Three Aces

Three Aces Luther Luther the Farmer wasn’t good at sports. He was strong and coordinated and had good reflexes but Luther just didn’t see the point. What was the justification for dribbling a ball or running needlessly or jumping or slamming your body into other young men? He came from a large Mennonite family and men were supposed to be practical. Although Luther later lost his faith, the idea that men should be practical (and devout) remained with him. And so, it was strange that he became a champion poker player and, even, supported himself by gambling. Luther didn’t remember exactly when he had learned to play cards. If he thought about cards and card-playing, he remembered that gambling was forbidden. No one in the brotherhood ever actually proclaimed that prohibition and, in fact, the subject was never mentioned. But some things went without saying. But you could, sometimes, learn things you weren’t supposed to know. In fact, life was pretty much a process of discovering things that weren’t supposed to be there. Once, when he was a small boy, he had spent an afternoon with an uncle, or a cousin, a middle-aged man who drank too much. Luther’s mother was in the hospital having a baby and, for some reason, Luther was entrusted to the man who was a remote relative, someone that lived near by, but was scarcely ever seen. For awhile, the man drove around town with Luther sitting in the backseat of his old car. Several times, the man stopped and went into houses or shops and Luther remained in the car. From the backseat, he could sometimes see the hospital where his mother was laboring to give birth to his baby sister. The hospital was a grim-looking building that seemed to hover over the trees and it seemed to occupy all points of the compass, appearing unpredictably before Luther’s eyes. Later, in the afternoon, when Luther’s uncle smelled strongly of booze, they went to a bungalow on a residential street where there were several cars and pickups pulled up to the curb. On this occasion, the older man told Luther to come with him into the house. In the basement rec room, there were a half-dozen men leaning over cards at a formica-topped table. Bottles of caramel-brown and rust-red booze were sitting on the table and Luther saw a carelessly heaped mound of greenbacks and silver coins resting as a prize between the men. A shy-looking young man seemed to be winning. Cigarettes were roasting in glass ashtrays and the air was full of smoke. Money was stacked all around him. Luther looked at the skinny shy-looking young man. Each time he stroked the stake that he had won towards his chest and the money stacked there, he smiled apologetically and said that he was surprised. The other card-players looked at the young man with envy or anger or disgust. They seemed to be looking at him even when they weren’t looking at him. Luther wondered what gift possessed the young man, what was the basis for his good luck. Cards were shuffled and tossed to the players and bets were placed and the young man won again. He shrugged and gazed wistfully at the rumpled money – it had come to him easily and, perhaps, it would depart just as suddenly and unexpectedly. After that day, Luther played cards from time to time and found that poker came to him naturally. He developed some skills, had good intuition, and won more than he lost. When he was enrolled in Agricultural Economics at the Community College, Luther spent a lot of time playing cards in the student lounge. No one seemed embarrassed or ashamed about gambling and, sometimes, even one or two of the instructors would half-heartedly join the game. Luther found that he could win enough money in an afternoon to pay for his textbooks. As long as he devoted his winnings to some productive enterprise, it seemed to him that gambling was permissible. Over spring break, Luther used his winnings to travel to Vegas. There he lost heavily. But the odd thing was that losing was exhilarating – the thing about losing was that you sensed that you could reverse the process, that, in a moment, everything might turn around. Every loss teetered on the brink of a great victory and merely served to remind you that winning was not only possible, but probable. Luther made up his losses with pick-up games at the Community College and, when he graduated, he knew nothing about Agricultural Economics but a lot about Texas Hold ‘em poker. He tried to help out on the farm, but the labor and the bookkeeping bored him. He took a Greyhound Bus to Atlantic City and found games around the edges of the big casinos. Most of the people playing in those games were elderly and in poor health – some of them lugged bottles of oxygen to the card table – and they drank heavily. The other players, often, seemed more interested in shouting at one another or boasting or making threats than they were in winning and Luther made money pitting himself against them. He was careful to make only enough money to support himself in an inconspicuous way. There were Russian gangsters from upstate New Jersey and Laotians who were aggressive when they won. The gangsters and Asians were flashy. Luther stayed away from the games that they dominated. It wasn’t hard for him to pretend to be what he was: that is, a naive rube from the Midwest. After awhile, Luther was well-known in Atlantic City and he found it increasingly difficult to conceal his expertise as a gambler. He took the Greyhound to Philadelphia, only an hour or so away and found a city park frequented by gamblers. He worked there for a couple of years and, then, traveled to New York City and supported himself by playing cards in Brooklyn. Ten years passed. Luther rarely returned home. He attended a couple of weddings, a funeral, and one high school graduation. But he didn’t appear for holidays and mostly kept his distance. When he was back in town, Luther stayed at a motel on the freeway and didn’t visit the farm where he had been raised. At family gatherings, his siblings looked at him with scarcely concealed admiration, curiosity, and contempt. Luther maintained some contact with a younger sister. She had married outside of the religion and lived in the big city and Luther kept her informed about his whereabouts. It was Luther’s sister who sent him an email that their father had suffered a stroke and was dying. Luther was in no hurry to return to the farm. He feared an unpleasant confrontation with his father who, of course, disapproved of his profession. Luther took the Greyhound back home and the bus tarried on the way, stopping in a hundred cities of middling size and, by the time, he reached his hometown, his father was conveniently dead. He attended the funeral and, after the burial, sat next to his mother in the farmhouse. She seemed to have shrunk and was almost pocket-sized. Luther thought that he could carry her effortlessly away from the home. A strong wind might displace her. Luther’s mother told him that she didn’t think that there was much left to her life. She said that the farm would have to be sold, or divided among the siblings, and that she didn’t want Luther to be deprived of his share. “But you must promise me not to play cards anymore,” Luther’s mother told him. Luther nodded. “I want you to promise,” she said. Luther nodded again. The house was full of the smell of roasted and broiled meat. Luther felt that the walls were too close and the ceiling too low. Cousins and nephews and grandchildren were underfoot and the nursing mothers were queued up outside the bathroom, waiting to use the toilet. People had brought their dogs and the animals gamboled about the living room and romped in the yard outside the house. “I don’t understand what makes you people so opposed to cards,” Luther said. His mother shook her head. “Who do you mean by ‘you people’?” Luther shrugged: “Oh, you know.” “Cards are used for fortune-telling, divination, it’s a form of soothsaying,” his mother said. “No, it’s just a game,” Luther replied. “Then there’s no point to the game,” his mother said. She paused and, then, said: “People gamble because they want to prove that they are lucky. But there’s no such thing as luck. It is all providence, not luck.” Luther didn’t like quarreling with his mother, but, he said: “I don’t see anything in the Bible against gambling.” “Not so,” his mother responded. “When a trumpet sounds in the city, are not the people afraid – that’s Amos,” she added. “I don’t see how – “ Luther began. His mother shushed him. “Just promise me, Luther, just promise me.” Luther was about to tell his mother that he would no longer gamble. But, then, his sister intervened. She had come from the kitchen with a plate of ham and cheesy potatoes all orange-yellow and she sat down on the other side of Luther’s mother. Now, there was a witness to his pledge. “I was talking to Luther about gambling,” Luther’s mother said. “I told you that I didn’t do that so much anymore,” Luther said. Luther’s sister looked at him quizzically. “Will you promise me that you won’t gamble any more?” his mother asked him. “I don’t know,” he said. His sister said that it wasn’t fair to use this occasion to make Luther change the way that he was living. “I just want the best for you,” his mother said. “I won’t promise anything,” Luther said. “That goes against my grain, but I will try not to gamble.” “Is that the best you can do?” his mother asked. Luther’s sister answered for him: “It’s the best he can do.” A couple days later, Luther rode to the airport with his sister and took a plane back to New York. He found a couple of games that looked promising and won as always. But he felt troubled. On a sunny afternoon, he went to a park where people were playing backgammon and chess. He knew about those games but had never played them competitively. A local guy named Reuben was playing chess against with a Russian Jew. Reuben looked like he was a couple of pawns down and the situation on the board seemed to favor the Jew. Luther knew that Reuben was a strong player. A black kid wearing sunglasses was watching the match from the other side of the table. “What do you think?” Luther asked the black kid. “Reuben is fucked,” the black kid said. Reuben looked up from the board, squinted at the black kid, and, then, grinned. “I’m not so sure,” Luther said. Luther detected confidence in Reuben’s grin. Luther had spent years watching people trying to bluff and outwit one another and he could sense confidence, fear, and uncertainty. “Reuben is gonna take this guy,” Luther said to the black kid. “You think so?” the kid replied. Luther made a wager with the black kid for 15 dollars that Reuben would checkmate the Russian Jew. When he collected a half hour later, the black kid asked him: “How’d you know?” “Intuitition, I guess,” Luther said. Luther went to the tables where the men were playing backgammon. He studied the players and watched their hands and lips. Then, he made a couple wagers with the kibbutzers as to who would win. Again Luther collected twenty dollars from one bystander and thirty bucks from another. A couple days later, Luther announced that he could no longer play poker. He said that he had lost his taste for the game and, besides, had made a vow to his mother that he would no longer gamble. His friends shook their heads incredulously: “How are you going to live, dude?” and “you’re gonna work as a chef now or something?” Luther smiled: “Short order cook, I always wanted to be short order cook.” But Luther took the Greyhound down to Atlantic City and found some informal games, cash-tournaments operated by dealers moonlighting from the casinos. Luther circulated in the card-rooms, meeting and greeting, and, after learning a little about the players, he made side-bets with other observers as to the outcome of the games. These bets were pretty much sure things. Luther could measure a player’s confidence and skill by the way he held his cards, by the tone of his voice, by the number of times he blinked his eyes or the frequency with which he lifted his drink to his mouth It was a relief to be free from the luck of the draw, from the random chance of the cards flung his direction. In short order, he made a lot of money. In this way, Luther supported himself and, indeed, flourished. Six years later when his mother died, Luther went home again. “I am no longer a gambler,” Luther told his family members. “What do you do?” “I am a kind of consultant,” Luther said. His older brothers were happy and didn’t make any further inquiries. “The prodigal son,” his younger sister told him. The baby of the family, his sister that had been born on that afternoon long years before when he saw his first card game, approached with tears in her eyes. “I’m so happy that you’ve changed your life,” she said. “What has been lost is now found,” Luther said and he hugged her. Tim Tim’s father taught him to play poker. Because of this, Tim didn’t like the game. Although they were dead before he was alive, Tim’s grandparents on his father’s side were strict and righteous people who detested card-playing, alcohol, and, probably, dancing as well. Tim’s father first learned poker when he was in the army. On some level, perhaps, Tim’s father must have agreed with his parents about gambling because he made learning the game an exercise in shame and humiliation for his son. Tim’s father talked constantly as he played and taunted the other players. When someone folded, Tim’s father said that the loser was a “shoe-clerk from Keokuk” (or sometimes Peoria) and that he should return to his vocation of fitting ladies’ feet for heels and flats. He saluted his own winning hands and told Tim that lady luck was going to deprive him of his paycheck. But Tim was just a kid and didn’t earn a paycheck and so a lot of these taunts and boasts made no sense – after all, they were only playing a penny-ante game with coins saved up in pants pockets for a couple of weeks. After several hands, one of the children would usually flee the table in tears. “You have to be tough to play poker,” Tim’s father told him. “I learned this in the service.” After leaving home, Tim stayed away from card games. He assumed that the purpose of these games was to humiliate your opponents and strip them of money that they needed to live or, at minimum, that their wives required from them as a kind of marital tariff. Poker was strife and envy and cruelty – who needed it? So it was strange that Tim found himself in a whiskey-fueled game with a bunch of blue collar cooks and grocers and mechanics. Even more strange that Tim won almost every hand and walked away from the table with 97 dollars in cash. Here’s how it happened: 1. Tim graduated from college and took a job as a City Engineer at mid-size municipality out in the country; 2. Tim was single, but hoping to find a girlfriend; 3. After several unsuccessful dates, Tim was lonely. He mentioned that he was lonely to his boss; 4. Tim’s boss said that he knew a nice girl who was a waitress at a restaurant where they sometimes ate lunch. Tim’s boss said that he would arrange for a date; 5. Some confusion ensued. Tim’s boss flirted with all of the waitresses and he had mistaken a woman that was married for another waitress who was single. So he tried to arrange a date for Tim with the married woman. This led to comical misadventures but no romance; 6. One of the other waitresses learned that Tim’s boss was trying to find a girlfriend to his young associate. Her name was Kim; 7. Kim was plain but confident. She had four brothers who were very hardworking. One of them was a short-order cook, one was a mechanic, one stocked food at a grocery and the fourth was a lawyer, fabulously successful, in a remote city; 8. Because Kim had been raised with men, she felt that she understood them well; 9. Kim took the initiative, flirted with Tim, and invited him to come by after her shift and have a drink with her in the bar; 10. Tim asked her if his boss had set up the date, and, although he had not, Kim said that he had; 11. They had many drinks in the bar, most of them complimentary since the bartender was one of Kim’s best friends. 12. Kim seduced Tim and decided that she would make him her boyfriend; 13. Thirteen is unlucky; there is no thirteen; 14. On Sunday afternoons, when Kim’s brother, the cook, was not working, her family members gathered in the mechanic’s house by East Side Lake. With wives and children and their cronies from work, the boys barbecued bratwurst and burgers and drank beer and, then, adjourned to the rec room in the basement to play poker; 15. Kim asked Tim to attend the Sunday gathering. She told him that the food was excellent – after all, she worked in a restaurant and, sometimes, took leftovers home and one of her brothers was a grocer and had access to the best cuts of meat and the freshest produce; 16. “They will want you to play poker with them,” Kim said. “I don’t like that game,” Tim told her, “I barely remember the rules.” “You’ll do fine,” she said; 17. The grill dispersed sweet smoke across the backyard and the lake glittered behind lilac hedges and it was a beautiful Sunday morning, church bells ringing at the end of green, leafy streets; 18. As promised the food was excellent; 19. A couple of Kim’s brothers unveiled bottles of Johnny Walker Red and Crown Royal whiskey: “it’s time for me to take your money,” the short-order cook said to Tim. He patted Tim on the back; 20. Tim smiled wanly. He turned away to look covertly into his wallet. He had a couple of twenties but nothing smaller. “I don’t even have any money,” Tim said; 21. Kim beckoned to Tim. She took him indoors where there were babies creeping around on the carpet, dogs wagging their tails and sniffing for dirty diapers, a half dozen women smoking cigarettes and drinking wine from a couple of cardboard boxes fitted with spigots. “Here,” she said. She handed Tim a big wad of one and five dollar bills, all folded and crumpled together. “It’s my tip money from last night,” Kim said. “I can’t take it,” he told her. “It’s yours.” “No, no,” she said. “Be a good sport.” 22. In the basement, the men were smoking cigars and Swisher sweets; 23. Trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, Tim sat down at the table. “I’m not much good at this,” he said. Someone handed him a drink. It was very strong; 24. Tim got drunk. The more drunk he was, the better he played. 25. To his amazement, Tim won many hands. The cards that came to him were always exactly what he needed. Money accumulated in front of him; 26. Tim lost track of time. At one point, an older man with a boy came down the steps into the basement. The older man was someone’s friend from work. “It looks like you’re winning big time,” the older man told Tim. Tim shook his head, but didn’t say anything for fear that he would jinx his winning streak; 27. The older man was already drunk and staggered slightly as he stood over Tim’s shoulder watching the game. He seemed to hope for an invitation to play, but one of the men said: “You know that the boy’s parents would disapprove.” “So what?” the man said. But a few minutes later, the man said that he was expected somewhere else and they left the room. As they were leaving, the boy asked: “Do you think the baby has come yet?” 28. Kim came down to watch the game. She seemed proud of Tim. “I told you he was smart,” she said to one of her brothers. Her brother, the short-order cook, said: “Hell, he’s not smart, he’s just lucky;” 29. Just before the game ended, Tim won another big pot. He shrugged as he raked the cash toward him. “I could say that the shoe clerks here need to go home to Peoria,” Tim remarked. “But are you saying that?” one of Kim’s brother’s said in a tone of false hostility. ‘Of course not,” Tim said; 30. Tim went back to his apartment where he had sex with Kim. He felt powerful and happy; 31. A month or so later, Kim suggested that they consider marriage. Tim wasn’t ready for marriage and so the relationship faltered and, after six more weeks, they stopped seeing one another; 32. Kim moved to Chicago and got married to someone there; 33. A year later, Tim married a schoolteacher in town. For many years, Tim cherished his memory of that poker game. When people complimented him at work on a job well-done, he often said: “Hell, I’m not smart. I’m just lucky.” And he felt lucky. So Tim was usually optimistic and confident. Tim’s assistant, a young man promoted from the city road crew to the engineering office, once asked him how he managed to stay so cheerful. “I’m just lucky that way,” Tim said. One day, Tim was eating supper with his wife at a restaurant on the strip by the freeway. Tim knew the zoning and ordinance people at the city and so he was vaguely aware that the Supper Club was owned by Kim’s brother, the man who had once been a short-order cook. After dinner, the restaurant’s owner came from the kitchen and, after shaking Tim’s hand, sat down at the table. “We’ve known one another from way back,” the restaurant owner told Tim’s wife. They talked about their children. Tim’s son was in the Marines, stationed in Afghanistan. The club owner’s sons were both attending college. He sighed about all the expense. “Do you remember playing poker with us?” the restaurant owner asked. “Sure,” Tim said. “That must have been thirty years ago.” “Time sure flies,” the club owner said. “I won big that day,” Tim told his wife. “He thinks he won big,” the club owner said. “But we were trying to invite him into our family. So we let him win.” “Really?” Tim’s wife said. The former short order cook winked at Tim. “You can’t just let someone win at poker,” Tim said. “I remember you said I was a shoe clerk from Peoria,” the old short-order cook said. “I never heard that before. That always stuck with me.” “I was just joking,” Tim said. “I know.” “But did you really let me win?” Tim asked. “No, you can’t do that,” the restaurant owner said. “It’s the luck of the draw. You kicked our asses.” “That’s what I thought.” When Tim went to pay the bill, he found that Kim’s brother had comped his drinks. “He can’t do that,” Tim told the waitress. “Well, he’s the owner,” the waitress said. Tim gave her an especially large tip/ Badger The tavern across the freeway and down the frontage road from the casino had once been a bar and grill but the casino buffet, allegedly free although no one knew anyone who had ever eaten there without paying, was popular and made it unprofitable for the grill to continue serving food and, therefore, the kitchen was closed and much of the equipment sold at auction, resulting in an empty large, gleaming room at the back of the tavern that could repurposed for other uses, including, as it happened, a card parlor where folks might warm up before making their way to the casino, or where they might wager their winnings, or hope to remedy their losses, after a half-dozen hours gambling down the road, and, Badger, who had been banned from the casino for card-counting, came to the tavern often and was, as it were, the resident gambling professional in the room at the back of the house, discretely closed off from the small tavern where the TV showed professional sports and where local people came to have a few beers on their way home from work and, sometimes, when he wanted a cigarette and a break from play, he went outside and stood behind the building where the vents from the old grill still smelled of cold, rotten grease and where the prospect presented to the eye was some quonset huts in an empty field and a gas station with a lofty sign showing like a neon diadem over the runways of the freeway and, once, a waitress that Badger knew, and with whom he had joked around, stood next to him and accused Badger of not liking women, of being a cold fish, of being someone who you might want to know better but, probably, shouldn’t mess with, and Badger just looked at her and protested with his soft, brown eyes that so many people had trusted to their detriment and said: “You know, I’ve got a girlfriend and we’re very close” and the waitress shrugged and said she didn’t believe him, that he was just bluffing like he always bluffed and asked “so why don’t you bring her around here,” and Badger replied “to be pawed and groped and leered at by these losers?” and the waitress, then, asked Badger where his girlfriend worked and he told her that she was also a waitress and worked at the supper club a couple of miles or so down the road, on the freeway strip, but the woman standing by Badger by the dumpster behind the bar looked skeptical and batted her eyes at him from behind her cigarette and spoke something that Badger didn’t exactly hear because of trucks shifting as they came up the exit ramp and due to a siren that was just then approaching and just then receding, and, as the tumult receded, Badger said: “My girl always makes me feel like three aces,” the siren now sliding like a shark through cold waters very distant from them, but neither advancing nor retreating, and she asked: “Just three aces, how come not a Royal Flush or a Full House?” to which Badger replied: “What’s the good of a sure thing?” and, paused, and thought for a moment, and sipped smoke from his cigarette, and smoothed the lapels on his shirt, and asked, whether rhetorically or not, we can not say: “What’s the fun of a sure thing?”