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Authors: Mark Joseph

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BOOK: The Wild Card
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“I couldn't believe it,” Bobby confessed. “She blew my mind.”
Beyond the shuttered windows Saturday disappeared like a day lost to jet lag. A proper summer fog finally had broken the heat wave, sending grateful locals into the bars and tourists strolling through Chinatown. At five sharp the Hooper Fish Company crab boat
Joaquin Murrietta
left Pier 43 to check her traps for the last time that season.
Alex tapped a cigarette on the felt, sniffed it, and touched one tip with his tongue to which adhered a single tobacco flake. The bitter taste caused him to revolve away from the table, and as he propelled the noxious sotweed into the air the professor realized the expression “blow one's mind” was unknown in 1963. A short, fierce, argument inside Alex's head ended with the brutal silencing of Professor Goldman and his pedantic quibbling by the wizard of Alvarado Street. Turning back, scarcely missing a beat, Alex recalled, “When Dean shot off his mouth and yapped, ‘Let's play a hand for the broad.' Holy shit! What the fuck! Oh no no no, uncharted territory, big taboo—but not for Sally. She went right with it and turned the whole crazy idea around and blew all our minds.”
“We weren't ready for someone like that,” Nelson said earnestly. “She was too far ahead of us.”
Dean clenched his fists and held them to his eyes as though he were weeping. “Oh, Billie,” he moaned. “Oh, God.”
Overlooking Dean's histrionics, Alex went on, “That's not quite true, Nelson. Bobby was ready.”
All but Dean looked to Bobby who returned their glances with a neutral expression, determined not to put his feelings on display. “I appreciate the compliment, Alex, but Nelson's right. I wasn't in her
class any more than the rest of you, not even close,” he said quietly, closely eyeing Dean whom the others continued to ignore. Sweating and trembling, the big man appeared ready to erupt from the pressure of reconstructing their voyage on the
Toot Sweet.
Bobby felt equally powerful forces at work inside himself—his mind reluctantly edged closer to the moment of his detonation, the turning point of his life about which these familiar strangers knew nothing. He'd told Nelson a few things in the cab, but how could he explain that Sally had opened a window and allowed him a glimpse of a universe of illumination? And as suddenly as the window had appeared it had been slammed shut—wham, a black hole in time. In the first nanosecond he'd been blinded by the darkness and had spent the rest of his life clawing back toward the light.
“She was the first hippie,” Charlie observed. “It took me a long time to figure that out, but I think she wanted to have her Summer of Love a few years early. Whose deal?”
“Ante up for seven stud,” Nelson replied, shuffling the blue deck. “We've heard your theories before, Charlie. First hippie, my ass.”
“Not me, I haven't heard Charlie's theories, or any theories,” Bobby said, curiosity getting the better of him. “You guys have talked about her for years, but I …”
Suddenly Dean jumped up, pointed wildly at Bobby, and shouted,
“You broke my nose,
you son of a bitch.” Teeth grinding, eyes squeezed tight, head jerking left and right in the throes of intense emotion, he sprawled his huge hands in the middle of the table, leaned over with all his bulk, popped open his eyes, and kissed Bobby on the lips.
Beaming, eyes crazy as an acid dream, he growled, “Thank you, man.”
Startled, Bobby recoiled and toppled over backwards onto the floor in a clatter of chair and yelps of surprise. The Enrico Caruso Suite resounded with uproarious laughter, Dean's cackle, Charlie's high shriek, Nelson's giggle, and Alex's belly laugh. Bobby too was laughing, but he wasn't sure at what.
“Christ almighty,” he mumbled lying on his back. “What else do I have to put up with to play a little cards?”
Dean rushed around the table and pulled Bobby to his feet, saying, “Every time I see my crooked nose in the mirror I remember what an asshole I was.”
“For Christ's sake, Dean, can't we stick to poker without getting all sentimental?” Bobby complained, smoothing out his clothes and no longer laughing.
“Hear hear, let's play,” Alex chorused.
“We tolerate Deano because we're used to him,” Charlie said.
“Only because the big turd made us rich,” Nelson added.
“You're still an asshole, Studley,” Charlie taunted. “You haven't changed that much. If it wasn't for Billie, you'd be dead.”
“Billie?” Bobby didn't remember who Billie was.
“His wife,” Alex said, snapping open his Zippo and furiously lighting a Lucky. “Dean is terrified of Billie finding out about Sally. He's afraid she'll freak out and leave him, but, even though we've never met, from what I've heard I've always thought she'd be more forgiving than that.”
“She isn't going to find out unless the world finds out, and then it won't matter,” Dean declared ominously.
“Who knows what you say in your sleep?” Charlie teased. “Maybe she already knows.”
“Horse exhaust. What a crock.”
“You never know, pal. Maybe you're the wild card, Dean. Maybe you always were the wild card.”
“Jesus,” Bobby muttered, still fussing with his clothes and flexing his back as he sat down. “Damn, I think I pulled a muscle.”
“Are you gonna play or throw another fit?” Alex inquired sharply of Dean.
Casting a disdainful sidelong glance at Alex, Dean asked, “You okay, Bobby?”
“Yeah, what the hell, with everything else that's happened in this game, getting kissed isn't the worst of it. Let's play.”
Charlie asked, “What's the game? I forgot with all the fuss.”
“Pay attention, Charlie, or you'll lose your big stack of chips, which you probably will anyway. Ante up for seven stud,” Nelson repeated and after everyone tossed in a white chip, he dealt two
cards face down to each player and then one card up. “A ten to Alex, a nine to Dean, a jack to Bobby, a six to Charlie, and a five to me. Jack bets. Bobby, you're boss.”
Bobby placed one red chip in the pot. “Ten grand on the jack.”
“I fold,” Charlie said.
“Too rich for me,” Nelson said. “I'm out.”
“I'll see your ten and raise twenty-five,” Alex said.
“You pricks,” Dean swore, breaking etiquette and flipping over his hole cards, a pair of threes. “I'm not gonna get suckered into this with you sharks. I'm out.”
“Tough geshitski,” Alex said. “Bobby?”
“See your twenty-five. Deal 'em.”
“Another ten to Alex for a pair and the three of diamonds to Bobby's jack, no help.”
“Oh, man, do you see that? That would've been my three.”
“Shut up, Dean,” Nelson snapped.
“Fifty on the tens,” Alex said.
“Out,” Bobby promptly replied, turning his cards face down with a nod to Alex who collected the pot. “Too bad you didn't stick around, Deano. Triple threes might have been good. I think you're spooked.”
“What!? I ain't spooked.”
Charlie's short, barking laugh spilled into the air, “Hahaha, you're fulla shit, Studley. Everybody's spooked. I mean, we can't play hide and seek with Sally forever. We have to get down to it sooner or later.”
An uncomfortable silence descended on the table. Finally, Nelson said, “Nah, let's play cards. C'mon, Wiz, it's your deal.”
“That's right, rock and roll, my deal, let's see, what'll we play next?”
“Let's play low hole card wild,” a relentless Dean suggested with a gleam in his eye. “Whaddaya say?”
Alex stopped shuffling, lay the red deck on the felt and buried his head in his hands, silently stifling an urge to grab Nelson's piece and shoot Dean between the eyes.
Charlie snarled, “No wild cards, you jerk. Not for this much money.”
Shaking his head, Nelson pleaded, “Christ, Dean, give it a rest.”
“We used to play low hole card wild,” Bobby said mildly. “That's what we played that night.”
“Haha,” Charlie twittered. “No shit. Maybe that's why we don't play it—”
“We don't play it because it's a lousy game,” Alex interrupted vehemently. “It's straight poker at this table, no wild cards, no bullshit.”
Sputtering with laughter, Nelson said, “I thought poker was all about bullshit—in spades. Low hole used to be my favorite.”
“It's my deal, and we won't play low hole card wild at this table,” Alex hissed.
“Ooo,” Dean needled. “Watch out for this boy. He's dangerous.”
Charlie coughed, Nelson looked embarrassed, and Alex shuffled again, the tension visible in the taught, white tendons in his hands.
He declared, “Seven stud one more time, straight poker. Nelson, cut the damned cards, please.”
As Nelson reached for the deck to make the cut, Bobby smiled broadly and said, “Relax, Wiz, a wild card is just a card, y‘know. One card of fifty-two, and I know you're on speaking terms with the math, Herr Doktor Professor von Goldman. Wild cards change the odds, but so what? You go with it. You know the numbers backwards and forwards—you didn't have perfect scores on your college boards for nothin'—so what's your problem? You gotta be ready for anything if you're gonna play this game. You gotta be loose.”
“Loose,” Alex echoed.
“Yeah.”
Nelson cut the deck and Alex picked up the cards, clucked his tongue several times, and tilted his hat back on the crown of his head. It was a day for letting things go. He remembered the little girl on the plane and then thought of his children who'd never met the wizard. He thought about the letters of resignation that waited
in his suitcase, brief missives addressed to his department chairman at the university and supervisor at the Department of Defense. Equations flashed across his mind's eye, significant issues of time, space, the motion of particles, the speed of light, the essence of being—useless junk, quickly replaced in his memory with odds for seven card stud low hole card wild. Bobby was correct. He knew the numbers.
“I guess we should listen to the pro, right, boys? I mean, he knows what he's talking about, that's for sure,” he drawled and adjusted his hat low on his brow. “You're right, Bobby, a card is just a card, a slip of stiff cardboard covered with ancient mystic symbols, hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades, the king with his sword, and the knave who wields a stealthy knife. A wild card, though, that's high concept, illusion and deception taken to another level.”
With a flourish Alex fanned the cards, cut them, cut them again, and pushed the deck over to Nelson for another cut.
“There's no point in being a dogmatic fool,” he said. “You called it, Stud. Down and dirty, here they come.”
“Aw right, baby, it's time to git naked, git crazy and boogie aw night long with the Wolfman, ‘cause we all just animals in the moonlight howlin' at the big pizza pie in the sky. Now I'm gonna lay a little Maurice on ya. Stay just a little bit longer, baby, and maybe maybe maybe you'll learn the Wolfman's secret of life in the insane lane. Aw right.”
The little radio buzzed, Wolfman Jack howled and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs pumped out their immortal song of teenage desire, “Stay.” Sally stood close behind Bobby, gently pressing her belly against the back of his head and moving her hips to the slow beat of the erotic ballad.
“You sure you wanna do this?” Bobby asked her.
Eyes closed, nodding her head, Sally quietly sang along with the Zodiacs.
“Well, your daddy don't mind, bopbop a wahwahwaaah, and your mommy don't mind, bopbop a wahwahwaaah, if we …”
“If we're gonna do it,” Bobby said, clutching the deck and twisting to wink at Sally, “it has to be low hole card wild.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh,
yeah.”
“Alex thinks low hole card wild is strictly for morons,” Nelson snickered. “You definitely qualify, Studley. You never win.”
Smack.
“Damn bugs.”
“Please please please please please, tell me that you're going to …”
“Explain this game to me,” Sally asked, snapping to attention.
Dean guffawed and blurted, “I wish someone would explain this damned game to
me.
”
“You explain it, Alex. You're so logical,” Bobby taunted. “We know how much you love it.”
“What's it called again?” Sally asked.
“Low hole card wild,” Bobby said.
“Low hold card wild,” she repeated like a mantra. “Low. Hole. Card. Wild.”
A fish jumped and landed near the boat with a loud splash. “It sounds … exciting,” she said, drawing out the last word. Droplets of sweat surfaced on her upper lip.
Nelson danced a little jig, wailing, “It's a crazy game for crazy people and that's why it's Crazy Nelson's favorite game. I'm gonna wake Charlie up; he can't miss this action.
Charlie!
Get your butt outta the sling.”
The song ended—
“come on come on come on and stay, ooo, la de da”
—the Wolfman spieled platter chatter, and Sally crouched down next to Alex and looked at him with fawn's eyes. “Tell me the rules.”
“You've been watching us, so I guess you understand regular poker, the sequence of the hands and all that, straights and flushes?”
“I think I do, yes.”
“Okay,” Alex began. “It's actually called seven card stud low hole card wild because you deal it like seven stud. Everybody gets two cards face down and one up to start and you bet, then three more up, one at a time, and you bet on each one, and then the last card down and a final bet for a total of seven cards, three down and four up, and the best five make your poker hand. The three down cards are called hole cards, and the lowest hole card in your hand is wild, and all like it in your hand are wild. A wild card can represent anything you want. If you have a pair of tens and a wild card, say a five, the five becomes a ten and you have three tens. The wild card is a chameleon, a magic card that can make your dreams come true and then break your heart. It can be part of a flush or straight and even give you a royal flush which can lose in this game to five of a kind, or even six or seven of a kind. In seven stud low hole card wild everything is turned upside down and crazy. It's poker for lunatics, at any stakes. Everyone has a different wild card and you don't know what any of them are, except yours, and you can't
be sure of that because what happens in this game, and this is the dirty, evil, wicked part, what happens is, say you have two sevens on the first two hole cards, making sevens your wild card, and a queen up, and you think you have three queens, but on the last card you get a three which is lower than a seven and now the three is your low hole card and that's your wild card and you only have three sevens. Get it?”
“I think so,” she said with a gulp that provoked an outburst of laughter from the boys.
“Don't kid yourself,” Alex said, giving Sally a friendly but patronizing pat on the hand. “Nobody gets it right away. One other thing. An ace in the hole can be high or low, and you decide if it's your wild card. It doesn't have to be. Here, let me show you.”
Alex shuffled the deck and laid out a demonstration hand for two players, dealing each imaginary player two cards down and one up.
“Okay, the first hand shows a deuce up and the second an ace up, so one player has a pair of deuces or something better, and the other at least a pair of aces, because each has a wild card in the hole.”
He turned over the first pair of hole cards, a deuce and an eight.
“This guy's low hole card is a deuce, which is as good as it gets, especially because he has one up and it's wild, too. He has three eights. Let's see, we'll turn over the other guy's hole cards, and he has a pair of nines in the hole to go with his ace showing, and this guy knows his last card may be lower than nines, in which case he'll have three nines which is a good hand in regular poker but not good enough to win in this game with five or six players.”
He swiftly dealt the rest of the hand, and the second player lucked out, paired his ace, keeping the nines wild and giving him four aces. His opponent received a flurry of low cards and ended up with his original three eights. “See what I mean? It can be confusing.”
Sally laughed and said, “Let's just play and see what happens.”
Alex squeezed around the table, making room for Sally, and she sat down and began casually collecting the cards.
“We have to bet something,” Charlie said. “Otherwise everyone just stays in and you might as well deal all seven cards at once.”
“Got any ideas?”
“Strip poker,” a leering Dean suggested.
“No way,” Bobby said. “Don't be a creep.”
“I have some money,” Sally said.
“So do I, everything I won from you guys,” Bobby hastened to say. “We're the only two players.”
“Wait a minute, I have some dough,” Dean announced, digging in his pocket.
“What? You been holdin' out on us, man?”
“I got twenty bucks.”
“You owe me that, you scumbag,” Alex spat. “You owe Bobby, too.”
“Well, ain't that just a bitch,” Dean scoffed. “Haw! I'm in.”
“That isn't your money, Dean. You owe everybody.”
“Go to hell, Alex. This is a new game.” Dean slammed the double sawbuck on the table, rattling the chips and beer cans.
“We can divide twenty bucks four ways, that's five each and we can all play,” Nelson suggested.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Ah shit, all right. Count out some damn chips.”
“Who's gonna deal?”
“Let Sally deal,” Bobby said. “It's her ass on the line.”
“What? C'mon,” Dean protested. “She doesn't even know how to shuffle.”
“So what?”
Rubbing eyes puffy with sleep and alcohol, Charlie appeared, asking, “What's going on?”
“Low hole card wild, my man, with a kicker in the pot,” Dean replied.
“Sally wants to play,” Bobby said.
“A girl? That's against the rules.”
“We have new rules,” Sally said with a cheerful smile. “The winner gets whatever he wants from me unless I win, and then I get whatever I want from whoever I want.”
Blinking rapidly, Charlie rubbed his eyes again and stared at Sally
while his comprehension grew in increments. Finally he said, “Whose crackpot idea was this?”
“Mine,” Dean and Sally said simultaneously.
“Well, I don't have any more money and I'm fucked up. I'm going back to sleep.”
“No, no, no, no, no, you have to play. Everybody has to play,” Nelson insisted. “Dean was hiding twenty bucks and if we divide it four ways, we're all in. Sit down.”
“There isn't any room.”
“Stop making with excuses, Charlie. Scoot over, Dean,” Nelson ordered. “Siddown.”
Charlie complied and wedged himself onto the bench that formed an L around the table, mumbling, “You should rename this boat the
Sardine Can.”
Alex counted chips, distributed neat stacks of whites, reds, and blues, and gestured toward the deck already in Sally's possession.
“Your game, your deal. Give everyone one card face down, then another one, then one face up.”
“Shuffle first?”
“Yes.”
Sally picked up the cards and executed a perfect cascade shuffle, a type of shuffle sometimes seen in bridge but rarely in a poker game. The cards rippled in her hands in consonance with the gurgling river. “Like that?” she asked unable to contain a smirk.
“God
damn,”
Dean swore. “Would you look at that.”
“Hey, we got a player here,” Alex chortled. “You've played before.”
“Hearts,” she said, shuffling again, her eyes flicking up to follow a mosquito. Instinctively, they all followed her glance away from the cards while she continued her patter. “I used to play hearts with my grandma and she taught me how to shuffle. She taught me a lot of things. Somebody get that bug.”
Smack.
“You ever play poker?” Nelson asked.
“When the game is over, you tell me,” she answered and dealt the hand, singing out the cards the way she'd observed. “A deuce
to Charlie, a six to Nelson, a nine to Alex, a king to Bobby, a seven to me, and another nine to Dean. Bobby bets.”
“A quarter on the king.”
“So now I put a blue one in?”
“Yes, or two reds and a white.”
“Okay.”
“Want me to tell you what I'm gonna do if I win?”
“No.”
“I'm gonna—”
“Shut up, Dean. You don't have to be crude.”
“Oh, yeah? Maybe I do. What if you win, Alex? What'll you do?”
“Throw your ass in the river, wise guy.”
Everyone stayed in. On the next card Charlie paired his deuce and bet a quarter and everyone stayed in again with nothing showing. On the fifth card Charlie caught a third deuce, and before Sally could finish dealing the round, Charlie bolted from the table, rushed to the stern and vomited over the side of the boat.
“Charlie?” Alex hollered.
“He's drunk and fucked up, but he's got winners,” Bobby declared. “No one is going to beat four deuces or better.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Dean contradicted, and when Charlie returned but didn't sit down, he said, “Your bet, Charlie.”
Charlie reached across the table and flipped over his hole cards, the fourth deuce and an ace, giving him five aces in five cards, the best hand they'd ever seen.
“I win,” he said simply.
“Charlie wins? Charlie?”
“Charlie wins the broad?”
“Charlie the
queer?”
Flabbergasted, Bobby turned to Sally and said, “What are you going to do?”
With the most innocent sweet smile she answered, “That's up to Charlie.”
Charlie took a deep breath, looked at his friends and at Sally and said, “You all know what I am, so I give her to Bobby. That's the only thing that's fair.”
Bobby howled like the Wolfman, and Alex laughed loud enough to give himself a stomach cramp. Everyone hooted except Dean who screeched, “Just wait one fucking minute.”
Bawling with laughter, Sally tried to speak, failed, pointed at Charlie, and then at the rest of them, and finally said, “You all knew?”
“How could we not know?” Alex replied. “I've known Charlie since kindergarten. I don't care if Charlie likes boys instead of girls.”
“What about the rest of you?”
“We're not three dollar bills,” Dean answered. “Only Charlie.”
“Speak for yourself, Studley.”
At that Nelson and Alex jumped on Dean and began cooing and kissing him, prompting a wrestling match as he struggled to throw them off, rocking the boat and once again rattling the beer cans.
BOOK: The Wild Card
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