by Gene Riehl
He opened the front door and stood aside as the Fitzpatricks went through. Darcy stayed behind for a moment.
“This is it, Puller, these are the people. Sam went to grad school in London, actually met Buckminster Fuller just after Fuller started the geodesic movement. Sam’s always wanted to live in a dome. Couldn’t believe he’d found one when I took him through last week.”
Monk looked at her. “Damn it, Darcy. His wife’s never seen it?”
“Don’t worry. Janet’s a nice lady. It’s Sam’s dream. She’s not going to ruin it for him.”
But she did, of course.
Before Monk and Darcy could even get inside to join them, Mrs. Interior Design came back out, Sam in tow.
“Thank you so much for the chance to see your home,” she said to Monk on her way past. “We’ll talk about it and get back to Darcy.”
She strode back to Darcy’s Cadillac, Sam hustling to keep up. He opened the door for her, but she couldn’t wait till they got inside before she went to work on him.
“Jesus, Sam!” she snapped. “What’s the matter with you? It’s got no corners! How do you expect me to furnish a house with no goddamned corners?”
“But honey,” Sam told her, “it’s state of the art. Think about the—”
“Think about nothing! Just get in the car and take me someplace I can decorate.”
Darcy started for the car, turned back to Monk and shook her head. “He was so certain. I just don’t know what to say.”
She glanced toward the car. Monk could see the missus right up in Sam’s face, her mouth working him over like a middleweight with a lightning jab.
“I’ll talk to her,” Darcy said. “Give me an hour to change her mind, but don’t give up hope. Even if I can’t persuade her, I’ll find somebody else. I’ll find somebody with round furniture.”
But Monk felt his shoulders sag as they drove away. He was no expert on real estate, but he knew a lot about relationships. Enough to realize that Sam Fitzpatrick getting his dream house was about as likely as prime rib at a vegan picnic. Darcy could talk herself silly, but Pastor Monk’s dome still belonged to his only begotten son. The dome the old man had been convinced would start a revolution in home design—a demand so great he’d be able to sell it and use the profit to build another church—was still safely in the family.
He walked out to the curb. Even the FOR SALE sign appeared to have given up. The post tipped like an Italian monument, the hanging signboard with Darcy’s smiling face swinging crookedly from its chains. Monk pulled it upright, but it sagged again the instant he let go. He looked in the flower garden next to the sign for a rock or two, found a couple of beauties, round and smooth, took them back to the sign. He straightened the post again, then wedged the rocks around the base to keep it that way. He stepped back and stared at it, daring it to tip again, but it didn’t. I’ll be damned, Monk thought. At least the drive out here hadn’t been a total waste. Then he turned and scowled at the dome as he headed back inside. He had plenty of rocks, he told himself. He could keep that sign upright forever, but he couldn’t help wondering how many it would take to bury the whole damned place completely.
Inside the dome, he realized he was starving. He walked through the circular entry into the circular living room, from there to the circular dining room and on into the circular kitchen. He swung the refrigerator door open. He kept a few things in there for the days he checked on the place and did the necessary upkeep chores. It was lean pickings, he saw. Two nearly empty jars of Gray Poupon, half a gallon of orange juice, and an uncapped mayonnaise jar. He closed the door and tried the closest cupboard, where he spied a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, which he opened and poured into a bowl. He popped the soup into the microwave and pushed enough buttons to heat it. Grabbing a big spoon from the drawer to the right of the sink, he plucked the soup from the microwave and took it to the small round dining table next to the kitchen. It didn’t take him five minutes to finish it off, and he’d just gotten the bowl washed and put away when the phone rang.
“I thought I’d catch you there,” Lisa said when he answered. She paused for a long moment. “Well?” she said. “I’m waiting … or were you going to surprise me when you get home?”
“They didn’t want it. The wife seemed a little upset.”
“Darcy have anybody else in mind?”
“Says she does, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
There was silence on the line. “So what are you going to do?” Lisa said at last. “I hope you’re not thinking we can move out there.”
“I can’t keep making this payment forever. Not with the rent we’re paying downtown.”
This time the silence was shorter. “We talked about this, Puller. I hate to be a problem, but I can’t move out there with you. I’d have to get up at four in the morning to get to the office by seven.”
Puller found himself nodding. “I’ll think of something.”
And he would try, of course, but the bottom line was against him. He could make the double payments for another couple of months, at the most. After that he didn’t know what he was going to do. He closed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair. His stomach began to churn with a familiar anxiety, the same feeling that always came over him when he tried to clean up the mess his father had left behind. And he knew just what he had to do about it.
“I need to go back to work for a while,” he told Lisa, and it wasn’t really a lie. “I’m not sure when I’ll get home.”
“Call me if you’re going to be real late, okay?”
“Count on it.”
On the way out to the Saab, Monk had to pass the FOR SALE sign once more. It was leaning again, but he realized he no longer cared. Now he had a plan. If it worked out, he’d be able to stay in the loft with Lisa, at least for another month or two. He reached to the sign anyway and pulled it straight, but the moment he took his hand away it fell back to where it seemed determined to stay. He glared at the damned thing for a moment before turning away and going to the car. Behind the wheel, he’d barely made it to the road that passed through the Civil War battlefield when his cell phone rang.
“It’s the PET-scan center at Georgetown University,” a woman’s voice told him when he answered. “Reminding you of your appointment tomorrow morning at eleven.”
Monk stared through the windshield at the battlefield where so many brave men had been slaughtered. A PET scan wasn’t anywhere near the same thing as the Union Army’s suicidal assault on Marye’s Hill, but he could use some of that kind of courage himself.
“Mr. Monk?” the woman said. “Are you still there? Did you remember your appointment?”
Monk exhaled. What was wrong with the woman? Did she imagine there was any chance he’d forget?
TWENTY-EIGHT
Monk had to go to Atlantic City, and there were two reasons why.
He needed the money, true enough, but he needed something else just as much.
Another failure with selling the dome meant he had to come up with the means to keep making double payments until the damned thing finally sold, and the continuing disintegration of his mind meant he had to prove to himself he could still use it at the tables.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon when he got to Bally’s.
As he walked through the massive glass doors into the tumult of chimes, buzzers, and mind-numbing electronic musical ditties, he found his strides growing longer the closer he got to the poker room at the rear of the casino. The room wasn’t as noisy as the rest of the house, Monk saw when he got there. It wasn’t crowded—not like it would be in a few hours—and with luck, he’d make his score early and be back at the loft by midnight.
He wandered around the poker room, watching the action for a few minutes, looking for the best game to join. It was pretty much all Hold ’em these days—the movies and ESPN had made Texas Hold ’em the game du jour—and that was fine with Monk. It was the perfect game for a man with his skills.
He saw a
table in the back. Three men and a woman. Had to be careful about women. They could play, for one thing, and they were by far the hardest to “pick.” He didn’t have the time for the five or six hours it would take to learn to read her. So he moved toward the table nearest the entrance. That one would do, he decided, after watching the six men around it. It was a pot limit table, for one—which meant semiserious players—and their faces were impassive, which was another good sign. Contrary to the stereotype, the very best poker players weren’t stone-faced. The top players confounded their opponents with movement, gave off so many tells that you couldn’t pick the one that counted. But these guys weren’t top players, and he’d have no problem reading them. Didn’t mean he’d win every hand, of course, but all a serious gambler needed was an edge.
He moved up to the table and took an empty chair. The dealer nodded as he sat down. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Monk said. “Good day to win a little money.”
The man to his left blew a lungful of cigar smoke across the green felt. “Shoulda been here earlier, pal,” he growled. “Coulda had a bunch of mine.”
“Chips, sir?” the dress-shirted dealer asked. Good, Monk thought. The dealer hadn’t made him as a player or he would have used the insider word “checks.”
Monk pulled a roll of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, peeled away twenty of them, handed them across the table. “Two thousand. Mix ’em up.”
“Counting two thousand dollars,” the dealer said, as he counted the money, then pushed several stacks of red, yellow, and green chips—five, twenty, and twenty-five dollar chips—to Monk, before stuffing the cash into a slot in the table.
The man to his right glanced at his chips, a small stack for a pot limit game. “Hope you’re not planning to stay long.”
“Just long enough.”
God, he loved the lingo of gambling. From his buy-in for chips to the good-natured taunting of the players, it was all so damned good. He glanced around, listening for a moment to the raucous laughter, the brief but colorful language. Robert Frost had said it best. “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Frost had to have been a player himself. At least Monk liked to think so.
But for Monk, the “juice” had started way before he actually got here.
It started back at the dome, when he took the credit cards out of his pocket and stuffed them away in the drawer of his desk. When he opened the secret compartment in his briefcase and removed the cash he was willing to wager, and when he slid his lucky gold-nugget ring on his pinky finger. The electric tingle got better and better on the plane and heightened even further when he walked through the casino doors. In the same way a new lover sets your whole body aflutter, the noise, the smoke, the stink of too many people in one room, all of it made Monk feel more alive.
It was the one place where he could be as irresponsible as an infant, the one place where the horrors of the world didn’t exist. In here, nobody was dying of cancer, nobody’d been dumped by a lover. In here nobody was losing his mind to dementia. Nobody was lying, except to himself or herself. They didn’t even have clocks in the casino. Noon was the same as three in the morning. Time was suspended, and your money was as good as anyone’s.
In a casino there were only two absolute truths.
The first was that winning or losing was less important than playing. It was more fun to win, of course it was, but in the end it was the thrill of putting it on the line, of letting it ride, that really mattered.
The second truth was that anything could happen in a casino, and a casino was one of the few places on earth where that was true. When a player drew three cards that turned his hand into a royal flush, it was as though the planet stopped spinning, and gravity disappeared. The player would stare at his hand for a moment, but his first thought wouldn’t be about the money. What mattered first was telling somebody, and the knowledge that he’d be telling people for the rest of his life. And that others would carry his tale. Gamblers everywhere would hear about the day the earth stood still. It was an achievable way to immortality. One day the player would die, but as long as people rode into town on gambler-busses, his name would live on forever.
And the beautiful part was that he might be anybody in this casino … sitting at any one of these tables.
He might even be Puller Monk.
Just the thought of it made Monk eager to start.
He tossed a red chip into the center of the green-felt table. The man to his left added two red chips. The dealer burned the top card off the deck and dealt two facedown cards to each of the players. Monk looked at his. Jack of hearts, nine of hearts.
The betting started to his left and went clockwise. There were several raises and Monk had to slide out two greens to keep himself in the game. He looked at his cards again. Several possibilities came to mind, although it was far too early to get excited. Hold ’em was a much quicker game than stud. Worst thing you could do was get caught up in the pace.
Again the dealer burned his top card, then dealt the flop, the three cards that now lay faceup on the table. A “rainbow,” Monk saw. Ace of spades, queen of hearts, nine of clubs. He thought about his possibilities. Flush. Straight. Straight flush. He grinned. He scratched his head, bounced a little in his chair. The guy to his right looked at him and shook his head.
Everyone was aggressive, and when the bet came around, Monk had to toss in two greens and two reds to stay. The dealer burned the top card again, then dealt the turn, the fourth up card, or fourth street. Six of diamonds. There goes the flush and the straight. Forty dollars to Monk, when the betting came around. He threw in two greens. “And ten,” he said.
“Big-timer,” the guy at the far right end said, as he threw his cards facedown on the table. Two others folded but didn’t bother to comment. Three left, three to beat. The dealer burned his top card before dealing the river, the last card. A four of diamonds.
Monk looked at the board and began to identify the “nuts,” the best possible hand that could be made with the faceup cards on the table.
Anybody holding two aces was the automatic winner. Nobody could beat three aces. Anybody who had a pair of any other card in the flop would beat his pair. The man to his immediate right called the twenty dollars to him and bumped another ten. Thirty dollars for Monk to stay. He didn’t like the feel of it. He tossed his cards on the table, facedown. The hand played out and went to the man on the right with three nines.
Three hours passed in a blink. Winning and losing, down maybe eight hundred, nothing to get worried about. Fidgeting, groaning, scratching. Bluffing, losing, grimacing, bluffing even more. The others really getting tired of it.
And finally getting the hand he’d been waiting for.
His first two cards were both fives, a spade and a diamond. The flop gave him the two more he needed. “Yes!” he yelped.
The guy to his right snorted. “You ever get a hand you don’t like?”
Monk laughed far too loudly as he threw in twenty dollars. By now they were all convinced he was nothing more than a “fish” ready to be gutted. Three bumps later, the dealer dealt the turn. Jack of diamonds to add to the diamond on the board now, with the nine. Monk still liked his quad fives, and bet them hard. This time there were four raises before it got back to him. He bumped it another twenty. Everybody stayed.
The river turned up the eight of diamonds. Monk stared at it, and did the nuts. His fives beat anything but a royal flush and a straight flush. He grinned even more broadly. The two guys to his far right glared at him.
“Goddammit,” the first one said. “I just don’t know about you.”
“Only costs a few bucks to learn.”
“Phooey!” The guy threw in. His seatmate did the same.
Now there were five.
The betting went around the table until there were only two players. Monk and the guy sitting next to him on the right. Monk looked at his chips. Not many left, but the pile in the center was a beautiful t
hing to see.
And it got bigger as they faced off, each of them raising, trying to run the other out of the game.
The last bet was to Monk. To call, he had to throw in all but one of his green chips. He looked at his opponent. He’d been watching the guy for hours, but hadn’t seen any sort of tell, not one he could rely on anyway. Not for this kind of money.
“To you, sir,” the dealer said to Monk.
He nodded, but never took his eyes off his opponent. And that’s when he saw it. The guy had bags under his eyes, and one of them had twitched. There it was again. Almost unnoticeable, but definitely there. He was bluffing. He didn’t have the straight flush.
“I’ll have to see ’em,” he told Baggy Eyes.
“You know the price.”
Monk tossed three green chips onto the pile.
Baggy Eyes laughed as he laid down his cards. Diamonds, both of them. Seven and ten. Monk felt the blood run out of his face.
“Jack high,” the guy said. “All red, all in a row.”
“Fuck,” Monk said quietly. He rose from his chair, slid his last chip to the dealer, and walked away.
TWENTY-NINE
“You feeling okay, Mr. Monk?” the heavyset radiology technician asked him, after Monk had been strapped to the table that would slide him into the PET scan machine at Georgetown University Medical Center. “You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine,” Monk said. “Just a little tired is all.”
“We’ll go ahead and start then. Straighten your arm,” the technician said, “I need to find a good vein for the dye.”
Monk did so. This part was easy. Needles weren’t his problem, but as he thought about the rest of it—the feeling of being buried alive he was about to undergo—he had to force himself to breathe deeply and evenly, to stop his legs from twitching, to stop himself from leaping from the table and bolting out of the room. The technician used his index finger to snap gently against the prominent vein in the inside of Monk’s elbow, then bent over to inject the dye. Monk felt the prick of the needle and a sudden chill sensation as the dye entered his vein and began the lightning journey up his arm, through his heart, and all the way to his brain. He’d spent an hour doing a Google search, and knew exactly what was about to happen.
