He brought the cheesecake to his lips, but changed his mind, putting it back into the carton and pushing it away.
‘But I do recall the times we’d get up early just to roll around in her daddy’s corn crop on June mornings up there in Kansas. The dawn sun warming our faces just right, and her laughing and joking next to me.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘There’s a window faces east on the way to the chamber. I want to look back into it for one bare minute and feel the rays and imagine her close to me. To think about maybe seeing her again. In heaven, if Jesus can redeem me like you say.’
‘You know the guards will be armed? And that window you’re speaking of must be twenty feet off the floor? If you’re planning anything dumb . . .’
The prisoner gave a wry chuckle.
‘It’s never been done. And I can’t even jump six inches in all this jewellery they got me wearing. I’m not playing you, padre. It’s just a dying man’s simple wish. So, how about it? One hand of poker? For my soul, you might say. You win and I promise you this, I’ll pray so loud they’ll hear me in Gen Pop.’
Malley smiled for the first time.
‘It’s a nice idea, but you’re forgetting one thing. We don’t have any cards.’ He looked at his watch. ‘And you have less than five minutes.’
‘The hacks have a deck. How do you think they pass the time? Ask them. Hey, Sullivan? Lend the padre your cards.’
The head guard gave him an icy, see-nothing look, but Malley told him it would be OK, just this once. A battered, blue-backed deck was passed through to him.
‘You want me to deal?’
‘That sounds fair to me, padre. But to keep things on the straight and narrow, how about I shuffle them first, ’less you mind?’
He took the cards and pulled them from the pack. The bicycle pattern was grained and faded from use, and there were small sweat stains and creases on every one. He hadn’t split a deck for nearly a decade, but at once it was like speaking a language he’d grown up with. All those road games and tobacco bets in County lock-up, the ten-dollar grifts with drunks in bars. Barely looking down, he riffled the fifty-two then clasped his hands around them, passing them back to the priest.
‘Let’s do it if we’re going to.’
Malley’s eyes were shining, caught up in the game now. He dealt slowly, like an amateur, a hick player. A hole card each, then the ten of diamonds for the prisoner and the seven of clubs for himself.
‘So far so good. I almost wish we were betting money too. I might clean out the collection plate.’
Malley cautiously bent down towards the table edge and peeled up his hole card for a peep. He tried to keep his face a mask, giving nothing away. ‘Aren’t you going to look?’ he asked.
The prisoner shrugged. ‘I’m in no hurry, remember.’
Malley dealt third street. Three of spades for the prisoner. He got the four of clubs.
‘You flushing on me, padre?’
In the distance, there was a heavy clatter of steel as doors were slid open. The guards stood up and began to straighten their tan uniforms.
Two of hearts. Jack of diamonds.
‘I guess you’re in front now. Go easy on me, padre. Come on, pair me up. Ten, three or deuce. Or a bullet even. This is getting to be fun, ain’t it?’
Nine of spades. Ten of hearts.
‘Ouch. You stole that ten from me.’
Keys rattled and were inserted into the lock of the inner door. They could hear the Warden’s voice barking orders. Hurriedly, the padre showed first, flicking over his hole card to reveal the six of hearts.
‘Jack high, son. That’s all I’ve got. Can you beat it? Hurry now.’
The prisoner slowly moved his fingers towards his hidden card, pausing to gauge if they were shaking. His nerves were good, but his hands suddenly seemed old and ruined. The battered knuckles, the chipped nails, the thick, faded jailhouse tattoos. The hands that had killed her, ugly mitts, like they weren’t part of his own body, the hands that had choked a rough purple necklace around her sweet neck.
‘Well, let’s see.’ He squeezed the corner upwards and glanced for a long time, seeming not to believe what he saw. Malley could sense the Warden standing behind him, but he couldn’t look away. After what seemed like minutes, the prisoner finally spoke.
‘Padre, your jack’s good.’
He pushed his cards into the centre with a sullen swipe, splashing the whole deck and sending them skeetering off the edge of the table. He pulled his hands back to his chest and looked up to see the face of his tormentor scowling down at him. Behind him were two hacks holding shotguns, and the rest of them were lining up into formation. He took a deep breath, like a man preparing to take a long dive underwater.
‘Warden Swift. And there was me thinking this wasn’t my lucky day . . .’
‘I’ve got to hand it to you, that went better than I’d hoped.’
At the back of the witness room, the Warden was talking to Malley.
‘I had him down as pure trouble, but you seem to have tamed him like a lamb. I won’t even ask about the card game you were playing.’
Malley allowed himself a smile. The prisoner had kept his word, repeating the Lord’s Prayer loudly and clearly as they led him down the hallway, not even glancing back for a second at the red dawn flooding through the skylight. It had gone like clockwork.
‘I’m sure your methods had something to do with it all, Warden,’ he added, modestly.
‘That’s good to hear. I knew we’d bust him between us in the end.’
The small curtain was drawn back, and they took their seats alongside the other witnesses, five or six journalists and lawyers, and the crew from the Coroner’s. Behind the curtain, the chamber looked like a small submarine with four large portholes.
The prisoner could not hear them through the glass, and nor did he seek their gaze as he was efficiently strapped down by the silent guards. Sullivan checked his bonds one last time, then nodded to the Warden. He backed out and the door closed behind him with a dull metallic shudder.
The second hand on the clock climbed implacably round to the hour, the telephone on the wall stayed mute, and then the lever was pulled. Two tablets dropped into the trough of water behind the death seat. The gas began to curl upwards, cloudy and slow. The Warden watched it, satisfied, through the glass.
‘Did he say anything raw about me in there? Don’t spare my blushes, padre.’
‘No. Not at all.’ There was no point in ruining a decent morning’s work. ‘Mostly he just got sentimental about his wife, the way they all do near the end. How he loved her, how he regretted what he’d done, how they used to lie together in her father’s corn fields in Kansas before it all went wrong.’
The Warden turned to look at him.
‘Cornfields? Her daddy was a bartender in Miami. Died when she was a baby. Never went near a field in his life. Poor chump must have been raving at you.’
Unnoticed, the prisoner turned his left hand under the thick leather strap, getting just enough of a twist that he could glimpse the object cupped secretly in his palm. It was a crumpled card, bent almost double by the tight grip he’d held it in.
His hole card, the queen of spades, smiling back at him. Plump cheeks and big dark eyes.
He grinned, then sucked hungrily at the almond-smelling air.
Ginny. Ginny, with the pretty black hair . . .
Once More, Into the Abyss!
by Jennifer Tilly
The phone call from Binky should have been an omen. Binky never calls me. He only texts. Binky is in charge of procuring people for the biggest cash games around town. He gets five hundred dollars for every fish he brings in and, needless to say, I am one of them. Before Binky discovered the poker world he served a similar function, getting paid for each hot girl he delivered to the clubs. He also deals occasionally, but he is a little erratic, sometimes showing up drunk and falling asleep on the sofa, while Noah who runs the games fills in for him.
&nbs
p; When I met him, he was a big, cheerful, not very bright bodybuilder. The famous poker phenom Andy Lamas discovered him in Brooklyn and brought him out to Vegas to sort of be his personal pet. Binky slept in Andy’s guestroom for about four years. Being around a top-tier poker player like Andy, Binky developed a bit of a gambling problem. When Andy finally kicked him out, he owed him about thirty thousand dollars.
I always liked Binky. He was uncomplicated and simple. I had a dark period in my life when my brother was slowly dying from cancer. During this time, I would constantly lose, and Binky would meet me in the hallway with tears in his eyes and plead with me to go home. Once he walked me out to my car after a particularly bad night, and we stood under the bright lights of the parking lot and talked. He told me he had lost his dad to cancer and knew what I was going through.
He gave me some advice to curtail my losses.
‘Look how Lee always leaves at midnight, win or lose. He’s not obsessive about poker. There’s always another game. I see you play and you don’t know when to quit. Sometimes you’re almost back to even, but you’ll have about 100K on the table and then you lose it all. When you’ve got a big stack at risk it’s good to just call it a day. Also you should have a stop loss . . . Tell the host to cut you off after a certain amount.’
To hear him telling me these things in his thick Brooklyn patois, looking at me with those sad puppy dog eyes of his, made me feel like someone cared about me. Feeling like someone cares always makes me cry. And when I cried it made Binky cry. We stood there in the cold under the fluorescent lights at 5 a.m. and cried about our mutual losses. I’d always known him as Andy’s goofy friend but to have him show such compassion made me feel there was more to him than just a big dumb bodybuilder that liked to chase girls.
Still, we were never close. That’s why it surprised me when he called me that day.
In the recent months, the poker world was all abuzz with Binky’s crazy exploits. As a lark, some of the guys in one of the big cash games fronted him money one night when they were short-handed. He managed to run twenty thousand up to two hundred thousand in less than twenty-four hours!
With his winnings, he made some wise investments – a ten-thousand-dollar pair of sneakers and a time share in NetJet. Not to worry, a week later he ran his two hundred thousand up to a million, and then three days later won another million at the big private game at the Aria. Binky! Binky who used to deal drunk, and sleep in Andy’s guestroom!
Of course, then it all started going south. Just as quickly as he won, he began to lose. Apparently he played like a maniac and the whole poker gang wanted a swing at this particular piñata. When Andy invited me to his game, the lead billing was given to Binky.
‘Binky will be there!’ Andy promised. ‘All he does is lose now! He plays horribly!’
Yes, Binky is Andy’s friend, but Andy has a business to run and if Binky is going to lose his money, Binky would prefer he did it at his game. Andy prides himself on having the best game in the world stocked with the biggest fish. He’s like those people who go on hunting safaris that fill their property with semi-tame wildlife and then charge people to come and shoot them. Easy pickings.
I played with Binky that day and it made me sad. At that time, he only had about 200K left of his two million. In the beginning, he was jovial, cracking jokes, and being the life of the party, but as he steadily lost, he grew more sullen and desperate. He looked like a total degen. He was sweating profusely, his face was puffy and red, and his once-chiselled body soft and flabby. I remembered the advice he had given me once about moderation and wished he would take it.
That was the last I heard from him until the phone call. I was driving in my car, and when I looked down and saw my phone flashing ‘Binky’, I knew something was wrong. I hardly ever answer my phone but on a whim, I picked it up. He sounded so down I barely recognised his voice.
‘Binky,’ I said. ‘Is everything all right?’
No, everything was not all right. He had lost everything, and worse owed upwards of six hundred thousand to various entities all over town. The guys staking him had all turned their backs, and now he’d had a falling out with Joey Martinez who’d let him play his game.
A complicated story followed of how Binky was gambling, gambling, gambling, but he had the key to his mother’s safety deposit box where her jewellery was stored. He knew if he lost, he could pawn his mother’s jewellery. She was sick and would not notice. Anyhow, of course he lost, but when he went to his mother’s box, it was empty! Unbeknownst to him, his brother, who was an even bigger degenerate, had a key as well, and had already sold the jewellery to pay for his gambling debt! I was horrified by this story, but tried not to show it. His poor mother.
‘Well, Binky,’ I said authoritatively, ‘there are genetic markers for gambling, just like alcoholism.’
When my dad died, I found out that he’d had a huge poker problem. It was a family secret, and I had no idea. My mom and dad divorced when I was very young and I didn’t see him much after that. My sister Beth, who grew up with my dad, admitted he used to play poker all the time.
‘He would come home occasionally with a jade ring or some paintings. Those were his poker winnings. But usually he lost. Then one day Sally, our stepmom, gave him an ultimatum: Poker or me!’ He chose his marriage.
That always made me sad to think of the many pokerless years that stretched ahead of him after that. He had a little rinky-dink Casio seven-card stud game he would play before he went to bed, to ‘unwind’. When he died Sally gave it to me, along with his dog-eared Sklansky book and his fake watch collection.
After he passed away I asked my mom about my dad, and her eyes opened wide as she recalled the trauma of living with a gambler. When she would take the children to Disneyland or to visit her parents he would jump in his car and drive straight to Las Vegas without passing Go.
And she would say ‘Las Vegas’ in a horrified whisper, like it was catching. Once he took my mom there for a vacation. He presented her with a hundred dollars and said ‘This is to gamble with.’ My mother was very proud of the fact that she took the money to the mall and bought a pair of shoes instead. She sure showed him! He never knew. Of course, my dad lost his hundred dollars, but my mom had a fancy new pair of Las Vegas shoes to show for the trip.
Because we grew up with our mom, it was always deemed a bad thing to have any of our dad’s traits. If we were competitive or liked games we were being ‘Stan-ish’, as if my dad’s name was a pejorative to convey extreme irresponsibility. Once I met a woman who was about to marry my dad’s brother. She took me in a corner and went on a diatribe about how he didn’t warn her about my dad. ‘Stan came in the room at a party and said he needed to borrow some money, and everyone ignored him. I reached in my pocket and said, “Sure, how much do you need?” He never paid me back!’ she huffed. I wondered why she was telling me this. I was seven. I hadn’t seen my dad in years.
I don’t remember him much from when I was little. But the memories I do have I carefully catalogued so I wouldn’t forget them. Once I was three and my throat hurt and I was crying, and my dad came in the room and gave me some chocolate lozenges, and read to me. He was a big warm presence. Even though he couldn’t take away the pain he somehow made me feel better.
After my dad died, I started playing poker, and was just as obsessive about it (or Stan-ish about it, as my mom would say). I started out with 25/50 cent at the kitchen table, then 1dollar/2dollar, now 100/200. No matter what level you play at there is always a more interesting game just beyond your bankroll.
‘Poker is a huge swirling sinkhole,’ I said to Binky. ‘You go to the edge, just to take a look, and the ground gives way beneath you and it starts to suck you in. You and I can’t just stick our toes in . . . we have an addiction. It’s in our genetic make-up.’
Binky was in no mood to listen to my bad analogies.
‘I’ve just had a bit of bad luck,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘I’m going to pull myse
lf out of it.’
And as he starts to outline his plans for restitution, my car is driving under the palm trees of LA, and reception is dipping in and out. It doesn’t matter. Everything Binky is saying is just sadness, and I don’t want to hear it.
Tonight, I am finally returning to Dan’s Big Game after several months’ absence. I have been training for my comeback. I have a new cautious style. When I arrive, I announce I have to leave by 1 a.m. I have an important meeting in the morning. I tell the host to cut me off at a certain amount (one hundred and thirty-one thousand dollars . . . the exact amount I have in Aria chips that I’ve been carrying around with me in a small embroidered Lulu Guinness pouch, which has proven to be my lucky talisman: in three months, I have never had to dip into it once). Finally I will try to only play in position, and if I go on tilt, I get up and walk around for ten minutes. This seems to be working for me. In the smaller games, I have been steadily winning. I feel I am ready.
Now, Binky emerges from the void like a harbinger of doom. It seems like a bad omen. When his melancholy voice pauses for validation, I give it to him.
‘Well!’ I say kindly. ‘It sounds like you are really doing your best to make things right. There’s a lot of money in home games; I think you will be able to get back to even in no time.’
I am lying and I know it, but Binky doesn’t seem to notice.
‘Thanks,’ he says tearfully. ‘I just don’t want you to think I’m a bad person.’
‘Of course I don’t!’ I exclaim. Another lie.
And then a third lie.
‘Whoops, I’m approaching my destination! I’ll talk to you later!’
I hang up and continue to drive, feeling uneasy. The desperation and crazy play Binky exhibited during my one game with him was like holding a mirror up to myself. It’s so easy to fall into that vortex.
Binky’s sad phone call has created a sense of unease. It is daylight saving time and it gets dark early. As the sunlight fades so does all my confidence. I go home and organise my whole house, as if the tidiness of my environment will reflect in a disciplined game. I put on make-up and my lucky rings. I dress in layers for the fluctuating temperatures throughout the night. I put my pouch of Aria chips in my purse. Bob, my boyfriend, is hovering in the background trying to give me ‘space’. I am grateful for this. Last thing I need is a Nervous Nellie throwing bad vibes my way. I hear him making fidgety busy work in the kitchen while I gather my stuff to go.
He Played for His Wife and Other Stories Page 3