King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  “Really?” I had answered, somewhat too coldly. There was something playful and—what was the right word—mocking in his voice, and though I had half a mind to hang up on him, I kept on listening.

  “Aha … well, how best to put this? I live in a group house, all wonderful people. We’ve got a great sense of community. Everyone is very heavily into their studies. Could be just the spot for you.”

  “Well, no offense, Raines, but …”

  “Jeremy,” came the instant reply.

  “No offense, Jeremy, but I’m not looking to make friends or hang out. I just want to get some reading done. I’ve got a very tough course load.”

  “Absolutely,” came the swift reply. “Oh, yes, absolutely. The work must come first. No one understands that better than we do. We are all serious students at good old Calvert College. What’s your major?”

  “Literature,” I said proudly (with perhaps just a touch of arrogance).

  “Wonderful. I’m a psychology major myself.”

  I felt a certain sense of smug satisfaction and thought of Dr. Spaulding’s endless put-downs of the “educationalists and their little twin brothers, the psychologists.” Indeed, the very fact that Raines was a psychology major nearly convinced me to hang up the phone on him. But before I could make the move, he preempted my unspoken criticism.

  “Of course, psychology at Calvert is still in the Stone Age, but I’m working on some alternatives to the usual Freudian junk. Love to talk about it with you, get your feedback on it.”

  “You would? But you don’t even know me,” I said.

  “Details, details,” Raines said. “I can tell you’re intelligent though. You’re studying with Spaulding, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but how did you know that?”

  “Well, if you’re a serious lit major you have to get Spauldingized,” he said. “A good man, a bit old-fashioned, of course, but a good man, nonetheless.”

  “Oh, really,” I said, offended. “Well, I’m glad you approve of him.”

  There was a brief silence on the other end of the line.

  “Well, I can see you’re deeply influenced by him. That’s fine. Don’t get me wrong. He’s first rate. It’s just that there’s newer things under the old Bal’mere sun.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, intensely annoyed by his offhand arrogance.

  “Perhaps,” Raines said, “we should discuss all this. Anyway, listen, we’ve got a great house. What better place to study than in a good house with congenial folks? So why don’t you come down tomorrow about three and check us out?”

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose I could. But no promises.”

  “Of course not. Wouldn’t think of it. We’re at 1529 Chateau Avenue. Just a block off the conveniently located York Road. See you tomorrow, lad.”

  I hung up and shook my head. The nerve of the man, attacking Dr. Spaulding. And what of Raines’s odd figures of speech (even stranger, it suddenly seemed to me, than Dr. S. himself). “See you tomorrow, lad?” There was a kind of irony in his voice that sounded like W.C. Fields. On the other hand, that “conveniently located” bit made him sound like some kind of local game show host, the kind of windbag who you might see interviewing people on “Duckpins for Dollars.” Just who really lay behind all the verbal parody seemed a mystery to me, and though I once more told myself I didn’t have time to play games, I was intrigued.

  Now, I found myself wandering tensely around the living room of the strange house, debating whether I should go upstairs to the bedroom to find who was playing Coltrane.

  On second thought, going upstairs didn’t seem a good idea after all. It might be one of the other roommates, and he or she may not take it lightly that a stranger was intruding.

  Then there was the possibility that Raines had forgotten our meeting, or even worse, maybe I’d gotten the wrong address. The thought made me a little panicky. Chateau Avenue was in Govans, the very neighborhood I’d been born in. But that was back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was still lily white and safe. In 1965, Govans was what social critics called a “changing neighborhood.” Chateau Avenue still looked like a mostly white block—there had been a few old people watering their lawns when I’d walked down from the streetcar stop—but it was clearly heading in the other direction. It was even possible—given the wailing Coltrane saxophone—that I was this very minute standing in some Negro’s house. The thought made my body stiffen in fear. Lord, if a huge and angry Negro came walking in and found this confused white boy pacing nervously in his living room, God only knew what kind of trouble I could be in.

  With that in mind, I turned to beat a hasty retreat toward the door, but I hadn’t gone three steps when the noise started. A horrible clanging, like the sound of a great metal robot’s footsteps, began just beneath my feet. The living room floor shook violently and even the dining room walls vibrated to the hideous sound. I grabbed onto a sofa arm and held on for dear life, as the infernal noise grew louder, and the floor heaved up and down. It was not unlike standing in the middle of hell.

  For a breathless few seconds I stood stock-still and debated whether I should find the source of the racket or if I should escape now, while I was still in one piece.

  I nearly staggered out of the door, but curiosity won out over my own good sense, and I turned and headed toward the back of the house. Slowly, I walked toward the kitchen, which was shaking so violently that pots and pans hanging on the walls shook up and down, setting off a further commotion. Even the refrigerator itself shook off its foundations, and I thought of houses I’d read about, houses inhabited by restless, furious ghosts. Good God, the place was right out of Turn of the Screw.

  I was about to give it up and head out the backdoor when I saw a door open to the basement. I walked toward it, grabbing onto rollicking chairbacks for support, and taking a deep breath, I started down the ancient rotting steps. As I descended into the damp basement, the noise became unbearably loud, but by the time I was halfway down into that damp hellhole, I became aware of yet another sound—one even stranger than the metallic clang. Indeed, this second sound was so eerie that it gave me chills in my arm and chest. It was the sound of people chanting, a couple of men’s voices for certain and at least one girl’s. I stopped, trying to make out the two words they chanted over and over again. It seemed impossible, but they were chanting the words “Iron ore, iron ore, iron ore.” What in God’s name could that mean?

  And why did I go on? Indeed, that is something I have asked myself many times since that fateful day and I think the answer is simple. I was young and it was an adventure, a true mystery, my own mystery that I had discovered on my own. And in spite of all my efforts to seem and act like Lionel Trilling or Dr. Spaulding, there was something else that second being born in me, something that had its own needs, had to take its own risks, even at the risk of death (which occurred to me as a real possibility as the consequence of walking to the bottom of those steps).

  Now as I descended toward the damp, musty-smelling cellar, the sound grew louder and this time it was almost as if the words were being sung in some twisted Hindulike harmony: “I-ron ore!! I-ron ore! I-ron ore!”

  I took the rest of the steps in a leap and looked out into the old yellow-bulbed cellar.

  Across the room was some kind of huge black steel machine as big as a church organ, but which, upon closer inspection, looked more like a giant typewriter of some kind. Sitting at it and banging away on the huge keys was an intense looking young man with eyes as blue as the Chesapeake Bay. He wasn’t typing on paper, however, but on what looked like a roll of the plastic I’d seen hanging off the front porch.

  I blinked and stared at the mad figure sitting behind the keyboard of the giant black typewriter. He wore a filthy once-white business shirt, much like the ones I’d seen discreetly balled up on the living room floor; wrinkled, stained, and baggy gray dress pants; and a pair of terminally scuffed cordovans. Though he was only a few years older than me, about twenty-five, he was
already going bald, and what few strands of blond hair that were left stood up in a kind of wild, untamable cowlick. He had narrow, almost Oriental, eyes, and there was an idiotically happy lopsided grin on his face, which revealed a likable and sensual gap between his front teeth. I stood there astonished, unable to take my eyes off of him. Indeed, I had never seen such a complex, comical-looking man in my life. He looked like some kind of old movie comedian, a combination of wistful Chaplin, sour-faced Buster Keaton, with more than a little of the demented Moe Howard thrown in.

  Next to the machine, a short, powerfully built boy and a very fleshy, sexy blond girl prostrated themselves, throwing their arms wildly up in the air and then back down to the ground, as if they were slaves worshipping this weird, comical god and his monstrous typing machine. It was they who chanted the strange words again and again: “I-ron ore! I-ron ore! I-ron ore!”

  The man seated at the infernal contraption brought his right hand down on it, dramatically punched a key, then lifted it off in a grand burlesque gesture as if he were a drunken concert pianist. As he did this, the two slaves laughed wildly and chanted again. Smiling maniacally, spittle flying from his crooked mouth, the madman smashed his left hand down on the machine and typed in yet another letter. The roll of plastic squirted another inch through the machine and came looping crazily from the top. And now I noticed that there seemed to be something embalmed inside that coiled mass of plastic. From my vantage point on the other side of the room they looked like baseball cards, the kind I had collected as a child.

  I shook my head and tried clearing my throat, and moments later the seated man looked up.

  “Ahhhh, my boy, Thomas Fallon, I presume. Welcome to the Hellhole.”

  The two chanters stopped and looked up. They seemed not at all embarrassed by their actions.

  “Jeremy Raines?” I said.

  “One and the same, lad,” Raines said, smiling grandly. “Just worshipping the old embosser. Or as we Hellhole Dwellers call it, the old iron ore machine. ‘Old Iron’ gets kind of temperamental, and studies have shown that a certain amount of worship and praise makes it run smooth as silk.”

  “Oh, well, of course that explains the chanting then,” I said.

  Jeremy laughed a little, nodding his head up and down as if he were listening to some private joke. His wispy hair hung over his narrow blue eyes.

  “No,” he said, “that doesn’t begin to explain it. All in due time, my boy. Meanwhile, you must meet some of the loyal employees of Identi-Card. This is Eddie Eckel and his traveling companion, Miss Babe McCallister.”

  I looked at the short wild-faced man. He was dark complexioned, handsome in a brutal, almost apelike way, and wore a jet-black T-shirt, black Le vis, and black motorcycle boots. It was clear from his powerful arms that he was a person to be reckoned with, but his exceedingly short, bowed legs gave him a comical look. Holding his hand and smiling widely was a chubby but attractively buxom blonde with curly Shirley Temple ringlets on top of her head. She, too, was dressed completely in black.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, giving them what I hoped would be taken as my cool, ironic smile.

  The woman, Babe, smiled sweetly, but Eddie Eckel just shook his head.

  “You thinking about moving in here, bud?” he said in a rough street voice. Though he dressed like a young Brando, his voice was that of a Glen Burnie redneck.

  “Perhaps,” I said, trying to look both friendly and sound formidable at the same time.

  “Hmmm, ma-haps,” Eddie said. There was a playful mockery in his voice, and I felt the tension growing in my back and neck.

  “Now, my boy, let me show you around. There is much … a great deal you need to know,” Raines said, gesturing broadly.

  “Jeremy,” Babe interrupted. “Don’t forget your meeting at Hopkins. It’s at three-thirty, and you have to change your shirt before you go, ‘cause that one looks like somebody’s science project.”

  Raines looked down at his sub-stained shirt. He picked off a piece of dried lettuce and popped it in his mouth.

  “Tasty,” he said. “Harry Little’s makes a hell of a sub. Hope Sister Lulu’s managed to find one that’s a little more presentable.”

  “Sister who?” I asked.

  “Another of our happy band,” Raines said. “Look, Tom, why don’t you come with me? The meeting won’t be long, and we can roll back here and see about the house later today.”

  “You want me to come with you while you do business?” I said, incredulous. “Look, I really have to get back to my studies, so I’m afraid that would be …”

  “Well, of course you do, my boy,” Jeremy interrupted. “You have things to do, people to see. On the other hand, you might find all this amusing.”

  I shook my head doubtfully. This was not at all what I had bargained for. If anything, this house seemed less suitable for serious scholarship than my parents’. I started to voice these objections, but when I looked up at Jeremy Raines, I found myself curiously unable to speak, paralyzed by his friendly, cockeyed smile.

  What was it about that face—some openness, some charm, some boyish roguishness that I hadn’t seen since I’d hung around with my lost friends from high school. Indeed, since I’d started college, I’d scarcely made any friends at all, so intent I was on seeming adult and full of high seriousness. Raines’s impish smile promised something illicit, something I knew I should resist at once, which made it all the more attractive.

  Now he opened both his palms as if he were inviting me to partake in some great adventure.

  “Come on along, my friend,” he said. “Why not?”

  I stuttered and sputtered, fully intending to tell him exactly “why not,” but for some reason I found myself hedging: “Well, I don’t know if …”

  Then he cocked his head to the left and winked at me. It was a wink that said that we both knew my objections were going to be swept away sooner or later, so why not give in at once and join in the fun. Still, I had no intention of letting him simply browbeat me into anything. As a budding gentleman and a scholar, I had learned from W. B. Yeats to “pass a cold eye on life and death.” I made up my mind to say “forget it,” but when I managed to speak, I instead said the fateful words: “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm to take a few hours off …”

  “That’s the spirit,” Jeremy interrupted. He turned, put a long, muscular arm around Babe, and smiled at Eddie.

  “Ah, the Babe,” he said. “We could not function around here without the lovely Babe.”

  Though she scowled, it was completely obvious that she adored him.

  “Before you go, you should have your brown rice, Jeremy,” she said in a motherly tone of voice.

  Jeremy bowed to her in a parody of courtliness, then pulled me by the arm, and I found myself following him up the steps.

  “Love the Babe,” he said. “No one better. But she’s a kind of a health food nut. What we need to do is get out on the old highway, eat giant death-ball burgers, and act like Americans. Why the hell not?”

  He laughed wildly, and in spite of myself, I found myself laughing back, and seconds later I was racing after him up the rotting cellar steps.

  We didn’t quite make it out of the house before things became more complicated. Sitting in the living room in the outrageous barber chair (which she had jacked up, so that she was a good four feet off the living room floor) and having a drink was a stunning-looking woman of about thirty. She wore skin-tight midnight blue satin capri pants and a form-fitting, sleeveless fire engine red turtleneck sweater. Her hair was jet black and hung loosely around her shoulders. Her legs were long and muscular, and she had the largest, most perfectly shaped pair of breasts in North America (or at least in Baltimore). Upstairs, I could hear John Coltrane still wailing away.

  “Sister Lulu,” Jeremy said in his arch, amused way. “Having a little afternoon pick-me-up, are we?”

  “Yes, we are,” Sister Lulu said, running a long sensuous tongue around her lips as
she rattled her ice cubes. “Scotch on the rocks, and we are enjoying it immensely. Might I fix you both a huge one?”

  She spun around in the chair twice, lowered it quickly, and reached for a bottle and an ice bucket that sat next to the ancient gold-filigreed reading lamp, but Raines waved her off.

  “Afraid not, Sister,” Raines said. “Late for my business engagement.”

  “I ironed a shirt for you,” Lulu said, smiling and pointing to the sofa.

  There, hung neatly, was a freshly ironed shirt, with only one mustard stain on the sleeve.

  “Sorry about that, Jeremy,” Sister Lulu said. “You’re such a pig though.”

  “It’s true, I’m afraid,” Jeremy said. “Thanks, Lulu, and let me introduce you to a new friend. This is Tommy Fallon. He’s a fellow student at Calvert, a literature major, and he’s thinking about becoming a member of our little family.”

  He crossed over to the couch and took his filthy shirt off. His body was muscular and hard, with a well-defined chest and rib cage. Given his sloppy nature, his build came as a surprise to me.

  “You’ll like it here, Tommy. We have our share of fun.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I said, watching as Raines wrinkled the old shirt into a ball and threw it into the corner with all the others. “But I’m looking for a place to study.”

  As I spoke, I was aware that I must have sounded like a pompous fool.

  She tossed her head back in a mock-haughty way and took a long belt of her Scotch.

  “Well, honey,” she said. “Work hard, play harder. That’s our motto.”

  “Gotta get rolling,” Jeremy said.

  He gave her a squeeze, and she rewarded him with a long kiss on the mouth.

  “Knock ‘em dead,” Sister Lulu said, taking a long sip from her drink. “Nice meeting you, Tom. Hope you come back, honey, ‘cause I like a serious man.”

  She laughed wickedly and spun around twice again, and her huge breasts shook like two perfect Jello molds.

  Jeremy laughed, and I couldn’t help smiling myself. Then we were out the door.