Dead Man's Hand

by Otto Penzler

  "We've all heard about your daddy," he says in a low voice. It seems everyone but the celeb, who's new in town and doesn't know any better, has gone to see Daddy tricked out in his best black suit at the mortuary. "We're here tonight to pay tribute to him and to say good-bye to you."

  "Say good-bye?" I stare up at him. "What on earth do you mean?"

  "The game's over, Charlie. The fat lady's sung. Finito."

  "No, it's not," I say defiantly. "The game's going on."

  Roddy cocks his bald head. "How's that?"

  "I'm running it. I'm taking Daddy's place."

  Now he seems shocked. Imagine. Roddy Shone.

  "Don't kid a kidder, Charlie," he says sternly. "The game's no place for you."

  "The game's all I have. Don't shut me down."

  He's about to answer me when his mouth snaps shut. He's clearly thinking about what I've said. Roddy's a loner, too, apart from his revolving-door girls. All they do is suck his cock. When he tires of their technique, he kicks them out. I hear he's got a kid he's never seen—daughter or son, I don't know. That's damn sad, if you ask me.

  "Okay," he says at last. "Let's try it, see how it goes."

  I heave a sigh of relief. The world starts spinning again. "I'll take Daddy's place at the table."

  His brows knit together. "Now you're going too fucking far, kiddo."

  "Let's try it," I say. "See how it goes."

  He laughs to hear his own words so easily thrown back at him. "Like I said, you've got a damn curious mind." He nods. "But no crying now when I take your profits in a showdown pot."

  We all take our places at the table. Still and all, Roddy insists on a moment of silence. Then they all agree to tell a story about Daddy—all except the celeb, of course, who's on his cell until Roddy slaps it out of his hand.

  "No cell phones, PDAs, or pagers allowed at the game," I say to the celeb, to keep things from escalating. "House rules."

  "Plus," Roddy says, his eyebrows pulled into the center of his face, "it's disrespectful to Charlie here, and her daddy, God rest his soul."

  "You're very kind, Mr. Shone," I say, even though I've always ever called him Roddy. Today's a new day, and I'm a new person. I'm the big kahuna here. The sooner everyone around the table knows that, the better.

  The story I tell? The day my mother left, Daddy took me down to Louie's for one of their giganta hot-fudge sundaes. He stayed with me all day, talking to me about how good our life would be from now on. No more shouting matches, no more coffee mugs thrown across the kitchen. I knew he had work to do, stuff that had to be done to get ready for the game. But there was no game that night. That night Daddy took me to the movies and put his arm around me while I cried my goddamn eyes out.

  I will say that at the get-go the other players have a bit of a problem with me sitting in. In fact, one of the politicos says, "You're playing, Charlie? Really? Isn't that illegal?" We all have a big chuckle over that, especially Roddy, who has this piece of crap firmly in his back pocket. Photos somewhere, I think, and a nicely lit video with a little boy in a (very) supporting role. Yuck! Politicians make my skin crawl. Next to this one, Roddy is a goddamned choirboy.

  Anyway, it all gets ironed out and we start to play. At first, I keep my skill in check. I win every third or fourth hand. Then the stakes go up and Roddy goes on a winning streak. Right away I see that he's gunning for the celeb, but for one reason or another I get caught in the backwash. All of a sudden, I'm down a thou and Roddy's grinning at me across the table, as if to say, I warned you, kiddo. Get out now before I hurt you bad.

  No way I'm getting out. In fact, I've just begun. Now I bear down, put Daddy out of my mind, concentrate solely on the equations, which are running through my head like a river of quicksilver. I win three hands in a row. I let Roddy win the next one, just so he won't get suspicious.

  The deal comes to me. I'm about to ask Tony Danko, who's on my left, to cut the deck when the door opens and Seth comes in. I stare at him. What's he doing here? He's never come to a game before.

  Tony Danko looks at Seth, along with the others. "What the hell's this?" he says. "No fucking observers allowed."

  "He's helping me," I say. "He stays, if he wants."

  Tony Danko looks at me for a minute, then grunts in what I take to be disgust.

  Seth's eyes meet mine. I don't need the numbers to tell me what he's thinking. I can see it in the slight downward curve of his lips, I can see it in his pale gray eyes. He doesn't think I should be here. He wants to marry me, take me away from all this. His thirst for knowledge makes me dizzy, and for a moment I can't think.

  Then Tony Danko's big hairy ape hand has cut the cards and it's go time. I deal the cards. I've got a so-so hand, a pair of eights. The politico on my right opens and we all place our bets. Right away, Roddy raises. One of the politicos folds. I ask for cards. Naturally, I take three. Roddy slides one card from his hand, places it facedown on the table. That's all he wants? One card? His eyes meet mine as I deal him one card. I know what he's thinking. He wants to teach me a lesson. He wants to squash me like a bug. He wants me to know that the game is no place for a girl, even if I am my daddy's daughter. He's so fucking sure he knows what's good for me.

  Over by the door, Seth leans against the wall, arms folded. It seems like I can hear everyone's else's thoughts, but not mine.

  I fan out my cards, take a look at my hand. Good deal. I've picked up an eight. The bidding starts again. Another politico bites the dust. Again, Roddy raises. The third politico turns over his cards. Now I raise, doubling Roddy's raise. Maybe it's a bit reckless, I don't know. The numbers are adding up, though.

  There's over ten grand in the pot now. This last round is too rich for Tony Danko. That leaves me, Roddy, and the idiot celeb, who for sure doesn't know when to fold. For the one and only time, Roddy and I are in league. Two rounds of raises later, we run the celeb out, after he's ponied up the big bucks.

  Almost seventeen big ones are piled up on the table. There's just me and Roddy now. Winner take all. Does he have a straight, a flush? Did I deal him four of a kind at the beginning of the hand? Is Lady Luck that cruel? But it's Roddy who believes in Lady Luck. Me, I'm all about the numbers.

  "Now we separate the men from the girls," Roddy says, as he puts five grand on top of the pot.

  I risk a glance over at Seth. Don't ask me why. He's got an odd look on. If I didn't know better, I'd say it's a poker face. Now I can't tell what he's thinking. Is he terrified for me? Does he feel what I feel? The sudden rush of adrenaline. Daddy used to talk about that. "Damn, there's nothing better than being in a high-stakes poker game, Charlie," he'd say. "Not even sex."

  So okay, here it is. The moment it seems I've waited for my whole life. I can either call Roddy or I can raise him one more time, go for broke. I look at my three eights. What's he holding? I run the numbers one more time. The equations line up, like yellow metal ducks in a shooting gallery. I know what I have to do. I know how to win.

  Seth is watching me with hooded eyes. Is that a tiny smile playing around the corners of his mouth? Is he proud of me, proud of what I can do? He alone of everyone on the face of the earth knows what I can do. More than that, he can appreciate it.

  I search his face. What does he want me to do? I run the numbers, but the equations have gone all fuzzy, so blurred for once in my life I can't read them. I don't know what they add up to.

  I continue to look at Seth. Is this what he meant when he said "love has nothing to do with numbers"? And what did I answer? "A principle is a principle. It can't be erased randomly when it suits you."

  But what if the principle is false? Didn't Heisenberg say that Schrodinger's theory was crap?

  Unconsciously, my hand goes into my pocket. I feel the ring, its diamond hard and sharp against my fingertips. It feels warm, the ring, and I clutch it tight.

  What if my principle is false? But how could it be? I know that existence is based on mathematics. The numbers. Equations. But
what if something exists outside of Dasein, outside of existence. Something that isn't governed by the numbers? What would that thing be? Would it be love?

  So now here I am at that moment. Call or raise? But there is another choice. It exists outside of everything that's in my head, everything that makes up this room, this table, these cards. It's standing over by the door, arms folded, looking at me with hooded eyes.

  Am I calling Roddy's hand or am I raising another round? But it's more than that, I see now. Am I sitting at the table, across from Roddy Shone, about to play this last hand with the ginor-mous stakes? Am I walking out the door with Seth? Or am I doing both?

  I want to ask Heisenberg: Where am I?

  Once again, momentum and time rush toward each other, and here I go.

  Hardly Knew Her

  Laura Lippman

  Sofia was a lean, hipless girl, the type that older men still called a tomboy in 1975, although her only hoydenish quality was a love of football. In the vacant lot behind the neighborhood tavern, the boys welcomed her into their games. This was in part because she was quick, with sure hands. And even touch football sometimes ended in pileups, where it was possible to steal a touch or two and claim it was accidental. She tolerated this feeble groping most of the time, punching the occasional boy who pressed too hard too long, which put the others on notice for a while. Then they forgot, and it happened again—they touched, she punched. It was a price she was more than willing to pay for the exhilaration she felt when she passed the yewberry bushes that marked the end zone, a gaggle of boys breathless in her wake.

  But for all the afternoons she spent at the vacant lot, she never made peace with the tricky plays—the faked handoffs, the double pumps, the gimmicky laterals. It seemed cowardly to her, a way for less-gifted players to punish those with natural talent. It was one thing to spin and feint down the field, eluding grasping hands with a swivel of her hips. But to pretend the ball was somewhere it wasn't struck her as cheating, and no one could ever persuade her otherwise.

  She figured it was the same with her father and cards. He knew the game was steeped in bluffing and lying, but he could never re-sign himself to the fact. He depended on good cards and good luck to get him through, and even Sofia understood that was no way to win at poker. But the only person her father could lie to with any success was himself.

  "That your dad?" Joe, one of the regular quarterbacks, asked one Friday afternoon as they sprawled in the grass, game over, their side victorious again.

  Sofia looked up to see her father slipping through the back door of the tavern, which people called Gordon's, despite the fact that the owner's name was Peter Papadakis. Perhaps someone named Gordon had owned it long ago, but it had been Mr. Papadakis's place as far back as Sofia could remember.

  "Yeah."

  "What's he doing, going through the back door?" That was a scrawny boy, Bob, one of the grabby ones.

  Sofia shredded grass in her fingers, ignoring him. Joe said, "Poker."

  "Poker? Poker? I hardly knew her." Bob was so pleased with his wit that he rolled back and forth, clutching his stomach, and some of the other boys laughed as they had never heard this old joke before. Sofia didn't laugh. She hated watching her father disappear in the back room of the tavern, from which he would not emerge until early Saturday. But it was better than running into him on the sidewalk between here and home. He always pretended surprise at seeing her, proclaiming it the darnedest coincidence, Sofia on Brighton Avenue, same as him. On those occasions, he would stop and make polite inquiries into her life, but he would be restless all the while, shifting his weight from one foot to another, anxious as a little kid on the way to his own birthday party.

  "How's it going, Fee?" That was her family nickname, and she was just beginning to hate it.

  "S'all right, I guess."

  "School okay?"

  "Not bad. I hate algebra."

  "It'll come in handy one day."

  "How?"

  "If you get through high school, maybe go on to community college, you won't be stuck here in Dundalk, breathing air you can see."

  "I like it here." She did. The water was nearby and although it wasn't the kind you could swim in—if you fell in, you were supposed to tell your mom so she could take you for a tetanus shot, but no one ever told—the view from the water's edge made the world feel big, yet comprehensible. Dundalk wasn't Baltimore, although the map said it was. Dundalk was a country unto itself, the Republic of Bethlehem Steel. And in 1975, Beth Steel was like the Soviet Union. You couldn't imagine either one not being there. So the families of Dundalk breathed the reddish air, collected their regular paychecks, and comforted one another when a man was hurt or killed, accepting those accidents as the inevitable price for a secure job. It was only later, when the slow poison of asbestosis began moving from household to household, that the Beth Steel families began to question the deal they had made. Later still, the all-but-dead company was sold for its parts and the new owner simply ended it all—pensions, health care, every promise ever made. But in 1975, in Dundalk, a Beth Steel family was still the best thing to be, and the children looked down on those whose fathers had to work for any other company.

  "Go home and do your homework," her father told Sofia.

  "No homework on Fridays," she said. "But I want to eat supper and wash the dishes before Donny and Marie comes on."

  They never spoke of his plans for the evening, much less the stakes involved, but after such encounters Sofia went home and hid whatever she could. She longed to advise her mother to do the same, but it was understood that they never spoke of her father's winning and losing, much less the consequences for the household.

  "I bought it for you, didn't I?" her father had told her younger brother, Brad, wheeling the ten-speed bicycle with the banana seat out of the garage. Brad had owned the shiny Schwinn for all of a month." Why'd I ever think we needed fancy candlesticks like these?" her father grumbled, taking the grape-bedecked silver stems from the sideboard, as if his only problem was a sudden distaste for their ornate style. One Saturday morning, he came into Sofia's room and tried to grab her guitar, purchased a year earlier after a particularly good Friday, but something in her expression made him put it back.

  Instead he sold the family dog, a purebred collie, or so her father had said when he brought the puppy home three months ago. It turned out that Shemp had the wrong kind of papers, some initials other than AKC. The man who agreed to buy Shemp from them had lectured her father, accusing him of being taken in by the Mennonite puppy mills over the state line. He gave her father twenty-five dollars, saying, "People who can't be bothered to do the most basic research probably shouldn't have a dog, anyway."

  Sofia, sitting in the passenger seat of her father's car—she had insisted on accompanying him, thinking it would shame her father, but in the end she was the one who was ashamed that she had chosen her guitar over Shemp—chewed over this fact. Her father was so gullible that he could be duped by Mennonites. She imagined them ringed around a poker table, solemn bearded faces regarding their cards. Mennonites would probably be good at poker if God let them play it.

  Her father spoke of his fortune as if it were the weather, a matter of temperature outside his control. "I was hot!" her father crowed coming through the door Saturday morning, carrying a box of doughnuts. "I've never seen a colder deck," he'd say, heading out Saturday afternoon after a long morning nap on the sofa. "I couldn't catch a break."

  You just can't bluff, Sofia thought. But then, neither could she. Perhaps it was in her genes. That was why she had to outrun the boys on the other team. Go long and I'll hit you, Joe told her and that's what she did, play after play. She outran her competition or she didn't, but she never tried to fool the other players, or faulted anyone else when she failed to catch a ball that was thrown right at her. She didn't think of herself as hot or cold, or try to blame the ball for what she failed to do. A level playing field was not a figure of speech to Sofia. It was all she kne
w. She made a point of learning every square inch of the vacant lot—the slight depressions where you could turn an ankle if you came down wrong, the sections that stayed mushy long after the rain, the slope in one of their improvised end zones that made it tricky to set up for the pass. With just a little homework, Sofia believed, you could control for every possibility.

  Sofia's stubborn devotion to football probably led to the onslaught of oh-so-girly gifts on her next birthday—a pink dress, perfume, and a silver necklace with purplish jewels that her mother said were amethysts. "Semiprecious," she added. There were three of them, one large oval guarded by two small ones, set in a reddish gold. The necklace was the most beautiful thing that Sofia had ever seen.

  "Maybe you'll go to the winter dance up at school, Fee," her mother suggested hopefully, fastening the necklace around her neck.

  "Someone has to ask you first," Sofia said, pretending not to be impressed by her own reflection.

  "Oh, it's okay to go with a group of girls, too," her mother said.

  Sofia didn't know any girls, actually. She was friendly with most of them, but not friends. The girls at school seemed split about her: Some thought her love of football was genuine if odd, while others proclaimed it an awfully creative way to be a tramp. This second group of girls whispered that Sofia was fast, fast in the bad way, that football wasn't the only game she played with all those boys in the vacant lot behind Gordon's Tavern. What would they say if she actually danced with one, much less let him walk her home?

  "I'd be scared to wear this out of the house," she said, placing a tentative finger on the large amethyst. "Something might happen to it."

  "Your aunt would want you to wear it and enjoy it," her mother said. "It's an heirloom. It belonged to Aunt Polly, and her aunt before her, and their grandmother before that. But Tammy didn't have any girls, so she gave it to me a few years ago, said to put it away for a special birthday. This one's as special as any, I think."