Lucky at Cards

15

Barbara Lambert was such a very damned fine girl. If she had been aggressive or cheap or mercenary or a nymph or anything like that, then there would have been no need to tell her in the first place and telling her would have constituted no major problem. But she was a very damned fine girl, and I would have no fun telling her we were quits.

I told her at the end of the dinner. We went to the Evergreen and had rare steaks and baked potatoes, and I told her over coffee. I set my cigarette in the enameled ashtray and put my coffee cup in its saucer and spoke her name.

“Go ahead,” Barb said.

“Go ahead?”

“Go ahead and tell me,” she said.

She was especially attractive that night. The blond hair gleamed, the blue eyes struck sparks, the knit dress was tight around the soft curves of her body. But her lips were set now and her fingers gripped the cigarette she was smoking almost tightly enough to break it in half.

I said, “I’m leaving town in a few days.”

“For how long?”

“Permanently.”

She didn’t say anything. She nodded, digesting the information along with dinner.

“Why, Bill?”

“Reasons.”

“Reasons you want to talk about?”

“Well—”

“You don’t have to, Bill.”

This last said softly, quietly, with the head lowered and the sentence trailing off. “Oh, hell,” I said. “It’s no great secret. Things aren’t working out here, that’s all. I’m the old square peg in the round hole, that bit.”

“I thought you were doing well.”

“In some ways.”

She didn’t say anything. I waved for the check and put a bill on the table to cover it.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

We left the Evergreen. We drove for a couple of blocks without saying anything.

Until I said, “I’m not the guy you think I am, Barb.”

“You aren’t?”

“No.”

“Who are you, then?”

So I shrugged and told her. Not all, of course. Not close to all. But a little, and enough.

“I’m a sort of a criminal,” I said. “In a way. A con man, a hustler. I deal in high-priced card games. I’m good with my hands. Sometimes I cheat. Most of the time I cheat.”

She didn’t say anything. She was staring straight ahead. I offered her a cigarette. She didn’t take it.

“I wound up in this town by mistake,” I went on.

“Things kept falling in my lap.”

“Like me?”

“Like you. Like a batch of friendships. Like the job with Black Sand. All of that. I—I hadn’t planned on any of that. I was going to stay in this place long enough for Sy to fix my teeth and then I was going to leave. I didn’t want to settle down here.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I don’t know,” I said, not entirely dishonestly. “I’m not sure. I guess I thought maybe it could work out, living an honest life, staying in the same place forever.”

“But it didn’t.”

“No,” I said. “It didn’t.”

More silence. I drove on this street and that street and paid very little attention to where I was going. She held out one hand for a cigarette. I gave her one and she lit it herself.

“Where are you going, Bill?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Why don’t you take me with you?”

“Barb—”

“I’m good company,” she said. “I can cook and sew and say bright things. I’m fun at parties. And I know when to shut up and get out of the way. Most of the time, at least.”

I didn’t say anything. Barb smoked her cigarette.

She said, “Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“He travels fastest who travels alone? I won’t try to slow you down or cramp your style. I’m not the reformer type. Remember the game we played? I’ll be the high-priced call girl type, Bill. I’ll live your life.” She turned away and I couldn’t see her eyes. “I remember playing that game, Bill. Only you weren’t playing, and maybe I knew that all along.”

“Barb.”

She got rid of her cigarette. “No?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t even have to marry me or anything. See how shameless I am? You could just take me along. I’ll be your private whore, Bill. I’ll be William Maynard’s private whore. That’s quite a little title, isn’t it?”

I could see her face again. There were tears in the corners of her eyes. The tears weren’t flowing down her cheeks. The tears just stayed there, like pearls, like beads of sweet sweat. She didn’t wipe them away. I wanted to stop the car and kiss them away.

“Bill, why won’t you take me?”

“Because you don’t belong. It’s not your life.”

“What is?”

“A house. Kids. A good man.”

“Aren’t you a good man?”

“Not at all.”

“Can’t I have a bad man?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you wouldn’t like it,” I said. “Oh, it would be a storybook life for the first little stretch. Then it would turn sour for you. You would get sick of cheap hotel rooms and shabby men and sleeping days and hustling nights. You couldn’t take it.”

“Because I’m weak?”

“Because you’re human. Because you can only function in the gray world when a part of you is missing, Barb. The out-and-out crook is different. He’s some kind of a rebel or some kind of a nut or both, and all his lines are clearly drawn. The marginal criminal is in a different boat. He’s a human being with a certain part of his humanity surgically removed. He operates differently, functions differently, reacts to different stimuli.”

“You talk well for a crook.”

“I’m a bright crook. Intelligence doesn’t have much to do with it. The smartest man I ever met was a high-rolling crap shooter. He didn’t cheat. He knew every percentage on every bet, knew that all almost intuitively. He could beat casinos, and he murdered any money-craps game going. He doubled up and worked tricky combinations and did all this with the speed of an IBM calculator. And the dumbest man I ever met was a pool hustler. He acted better than the Method Kids, but he didn’t have a brain in his head. It isn’t a matter of brains. It’s something deeper, more basic.”

“Hearing a different drummer?”

“Something like that.”

“And I don’t hear that drummer?”

“Be damn glad you don’t.”

“Why? Because I can live a good clean life?”

“Uh-huh.”

“A good clean life,” she said. “And when it’s all over I’ll be just as dead as everyone else.”

Two tears spilled over, rolled slowly down either cheek. I moved to wipe them away. She twisted away from me, brushed savagely at the tears with the back of her hand.

“When are you leaving, Bill?”

“A day or two.”

“That soon?”

“Just about.”

“Oh.” She took a breath. “I think you should take me home now, Bill. Please.”

I headed the car in that direction. I didn’t say anything. Neither did Barb. I did some thinking, and I suppose she did the same, and nothing seemed to add up the way it would have in the movies. In the movies every sucker gets an even break, which is wrong.

Runyon had the real story—all of life is six-to-five against.

So I didn’t say anything and neither did she. At one point I leaned over and turned on the car radio. Some disc jockey was playing Two Different Worlds, proving that there is a God, and that He’s equipped with a deadly sense of humor. The record got halfway through the first chorus before Barb reached over to turn it off.

Then we were pulling up in front of her house. She switched off the ignition and pulled up the handbrake. She took the keys out of the ignition and handed them to me.

I looked at her. Calm, now. Cool.

“Come inside with me,” she said.

“Barb—”

“Please,” she said.

It was soft and warm and wordless. We walked to the door without touching one another. She opened the door with her key. I kept thinking that I shouldn’t be here, that I had no right. But she was calling the tune. Inside, she closed the door, and in a moment we were in the bedroom, and she closed that door, too, and turned from me and began taking off all of her clothes.

Nude, she smiled strangely at me. She raised her hands to her breasts, cupped them, felt of their weight. She let her hands trail lingeringly down the front of her body, touching, displaying. “Look what you’re giving up, Bill,” she said very softly. “It’s not all that bad, is it?”

It wasn’t bad at all. I took a step toward her and she choked back a sob and rushed into my arms. I held her and she put her head against any chest and sobbed aloud. I stroked her back and reached down. She pressed herself against me. I reached over and scooped her up and tumbled on the bed with her.

When my hands found her and touched her she was wild. Her feet kicked at the bedclothing and her breasts rose and fell with her furious breathing. I couldn’t keep my hands away. I petted her and stroked her until the fire was too much to be borne.

Then we were together.

In bed, she tried to pack a lifetime into a handful of moments. She clutched and held and sought and found. Her mouth was honey-sweet, her breasts cushion-soft, her body a rich vein of warm gold. A lot of sorrow faded and was lost, and a lot of distance melted down and evaporated. There was closeness, and give and take, and something that in a pinch could have passed for love.

Afterward, more silence. She lay motionless on her side with an arm curved under the swell of a breast. Her eyes were closed. She did not move. I bent down and kissed her mouth. I straightened up and tried to think of something to say. Nothing fit. I turned, strode out of the bedroom and out of the house and out of her life.

I drove off with the car radio blaring. I just wanted noise, and static would have served as well as the music. I was tuned to one of those stations that shouts at you. They’re supposed to be very big with the teenage set. These stations tell you their call letters every two or three minutes, and they hit you with spot news about pedestrians run down on local streets and kittens rescued from trees and other bits of excitement. I half-listened and half-drove and found a whole load of things I didn’t want to think about.

No reason to stay in town. No reason at all. I had found a bad girl, and she had made me do something I shouldn’t have done, made me make a big play for the money and the girl—that age-old American dream.

I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the girl and I didn’t even want either of them very much anymore.

And then I’d found another girl, a good girl, and I had to run away and leave her. I didn’t want to, but I had to, because that was the only way it would play.

Beautiful.

There was a bottle of Cutty Sark somewhere around the apartment, but I would be alone there, and solitary drinking didn’t appeal. I found a bar on Orchard close enough to empty to be reasonably quiet. I sat as far from the jukebox as I could get and I had a couple of drinks. At first I tried to work things out in my mind, but it didn’t take me long to see I wasn’t going to get anywhere that way. I gave up and let the liquor do the job it was hired for.

A long time ago life had been infinitely simpler.

A long time ago, doing magic tricks in third-rate strip joints and fourth-rate hotels with an occasional birthday party or bar mitzvah thrown in. A long time ago, Maynard the Magnificent instead of Wizard the Mechanic. A long time ago.

There was never much in the way of money in those days. There was never the big score, never the feeling of being on the inside of a swinging operation. But it was cleaner then, and fresher, and you never wound up putting yourself in a box. A person can become too hip, too much with it.

The squares have a better time.

Maynard the Old Philosopher. I scooped my change off the bar top and left the tavern. I drove home, parked the car. The drinks had not done their job. I was still sober, and it was a bad time to be sober. I parked the Ford and headed for the apartment.

My key in the lock, turning. And a funny feeling, hard to describe, harder still to explain. A feeling that someone somewhere had taken the play away from me, that I wasn’t reading the backs right. Coin your own cliché? brother. An itchy, uncomfortable feeling.

I opened the door.

He was there, in my chair, his hands in his lap and his feet on the floor and his mouth set in a firm thin line. He should have had a gun in his hand, maybe, but he didn’t. He just sat there like a boulder and stared at me.

Murray Rogers.

He said, “Close the door.”

I didn’t move. I read his poker face and I felt the grim hard brittle tension in the air and I stood in place like a statue.

“Close the door,” he said. “Come in, close the door, sit down.”

I came in, closed the door. I did not sit down.

“Hello,” he said. “Hello, you rotten bastard. Hello.”