by Lewis Shiner
“Don’t get too wild, there, Alex,” Wade cackled.
Without thinking, Alex told the truth. “I figure I need to keep my wits with you sharpies around.”
For a fraction of a second Alex thought he might have crossed an invisible line, but then Wade cackled again and said, “You got that just about right,” and there was laughter all around.
Donny produced two sealed boxes of Bicycles and passed the blue deck across the table to Alex. Alex tore off the cellophane, broke the seal, and fanned the cards face up on the table, making sure all four suits ran continuously from ace to deuce. He plucked out the jokers and the ad and the spare, put them back in the box, and put the box on his side table. He swept the cards back together and used a dealer’s shuffle that he’d been practicing for the last two weeks that kept the cards flat on the table. Julie turned to Alex’s father and said, “I don’t know, this kid is looking pretty sharp himself.”
Alex caught the high card for the first deal. He offered the blue deck to Wade for the cut and Wade did it by the book, cutting toward Alex and letting Alex finish it. Everybody threw in a dollar ante. The chips, Alex saw, were made of dyed and embossed leather, well worn. He said, “How about we ease into it with a little seven stud?” He made himself deal more slowly than usual rather than risk a misdeal. He called out the up cards as he went around the table, and when he gave Wade a king he couldn’t resist saying, “A cowboy for the cowboy,” and got a laugh for it.
Wade, who was high, said, “Pair of cowboys bets a dollar.”
“Nothing like starting your bluff early,” Julie said.
Alex folded quietly after the second up card. Wade turned out to have the second king, which, with a pair of deuces, took the pot.
He folded the next three hands. Other than his own awareness of the stakes, it was like any other friendly poker game, with lots of shit given and taken. Wade bragged on his cards and Julie kvetched. Donny was restless, drumming his fingers, sipping his drink, and Alex’s father did his snake-in-the-grass routine. Bob played conservatively and bailed when the betting got serious.
The fifth hand was five stud and Alex had tens wired. He waited until the next card, a deuce, to bet as if he’d just paired. When the third ten arrived, he bet it like two pair and kept Wade and Julie in to the end with lesser hands. It was a decent pot, and Donny said, “Well played.” That got Alex a smile from his father.
They took a break after an hour and a half for calls of nature, fresh drinks, a chance to stretch. Alex was up a couple of hundred, Wade and Julie each down a hundred. Conversation touched on the new polo and hunt club in Plano, the Cowboys losing the conference championship to the Vikings, the ongoing bear market that had turned into a recession, the lousy performance of ge compared to Boeing, the soaring inflation.
“You’re making me suicidal,” Julie said. “Can we please go back to the table where I can lose my money honestly?”
When they sat down again, you could feel the focus sharpen. The chatter dropped off and nobody drank. A few hands in, as Bob dealt Spit in the Ocean, he said, “How about that Ronnie Reagan? You think he’s going to run?”
“Hell yes, he’s going to run,” Donny said. “He’s working the tv networks like a pro.”
Wade said, “I like the cut of that man’s jib.”
Bob said, “He’d get the economy straightened out, that’s for sure.”
Alex, who’d chased the last two hands and lost them both, tried not to visibly bristle. His father, who didn’t care for Reagan either, said, “Now, gentlemen, we’re not supposed to talk politics at the table.”
“Hell,” Wade said, “we all businessmen here. Reagan’s the only candidate out there who understands business. If Nixon had two brain cells to rub together he would have picked Reagan for Vice President. Now when they impeach him we’ll be stuck with that moron Ford.”
Alex bit his tongue. How did Reagan become a business expert? By hosting GE Theater?
Things continued downhill from there. When he had a good hand, the others seemed to instantly know it and fold, leaving him with minimal pots. His promising hands died on the vine. By 11:30, with half an hour left to play, he’d lost his $200 lead and another hundred besides.
Julie was dealing seven stud high/low. Alex had one queen down and one up in the first three cards and he knew this was going to be his hand. He opened with a five-dollar bet and said, “It’s late and I’ve got some money to win. Cowards out.”
His father and Bob both took his invitation and folded. After two more rounds, when Alex got his second queen up, Julie dropped as well, folding the fourth queen with his up cards. The battle lines were drawn. Donny was working a straight flush, showing the 4, 7, and 8 of clubs. Alex knew he wouldn’t get it, because Alex himself had the 6 of clubs in the hole and the 9 and deuce had both come up in other hands. That meant Donny would have to settle for a straight or flush at best, and if Alex got a second pair to make a full house, he would beat either one—only four of a kind or a straight flush could top him. Meanwhile Wade was clearly going low, with a 2, 5, and 3 of various suits.
“Round again,” Julie said. He dealt the 5 of clubs to Donny and you could hear everyone suck in their breath. Wade got a 7 and this time people were muttering under their breath. The murmurs got louder when Alex got a second 10, giving him two pair showing.
“Queens and tens are tall,” Julie said. “Bet ’em.”
It was time to let Donny take the lead. Alex stifled his elation and said, “Check to the straight flush.”
The maximum bet and maximum raise were $30. Donny looked Alex in the eye, as if trying to decide how high he could go without Alex folding. “Ten dollars.”
Wade, who figured on having the low to himself, said, “Up thirty.”
Alex threw in $40 and Donny, of course, raised another 30. Wade took it to the three-raise limit with another 30. Alex had never paid a hundred dollars to see a card before in his life. This would be the biggest pot he’d ever won. He called and Julie said, “Down and dirty.”
Alex and Donny glanced at their final cards. Wade didn’t bother. Alex’s was the jack of hearts, meaningless. “Queens and tens,” Julie said.
Alex went the limit, as did the others, putting another $120 into the swollen pot.
“Declare time,” Julie said. “Zero for low, one for high, two for both ways.”
They each took two chips under the table and came up with a clenched fist. Alex was so tense he was afraid of crushing the antique leather. Julie counted to three and they opened their hands. No surprises. Wade went low, Donny and Alex high.
With no hesitation they went around again, $30 bet and three $30 raises. By this time there was so much money on the table, over a thousand dollars, that Alex tossed out another 120 with a kind of drunken nonchalance. You could work a month at Duane Reed for less than what he’d just spent on a single round of betting. Don’t think about that, he told himself. Think how far ahead your half will put you.
“I believe you’re called,” Donny said. “Have you got the boat?”
Alex turned up the third queen. “And,” he said, “you don’t have the straight flush.” He flipped the 6 of clubs.
Julie whistled and Bob laughed out loud. Wade said, “I’ll be goddamned!” and leaned over to slap Alex on the back.
It was Donny’s signal to fold his up cards so Wade and Alex could divide the chips. Instead he smiled and said, “You’re right. I don’t have the straight flush.”
He turned over the first of his three hole cards. It was a second 8.
Alex felt the floor tilt.
Donny turned over another 8, and Alex thought, maybe he’s fucking with me. He can’t possibly have the fourth 8.
He did.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Wade said again.
“I’ve been playing cards fifty years,” Julie said, “and I’ve never seen a hand like this.”
Somebody said, “Incredible,” and another voice said, “Unbelievable.”
Alex’s vision was too blurred to tell who. He sat back in his chair and listened to the air go in and out of his mouth as Wade and Donny began to divide up the money.
“Take five blues,” Wade said. “Again.”
On autopilot, Alex turned his cards face down and gathered them up and piled them somewhere near Julie. All he wanted was to get up and walk away from the table, and it was the last thing he was permitted to do. His job now was to sit through another twenty humiliating minutes and pretend to act normally.
The fact that the money he lost was his father’s only made it worse.
The deck passed to Donny. “That was fun,” he said. “Let’s play that again.”
*
Alex made his few remaining dollars last until midnight. He had enough to ante and stay in for a card or two, then fold once the raises began. At one point his father caught his eye and mimed pushing a stack of chips toward him, and Alex shook his head.
The worst was after they cashed out. Donny shook hands and said, “I’ll be telling the story of that hand tonight at every poker game I’m in for the rest of my life.”
“Not if I’m there,” Alex said, faking a smile. “Please!”
Julie put an arm around his shoulders and said, “You played like a pro. You’re welcome at our table any time.”
“As much as I lost, I should think so,” Alex said, and everybody laughed.
In the car, his father gave him a few minutes of silence and then said, “You made me proud tonight.”
“For what, taking a sucker’s bet?”
“I would have played that hand the same way. So would every man at the table. He didn’t even catch the fourth 8 until the last card.”
“He knew I had the boat. He knew I was not going to back down. If he didn’t have me beat, he would never have called on the last raise.”
“By which time the betting was over. You’re second guessing yourself. All that matters in the long run is that you played well and you were a good sport.”
“An important character trait in a loser.”
His father rebuked him with silence, and Alex felt guilty for his poisonous mood. Which didn’t change the fact that he’d been humiliated, put in his place as surely as he had been by the 7-Up plant manager in Austin.
When they got home, he kissed his father on the cheek and took a deck of cards up to his room, where Callie was reading French Vogue. She saw his face and said, “Uh oh.”
She was not a poker player, so he had to explain everything as he recreated the hand on the bedspread. He felt better for walking through it, like a football player watching the game films from a blowout loss. Her eyes were mostly on him, but she got the gist. “The odds against this must be phenomenal. Your hand just so, his hand, the other people’s up cards.”
“At least a million to one.”
She nodded. “It figures.”
“It does?”
“The rich always win.”
She could make him smile as easily as she made him crazy. He said, “You won’t be able to say that in the third person much longer.”
“The world will always be in the third person to me.”
Alex wasn’t sure what she meant, but it sounded like poetry. He gathered up the cards and let it go.
*
“One leg at a time,” Madelyn said. It was a Wednesday, the first of May; the sun was out, so the mall was deserted.
“Hi, dear, I’m sorry to call you at work, but…”
“What is it, Mother?”
“I’m afraid it’s Cole. He called here. Somebody he knew saw you at the store—”
“Oh dear God.”
“I told him I didn’t know where you were, which wasn’t entirely a lie, I mean, you might have been at lunch—”
“When did he call?”
“Just now. I think he may try to call you there at the store. I didn’t tell him anything, he already knew. He left a number, Austin area code.” She rattled off the digits to the downstairs phone in the Castle. The past suddenly felt like a dry-cleaner’s plastic bag, suffocating her.
At that moment the second line buzzed. Beth, at the register on the far side of the store, picked up. Madelyn glanced at her and she mouthed, “For you.”
“That’s him now,” Madelyn said. “Thanks for the warning. I’ll talk to you later.”
“What are you going to say?” her mother asked.
“I have no idea,” Madelyn said.
She pushed the button for line 2. “This is Madelyn.”
The silence at the other end went on so long that she was about to hang up. “Sunny saw you,” Cole finally said. “He was home on semester break from Duke Medical School. He said you were pregnant. He guessed four months.”
She had glimpsed someone who looked like Sunny the day before. She’d hidden in the back and hoped he hadn’t seen her.
“Well?” Cole said. “Is it true?”
“I don’t want to have this conversation.”
“Is it mine? If it’s my child I have a right to know.”
His moral superiority undid her patience. “You didn’t care enough at the time to ask if precautions were necessary. You just took what you wanted. What is it you’re offering, here? Did you want to help pay my expenses?”
A long, embarrassed silence ensued. “This is not a good time for me financially. I’m trying to put a new band together…”
“You didn’t have a problem working construction in Virginia.”
“So you’re determined to go through with it?”
“Yes. I’m determined to go through with ‘it.’”
“And my feelings don’t matter at all?”
“Get a real job, start sending me money, and maybe—maybe—we can talk. Otherwise I don’t want to hear from you.”
“Madelyn, that’s not fair—”
“I lost my job and my academic career because of you, and now I’m working in a jeans store for minimum wage. You want to talk fair?” She was going to lose another job if she didn’t keep her voice down. “Fuck off, Cole,” she said quietly and hung up.
Seconds later the phone rang again. Madelyn shook her head and held an open palm toward Beth. Beth nodded and Madelyn went in the back and washed her face. Her hands shook. She’d never told anyone to fuck off before. She rather liked it. What a relief it had been to blame everything on Cole. In reality, the amount of blame she awarded to herself varied between 40 and 90 percent, depending on how many times her bladder had woken her during the night and the extent of the swelling in her ankles, exacerbated by working retail, the only job she’d been able to find, and then she’d been lucky that the owner was a woman with two young kids of her own.
She wondered, briefly, if Cole would show up in person to harass her. Let him, she thought. She’d befriended several of the Valley View Mall security people, and she imagined them dragging Cole away, a cop on each arm, his legs kicking in futile rage, and the thought was deeply satisfying.
She dried her face and went out to relieve Beth at the register.
*
The wedding was booked at Christ the King, just south of Preston Center and the Studio Club, for Friday afternoon, May 31. Alex hated the obscene wealth of the diocese, the pretentious stone arches and massive vaulted ceiling of the cathedral itself, the outrageous expenses that kept piling on, the overbearing weight of tradition and social status that constrained every decision. Between his father on one side and Callie on the other, he was helpless to stop the juggernaut. In the end he went where he was told to go and did what he was told to do.
Cole drove up from Austin with Jimmy and Amanda on Wednesday afternoon. Alex had barely had time to say hello. Thursday would be the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner, followed by the bachelor party. Cole, as best man, was responsible for the party and suggested that the traditional stripper popping out of a cake was not very enlightened and that they should invite the women and have live music. He’d talked Alex into renting the new Studio Club location, down
the street from where The Chevelles had played, and had hired a band called The Stone Brothers, which had evolved out of the Novas.
The rehearsal started with Alex being introduced to Callie’s parents, the Glücks. The father had a big belly and short legs and a cheap brown plaid suit, and Alex had to fight not to think of Donald Duck. Hysteria was within easy reach. The mother was short and heavy too, with artificially bright copper-colored hair done up in tight curls that hurt Alex’s eyes. Neither Glück bore any resemblance to Callie, as if she had changed her own genetic makeup through sheer force of will.
They walked from cue to cue, skipping most of the lines, including the vows that Callie had written for them, incorporating snippets from Blake’s Songs of Experience, Ionesco’s The Chairs, and Gregory Corso’s “Marriage.” At the point where Cole was supposed to produce the rings, he instead offered them two ring-pull tabs. It all seemed like a put-on, a tech rehearsal for a high-school play, nothing he could possibly take seriously.
The rehearsal dinner, at Lucas B&B in Oak Lawn, was even more awkward and artificial. Callie, seated next to her parents, didn’t bother to hide her contempt for them, leaving Alex to wonder why she’d insisted on flying them in. Maybe, he thought, she meant to show them how well she’d made out in spite of them. Not helping the mood was the fact that Callie’s sister had canceled at the last minute, offering no excuse, and leaving only two bridesmaids, Alex’s sister Susan and Jimmy’s girlfriend Amanda, desperate choices they’d fallen back on when the only friend Callie could name was Madelyn. Cole, Susan, Amanda, and both of Alex’s parents tried repeatedly to lighten the mood and get the conversation moving, but it sprang one leak after another and sank again and again. Alex cut his steak into increasingly smaller bites and pushed it around his plate without eating anything.
At eight they moved on to the Studio Club. The Stone Brothers, per instructions, kept it quiet for the first set of Beatles, Byrds, and Gerry and the Pacemakers. The crowd, mostly standing in the middle of the dance floor and trying to be heard over the music, included people from his father’s office, a few friends from St. Mark’s, some out-of-town relatives on his mother’s side, Uncle Jesús from Guanajuato, and a lot of young women he’d never seen before. The hard liquor was flowing and Alex understood what it was there for. He skipped the Bohemia and went straight to the screwdrivers.
