Dead Man's Hand

by Otto Penzler

  He should only know how curious. I just smile up at him blandly, like I'm the kid he thinks I am.

  Seth says I'm fearless. I don't know about that. Plus, he says it like it's a disease I caught or, more likely, was born with. Seth says a lot of things that piss me off. He says even more things that ought to piss me off, but for some reason don't. Maybe it's because he's the only man I ever met—except Daddy, of course—who doesn't look at me as if I'm stark naked.

  Seth says things like, What am I doing with my life? When am I going to have time for him? I'm as soulless as the marks in Daddy's card game. Well, now, that does piss me off. But in response, I say, "I'm heartless, Seth, not soulless."

  And he, the constant big-mouth (but only with me, it seems), comes back with "What's the difference?"

  And then we're off on some heady discussion about God and Christ and the soul and death. These kinds of talks are Seth's meat. He's like a hungry lion pulling apart red meat with his teeth and claws. Seth likes to get to the bottom of things. And when we do I always say to him, "Okay, now what?"

  You don't think it ends there, do you? Oh, no. Mr. Big Mouth comes back with "Now we have more knowledge. We know something we didn't know before. We've progressed."

  "Progressed where, Seth?"

  His big gray eyes stand out like beacons in almost any light, but most specially when the sun's in them. "life is progression; they're one and the same," he tells me. "Death puts an end to all that. Death is stillness; it's the opposite of progression."

  Seth is a writer. I don't pretend to understand what he writes, but I know it's good. How do I know it's good? Because once I start reading it, I can't put it down. Actually, Seth claims I do understand what he writes. In fact, he says I understand it better than anyone else.

  "It's the numbers," he says. "The numbers inside your head. Writing sentences is like balancing equations. When sentences aren't in balance, you have to erase them and start over. But the mistakes are where the learning comes from. Knowing what not to do leads to knowing what to do."

  That kind of talk should give me a headache, I think. But it doesn't. I understand it absolutely. Because (and here Seth's right) of the numbers in my head.

  Seth wasn't always a writer. Or maybe he was, but he just didn't know it. He went to school to become a doctor—that was his mother's big dream for him. A wish above all others. Seth's dad was a day laborer, working at one of the casinos. His mother hated that, but Seth would say to me, "What's wrong with what my father does? Look. Look how happy he is." And Seth was right. His dad was a happy man until the day he died with tubes and blood coming everywhere out of him like some kind of lab experiment.

  So at one point Seth was premed in college. Then came quantum mechanics and physics. Right away I knew he was no good at it. He struggled and struggled. I tried to help him. I so much wanted to, the way he'd helped me, but when I offered to, he shook his head. (I can tell what you're thinking. How could I help him? Me, who couldn't even pass the yearly home-school tests. Well, God knows I can't write a decent sentence, as I'm sure you can tell, but as for quantum mechanics and physics, I understand them from the ground up. How do I do that? I don't rightly know. I just do. It's the equations inside my head, the things that make sense of the world around me.)

  "You don't think I can help you, do you?" I pouted.

  "That's just it. I know you can help me, Charlie."

  "Then why won't you let me?"

  He closed the thick textbook. "Because," he sighed, "you've got to know when to hold 'em, you've got to know when to fold 'em."

  The next day, he brought all his texts back to the bookstore, traded them in for books written by Hegel, Kant, Locke, Spinoza, Sartre. Unexpectedly, he bought a book for me. Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), by Martin Heidegger. In it, Heidegger explains Being and Dasein, literally "existence." He talks about the concept of "being there," of time and matter both being a function of mathematics. In other words, what existence boils down to is numbers.

  "But I already know that," I say.

  "Read it again," Seth says. "This time without my help."

  I do, but it leaves me feeling like I've eaten half my breakfast. That day, I get up early, walk down to the college bookstore. Talking to the clerks there leads me to Schrodinger, whose famous theoretical cat experiment was meant to prove the conflict between what we can see with our eyes and what quantum mechanics tells us goes on at a microscopic level.

  SchrÖodinger, in turn, leads me to Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. Basically, what Heisenberg discovered was that the relationship between momentum and position is like the relationship between energy and time. It's the Uncertainty Principle. In other words, a single particle can be in a number of places at once. Does that sound like gobbledygook to you? Not me. I totally get it. How we experience things in the world—from motion to time—is a function of numbers. In fact, looking at things that way, motion is time. That's why I could almost always win at poker—or craps, or roulette or—well, you name it. I can see through what everyone else sees to the underlying building blocks on which everything is based. What it all boils down to is this: I speak a different language than you do.

  Because the poker games take place at night, Daddy and I live an upside-down life. Well, it doesn't seem upside down to us, but it does to Seth who, like most people in Reno not attached to the gaming industry, lives his life just like anyone else in the country.

  For Daddy and me, it's day for night. We get up at five in the afternoon. I get up first, by a half hour or so, and fix him breakfast. That is, I used to, until Seth started coming around. He eats my breakfast as his dinner. I asked him, once, why he was doing that. He said it didn't make any difference to him. Maybe he's telling the truth, I don't know. Seth says he doesn't lie, but I don't know. Can that be true of anybody? It's not true of Daddy, and it sure as hell wasn't true of my mother.

  Tonight Daddy is feeling ill; he cancels the game. I tell him not to. I tell him I've watched him run it long enough, I can handle it myself. He just laughs and goes back to watching porno on the TV and coughing from his phlegmy chest. He'd work with a temperature of 103, my daddy, but a cough? Uh-uh. You don't want to get the suckers sick, do you?

  So I have a night off. Seth is delirious. After a proper dinner, not at one of the casino restaurants, we climb into his big cream-colored vintage Caddy and go to the Luna Drive-In. It's the last outdoor movie theater in town, a relic from another age that some poker millionaire who loves movies bought and turned into a tourist attraction. The Luna plays only old films like Dracula and Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Tonight they're playing Sleeping Beauty, which is beautiful, sad, and happy. Seth buys us Cracker Jacks and Red Hots. Only old-time candy at the concession stand.

  Afterward, we drive out into the hills, further than we've ever been. There's a bit of a wind, chill and somehow comforting. The sky is like an iceberg with candles in its hollowed-out center. That's how many stars shine down on us.

  We sit side by side, staring up at the sky.

  "Where would you like to go, Charlie?"

  "What?" I'm startled. What the hell kind of question is that?

  "I mean if you could go anywhere in the world."

  I shrug. "Why would I want to leave Reno?"

  He laughs, not unkindly. Seth doesn't know how to be unkind. "It's a big world," he says. "There's so much to see, so much to learn. So much knowledge waiting."

  "Waiting for what?"

  "For us to come find it."

  I turn to him, put my lips over his. We start to kiss, and that feels like the stars are showering down on us. After a while, Seth disentangles himself. He opens the big, heavy Caddy door and steps out. I figure he's got to pee, but instead he turns to me, gets down on one knee. I look down. In the center of his palm is a diamond ring, which he holds out to me.

  "Charlotte Bliss, will you marry me?"

  Jesus. I laugh. Honestly, I don't know what else to do. If Seth had hit
me over the head with his shoe, I couldn't be more surprised. My fault, right? I should've read the signs. I should've seen it coming. You did, I suppose.

  The laugh is bad enough, but then I follow it up with "I don't think so, Seth."

  "Why not?"

  "Marriage? The numbers just don't add up."

  "I know what's going on. Your father doesn't want you to leave him."

  "You've got it ass backwards. It's me who doesn't want to leave him."

  "That's plain crazy." He frowns, shakes his head. "You're saying that because your mother and father didn't make it."

  He's right, of course. Daddy's all I have. Seth is so much smarter than me. Which is yet another reason not to marry him. He'll tire of me in the end, won't he?

  "Anyway," he goes on, "love has nothing to do with numbers."

  "Of course it does," I say. "Everything has to do with numbers. I know it, and so did Heidegger and Heisenberg."

  "In this one instance, they're wrong," he insists.

  "A principle is a principle. It can't be erased randomly when it suits you."

  He sighs, rises up, gets back behind the wheel. But then he presses the ring into my hand. "Take it, Charlie," he says as I try to give it back to him. "Just ... you don't have to put it on. Just keep it, at least for a little while."

  I put the ring in my pocket.

  "Let's go home," he says, slamming the Caddy's door.

  "No. Seth." I take his hand, put it on my breast. "Let's stay out all night, like I would have if I'd had a prom."

  He can't resist me. He gets an old striped blanket out of the Caddy's trunk, spreads it on the ground. We lie down on it, side by side. It smells of him and of summer, and I love that. For a time we just hold hands, stare up at the milky sky. Then he rolls over on top of me. I can feel how hard he is, like he's bursting with energy. I rise up toward him, meeting his energy with mine. And time is rocked by the force of our momentum.

  So today has dawned just like any other day, red and hot, and dry as a prayer meeting. Unlike every other day, I see the dawn. But just for a bit. My arms and legs are wrapped around Seth. I fall back asleep to the soft beating of his heart.

  It's noon by the time we both open our eyes again. We go have a bite to eat at the diner and talk about everything, except the one thing Seth is dying to talk about. I feel the diamond ring in my pocket. In secret, my fingers go to it, turning it around and around. I want to say something, erase the sad look on his face but, honestly, I don't know what to say.

  It's four thirty by the time Seth drives me home. Two blocks away, I see the red-and-white lights flicking on and off. We turn the corner and I see the cop cars, three of them, all nosed in toward the front door of the ranch house I share with Daddy.

  I'm out of the car, tearing down the street even before Seth's Caddy rocks to a stop on its pillow shocks. The clutch of uniforms standing around turn toward me as I race at them. One reaches out to stop me. Then I hear Seth's raised voice:

  "That's Tommy Bliss's daughter."

  Between that and the fact that I know Bill Penny, one of the uniforms, they let me through. Penny hurries after me.

  "Charlie," he says. "Charlie—"

  I hear the urgency in his voice. It makes me want to vomit. My heart hammers in my throat. Through the living room, past the kitchen with its familiar breakfast smells of toast and bacon. Down the hall.

  "Daddy," I call. "Daddy!"

  There's a tall, slim man slouched at the open doorway to Daddy's bedroom. Not a uniform. A suit with latex gloves stretched over his hands.

  "This is Detective Ralphs," Penny says from behind me, like a prompter at a play. It's all so unreal. I feel like an actor who's forgotten her lines.

  "It's okay," I hear Penny say. "This is Charlotte Bliss. The deceased's daughter."

  Oh, God. No.

  I stand in the doorway for I don't know how long, staring in at what looks like a set piece from CSI. Daddy's sprawled on the bed faceup. There's blood everywhere. A detective bends over him, taking flash photos from every angle. The sharp smell of cordite hits me.

  "Who shot him?" My voice seems to come from far, far away.

  The detective takes a toothpick out of the corner of his mouth. "I'm sorry for your loss, Ms. Bliss."

  I'd like to plant my fist in his face. Instead, I repeat my question.

  The detective tells me. Someone Daddy kicked out of his game. A flat-broke busted nobody who's sure as hell somebody now.

  "We have him out in one of the squad cars," Penny says.

  He puts a hand on my arm. I shrug it off.

  "We got him, Charlie," Penny says. "We got him."

  His words seem like the only sound in the world. The camera flashes one more time; then I slide past the cadaver. I can hear Penny's words following me as he navigates the hallway on crepe-soled shoes.

  Time and energy seem to collide inside me, canceling each other out, creating the form of stillness Seth would call death. Only I'm not dead. Daddy is.

  Then what the hell am I?

  Seth doesn't say anything, doesn't hold me. He knows I don't want that. Not now, anyway. He does all the calling—the mortuary, all that. Me? I just stand, looking in at Daddy. He's so still that I think Seth must be right. Does everything come to a rest sometime? I wish I could ask Heisenberg, because I don't know the answer. The equations in my head seem to add up to zero today, no matter which way I configure them.

  Seth tracks down my mother, how, I don't know. Maybe she wasn't all that hard to find, after all. Maybe I just didn't try. You want to know why?

  "Mrs. Bliss. Faith?" Seth says into the receiver. "Oh, sorry, Ms. Horner." Typical. She's regressed to the name she used when Daddy met her at Royal Flush. "I'm sorry to tell you that your ex-husband passed away today." He waits, his face so twisted up I can imagine the tongue-lashing the poor lamb's got to put up with. "Okay, okay, I understand that you hate him, Ms. Horner, but there's your daughter to think of. Charlotte's all alone and—"

  He stops abruptly, a look of disgust coming over his handsome features. "I understand," he says finally. "I mean, I don't under—"

  He looks at the receiver before he puts it back in its cradle. "She hung up on me," he says softly, as if to himself. Then to me: "She doesn't want to see you, Charlie. She—"

  "Yeah, I know." I cut him off before he can finish. I don't want him to finish. I don't want to know what else she said. Whatever it was, after the first bit, it doesn't matter now, does it?

  "Charlie, I'm so sorry."

  Dry-eyed, I pad down the hallway to the pink-and-mulberry-tiled bathroom, shutting the door firmly behind me. I avoid the mirror. I don't want to see myself now, because I'll see her, and right now that would be too much even for me.

  Instead, I sit on the edge of the porcelain tub, turn on the taps, let the hot water run over my feet and ankles. I did this when I was a little girl. It was comforting. It blocked out the pain their screaming brought me.

  Once the tears come, I can't stop them. I'm hunched over, face in my cupped hands, sobbing until I can't catch my breath. How could you do this to me, Daddy? I wail silently. Damn you, why did you leave me all alone?

  I sit there for the longest time, immobile again, in Seth's deathlike state. Until he knocks on the door, calls my name, comes in hesitantly.

  "Charlie," he says. "Are you all right?"

  I don't answer him. What could I possibly say?

  He takes a step across the mulberry tiles. "Charlie, the detective needs to talk to you."

  I nod and get up. Without wiping my feet I brush past him, walk toward the uniforms, standing around thinking of doughnuts and their aching backs.

  After they've left, after the coroner has taken Daddy's body away, after Seth has taken Daddy's black suit out of his closet, after he and I sit in the deathly atmosphere of the mortuary and make decisions that have no bearing on my Daddy, or on me, it's all over.

  But it isn't.

  On the way back home,
Seth says, "Charlie, the game is scheduled for tonight. I can find your father's book. I'll call all the players, okay?"

  For a time, I stare out the side, see fixed lights and passing traffic as part of the same blur. But they're not the same, are they? Seth, wanting to get me home as quick as he can, accelerates, matches the speed of a car on our left. For a moment, the blur vanishes. It looks as if we're not moving at all, as if both cars have entered a world within the larger world, where time has slowed and motion has stopped altogether. Then, Seth's Caddy continues to accelerate, and the blur returns. The world is as it was. But it's not, is it? Daddy's no longer in it.

  Or is that true? The game is his. If the game continues, does Daddy continue, too? It sounds funny, even to me. But only at first.

  When I come to think of it as a principle, a truth of its own, I turn to Seth and, with the wind blowing my flaming hair, say, "No. Don't call anyone."

  "Charlie, I really don't think you're up to doing it yourself." Not surprising, he doesn't understand.

  "I'm not calling anyone, Seth. I'll be running the game tonight."

  Of course he tells me not to do it. You'd think I'd be angry at him for trying to stop me, but I'm not. You'd think I'd be angry at him for being so predictable, but I'm not. What I am is in a mind-set where the equations have started rolling again. Zero is not an option. As I go about the preparations, I can hear Daddy's voice in my head, clear as a bell. He wants to make sure I don't forget anything.

  I don't, which is good, because here they come, right on time. Three local politicos, Tony Danko and Roddy Shone, a Hollywood celeb who I can tell at a glance is from the Vince Vaughn school of Texas Hold 'Em. He's gonna get a good fleecing tonight. If not from me, then for sure from Roddy.

  Speaking of Roddy, the minute he steps through the door, he takes my elbow, pulls me aside.