David Eddings - High Hunt

I’d been drafted into the Army after college. I sort of resented the whole thing but not enough to run off to Canada or to go to jail. Some of my buddies got kind of excited and made a lot of noise about “principle” and what-not, but I was the one staring down the mouth of that double-barrelled shotgun called either/or. When I asked them what the hell the difference was between the Establishment types who stood on the sidelines telling me to go to Nam and the Antiestablishment types who stood on the sidelines telling me to go to a federal penitentiary, they got decidedly huffy about the whole thing.

Sue, my girlfriend, who felt she had to call and check in with her mother if we were going to be five minutes late getting home from a movie, told me on the eve, as they used to say, of my departure that she’d run off to Canada with me if I really wanted her to. Since I didn’t figure any job in Canada would earn me enough to pay the phone bill she’d run up calling Momma every time she had to go to the biffy, I nobly turned her down. She seemed awfully relieved.

I suppose that ultimately I went in without any fuss because it didn’t really mean anything to me one way or the other. None of it did.

As it all turned out, I went to Germany instead of the Far East. So I soaked up Kultur and German beer and played nursemaid to an eight-inch howitzer for about eighteen months, holding off the red threat. I finished up my hitch in late July and came back on a troopship. That’s where I got into the poker game.

Naturally, it was Benson who roped me into it. Benson and I had been inducted together in Seattle and had been in the same outfit in Germany. He was a nice enough kid, but he couldn’t walk past a deck of cards or a pair of dice if his life depended on it. He’d been at me a couple times and I’d brushed him off, but on the third day out from Bremerhaven he caught me in the chow line that wandered up and down the gray-painted corridors of the ship. He knew I had about twenty dollars I hadn’t managed to spend before we were shipped out.

“Come on, Alders. What the hell? It’s only for small change.” His eyes were already red-rimmed from lack of sleep, but his fatigue pockets jingled a lot. He must have been winning for a change.

“Oh, horseshit, Benson,” I told him. “I just don’t get that much kick out of playing poker.”

“What the fuck else is there to do?”

He had a point there. I’d gotten tired of looking at the North Atlantic after about twenty minutes. It’s possibly the dullest stretch of ocean in the world—if you’re lucky. Anyway, I know he’d be at me until I sat in for a while, and it really didn’t make that much difference to me. Maybe that’s why I started winning.

“All right, Arsch-loch.” I gave in. “I’ll take your goddamn money. It doesn’t make a shit to me.” So, after chow, I went and played poker.

The game was in the forward cargo hold. They’d restacked the five hundred or so duffle bags until there was a cleared-out place in the middle of the room. Then they’d rigged a table out of a dozen or so bags, a slab of cardboard, and a GI blanket. The light wasn’t too good, and the placed smelled of the bilges, and after you’ve sat on some guy’s extra pair of boots inside his duffle bag for about six hours, your ass feels like he’s been walking on it, but we stuck it out. Like Benson said, what else was there to do?

The game was seven-card stud, seven players. No spit-in-the-ocean, or no-peek, or three-card-lowball. There were seven players—not always the same seven guys, but there were always seven players.

The first day I sat in the game most of the play was in coins. Even so, I came out about forty dollars ahead. I quit for the day about midnight and gave my seat to the Spec-4 who’d been drooling down my back for three hours. He was still there when I drifted back the next morning.

“I guess you want your seat back, huh?”

“No, go ahead and play, man.”

“Naw, I’d better knock off and get some sleep. Besides, I ain’t held a decent hand for the last two hours.”

He got up and I sat back down and started winning again.

The second day the paper money started to show. The pots got bigger, and I kept winning. I wondered how much longer my streak could go on. All the laws of probability were stacked against me by now. Nobody could keep winning forever. When I quit that night, I was better than two hundred ahead. I stood up and stretched. The cargo hold was full of guys, all sitting and watching, very quietly. Word gets around fast on a troopship.

On the morning of the third day, Benson finally went broke. He’d been giving up his place at the table for maybe two-hour stretches, and he’d grab quick catnaps back in one of the corners. He looked like the wrath of God, his blond, blankly young face stubbled and grimy-looking. The cards had gone sour for him late the night before—not completely sour, just sour enough so that he was pretty consistently holding the second-best hand at the table. That can get awfully damned expensive.

It was on the sixth card of a game that he tossed in his last three one-dollar bills. He had three cards to an ace-high straight showing. A fat guy at the end of the table was dealing, and he flipped out the down-cards to Benson, the Spec-4, and himself. The rest of us had folded. I could tell from Benson’s face that he’d filled the straight. He might as well have had a billboard on the front of his head.

The Spec-4 folded.

“You’re high,” the fat dealer said, pointing at Benson’s ace.

“I ain’t got no money to bet,” Benson answered.

“Tough titty.”

“Come on, man. I got it, but I can’t bet it.”

“Bet, check, or fold, fella,” the dealer said with a fat smirk.

Benson looked around desperately. There was a sort of house rule against borrowing at the table. “Wait a minute,” he said. “How about this watch?” He held out his arm.

“I got a watch,” the dealer said, but he looked interested.

“Come on, man. I got that watch when I graduated from high school. My folks give a hundred and a half for it. It’ll sure as hell cover any bet in this chickenshit little poker game.”

The fat guy held out his hand. Benson gave him the watch.

“Give you five bucks.”

“Bullshit! That watch is worth a hundred and a half, I told you.”

“Not to me, it ain’t. Five bucks.”

“Fuck you, Buster. You ain’t gittin’ my watch for no lousy five bucks.”

“I guess you better throw in your hand then, huh?”

“Christ, man, gimme a break.”

“Come on, fella,” the fat guy said, “you’re holdin’ up the game. Five bucks. Take it or leave it.”

I could see the agony of indecision in Benson’s face. Five dollars was the current bet limit. “All right,” he said finally.

He bet two. The dealer raised him three. Benson called and rolled over his hole cards. He had his straight. His face was jubilant. He looked more like a kid than ever.

The fat guy had a flush.

Benson watched numbly, rubbing his bare left wrist, as the chortling fat man raked in the money. Finally he got up and went quickly out of the cargo hold.

“Hey, man,” the fat dealer called after him, “I’ll give you a buck apiece for your boots.” He howled with laughter.

Another player took Benson’s place.

“That was kinda hard,” a master sergeant named Riker drawled mildly from the other end of the table.

“That’s how we play the game where I come from, Sarge,” the fat man said.

It took me two days to get him, but I finally nailed him right to the wall. The pots were occasionally getting up to forty or fifty dollars by then, and the fat man was on a losing streak.

He had two low pair showing, and he was betting hard, hoping to get even. It was pretty obvious that he had a full house, seven and threes. I had two queens, a nine and the joker showing. My hand looked like a pat straight, but I had two aces in the hole. My aces and queens would stomp hell out of his sevens and threes.