Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“Five-card stud all right?” Joe said. They all assented. Joe took the joker out of the deck, chucked it aside.

She watched him shuffle. How often she’d seen him do this! It was a lovely thing to watch. The cards seemed to have a life of their own, dancing back and forth between his hands like flickers of light too fast for the eye to catch, and arcing at the center of their trajectory. The gold signet that was never off his finger glinted like a liquid blob of sunlight.

He splashed the cards out on the table in a semi-serpentine, like a stunted S. They each picked one for dealer.

Joe got the high card, Joe got the deal.

After that, the game commenced without further ado.

The first deal was dealt. There was that moment or two of silence she knew so well, that preliminary hush before the betting as each player studied his hand, marshalled the facts, planned his strategy. A silence so taut, so boding, it almost hurt to listen to it sometimes. She was glad each time when it was over. It was like waiting for a long roller to come crashing in to shore, it was like waiting for a sundered tree to come toppling down to earth.

The silence broke.

“I open,” Meany said suddenly, and pushed five dollars in.

The game was on.

She had to find something to occupy her time with. Reading was no good; she’d done so much of it she couldn’t stand the sight of the so-called woman’s-type of magazine any more. Anything deeper than that would have been difficult in a room crowded with smoking, card-playing men. She wasn’t a deep reader, anyway.

She went over to the bureau-drawer and got out some knitting she was working on. It was going to be a muffler for Joe when it was finished, although he wasn’t much of an outdoor man. She’d even thought of running a band of fringe across each end of it, when she got down that far, if it didn’t present too many difficulties. Her knitting wasn’t too good, but at least it gave her something to pass the time with during these (sometimes) nightlong games.

With it coiled in her lap, she settled herself in the only chair they’d left to her, the large overstuffed one in the corner of the room. It made for an odd contrast, the prim, old-fashioned act of knitting against the debonnair, up-to-date little dinner-dress she had on.

Joe kept her well dressed. It paid him in his business to have her attract the roving male eye. Then he took it from there.

Roebeck got up and changed his seat around to the other side of the table, but his bad luck went right after him. His face was sour as a crabapple.

Meany had taken off his coat. Damp patches showed on his shirt where it covered his armpits. She turned her eyes away with a flicker of aversion. It was a shirt of maroon and white stripes, but the maroon occupied more background than the white. He had black elastic armbands around his sleeves. She wondered if he ever bathed, without caring if he did or not.

“Raise,” one of them said.

They were completely oblivious of her, she could tell that by looking at them. They didn’t even know she was in the room at all. It was a pretty tough thing, she had to admit to herself, to be a woman in a man’s world. But then if she hadn’t been one, there would have been no Joe for her, she reflected, so perhaps it wasn’t such a bad arrangement after all.

He raised his head and looked over at her suddenly. Straight into her face, straight into her eyes. But he wasn’t seeing her, she knew. There was a lack of recognition there, a calculating blankness, that told her. He was seeing cards.

He’d been good to her. The races at Saratoga, the boardwalk at Atlantic City, when they were in the chips, as he phrased it. Rector’s, Shanley’s, Bustanoby’s, the holiday side of life. Cheesy hotel-rooms when they weren’t. But he always bounced back again. She would have loved him even if he hadn’t been good to her. She was that kind.

“Raise,” somebody said.

She wanted to yawn almost uncontrollably. Her needles stopped, slanted downward between her fingers, and she realized with a start of reawakening she had been on the point of dozing off.

“Raise,” somebody said again.

“Call down for another bottle,” Wallace suggested to Joe. “I’ll pay for it. I’m ahead in the game anyway.”

“Not for long you won’t be,” Joe promised grimly.

She got up and telephoned the order down for them herself, so Joe wouldn’t have to leave his chair.

“Thank you, my dear,” Wallace said, crinkling his eyes at her in a slyly lascivious sort of way.

Woman-wise, she caught the meaning of the look, and dropped her own.

“I’m through,” Meany announced dismally, folding.

“You can’t win your money back if you get up and walk away from it.” Wallace told him patronizingly.

Meany sliced his hand around past himself in refutation. “If your luck hasn’t changed this far into a game, it ain’t going to change any more the rest of the whole night long. I know that by experience. I’ve used up all my playing-with money, and I ain’t going to dig into my not-for-playing-with money. I’m a working man, and as it is I’m going to have to be working for nothing for the next two weeks.”

“Got trolley-fare?” Joe murmured insultingly.

Meany paid up and left, giving the door an angry crack after him.

“If a man can’t handle his cards, he shouldn’t sit in on games,” said Joe, tractably enough.

“He handled them all right,” opined Wallace. “He didn’t have any to handle, is what the trouble was.”

Meany was immediately forgotten (as every card-player is who ever left the table a loser) and the game went on as though he’d never been in it.

A chair scuffed back and she looked up. This time it was Roebeck who was on his feet.

“You quitting too?” said Joe, riffling the cards.

“I should’ve quit before I started,” growled Roebeck.

Wallace was adding up something. “That makes two-seventy-four,” he told Roebeck.

The latter reached into his pocket, brought out a mildewed bill-fold. “Here’s two hundred,” he said.

“And—?” Wallace asked.

“I’ll give you an I.O.U.”

“I don’t take I.O.U’s.” Wallace snapped back.

There was a tense moment. She stopped knitting, but Joe kept riffling away.

“Look, if I lost to you, you’d expect me to pay in full,” Wallace said. “Well, I expect it too.”

“Come on, play,” Joe barked impatiently.

Roebeck reached into a different pocket this time, counted out some crumpled bills. The door slammed dosed after him.

“Sore,” was all Wallace said.

“Well,” said Joe, “that separates the boys from the men. Now maybe I can do myself some good.”

“Maybe,” Wallace said drily.

She put her knitting aside altogether and began to watch the deal. A lot depended on it. Joe was in the hole already and going deeper every time around.

The deal began. Last deal of all, everything or nothing.

One up, one down. Joe an ace. Auspicious, she thought. Wallace a punk five.

Suddenly she was praying. She caught herself praying. God, be good to Joe. If he needs a jack, give him a jack. If he needs a full house, fill him a house. Women have prayed before. For love, for children, for beauty, for wealth. But what woman in the world ever before prayed for a king or a ten or a two-spot?

On the third card. Joe got a queen. Wallace a no-good three.

On the fourth, Joe got another ace. He was getting marvelous cards. He already had a pair exposed on the table. A little pulse high up under his cheekbone started to tick with suppressed excitement. She’d never seen that before, as often as she’d watched him play.

She went over and stood beside him, forgetting to breathe. He quietly turned up one corner of his hole-card with the edge of his nail, to let her see it. She could just barely make out the tip of the reversed red “A.” He had three of a kind, in aces! She knew enough to keep her face impassive. She bent over and touched her lips to the top of his head for a moment.