The Cardturner

by Louis Sachar

  "Well, aren't you going to introduce us?" asked the woman.

  My uncle didn't say anything.

  "You don't know his name, do you?" accused the woman.

  He remained quiet.

  She reached her hand across the table. "I'm Gloria."

  "Alton," I said, shaking her hand.

  "Don't feel bad, Alton. I've been Trapp's partner for eighteen years, and he only just learned my name last Wednesday."

  "Hah!" laughed my uncle.

  9

  Shuffle and Play

  Gloria was an elderly woman with blond hair. She wore lots of jewelry, including earrings that looked like cards, the queen of hearts and the queen of clubs. She was nicely dressed, as were most of the women in the room. It was mostly the men who were slobs.

  You know what? I'm not going to describe anybody else as elderly. Let's just say that if you take my age and double it, I would still have been the youngest person in the room, by a lot.

  A man came around and placed two metal trays on each table. The room, which had been abuzz with bridge gibberish, began to quiet down.

  "There are fourteen tables," the man announced. "We will play thirteen rounds, two boards a round, with a skip after round seven. Shuffle and play."

  I didn't know he was called the director, or that the metal card-holding trays were called boards. This isn't easy. I'm trying to relate my overwhelming sense of confusion and at the same time let you know what was going on—even though I didn't.

  A board is a small rectangular tray, with four slots for the cards. The slots are labeled North, South, East, and West. Each board is numbered. Our boards were numbered five and six.

  One thing did become clear to me. Gloria was my uncle's partner. I was to be his assistant, his cardturner. Before each hand, I was to take him aside and tell him what cards he held, and then he would tell me which card to play.

  That made more sense.

  Sort of.

  The cards were shuffled and dealt; then each hand was placed back into the slots on the board. I learned later that this would be the only time all day that the cards would be shuffled. The same hands would be played over and over again at different tables.

  We began with board number five. Everyone removed their cards from their corresponding slots. Since my uncle and I were in the South position, I removed the cards from the South slot. The bridge studio was now as quiet as a library.

  It may seem silly, but I suddenly felt very nervous.

  I stood up and led my uncle to the coffee alcove. I think that was why he always sat at table three. It was the one closest to the alcove.

  No, I didn't let him have any "café." Even if my family did hope to inherit his fortune, I wasn't about to do anything to speed up the process. The coffee alcove was just a place where I could tell him his hand without other people overhearing.

  I spoke quietly, slightly above a whisper. "Nine of spades, king of hearts, three of clubs, jack of spades, ten of di—"

  "Stop!" he suddenly shouted, covering his ears. "What do you think you're doing?"

  "Just telling you—"

  "Are you a moron?" he asked. "Or are you just trying to drive me insane?"

  I didn't know what I'd done wrong. Everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing to look at us.

  The director hurried over and asked if there was a problem.

  "Yes, there's a problem," said my uncle. "My new cardturner is an imbecile!"

  "Keep it up, Trapp," the director warned, "and I'm going to penalize you half a board."

  "Yes, penalize him," said Gloria, entering the alcove. "Maybe he'll learn some manners." She said this even though penalizing my uncle would also have meant penalizing her.

  My uncle threw up his hands. "He just starts rattling off cards!"

  "Well, did you explain how you wanted it done?" asked Gloria.

  He sputtered a moment, then admitted he had not.

  "Then I suggest you do," said Gloria. "But first you owe him an apology."

  She gave me a sympathetic smile, then returned to the table.

  He didn't apologize, but he did explain how I was supposed to tell him his cards. I had to sort them into suits first, and then tell him his spades, highest to lowest, then his hearts, then diamonds, then clubs. Always that order.

  "You got that?" he asked.

  "Spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs," I repeated, trying to sound bored and uninterested, as if I found the whole thing beneath me. I was angry that he'd called me a moron and an imbecile in front of everyone.

  I gave him his hand as directed. "Spades: ace, jack, nine, three, two. Hearts: king, nine. Diamonds: ten, six, four. Clubs: ace, queen, three.

  "Is that better?" I asked, filling my voice with contempt, both for him and for his stupid game.

  He didn't seem to notice my tone, or care about what I thought. His mind was focused on those thirteen cards.

  We sat back down. On each corner of the table there was something called a bidding box.

  Gloria reached into her bidding box, took out a green pass card, and placed it on the table. "Pass," she said aloud. At every other table, the bidding was done in silence.

  The man next to her, in the East seat, also passed.

  "One spade," said my uncle.

  I reached into my bidding box, removed the 1 card, and set it on the table. "One spade," I repeated.

  I should mention that nobody bothered to explain bidding boxes to me. I figured out what I was supposed to do all by myself, but do you think my uncle gave me any credit for that?

  No.

  Over the next two and a half hours we played twenty-six hands of bridge. "Nine of hearts," my uncle would say, and I'd set the 9 on the table. "Queen of clubs," and I'd lay down the Q. He never once forgot what cards he held. His voice remained flat, so I had no clue how well he was doing, but after a while I got the impression that my uncle and Gloria were doing very, very well.

  Each time, one of the hands became the dummy. That hand was placed faceup on the table for everyone to see. The dummy's cards were said aloud for my uncle's benefit, once and only once, always in the same order: spades, hearts, diamonds, then clubs. So not only did he have to memorize every card in his own hand, he had to memorize all of the dummy's cards too. That's twenty-six cards, half the deck.

  Every North-South pair was a team, and every East-West pair was a team. When we finished a hand, everyone would place their cards back in their original slots on the board. We played two boards each round; then the East-West pair would leave and a new team would sit down against us. We would pass the boards we had played to table two and get new boards from table four.

  It was like some sort of odd dance, with the people moving in one direction and the boards moving in the other. After the seventh round, every East-West pair skipped a table to avoid playing boards they had already played.

  At least three women commented on Trapp's "handsome" new cardturner. Gloria always had to introduce me since my uncle still didn't know my name.

  It might not have been just the jacket and tie. Women over a certain age tend to think I'm handsome. Girls under twelve too. According to Leslie, all her friends think I'm hot. Whenever her friends are over, I can hear them giggle when I walk past. The first few times it happened, I checked to make sure my fly was zipped.

  When it was all over, Trapp and Gloria had played against every East-West pair except for the team that had skipped them. (I'll call him Trapp, since that's what everyone else called him.) They'd played twenty-six of the twenty-eight boards. The director gathered all the score sheets and entered the results into the computer.

  "Did you win?" I asked.

  "We'll have to wait and see," said Gloria.

  It was odd that after playing for almost three hours, we had to wait for the computer to tell us who won.

  "Thank God for computers," said Gloria. "In the old days, we had to wait around for almost an hour while the director tallied the scores by hand. Sometim
es we didn't find out until the next day."

  Gloria explained that the final score depended on how she and Trapp did on each board, compared with every other North-South pair. So even if they only took two tricks on board nineteen, they would still get a high score on that board if most other North-South pairs only took one trick.

  I liked that. I was unlucky when it came to cards. Cliff always beat me at poker. He must have won close to a hundred dollars off me, and we only played for quarters.

  I guess that was the one good thing about him being with Katie. We hadn't played any poker for a while.

  But in this game, luck wasn't a factor. It didn't matter if Trapp was dealt bad cards. It was just how well he played those bad cards, compared to every other person sitting in the South position, who had to play the same bad cards.

  A woman came up to my uncle and asked his result on board fourteen, a hand we probably played an hour and a half ago.

  My uncle thought for no more than seven seconds. "We set three no-trump two tricks."

  "You set it? They made an overtrick against us!"

  "You have to knock out dummy's king of spades," said Trapp, "and then hold up twice on your diamond ace."

  But he still couldn't remember my name.

  The printer spat out the results, and the director posted them on the wall. The scores were given in terms of percentages. Trapp and Gloria won with a 65 percent game. That might not sound like much, but second place was only 56 percent.

  I take back what I said about luck. The East-West pair who skipped table three was very lucky.

  10

  An Apology of a Sort

  We drove back in silence, which was just fine with me. I was having a difficult enough time trying to follow the directions from his house to his club, in reverse.

  "I'm going to give you thirteen letters," he suddenly said. "I want you to repeat them back to me."

  Before I could even say "What?" he began rattling off random letters. "G-b-c-d-i-o-a-o-r-y-t-g-l."

  I gave it my best shot—"Um, g, b, c . . ."—but then stopped. "Look, I get it," I said. "Your memory is better than mine."

  "It's not memory. It's context. I'm going to give you the same thirteen letters, but in a different order. Concentrate really hard now."

  I sighed.

  "G-i-r-l, b-o-y, c-a-t, d-o-g."

  I didn't bother saying them back to him.

  "Hah!" he laughed, then said, "They're the same letters. I just sorted them into suits for you."

  Half an hour later we were parked in his driveway and I escorted him to the front door.

  "How much did Mrs. Mahoney tell you?" he asked.

  About what? I thought, then noticed him fumbling with his wallet. "She didn't say," I said. "Just whatever you paid Toni is fine."

  "This has nothing to do with Toni. We have a different arrangement. How about seventy-five?"

  "Sure."

  He handed me his wallet. I removed three twenties, a ten, and five ones, then gave it back to him.

  Teodora opened the front door. "Thank you so much, Alton," she said as she shook my hand, using both of hers. "This means so much to him."

  "It's just a card game," groused my uncle.

  She led him inside, and I returned to the car.

  Okay, I admit it. When he handed me his wallet, the thought did occur to me that I could take any amount of money I wanted and he wouldn't know the difference. Not that I would steal from a blind person. Not that I would steal from anybody, even if he was so rich he'd never notice, and even if he did call me an imbecile and a moron in front of a roomful of people.

  Besides, I was no longer angry at him, and it wasn't just because he paid me. I think the girl-boy-cat-dog thing was his way of apologizing.

  "You will return that money!" my mother said the second I stepped into the house.

  She had obviously chatted with her dear friend Mrs. Mahoney.

  "Get back in that car, drive straight to his house, and tell him you have no interest in taking any money from him. You're doing it for the joy of spending time with your favorite uncle."

  "He'll think I'm crazy!" I protested.

  "No, he'll respect you for your integrity."

  "I'm not being unintegritary," I replied. (Don't bother looking up that word.) "I've been gone for almost six hours. Seventy-five dollars is barely minimum wage. And then there's the price of gas."

  I thought "the price of gas" would be my trump card. I couldn't remember a single day when my parents didn't complain about gas prices—not that it stopped my father from buying an SUV.

  "You think you're doing this for a measly seventy-five bucks?" asked my mother. "Seventy-five dollars is squat! In a few months Uncle Lester will be . . ." She didn't finish her sentence. For a brief instant I thought I saw a flash of sadness on my mother's face, as if the words she was about to say suddenly meant something to her. But that was only for an instant. "All right, you can return it to him on Monday."

  "What's Monday?" I asked.

  "He goes to his club every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday."

  So this wasn't a onetime thing.

  "What about my job?" I asked.

  "What job?" she scoffed.

  "I was going to get a job this summer."

  She stared at me, hands on her hips.

  I turned and skulked into my room.

  Okay, I was too lazy to get a job, and my mother knew it, but I wasn't as lazy as she thought I was. I was fairly certain that I could have packed groceries or hauled boxes from one end of a warehouse to the other with as much vim and gusto as anyone. My problem was I couldn't get motivated to actually get into my car and drive to every supermarket, restaurant, movie theater, and appliance store just to ask to fill out a job application. Especially since I was pretty sure they'd throw my application in the trash the second I walked out the door.

  I phoned Cliff and told him about the bridge club. "It's crazy," I said. "These people are like from a different planet. Planet Bridge. They even speak their own language."

  "They're just a bunch of old people," said Cliff. "It's either bridge or bingo."

  For some reason I felt offended by that remark. Bingo was just a game of luck. Bridge seemed more like a sport, a mental sport, like chess, only with a partner. And my uncle was a superstar of the sport.

  "My uncle is amazing," I told Cliff. "Everybody's always coming up to him and asking ‘How should I have played this hand?' or ‘How would you bid this hand?' And he can't even see the cards."

  Cliff wasn't impressed. "You told him what cards he had, right?"

  "Right, then he told me which card to play."

  "Well, what's so amazing about that?" Cliff asked. "Now, if he could somehow know his cards without you telling him, that would be amazing."

  I tried again, but he showed little interest. In fact, he didn't seem all that interested in talking to me, quickly dismissing whatever I said.

  Then it hit me: Katie was over there.

  I can be such an idiot! I told him I had to go, and hung up.

  11

  Tiger Woods's Caddy

  I didn't have to return the seventy-five dollars after all, thanks to Leslie. She pointed out to our mother that if I returned Uncle Lester's money, he might think we were so rich we didn't need it. Then he wouldn't leave us anything in his will.

  I drove Trapp to his bridge club Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and continued to get paid seventy-five dollars each time. Maybe I should have given Leslie a cut.

  I no longer wore a jacket and tie, but my mother worked during the week, so I had to drive my car. One time it lurched a bit, and almost died, but I doubted Trapp noticed. We were driving back to his house after the Wednesday game, so his mind was on some bridge hand.

  Every bridge hand is a unique puzzle. If Trapp failed to solve the puzzle at the table, he would figure it out on the way home. He would think not only about what he should have done differently, but also about what the opp
onents should have done, and what he would have done if they had done that. I could have driven into a ditch and he wouldn't have noticed.

  Gloria was Trapp's partner on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday, but on Wednesday he played with Wallace, a tall black man who taught physics at the university. Wallace and Trapp argued with each other after every single hand, saying things like "I asked for a club switch! If I wanted a spade returned I would have led a low one," and "How could you bid three spades? Didn't you hear my double?"

  Listening to them, you would have thought they were in last place, but they ended up with a 72 percent game, which was huge. Apparently it was very rare to break seventy percent.

  I learned what I was supposed to do if Trapp was dealt a hand with no cards in one suit. I'd say the word void. So when telling him his hand, I'd say something like "Spades: ten, nine, eight, seven, six. Hearts: king, queen, jack. Diamonds: void. Clubs: ace, nine, six, three, two."

  I also began to understand how the game was played. I learned what trump meant. I wouldn't admit it to my uncle, but the game began to intrigue me. I would sometimes try to guess what card he'd play before he told me to play it, but don't worry, I never asked, "Are you sure?"

  Toni Castaneda must have been out of her mind.

  In all, we came in first three times and finished third once. I say "we" because I began to think of myself as part of the team. I imagined I was like Tiger Woods's caddy. I had once heard Tiger Woods on TV saying how important his caddy was to him, how he wouldn't have won some golf tournament without him.

  Trapp never actually said anything like that about me, but he wasn't big on compliments. One time I heard him say "Nicely played" to an opponent. That was it.

  12

  The Basics

  Do you see that picture of a whale? It's going to be our secret code. (Okay, maybe it's not so secret.)

  This past year I had to read Moby-Dick in my Language Arts / English class. It seemed like a pretty good adventure story about a monster killer whale, but just when I started to get into it, the author, Herman Melville, stopped the story and went on page after page describing every tiny detail of a whaling ship. I zoned out. I never finished the book and had to bluff my way through the test.