Champion of the World (2 page)

T
he longshoreman was dressed for an evening on the town, in a leather vest emblazoned with the seal of his union chapter and a silver bear claw belt buckle holding up herringbone slacks. His red hair hung loose to his shoulders, and the single gold tooth in his mouth glinted under the lights each time he won a hand of five-card poker. With the big clock in the gaming pavilion creeping up on half past seven, Moira Van Dean folded a pair of kings and let him take down a lukewarm pot with the tens she knew he had hidden. As he raked another stack of chips into his lap, the longshoreman blew her a kiss.

Some men just didn't know how to win without making a spectacle of themselves.

For the first half of her shift, she had managed to make nice, letting the longshoreman win hand after hand without so much as a knowing laugh or an
Oh, I do declare
. This, though, was too much. As the next hand began, she showed him the honest, square-john grin she knew was best for taking people's money, and he looked back like he wanted to sink his teeth into her.

“Now the little lady is ready to play cards,” he announced, as if they were all about to watch a monkey try to tie its shoes.

The rest of the sleepy-eyed drunks slouching around the table chuckled along with him, each of them watching her with the usual mix of boredom and animal lust. She wasn't fooling anyone. In her apricot evening gown and beaded amber necklace, they knew she was the carnival shill. They all thought she was there to keep them company and to see that the carnival got its five percent rake out of every pot. In truth, her job was more about making sure the action at the table didn't lag, that chips moved from one side of the table to the other at a brisk pace, and that they all continued ordering the watered-down highballs the carnival sold in paper soft drink cups for fifty cents apiece.

Any money she collected went back to the carnival's kitty, so her job was also to win a few hands from time to time—just not so many that it disrupted the game or the men gave up. In addition, she was there to cut any company losses, to make sure nobody won too much money. If one of these dockworkers and two-bit grinders proved sharp enough to put together a big stack of chips, Moira was tasked with winning some of it back. It was not challenging work. Once the evening performance got under way across the carnival lot, only the worst men remained inside the gaming pavilion. It would take a team of plow horses to drag any of them away before all their money was gone.

Gaming pavilion
was what employees of the Markham & Markham Overland Carnival were required to call it, though it was really just a weathered twenty-by-twenty canvas tent battened by yellowing sidewalls and domed in the middle with a thick wooden stake. It smelled of damp wool and trampled grass, the ground cold under her open-toed shoes. Electric lights were set up on poles in all four corners, and under the clamor of the men drinking and writhing and giving away their savings, you could hear them buzzing.

The game was standard stud poker. Each player got five cards—
three up, two down—with a series of betting rounds between. By the time the dealer got three cards into the next hand, most of the men at the table had folded, leaving just Moira and the longshoreman to play heads-up. The dealer flopped the longshoreman a jack of clubs as his fourth card, and when he bet on it like a bull charging for a matador's cape, Moira fought down a smirk. One look at the longshoreman's drunken, bloodshot eyes told her he had a hand he liked. She signaled the dealer by putting both her elbows on the table and the dealer gave her the high sign to fold, idly touching the knot of his necktie with the tips of his fingers. Before she made a move, she chewed a fingernail and let her eyes stray nervously around the table, wanting the men to think she was uncertain. Finally, painfully, with her head tipped slightly to one side and her mouth pinched in a regretful scowl, she pushed in her cards.

“Fold,” she said.

The longshoreman made a clucking sound with his tongue and swept up another meager pot. “Cowardly,” he said.

She bit her lip. She wanted to tell him she knew he was holding at least one more jack, that he had her pair of fours beat all to hell, but instead she just frowned into her lap. The longshoreman flipped his cards to show off three of a kind, and she clamped her hand over her mouth, wide-eyed, hamming it up. The men shifted in their seats, embarrassed for her, and as the dealer began to shuffle again they busied themselves counting their chips, congratulating the longshoreman with the looks of men who believed it should have been them.

“For your trouble,” the longshoreman said, plucking a twenty-five-cent chip from his stack and flicking it across the felt at her.

When she explained to him she was not allowed to take tips from players, the longshoreman sneered. “Take it as a loan,” he said, letting the chip lie. “When I bust you, maybe we can work out some form of repayment.”

Right then, she should've taken her chips and walked away. She could've let one of the other girls take over the poker table and switched to dice or even blackjack. It would've been the smart move, but sometimes the card player in her got the better of her good sense.

She won the next three hands without looking up from her cards, ignoring the dealer when he touched his tie knot. Grumbling, a couple of the other men decided to take their chips to a different table, and underneath the skirt of the tablecloth the dealer kicked her in the shin. She promised herself she would fold the next hand, but when her first two cards were a pair of queens, she felt the stir of good fortune in her belly. She couldn't fold two queens. Again she blew through the dealer's fold sign, playing her hand slow and careful, trapping the longshoreman into making a big bet on the final round.

“Let's see what you've got, girlie,” he said, fingers playing idly at his belt buckle.

Just for show, she checked her hole cards one last time. “My, my,” she said. “What's a nice girl like me doing with a hand like this?”

When the longshoreman saw her queens, black hatred spread over his face. From a shoulder sling under his vest he pulled out a short, bone-handled dagger and began using it to clean his fingernails. The sight of the blade twisted her stomach, and the snub-nosed pistol she had strapped over her ankle suddenly felt as hot as a lump of coal. She tried to catch the dealer's eye, but now he was steadfastly avoiding her gaze. She crossed her legs and eased the gun out of its holster.

When there was trouble at the tables, it reassured her to think of her father bellied-up and dealing a card game in his pin-striped shirt with garters around the elbows. By the time Moira came along, her father had already ditched the pinched nasal accent of his Pennsylvania upbringing in favor of the soft drawl of a riverboat card dealer.
Even as a little girl she understood he was the sort of man women adored. Casino cocktail girls made sure his drink was always full. Men liked him, too, drawn to his easy manner and dry wit. Most of the time he could cool out a sore loser or broke drunkard armed with just his smile and a handful of complimentary chips.

“I'm just the middleman,” he told her on the first night she worked running ice in the casino ballroom, age twelve. “My job is to make it as painless as possible for people while I empty their pockets.”

Now she tried to put some of that faux Southern hospitality into her voice as she batted her eyes at the longshoreman and said, “Surely there's no need for that. Stow that thing away and let us refill your drink on the house.”

He ignored her, puckering up to blow a speck of grime off the tip of his knife. She looked around for a roustabout or a pit boss, but all the men had gone out to the big tent to help with the show. There was nothing to do but play the next hand, and by the time four more cards had been dealt, the other men got out of their way and it was just the two of them again.

“I fold,” Moira said, without even bothering to look at her hole cards.

“You got the best hand,” the longshoreman protested. “You don't fold the best hand.”

She eyed his cards across the table and then sighed at him, this stupid man. “You're chasing a straight,” she said, “but you're not going to get it.”

“Now, see,” the longshoreman said. “How could you possibly know a thing like that?”

A strange barking laugh escaped her lips, and it seemed to stoke his anger even more. He leaned forward in his chair and ground the tip of his dagger into the table's wooden rail. He said, “You think I haven't noticed the two of you signaling each other all night long?
Your carnival shams might fool these other mugs, but it hasn't worked on me, has it? I'm too skilled a player for you—for any of you—even in a rigged game. Now, play on.”

Her knees felt watery and she thought of telling him the truth: the only way this game was fixed was to keep Moira from cleaning him out in minutes. She didn't need to cheat. She could explain the numbers of this hand to him, why following after an inside straight was a sucker's bet, but the odds would mean nothing to him. Plus, she was not a card counter. Her own game was more guts and instinct than any kind of science. She could read the lay of a gambling table like a boat captain saw the rolls and draws of a current. With the slightest move, a quiver in the corner of an eye, a crossed or uncrossed leg, another player could tell her what they were about to do, the same way an outfielder could tell where a batter was going to hit the ball by the position of his feet and the angle of the bat. But why try to explain that to a man as obviously bad at cards as the longshoreman? Why think he might understand when she didn't fully understand it herself?

“Fine,” she said, giving him the full benefit of her eyes. “I bet all.”

The longshoreman measured her stacks with a wide skeleton's grin. She had a little more than half his own holdings left. A smart player would have at least taken some time to think it over, but the longshoreman called the bet immediately. She turned slightly in her seat, aiming the gun at him under the table, curling her finger lightly on the trigger.

Don't make me,
she said to him in her head, trying to breathe and hold the thing steady.

Just as the dealer sent their last cards around facedown, the flap on the tent's door rustled and over the longshoreman's shoulder she saw Pepper come into the gaming pavilion. He was still in his
purple cape and wrestling tights, his fingers massaging the groove in his throat where the noose had caught him. After pausing to give his eyes a chance to adjust to the glare of the lights, he gave her his funny, crooked smile. It felt like someone had set a flock of doves loose in her chest.

She didn't even bother checking her last card. She knew her ace high would carry the day, so she flipped them over to show the table and waited for the longshoreman to realize he'd lost. His eyes danced back and forth between his cards and hers. She watched it register in his face as he tried all the possibilities in his head. When he saw there was no way he could win, a low growl came from deep in his throat and he lashed out with one arm, scattering chips like a cloud of flies. His chair toppled backward as he stood, dagger clutched in one fist. Before he could move, Pepper was standing by his side, laying a hand casually on his shoulder.

“What's all this?” he said, like they were all in on some kind of joke together.

The longshoreman jerked away, wheeling and slashing with his dagger, but then he was down on one knee and Pepper was bending his knife hand back toward his elbow at a sickening angle. The longshoreman cried out and the knife dropped to the ground. With a quick twist, Pepper forced him down onto his belly and put a knee between his shoulder blades. The longshoreman cursed and thrashed, but Pepper's expression was as flat as glass as he scooped up the knife and set it on the table. A couple of roustabouts showed up then, too late as usual, and hauled the man to his feet.

“Cash this fellow out,” Pepper said, stuffing chips into the longshoreman's pockets. “Make sure he knows not to come back.”

As they dragged him away, the heels of his boots skittering in the grass, the longshoreman yelled something at them. Moira couldn't make it out, but in his voice she recognized a lifetime of anguish and
misfortune, a man foundering with no end in sight. Her throat felt dry and she realized she still had the gun pointed at his upturned chair. Slowly she lowered the barrel into her lap and turned to the dealer.

“Aren't you just about the most useless man?” she said.

Pepper touched her lightly on the arm. “Easy,” he said, and bent to pick up the longshoreman's chair. “It's taken care of now.”

They left through the tent's rear exit, walking into the carnival's backyard area, where a couple of Wild West trick shots stood in fringed jackets, balancing the butts of their rifles in the grass like walking sticks. When he saw how badly her hands were trembling, Pepper took her lighter and lit her cigarette. She took a greedy first puff, the smoke scorching her lungs and easing her nerves.