Max Collins - Quarry in the middle

I was the first player to arrive, other than my host, a tall, slender guy in a lightweight white suit over a gray shirt and skinny white tie, very hip and New Wave, only his well-oiled Frankie-Avalon-circa-1958 pompadour undercut it. His hands were free of rings, but that was because he’d removed them before starting to shuffle, putting them in his drink well-gold rings encrusted with just a few fewer precious gems than the Maltese Falcon.

Jerry Giovanni, suspiciously tan for a Midwesterner-Florida trips, maybe, or tanning bed access-was almost handsome, a slightly horsier-looking John Travolta.

Pausing in his shuffling, holding the deck in his left hand, he got to his feet, extended a palm and said, “Jerry Giovanni. My friends call me Jerry G.”

I shook the hand. Firm. “Jack Gibson, Mr. Giovanni.”

He sat, smiled wide, the whiteness of his teeth against the tanned flesh just as startling as the similar effect Richard Cornell achieved, and gestured to the seat opposite him.

“We only have five players tonight, Jack. And call me Jerry G.”

“Okay, Jerry G.”

“So I was pleased to hear you were joining us. I asked Mandy to have you come in a little early.”

“Mandy?”

“Little blackjack dealer. Redhead. She likes you, Jack. I could fix you up. Kid can suck the chrome off a ’71 Caddy.”

“No, that’s okay. I can make friends on my own.”

He laughed with a snort, liking that, or pretending to. His eyes were too large for his face and a little close together; guess I already said he had a horsey look. But his snorting laughter emphasized it.

“No offense meant,” Jerry G said. “Good-looking fella like you, I’m sure you get more tail than Sinatra.”

“Maybe Sinatra now.”

He shuffled, did some show-off stuff doing the accordion bit with the deck. Not that smart a move from a guy doing all the dealing.

“You know the house rules, don’t you?”

“The house usually does.”

He snort-laughed again. “No, no, Jack, I mean, the rules of the house. Of this room. It’s a thousand-dollar buy in. We don’t play table stakes-you can go to your pocket any time. Checks are fine, even items like watches or jewelry, if the players are agreed as to value. But no IOU’s.”

“Cool.”

“I’m the banker, and I’m the dealer. And I play.”

“I heard about that. I can live with it. What do we play?”

He grinned nice and wide, yards of white teeth and miles of tan skin-this must have been the last thing Custer saw. “Dealer’s choice.”

I had to laugh. No snorting, though. “I wouldn’t mind having that defined a little better.”

“Obviously, no wild cards. I’ll choose between draw, five-card stud, seven-card stud, and Texas Hold ’Em. I like to mix it up.”

“Okay. I appreciate you taking the time to bring me up to speed like this.”

The smile settled down and the eyes seemed shrewd suddenly. “No problem, Jack. But that’s not why I wanted a few minutes with you.”

“All right. Why do you?”

He shuffled, but his eyes watched mine, not the cards. “You’re a stranger in town.”

What was this, Tombstone?

I said, “I would imagine a lot of ‘strangers’ come to Haydee’s Port.”

“But why did you?”

I didn’t answer right away.

He jumped on the silence. “One thing, Jack, a lot of people have tried to pull something on me, and on my papa. You know who my papa is?”

I nodded.

He paused in his shuffling to jerk a thumb upward, as if it were God he were referring to and not an old Mafioso. “Different kinds of cops have come here, do-gooders of various varieties, and it’s just never worked out for them.”

“I came to play poker.”

“You understand, we can play kind of rough, and I don’t just mean the cards. This isn’t a matter of me asking you if you’re a cop, and you saying yes or no or whatever, and we cover the entrapment ground. No. That river out there, it doesn’t discriminate between local or federal or reporter or just about anybody who tries to play us.”

I never really intended to pretend to be a salesman of vet supplies, at least not for longer than enough to get in the game, and then come clean later. But I could tell I needed to skip a step.

“My name isn’t really Jack Gibson,” I said.

“What is it then?”

“I haven’t told anybody that in a long time. I’ve used a bunch of names, and I’m using one right now, not Gibson, where I live. And I prefer to keep that private.”

“All right. I can understand that. What brings you to Haydee’s Port? To the Lucky Devil?”

“I used to do work for the Giardellis. I did quite a few jobs for them, usually through a middleman. I did one directly for Lou Giardelli, not long before he passed.”

He had stopped shuffling. He was studying me, eyes tight now, forehead creased, not exactly a frown. Not exactly.

“I came hoping to have a word with your father,” I said.

“About what?”

“Rather not say.”

“If it concerns my father, it concerns me.”

And that was when the first two of our fellow players arrived, and then another showed, and another, and soon we were playing cards.

I have to give Jerry G credit-our interrupted conversation did not seem to throw him off his game. He had good concentration, and played smart cards, marred by an occasional reckless streak. He was friendly to me, often joking between hands, as did they all, but the table talk during play was limited to say the least.

You don’t need to be too concerned about the other men at the table. One was a doctor from River Bluff, a surgeon, and another was a lawyer from Fort Madison; both were in their prosperous mid-fifties. Another was a guy from Port City, Iowa, a good sixty miles upriver, who had blue-collar roots and ran a construction business; he was in his late thirties. The player who’d come the farthest was an executive with John Deere who’d come from Moline.

Everybody seemed to know each other, though this did not seem to be a regular group-my take was that a pool of maybe twelve provided the players for these mid-week games.

Jerry G ran the bank out of a small tin box, and we played white chips at fifty, red chips at one hundred, and blue chips at five hundred. You could only bet five hundred on the last round of betting. I admit I was not used to stakes like this, but you soon learn to just play the cards and bet the chips at their relative value. I played conservatively, and did not bluff. If I bet them, I held them.

The players picked up on this early, and started kidding me about it. Before long they had accepted that I simply did not bluff.

With this approach, I was just barely holding my own. I had trouble in particular with Texas Hold ’Em, which was not a game I’d ever played before. Apparently it was a Vegas favorite, and I did my best. I was strongest on draw poker, which is what I’d grown up playing, though the stud hands were the ones that allowed me to build my “never bluffs” reputation.

The game was pleasant-nobody bitched, nobody got mad, nobody was insulting. These were professional men, and even the construction guy had the right tone, and a good sense of humor-he enjoyed saying “fuck” and “shit” in front of these men who never uttered the words unless a really bad loss came their way. Only the surgeon and the construction guy were smokers, and ceiling fans keep the air breathable.

The little barmaid kept the drinks coming, and here I noticed one of Jerry G’s little tricks-he was not drinking. I had to watch the barmaid out of the corner of an eye to see that Jerry G’s tumblers were being filled not with Scotch but with tea from an under-the-counter pitcher-the boss was like his B girls out front, only pretending to get tipsy. At least he wasn’t talking patrons into buying him Dewar’s that was really Lipton’s.