Coop would never come back. Claire knew that. She knew about the two of them. She had lived in mid-air all those weeks. She’d witnessed Anna returning, sometimes as late as dusk, to the farmhouse, wild-eyed, her face holding nothing back, full of new certainties and knowledge, scared of everything. Anna hadn’t stopped moving. She did not have to confess a thing as she circled and circled their small, dark kitchen.
Claire should have burned the cabin down then.
She walked out into the sunlight. She untied the reins and rose onto the horse with the cat in her arms, talking to both of them.
The Red and the Black
The Deadhead, or hippie, would be the one true ally Cooper found when he arrived at Tahoe. And the thing about ‘the hippie’ was that he seemed the healthiest person in the casino. He was a salt-of-the-earth hippie, cow-shit-on-his-Tevas hippie. From the first time Cooper heard rumours of him to the last night he saw him sitting at that card table with The Brethren, there was never a change in his outfit. There were his unironed Hawaiian shirts, there was the long hair, the loose beads that jangled whenever he moved, and the uncomfortable-looking necklace at his throat made from seashells. Cooper had been sitting on a banquette when he first overheard talk about him.
That friend of yours, that hippie …
Dorn’s not a hippie. You can’t gamble and be hippie.
Man’s a hippie. He goes way back. Lives with that speech therapist he met at a Grateful Dead concert. That’s hippie.
Dorn, slouching and robust, was the most collected card player to come down from the Sierras. He had a theory that two hours of handball a day justified and cancelled the drinking and cocaine and sitting in the presence of smokers during the long evenings.
Are you the hippie? Cooper asked. They were both watching a game.
Could be.
There’s that line—’Hippies are living proof that cowboys still fuck the buffalo.’
I wonder how many times I heard that one.
Cooper had spoken to almost no one since he’d arrived. Now, in thirty seconds, he realized he had managed to insult one of the smartest and most anarchic players in Tahoe, who, the rumour went, had twice skunked David Mamet in a game. His new acquaintance put his hand on his shoulder.
Excuse me. Have to meet someone. My name is Edward Dorn. Like the poet.
The hippie left, and Cooper followed him outside and watched him get on a bicycle, and drift down the street.
Cooper was twenty-three years old when he first arrived in Tahoe and fell into the company of Dorn and his compatriots. He had begun his gambling career watching and playing pool in bars and halls along the coastal towns. He’d studied how the quickly aging players slunk around the pool tables, how they forgave themselves too easily with a grimace, how some were falling in love with the stroke. And he recognized those who were too bitter or ambitious, as well as those who could conceal the larger range of their talent. Cooper had known little about people before this. But pool was by necessity a game of disguises by which you coaxed your mark to the table. And then, when he started playing cards, discovering a technical skill in himself, he saw that in poker you did not need to hide your talent. No one refused a game because you might be a better player than you seemed. This was furious mathematics, a stone in your heart, luck, and the chance of an eventual card—the River—that would glance you towards your fate. He found himself at ease within all this chaos and risk. When he saw drunks steer themselves uncertainly between the card tables in Tahoe, as if avoiding whirlpools, he recognized the same look that had been on him and the other fooled youths coaxed back towards the great Anaconda hoses on the floating platforms of the Russian River.
The group around Dorn took Coop under their wing. There was Dorn, Mancini, and ‘The Dauphin,’ so named because he had been seen reading a European novel. They would enter gambling halls like royalty from Wyoming—save for Dorn, in sandals and beads, flash-frozen in the sixties. Gamblers scarcely remembered the name of the president of the United States, but Dorn followed politics with an obsessive aversion. He hated Born-Agains like Pounce Autry, whose group, nicknamed ‘The Brethren,’ formed a prayer circle on the mezzanine before coming down to the card tables. Dorn gave Autry a wide berth. Autry bounced between Tahoe and Vegas, but Dorn and his cohorts saw Vegas as the end of the world. They preferred to be based in Tahoe. Now and then they drove to Reno for a weekend on journeys that were non-stop arguments as to what was the best drug, worst drug, best breed of dog, who was the best cardsharp they had met, the best masseuse, the best or worst actor. Without a doubt, for all of them, De Palma’s The Fury was the very worst movie ever made, that was a given. And at some point Mancini would insist that Karl Malden was the greatest actor.
Almost every movie—On the Waterfront, Streetcar, I Confess.
There’s One-Eyed Jacks …
You took those three fucking words right out of my mouth. Him and Katy Jurado—that’s the whole movie.
He’s in Cincinnati Kid, isn’t he? Isn’t he the mechanic in that?
Mancini, who’d been warming up, hesitated. You know, Karl has been in great fucking pictures, but Cincinnati Kid has problems. Remember they’re having this game of no-limit five-card stud. And Steve McQueen has, I recall, aces and tens. And Edward G. Robinson—another grand master of the art, if he’d been a chess player, they’d have a statue of him—has three cards, no pairs. Now, you never ever give them a chance to draw, when that happens. You just don’t give them a chance to draw again. Period. But Fancy-Pants McQueen puts in a piss amount and allows Edward G. to stay in and draw a card—he should never be allowed to get to that card. You’d put in everything, your wife, your parrot, to prevent him from drawing, you make it too expensive… . You know you have the best hand as things stand. You bet all your money.
So what happens? I forget what happens.
Edward G. lays down a straight flush he’s just made, and busts him.
Cooper didn’t know the movies they were talking about. The others were in their thirties and forties, he was the youth among them. They watched over him, knowing him as a compulsive risk-taker, dangerous even to himself. But what he could do, which surprised them, was imitate the way each of them played, as if he were speaking in tongues. Though in the mania of a game, when you had to be calm, Cooper could be either startling or foolish. Someday he might be their skilled heir, but it felt to them that for now he was still in hand-to-hand combat, mostly with himself.
Whereas Dorn’s friends were in it for the way of life. They played twelve-hour marathons, crossed over from scotch to cocaine, read Erdnase and Philip K. Dick by the pool or in the back of an air-conditioned car, fucked glowing women with the Discovery Channel loud in the background, and shot up in the elevator going down. Cooper didn’t participate, was an untouchable. He was sane everywhere but within a game. There was Peruvian flake to keep the others from getting tired. Asleep they could not win. That was the only logic. Several years later in Santa Maria, when a woman named Bridget attempted to give Cooper some, he held her face between his hands and said, ‘I know you won’t believe me, but one day you’re going to write four hundred words down on the back of a matchbook and think you’ve written a masterpiece, you’re going to believe you’re invincible.’ She smiled back at him: ‘You’re invincible, Cooper.’
In a deli one evening their group spoke of unusual winnings. Dorn mentioned a player called The Gentile who had won his future wife in a card game, with a pair of nines.
There were setups, larceny, and drugs everywhere. Two men asked Dorn to suggest a reliable card mechanic, and he mentioned Fidelio. ‘Pretty name,’ they said. ‘What nationality is he?’ ‘Filipino,’ Dorn said. ‘No, thank you,’ the gamblers said, ‘we need an Aryan.’ Cooper was appalled, but Dorn said, ‘Fair enough, they want a dealer who’s invisible.’ It was a world where you needed to quickly forgive. You found yourself drinking with hit men or smack dealers who might have killed someone with an eight ball the previous we
ek. Fast lives were ending all around them. The concern among their own group was which one of them would be the first to crash. The Dauphin or Mancini. They saw less evidence of disaster with The Dauphin. Though he took Quaaludes regularly, the odds were with him. And he seemed preoccupied with teaching his friends about the recordings and skills of the great concert pianists, as well as how to dress, railing against slip-on loafers, tattoos, men’s cologne, the Windsor knot. He talked for hours on the proper length of the sleeve and the correct height of a collar. The greatest work of literature for The Dauphin, as far as clothes were concerned, was The Tale of Genji, and on those long drives he read the other passengers to sleep with paragraphs from Lady Murasaki. He had already lectured them on Japanese noir and the early femmes fatales. ‘You’ve not met them yet,’ he told Cooper, ‘but you will. They’ll come at you with a weakness. There is nothing more seductive to a man than a woman in distress. They’re like priests, you never give them a handicap.
Cocaine fooled The Dauphin, however, and under its influence two Baptists lured him into a game of Deuce to Seven and he lost everything. A few days later a heart attack felled him. He placed his last bet on a football game that was showing in preop, and was dead a week later. When Dorn went to identify him, the orderly pulled back the sheet and they saw the Jack of Hearts tattooed on his calf, a mistake of taste from his youth.
That left Mancini the winner. (He continued his cicada-length relationships with women and surprised everyone by eventually becoming a drug counselor in Iowa.) They gathered in his apartment at eleven the morning after The Dauphin’s death. The colour TV was on mute. There was some coverage about the buildup of the war in the Gulf, and Mancini switched channels and stopped when he found a programme with a female snake-handler wearing shorts. They watched her in silence, remembered anecdotes about The Dauphin, then got in the car and took a drive around the lake. They were more than six thousand feet above sea level and it was easy to get drunk.
They played shorthanded poker among themselves and learned new games and broke down percentages. Dorn’s first principle had always been (as in the song) that you go with ‘the one with hair down to here and plenty of money.’ In the lull after The Dauphin’s death, Cooper decided to show them how good a card mechanic he could be. He tore open a new pack, discarded the guarantee cards and jokers, cut at twenty-six and gave a series of faro shuffles, eight times in under a minute, so the deck ended in exactly the same order he started with. He confessed all this to them, even if it was something he would never use in a game, so they would trust him. ‘Watch carefully,’ he said at the start. ‘You have the fingers of a good Catholic with his rosary,’ Mancini noted. ‘Why do you do this?’
There is a great history of people being given the wrong book, at some key moment in their lives. When Coop had been scammed a few years earlier in three-card monte on the pier in San Francisco, he went to a game shop to discover how he had been cheated, and instead found a reprint of The Expert at the Card Table, published as far back as 1902. Apart from explaining the three-card-monte hustle, the book became a Pandora’s box for him. He found a subterranean world.
I thought I should discover everything that might come against me, Coop said. I found a treatise on the ‘Science and Art of Manipulating Cards.’
Well, someday you must meet The Gentile, Dorn said, and learn a few more things from him. He’s an old-time faro player. Maybe I will write you a brief letter of introduction.
A few days after The Dauphin’s funeral, they scattered. Dorn returned home to Nevada City, where Ruth, his perennial girlfriend, worked as a speech therapist. He invited Coop to join him, and they drove a winding road bordered by pines and were caught in a swirling snow until they left the mountains. Dorn changed the radio dial to KVMR as they entered its frequency. In Nevada City, he turned out to be a pillar of the community, active with the local public radio station, and with helping transform an old forge into a community centre. At the same time, he remained obsessed with conspiracy theories that, like poker, had a disguised structure, revealed only by footnotes and glances. Dorn could always sense the contours of a setup or read a deceit. What frustrated him in his dealings with the Vegas Brethren, the born-agains, was that he hadn’t broken their code, couldn’t figure them out; he felt finessed by them. He was unsure whether Pounce Autry was a great poker player who hated to lose or whether he was always assisted by a mechanic or cardsharp who stacked or beagled every deck. Recently, during the buildup to the war, he kept seeing their lapel flags. Coop, disgusted by their adamant political self-righteousness, wanted to take them on.
Can’t be done.
I think I could.
Well, visit The Gentile first, if you want to go up against Autry’s crowd. The Gentile will teach you. He’s become a civilian, but he hates everything about Vegas. Also, he ran off with someone’s girl.
The one he won in the card game?
Yes.
So how do I get there?
First of all, you don’t ever call him The Gentile. His name is Axel. Get a bus to Bakersfield, then you can hire someone to drive you the seventy miles into the desert.
The no longer functional Jericho Army Base is where Axel and the woman have ended up, living in the 1980 Airstream they’ve hot-wired up to a transformer pole. They suggest that Cooper sleep in an old surveyor’s tent not too far from their silver dwelling. Lina shows him the well where they bathe. There are still traces of gold in the water, she says. They cook all meals outside, and a propane tank hisses away during breakfast and dinner. At night Cooper can see other lights in the far reaches of the abandoned base. Two horses that belong to Lina drift near the camp.
Mentioning Dorn to The Gentile breaks the ice.
God, I knew his mother so well, I could almost have fathered him.
He’s the smart one among us, Cooper says graciously.
The Gentile thinks, then mutters, And now they say he’s a hippie.
It looks that way.
Coop watches Lina walk over and mount her horse, supple as a scarf, and suddenly he thinks of Claire. The way she was always serene on an animal. Lina has, according to The Gentile, a price on her head, her first husband still unforgiving about her escape from his bullying. A woman in distress … Cooper remembers. There are mesas and horse trails and old gold mines to explore during the day. The fact that Cooper knows horses surprises Lina. ‘Hey, a gambler who rides!’ So the two of them trek into the desert. Cooper has to wait for night, in any case— Axel refuses to bring out cards until it is dark, and then he takes Cooper into the Airstream’s den and closes the door. They will emerge after three or four hours, at which point Cooper walks to his tent and crashes into sleep.
Some afternoons he wanders alone through the deserted cafeterias and abandoned barracks of the military base, which feels like a suburb of the moon. He meets no one, though at night he will sometimes hear a generator or see a fire. There are only Lina and Axel to talk to. It feels like a parody of guru–disciple teaching, except that The Gentile has a vociferous sexual life—he has even apologized for the noise, and his yells often sound like screams for help. Their sex takes place in the late afternoons, and shortly afterwards they emerge from the Airstream like humbled dormice. Cooper, in his tent forty yards away, has tied a thin cotton cloth over his eyes so he can nap in the three p.m. glare, but it’s tough to ignore the shouts of surrender or epiphany coming from the trailer.
After a week, The Gentile doubles the hours of card-playing. The games now last at least six hours. At midnight they pause, Axel goes into the kitchen, and returns with scotch and two glasses, and they begin again. ‘Beware the false ending,’ he says, as if the previous hours had been only a rehearsal.
The Gentile records their theoretical credits and debits on a chart. By now Cooper already seems to owe him $30,000. ‘Whoever loses rides into Miniver for groceries,’ The Gentile announces, ‘and I don’t mount horses or mules.’ Another night he raises the stakes. ‘If you win, you may
sleep with Lina. Try dealing from the middle of the deck. Anything goes tonight. If I catch you at it, the bet is cancelled. If you win, you can show that affection I know you have for her.’ Cooper is deeply embarrassed. ‘Some say I won Lina in a card game,’ The Gentile continues, ‘though in fact she won me in that card game. But of course I was the dealer. The CIA believes you can break anyone, turn anyone, if you know their weakness. It’s usually sex, always number one, then money, or power. Now and then pride and vanity. What about you?’
They play with their scotch glasses balanced on the windowsill. ‘It’s easy being a mechanic playing a large table, so let’s limit ourselves to a small one. Also, Vegas has distractions. We don’t. So you can watch me carefully.’
Thus begins the second week of a more illicit education. How to be an undiscovered cardsharp. ‘It’s something we are not naturally inclined to do,’ Axel murmurs, ‘to handle things with skill and grace and make it appear that nothing is happening. You need to give the illusion of the unexceptional. Slow down your deal, in fact deal like a sucker. Then you can vanquish them. Now, show me your crimp work.’ It is clear to Cooper that, as far as Axel is concerned, Vegas needs to be buried under the sands. ‘I look at this military base and have high hopes that Vegas will end up the same, with entombed singers and comedians. A thousand years from now we will dig up the tomb of the great Wayne Newton, and he will be a god again.’ Axel never stops talking. Cooper is reminded of hitchhikers who enter a car and rattle off biblical quotations with chapter and verse to prove that the end of the world will arrive before the weekend. The Gentile lectures about manner and style and focus. ‘I am told that Tolstoy,’ he says, ‘was able to walk into a room that held a small group of people and understand everything about them in fifteen minutes. The only person in the room he could not understand was himself. That’s what a good professional is like.’