Heart's Desire (18 page)

Chapter Thirty-four

FRIDAY EVENING BERNARD ARRIVES HOME FROM WORK IN HIGH spirits after having made another big sale to his diner chain. While singing “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly” from Annie Get Your Gun, he hands me ten crisp new hundred-dollar bills.

“What’s this for?” I interrupt just before the bridge.

“Seven hundred for services rendered.” He wags his head approvingly toward the backyard. “And a little bonus for coordinating transportation the other night.”

Still short about twelve thousand for continuing education, I’m in no position to decline his generosity. “Thanks.”

Bernard picks up his song again as he heads toward the stairs.
“Folks like us could never fuss, with schools and books and learnin’, still
we’ve gone from A to Z, doin’ what comes natur’lly.”

The words, along with the sudden influx of cash, serve to nurture an idea I’ve only been toying with up until now. I have a little over two thousand dollars saved from working in the yard, enough to buy the new engine for my car, which Mr. Shultze’s friend has offered to sell me for two grand even.
Or
enough to stake myself at Cappy’s poker game tonight. With its unlimited upside potential, the second option is infinitely more attractive. And if I blow my entire stake, which is how it often goes in Texas Hold ’Em, I won’t need the car anymore because I’ll be too broke to go back to school in the fall.

WHEN I ARRIVE AT THE POOL HALL THERE ARE MOSTLY BEATER CARS and rusty pickup trucks parked out front. However, around the back of the building I spot a brand-new gold Lexus SUV and a black Mercedes—not your typical choice of conveyance for local pool players.

Unlike the quiet afternoon I stopped by and talked with Auggie, tonight the room is filled with cigarette smoke and the smashing of solid breaks followed by the
clackety-clack
of billiard balls smacking and kissing and then skidding across the green felt and thumping into hard rubber. The players’ jeans are smudged with blue chalk, and a cloud of dust hangs in the air under every long rectangular light fixture. Emmylou Harris singing “One of These Days” drifts out of an old-fashioned jukebox against the far wall.

A few women shoot pool but most are in attendance to cheer on their boyfriends, have a few drinks, and collect ideas for their next tattoo. I quickly thread my way through the dozen heavy wooden tables and head toward Cappy’s storeroom at the back. As much as I’d love to run into Auggie, I decide that I’d rather not have him see me squinting over a pile of cards all night as our second date. Besides, the picnic is tomorrow.

Cappy must have been in his office, because we almost collide in the narrow corridor leading to the storeroom. He looks exactly the same, wearing his trademark boating cap, checked pants, and white patent-leather shoes, a cigar in his left hand and a stubby pencil in his right hand.

“Well, if it isn’t the Calculator Kid! I haven’t seen you since we fixed last year’s Super Bowl,” he jokes and gives me a friendly pat on the shoulder with his pencil hand. “Though I hear you ran into my grandson.” There isn’t much Cappy doesn’t hear about, one way or another.

“Yeah, we, uh—”

“So how’s life on the straight and narrow? Or is the joker back to being wild?” Unlike parents, just because Cappy knows about things doesn’t mean he’s angling for any confessions.

“The straight and narrow puts a person straight into debt is what it does,” I say.

“I thought you would have given me a call by now.” He pretends to look hurt.

“I’m calling now if you’ve got a game going on.”

“Right this way.” Cappy leads me into the renovated storeroom.

Sure enough, a game is starting up. Rod Green, the deputy mayor, is standing in the corner of Cappy’s storeroom-turned-casino; already sitting at the table is some guy in a suit I don’t recognize; and about to take a seat next to him is the dreaded Edwin Kunckle the Turd, his pompadour resembling a big swirl of silver mousse. The only apparent purpose this particular style serves is to soften the prominence of his ample nose and detract attention from tea-colored teeth.

“Hey, what’s
she
doing here?” asks the deputy mayor. I assume because my dad works for the State of Ohio that Deputy Mayor Green is afraid I’ll mention his little poker pastime to my folks.

“I guess she’s here to play some cards,” says Cappy with his bookie coolness.

“Well, she doesn’t look any twenty-one to me,” counters Green.

The Turd watches the conversation with interest. It’s obvious that he agrees with Green. However, he’s also a man accustomed to having others do his bidding for him.

“This isn’t the Indian casino,” says Cappy, which translates to
This is an
illegal
game.
“It’s just a friendly game,” Cappy continues, which means,
It’s
my
game.
Cappy has the ability to effortlessly put people in slots like dropping coins into a candy machine.

I notice that Cappy uses one of the dealers from the Indian casino, rather than let the players manage the deck and risk ruining a hand. As proprietor he would never dream of dealing, since it’d be like the owner of a restaurant filling the water glasses. And I haven’t seen any sign of Auggie, so he’s either off duty or Cappy has decided that running the poker game isn’t part of his job description.

When I hand Cappy my fifty-dollar entrance fee he slides it back to me so that no one notices. I don’t complain because at the racetrack I’d often run to the betting window for Cappy while he was busy calculating odds and taking last-minute phone calls. And back when I was in high school I’d helped him out in the office during a couple of busy playoff weekends. He’d paid me for my efforts, but he’d also made a nice chunk of change. So the free admission is more like an employee discount.

Along with the others I exchange a thousand dollars for poker chips. Then we all pull our chairs up to the table, which is outdoor patio furniture with a brown vinyl cloth covering the plastic surface, including the hole for the umbrella. Just before the dealer asks Green to cut, Al Santora charges into the room, breathing heavily, as if he ran the entire way over. Compared with the smoothly shaven and freshly pressed businessmen, Al, with windbreaker, baseball cap, and five o’clock shadow you could use to sand a floor, looks like an advertisement for a blue-collar guy.

I’m probably more surprised to see Al here than he is to see me. For one thing, his wife would kill him if she knew he was at a high-stakes poker game, for religious
and
financial reasons. Furthermore, with his modest salary from the Water Authority needed to support four kids, including one in college, I know he doesn’t have any money to lose. Even a forty-dollar hit at our church game leaves him gloomy and faced with the prospect of some serious deficit financing. But Al pays his fee, changes five hundred dollars for chips, and an extra chair is brought to the table. Al and I nod to each other, as if to say,
Good luck.
Because we’re both aware that no matter how experienced a player you are, winning at poker requires as much luck as it does skill, the same way that successful pool is a mystical combination of physics and geometry. Finally the game begins.

No one is more aware than Cappy that Texas Hold ’Em has been around for years but only recently became popular as the featured game at big-money poker tournaments in Las Vegas, and then around the globe. When they started to televise the World Series championship with its prize money of over a million dollars, the number of entrants went up tenfold, and some journalist even wrote a best-selling book about it. So now everyone wants to play Texas Hold ’Em. It’s quick and exciting and the money can change hands faster than gossip races through a small town. This is because any player can at any time put his entire stake into the pot.

The basic principle is that each player gets two cards that only he can see. The winner is the player who can put together the best five-card poker hand as a combination of his two pocket cards and the five open cards, so-called “community cards,” on the table. However, rounds of betting are interspersed between the cards being dealt. And after each bet the players can either raise the bet, fold up, or call, which means matching the bet of the previous players.

The unknown player at our table turns out to be a businessman from Australia who goes by the name of Seymour. It eventually becomes apparent that Seymour seems incapable of bluffing and so his money leaks away slowly, like a tire pierced by a small nail. Meantime, it transpires that Kunckle isn’t a fool when it comes to poker and knows his way around reading the rest of us. I have to be careful not to give anything away by scratching or squinting or checking my cards too many times. Al, on the other hand, is constantly fussing with his cigarettes, shifting in his chair, and rearranging his hand so often that it’s impossible to determine what all the frantic activity actually means.

Cappy occasionally circles the room, even peering over shoulders to look at a person’s hand. Normally that wouldn’t be allowed if he were just a bystander. Players would be afraid he might give away their cards by an expression, or maybe even throw a signal to tip off an operator in the crowd. But since it’s Cappy and he has a reputation for clean games, no one minds that he periodically checks on things. In fact, it’s reassuring. Because Cappy knows every possible way to cheat, from switching decks in the middle of a deal, marking cards while the game is in play, to working the room with a partner. As a teenager he had a job as a busboy in a restaurant where magicians did table tricks, and Cappy managed to pick up more than a few of them. He can move an ace from his left sock to the eighth card from the top without you seeing him so much as twitch. So his patrols are a way of making sure everyone has the cards they were dealt and that nobody is playing footsies under the table.

For the first two hours the money moves back and forth mostly between Green and Kunckle. I keep folding, with the worst hands in the history of the world, and this eats away at my bankroll. Al goes up and down, not initiating any large bets of his own, but answering most bets with a call and sometimes a raise. Most of us have had to cash in another five hundred or so for chips by now.

Just when I’m convinced it’s not my night, the dealer sends a double belly-buster my way—a string of five cards showing, 2-3-5-7-8, with two gaps, the 4 and 6, which happen to be my hole cards. I bet a little too aggressively, which scares off the wily Rod Green. But Kunckle and the others don’t think I could possibly fill the straight and so they play right up until the last round of betting, when Kunckle, confident that his hand will prevail, calls for a two-thousand-dollar raise. This frightens off Al and Seymour, and I’m the only one who matches. With a little over five thousand now in the pot, Cappy watches intently from the doorway with a hint of a smile on his face. He loves action, especially when it’s carving holes in everyone else’s stomach while simultaneously filling his bank account. With games like this, they’ll all be back next week. And maybe with a flush friend or two.

The Turd arrogantly flips his hole cards, displaying the pair of aces that, when combined with the one in the middle of the table, gives him three of a kind. I slowly turn over my four and six and he’s flabbergasted to see the unlikely straight take shape when joined with the community cards. Yes, it’s official. I’m the big winner tonight! Kunckle gives me a look with those piercing dark eyes that basically says,
I’ll get you, and your little dog, too!
Obviously, it’s not the money that matters, since, as Cappy likes to describe Kunckle’s balance sheet, the man farts against silk. Edwin the Turd is simply a guy who isn’t accustomed to losing. And from the narrowed eyes and clenched fists it’s apparent that this upsets his digestion more than it should.

Al and I talk for a few minutes in the corner before departing. He’s down about a grand and I feel a little guilty knowing that I took almost five hundred off him with my straight. But he just jokes about it, and doesn’t act all grumpy the way he does when he loses at our church games. Who can tell, maybe he got a raise or inherited some money that his wife doesn’t know about.

On the way home I perform a few quick calculations in my head. With the two thousand dollars from my folks, seven grand in financial aid, and now this five thousand, I would really only need another ten thousand dollars not to have to take out more student loans for the upcoming year. I’ll make about four thousand working on the yard over the rest of the summer, and so that leaves me down six thousand. Whoops—forgot about the new car engine, which I’ll tell Mr. Shultze to go ahead with in the morning. So I’m back to needing about eight grand. But if I win that contest, I’ll be free and clear with regard to rent and tuition. Furthermore, if I could win
another
four or five grand playing poker, I’ll be able to buy one of the good computers that can run state-of-the-art graphic design programs, and have a little cushion for real food and some desperately needed new front tires for my car.

Chapter Thirty-five

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON I BIKE OVER TO BERNARD’S SHOP TO help him take digital photos of all his lamps and mirrors and post them on Internet auction sites. He must be indeed doing okay because there are lots of new items on display since I’d last been in the shop during my Christmas break.

Bernard dusts the white marble Parian busts and then arranges them for photographing on a purple velvet cloth. “No young people ever come in here,” he complains. “What if I were to change the name of the shop from
The Sweet Buy and Buy
to
The Den of Antiquity
?”

“It sounds pornographic,” I say.

“Exactly!” says Bernard. “People will be so embarrassed to have come in looking for smut that they’ll feel obligated to buy something in order to remove the stain on their conscience as well as the perceived public perception of disgrace.”

“Try again,” I say.

Bernard removes the price tag from a dainty statuette of the Venus de Milo. “How about
Venus Envy
?”

“I think you’d be better off filling the Trojan horse in the window with free condoms.” I plug in the battery charger for the digital camera, probably the main reason Bernard couldn’t get it to work.

“You’ve been awfully smiley this past week,” observes Bernard.

I hesitate to tell him that I’ve finally surrendered to love—because I feel the need to make absolutely sure first. My date with Auggie is tonight. And also, in view of his recent breakup, it’s not the sort of thing I want to throw in his face, even though he seems to be well on the road to recovery.

“I won some money playing poker last night,” I say to explain my newfound happiness. Normally I don’t tell Bernard too much about my finances, since whenever I complain about going into debt he simply offers to give me some money, which I can’t accept as long as I’m able to earn it. As it is, he usually rounds my hours up and finds reasons to add in little bonuses.

Bernard doesn’t look entirely satisfied by my explanation.

“And I took most of it off Edwin the Turd.”

“I see,” says Bernard, as if he thinks there may be more to this story.

A long scarf with a brightly covered bird on a red-and-blue background catches my eye. “This is a pretty scarf!” I offer as a way to change the subject.

Bernard comes over, begins to artfully wrap it around my shoulders, and says, “It’s a shawl, actually, from the Mauve Decade.”

“The
Mauve
Decade?” It’s a well-known fact that Bernard enjoys giving his own names to things. For instance, when he refers to
The Basement Years,
we all know he means the period in his life from age nine to eleven when Olivia home-schooled him to protest segregation in the local district. They worked during the mornings, and then when Olivia went out to protest, Bernard devoted his afternoons to performing Broadway musicals in the basement. It was sort of like Picasso’s Rose Period, at least that’s how he explains it.

“Honestly,
what
are they teaching you in art school for $30,000 a year? The Mauve Decade was the 1890s. A young chemistry student named William Perkin came up with an attractive purplish dye that he called by the French
mauveine.
His colleagues, scientists—what did
they
know—ridiculed it as ‘purple sludge.’ But then Queen Victoria wore mauve to her daughter’s wedding and the wife of Napoleon III, Eugenia, Empress of France, also took a shine to the new hue.”

By now Bernard has me all togaed up like I’m part of a Greek chorus. He turns me toward the mirror and smoothes out the fringe and then stands back to examine the overall effect. If Gwen could only see me now!

“Shawls became a necessity with the advent of the late eighteenth-century neoclassical sleeveless shift,” continues Bernard. “The dresses were only wearable in Northern Europe if accompanied by a warm wrap. However, the truly priceless shawls were handmade in Kashmir in the fifteenth century.” Bernard opens one of the many books about antiques on his countertop and points to a picture of a colorful wrap. Then he turns a few more pages and says, “These are copies that were later mass-produced in Paisley, Scotland; Norwich, England; and Lyons, France.”

I raise and lower my arms like a bird getting ready to take flight and watch how the fabric catches and holds the light. There must be gold and silk threads in the material, because it practically glows. “Are they all this colorful?”

“Unfortunately not. I just picked up this one because it reminded me of Isadora Duncan, and, well, I thought maybe we could use it in one of Gil’s theatricals. He’d talked about directing
Sweet
Bird of Youth
next year.” A tear forms in the corner of Bernard’s eye at the mention of Gil and their old life together.

“Who’s Isadora Duncan?” I ask, once again attempting to change the subject.

“Who is Isadora Duncan?!” Bernard clutches at his chest and pretends to fall backward into a Hepplewhite chair.

“Only the
inventor
of modern dance!” He rises and strikes a dramatic pose in the form of a swan. “I must insist that you drop out of that college at once! Isadora thrived between the Mauve Decade and the Roaring Twenties and was greatly influenced by the natural world. However, she died when her long shawl with trailing fringes caught in the wheel of a sports car.”

“Oh, c’mon!” I say with disbelief. “She was strangled by a
shawl
?”

“You bet your sweet aster,” he replies.

Bernard dashes over to his old-fashioned record player and puts on a 45. “This is ‘Bye Bye Blackbird.’ Isadora was famous for doing a dance inspired by the red poppies of her native California to this song. She was fond of saying that life is the root and art is the flower.”

He begins to lead me in a bizarre series of movements not at all like the cha-cha or the Lindy, while gaily singing along, “
Make my
bed and light the light, I’ll arrive late tonight, Blackbird bye bye.
”

When the music ends I ask, “So is
that
who you’re talking about when you say that something is Isadorable?”

“Exactly—a combination of garish but wonderful. Isadora insisted that no flower of art ever fully blooms unless it’s nourished by tears of agony.”

Bernard goes and puts on another record. “Just before she died Isadora danced and sang to this—‘I’m In Love Again.’ Then as the driver pulled away from the curb she cried, ‘
Adieu, mes amis, je vais à
la gloire!
—Good-bye, my friends, I go to glory!’ ”

“I don’t believe a word of that.”
Honestly, where does he get these
stories?

“Google it!” Bernard is smug about having finally learned how to use a computer. “Or better yet, ask Mother.”

Just then the squeal of brakes makes us both look up and rush to the front of the store. Through the big display window I see Officer Rich’s squad car parked so close to the shop that the front corner of the passenger side is actually a foot up on the sidewalk. My first reaction when I see a police car is still to run in the opposite direction, and so I quickly scour my brain for anything I may have done wrong.
The stolen flower!