by Alan Trotter
You sit down to a game of blackjack and you begin to exist at two speeds at once. The excitement comes from the leaps you make from one hand to the next—up or down a bill (or twenty, or a hundred, or whatever it is you need to get excited). A good hand and your winnings jump up a step; a few good hands in a row and you really feel like you’re climbing somewhere. But you’re making all your leaps inside a train car which is being borne slowly, steadily downhill. Because the house has the edge.
In everything there’s a house edge. The house edge is the average amount you lose relative to any bet you make. On straights in roulette, the house edge is the five and twenty you lose every hundred. When you get arrested in the city it’s the one time in three the police choose to fix you a beating. The individual leap is what you concentrate on when you sit down to a hand of blackjack, and the hands are skittish individuals, but the house edge is the larger container, and it moves at a slower, truer speed. The house edge is reliable as death.
The two gamblers had dreamed away the house edge. It made them boring.
Meanwhile _____’s strategy collapsed quickly. Every dealer on the floor had made the same argument to him in their own way: no they didn’t know a Jarecki, no _____ couldn’t see him, and either he was going to gamble or he was going to leave. Then two more men appeared from behind a curtain to make the point again. The smaller had the look animals get when they’ve grown accustomed to being beaten by the people they rely on for food and care. The larger had a nose that had been broken so many times it lay flat on his face like roadkill.
Roadkill laid his hand on _____’s shoulder. _____ shook it off and attempted to tip over a roulette table, to shrieks from the opera crowd, who fled across the room, putting some space and their women between _____ and their chips.
From the back room behind the curtain came a third man. He had grey fuzz for hair, sharp features and a cold eye for _____. This was a man called Fylan, one of Jarecki’s proxies. _____ dodged to Fylan and started to introduce himself. Roadkill caught up to him and laid a firmer hand this time. I left for the cloakroom.
*
By the time I was outside, _____ had already been deposited there. I gave him his hat and helped him off the ground. I said his strategy had collapsed quickly. He showed me a wallet and a watch and explained that the wallet belonged to the big man with the mistreated nose, and the watch belonged to Fylan, the proxy.
Neither had been missed yet, he said, but someone would come to recover them. He was going to continue to irritate them until he got what he wanted.
I dragged a mattress up the stairs to _____’s apartment and we set to waiting.
*
The apartment manager was fond of _____. He’d bring up ice in a bucket and talk to _____ while I’d sit with the bucket between my feet and work at it with an ice pick. They’d have glasses of scotch on the rocks and I’d have a tall glass of ice chips (I didn’t care much for drink, which tended to make me feel too much like my head might tip off my shoulders if I made a sudden move). I’d suck on ice chips and listen to them talk.
They talked about horses, which the apartment manager liked to play. He’d explain that he had just figured out why he’d never been a winner and now that he knew he was going to start winning big. Then he’d wait for _____ to ask him about it. He liked _____ even though _____ never did ask about his system.
The apartment manager would say that in all his years of cursed luck he’d never managed to lose his wife in a bet however hard he tried, and then he’d laugh until he left to get more. He’d talk about the cars and apartments and women he’d buy when he started winning and he talked about what he’d do with me if he could afford to have us do favours for him. A big guy like me, he figured, could do things to a lot of guys he knew deserved it.
His wife’s brother could take some hurting, could lose an inch or two in height and a pint or so of blood, he reckoned. There was a policeman who’d insisted on hauling him to court to answer a phoney vagrancy charge when all he’d done was have some drinks and forget how much coppers liked to be curtsied to and doted on. There was a woman in the building who’d no money because of all the hop she was taking—when the time came to pay the rent they’d reached an arrangement and he’d gotten something that still burned where you don’t tell the ladies. When he’d had a job at the racetrack, helping out in the stables, one time a horse came in that was more handsome than any animal he’d ever seen, so he’d put some money on it, and it won. He loved hamburger, the apartment manager, thought it was the finest food there was, and don’t try and tell him otherwise. So he figured the horse would like hamburger too and figured to treat it for the win. But the horse choked on the meat. He lost the job at the track and the son of a bitch who owned the horse shouted into his face for a good hour and more. He was sure I could do wonderful things with a thonged blackjack and that dumb horse owner’s teeth.
He gave _____ thin black cigarettes from a metal case and lighted them for him. I sucked my ice chips and listened. We watched the rain for four days, and it never once stopped.
_____ wanted me around all the time, but in the mornings when I’d watch him climb out of his bed and his shins walk past my mattress, he’d unlock the door of the apartment and I’d go for a walk, take the chance to stretch my legs.
*
One of those nights, while we were waiting, the apartment manager’s wife came up as well. She had a drink and talked about how unhappy her marriage was. Occasionally the apartment manager would help her out, reminding her of the start of a story about just how unhappy they were together, then pass her a black cigarette. She told good stories, and a dirty joke as well as anyone you ever knew.
My back had been hurting from leaning down to chip ice, so I had taken to sitting on the ground with the bucket between my thighs. A while into one of her jokes she patted the skirt that sat up over her knees and I moved over and sat between her calves. She told the rest of her joke and stroked her hands through my hair and when she finished and I was roaring with laughter she patted my head and rubbed at my shoulders roughly, appreciatively, and I moved further into the vein-outlined world of those legs. The apartment manager blew smoke rings from his black cigarettes and scratched at the itch the hop smoker had given him.
*
On the fourth day I came back to the apartment from stretching my legs and found that our waiting was done. The broken nose and his smaller, beaten friend were there. Roadkill was clearly already sore to find that _____ didn’t contain apologies, and it only soured his mood when I appeared.
Maybe he thought me coming up the stairs was a deliberate move—the two of us boxing them in. Anyway he lowered his head and charged me back into the railing of the stairs, but I got a low uppercut in before he reached me and I felt the nose give, though it didn’t stop him coming.
He had me pushed into the railing and my arms pinned, but he was clumsy and I kicked his legs out from under him. His head caught the side of the railing as he went down. He made a move to get back on his feet that was more bullheaded than graceful, so I used a fist to make sure he’d stay put.
_____ already had his smaller friend on the ground and was beating him with a belt. I took a moment to catch my breath and see if any of my ribs were broken. When _____’s arm got tired he went to his desk and wrote something out, then pulled off the sheet of paper and came over to me.
There was blood around his mouth but I couldn’t see where he’d been biting the smaller man. He often bit. Once, among our hand-breaking, I had seen him bite through a man’s cheek and pull out one of his teeth with his own. The only explanation he’d given was to say that it was already loose.
_____ stuffed the piece of paper half in Roadkill’s fly, pressed the lifted wallet into his jacket, and together we dragged the pair of them to the stairs and sent them sliding down the first flight.
The next visit we had was a telegram. It took us back to Jarecki’s casino the next evening.
*
&n
bsp; The re-ruined nose met us in the club. It had been built into a thick package of gauze—two small plastic straws sticking out where the nostrils would be. It led us through to a hidden door set into the back wall. When the door cracked I could see Fylan standing in front of a large carved desk.
_____ told me to wait outside. I didn’t want to mess things up without cause, so I stood and killed time listening to the breath whistling through those straws.
After a while, Roadkill spoke, told me his name was Bernard.
He told me I’d picked a bad one to arm for.
I told him that wasn’t how _____ and I worked.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I speak to a lot of brains out here in the cold.’
After that we didn’t talk much.
When _____ came out we had our first favour from Jarecki. _____ waved a piece of paper at me. He said there was a name and an address, and we were to search the place. I asked _____ what it was we were meant to find, and he explained that we were just meant to search.
*
The soft, pale man lived on the outskirts of everything. As soon as he saw us at his door he began apologising. It was as if he had just delivered us some bad news, and he felt cut up about it, eager to make reparations. As we went in, _____ reassured him that he had nothing to apologise for, which as far as we know could be true, though the odds are always against it.
_____ started feeling along the seam of the cushions on his seats, then slicing them open and poking around inside with his knife, like he expected to wake something sleeping in there. I unrolled the blind, standing clear to let anything that might drop out drop. And when it didn’t I peered up behind it and then, to get a better view of the nothing that was up there, tugged it down.
_____ called him Truford and asked him where it was. Truford looked at his toes like they were embarrassing him. _____ knocked down a couple of vases and asked again where it was. Truford claimed not to know what it was we wanted, which, if it was true, made all of us. _____ swept his arm through a shelf of plates and then used his shoe to rake through the pieces. It could be anywhere, anywhere at all.
I threw everything out from the cupboard underneath the sink and a bottle—bleach, by the smell—started leaking on the floor.
It might be tucked or taped behind a pipe, so I felt around behind the pipes. It was obvious before I touched one of them that I was going to burn myself on it, I could feel the heat off it, but it had to be checked. Still the burn annoyed me, and I tugged on one of the other pipes, just enough that a thin spray of water began pissing itself up against the underside of the sink.
_____ kicked loose some baseboard, then pried it free with his hands. In the bathroom I emptied the pills from their containers and the containers out of the mirrored cabinet, and pulled the cabinet off the wall. I cut the toothpaste tube open and pulled down the curtain rail from the shower and peered along its hollow, empty length. In the bedroom I pulled the pockets and the lining off the only jacket he seemed to own and filleted his mattress and pillow.
Truford was sitting on the guts and springs of one of his chairs, like a fat angel on a broken cloud. _____ asked him again where it was. He still doesn’t know, he said, which is or isn’t the same as he doesn’t know what it is. _____ separated the two pictures hanging on the wall from their frames. Neither showed Truford. I guess there’s no space for a man like Truford even on his own walls.
*
The search must have gone well, because it wasn’t long before Bernard came to the door with another job. His nose was still bandaged, but only over the bridge, so he didn’t need the straws to breath any more. This time he came with a Mexican boy of about fifteen. He spoke to _____ while the boy did nothing but flip a knife open and shut, open and shut.
*
I’m too large to make much of a tail and I sneak a bit better than I ice skate, but the work for Jarecki didn’t tend to the subtle, and made the time pass.
Say the well-loved daughter of a well-connected father fell for a tough, and the tough’s paws turned fist too easy. The father would go to Jarecki, we would go visit the tough. The friends of a new dealer at the club come to visit him at his table and the house obligingly loses to them—we would go and see how their luck stood up to a test. We’d be given somebody; we’d extract apologies, reparations, we’d ease the flow of regret.
We also turned down a few favours from Jarecki. As when _____ didn’t want to scare a girl back to work after she’d run off with a john. He’d realised that the madam, more romantic than most and caring for the girl, was, in this instance, for love conquering all. So when we let it, the madam grew a soft spot for _____, which suited him down to the ground. Other favours he turned down for less identifiable reasons. And we did favours on the side for people other than Jarecki, so we stayed what you’d call independents.
As far as I could call it, _____ only ever spoke to Fylan, the proxy, and never to Jarecki himself.
When there wasn’t work we threw cards into a hat, or we listened to the apartment manager’s stories while I chipped ice, or we rode the rollercoasters. I didn’t want to drag my mattress anywhere else, so I kept sleeping at the foot of _____’s bed.
*
I woke into darkness and to the sound of _____’s bed springs.
_____ had a routine when he would wake. First he would sit up, then he would cough for a while, a prolonged fit of coughing, like he was a cage that he had to rattle to make sure he was all awake, down inside as well and not just got his eyes open. I listened to him go through this cough—which sounds like it hurts but gives him satisfaction—then spit into the handkerchief he keeps by his bed for the purpose. Then he stood and I expected him to step over me on his way to piss and dress, and instead I got a kick in the ribs, hard as I ever have.
I’d thought before about whether _____ would ever try to kill me: how he would go about it. The threats, beginning with the first day at the fairground, didn’t worry me. I had learned that this was the sort of thing he threatened everyone with, and rarely did he mean it. But it was also true that we’d done things together in the course of our favours for Jarecki, and there are things you do with a person, shared experiences, that you’d be stupid not to hold in your mind when considering their character. These recollections aren’t something you could easily rid yourself of. It would be like digging a tick from your skin—the mouth can tear off and stay behind, still biting.
When I took the kick to my ribs I was on my side, and I tried to jack-knife my legs up to knock _____ to the ground before he did whatever he was going to do next. But instead the pain made me buckle, set me clutching at my chest, and I thought I was going to vomit. It must have looked pretty funny.
I was expecting, I guess, _____’s knife across my face or into my belly, or for him to stamp on me. Instead he mumbled something and shambled away and the lights in the bathroom flicked on, and I could hear him pissing.
When he came back out I was still clutching at my ribs, and he patted me on the shoulder and then took the glass of water that I keep by the leg of his bed, filled it up and brought it back to me. Which was white of him, and not something he’d do if he hadn’t regretted the mistake. Then he went through to the main room.
After a while he was joined by some noise at the door and then a couple of voices.
When it was clear at least one of my ribs had broken and the pain was going to make sleep impossible, I followed.
*
_____ was dealing cards to the apartment manager—who was talking about some leg show he’d seen—and to a space at the table where a black cigarette burned in an ashtray. Once he’d dealt they did a round of betting, folding the empty seat when its turn arrived. _____ was dealing the flop when the apartment manager’s wife came back in the room.
I pulled a chair up beside her and watched as they played, the apartment manager’s wife showing me her hands. Lydia she’s called—why shouldn’t she deserve a name?
Showing cards like that is a comp
liment. It shows you trust the other person not to give any hint of what the hand is like, and it’s intimate. You get a better idea of how someone else plays the game when they’re showing you their hands than you will any other way. You don’t let someone see your weaknesses like that. Women do, I guess, when they like you. And it’s okay, when it’s like it was with Lydia.
When she folded a hand pre-flop she’d tell one of her jokes, and we’d all laugh, though laughing hurt my ribs. Sometimes when she got to the end of a joke, her eyes would lock with the apartment manager’s and they’d say the last line of the joke loudly and in time, like it was a line from a song, and already laughing, and then you’d kind of see why they’d ended up together.
Eventually I left the three playing and slept with the pain. Though whenever I wasn’t lying flat on my back any more I woke up to hear about it.
*
The poker games began to happen weekly, sometimes twice a week. Normally just with _____, the apartment manager and Lydia. Sometimes with one or two friends of the apartment manager, people he knew from the track, who bet big, hurriedly, eager to lose and recreate the thrill of losing on the horses.
When someone took a break I’d sit in for them, or else Lydia would show me her hands, or else I’d just sleep and never mind the game in the main room.
When _____ plays poker with people he hasn’t played with before, he begins by playing cautiously. If he starts off betting big, no one believes him. People think they know a man like _____ very quickly. If they met him twice they’d think they knew all there was to know. And they guess from the type of man they think he is that he’s going to play recklessly.