The Ninth Wave

by Eugene Burdick

  Mike bent over and whispered in Hank's ear, "Take it easy, Hank. They don't bluff very easy. You're down a hundred bucks already."

  Hank did not move his hands from the table, but he turned his head and looked up at Mike. He answered, in a normal voice that everyone in the room could hear.

  "You've got it wrong, Mike," he said. "I have to find out who is willing to buy a pot and who is going to really win one. Now I know."

  The players looked up angrily, tried to find Hank's face in the gloom. They looked at his hands and one of the players swore.

  "We don't need any kibitzers, Freesmith," Hollis said. "Let Moore play his own cards. After all, he's the big gambler from L.A., isn't he?"

  The ring of men sitting in the gloom back of the table laughed. The players looked up and grinned.

  "Up yours, Hollis," Mike said.

  "Don't be vulgar," Hollis said. "Just let the big-time gambler play his own cards."

  Mike looked down at the back of Hank's head, then down the dark reach of his arms where the light suddenly caught the elbows and hands in intense white detail. Hank had not moved during the conversation.

  By ten o'clock Hank had lost three hundred and forty dollars and had won only one small pot. The other players had relaxed and between deals they began to tell short stories about summer vacations and rumours about the fraternities. At exactly ten o'clock Hollis held out his hand.

  "It's ten, Moore, and you are the big loser," he said. "How much longer do you want to play?"

  "Twelve," Hank said. "I'd like to knock off for ten minutes right now and have a cup of coffee."

  As they walked down to the coffee shop in the cellar of Encina Mike talked earnestly to Hank.

  "Look, Hank, you're in over your head," Mike said. "Play close to your vest and if you get back even just ride along. Remember we don't have enough money right now to pay off what you've lost."

  "Don't worry, Mike," Hank said. "The big winner in a poker game is the man who wins in the last hour. All you need is a couple of big pots."

  "Sure, but you haven't even won one big pot yet," Mike said.

  "That isn't important. You have to spend a little time finding out how the rest of the people play. That costs a little money, but it's worth it in the long run."

  Have you found out anything?" Mike asked. "Hell no."

  "I have," Hank said. "For example, the three boys in the seersucker suits are cheating. When one of them has a good hand he signals to the other two . . . pulls his ear, yawns, scratches his armpit, stuff like that. Then the other two keep raising the bets to build up the pot. It's the only simple way to cheat in poker there is. It gives you just the slight mathematical edge that you need."

  "Well, for Christ's sake let's call them on it," Mike said. "Let's sock one of the bastards and call the game off."

  "Don't get excited, Mike. Now I know when one of them has a good hand. I'm better off than they are."

  Mike started to talk again, but they walked into the coffee shop and the other players were there. Mike and Hank sat in a booth by themselves and drank their coffee and then walked back up to Hollis' room.

  The first game was five-card stud. Hank got a king down and then his first up card was a king. Hollis had an ace up. The rest of the up cards were low. Hollis bent forward to look at the other cards and his face came down into the light. He tugged at his ear lobe.

  Mike looked at Hollis carefully. Hollis was now wearing one of the seersucker coats. Mike realized that he must have changed with one of the other boys during the coffee bred. Slowly it washed over Mike that the seersucker coats were part of the plan; they were a sort of signal. The three players in the seersucker coats supported one another in the betting, but all of them must be in on it. Mike had a quick, grinding impulse to reach across the table and slap Hollis in the face and tell him that he knew they were all cheating.

  Hollis checked. The next player in a seersucker coat bet ten dollars. Someone else raised that five dollars. Hank went along.

  Mike wanted to bend down and tell Hank what was happening, to warn him that they were sandbagging the betting, but he was sure that he could not control his voice. He gripped the back of Hank's chair.

  Use your eyes, Hank, he thought. Don't you see that Hollis has aces back to back. He just gave the signal.

  On the next card Hank drew another king. No one else improved their hand. Again Hollis checked and one of the other players bet ten dollars. Someone else raised. Hank went along. So did everyone else.

  On the fourth card no one visibly improved his hand. Hank bet twenty-five dollars on his two kings showing. Hollis raised twenty dollars. Four of the players folded.

  Mike rapidly counted the chips. There was almost five hundred dollars in the pot. When the last cards were dealt Hank had not improved his hand and, apparently, no one else had. Mike's stomach was knotted hard.

  "It's up to you, Moore," Hollis said. "You've got the two kings showing."

  "Thirty dollars," Hank said.

  "Raise you thirty," Hollis said.

  "Thirty more," Hank said. "If it doesn't drive you out."

  Hollis saw Hank's raise, but the other player folded. Mike realized that Hank had Hollis beaten; that there was no possible way that Hollis could win. Mike looked down and saw that Hank's hands were still on the table, the way they had been all evening.

  "What do you mean, drive me out?" HoUis said. Slowly his face puckered with cunning. "You don't think you're bluffing me, Moore? You're trying to buy it, aren't you? Just like you said I was earlier."

  Hank did not reply.

  "Well, I'll tell you, Moore. Just for this one hand and just to show you that we know how to give a big L.A. gambler some fun I'll raise you one hundred dollars and give you the right to bump if you want."

  Hollis leaned forward, suddenly triumphant. His face came into the light, lean and tanned, and he grinned at Hank. His smile faded as Hank counted out ten blue chips. Then Hank counted out another ten blue chips and threw them on the table.

  "I raise you a hundred dollars, Hollis," Hank said. Hollis put in ten more blue chips. The pot was almost a thousand dollars now. The room was very quiet. Down the hall a door slammed, bare feet sounded on the corridor floor; disembodied, wet, lonely. A shower hissed somewhere.

  "Show your cards, Moore," Hollis said.

  Hank was opening a fresh pack of cigarettes. He went on with it. He neatly tore the cellophane back, ripped the paper and pulled out a cigarette. He lit the cigarette. Then he reached down and turned over his hole card.

  The three kings burned on the table.

  Hollis whimpered.

  The rest was easy. Hollis bet frantically, desperate to win back the money he had lost. He no longer looked for signals or gave them. He snatched up his cards, glanced at them and if they were bad his face collapsed. He bet too heavily, too soon, when they were good. The other players. played aimlessly, staring at Hollis and not knowing quite what to do.

  Hank only went along with three hands in the last hour of play. But he won all of them and they were the three biggest pots.

  Hank won eleven hundred dollars that night. Hollis wrote him a check, his hand trembling as he wrote. The whole room held its breath as Hank took the check, turned and left the room without saying a word to anyone.

  When Hank and Mike were in their room Hank handed the check to Mike.

  "Put it in the kitty," he said.

  He walked over and picked up his physiology book. He put his feet on the desk and opened the book. Before he started to read he looked up.

  "Mike, I know you rigged that game with Hollis," he said. "Don't do it again. I won't play next time. I don't like Hollis, but I won't play him again. Him or anyone."

  "You're right. I rigged it. Maybe I'll do it again if I think I can get away with it," Mike said. "You scared the hell out of me for a few hours, but it was worth it"

  "Don't do it again."

  "Don't try and scare me," Mike said. "You didn't have to
play if you didn't want to. You won't have to play the next time. Don't try to load your problems off on me. I rigged it but it was a pretty damned obvious job of rigging and it didn't fool you a bit You played because you wanted to."

  Hank looked steadily at Mike for a moment. Then he grinned.

  "That's why I like you, Mike," he said. "You are so lacking in morals yourself that you can always spot immorality in someone else. You're right. I didn't have to play. It's just that I couldn't resist playing Hollis. But I won't play next time. Even if you rig it very smoothly."

  Mike knew that Hank meant it. At once Mike gave up any thought of ever trying it.

  "O.K. How about calling a cab and riding down to Paly and spending a few bucks on some ham and eggs," Mike said.

  They went to the all-night diner and each had four eggs, ham, pancakes, hashed-brown potatoes and toast. Hank ate a second order and then they walked slowly back to the campus.

  Mike remembered the poker game long after the money was spent. He remembered it because Hollis tried to become friendly with Hank. He invited Hank to go East with him for the Christmas holidays. Hank refused. Hollis sent Hank a set of cuff links and six shirts with French cuffs for Christmas. Hank hocked them for ten dollars. When Hollis' family came to Stanford in the spring he proudly introduced them to Hank and for two days Hank rode around the Peninsula in a rented Cadillac showing the family the sights. Hollis tried to get Hank pledged to his own fraternity and was outraged when he discovered that they did not pledge Jews and Hank would not join anyway.

  Finally Hank got bored with it and told Hollis to stop coming around. Hank said it in front of Mike and Hollis was embarrassed. Hollis smiled wistfully at Hank and then he turned and with his confident, easygoing walk he left the room.

  Mike took a piece of paper off his desk and slowly wrote a single sentence on it: "Freesmith's Unnumbered Principle: People appear to love the man who humbles them." He looked at it for a moment and then shoved it into the desk drawer, along with the other abandoned pieces of paper that contained similar sentences.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hot Bread and Butter

  In their junior year, Mike and Hank rented a small cottage behind a professor's house on the campus. The cottage was isolated from the professor's house by a thick hedge, a lemon tree and two apricot trees. The cottage was very cheap. It rented for sixteen dollars a month.

  In their sophomore year they had both gotten scholarships which paid for tuition. They still had to pay for books, the rent on the cottage, laundry and, finally, food. The food was the worst. By their junior year they had spent almost all of the poker winnings on food. And most of the food had been eaten by Hank.

  Hank became hungrier all the time. Even when he had eggs, bacon, fried potatoes and toast for breakfast he was hungry by the middle of the morning and had to eat three or four doughnuts and a few cups of coffee. It was the same in the middle of the afternoon. He would stand by the counter in the soda fountain and rapidly eat three large ice cream cones; his teeth crunching the soft shell of the cone, not tasting the ice cream, but forcing it down his throat as fast as he could. Vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, coffee, rocky-road; he ate all of them with equal eagerness. He was unaware that he bunched his shoulders when he ate, bent slightly forward, as if protecting the food he was eating or sheltering it from the view of others. All he knew was that when he had eaten he could go back to his books and study again.

  But it was the nights that were difficult. They would be reading in the cottage and around midnight Hank would look up from his books. In front of him was the evidence of the night's work; pencil drawings of intricate ganglia, cross sections of muscle tissues, the beautiful and exotic shapes of bacteria. He wanted to go on with the reading, but he could not. Somewhere, at the very outer edge of his consciousness, the thin taut membrane of his attention had been slit. It was tiny and faraway, he could almost ignore it, but that was impossible. Hunger came gushing in on him. His mouth started to water, his stomach turned tight with hunger, his intestines growled. He looked back at the book and the words were dim and blurred. His fingertips trembled slightly and he knew he could not read until he had eaten.

  He stood up and spoke in a voice that was falsely casual.

  "I'm going over to the Cellar for a bite," he said. "Want to come along?"

  Mike would shake his head and Hank walked over to the bureau and took two dollars out of the cigar box. Forty-five minutes later he would return and slip into the room. He picked up his book. For a moment he was aware of the hard round knob of his belly pushing against his belt, a strange distension that would vanish in an hour and leave him skinnier than before. Almost with disgust he thought of the hamburgers, malted milk and pie that he had eaten. Then he would be lost in the book again and would not think of anything until three in the morning when he stood up, stripped off his clothes and fell naked into bed. In the morning he would step out of the bed, brush his teeth and with the sweet minty flavor of the toothpaste still in his mouth he would be ravenous. He would trot down the street to the Cellar.

  Hank tried everything to cut down his appetite. Once, for a three-week period, he took little cellulose reducing pills, followed by three glasses of water. The pills expanded into a huge mass in his stomach, his belly bulged out round and turgid. But the hunger was still there, cutting through the soft watery mass of cellulose. He had to eat, forcing the food into an already full stomach and he felt distended, unnatural. Another time he tried eating fruit and nuts because someone told him that these would reduce his appetite. He ate peaches, oranges, apples, bananas, grapefruit and pears. He ate them until the juice dripped off his chin and he broke out in a rash. But they did not reduce his appetite.

  In the end he gave up and attempted to keep a stock of food in the cottage. It did not matter what the food was, just so there was plenty of it. He ate soya-bean cereal with buttermilk, yogurt and cheese. The cottage was littered with the moist paper cartons in which delicatessens sell their yellowish potato salad, milk bottles, soda-cracker crumbs, the skin of salamis, crusts, apple cores and banana peels.

  Even so there were nights when there was no food in the cottage, for Hank did not think of food when he was close to a grocery store. He discovered slowly all of the restaurants in the town that were open all night. His favorite was a Chinese restaurant that served a huge bowl of fried rice and shreds of pork for fifty cents. When this was closed he ate at a drugstore which featured a hot roast beef sandwich which floated in a circle of solid, glycerinlike gravy and was flanked by two round balls of mashed potatoes.

  "We have to do something about our food costs," Mike said at the beginning of their junior year. "If we can cut down on what we are spending there we can get by the rest of this year and our senior year on what is left of the poker money."

  "What about hashing?" Hank asked. "Lots of guys have hashing jobs. Just wait on table and you get your lunch and dinner."

  "But what about the rest of the time? What do we eat then?" Mike asked.

  Hank squirmed in the chair. He looked down at his fingers. They were dirty. His stomach convulsed, saliva gathered in the back of his mouth and poured around his teeth. He was hungry. Like an animal, he thought, Like a slobbering, damned animal.

  "I said no crap about money, Mike," Hank said. "For Christ's sake we've still got money in the cigar box, haven't we?"

  "Sure. About three hundred bucks," Mike said.

  "Well, let's worry when that's gone."

  Hank looked back at his book, picked up his pencil.

  "No. We'll worry about it now," Mike said. "It we wait until next year it'll be too late."

  "I'm not going to worry about it," Hank said. He refused to look up from his book.

  "I'll worry about it," Mike said. "I just want to make sure you'll go along with whatever arrangements I make."

  "O.K., O.K. I'll go along," Hank said. He started to copy the complicated, beautifully involved bones of the knee onto a fresh page. "With anything
. Stop talking about it."

  Mike got Hank a job in a bakery. It was a perfect job. Hank only had to work from eight at night until midnight. When he came to the bakery everyone else had left. Hank's job was to operate the bread-wrapping machine. The cooling loaves were neatly stacked in a huge rotating rack and Hank had only to load the machine with wax paper and press the button. The loaves came pouring out the side of the machine, each of them neatly wrapped. Every fifteen minutes a bell rang and the machine needed more wax paper. The rest of the time Hank could read. It was perfect.

  When Hank came to work the first thing he did each night was to take a loaf of hot bread and cut it in half. Then he went to the refrigerator and took out a cube of butter. He put the cube of butter between the halves of hot bread. The butter melted into a warm, yellow pool. When he bit into the bread he could smell the warm yeasty odor and the butter ran between his fingers. He usually ate two loaves of bread and butter during his four-hour shift. When he left at midnight he carefully selected a big sack of coffee cakes, doughnuts, rye bread, cookies and cupcakes. During the day he ate out of the bag, washing the food down with a few quarts of milk. He never became tired of the bakery goods. During the time he was working at the bakery he actually saved money.