Эд Макбейн - Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

“I think I know how to beat him,” Ronnie said suddenly.

“Huh?”

“Jimbo. I think I know how to beat the bastard.”

“How?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Ronnie said, and then he fell silent again, but it seemed to me he was paddling more furiously.

I met Rebecca under the pines bordering the lake. She was wearing black slacks and a black bulky sweater, and she rushed into my arms and didn’t say anything for the longest time, just held herself close to me, and then lifted her head and stared into my face, and then smiled that fast-breaking smile, and fleetingly kissed me on the cheek, and pulled away and looked into my face again.

We skirted the edge of the pine forest, the night was still, I could feel her hand tight in my own. We sat with our backs to one of the huge boulders overlooking the lake, and I held her in my arms and told her how miserable I’d been without her, and she kept kissing my closed eyes as I spoke, tiny little punctuating kisses that made me weak.

The night was very dark. Somewhere across the lake a dog began barking, and then the barking stopped and the night was still again.

“I can barely see you, Becky,” I whispered.

I held her close, I held her slender body close to mine. She was Becky, she was trembling, she was joy and sadness together, echoing inside me. If I held her a moment longer my heart would burst, I knew my heart would burst and shower trailing sparks on the night. And yet I held her, wanting to cry in my happiness, dizzy with the smell of her hair, loving everything about her in that timeless, brimming moment, still knowing my heart would burst, loving her closed eyes and the whispery touch of her lashes, and the rough wool of her sweater, and the delicate motion of her hands on my face. I kissed her, I died, I smiled, I listened to thunder, for oh, the kiss of Rebecca Goldblatt, the kiss, the heart-stopping kiss of my girl.

The world was dark and still.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you,” I said.

And then she threw her arms around my neck and put her face against mine, tight, I could feel her cheekbone hard against mine, and suddenly she was crying.

“Hey,” I said. “What... honey, what is it?”

“Oh, Donald,” she said, “what are we going to do? I love you so much.”

“I think we ought to tell him,” I said, “when we get back.”

“How can we do that?” Becky said.

“I can go to him. I can say we’re in love with each other.”

“Oh yes, yes, ” Becky said breathlessly. “I do love you, Donald.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do.”

“He...” She shook her head in the darkness. I knew that her eyes were very solemn, even though I couldn’t see them. “He won’t listen,” Becky said. “He’ll try to break us up.”

“Nobody will ever break us up,” I said. “Ever.”

“What... what will you tell him?”

“That we love each other. That when we finish school we’re going to get married.”

“He won’t let us.”

“The hell with him.”

“He doesn’t know you. He thinks Italians are terrible.”

“I can’t help what he thinks,” I said.

“Donald...” She paused. She was shaking her head again, and she began to tremble. “Donald, you can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because he believes it, don’t you see? He really believes you are some — some terrible sort of person.”

“I know, but that doesn’t make it true. And simply because he believes it is no reason for me to behave as if I believe it.” I nodded my head in the darkness. I felt pretty convinced by what I was saying, but at the same time I was scared to death of facing her father. “I’ll tell him when we get back,” I said.

Becky was quiet for a long long time.

Then she said, “If only I was Italian.”

I held her very close to me, and I kissed the top of her head very gently. Right then I knew everything was going to be all right. I knew it because Becky had said, “If only I was Italian,” when she could just as easily have said, “If only you were Jewish.”

Horizontal Ronnie swung into action the very next day.

He had been inordinately silent the night before on the trip back across the lake, and I hadn’t disturbed his thoughts because I assumed he was working out his system for beating Jimbo. Besides, I was working out what I would tell Becky’s father when we got back to the city.

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.