Tales From Gavagan's Bar (16 page)

             
Willison gazed at the closed door behind him and addressed Mr. Cohan. "Your treatment was certainly drastic," he said. "But I don't quite understand."

             
"You do not?" said Mr. Cohan placidly. "Then go look in that men's room. You'll be finding it empty. The man is stone sober by now, his feet are on the right time track, he's back where and when he belongs, and thank the Lord this is one place he'll not be coming to again. It's not that I like to be discouraging the trade, but there are a few things we cannot have in Gavagan's."

-

             
Mr. Witherwax, in very good voice that evening, was explaining to little Doc Brenner something he had been reading in a book.

             
"It's like this," he said. "All you gotta do is find out whether something is progressive or not. Then you don't have to worry about whether it's right or wrong. It says in the book that when you say something is right, you only really mean it helps make progress, see?"

             
A massive young man on the other side of Brenner turned around and said: "Phooey!" with great emphasis.

             
Mr. Cohan, from farther down the bar, dropped a discussion of the Brooklyn Dodgers and sidled along to extend a placatory hand toward the massive young man. "Now, now, Jerry—"

             
"I didn't mean phooey on these people here," said the young man, amiably. "As a matter of fact, I like the way they look, and while you're mixing another Angel's Tit for me, give them a drink, too, Mr.
Co-han.
But I say phooey on progress."

             
"Let me make you 'quainted," said the bartender. "Mr. Witherwax, Doc Brenner, this is Mr. Shute."

             
"How do you do?" said the young man, formally, compressing Mr. Witherwax's hand to the consistency of an octopus's tentacle. "I say there isn't any such thing as progress."

             
"Don't bite the hand that feeds you," said Doc Brenner. "If it weren't for progress, you'd probably have died of diphtheria while you were a kid."

             
"Like this book says," said Witherwax, "you might as well help progress along, on account of you can't stop it."

             
"Inescapable law of nature," said Brenner.

             
"No, it isn't," said Shute, downing his Angel's Tit at a gulp and munching on the cherry. "I escaped it. Or else I made progress backward. Fill it up again, Mr. Cohan." He laid a bill on the bar; so did Witherwax.

             
"Here, here," said Brenner, "this round is on me. Rye and plain water."

             
"All right," said Witherwax, "let's roll for it. That box of yours, Mr. Cohan. Want to come in?" He addressed Shute.

             
"Not I," said the massive young man. "Sorry, and no disrespect to you, but I just don't dare gamble on anything. That's how I got mixed up with what you call progress, and I almost died of it."

             
He stared gloomily at Mr. Cohan, who was busy with a Martini for Witherwax. "Right you are, Mr. Shute," said the bartender. He turned to the others: "He has his reasons."

             
"Doesn't sound reasonable to me," said Brenner.

             
"Well, I'll tell you," said Shute. "I'll tell you the story, though you probably won't believe it. That's the trouble; nobody does. They think I'm a prehistoric survival or a plain nut." He sipped from his Angel's Tit and continued:

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My father was Francis Shute. You probably never heard of him, but he wrote a lot of books on folklore and early magic, sort of picking up where Frazer left off in
The Golden Bough,
if you know what I mean.

             
I understand I can't ever be president of t
he United States. I wasn't born in the country. At the time they brought me into the world—I think that's the right phrase, isn't it?— my parents were living in the Harz Mountains in central Germany. That's the greatest folklore country there is, the place where the Brothers Grimm got their start. They were trying to collect tales that the Grimms might have overlooked, or new and altered versions of the stories the Grimms already had. My father worked on the theory that folklore is an explanation of something and contains a basic stratum of
truth of some kind, but when the exterior events are different, then a new folklore story comes around, getting a little closer to the underlying truth of what makes the world tick. It's really very interesting. That was 'way back before the First World War, you know, but he found stories growing up that the Grimms never heard of—not about individuals, but the Germans as a race of heroes who were going to save the world from a lot of dirty monsters with long beards, and that sort of thing.

             
[Brenner cleared his throat.]

             
Yes, I know, what's all this got to do with progress. Wait. My parents lived in a German peasant cottage with a straw thatch, that might have been an illustration for one of the fairytales. I used to see pictures of it when I was a boy.

             
I was born on the night of June 24th, and they tell me it was one of the stormiest nights ever seen in the Harz, with the wind howling outside. Just as I was born—so they say—there was a big puff from the fireplace, the logs turned over, sparks flew out into the room and people began coughing. I daresay I bawled.

             
The local midwife and her assistant had come in to help the local doctor. They began muttering and one of them crossed herself. My father knew what that meant. You see, the 24th of June is St. John's Eve, when the fairies are supposed to be especially active, particularly in that part of Germany. According to their ideas, the puff of wind and the sparks and smoke were evidence of a fairy coming down the chimney to bestow a gift on the new-born baby. They didn't know whether it was a good fairy and a good gift, or one of the other kind. They rather thought it might be bad because it was such a foul night out, but said I'd have to find out for myself, and exactly what the gift was, when I grew up.

             
My parents told me the story, and while I was quite small, there was the kind of family joking you'd expect about my fairy gift and what it was. This became less and less as I grew up, just as the talk about Santa Claus becomes less. You can't assign any definite date when you stopped believing in the real existence of the old guy with the whiskers and reindeer,
but you gradually get the idea.

             
Well, I got the idea about my fairy gift, or thought I did, until I was well along in college. The frat house there was the first place I ever really played cards for money. We played at home, for chips and things, of course, but my father was such a rationalist that there never seemed much sense in risking money on the game because, as he pointed out, it all came out of his pocket anyway.

             
I don't mean to say that we did any serious gambling at the frat house. It was the usual college idea of a big evening; penny ante with a nickel limit and a couple bottles of beer, that left us all unprepared for recitation the next morning, but feeling like very gay dogs. I enjoyed the association and I liked the game, but it wasn't very long before I found out I couldn't afford it—financially, even at penny ante, and because I got bad-tempered. You see, I couldn't seem to win a single pot unless everybody dropped out before the betting began. We'd play about once a week. I kept track over a period of six weeks, and I went that long without winning once, not one single pot.

             
All right, I know you're going to say that's the complaint of a man who doesn't play his cards well. It just isn't true. I was a good card-player. In fact, I made the college bridge team in my sophomore year, and we won the team-of-four championship tournament from five other colleges during the Christmas vacation. After that happened, I told myself that this failure to win at poker was silly, so I got a copy of that book that has the percentage chances of winning on various types of hands, and studied it harder than I did my lessons, until I had committed it to memory. If you hold a flush in a five-man game, for instance, the chances are 508 to 1 that nobody will hold anything better.

             
After I had memorized the whole business, I got into the weekly poker game again. I didn't win a pot; I had a full house beaten once, and once a set of fours. So I gave up poker.

             
[Shute paused in his narration, motioning Mr. Cohan to fill his glass again.]

             
At the time, I didn't connect it with the fairy's gift, or anything of the kind. I thought it was some mannerism of my own, by which I unconsciously announced the strength of my hand. Of course, that wouldn't account for my being beaten with a full house, but that angle of it didn't occur to me—at least till after the Ellington football game.

             
You know, that was the year we had the wonder team, with Prewalski, Mack, Cassaday, and Loomis in the backfield; the team that hadn't been scored on the year before, and that had run up at least four touchdowns on every opponent down to the Ellington game. The day before the game, some of the Ellington brothers came over to stay at our frat house, and when one of them became patriotic enough to offer five dollars on his team, which had won two games and lost four, I naturally obliged him.

             
Maybe you remember reading about that game in the papers. There was never anything like it. On the very first play, Cassaday broke his leg; and that was already pretty bad, because he was the only really good line-plunger we had, and with him gone, Ellington could open out for pass defence. That didn't make too much difference with Mack doing the passing, because he could have thrown a football through the eye of a needle, if he found one big enough. It was one that had worked all season; Prewalski was in the clear, ready to take the pass, Mack got it away like a machine—and when the ball was about a yard out of his hands, the lacing on it burst open, the air squirted out, and the ball dropped to the ground. I know that sort of thing doesn't happen in college football, but it did this time.

             
The game was all like that. It wasn't that our team did anything wrong, but that everything they did went wrong through sheer bad luck. A substitute ran off the bench to pick up a piece of paper that had blown on the field, and the referee called back a touchdown run and penalized us for twelve men on the field—that sort of thing. They beat us, nine to seven, and nobody's been able to explain it since.