empty room and _____’s grin.
I gave my shoulders a turn just to make sure I still could and _____ came over and took my hat off my head. He brushed some more glass from it and handed it back.
After we had given the apartment a once-over, _____ dragged over a high-backed chair and arranged it facing the door.
_____ told me what we were going to do to Cain. He said that we could just beat him or break his hand, and that would, doubtless, be enough to motivate him to pay his debts. I started to say that we’d beaten plenty of people, and broken enough hands and thumbs, and he interrupted, agreeing. This was why we’d always made a good team, because we understood each other, _____ said. He flipped out his knife and said that when Cain appeared we would take him and cut off his ear, and he made a slicing motion with the knife.
