by Mark Joseph
“You’re full of shit, Alex, right up to your brown eyeballs.”
Smack.
“God damned mosquitoes.”
“Gimme another beer. Where’s Bobby?”
“He and the broad went off somewhere.”
Smack.
“I raise a buck,” Dean repeated and slapped a dollar bill on the table.
“The limit is two bits,” Charlie protested vehemently. “It’s always been a quarter. Shit.”
“Not anymore. You don’t have to play, Charlie.”
“Damn right, if you can’t play by the rules, I fold. Do you have any idea where we are?”
“Nope, but there’s no waterfall on the Sacramento,” Dean said. “I know that for a fact. We’re on some other river, maybe the Yuba or the American. I dunno.”
“I see the buck and raise a buck,” Alex said. “Nelson?”
“I’m in. Okay, roll ’em, big daddy.”
“A five to Alex no help, a three to Nelson no help, and a six to me for a pair of sixes. A buck on the sixes.”
“I raise a buck,” Alex said. “You don’t scare me by raising the stakes, Dean.”
“I’m out,” Nelson said.
“I see your raise and raise you back two bucks.”
“I call,” Alex said. “Deal.”
“Another five to you makes a pair and a queen to me. Two bucks.”
“See your two and raise five.”
Alex had noticed that Dean bet conservatively when he had good cards and wildly when he was bluffing. Raising five bucks called his bluff.
Dean plunged. “I see your five and raise you a case of Schlitz.”
“You wanna bet beer? You run out of money? It was your idea to toss the limit, you jerk.”
“I raise you a case of beer, motherfucker.”
“Jesus, Dean, you really know how to screw up a card game.”
“What do you expect from a guy who throws all the maps into the river?”
“I’ll see your case of beer. Deal.”
“Let’s have a brewski before I deal the last card, okay? Hey, Charlie, I got a rule for ya. How about we drink a beer with every card? Ha ha.”
“You’re doing that anyway, Deano. Is there anything to eat on this boat?”
“Beanie wienie.”
Secured against the current with a long rope tied to a stout tree, the boat was pulled partway up a gravel and clam shell beach on a small, wooded island. The boys had planned to erect a tent and set up camp, but because of the bugs the tent remained rolled up and stowed in the forward cabin. The moon and stars and a Coleman lantern provided enough light in the galley to play cards.
“C’mon, Dean, let’s see the last card.”
“All right. A four to Alex and, ho ho, another queen to me for two pair. I bet two cases of beer.”
“Uh uh, cash only, Mr. Studley.”
Dean pulled out his wallet, picked out a twenty, and threw it on the table.
“Twenny bucks,” he said.
“See your twenty,” Alex said, magically producing a roll of banknotes, “and raise you twenty.”
“Holy shit,” Charlie said.
“That’s all I have,” Dean said. “That’s gas money to get us home.”
“I’ll take your marker,” Alex said, turning over his hole card, the five of hearts. “Can you beat three fives?”
Dean screamed, “You motherfucker!” and raked the table with his forearm sending beer, money, and chips flying across the galley. Then he cracked up and, laughing and sputtering like a maniac, popped open another Schlitz and chugged it.
Nelson began to sing, “A hundred bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around, ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.”
Alex and Charlie joined in. “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall.”
Dean added a baritone, and the bottles came off the wall one by one as the old camp song echoed over the river. Somewhere around the thirty-seventh chorus the pungent odor of burning hot dogs and beans wafted into the air. Laughter, shouts, rollicking crashes and splashes, horrendous off-key singing, the bravura of young men, a cheerful tableau in a buggy paradise.
27
At the mouth of Shanghai Bend the levees formed an artificial canyon that concealed all signs of life in the broad valley beyond—no lights, no highway buzz, no vast tracts of lettuce and tomatoes, only the tangled wilderness of a small island that lay close to the east bank.
Picking through the underbrush with a flashlight, Bobby and Sally could hear the cheerful, rowdy noise from the boat over the hiss of the falls.
“Sounds like your friends are having fun, playing cards and whooping it up,” Sally said.
Bobby wisecracked, “They’re practicing for college.”
“If I wasn’t here, you’d be with them, wouldn’t you?”
Smack. “There’s a lot of bugs out here,” he said. “We’re being eaten alive.”
“Do you want to go back to the boat?” she asked.
“Nah. There’s probably more bugs over there because of the lights.”
They reached the tip of the island which afforded a splendid view of the falls. Fifty years earlier, heavy pumps and dredges had gouged tons of clay from the river bottom and formed the cataract, a series of staggered terraces and stunted waterfalls, the deepest of which in June was no more than two feet. Between the vertical drops, whitewater swirled around strange, pitted boulders, the tortured dregs of the last gold rush. Although Bobby knew nothing of hydraulic mining, he could tell the river had been mauled and deformed.
“This place is weird,” he said. “Look at those rocks full of holes.”
While Bobby tried to figure out what had caused the strangeness of the falls, Sally used the uniqueness of the odd formations to fire her imagination.
“Let’s pretend it’s the moon,” she said gleefully. “President Kennedy says we’ll go to the moon real soon, so here we are ahead of schedule. Our rocket ship is right over there, full of drunken astronauts, and here we are visiting the first moon river. Nobody knows the moon has a river except us. We’ve made a discovery. We’re pioneers.”
Laughing, she took Bobby’s hand and led him to the edge of the water. “I’d jump in if I could swim,” she said.
“You really can’t swim?”
“I can wade,” she declared, kicking off her tennies and rolling up her jeans.
Before Bobby could shed his hightops and socks, Sally splashed into the river, promptly slipped on the slick bottom, and fell on her ass. Delighted, she sat in the inches-deep water and let it run over her like a cool bath.
“I’m not afraid,” she said, giggling and speaking to herself in a state of wonder. “It’s not like the ocean. It even tastes good.”
Awestruck, realizing he was witnessing a moment of liberation, Bobby jammed his wallet in his shoes and jumped into the river next to Sally.
“Maybe I won’t go to San Francisco,” she said, cupping water in her palms and pouring it over her head. “Maybe I’ll stay right here forever.”
She threw her arms around him and began kissing him, saying, “Thank you thank you thank you.”
“For what?” he stammered. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You let me stay on the boat so I could come to this magical place.”
“You really think it’s magic?”
“Sure. Don’t you?”
“If it’s magic, it might be black magic,” he said.
“Places have souls,” she said. “Don’t you know that?”
She kissed him again, and this time he kissed her back. They were both soaked from head to toe and she trembled as she pushed against him.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“I’m warming up,” she answered with a giggle.
Suddenly they heard banging and crashing in the woods behind them.
�
�Hey, Bobby! Where the fuck are you, man?”
A beer can clanged off a tree.
“Hey! Yo! Bobby!” Dean’s voice echoed off the levees. “We can’t play four hands anymore. Charlie won the last hand with a pair of deuces. That’s crazy. Where are you, man?”
Bobby and Sally were standing ankle deep in the water and grinning like elves when Dean burst out of the woods.
“There you are,” he shouted. “Whatcha doin’, man? We got a game goin’.”
28
They crashed. Recognizing that they were no longer young studs with the stamina to play night and day without a break, Bobby checked into his room, taking his sudden riches with him, while the others flopped in the bedrooms and living room of the suite. They slept through the morning and past noon—dreaming perhaps of the queen of hearts—and roused themselves at a leisurely pace in mid-afternoon.
Dean called Billie.
“How’s the game, honey?”
“Interesting.”
“You winning?”
“It’s not over.”
“Hmmm. You still want me to come down tomorrow?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You hung over?”
“Yep.”
Nelson swam a few laps in the hotel pool. Alex plugged in a laptop and checked his e-mail, deleted all his messages without reading them, and then, as an afterthought, dropped the computer into the trash compactor in the kitchenette and crushed it. Charlie, always the host, ordered breakfast for everyone, coffee, aspirin, a case of beer, and another bottle of rum for Dean. The caterer’s carts were cleared away and a stack of room service trays lay outside the door. They didn’t talk much. Mose Allison was on the stereo, the shades drawn tight to blot out the useless light of day. The air conditioner whirred away. Brushed clean, the felt glistened under the lamp.
It was four o’clock on Saturday afternoon when the game resumed. Cards from a new deck whistled like bullets over the felt and landed in tidy piles for a hand of draw, Alex dealing. The ante was now a thousand dollars, the new value of a white chip. Reds were ten thousand, blues twenty-five thousand, and a bumblebee chip was worth one hundred thousand dollars. Each player started with a half million in chips, one hundred times the first buy-in.
Two million five hundred thousand dollars in five canvas bags were stacked in a corner of the living room. Even for rich men, the money was enough to make them dizzy. Under his hat, surrounded by a cloud of Lucky Strike fumes, Alex couldn’t control his smirk. Finally playing the poker game of his dreams, his eyes flicked around the table taking snapshots. Dean, hung over and sweating, corralled his chips with his arms, coddling them like babies; Charlie was flushed, his face red with wonder at what he was doing; Nelson looked grim and resolute, determined not to lose; Bobby alone was relaxed, leaning back in his chair and toying with a bumblebee chip.
As a pro, Bobby wasn’t fazed by mind-boggling stakes, but he knew the others were. They were flat-out crazy to begin with, tortured by guilt and who knows what else, and it occurred to him that perhaps they expected him to inflict punishment by taking all their money. He was happy to oblige.
“It’s only money, hey boys?” Charlie said with a nervous chuckle. “We talked about doing this for years, and now that it’s happening, Jesus.”
“It’s just cards and chips,” Alex said, not entirely convinced himself. “Can you open, Studley?”
“I open for ten,” Dean said, dropping a red chip into the pot.
“Uh oh,” Bobby said. “The captain has openers. Okay, I see your ten and raise twenty. Thirty to you, Fishman.”
“I’m in,” Charlie declared. “Thirty large.”
“I fold,” Nelson said.
Alex peeked at his cards one at a time—three sixes, the devil’s hand. He contemplated his chips and selected two blues.
“Thirty plus twenty is fifty grand.”
This time it was Dean who started laughing and sputtering, “It’s funny money, fifty thou’ on fucking openers. I call.”
“Call,” Bobby said.
“I’m still in,” Charlie said.
“One card for me,” Dean said.
Bobby tossed away two cards and said, “Give me two.”
“Three,” Charlie said. “Make ’em three big ones.”
“Dealer takes two,” Alex declared. “You opened, Deano. Your bet.”
“Ah, shit. I check.”
“Me, too,” Bobby echoed.
“Fifty thousand dollars,” Charlie shouted. “I bet fifty grand, hahaha.”
Alex looked at triple sixes and two new cards that didn’t improve his hand. Without a doubt, Charlie caught good cards and had a better three of a kind. He’d call any bet.
“Fold,” Alex said, rapping the table sharply with his knuckles.
“I’m gone,” Dean said.
“Take it, Charlie,” Bobby conceded and tossed in his cards.
Charlie shrieked with joy and stood up to rake in the pot. “I can’t fuckin’ believe it. Wow. Three eights and I win what? What’s in here? One hundred twenty big ones. Thank you, eight of spades. My lucky card.”
Alex looked up and saw Bobby smiling at him.
“Nice move,” Bobby mumbled under his breath.
“Thank you.”
“Ante up for seven stud,” Dean announced. “Rolling. Read ’em and weep. A queen, a seven, a ten, a jack, and another ten to the dealer. Queen bets.”
“I remember the last time I sat down with you boys,” Bobby said as he counted out chips to bet on the queen.
“On the boat,” Alex said.
“Yeah, on that damned boat in the middle of fucking nowhere. I was pissed off.”
“It didn’t show,” Nelson said. “You seemed happy to take our money.”
“As I recall, you all ran out of money pretty quick, and we started playing for beer.”
“Well, we didn’t have anything else.”
“Except the girl,” Charlie added.
“Fifty on the queen.” Bobby tossed two blues into the center of the table, clucked his tongue twice, and said, “Yeah, the girl.”
29
Pulled up on the beach, the boat tilted stern down which meant no level surface anywhere. Drunk as a Hollywood cowboy, Nelson had slipped off the bench and puked so many times they’d kicked him out and made him sit in the stern and hang his head over the transom. Charlie was curled up in the forward cabin, passed out, leaving Bobby, Dean, and Alex still at the table while Sally watched. Miraculously, the little radio picked up Wolfman Jack broadcasting nonstop rock and roll from Tijuana, Mexico, six hundred miles south.
“That’s it, boys and girls, I know you love it, The Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Blues comin’ right atcha from XERB, the world’s most powerful radio station. Oh yeah. Now hold onto your hats and put on your dancin’ shoes, ’cause we got a request from Bonnie in San Diego for somethin’ real special now. My main man, the godfather of soul, the baddest of the bad, Jaaaaames Brown!”
The galley deck was awash with beer foam and tin-plated steel cans that rattled with a timbre deeper and richer than aluminum, a hearty industrial tune that would soon disappear from the land. In 1963, with America on the cusp of a social revolution, liberation was in the air, in the lively beat of the music, in the desperate yearning of the lyrics. On the Toot Sweet Sally was the incarnation of liberation because she’d broken away, every teenager’s dream. To her, the scent of freedom was as heady as a bath in eau de cologne, and she felt good, a little tipsy from three beers but safer than she’d ever felt with the surfers. On the beach in L.A. a tinge of menace always lurked in the sand dunes. Posturing punks, muscleheads, killer waves. Here, with Bobby and his friends, she felt as though she’d stepped into another world with rules they could make up on the spot. So far, running away was a success.
Sally stood behind Bobby, one arm draped over his shoulders, fascinated by the game. On a hot streak, Bobby was winning hand after hand, taking all of Alex and Dean�
��s money, and when they ran out of bills and coins and started playing for beer he won all the beer.
“You think you’re Doc Holliday or what?” Dean taunted.
“Hell yes,” Bobby barked and flashed a grin at Sally. “Just like in the movies, hey, babe?”
She winked and laughed and drank a mouthful of beer.
Dean rapped knuckles on his cards and demanded, “Beat two pair aces up, Doc?”
“Dunno. What’s it worth to you to find out?”
“A case of that fancy Coors beer from Colorado.”
“That stuff is elk piss but okay, you’re on.” Bobby flipped over the seven of clubs and won again. “Three sevens, sucker. You gonna drive to Denver to get it? I don’t think this boat will make it.”
“God damn!”
Sally had never seen anything as exciting as the boys’ poker game. Surfing came close, but that was boy against ocean and this was boy against boy. It was a fight without blows, a war without weapons, and she was bright enough to understand that luck was a small part of this cerebral and emotional game. Right away she caught on to the rules, the sequence of hands, and the concept of bluffing. What else was there? Nuance and subtlety and deceit, and she thought it was the greatest thing since rock and roll.
“I want to play,” she said to the boys.
“What? You gotta be kidding,” Dean scoffed.
“Aw, c’mon, guys. You afraid?”
“You’re a girl! Jesus,” the three boys exclaimed simultaneously.
No matter how much she cajoled, they wouldn’t let her play.
“Maverick’s rules,” Bobby cited. “Women don’t play poker.”
“It’s in the book, Poker According to Maverick, and that’s our rule book,” Alex said.
“Maverick is full of it. It’s just a TV show,” she retorted, but they still wouldn’t let her play.
“The game is over anyway,” Bobby said. “I’m going to set up the tent.”
Alex wasn’t ready to quit. “What do you mean it’s over? We can still play.”
“With what? Chips? Chips don’t mean dick, and I’m tired of playing for beer we don’t have.”