Ice Country (4 page)

As we pass a two-storied wooden structure on
our left, a dark-eyed, silky-haired head pops out of a doorway,
spilling soft reddish-orange light on the snow. “Hi, boys,” a
lustrous voice drawls.

“Evenin’, Lola,” Buff says. “It’s a cold ’un.
Better keep that door shut to keep the warmth in.”

With a full-lipped smile that says she lives
for contradicting people, Lola takes two strutting steps outside
into the snow. Her feet are bare and she’s wearing a sheer, lacy
dress that lets through more than its fair share of light.
Underneath she wears only the barest of essentials, something lacy
up top and down below, leaving little to imagination. She’s got to
be freaking freezing her perfectly sculpted buttocks off, but if
she is, she doesn’t show it.

“Sure you won’t reconsider my previous
offers?” she says in a seductive, lilting tone, swaying her hips
side to side, in a way that’s
completely
different to how
Looza was earlier when she was mixing the stew.

“Uh, well, I think, we have to…” Buff is a
tangle of words.

“Sorry, Lola. Not tonight,” I say. Not ever.
When I find the right girl and the time is right, I certainly won’t
be looking to pay for it.

“Another time, perhaps,” she says with a
wink.

“Uh, yah, you too,” Buff says nonsensically
as we walk away. He looks back several times.

“By the Heart of the Mountain, you’re
pathetic sometimes,” I say.

“Says the King of Bad Breakups,” he retorts,
magically finding order to his words again.

“At least I’m the king of something.”

“Hopefully we’re both the kings of boulders
tonight,” he says. “Did you get the silver?”

I screw up my mouth. “Yah, but it’s only
twenny.”

“Iceballs! It turned out I only had ten.”

“Son of a no-good, snow blowin’…” I spout off
a few more choice words. With only thirty sickles we’ll be lucky if
they even let us in the Chance Hole.

“Sorry. Darce had to use the rest of it to
fix a hole in the wall.”

That brings me back to reality pretty quick.
“Buff, I’m sorry. This is my fault. I never shoulda started
something with Coker.”

“Icin’ right it’s your fault,” he says, but
he’s grinning. “But he did have it coming to him. And it was kinda
fun, at least until that freezin’ stoner dropped that stool on our
heads.

I grin back. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

Buff claps me on the back. “Like you said,
Dazzo, we’ll fix things, just like we always do.”

~~~

We know we’ve reached our destination when
the pipe smoke starts curling around our heads.

Against the stark white of the winter
scenery, the gray smoke almost seems to take on a life of its own,
with fingers that grab and clutch without ever actually touching
you. The smoke wafts out from a stone staircase that descends
cellar-like beneath a two story building that, based on the sign on
the door, claims to specialize in
Custom Doors
. Other than
in the White District, there’s not much demand for that sort of
thing these days—most of us are just happy to have any type of
door—so I suspect it’s just a front for the gambling operation.

Heavy voices rumble from below like distant
thunder from some fire country storm. Moments later, a short man
emerges from the cellar, looking distraught, glancing behind him
with wary eyes, as if he’s likely to get knifed in the back. Which,
coming out of a place like that, he just might.

He’s heading right for us, but not looking
where he’s going. We just stand there, watching him, waiting for
him to notice, but he keeps on coming. When he finally looks up,
he’s so close he barely stops before running smack into my chest.
“Oh,” he exclaims, twitching so hard that his knitted cap flops off
his head and into the snow, revealing a head as bald as the day he
was born. Buff reaches down and picks it up.

“Uh, sorry…and thanks…and, uh, sorry,” the
man says, taking the cap and sort of bowing with his hands clasped
together around the edges. He’s jerking every which way and can’t
seem to keep his eyes focused on us for more than a few seconds.
Each time they dart away, it’s toward the cellar steps.

“Are you waiting for someone?” I ask, nodding
toward the steps.

“Oh, nay…nay, nay, nay, nay, nay! Most
definitely not. But I really don’t know how I’ll…never mind, it’s
not your concern.” The odd little man scurries off, his feet
sinking into the snow up to his knees. “Not enough sickles in the
world…ever pay them back?...What’ll Marta say?” he mumbles to
himself as he plods away, trying to replace the hat on his head.
But his hands are so jittery he can’t get it right, and eventually
gives up, settling for cold ears until he gets to wherever his
destination is.

“He lost big time,” Buff says. I nod, wishing
it wasn’t true. Although perhaps if other patrons of the Chance
Hole are losing, that means there’s plenny of room for us to
win.

I hang onto that thought as we descend the
steps. There’s no smoke or voices now, as the thick door at the
bottom is closed again. A man as big as a boulder with legs like
tree trunks stands in front of the door, thick arms crossed over
his chest.

“I ain’t seen you two before,” he says in a
voice that suggests his father is a bear. Given the thickness of
his beard, his mother might be a bear too.

Buff lets me do the talking after his
unfortunate tongue tie up when he spoke to Lola. “You haven’t.
Usually we play small time, but we’re looking to up the ante
tonight.” Yah, with the all of thirty sickles we have to play
with.

He looks me up and down with a crooked smile,
as if he doesn’t believe for a second that we’ve got the stones to
play with the high rollers. My nerve falters under his gaze, but I
don’t let it show on my face. When his heavy brown eyes return to
mine, he says, “Buy-in’s twenny sickles, five-sickle ante per hand,
betting starts immediately.”

When he opens the door the smoke and noise
hit us like a morning fog.

I
nside is full of
snakes. Not the slivery brown rattlers you’ll find in the woods
sometimes in the heart of summer, but the greasy, venom-eyed,
hustling kind who work the Red District underground. There are a
dozen tables and all appear to be full. The slap of cards, jingle
of coins, and groans of loss or shouts of victory muddle into one
stream of sound that represents one thing and one thing alone:
greed.

Here is where fortunes are made and bigger
fortunes are lost. Just by stepping through this door we’ve proved
that we belong, certainly more than the bald-headed man with the
unsteady hands who left earlier.

Through the pipe smog, I scan the crowd,
laughing when a chubby guy with a lopsided smile scrapes a pile of
coins from the center of a table while a hooded man slams his cards
down. For every winner there’s a loser.

“Advance?” a nasally voice says from beside
us.

A pointy-nosed woman sits at a desk, stacks
of coins in front of her.

“Excuse me?” I say, being as polite as
possible.

She lifts a hand to her curly red hair,
shakes her head, rolls her eyes. Maybe we don’t belong here after
all. Even she knows we’re new to this scene. Slowing her pace, she
says, “Would. You. Like. An. Advance?” She motions to the
coins.

Forget trying to act the part. This woman
appears to be offering us money—which we desperately need—so I need
to understand. Keeping my voice low, I say, “Look, you know as well
as us that we’re new to…all of this.” I wave my hand across the
room. “We’ve played cards plenny of times, but never in a joint
like this—for high stakes. So can you please explain how it works.
The advance, I mean.”

She sighs, seems to resign herself to the
fact that I’m not going away without some information. “Most of
our…
customers
…are high rollers. They play for big stakes and
they don’t back down. You think they carry hundreds of sickles in
their pockets? Forget about it. They come here empty handed, and we
keep a tally of their balance. We can also advance you silver so
long as you’re good for it. We can do up to a thousand sickles the
first time, until you’ve proven you’ll pay it back. Then we can go
as high as ten thousand.”

A thousand sickles? Ten thousand? I haven’t
ever seen that kind of wealth in my life. “You’ll give me silver?”
I say slowly.

She laughs, which comes out as nasally as her
voice. “Not give—loan. Each day you don’t pay it back, the balance
goes up by ten-hundredths of the amount you owe.”

Buff and I look at each other. The green of
his eyes almost looks silver, as if he’s been staring so hard at
the piles of coins that they’ve gotten stuck there. “What do we
do?” he asks.

I shrug, trying to think. If we keep doubling
our thirty sickles each time we play, we won’t really need anything
else. But we could also lose it all in the first round.

I lean in, so only she’ll be able to hear me.
“How far will thirty sickles get us?”

“Thirty sickles each?” she says, tapping her
chin with a long, white finger.

“Uh. Thirty sickles total,” I admit.

Her nostril-heightened laugh is back. “You’re
joking, right? Didn’t Ham tell you the buy-in’s twenny? You won’t
both be able to play if you’ve only got thirty sicks.”

Decision time. Take the money now, or one of
us has to walk out the door. Or we could both leave. But then where
will we be? No money, no jobs, no pub. I steel myself and go for
it. “We’ll take thirty sickles,” I say.

“Minimum advance is one hundred,” she says
flatly.

“Make it two hundred,” I blurt out before I
can stop myself.

Buff nudges me, his eyes wide and green
again. I shrug.
Just go with it
, I mouth.

Nostril-voice counts out the coins and hands
them to me. “Welcome to the Hole. May you have bad luck,” she says,
smirking. I hope she says that to all the customers, but I have a
feeling she brought it out special just for us.

I lead the way, skating between the tables
like I belong, even though inside of me Looza’s stew is sloshing
and churning, like even it knows we’re doing something we
shouldn’t. The slap of cards is like a hammer to the back of my
head, which starts to ache again.

Every table appears to be full, except one,
which has two chairs pulled out at an angle, as if whoever vacated
them left in a hurry. One of them was probably the nervous-looking
bald guy’s. They’re still playing, but the game almost seems
friendly, as if they’re just having a bit of fun, without care as
to whether they win or lose. Seems like our kind of table.

I approach, ducking my head to draw one of
the gambler’s eyes. A round-faced guy with double-pierced ears
looks up at me with a smile broader than Looza’s hips. His eyes are
blue and twinkling with red flecks under the lantern light. “Hey,
kid. You want in?” His tone is light and friendly. We’re just here
to enjoy each other’s company, it seems to say.

“Sure, thanks,” I say, feeling more and more
at ease. It almost feels like the cards we normally play back in
the Brown District. Only we’ve got a hundred sickles each that
aren’t ours to play with. “Mind if my buddy joins, too?” I ask,
motioning to Buff.

“The more the merrier,” he says.

I give Buff a hundred sickles from the
advance, and keep the same for myself. That should be plenny to get
us started. Sliding into a seat, I watch Buff do the same. He looks
less pale than before, as if he’s settling into things, too. We
watch as the players finish out their hand, tossing in bets of a
few sickles each, and laughing when the merry-eyed guy with the big
smile wins a nice pot of perhaps forty sickles when he shows double
boulders.

A friendly game amongst friends. The others
at the table appear equally easygoing. On my left is the guy who
invited us to play, and on my right is a thin, clean-shaven guy
with a long face that almost touches the table. He’s got at least
two hundred sickles piled up in front of him, perhaps double what
I’ve got. On either side of Buff are twins, each with jet-black
hair and knit caps that they’ve kept on despite the relative heat
of the crowded cellar. They’re all quick to smile and don’t seem to
mind parting with their silver if it means one of their buddies
wins.

“Ante’s five sickles,” Pierced-Ears
announces.

Buff and I grab a five-sickle piece each and
toss it in the center of the table. The other four do the same.
Excitement builds in my chest at the prospect of winning even the
ante, which is five times the normal one-sickle ante I’m used to.
Twin-Number-One deals, two cards each, facedown. I’m feeling more
and more at home. This is my element. I’ve been playing
boulders-’n-avalanches since I was old enough to understand the
rules. I’ve always been good at it. This is just like any other
game.

I peek at my cards. Twin boulders!
What
are the chances?
I think. I do my best to hide my excitement
behind a blank stare, but my heart’s beating so hard I swear the
others can hear it. Pierced-Ears takes a look at his cards and
rolls his eyes, tosses them in the middle. “I’m out,” he says. A
small stone and a minor tree branch. He was smart to fold. No
chance of winning with cards like that.

Twin-Number-One dealt, so it’s Buff’s turn to
bet. He glances at me but I can’t read him. Glances back at his
cards. “Five sickles,” he says, tossing in another coin. There’s no
way he’s got my hand beat, but it doesn’t really matter. Me taking
his money is as good as him keeping it. We’ll split all the
winnings anyway. Twin-Number-Two nods and tosses in some silver.
Long-Face chews on his lip and then does the same.

My bet. I’ve got to play this one slow, or
they’ll know right away I’ve got something good. I toss in the
minimum required to stay in the hand, five sickles. We skip
Pierced-Ears since he’s out. Twin-Number-One throws his cards in
the middle, facedown. Another one out.