Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  A seductive thought. Especially in the circumstances.

  Yet I hesitated, and finally decided to let the mind have its own way. The conscious side of human intellect is limited and usually tied to the pace of the spoken word, while the unconscious is—can be—untrammeled by mechanics.

  It was this more competent and efficient side that now resisted sleep and would not be put off with promises of future comprehension.

  All right, dammit.

  So we will think for a while...

  I took a deep breath and turned myself inward, groping for the various strands. There were an embarrassing number to choose from, and I selected one at random.

  Item: Maxey thinks Sam Goines sent the hit team to the penthouse with orders to kill everyone in the room.

  But they didn’t kill everyone—and I don’t believe they wanted to. If that had been the idea, they’d have sanitized the room first with frag grenades and then come in to hose down anyone who was still moving. More efficient, less dangerous.

  No.

  That was aimed fire, intended to kill just who it did kill. DiMarco and the poor son of a bitch who was pretending to be Sam Goines. Someone else in the room may have been on the list; I don’t think Sam—or whoever really sent them—expected anyone in there to jump the gunners.

  Item: aces and eights. Do I really believe someone is leaving a crazy calling card like that?

  Well...maybe. It’s happened twice now, and if the first time could have been an accident, the second absolutely could not. So, yes, someone is doing that, but don’t ask me why. Because down inside, where I live, I still don’t really believe it, and to hell with logic and the evidence of the senses.

  Item: one atomic bomb. Of all the utter world-class hoked-up spies-in-the-woodwork nonsense I ever heard, that has got to be the lemon icing on the cake.

  But Corner Pocket believes it and Interpol believes it, and if it doesn’t fit the Sam Goines I remember, well, neither do a lot of other things I have been finding out about him in the last few hours, so maybe we have got to keep it in mind as a possibility, if nothing else. At least for the time being.

  Item: Jorge Martinez. How in hell did he get involved in craziness like this, and did he know I was going to be in the room, and if he did, was that why he was hired—to kill me or not to kill me, but anyway to be able to pick me out of a crowd?

  Another name and face floated up to center stage. Jorge de la Torre. The coincidence of those first names, Jorge and Jorge, had led to nicknames that didn’t require explanation: Big Jorge and Little Jorge. Easy to remember, because Big Jorge—de la Torre—was the first soldier, in charge of the whole company, while Little Jorge—Martinez—only had to worry about the platoon.

  But the nicknames changed a little after the first few weeks of combat.

  They became Big Trouble and Little Trouble, and not just because some of the babies from the repple-depple found them a little hard to please. War, even the mean and idiotic kind that we fought up and down the coastline of Southeast Asia, can be addictive to a certain kind of man. Lunatics, sure. But useful, purposeful lunatics who have found their calling in life. And death.

  Big Trouble and Little Trouble scared the hell out of everyone. Including me.

  Because they were home. They had recognized each other the first time the gunfire was for real, and from that moment on they were brothers in a way that is more than blood, assigning themselves to two-man night patrols that were strictly forbidden by regulation and by specific order of the various officers who sometimes arrived to take charge of things.

  Officers assigned to our company never seemed to last long. But when they were gone, Big Trouble and Little Trouble were still there, talking in low tones and cleaning their weapons with that middle-distance stare. R and R did not attract them. Rest areas were places to plan new tactics. For use in the immediate future.

  I think the final fight—my final one, anyway, the one the history books call the second battle of Khe Sanh, when they remember it at all—was a kind of present from the gods, as far as the two sergeants were concerned. An ultimate challenge.

  Yet I owed my life to Jorge Martinez.

  And now I was one of the reasons he was dead.

  Item: Sam Goines. If he wasn’t lying on a coroner’s slab somewhere right now—and he certainly wasn’t—then just where was he? And what kind of a game were we playing? I only came to play poker, folks...deal the preacher out.

  But I was in, and no mistake about it. Dealer’s choice and the button’s at Sam’s seat; table stakes, freeze out with a forced opening and burying money to the losers.

  (Old friend, just what would it cost me to buy back my introduction to you?)

  Item: cocaine. It was getting to be a recurrent theme. Terrence Lyle McDuff had died of it, killed because he was no longer reliable, if Maxey’s version of events was to be believed, and so far it was the best explanation that had been offered.

  Who else? Well, the Voice of Heaven on Earth, for one. I hadn’t seen him snorting and I hadn’t seen him smoking and it would be a spectacularly stupid thing for him to do. But Holy Joe Gillespie had never been a mental giant, and his reaction to the card tricks this morning had been pretty extreme, even for a man faced with a totally novel situation. File him under Probable.

  And go on to Danny DiMarco. Hadn’t there been some kind of problem with him and coke a few years back? Yes: a bust, with a load of Colombian found in the bar compartment of his limousine. He’d been on the skids in those days, and everyone thought he’d started dealing because he needed the money. But it turned out to be his chauffeur, not him. Didn’t it?

  And a month or two later, he was back on top...making a new picture and working in Las Vegas and getting married to his jail-bait costar...who, now that I thought about it, was the chauffeur’s daughter.

  Okay. Right...

  Item: Francis Carrington Shaw. Another recurrent theme. Judge Happy Apodaca worked for him. So did Manny Temple. Danny DiMarco had just bought control of the Scheherazade from one of the Shaw companies.

  But there was more. Struggling, antlike, with bits of mental debris several times its size, the librarian of memory finally unearthed something I’d seen a few years back on the business page of the San Francisco Chronicle. A rumor that FCS—the initials were also the legal name of his main holding company—had provided financing for some complicated kind of international arms deal, other principals not identified by name.

  Would one of those names have been Goines?

  And would FCS be connected to anyone else in the game? What about Holy Joe?

  Item: the colonel. I couldn’t seem to think of him any other way, and that in itself was worth knowing, because it meant I didn’t know him at all. I had seen the man and I could tell you what kind of poker combinations he liked to back and some of the situations in which he would bluff and even follow a little bit of his betting psychology.

  But I didn’t know him.

  I knew a beard and a voice, and while the gaming pattern might be as good in some ways as a signature or even a fingerprint, it wasn’t the man himself, and we were still strangers.

  But...not quite. Somehow, I couldn’t get over the feeling that I had met him before.

  Item: Maxey. Meeting her again after all this time could be an accident, but I didn’t believe it for a minute, and if Sam Goines was really behind any of this he must have known how I’d react, and maybe even been counting on it.

  Well, okay, then, old friend of mine. You were right.

  Whatever it was between Maxey and me all those years ago, it was still there. For me, anyway.

  And for Maxey?

  Hard to say. I’d been unable to make effective contact with the emotional center. The wa. She seemed to feel some of what I was feeling, and I’d swear that fainting spell at the hospital was straight goods. For real. Her lights were well and truly out when I carried her to the couch.

  Or was I just too busy with my own feelings to mo
nitor hers?

  Mark it a possible.

  A lot had happened since the last time we saw each other, but it was Maxey who’d started my ball rolling again, way back then, when I was ready to give up.

  Not that she drew me a diagram and led me through it. Nothing like that would have occurred to Maxey, then or now. But being with her had cut the drinking to a minimum and started me concentrating on the job of learning to play poker like a professional instead of an amateur.

  And the questions she’d asked about my t’ai chi exercises had pushed me to begin looking into the Oriental philosophies and martial arts that stem from them...which is to say the whole panorama. They had led me to Yoichi Masuda, the mahayana master who had taught me and led me and been my friend ever since, and to the life and work that had evolved.

  None of which had any bearing on the main question:

  Maxey...

  The headdress was unfamiliar but the face was one I knew, and there were too many clothes and the landscape was green and it stretched into infinity and now I was dreaming and I knew it, but I couldn’t shake it off and wake up.

  Or didn’t want to...

  Monocular vision is not natural for any animal I have ever heard of, ancient legends of the Cyclops notwithstanding, and adaptation to such a condition comes in dribs and drabs over a period of years.

  You learn to estimate distance by relative size; by strains of focus rather than the two-eyed strains of convergence that you learned to use without conscious effort as an infant, but it doesn’t happen all at once. Getting used to the distance between a plate and your mouth is easy and is one of the first steps in the relearning process. But you will get some food on your face and on your shirt before you arrive at the point where you don’t have to think about it anymore...and the rest of the learning process is just as uneven.

  Some things, in fact, never change.

  After all this time, I still dream in 3-D. Still see dreamscapes and dream people with two eyes. Even if I’ve never seen them that way in the world I believe to be the real one.

  Maxey was standing far off across a green baize plain, dressed as a queen. But not of hearts; I’m not that banal, even in a dream. No. She was the queen of swords from the tarot deck, and she was smiling and beckoning and I couldn’t quite hear her, which was frustrating because, after all, this was my own personal dream and I found myself wondering—not irrelevantly—why I was dreaming her as such a dangerous card.

  The queen of swords leaves a trail of doom and terror through the Lesser Arcana of the seventy-two-card tarot deck, from which the modern fifty-two-card pack is derived, and while she is not as totally devastating as the nine of swords (death and destruction, any way you read it), she is no fun either, a questionable ally and a deadly enemy who can be relied upon to guard herself and her own to the exclusion of all other considerations.

  I tried to call to her, but there was no sound and the effort turned the whole scene dim at the edges and suddenly I was standing on the campus at Sewanee, the University of the South, facing Shapard Tower. It was night and I strained my eyes—both of them in fine working order, courtesy of my friendly local subconscious—to see and be filled by the white pattern of moonlight on the knobbed spires.

  Queen Maxey was gone, but something was going on to my right. I forced my attention away from the tower to see what it was and found myself facing another survivor from the tarot, this time a member of the Greater Arcana.

  The joker smiled back at me.

  But not the leering, devilish face of the modern deck. This was his elder counterpart—Card Zero, called the Fool—whose smile was sweet and trustful as he prepared to blunder over the edge of a cliff. Feather in cap and satchel over shoulder, he was wandering toward me now with a heart full of joy and goodwill. But as he came closer, the face changed.

  It was Little Trouble.

  Sergeant Jorge Martinez seemed as happy as a clam, but the cap feather was really camouflage worked into the cloth cover of his helmet, and the satchel was a sack of ammo bandoliers hanging from the end of an M16.

  What was he doing here at Sewanee?

  The answer came almost at once. Still smiling, Little Trouble unslung his burden and set it at his feet, working the bolt of the M16 and shouting something at someone behind me, and I turned to see a line of what seemed to be children wearing National Guard uniforms. Their M1s had ammo clips in place and they were aiming, ready to fire.

  “Stop that,” I said. “You crazy bastards, stop that before you hurt someone!”

  But they didn’t hear me, and when I turned back to Little Trouble, he was invisible and it was snowing. Flakes of whiteness filled the sky and then I remembered—Sara.

  We had stood here, outside All Saints, with the snow cutting us off from the world and touched and talked to each other and told each other things no one else would ever hear and been warm in the midst of the chilly whiteness.

  Where was Sara?

  The snow had stopped and I could see again, and Little Trouble and his murderous National Guard children were gone.

  Sara had been here; I had felt her presence, and while she was with me the world had been right and possible, a world for living, but now she was gone and I was alone and I had not seen her face.

  Her face...

  The snow wasn’t melting, and I understood now that it wasn’t really snow. This was just white powder, and I didn’t need a closer look to know what kind. I was up to my ankles in cocaine, and the dream was getting a little more literal than it needed to be.

  And then the bells of the Polk Memorial Carillon began to ring.

  I steeled myself against the sound, trying to hang on to the dream, to find Sara. Or Jorge Martinez. Or Maxey. What was Maxey doing among all those dead people? But the world continued to shudder and parts of it crumbled, and when the clamor continued, the fabric came apart, shimmering into nothingness and contracting to a single point that echoed and vibrated to the kind of sound Edgar Allan Poe had understood so well, tolling and pealing and hammering...

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Paul, too, saw his world clearly. He lived daily with the sure knowledge of the wages of sin, comforting himself with the assurance that—as in the second half of the verse—”the gift of God is eternal life.”

  SIXTEEN

  I woke with a sense of foreboding and frustration. And loss.

  The room was dark, but splinter-bits of sunlight that had somehow wormed their way around the edges of the industrial-weight blackout curtains informed me that it was still daytime, albeit late afternoon, of a day that had started at midnight and seemed to want to go on forever.

  Fragments of the dream drifted back from wherever it is that such things go, and I closed my eye in a determined effort to recapture as many of them as possible.

  Maybe I could even follow them home.

  But the sound that had shattered their world and driven me out of it had more staying power than I did.

  Some modern telephones attract attention with discreet chimes, some with a well-modulated electronic tone, still others with a silently flashing light. But the instrument in my room was the old-fashioned kind intended for business lunches and wake-up calls, and its inventor would doubtless have taken a certain modest pride in the way it dragged me back from the twilight border of eternity into crisply air-conditioned Las Vegas afternoon.

  I picked it up on the third ring and said something intended as a cross between “hello” and “go away,” hoping perhaps that the caller would take offense, or take the hint, and hang up in my ear.

  But it was Maxey.

  She had known me too long and too well to expect anything like civilized conduct from me in the first few moments after being roused from sleep. And she was in no mood for nonsense.

  “On your feet, stud,” she said.

  “No chance!”

  “Open your left eye, put in your right one if it’s lying around somewhere—”

  “Max
ey, dammit.”

  “—do a couple of those limbering-up exercises of yours, and meet me in the coffee shop. You got ten minutes. And I got us an appointment. We’re going to Heaven.”

  “Maxey!”

  But she was gone, and if I had any options, I absolutely couldn’t see what they might be.

  I kicked off the covers and ordered my legs to lever me upright.

  It took three tries.

  But I finally made it.

  She had already ordered the coffee—a special blend of hot-and-heady with just the hint of chicory that a few years in Tennessee can teach you to favor—but said the rest of the breakfast, if there was going to be one, would have to wait. We were late.

  That was all right with me. The meal we had tied into at the Golden Nugget had been enough to march an army from Beijing to Shanghai, and folk myth notwithstanding I was not hungry again a couple of hours later. I could wait.

  For a year, maybe.

  Pouring good coffee into a couple of Styrofoam cups and drinking it on the fly, however, was another thing entirely, and I was still protesting with as much vigor and dignity as I could summon even while Maxey was herding me into my own rental car and directing us on a serpentine course out of town in the direction of Henderson.

  “Maxey!”

  She was checking her wristwatch for what seemed to be the tenth time in five minutes, and did not reply.

  “Maxey, you’re a lovely lady and a smart one and I am prepared to follow you to the very gates of Gehenna—”

  “Whatever that is.”

  “—but if you don’t tell me where we’re going pretty soon, I am going to take my foot off the gas and put it on the brake and turn off the engine and go back to sleep right here on the highway.”

  She looked at me with an expression of surprise that could not have been faked. “I told you,” she said.