“Mother … the twelfth child?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean our Saintly duty to create an earthly body for another one of them little kiddie souls waiting up in Heaven. I’m a-talkin’ about Child Number Twelve, Mother.”
“Oh Dudley … please Dudley … Dudley, I can’t go through all that again. Dudley, Dudley, ain’t eleven kids enough? Sometimes they drive me crazy, Dud. I’m old before my time. Don’t make me do that again. I know it’s our duty and all but Dud … please …”
Inwardly he smiled. She’d walked straight into his trap. But he couldn’t resist the mean temptation to lock the trap, to clinch his argument. “But Mother, I’m the Bishop. You’re the Bishop’s wife. We got to set a right example for the Saints in our ward.”
“I know, Father. But please … look at me. I used to have a nice body, now I’m shaped like Mrs. Potato-Head. Remember when you thought I was a pretty girl? Remember? And if that don’t matter to you anymore, and I guess it don’t, what about my nerves? What about my mental health, Dudley?”
He squeezed her hand, stroked her shoulder. She was crying again, silently. “Now now, Mother, you’re the soundest strongest level-headedest woman I ever knowed. Forty-four kids and sixteen husbands couldn’t drive you crazy. And that mental health talk, that’s Communist, that’s part of the Communist international environmental — you hear? Environ-mental?—conspiracy. That’s why we made the state shut down that what they called ‘Mental Health’ Clinic. That’s why we run them Jew headshrinkers outa the county.”
“Sometimes I wish you hadn’t done that, Dudley. That Doctor Robinson was a nice man. Everybody liked him. He done some poor women around here a world of good. I know three might of killed theirselves wasn’t for him.”
“Is that right?” The Bishop was uncomfortably aware that he was losing control of this dialogue. Somehow she had put him on the defensive again. “Well your nice Doctor Robinson is gone and them three women are still alive, ain’t they?”
“Two of ‘em. You know what happened to Danielle.”
“That woman always was crazy. She was a drunk. She had no business tryin’ to drive a car. Anyhow, I said it then and I’ll say it now, we don’t need no Communist brain-washin’ clinic around these parts. We don’t need no Mental Health in Alkali County.”
She fell silent, quietly crying. Where was I? he thought. Yeah — the twelfth baby. “Anyhow, Mother, we got to have that Child Number Twelve. It’s our Christian duty as Latter-Day Saints to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.”
“Do we always have to do it all by ourselves?”
“No and this is what I want to tell you. If —”
“I just can’t do it anymore. Why can’t them Gentiles help? I’m plumb worn out, Bishop Love.”
“I know that, Mother, so listen to me. We’ll have Number Twelve by Ranger Dick.” We? We? Never mind. He waited, staring at the ceiling, grinning in his guts. Now I got her. Let that sink in. Now she’ll see the light of reason.
After a pause his wife said, “She’ll do it?”
“Yes.”
“And that’ll count for us?”
“That’s right, Mother.”
“She’ll be the surrogate mother?” In Mrs. Love’s mouth the word came out as sorrow-gate. And sometimes as sore-gate.
“Ah — that’s right.” Love wasn’t certain about that point but now was not the time to fuss over fine distinctions.
“It’ll really be our child?”
“Ah —yes.”
A pause. Another silence. “And who gets to raise the child, Father? Who gets to take care of it every day?”
Another pause. A further silence. Careful now, Dudley. Watch out. Think. He thought. And said, “She’ll take care of it. It’ll be our child but she’ll raise it. Unless —”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you want it.”
Zip! Zap! Zat! Zit!
This time Mrs. Love raised her head from the pillow, elevated herself to one elbow and looked at her husband. In the semi-darkness she could see only his square handsome massive head, the big shoulders, his arms. A faint bluish glow, like a halo, like an aura, seemed to emanate from his face and outline his head. For a moment she was startled.
“Dudley — you been eatin’ carnotite again?”
He twitched in surprise. “What? Eatin’ what? What’re you talkin’ about, woman?” With difficulty he shifted mental gears.
“You look radioactive.”
“You’re crazy.” He looked at his hands, saw the pale luminosity, touched his face. Felt normal. Touched his hair, ears, neck. Everything felt normal except his heart, which seemed overexcited, under pressure, strictured. Staring at his wife, he saw the blue glow in the bedroom window behind her. He smiled. “For godsake, Mother, it’s only the bug-zapper.” He took her nearest hand again, stroked her warm palm with his thumb. “Now you relax, sweetheart. Don’t worry none about me or her or that Number Twelve child. Everything is gonna be A-OK. We’re gonna work this out so everyone is happy. Everyone.”
She lay down flat again, on her back. Both of them wide awake, terrified by life and love and death and marriage and sex and reproduction and the future, and by what would the neighbors think, they stared at the opaque obscurity of the ceiling. After a while, before they finally got some sleep, Mrs. Love said,
“But Father … what will the neighbors think?”
He also had an answer for that. Grinning in the dark, he replied, “Who told ‘em they could think?”
26
The Last Poker Game
The canyon winds blew softly.
The old houseboat rocked gently on the wavelets.
The old Green River flowed homeward to the sea.
Toward the sea, pardon. Suffering evaporation in the Lake Foul National Settling Pond, then the Lake Merde National Recreation Slum, then diverted into canals, conduits, channels and ditches to die by slow degree among the surplus-cotton plantations of Arizona, the sorghum fields of the Imperial Valley, the beanfields and alfalfa farms of Mexicali, the cisterns, swamp coolers, car washes, fire hydrants, Laundromats, golf courses, swimming pools, sensory deprivation tanks, kitchen sinks, toilet bowls, septic tanks, leach fields, sewage lagoons and sewage treatment plants of Greater L.A. … this ancient and noble river never achieved union anymore with its parent body, the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean, but expired in poisoned trickles and polluted dribbles on the baked cracked desiccated mud of the barren delta, far above its natural outlet. Centipedes crawled, flies buzzed, cows stumbled, vultures cruised, spiders crept, weeds grew where once upon a time and not so long ago a living river flowed and sparkled, fish danced, herons stalked and falcons gyred and stooped, with a green fragrant forest, on either bank, sheltering the secret lives of deer and ocelot, jaguar and javelina, gray wolf and black bear, red fox and puma, armadillo and snapping turtle, anhinga, elegant trogon, ivory-billed woodpecker, kingfisher, bald eagle, marsh hawk, sea gull, pelican, fucking albatross, magnificent fucking frigate bird. …
Gone. A river no more.
“So what?” she snapped. “So who cares?” In mock disgust she whipped her cards to the table while Doc, as usual, with apologetic smile and stinking cigar, raked in the pot. Bonnie the bad loser. But next dealer.
“How’d you do that, Doc?” says Seldom.
“Control, friends, control. Same as always.”
“Naw, somehow it ain’t the same without Oral here.”
“Oral the Provider,” Susan says (Mrs. S. S. Smith #3).
“Oral the Moral,” Kathy says (Mrs. S. S. Smith #2).
“What happened to that kid anyhow?”
“Well you seen him there at that there Rando-voo. Poor guy’s in love with that Miss Universe type from … where’s she from? Italy? Spain? Greece? Germany?”
“Norway,” Doc said. “The Svenska maid. The King of Norway’s daughter, fair Sigrid with the Emerald Eyes.”
Bonnie looked
up from her fingernails. “Emerald? How would you know? We were fifty yards away.”
“Deal the cards.”
“So what’s the game?”
“Dealer’s choice. You’re the dealer.”
“All right,” says Bonnie, shuffling the deck, “this time it’s Abbzug Wins, also known as Montana Gouge. Everybody ante one buck. How’d you know they’re green?”
“Hey, two-bit limit.”
“Special game. Ante up or shut up.” Bonnie led with a dollar bill.
Reluctantly, each player pushed or dropped or tossed four blue chips onto the center of the table, the middle of the soft beguiling green. The dealer reached out and pulled in the five dollars. The others stared. Bonnie stacked the chips before her, tossed another dollar into the pot and repeated the dealer’s command: “Everybody ante another buck.” She shuffled, riffled, interleaved the cards, watching her husband. “How’d you know, Doc?”
“Hey, dealer, what kinda game is this?”
“How’d I know what?”
“He said dealer’s choice. I’m the dealer. You want to play poker, Smith, or you want to go home and cry?”
“Tough broad, this here Mizz Abbzug.”
“Also she forgot to cut the deck.”
“It’s a tough game, country bumpkin. You in or out?”
The big Aladdin lamp swung gently overhead, casting its mellow radiance upon the chips of red and white and blue, the paper dollars and the silver coins, the redback cards, the rednosed Doc, the strawhaired Seldom, the comely and serene young faces of the three women. Bonnie’s Reuben and the Smiths’ five kids were sleeping forward on the bunks in the wheelhouse. Outside of the grand master salon, where this sporting game of chance took place, the only sound was the faint moan of the night wind sweeping up the river, the lapping of little brown waves, the slap of beaver tail on water, the occasional tramp and thud of Seldom’s horses grazing on alfalfa in Seldom’s twenty-acre riverside pasture. You might also have heard, if you listened with extreme acuity, the rustle of vines creeping over sandy, well-tilled, drip-irrigated and well-manured soil in Susan Smith’s two-acre melon patch. The constellations of the stars, blazing with holy light through the dark clear desert sky, could not be heard by any array of human ears. Nor the arc of meteor, the shower of shooting stars. Nor the vast approach, from far beyond Andromeda, of the Lord of the Universe, Uranus, seeking out his bride, Gaia, green-bosomed, brown-thighed, rosy-bellied Earth.
Listening, Smith stared blankly at the ceiling.
Grinning, Bonnie returned the false ante to all players, and dealt five cards face down to each. “Straight draw,” she announced, “nothing wild, jacks or better to open. Everybody ante up. How, Doc?”
“By me,” said Kathy.
“Only a guess. Black-haired Sigrid with the Emerald Eyes — from a poem I read somewhere, long ago, in another country. An odd and interesting genetic type.”
“By me.”
“Seldom?”
He fanned his hand, looked, clapped it shut. “Pass, podner.” Still listening, his gaze went over Bonnie’s shoulder, out the little curtained port, into the windy dark.
“What do you hear?”
Doc tossed a blue chip into the pot. “Two bits.”
“Nothing.”
Bonnie looked at Smith intently for a moment, accepted his statement, announced Doc’s bet. She called. The others called, no one folding. No one had folded yet in this night’s game; without young J. Oral Hatch taking part, their secret tapline to the U. S. Treasury, poker was merely a playful divertissement among family members, Sarvis, Smith & Co. Inc., lacking seriousness. Not much fun. If most of the chips ended up before Doc Sarvis, as usually happened, it mattered little to anyone. He bought the whisky, soda, Pepsi, beer and chips, Bonnie made the dip and salsa, cake and coffee, no one really lost. The game was merely background noise, like Mozart or Muzak, as in the Archduke’s court, for the sustenance of conversation. Manual persiflage, as Doc would say, to keep the KGB confused, the FBI off the streets, the CIA amused, the Interpol entertained.
“Her name is Erika, right?” Bonnie checked the pot. “Somebody’s light again.”
“It’s you, my darling. As always.”
“Izzat right, Hawkeye?” She added her blue chip — “Pot’s right!” — picked up the remaining deck, thumb, forefinger, middle finger poised for action. “Cards!”
Three for Kathy, three for Susan, one for Seldom, two for Doc. “Doc takes two,” the dealer announced. “He’s trying to bluff again. On your guard.” She peeled off one card for herself, quickly, and dropped the deck. “Dealer tay … mmm …” she mumbled, furtively. Loudly: “Your bet, Sarvis.”
“Five beans.”
Bonnie studied her hand, lips moving. Eyes bright, tail bushy, nostrils dilated like a vixen smelling blood, she chirped, “Raiseyou five beans, old bean.” She flipped two blue chips on top of Doc’s one. Called, called, called, and “Raise you back,” said the good gray balding doctor, tossing his fifty cents into the pot.
Bonnie stared at him, locking eyeballs. He stared back through foggy glasses. She stared, watching for the hint of fraud or irresolution. No such hint forthcoming: Doc’s poker face was implacable, unshakable, redoubtable.
“You’re called, you quack.” She matched his raise. “And raised again.” She flipped her second chip upon the pile. All blue. Heavy stakes. She looked at Kathy on her left. “That’s fifty cents to you, my dear.”
“I’ll stay.”
“Susan?”
“Stay.”
“Seldom?” He was gazing up at nothing, frozen, mouth agape. “Seldom Seen Smith? This is Mission Control calling Smith.”
“Yeah?” He returned to earth. “What’s it to me?”
“Two true blue.”
He checked his cards again, cupped deep in his large grimy left hand. “No game for shoe clerks.” He collapsed his hand and spun it face down upon the discards. “I’m out. Go get ‘im, ladies. And that’s right, her name is Erika. Now what you spoze a classy gal like that sees in a simple Utah kid like J. Oral Hatch?”
Doc raised again: fifty cents. He stared at his wife, his face immobile, blank, dumb, devoid even of any trace of curiosity in her response.
Mrs. Sarvis — Mrs. Bonnie Abbzug-hyphen-Sarvis, to be precise — stared right back, her face heartbreaking in its rosy loveliness, exasperating in its stubborn will to triumph even at the risk of severe financial loss ($1.50? $1.75?). “What do you have in your hand, you old bluffer you?”
Doc fanned out his cards — close to the chest — and looked. “Bullets,” he said. “Three bullets and a pair.”
“You liar.” Bonnie looked again at her own hand. Ten high straight. She’d drawn the eight, smack dab in the middle. Pretty damn flashy maneuver. But he had her beat if he was telling the truth. And sometimes Doc did tell the truth, especially when bluffing. Sometimes he lied. Sometimes he did both. Bonnie hesitated, hesitated. She glared at her husband. She glared at her perfect straight. (Is there any other kind?) She was dying to show it, aching to tell about it.
“Full house beats a straight,” he reminded her. “Beats a flush too.”
“Keep him honest,” Susan said.
Bonnie picked up her last greenback. “Raise it again, big shot.” She slapped the bill down on the pile of chips. “And no more raises, that’s it. Right, Seldom?”
“House rule,” he agreed.
Kathy dropped out. Susan dropped out. Seldom was out. Only Doc stayed in, facing the determined dealer. He squinted at her with his small evil red eyes, the dingy smoke from his cheap cigar encircling his head like a wreath of pure smog. He grinned. He dropped two blue chips in the pot. “You’re called, dealer. Let’s see what you got. Put up or shut up.”
Bonnie displayed her pretty little straight. “Beat that, wiseass. I did it the hard way too.”
Doc grinned again, cigar jutting from the corner of his loose, sensual, slack-fibered mouth. Crumbs in his beard. He smacked
down his cards, one by one, with heavy, melodramatic flourish. One: Ace of spades. Two: Ace of clubs. Three: Ace of diamonds. “Three bullets,” he pointed out, a sneer of mean and petty malice on his lip.
“So?”
“And the pair.” He looked at the two in his hand, just to make sure, then slapped them, one at a time, onto the table. Four of hearts. Three of hearts. “Pair of hearts,” he explained. “Big two-hearted bluffer.”
Seldom clapped, the women cheered, Doc smiled, as Bonnie raked in the biggest pot of the evening.
Kathy shuffled the deck.
Seldom Smith listened for the sound of strange horses.
The old houseboat creaked at its moorings. The little riverine waves gurgled and played, flipped and flopped at waterline, splashing against the hull. The boat rocked, the lanterns swayed from their hooks in the ceiling beam. Shadows wavered on the walls. From far away along the river’s shore they heard the cry of an owl. The hoot of the great horned owl, calling for his friends.
Come out and play. …
“You think he’s around?” Bonnie said.
“Who?”
“Him.”
“You mean —?”
“Yeah. Him.”
“Doubt it,” Seldom said. “Last I heard …” He paused.
“Yeah?”
“Last I heard he was headed for Australia. That’s what I heard.”
Bonnie cut the deck, Kathy named the next game — seven-card Hi-Lo — and began to deal.
“The last good country,” Doc mused, talking to himself. “We should all go there to live.”
“Any of you see him lately?” Bonnie asked.
“Not me,” Seldom said.
Doc looked up. “Not me. You?”
“Me? How would I see him? I don’t even know where he lives anymore. Do you? Or even if he’s still alive.”