The Jack Finney Reader

by Jack Finney

  She grimaced and sat down on the tan chenille bedspread, watching his face. And how much will that leave us?

  Enough; don't worry. He patted the wallet in his hip pocket. Then, slipping the knot of his tie down, he began to unbutton his collar.

  Ben, are you sure? she said softly. It's costing more than we figured, and there isn't a soul we could wire for money.

  He nodded, his face calm. We've got our bus tickets through — again he touched his hip pocket — and forty-five dollars, plus the change in my pocket. So we'll hit San Francisco, after meals and the hotel bill, with thirty-odd dollars. I figure fifteen dollars for a room and kitchenette for a week — I've got the address of a place on Sutter Street. Five or six dollars carfare and lunch money for me, the rest for food. And before the week's up, I'll find a job. Bound to, baby. Taking off his wrinkled suit coat, he tossed it on the chair, then walked over to his wife. Standing before her, he began gently massaging the back of her neck, staring over her head.

  You have to take a chance now and then, he murmured soothingly, then repeated what they had told each other so often: If we'd stayed in Newark till we could move out here with absolute security, we'd have been there the rest of our lives, As it is, we'll be in California by noon tomorrow. Get happy about it, he urged her gently. We'll be all right.

  Okay. She glanced up, smiling a little. But we'd have been there tonight, except for me.

  Ben shoved both hands into his pants pockets and walked toward the windows. Listen, he said, four days and nights on a bus is no rest cure for anybody, including me. This way, we break the trip, get a decent night's rest, and hit San Francisco fresh and relaxed. He glanced out the windows at the sunny street below. And that's the best way to look for a job. Anyway, we deserve this — he winked at her again — before we forget how to sleep lying down.

  I haven't forgotten. Rose smiled and pulled back the tan bedspread, exposing the fat pillows and folded-down sheet. White sheets, she murmured. Clean and fresh. She sighed and lay back.

  Ben smiled. Get some rest now. Take a nap. Start getting our eight dollars' worth.

  Okay. With first one foot, then the other, she pushed her slipper heels off, then lowered both shoes, hanging from her toes, to the floor. How about you? She snuggled her head into a pillow.

  Pretty soon; few minutes, maybe. He dropped into the big chair, feet sprawled out. Maybe I'll read for a few minutes first; I might go down for a paper.

  Okay. Rose closed her eyes. Reno, she murmured. Never thought I'd be in Reno; didn't know we even passed through it.

  Opening her eyes, she smiled at Ben. You want to divorce me?

  Can't afford it. Then, with gentle finality, he said, Get some rest now, baby, and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Lighting one, he sat back in his chair, blowing smoke at the ceiling, watching Rose.

  Within a minute she was asleep, and Ben watched her for a few moments longer, then stood up, taking his coat from the chair.

  Downstairs in the lobby, he crossed from the elevator to the newsstand. The massive hotel doors were clear plate glass, and he saw the doorman standing out in the intense Nevada sun, wearing gabardine riding breeches, a green silk shirt, and a cream-colored sombrero. The sidewalk cow hand, Ben said to himself. Pulling the change from his pocket, two half dollars and a dime, he bought a paper, then returned to the elevators and stood waiting.

  Even without turning his head to look, he knew what the steady wash of sound from the big room off the lobby meant. It was the composite drone of many sounds; the heavy chunk of slot-machine springs, the tiny musical racketing of an ivory roulette ball on a turning wheel, the sustained monotone of many voices, and the occasional rich chink, audible even out here, of silver dollars in stacks.

  He turned and walked toward the casino to watch, one hand slipping casually into his pocket. As he crossed the wide lobby toward the sounds ahead, the hand in his pocket fingered the half dollars there, knowing — a tiny instant before his mind knew it too — that he wanted to gamble them in the room ahead. Instantly fear moved in his stomach. He was more worried about money than he had let Rose know. He understood, more than she did, how possible it was not to find a job in a strange city, in a week or much longer; and if their money ran out he simply did not know what they would do.

  Then he shrugged in annoyance, suddenly tired of days and weeks of budgeting almost to the penny. If their luck was to be bad, he told himself irritably, a dollar wasn't going to matter much now, one way or the other. We're not that bad off, he said to himself — you can't visit Reno without betting a dollar. Anyway — he shrugged again — he knew he was going to bet it one dollar, and he stopped in the wide doorway, looking into the casino.

  It was impressively large, high-ceilinged, and carpeted in beige, the walls unobtrusively cream and tan. There were no windows, Ben noticed, and the room was filled with soft yellow light from fluorescent tubes high overhead. The room flashed with chrome. Slot machines stood in an endless row curving around the walls of the room, and for a moment Ben stood staring, then he stepped into the casino, toward the gaming tables in the center of the room.

  Only two were in operation, now in the late morning, and, strolling forward, Ben watched the half-dozen men and women seated around the roulette table. He smiled; they were so busy, their arms extending over the table from every angle to drop colored chips onto the numbered oilcloth surface.

  But he did not understand roulette, and he turned toward the crap table, partly hidden from view by the backs of the players standing around it. Then, at a gap between two players, he stepped up to the table, and saw that it looked like a billiard table. But the dark wood sides were a foot tall, and the green-felt surface was ruled with painted white lines into a maze of squares and rectangles. Some of these areas bore printed words: Field, Come, Line, Don't Come-bar aces, Big Eight, Big Six. Others showed red or yellow numbers, and still others the pictured likenesses of dice in various combinations, labeled 30 to 1, 7 to 1, 15 to 1. And all over the green surface, in these squares and rectangles, lay silver dollars, singly and in stacks, more than he had ever seen in his life before, and Ben eased his weight onto one leg, waiting to understand what was going on.

  Coming out! cried a slim, black-haired man who stood behind the table in a white shirt, black tie, and a tiny green apron to protect his trousers from hour-after-hour rubbing against the table. Beside him, his identically dressed partner, a heavy-set, middle-aged man, said, Coming out for a point! and the younger man reached with a stick toward two red dice lying on the table, and Ben looked at the stick curiously.

  It was a slender length of polished blond wood, curved at one end to a sharp right angle — the shape and size of a poker. The two dice nestled in this little elbow, and the dark young man drew them down the length of the table, maneuvering them around the stacks of silver dollars and chips. With a final flip of the stick, he rolled the dice toward the waiting hand of a lean-faced man several players to Ben's right.

  Instantly, expertly, the man snatched them up, then shot his arm forward to toss the dice back down the length of the table. They struck the backboard, then bounced down onto the table again. They stopped together, suddenly motionless on the felt, a four and a two face up.

  Caught a six! Six is the point, loser in the field, pay the come-bet! the young stick man cried. Then he stood glancing idly around the room, while his middle-aged partner picked a stack of silver dollars from a wood rack at the back edge of the table, and, with the other hand, a stack of yellow chips. Leaning forward over the table, the gray-haired man collected several bets, lifting them onto the bottoms of the stacks in his hands. Then he paid off a few others, matching them, stack for stack in height. He pushed a marker onto a square marked six, and the young stick man reached out for the dice once more.

  Down the table, Ben saw a fat, bald young man in a Hawaiian shirt drop two silver dollars onto a space marked Field; and a pink-faced man wearing rimless bifocals set a stack of yellow chips
onto a space picturing two dice, each with a three uppermost. Ben noticed that the chips were labeled in gold lettering, $5.

  He looked at the lean-faced man whose cupped hand lay on the table, waiting for the dice. He didn't understand what bets had been won or lost, just now, but he knew this man was trying to roll a six again. Ben recalled — from the one time he had played craps, at an office party — that this game was a simple one, actually. If the man rolled a six again, the bet he had placed on the table before him would be doubled. If he rolled seven instead, he would lose his money. Any other number, just now, didn't count, for him.

  Ben felt he would win. Watching, he liked the easy way the man caught up the dice as they were scooped toward his hand, casting them out in one lithe movement, the dice scampering the length of the table to bounce smartly off the backboard.

  Four, easy, the stick man announced, pay the field, and the older man leaned forward, paying off all bets in the rectangles marked Field. Again the stick man herded the dice back to the waiting hand, and again they flew out over the table. In succession, the thin-faced man rolled an eight, a ten, a four. Then he shot a six, and the stick man cried, Six, easy! Front-line winner! And his partner collected the bet of the man in the sombrero and all the Field bets, rapidly paying off most of the others, including that of the man who had rolled the dice.

  Ben saw that these winning bets lay in a narrow ruled-off strip running along the front edge of the table and curving around both sides. The strip was labeled Line, and Ben realized that all players whose bets lay in this band were betting along with the man with the dice; they won as he won, lost as he lost. New point! the stick man was calling, and his partner slid the marker off the six square. Ben took the two half dollars from his pocket and stood holding them in his hand, waiting to feel whether this was a good time to bet.

  Watching the curved stick slide the dice toward the shooter's hand, Ben felt a sudden surge of confidence in this player's ability. Approvingly, he realized that the man never spoke, never pleaded in the stereotyped jargon of the amateur players Ben had seen. It seemed to Ben that this was a mark of an experienced crapshooter, and impulsively he laid his half dollars on the table before him in the strip marked Line.

  The man rolled a three, and on the first roll in craps this number meant something, Ben recalled, but for an instant, confused, he could not remember what. Under his eyes, a hand was snatching up his half dollars and moving on, and the stick man's mechanical voice was crying, Crap, a loser! Winner in the field! and a tiny shock of protest burst in Ben's mind.

  It didn't seem to him that he had even played yet. Not five seconds had passed since he'd put down his money, and it seemed that nothing could possibly have happened; there hadn't been time. But his dollar was gone. Standing there, he felt cheated. He simply hadn't yet had what he'd come for: to gamble a dollar in Reno; to stand and watch the dice roll, expecting to lose but with a run for his money in the meantime. Irritably, Ben reached for his wallet to do what he'd determined to do when he walked into this room; bet a dollar on a decent roll of the dice.

  He said it carefully to himself, and knew that he meant it — he would make up this loss himself. Hunting a job, he would skip a few lunches if he had to, with Rose never the wiser. Since he knew he would actually fulfill this promise, the feeling of wrongdoing subsided, and he took out the smallest bill in his wallet, a five, and handed it to the gray-haired dealer to change.

  His mouth open, about to ask for only one dollar in silver, he realized there was no paper money for change on the table; as he watched, the dealer pushed his five down out of sight into a chrome-rimmed slot on the tabletop. Then the man picked off a little stack of silver dollars from the rack before him, and set it in front of Ben, twisting his fingers so that it toppled sideways, leaving the big coins lying, edges neatly overlapping, easily countable at a glance as five.

  Ben picked up the unfamiliar coins, carefully transferring four to his left hand. The fifth dollar he laid in the Line in the certain knowledge that if he lost he would walk from this room.

  The pokerlike stick nudged the dice over the table to the waiting hand; they flashed out over the green surface, struck, rolled, and stopped. Caught a nine!, and the gray-haired man shifted the marker.

  The dice returned and were shot forward again; two deuces. Once more they came back and were sent scampering out again; an ace and a three. A bet was paid, but the long curving row of silver and chips in the Line remained undisturbed.

  Again the lean hand scooped up and threw the red dice. Front-line winner, and pay the field! Already the older man was matching the winning bets, dropping a silver dollar beside Ben's, and there was a rush of sensation in Ben's stomach, physical and thrilling.

  It simply did not occur to him to stop. He was even, and to leave neither ahead nor behind never entered his mind. Automatically, he reached out and, leaving a dollar on the table, picked up the other and held it in his palm. He watched the motionless dice, and waited.

  Now all bets were paid, and the new bets were down. The cupped hand snatched up the dice; they tumbled over the tabletop, hit, stopped and Eight is the point, called the never-tired voice, and the other man shifted the marker. Again the dice shot forward, bounced, then stopped, showing a six and an ace. Seven, a loser! And Ben's dollar disappeared, and again he stood, precisely as before: four dollars in his left hand, one in his right.

  Without his actually having to think it through again, the same reasoning that had applied before seemed to apply now; he had been prepared to lose the fifth dollar then, and so he was prepared to now. He put the big coin on the Line.

  The man at his left spoke; he was a sun-burned farmer, chinking three silver dollars in his half-closed fist. Haven't seen a good roll yet. His tone implied a conventionally amused disgust, yet, also, a cheerful assumption that a good roll was bound to come along.

  Should be one soon, Ben answered, nodding. He hoped it was an appropriate reply, and was aware of a feeling of companionship with this little circle of people. A new shooter, and a good one, the stick man was chanting. New shooter coming out. His stout partner took a handful of red dice from the table ledge and spilled them on the felt before a middle-aged woman on the last shooter's left.

  She hesitated, then selected two dice, and the gray-haired dealer scooped up the others. Bashfully, she slid a dollar onto the table, and Ben knew she had never gambled before. Should be lucky; beginner's luck, he thought, unaware of any contradiction between this feeling and his confidence in the last shooter's experience.

  She tossed the dice awkwardly, with not nearly enough force to reach the backboard, and the stick man lifted his chin to ask her, Ben knew, to throw the dice harder. But instead he said nothing because the dice showed a four and a three, and Ben knew he did not wish to seem to be questioning a winning throw. Seven, a winner, he chanted, and again Ben's dollar became two, and he picked one of them up.

  Coming out for a point, new point! As the stick man guided the dice back, he leaned toward the woman and, lowering his voice kindly, said, Throw them a little harder, ma'am; they're supposed to hit the end of the table.

  She nodded, blushing slightly. Then she tossed the dice, still awkwardly, but hard. They struck and rolled; two fives. Ten, the hard way, ten's the point, pay the field! Then — over and over again, neither winning nor losing — she threw the dice out, glancing around the table apologetically for taking so long. Then she rolled six and four. Ten, easy, front-line winner, and again Ben's dollar became two, and again he removed one.

  The bets were down, the dice rolling; a four. Hard point, Ben thought, and his confidence in this woman vanished, and he knew she would roll seven and lose. The dice struck the end of the table, dropped without rolling, and the voice announced, Seven, a loser. The moving hand picked up his dollar, and once more a dozen dice were scattered before the next shooter, a little man in a gray suit.

  Once more Ben was even. There were two dollars in his right hand, and he put
one on the Line as the little man selected his dice. His arm flashing over the table, the man threw a point, and presently made it. The moving hand added a dollar to Ben's dollar, and he took one of them off.

  The little man shot twelve — Crap, a loser! — and Ben put a dollar back on the table. He wasn't getting anywhere, he thought, and when the little man rolled a point and repeated a few rolls later, it occurred to Ben that to continue removing a dollar when he won, replacing it when he lost, was almost a certain way to lose in the end; for surely the house must win more often than it lost. A possible chance to win, it seemed to him, was to gamble that a shooter would make — he remembered the phrase — two or three passes in a row, and allow his bet to stand, doubling each time.

  He wasn't sure, but he felt it was not an unreasonable hope; three passes in succession. And it would turn his dollar bet into, first, two, then four, then eight dollars. He stood motionless, leaving the two silver dollars on the table untouched, and the gray sleeve flashed out, and the dice bounded back and rolled. Again the little man cast out the dice, then again, again, still again, then, Seven, a loser; the two dollars were gone, and the dice scattered before a young Air Force corporal in suntans and blue cap.

  The dollar in Ben's right hand went down, the chevroned sleeve flew out — Yeeoh, eleven! — and almost instantly his dollar became two again. The tan sleeve flashed — Yeeoh, eleven, a repeater! — and the two dollars turned into four. His heart was pulsing strongly at the sight of the money before him. Then all belief that this easy miracle could happen again vanished; and as the corporal picked up the dice, Ben's hand reached out and took up his little stack of four dollars. The soldier lost, and — his fat reserve safe in his hand — Ben stood with a mingled feeling of surprise and accomplishment, as though he had exercised some sort of superior ability.

  Someone was behind him, and he turned and saw two women in their thirties. He moved to the left, and one of them stepped to the table beside him, nodding her thanks. She was attractive, dressed in a simple, expensive-looking sun dress. The other wore a white blouse and a peasant skirt.