by R. M. Koster
Nor was there much he could do about it, for as soon as León Fuertes neutralized the Civil Guard, the Yankee and Celestial Energy Corporation rerouted the palace telephones, so that whenever Alejo or Furetto or Doktor Henker picked up a phone, they got an operator who said, “Abajo Alejo,” and hung up. When he looked out over the Plaza Inchado, he saw a frieze of Abajo Alejo placards, and on the other side of the palace, out in the bay, all the men with pleasure boats turned out with the same signs, and Tito Avispa even hired a skywriter to scrawl Abajo Alejo across the cloudless heavens from dawn to dusk on the ninth. At first the demonstrators were wary, but when it was clear nothing would happen to them, they became confident, even gay, whole families together marching under the homemade signs, and on the evening of the ninth there was dancing in every square in the capital. No move was made to oust Alejo from the palace. The demonstrators stayed at the edge of the Plaza Inchado, ready to duck back up Avenida Bolívar if shooting started, and the boats maneuvered out of rifle shot from the palace, but Alejo could hear the singing and the shouting, and the placards were like a million moth wings beating at his lips. First he said he would leave the palace only as a corpse, and if the demonstrators had stormed the place, probably he would have died bravely, but when they did nothing and when he realized that no one in the country could or would listen to him, his nerve broke, and at one in the morning on the tenth he and the former Paraguayans sneaked out through a secret passage dug by General Epifanio Mojón which led under a corner of the plaza to the Alcaldía. Gunther jumped the wires on a sedan parked behind that building, and they set out through the jubilant streets for La Yegua and the Ticamalan border.
It was past three when they cleared Córdoba.
“The road is better now,” said Gunther.
“I built this section during my first administration,” said Alejo with the weary rage of resentment.
“The Führer built roads,” mused Doktor Henker. “Ach, such roads!”
At the far end of Salinas Province oil derricks stretched steel cobwebs across the dawn.
“If only we had had more oil,” said Doktor Henker. “Oil is the blood of the modern state.”
The morning sun baked them through the scrub hills of La Merced.
“This country is no good,” said Furetto, gazing through the window.
Alejo had his eyes closed behind his dark glasses. “It’s not the country,” he snarled, “it’s the people.”
An attendant recognized them when they stopped for gas at the first town in Remedios. He called the Guardia Civil in Angostura; they called Tolete in the capital. Alejo and his companions were arrested just outside Angostura. By noon he was on his way to jail in the capital, handcuffed, ankle-manacled, blindfolded, and gagged, in a closed truck with two guardias pointing shotguns at him.
25
At the same time they were expelling Alejo from the Tinieblan presidency, I was deposed from Yale.
This was largely Alejo’s fault, for he only partially disinherited me, giving me no money but passing me his tendency to push luck past the brink. I would never have made a scholar, but I knew the value of education and would have emerged as respectably degreed as Alfonso if I hadn’t been forced to live by my wits. First I needed money to live and pay my debt; then things were going so well I thought I’d build up a little capital for the future. In the end I was risking for the sake of risk, and besides, the influence of the gringo business-worldview had made me greedy. Like Alejo I went too far, and my luck ran out on me.
Alfonso’s bank draft arrived in New Haven a few hours after I did, but it barely sufficed to pay one term’s tuition. I had decided (in Tinieblas Airport) to support myself and repay Alfonso by gambling and calculated that I needed three thousand—a thousand for Alfonso, a thousand for spring term tuition and books, and a thousand to live on. There was that much and more at the Law School, where a pot-limit, table-stakes five-dollar-ante poker game was celebrated every night, but I needed a stake and therefore took a job as Spanish stand-in for Astor Dupont Pelf.
Pelf, who was related to a stock exchange of plutocrats and got an allowance of two thousand a month, had one obligation in life: to graduate from Yale as had every one of his male ancestors back to Isaiah Pelf, who had roomed with Nathan Hale. Upon receipt of a bona fide Yale B.A., Pelf’s daddy would provide a seat on the New York Exchange and Pelf’s mommy a bloc of chemical shares. Pelf’s problems would then be over, for while he was inept at academic subjects, he had a lively business sense. “An executive doesn’t clog his brain with details,” he would say in his Groton baa. “He hires experts.” And he applied this principle to his studies.
Pelf’s English themes were written by an assistant professor at Boston College, who received the topic by telephone and sent the finished work by special messenger. A Sperry-Rand physicist drove up from Bridgeport twice a term to take Pelf’s science examinations. Since his major was economics, he had three of the brighter graduate students on his payroll as consultants and met with them for brunch in a private room at Mory’s every Monday morning to plan his posture in class. For Spanish, where there were daily recitations and spot quizzes, he needed a full-time impersonator, someone who would show up at every class as Astor Pelf. His first appointee, a music major from Bolivia, had performed brilliantly for almost two years and had virtually fulfilled Pelf’s language requirement when he hanged himself from a shower spout during Easter vacation. Pelf was forced to drop the course and find a new stand-in to complete the last semester. I applied for the post and was appointed, after assuring Pelf that since wrestling season didn’t start until spring term, my athletic celebrity wouldn’t interfere. The pay was four hundred dollars, plus a clothing allowance, for no one answering to the name of Astor Pelf could be seen in anything but a J. Press suit, a pastel button-down, a rep tie, and white buckskins. I managed to get two hundred in cash as a retainer before Pelf, clasping my forearm with his right hand and patting my back with his left, eased me out of his rooms while I experienced the mixed pangs of wonder and contempt common to lackeys of Yankee imperialism.
Then I went to the registrar to arrange my own program (no classes before eleven or on Saturday), and to the gym for a nervecalming workout (rings and parallel bars, no wrestling, though there were sparrers available, or bag punching, for I wanted to conserve every nip of aggression for the poker game), and to my college dining hall for a light supper (the last meal I ever ate there, though food was included in the tuition bill), and, just forty-eight hours after Lazarillo and I had been yelped out of our cell, over (at a careful stroll under elms still leafed with summer) to the Law School.
The Law School poker game was performed in the rooms of two New York Jews named Fox and Lyon who now hold posts in the United States Justice Department, Lyon as Deputy Attorney General and Fox as Librarian at Leavenworth. They played in partnership, alternating in and out of the game as one grew tired or the other felt lucky. Fox wore a green eye-shade and when dealing stud liked to call the cards as they fell, announcing pairs and triplets and warning of possible flushes and straights. Lyon, on the other hand, had none of this finesse. He addressed everyone, including his partner, as schmuck, and his only comments as dealer were snarls like, “How many cards, schmuck?” or “High schmuck bets.” Both were excellent, players, Fox a virtuoso of the sucker bet, Lyon a thunderclap sandbagger, and they made a generous living at the felt-topped hexagonal table they had brought with them from the Bronx two years before. This came from the fish, undergraduates with large allowances, who swam up from the residential colleges each evening looking more for excitement than gain. Fox angled them delicately, complimenting them on their fine clothes and sporting spirit, throwing them a few small pots until the right hand came up. Then he would reel in his fish, murmuring, “Bad luck.” Lyon’s technique was different. “You shouldn’t play in this game, schmuck,” he would say. “You’re a fish, and you’re going to lose,” and the fellow would get angry and decide to show that smart-a
ss New York kike who was a fish, and he’d lose just as Lyon said. “Bad luck,” Fox would say when a fish tapped out and hunched pitifully in his chair, wondering what to tell daddy. “You’re a fish, schmuck,” Lyon would say, raking in the pot. “How do you expect to win?” And as soon as his next check came, the fish would wiggle back.
There were other players who were not fish: Mike Qualm, who played goalie on the soccer, hockey, and lacrosse teams, and who was so used to having hard objects hurtling at him that he had the best poker face at the table; John Barker, who put himself through four years of college and three of med school playing cards, and who had his bridge pigeons and his gin pigeons and his minor league poker pigeons secreted throughout the university. Barker milked his pigeons every afternoon and evening and would drop in on the Law School game one or two midnights a week to lose a hundred or win two hundred as his luck decreed. And others whose faces dissolved in an incense-haze of tobacco smoke, whose voices alternated in the service (“I bet.” “I raise.” “I call.” “I fold.”), while the elm leaves burst golden, and then withered and fell, and were shoveled across the Old Campus by October wind and sogged to compost by November rain and buried by December snow.
I had played in this game three times my sophomore year and had each time lost every cent I had on me and would have lost more if Fox had been willing to accept my paper. Each time he shook his thin Dachau-gray face sadly and gazed with compassion out of pogrom-stained eyes and shrugged his persecuted shoulders and held up his palms with their beef-red stigmata of Roman spikes, while his partner growled: “Tough shit, schmuck; we don’t take markers from little fish,” and the other players fidgeted in their chairs, and the man waiting for my seat recounted his stake and edged in behind me. And each time I hung my head and slunk away with neon blotches creeping up from under my collar and down across my wrists. Back in my room I would replay every pot—the strong hands where I scared everyone out with an idiot-screamed pot bet and won only antes; the weak hands where I called and called, waiting for a card not even I believed would come; the mocking hands where I folded only to see my card flash down into the next man’s hand; the futile hands where I stayed to keep some smug winner “honest”; and the hideous second-best hand which tapped me out when, suckered like the fish I was, I pushed the whole, helpless remnant of my stake into the pot (which I was already spending on a glorious foray to New York, where I would meet Angela and reduce her to gibbers of joy in a posh suite at the Pierre), only to learn what everyone else had suspected, that Fox had four of a kind all the way, not the flush I thought he filled with his slimy one-card draw, and that my lovely pat full house was worthless. Then I would imagine what those gringos thought of me: stupid greaseball, musclebound spic; and my shame would spread until I had to jump up and walk around in the icy darkness chanting my credo: “I am Kiki Sancudo. I can wipe the wrestling mat with any man my weight in the Western Hemisphere.” And when gray dawn scraped against the lead-glassed, gothic-arched little window over my bed, I would fall into a swirling half-sleep where I seized long gooey kisses from Angela to find her transformed into Fox while my father sneered at me and called me schmuck.
So after the third time, I gave it up, not permanently, for I was never the sort of person who could admit his limitations, who could say, “I’m not a good poker player, so I won’t play poker.” No, I gave it up for the year, vowing to go back reborn from little fish to shark and tap them all out, Fox and Lyon and Barker and Qualm, to humiliate them publicly and pin them down the way I did wrestling opponents. I missed the game, the marvelous manufactures intensity of life which gambling gave more generously than love, for the body tires, or wrestling, as there were only a dozen odd matches plus the Eastern Championships (which I won) and the New York Invitationals (which I won) and the Nationals (which I missed, since, thanks to Fox and Lyon, I couldn’t afford to go to Oklahoma). The game gave tension and release, and action and satisfaction, every night from dusk till dawn, and there was always another deal if you could meet the ante. I missed it and yearned to creep back, “Just to watch a few hands,” but I had always been a proud bastard, am proud even now, sitting up like a Westminster show terrier to gulp my mush, and wouldn’t go back till I was ready.
No plans were made to hasten the hour of return and revindication. I didn’t buy Jacoby’s treatise or study game theory and the laws of probability. I even, once back in Tinieblas for summer vacation, succeeded in forgetting my three trips to the cleaner’s, except for certain dark nights of the soul when, with a blossom of shame (the master card for this emotion was punched on a Roman street corner in 1939 when I crashed my Black Prince two-wheeler into a fashionably dressed matron, slicing her shin with my fender and knocking her into an oily puddle) I was catapulted from some Tinieblan cantina to the merry old Fox and Lyon, where, for the millionth time, I cravenly folded what turned out to be the winning hand. Then, that midnight at the airport, so recently squeezed from prison back into the world, it came to me that my minnowhood was over. More, an inner voice said the stars were propitious. I might go back to the game, not only to fulfill my vow but to support myself. I never thought, not even for an instant, of acting out the wan gringo myth of working one’s way through college, not because I’m lazy—I am, in fact, quite the reverse, a restless man to whom inactivity is torture—but because work, by definition, is dull. In the mesh-windowed van going out to the airport I considered joining the American Marines or the French Foreign Legion, there being two moderately exciting wars in progress (I favored the one in Indochina, where the women are good looking), but when the guard on duty at the airport clicked his heels (a fossilized memory of when the Guardia wore feldgrau), and saluted the officer herding Lazarillo and me, I realized that a soldier pays more than I cared to in freedom for the luxurious legal right to shoot people and be shot at by them. So that fall I campaigned neither in the Red River Delta nor in the mountains northwest of Seoul, but on a green felt hexagon in a sitting room on the second floor of the Yale Law School dormitory, flanked by a Castro convertible day-bed, which a man who lived downstairs had bet on a pair of aces and lost to Fox’s two small pair, and impartially observed by the sullen negro in a framed reproduction of Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream.
“The little fish is back,” said Lyon, as I sat down opposite him in the only empty chair. He peeked at his hole card and, as the bet came round to him, flipped the six he had showing. “Go home, schmuck. A fish like you stinks up the game.”
With that Qualm came in. “No room?”
“How much you got, schmuck?” Lyon yawned at me. The Jack of Diamonds swished by him toward the player on his left.
“Two hundred.” I counted Pelf’s retainer on the felt in front of me and handed it to him over the pot.
“Ten minutes,” he said to Qualm. He fingered ten white, five reds, and five blues from the merry-go-round chip holder, making four stacks of five, then two of ten. “This fish’s seat will be open in ten minutes.”
I fixed Lyon with a stare resembling that of the gloomy King of Sceptres. The dealer’s hand celebrated a double royal wedding in Swords and Cups, and its owner swooped for the pot. In a nearby room Marlene Dietrich was falling in love again. Jack Diamond’s late employer rolled his chips into a tricolor sausage and asked if we were playing or not, and Lyon availed himself of this pretext to glance away. He tumbled the two stacks toward me. “Take your chips, schmuck.” Then he gathered the cards and began riffling them with pudgy thumbs.
White chips flopped in the center of the table. The winner of the last pot cut the deck into three equal layers and watched Lyon reassemble them in reverse order. Cards came round. I got a pair of tens back to back. The player on my left showed an ace. Lyon, a king; the sausage man, another ten.
“Ten dollars,” said the ace, bloodying the pot.
I called. The next man folded a four. The last pot’s winner stayed with a seven. Lyon called. His neighbor drew his hole card off the table, rubbed it along his chest,
cupped it below his nose, then slapped it down and closed his ten. Pot right. More cards.
The ace got a king, I an ace, the seven a queen, Lyon a nine.
“Ten dollars,” said the ace-king.
I raised thirty, hoping the others would suspect me of an ace in the hole. The queen-seven folded. Lyon called. So did the ace-king.
Jack. Seven. Nine.
Lyon checked his pair of nines, and the ace-king-jack bet fifty.
Raise or fold, I thought and called the bet. I was too poor to raise and too loyal to my tens to fold them.
“How much you got left, schmuck?” Lyon asked me.
“Ninety-five dollars.”
“Then that’s what I’m raising.” He stacked seven blues and one white, derricked them over the pot, and dropped them in.
“Sandbagger,” said the ace-king-jack and called.
Pair of aces or pair of kings or pair of jacks or possible straight. What did it matter to me when Lyon had three nines. In fact I could see the nine of hearts crushed face-down under Lyon’s right fist. I could see the number and spot right through the back of the card. Strange. A case for the parapsychology lab, but no good now. Why didn’t I look before?
I looked to my right and saw the faggot jack of diamonds lying on his stomach under the newly arrived jack of clubs. Amazing, but again too late. Miss Dietrich was buying drinks for the boys in the back room, and I started to fold my cards. Wait. What about a glance at the deck?