“What about threes?” Tim asked, trying to sound as though he were merely trying to nail down the rules.
“Threes are just threes,” George told him. “They’re not wild anymore.”
“What the hell is this?” Billy said. “Sesame Street?”
After another round of betting—Tim stayed in just in case there was another change in wild cards—Phil dealt the final hole card. Tim drew the seven of hearts, a meaningless addition to his hand. He figured he would fold when the bet came to him, but George spoke up before he had the chance.
“Remember, you have to declare hi-lo before you place your final wager.”
“Why?”
“It’s Chicago,” Dunleavy explained. “Low spade in the hole splits the pot. But you have to declare if you’re going for the high hand or the low one.”
Tim didn’t have to check to know that his face-down two was a spade.
“Oh, jeez.” He pretended to think over this complicated question of strategy before tossing his last four chips into the pot. “I dunno. Low, I guess. I just wish those threes were still wild.”
The only other player to declare low was Billy, who had the four of spades in the hole. He wasn’t too happy when Tim revealed the deuce.
“Goddammit!” he barked at George. “You were coaching him!”
“I was not,” George shot back. “I was just telling him the rules.”
Billy took a long pull on his beer, swishing it around like mouthwash.
“He shouldn’t play if he doesn’t know the rules.”
“He knows ’em now,” Dunleavy pointed out. “Guy’s a quick learner.”
“Here.” Kersiotis grinned at Tim as he slid two leaning towers of chips across the table. “This is your share. Not bad for a split pot.”
ONCE HE got a couple of winning hands under his belt, Tim started to relax. He’d been nervous about coming here, worried that he was putting his career above his principles, willingly placing himself in one of those dicey situations Pastor Dennis had warned about—his life was suddenly full of them—in which sin seemed not only possible, but completely natural and unavoidable. Now that he’d taken the plunge, though, it didn’t seem so bad.
At least part of this feeling had a theological basis. He’d done a little web surfing at the office, and had been pleasantly surprised to discover there wasn’t a whole lot of biblical support for the idea that gambling was a sin. It certainly wasn’t one of those open-and-shut cases like killing or adultery—there was no Commandment that read, “Thou Shalt Not Participate in a Friendly Game of Chance”—nor was it covered by one of those broad, somewhat murky prohibitions like the one in Ephesians against “obscenity, foolish talk, and coarse joking,” or even one of those archaic, widely ignored taboos, like the Old Testament ban on eating pork. The authorities who believed gambling was a no-no for Christians had to go pretty far afield to justify their position, claiming it was a form of stealing, for instance, or citing a passage like, “the love of money is the root of all evil,” or even suggesting that gambling was a violation of the Golden Rule, since the gambler who took an opponent’s money was doing to the opponent what the gambler wouldn’t wish the opponent to do to him.
But none of this struck Tim as very convincing: if everyone agreed to the rules, it was impossible to say that anyone was stealing money from anyone else, and, in any case, such small amounts were at stake that it made no sense to claim greed as a motivating force for the players. As for the Golden Rule, if you forbade poker on those grounds, you’d have to forbid soccer as well, and baseball and football and golf, and any sort of competition in business or in love—anything with a winner and a loser—and Tim couldn’t see how anyone could function in a world like that, not even Pastor Dennis. You’d have to be like those saints in India who spent their whole lives trying not to swat mosquitoes or inadvertently swallow a gnat.
“Hey, George,” Kersiotis said, during a lull between hands. “Ask Tim about driving.”
“Oh, yeah.” George grinned. “I forgot about that.”
“We’re taking an informal survey,” Dunleavy explained.
“It’s kind of a personal question,” George added. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
Billy looked up from his shuffling.
“Don’t be a pussy. Just ask the goddam question.”
“I’ll do it.” Dunleavy wagged a finger at Tim. “Be honest now. Have you ever jerked off while driving?”
“Driving my car?”
“Yeah, you know. One hand on the wheel, the other on your Johnson.”
“Sounds kinda dangerous.”
“You gotta pick your spot,” George explained. “A nice straight country road is your best bet.”
Kersiotis nodded. “Busy highways are a bad idea. That’s strictly for emergencies. You know, when you got no choice.”
“Can’t you just pull over?”
“No way,” said George’s brother-in-law, Al, a big red-haired guy who’d barely said a word all night. “You’d look like a total creep, jerking off on the side of the road.”
“Good way to get yourself arrested,” Billy muttered.
“And forget about the rest areas,” said George. “That’s the one place you want to avoid at all costs. That’s how you get yourself in the paper.”
“Wait a second,” said Tim. “Is this like a regular thing for you guys?”
“Not so much these days,” Kersiotis replied. He was a good-looking guy with the self-confidence of an ex-athlete. “I mean, I got three kids, lotta responsibility. But when I was younger, hell yeah. I mean, your mind starts wandering in a certain direction, what are you gonna do?”
George gave Tim a searching look. It almost seemed like he was disappointed.
“Are you telling us you never did it? Not even once?”
“You’d be the only one,” Dunleavy informed him. “Everybody else fessed up.”
“Really?” Tim looked around the table at the faces of his respectable, middle-aged companions. “All of you?”
“So what about you?” Kersiotis said. “You a member of the club?”
“I’d say so if I was,” Tim told them. “But it never even occurred to me.” Feeling pressure to confide something, he added, “I got a hand-job in a traffic jam once, a long time ago, but we weren’t moving. We were just kinda stuck there, waiting for them to clear an accident.”
“Handjobs don’t count,” Billy said disdainfully. “Everybody’s done that.”
“It’s true,” Dunleavy said. “Billy’s given a lot of handjobs. That’s why guys are always asking to go on test-drives with him.”
“Fuck you,” Billy told him.
“I had a girlfriend once who went down on me on I-95,” Al reported. He glanced at George. “Don’t worry, I’m not talking about your sister.”
George shrugged, as if to say it didn’t matter to him one way or the other if his sister performed oral sex in fast-moving cars.
“Anyway,” Al continued, “it was going great, but then I had to stop short, and let me tell you, neither one of us was very happy about it. We decided we better wait till later.”
“Twenty years later,” Dunleavy chuckled, “and Big Al’s still waiting.”
“That’s nothing,” Billy said. “One time in high school I fucked this girl while I was driving her home.”
“You are so full of shit.” George looked at Tim. “Don’t believe a word this clown says.”
“I’m serious,” Billy insisted. “Tina-Marie Johansen. You know, with the walleye? Her parents were really strict and she had to be home by eleven. We were running late, and the only way I could fuck her was if I drove her home at the same time.”
“Come on,” said Kersiotis. “The only thing you fucked in high school was your pet hamster.”
“This is the God’s honest truth.” Billy held up his right hand like he was testifying in court. “She was wearing a skirt, so she just slid over and climbed aboard. I mea
n, nobody wore seat belts in those days. I just had to lean a little to the right so I could see where I was going. The only problem was the stick shift kept banging into her ass when I put it into second.”
“Can you believe this?” Dunleavy said. “Now he’s working the stick shift and screwing a cross-eyed girl at the same time.”
“Not cross-eyed,” Billy said. “Walleyed. There’s a difference.”
“I’m surprised you weren’t juggling some bowling pins, too,” Kersiotis said.
“While giving yourself a haircut,” added George.
“You guys are just jealous,” Billy said. He slammed the deck on the table so Al could cut the cards. “Let’s play a hand of 727.”
WHAT SURPRISED Tim as the night wore on wasn’t the excessive drinking, or the compulsive sexual boasting, or the casual vulgarity of the conversation—he’d spent a lot of time around guys like this in his previous life, and this bunch was by no means the worst he’d encountered—what surprised him was how comfortable and unthreatened he felt in the midst of it. He’d come to Fox Hollow thinking of himself as a spy straying into enemy territory, but by the time they started the ten-dollar round of Texas Hold ’Em that was one of the evening’s main events, he’d begun to feel more like a wanderer who’d accidentally found his way home.
“I’m trying to get my wife to shave her pubes,” Dunleavy said, passing out white plastic markers that identified the Big Blind and the Little Blind. “But she won’t do it.”
“Trust me,” Kersiotis told him. “You’re better off. Shelley’s been going Brazilian for the past couple of years, and I gotta tell you, I’m not crazy about the stubble.”
“I’ll tell you what I don’t like,” George said. “That little strip of hair some of ’em keep down there. It’s like a Hitler mustache.”
Big Al raised his hand in a Nazi salute. He’d loosened up quite a bit after polishing off his fourth beer.
“Ja, mein Führer!” he bellowed, cracking himself up.
“We’re on totally different wavelengths,” Dunleavy explained. “She’s accusing me of wanting her to look like a little girl, like I’m some kind of pedophile or something. But that’s not it. I just want her to look like a porn star, except I can’t say that, ’cause she somehow got the impression that I don’t look at porn.”
“What?” said Billy. “She actually thinks you use that laptop for work?”
“If she does,” George quipped, “then she must think you’re a workaholic.”
Tim was well aware of exactly how upset and disappointed Pastor Dennis would be if he could see him right then, laughing along with everyone else at the idea of a man enslaved by lust, but for some reason he couldn’t manage to get himself all worked up about it. For one thing, he didn’t actually believe Mickey Dunleavy was addicted to porn—if he were, they wouldn’t be joking about it—and even if he did have some kind of problem, Tim was pretty sure it wasn’t any of his business. All he really knew was that he was having a good time.
It was just nice to get a night off for once, a little breather from the relentless pressure he’d been living with for as long as he could remember. Sometimes it seemed like all he ever did was worry. About Abby, about Carrie, about Allison, about the soccer team, the Tabernacle, the housing market, and now about Ruth. And lately, whichever way he turned, someone else was breathing down his neck, telling him he’d screwed up, and no matter how hard he tried to fix things, he only managed to screw them up worse and make people more pissed off at him than they already were. He understood on some level that he was at fault—he wasn’t going to deny it—but he couldn’t always figure out what he’d done wrong, or how to go about making things better. It was just the same old story, the same old Tim: good intentions, bad results. The only real question he had about his life was just how much worse it was going to get in the next few days.
“All right,” Kersiotis said. “Everybody ready?”
“Wait.” George rose from his chair and opened the cooler on the counter. “Anybody want a beer?”
“I’ll take one,” said Big Al.
“Me too,” said Dunleavy.
“What the heck,” Tim said, amazed not only by what he was saying, but also by how calm he managed to sound. “One beer’s not gonna kill me.”
TIM AND George were the first two players to be eliminated from the Hold ’Em tournament—George because he’d gone all in on the very first hand, staking everything on the perfectly reasonable assumption that he could win with a full house of jacks over sevens (unfortunately for him, Big Al made the same guess about kings over fives), and Tim because he was so distracted by the taste of his first beer in three years that he stayed in way too long with weak cards two hands in a row and ended up bankrupt.
“The hell with these assholes,” George told him. “Let’s go get some air.”
Tim dropped his empty in the trash bag and grabbed another Heineken from the cooler on the way out. He knew it was a bad idea, but there wasn’t much sense in stopping after one. If you were going to fall off the wagon, you might as well at least get a buzz out of it.
Here I am, he thought. Right back where I started.
He thought of Pastor Dennis and felt a dull pang of regret. The guy had invested so much time and energy in saving Tim’s ass, and this was what it had come to. It was the Pastor’s job, of course, but even so, Tim knew he’d take it hard when he found out.
I tried, he thought. I never tried so hard in my life.
He stepped onto the back deck and sat down next to George at the top of the steps, which led down to a dirt lot that would someday be someone’s backyard. Maybe there’d be a pool, Tim thought, or at least a picnic table and a gas grill, a fence and some ornamental shrubbery.
“I like it like this,” George said. “Be kinda sad when the people move in.”
“You’ll just have to build another one somewhere else.”
Tim set his beer bottle on the deck and leaned back, tilting his face to the sky. It was a stunningly clear night, the darkness speckled with stars and the blinking lights of airplanes. The planes seemed to be moving so slowly when you watched them from down here, like they had nowhere special to go.
“I’m glad you could make it,” George said. “I think the guys really like you.”
Tim shook his head. “I’m not much of a cardplayer.”
“You’re holding your own.”
“Tell that to your cousin.”
“Ah, don’t worry about Billy. He was just born that way. Nothing anyone can do about it.”
Reaching into his back pocket, George pulled out what appeared to be a cigarette case, a slender silver box that gave off a pearly sheen in the moonlight.
“You know who you should talk to?” he said, flipping open the case to reveal a single skinny joint. “Mickey Dunleavy. That guy’s got the touch. He’s the only real-estate agent around who’s still selling houses.”
“Definitely. I’d love to sit down and talk business with him.”
George pinched the joint between his fingertips and withdrew it from the case, which snapped shut with a surprisingly loud report.
“I put in a good word for you,” he said, sticking the joint between his lips and fishing a lighter from his hip pocket. “I think you guys might be able to get something going.”
“Thanks,” Tim said, riveted by the path of the flame as it moved toward the puckered tip of the joint. The paper crackled as it caught fire. “I really appreciate it.”
George tucked his chin to his collarbone and sucked in the first hit with a furtive, slightly anxious expression.
“No problem,” he said, in a small, strangled voice. “What goes around comes around.”
After several seconds, George closed his eyes and released a shocking amount of smoke from his lungs.
“Wow,” said Tim. “That smells good.”
George chuckled knowingly as he passed the joint.
“Thought you might like it.”
Tim got a little overeager on his first toke and ended up coughing it all out, much to George’s amusement.
“Sorry,” he choked, thumping his chest and wiping tears from his eyes. “I’m out of practice.”
“I hear you.” George inhaled another monster hit. “I’ve been cutting down myself. Doctor told me to watch my weight, but all bets are off when the munchies hit. Especially now that there’s a Taco Bell down the road that stays open till midnight.”
“I was always a White Castle man myself.”
“Plus, my wife doesn’t like having weed around the house. She thinks it sets a bad example for the kids. So now I gotta sneak around and hide it from her.”
“Just like the good old days,” Tim said, puffing more cautiously this time around. “When I was in high school, I hid my stash in a flashlight, in the compartment where the batteries were supposed to go. Kept it right on my dresser.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“Yeah, except I got busted during a power failure.”
George flicked his lighter on and off a few times, as if he were just getting the hang of it.
“I can always spot a fellow pothead. I bet you were into Pink Floyd, right?”
“Actually, I was more of a Deadhead.”
“Oh.” George couldn’t quite hide his disappointment. “I was a Floyd guy.”
“Dark Side of the Moons a cool album.”
“No, The Wall,” George told him. “That’s a fucking masterpiece. I had this girlfriend in high school, and we used to get stoned and put on The Wall and dry hump until I thought my dick would melt.”
“Ouch,” said Tim.
“No, it was all right,” George insisted. “Dry humping’s got a bad rap.”
“Safe sex.”
“Angie Pirro,” he said. “I never actually fucked her.”
Tim couldn’t tell if he was complaining or just stating a fact, so he let this pass without comment. They traded the joint back and forth in silence until the roach was too small to bother with, and George flicked it into the yard.
“Damn,” he said, shaking his head in admiration. “That’s some fucking good weed.”