Эд Макбейн - Barking at Butterflies and other stories

The course of action Ronnie decided upon was really the only one that offered the slightest opportunity of defeating Jimbo and destroying his empire. He had correctly concluded that Jimbo was the best marble player in camp, if not in the entire world, and had further reasoned it would be impossible to beat him through skill alone. So, discounting skill, Ronnie had decided to try his hand at luck. At eight o’clock that Monday morning, as the kids lined up for muster, Ronnie came over with his fist clenched. He held out his hand to one of the senior boys and said, “Odds or evens?”

“Huh?” the senior said. The senior boys at Camp Marvin weren’t exactly the brightest kids in the world. In fact, the junior boys had written a song about them which went something like “We’ve got seen-yuh boys, dumpy, lumpy seen-yuh boys, we’ve got seen-yuh boys, the worst!” Besides, it was only eight o’clock in the morning, and when someone thrusts his fist in your face at eight o’clock in the morning and says, “Odds or evens?” what else can you reply but “Huh?”

“My fist is full of marbles,” Ronnie explained.

“Yeah?” the senior boy said. Mention of marbles seemed to have awakened him suddenly. His eyes gleamed.

“They’re either an odd number of marbles or an even number,” Ronnie went on. “You guess odds or evens. If you’re right, I give you the marbles in my hand. If you’re wrong, you match the marbles in my hand.”

“You mean if I’m wrong I give you the number of marbles you’re holding?”

“That’s right.”

The senior boy thought this over carefully for a moment, then nodded and said, “Odds.”

Ronnie opened his fist. There were four marbles in his hand.

“You pay me,” he said, and that was the beginning of the Las Vegas phase of the marble madness.

If Uncle Marvin saw what was going on, he made no comment upon it. The common opinion was that he was still smarting from his loss of five hundred marbles to Jimbo and deliberately avoided contact with everyone in the camp. It is doubtful that he could have stopped the frenzy even if he’d wanted to. The kids, presented with a new and exciting activity, took to it immediately. Here was a sport that required no skill. Here was a game that promised and delivered immediate action: the closed fist, the simple question, the guess, the payoff. Kids who were hopeless washouts on the baseball diamond suddenly discovered a sport in which they could excel. Kids who couldn’t sing a note in a camp musical set the grounds reverberating with their shouted “Odds or evens?” A large shipment of marbles from home to a kid named Irwin in bunk nine only increased the feverish tempo of the gambling activity. The simple guessing game started at reveille each morning, before a kid’s feet had barely touched the wooden floor of his bunk. It did not end until lights out, and even after that there were the whispered familiar words, and the surreptitious glow of flashlights.

Uncle Jimbo, startled by this new development, stayed fastidiously away from the gambling in the first few days. Ronnie, meanwhile, exhibiting his true gambler’s instincts, began by slowly winning a handful of marbles from every kid he could challenge, and then became more and more reckless with his bets, clenching his fists around as many marbles as they could hold. Before too long, a bookie system became necessary, with counselors and campers writing down a number on a slip of paper and then folding the slip, so that a challenger had only to guess odds or evens on a written figure rather than on an actual fistful of marbles. That week, Ronnie successfully and infallibly called bets ranging from a low of three marbles to a high of a hundred and fifty-two marbles. It became clear almost immediately that if Jimbo were to defend his title, he would have to enter this new phase of the sport or lose by default.

I think he was beginning to like his title by then. Or perhaps he was only beginning to like his wealth. Whatever it was, he could not afford to drop out of the race. He studied the new rules, and learned them. They were really quite simple. If someone challenged you, you could either accept or decline the challenge. But once you had accepted, once the question “Odds or evens?” was asked in earnest, you either called immediately or lost the bet by default. In the beginning, Jimbo took no chances. He deliberately sought out only those campers whose luck had been running incredibly bad. His bets were small, four marbles, seven marbles, a dozen marbles. If he won a bet, he immediately pocketed a portion of his initial investment and then began playing on his winnings alone. And then, because he thought of himself as a blood-smelling champion closing in for the kill, he began to bet more heavily, taking on all comers, swinging freely through the camp, challenging campers and counselors alike. Eventually he wrote a bookie slip for five hundred and seven marbles and won the bet from a kid in bunk seven, knocking him completely out of the competition. Jimbo’s luck was turning out to be almost as incredible as his skill had been. He lost occasionally, oh yes, but his winnings kept mounting, and marble after marble poured into the locked suitcase on the shelf over his bed. It was becoming apparent to almost everyone in the camp — except Uncle Marvin, who still didn’t know what the hell was going on — that an elimination match was taking place, and that the chief contenders for Jimbo’s as yet unchallenged title were Ronnie and the nouveau riche kid in bunk nine, who had parlayed his shipment from home into a sizable fortune.

Irwin, the kid in bunk nine, was a tiny little kid whom everybody called Irwin the Vermin. He wore glasses, and he always had a runny nose and a disposition to match. Ronnie, correctly figuring he would have to collar every loose marble in the camp before a showdown with Jimbo, went over to bunk nine one afternoon and promptly challenged Irwin the Vermin. The number of marbles being wagered on a single bet had by this time reached fairly astronomical proportions. It was rumored that Irwin owned one thousand seven hundred and fifty marbles. Ronnie, whose number of marbles now totaled nine hundred and four, sat on the edge of Irwin’s bed and wrote out a slip of paper with the number 903 on it.

He folded the slip of paper and then looked Irwin directly in the eye.

“Odds or evens?” he said.

Irwin blinked behind his glasses, grinned maliciously, licked his lips with his tongue and said, “Odds.”

Ronnie swallowed. “What?”

“Odds,” Irwin repeated.

“Yeah,” Ronnie said. He unfolded the slip, and together they walked back to his bunk where he made payment. “I’ve got a few marbles left,” he lied; he had only one marble to his name. “Do you want to play some more?”

Irwin looked at him steadily and then, true to his nature, said, “Find yourself another sucker, jerk.”

Ronnie watched Irwin as he left the bunk loaded down with his winnings. He must have seen in that tiny figure retreating across the grounds a symbol of all his frustration, the quarantine that kept him from the mysterious Laura, the defeat of his system to beat Jimbo. It was late afternoon, and the cries of the boys at Free Play sounded from the ball diamonds and the basketball courts far off in the camp hills. Ronnie must have watched little Irwin walking away with his shattered hopes and dreams in a brown cardboard carton, and it must have been then that he made his final decision, the decision that brought the marble madness to its peak of insanity.

I was coming back from the tennis courts, where I was trying to help little Max with his backhand, when I saw Ronnie striding across the grounds towards Jimbo’s bunk. He was carrying an old battered suitcase, and there was something odd about his walk, a purposeful, angry stride which was at the same time somewhat surreptitious. I looked at him curiously and then followed him past the flagpole and watched as he entered the bunk. I stood outside for a few minutes, wondering, and then I quietly climbed the front steps.