Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  THE PREACHER

  ACES AND EIGHTS

  Also by Ted Thackrey Jr.

  The Preacher

  King of Diamonds

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2017 Ted Thackrey Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1941298605

  ISBN 13: 9781941298602

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  CONTENTS

  A SERMON

  CHAPTER ONE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWO

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER THREE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER SIX

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER NINE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  A SERMON (CONTINUED)

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A SERMON (CONCLUDED)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  A BENEDICTION

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  A BENEDICTION (CONCLUDED)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A SERMON

  Dear friends,

  Our text this morning comes from the Book of Psalms, thirty-seventh chapter, thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth verses:

  “I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

  “Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.”

  The Psalmist—King David, according to the tradition—seems to warn us here of the transitory nature of power, of its vanity, especially when held and exercised by those who would misuse it. David was a man who knew about such things. For he was himself a man of great power...

  ONE

  The Voice of Heaven on Earth uttered a blistering oath and then fell silent, appalled as much at the words as at their cause.

  I couldn’t really blame him.

  He had just dropped $45,000—funds no doubt already consecrated in his heart to propagation of the Word among the heathen—on a poker hand he absolutely knew could not lose. A thing like that can be embarrassing. And expensive.

  But that’s the trouble with cheating at poker: Every now and then you run into someone who cheats better and quicker than you do. I sat still and let him think it over.

  The Voice of Heaven, also known as the Very Reverend Holroyd Josiah Gillespie, DD, was no smarter than I remembered from the days when he was just plain “Holy Joe” Gillespie, a lean and hungry sometime Bible salesman from North Carolina studying for the ministry in the class ahead of me at Sewanee. He had been a smooth, flannel-mouthed, self-hypnotized shitkicker in those days, and he was no better now—except that now he was rich, internationally famous, semi-universally beloved, walking around in elevator cowboy boots built to accentuate the slim height that was now a part of his carefully tended persona...and the proud possessor of a dandy bag of second-rate card tricks.

  Watching him use them on the table-stakes poker players assembled in the living room of one of the $5,000-a-day suites that crown the Sultan’s Turret at the Scheherazade International in Las Vegas, however, left me with a decision to make.

  Cheating is always stupid. It can get you killed. Worse, it is the recognized mark of an incompetent player. A chump. No one who can really play that game has need of the Arts Arcane; he can win—handsomely—without them.

  Handling the cheater, on the other hand, calls for a certain amount of finesse.

  You have options:

  You can walk away. It’s not heroic and it’s not profitable, but no one ever got shot by finding a good acceptable reason to leave the game, and I have done it often enough when I’ve been a stranger in town.

  Or you can accuse the cheater. It’s the first thing that occurs to most players and the most natural. But exposing the cheat makes you the bearer of bad tidings—with all the attendant negatives—and can get you killed if the accused player has more friends in the room than you do. Count carefully before opening the mouth.

  Or you can cheat back...which is what had happened to the Voice of Heaven on Earth, and I think it may have been a novel experience for him, because after letting fly with the single expletive, he sat tongue-tied and awestruck as I raked in the dove-colored poker chips he knew should have been his own.

  His world had tilted.

  The Great Zot had belched.

  The poor bastard simply could not see what had gone wrong...

  This game was seven card stud, played without a professional dealer, and the Voice had more or less deftly stacked the deck on the pickup to deal me what was supposed to look like a world-class betting hand—queens over deuces full—in the sure and certain confidence that I would bet the sky against his two exposed eights and single king. Since he had also taken the trouble to give himself another kowboy and another eight in the hole, his hands had already been cupped to rake in the pot when I turned my final card to expose a fourth deuce.

  The look on his face was almost worth framing.

  And his audible reaction was almost too good to be real. Years had passed and seasons had ripened and the world had moved and altered around him, but poor old Holy Joe still hadn’t learned to engage his brain before operating his jawbone. Never an unexpressed thought.

  “But...you cheated!” he said.

  And suddenly the room was totally silent.

  I froze with my hands in sight on top of the table and let the words hang there in the filtered air for a moment or two.

  The Scheherazade is one of the newer pleasure domes on the Strip; sound insulation has come a long way in the past few decades, and all the forces of art and science had been marshaled to assure its guests of immunity from unwanted auditory stim
uli. Not even the air conditioning was permitted a whisper. So there was no competition for the words of accusation, or for what followed.

  “Is that a fact, now?” I said, smiling at him when I decided the moment had gone on long enough. “What makes you think so, my friend?”

  It was an offer of amnesty.

  He could still back off. I hadn’t sunk the hook yet, and the rest of the scene didn’t have to be played. He hesitated, and for a moment I thought he might have more sense than I’d imagined. But no.

  “That last two of spades,” he said, his voice rising to a pitch of righteous wrath. “It wasn’t in your hand!”

  Oh, well, hell...

  Poker-playing styles are as individual as a personal signature or the shape of a head. Or fingerprints. A working professional learns to recognize each pattern, categorize it, and turn to his own account the insights gained. It takes a little extra time and effort, but these are always well repaid and I had been quietly going about that part of my business when the larcenous quality of the Voice of Heaven’s game became too evident to ignore.

  He wasn’t even very good at it.

  Even so, I had taken my time deciding how to approach the problem and then waiting for just the right opportunity.

  I had realized from the moment I saw him execute a rather clumsy pull-through—whip one-half of a riffled pack through the other at an angle and then slap them together to nullify the shuffle and the previous cut at the same time—that he wasn’t the brightest cheat I’d ever met. But I really had thought he might be smarter than that, so I let the silence hang again for longer than it should have in the hope that he might change his mind and do something intelligent.

  But he didn’t, and at last I was forced to give him the only response possible under the circumstances.

  “Well, now,” I said, still smiling at him. “Well, now—and just how would you happen to know what cards I had in my hand, sir...?”

  Rational thought finally began to percolate through whatever he was using for brains, and he halted, balanced insecurely at the verge of whatever he had intended to say next. I had asked a question to which there was only one possible answer, and the reply was necessarily damning. He realized that now, and so did everyone else at the table.

  What he didn’t know was how to back out.

  So I decided to help.

  A little.

  The deal had passed to me, and I did a workmanlike job of collecting the cards, seemingly at random, aligning them horizontally and shuffling.

  “We live,” I said, smiling brightly to center his attention on my face and on what I was saying while my hands lived lives of their own, “in a world of wonders...”

  Sorting the cards to re-create the last hands was no real problem.

  “Mysteries surround us. Miracles abound. We accept them as our due, never voicing the questions that ought certainly to be our constant concern...”

  Individually, or even strung into phrases, the words were empty of meaning. But their tone and cadence were calculated. And effective.

  Saiminjutsu is a slightly arcane Oriental version of hypnotism, a method of turning the mind’s own defenses against it. Properly applied, it can achieve more than any unsupported combination of kata. But it requires the full power of shinki kiitsu, that unity of soul, mind, and body that is the very essence of the martial arts.

  I invoked that unity now, grounding its power in my own hara, to hold him thoughtless and pliable.

  “Why is this so? How can we bear to live lives of unexamined context? How dare we sojourn alone and unarmored on the darkling plain that is the arena of this earthly existence...?”

  The Voice of Heaven wanted to speak now, to throw off the stifling mind-blanket. But it was too late. He sat still, listening in silence, mouth slightly agape.

  Good.

  Good...

  I went on talking, looking at him, letting the moment build while I ran through two false shuffles, passed the cards to my left for a cut, and then nulled it on the pickup.

  No one seemed to notice.

  “We see here the eternal mysteries of life itself,” I said.

  “Who are we? Where are we? How long will we stay and where will we go?

  “And there are the more temporal concerns as well, smaller questions, but no less demanding of answers: What work shall we do in the world and what pay shall we ask...and how did that fourth deuce get into the hand of the tinhorn crossroads hustler when we were at such pains to be sure it went to the man across the table...?”

  As intended, the final words broke the spell.

  It was time.

  “The answer,” I said, “is in the sight and smell and touch of the world around us, the world of here and now.”

  Some people are more suggestible than others.

  The Voice of Heaven was awake again, no longer lulled by the cadences of my voice, alive to the dangers of the situation surrounding him. But he could not seem to force his eyes away from my face, and I found myself marveling at his apparent lack of personal force. Of mana. Without a superabundance of it, how had he ever managed to mesmerize the multitude in those nightly televised prayer meetings?

  A contradiction. But it made things easier; I stilled my center and concentrated upon void.

  “These,” I said, squaring the deck in my left hand and gripping it with the forefinger crooked a bit under the forward edge, “are the memory of wonder and the illusion of reality...”

  I began to deal, sensing rather than hearing the Voice of Heaven’s sharp intake of breath as he saw the cards arrive in front of him—two down, five up—re-creating the hands we had just played, but in reverse.

  He had the kings and deuces I had played; I had aces and eights, with a final down-card yet to be dealt into each hand.

  “Accept reality,” I said.

  The Voice looked at me as if he had never heard such a proposition advanced before. He was fully awake again now, but the suggestions he had accepted moments ago had done their work; his eyes and his mind were wide and uncritical.

  Open to wonder.

  “Accept the world as it is, and your own place in it...”

  I turned my hole cards to expose the king and eight he had thought would win for him.

  “The concealed cards in your hand,” I said, “are a queen and a ten...which leaves you backing a full house, just as it did me a moment ago. A good hand. But one that will lose to the stronger combination of aces over eights...”

  I glanced quickly around the table.

  No problems.

  The Voice of Heaven seemed to be the only one who couldn’t see what was about to happen...and that was just as it should have been. He was still staring at the cards when I looked back.

  “The only card that can beat me,” I said, “is the fourth deuce. And it is under your left hand.”

  He blinked.

  His left hand was flat on the table beside the cards I had just dealt, and he knew there was nothing under there. There couldn’t be. But things were going wrong for him; the world was tilting at an angle to the accustomed order. He simply couldn’t resist the urge to look.

  Hesitantly, carefully, he raised the hand.

  “Is it there?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!”

  The hand was still in the air, poised but forgotten in the exchange of words.

  Cham-Hai, the semi-meditational state of becoming one with the environment, had begun, and the world around me was beginning to slow down as my own perceptions of it increased in speed.

  Power was there in the belly, ready and waiting. I had shifted the grip down a finger, and my left hand now concealed the deck from his eyes, allowing the right fore and middle fingers to clamp hard on the top card, awaiting the burst of electric energy that would send them into action.

  “It is there,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t!”

  “Slap the table with your hand...now!
”

  The last word was the trigger. It brought his eyes back to my face for a single instant, and it was as though the world had suddenly gone into stasis with only my hands left alive.

  No magic; no miracle. It takes practice, but an hour or two of effort will make the move quick enough and accurate enough to be effective. Coupled with the personal acceleration that is perceived as a slowing of the world, it can have the quality of true magic. But it is only psychology. And physics.

  In the instant that his hand began to descend, the top card from the pack was also in motion, winging flatly across the two feet of space that separated us. And by the time his palm was flat on the table once more, the card was under it. I hadn’t breathed or moved anything except the two fingers that held the card. No one else had so much as twitched.

  “Accept reality,” I said again.

  He blinked.

  The impact of his hand on the table had slightly and momentarily deadened his sense of touch. He didn’t know the card was there yet.

  “Accept the world as it is,” I said. “And accept the gift of awe and wonder...”

  Another moment passed before he was ready.

  But when he finally raised the hand for another peek, the reaction was all that anyone might have hoped.

  And more.

  The deuce of spades has no face.

  But the grinning countenance of the devil himself could have had no greater impact.

  Some people are born to accept the evidence of their senses; others are not. The Reverend Holroyd Josiah Gillespie had lived his life in a world where objects at rest stayed at rest and those in motion stayed in motion, a world where the sound of his voice and the power of his personality produced a pleasant kind of reality that he could accept. A world of his own making, where his card tricks always worked and nobody objected because the Almighty willed it so.

  But this world was different. It was a place of wrongness, a universe at odds with all past experience, a threatening place where inanimate objects had minds of their own.

  And it was just too much. A single timorous sheep bleat was the best the Voice of Heaven on Earth could offer in exculpation as he did the only thing a man of his background and persuasions could do in the circumstances.

  He rejected the experience.

  Eyes uprolled as if to examine the ceiling and mouth slack, the sometime back country Bible hustler from North Carolina sagged sideways in the chair and then rolled awkwardly out of it to sprawl full length on the camphor-scented carpet. His jaw clenched and relaxed once or twice, and I wondered, fleetingly, if he might be in danger of choking on his own tongue.