Stone Junction

  ‘Little more complex than stick gambling, but the same idea. I gotta think you chose it because you think it’ll neutralize my vast card-playing experience. Which was smart of you.’ He draped his arm fraternally around Daniel’s shoulders. ‘But you’re gonna be in a world of hurt, Daniel. I beat Tony Big Elk so bad stick gambling that he retired, and he was supposed to be the best.’

  Daniel hadn’t heard that story before, so wasn’t sure if it was fact or intimidation. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t waste our time playing. I’ll just give you the ten grand and listen to you call the shots for another year.’

  ‘Probably be efficient,’ Bobby chuckled, ‘but it wouldn’t be as much fun. I haven’t played sticks in about fifteen years now and I’m kinda looking forward to it. You want to do it here, or in one of our rooms?’

  Daniel feigned dismay. ‘Inside? Bobby, this is Indian gambling. We do it outside. Naked. Right on the beach. First one to a hundred wins.’

  Bad Bobby plainly didn’t like this. He blinked slowly, took his arm from Daniel’s shoulder, and crossed his arms on his chest. ‘I assume you have the stones?’

  ‘In my pocket.’

  Bad Bobby glanced at his watch, then at his personal hostess hovering nearby. ‘It’s nine-thirty. I’ll meet you here at midnight. I’ve got to stash my roll, wash off the smoke, get something to eat.’

  ‘Midnight’s perfect,’ Daniel told him. ‘I was going to suggest it myself.’

  Naked, Daniel and Bad Bobby faced each other at the surf’s edge, the waxing half-moon spilling phosphorescence on the wet sand.

  ‘Okay,’ Daniel said, ‘let’s get our wager straight. If I win, I’m free to go, to do as I please; if I lose, I stay, and it costs me ten grand for the fun of getting beat.’

  ‘That nails it.’

  ‘I have a little proposition,’ Daniel said, ‘a side bet.’

  Bobby said, ‘I won’t know what it is if you don’t tell me.’

  ‘First, I want you to know why I’m offering it. You see, all I can win is leaving you, and as a matter of fact you’re good company, a fine teacher, and the best cardplayer I’ve seen in my brief career – including Guido. So I want to bet you another ten grand on the side, straight up, no odds. That way I at least stand to win something besides leaving, and if I lose I want you to take my whole roll.’

  ‘You want to give it away, I’ll take it.’ A wave crashed a hundred yards out. Bobby glanced at it.

  ‘Good thing you’ve got a deal with the ocean,’ Daniel said.

  ‘You gonna talk this game or play it?’

  ‘Play it.’ Daniel put his hands behind his back and began rapidly shifting the stones back and forth. ‘You’re the champion,’ he told Bobby, ‘so you get to go first.’ He kept trading the stones till he didn’t know himself which hand held what. He thrust his fists out to Bad Bobby.

  Instead of choosing, Bobby lifted his grizzled face heavenward and began a high, rhythmic chant: ‘Hiya-Ya-Yee-Ah-Yah––’

  ‘Hey,’ Daniel said sharply, ‘what the fuck are you doing.’

  Bobby stopped chanting and looked at Daniel with plain surprise. ‘Why, I’m singing my gambling song. That’s the most important part of the stick game, your song. You need it to open your circuits and mess up the other guy’s. See, you probably think you don’t know which hand holds which stone, but you do.’ He touched Daniel’s left hand. ‘Black.’

  Daniel opened his hand. It held the black stone.

  ‘One for the old guy,’ Bobby said, beaming as he accepted the stones from Daniel.

  It was a slaughter. Daniel beat him one hundred to forty-seven, and that after trailing twenty-eight to twelve. When it had reached eighty to forty-four Bad Bobby had groaned, which was about as close as he ever came to sniveling. ‘You’re hotter than a cheap pistol and I’ve turned colder than penguin shit.’

  It didn’t help Bobby’s concentration that – as Daniel had foreseen – the literal tide turned at five minutes past midnight, or that at about the time the surf began surging around their ankles, Daniel got an erection he was unaware of until Bad Bobby said, ‘Why don’t you put that thing away?’

  ‘Boy,’ Daniel said, ‘Nature sure makes you jumpy. Why don’t you see if you can make it a deal?’

  But what really hastened the rout was Daniel’s discovery that if he emptied his mind, concentrated through instead of on, he could feel the black stone in one of Bobby’s hands. Always the black, though often he’d point to the other hand and guess white so Bobby wouldn’t suspect he’d somehow keyed in.

  Daniel didn’t know how he knew, but it didn’t surprise him that he did. Wild Bill had hammered into his head that life was full of critical information that refused to pass through the rational circuits of knowledge. Or as Bad Bobby put it later, as he peeled off a hundred hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Daniel, ‘Simple arithmetic will tell you how much you lost, but only your ass knows how bad it’s been kicked.’

  Transcription: Telephone Conversation Between

  Volta and Bad Bobby

  BOBBY: It’s Robert. Called to tell you Daniel’s ready to move on. Beat me the first try in some version of stick gambling. Whipped me bad.

  VOLTA: That didn’t take long. You must be getting old, losing your edge.

  BOBBY: You were right – he’s good. He’ll stand in and take his best shot. No seasoning, of course, and he’s got a weakness for the long odds and big moves, but there’s somebody home, know what I mean, even if he’s not sure who it is.

  VOLTA: Any suggestions where to send him next?

  BOBBY: I don’t know. I’m not good at figuring what’s next. Have enough trouble figuring out what’s now. And Daniel’s hard to read. He’s got gamble in his blood but no heart for the road – he was burning out on the life, not the game, but you really can’t separate them. Thing I can’t figure is how he can be such a restless soul and not have a taste for the road.

  VOLTA: Maybe he doesn’t have a taste for the game and can’t admit that to himself.

  BOBBY: (after a pause) I don’t know. He’s either a helluva quick learner or he’s got some card sense on the natch, because in eighteen months he was holding up against some of the best, and that was starting from scratch. He don’t have to admit that to himself; that’s just a stone fact. And the bigger the money, the better he plays.

  VOLTA: Any indication where his interests lie?

  BOBBY: He mentioned the focus was too tight in gambling. He said he wanted to expand. Maybe send him back to the mountains for a while – he says he misses them. Maybe turn him over to Slocum Wright for a couple of years to learn boats.

  VOLTA: Not enough challenge.

  BOBBY: Well, you got me. By the way, before my senile ol’ mind forgets it, he said to be sure and tell you he had a dream and wants to talk to you about it.

  VOLTA: Tell him I’ll talk to him later, unless it’s something urgent regarding his mother.

  BOBBY: Sure, but where does he go? He seems real anxious to know.

  VOLTA: Probably because he’s thinking of quitting.

  BOBBY: (chuckling) Haven’t we all.

  VOLTA: True enough. But okay, give him these instructions. He should fly to New York two weeks from tomorrow, on the twenty-seventh. Wait in the Silver Wings bar for a man named Jean Bluer. If Bluer isn’t there by 6 p. m., he should take a taxi to the Wildwood Hotel and register as David Hull. If he hasn’t heard from Jean Bluer in three days, he should call me at the Six Rivers number.

  BOBBY: Who’s this Jean Bluer? Sounds like a Frenchy.

  VOLTA: A recent addition. I just decided a few seconds ago he might be the one to open a different dimension. Could take me a few days to find him, though – that’s why the convoluted and contingent instructions.

  BOBBY: You have anyone lined up for me?

  VOLTA: No.

  BOBBY: There’s a kid named Johnny Russo that looks good. Care if I take him on for a few months?

  VOLTA: Not at all. But I’m a little sur
prised. I thought you preferred traveling that mean ol’ hard-ass gambling highway by your lonesome.

  BOBBY: Guess it turns too lonely when a man starts losing his edge. Hell, I only won about half a million this week.

  VOLTA: That’s nothing. I heard some guy named Guido Caramba won seven hundred thousand in two days.

  BOBBY: Probably a good thing you have me to rag, otherwise you’d go around putting the boots to puppies. You know, Volta, any time you think you know something about playing cards, I’m sure you can find me and show me how it’s done.

  VOLTA: You know I don’t gamble, Robert.

  BOBBY: Right. And Pancho Villa couldn’t hide a pony.

  Daniel sat in the Silver Wings Bar at Kennedy International drinking whiskey and waiting for Jean Bluer. He’d parted company with Bad Bobby in San Francisco twelve days earlier and hiked and fished in the Sierras till his departure for New York. He’d made his flight in Oakland with barely enough time to cadge a shower in the employees’ lounge and change his smoke-tanged clothes. Now, seven hours later, he was on the other side of the continent, his head still in the Sierra high country, New York at his feet, his heart dislocated and confused.

  In the mountains he’d considered giving up his training. He didn’t feel it was going anywhere. Every teacher had demanded strict attention and ferocious concentration, but to no real point, or none he wanted. That, he decided as he ordered another whiskey, was the problem: He didn’t know what he wanted. He had no family, no lovers, no close friends. His vocational skills, essentially solitary occupations, were illegal in most states. Growing dope, cracking safes, and playing poker were potentially lucrative, and, if nothing else, he was comfortable with risk. The ten days in the Sierras hadn’t refreshed him as he’d hoped they would. As he waited, he decided if he didn’t like Jean Bluer, or if it was more of the same work in a different form, he would ask Volta for a two-year vacation. If Volta refused or resisted, he’d quit AMO. No. He would tell Volta he was taking a few years off for independent study, not ask. He was still hurt Volta had shown no interest in his dream.

  At six, Jean Bluer hadn’t arrived. Irked, Daniel downed his drink and made his way through the crammed terminal as the PA boomed static-fractured announcements of arrivals and departures.

  ‘I’m departing,’ Daniel, at least one sheet to the wind, muttered as he followed the arrows for ground transportation. But when he stepped outside into a raw dusk, he didn’t see any buses or taxis around. A porter whisked by with a rack of luggage.

  ‘Taxi?’ Daniel called.

  ‘Do I look like a fucking taxi?’ the porter snarled without breaking stride.

  Daniel, scrambling to make the leap between high country solitude and the teeming arrogance of New York, fell short. An infinitely sweeter voice behind him purred, ‘Are you going into the city?’

  Daniel turned. The speaker was a striking young woman with long, glossy black hair. She was barely an inch shorter than Daniel’s six feet, wearing a skirt the color of terra cotta and a loose red-silk blouse. The colors went well with her dark complexion and the lines complemented her body, more sleek than thin.

  ‘I’m looking for a taxi or a bus or something,’ Daniel told her. The whiskey and a rush of lust thickened his tongue.

  ‘So I gathered. These porters are becoming absolutely loutish, their insolence matched only by their capacity for obscenity.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Daniel said. He looked at her closely, trying to fix her nationality. She was wearing lots of makeup.

  ‘You didn’t say if you were going into the city, but if you are, you’re welcome to ride with me.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ Daniel said, trying to muster a formality equal to her own. ‘I accept with gratitude.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Wildwood.’

  Her large brown eyes looked pained. ‘There are better hotels in New York.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve never been here. I’m meeting an old friend.’

  ‘Business?’

  ‘Indirectly. We’ve done a lot of gambling together.’ Inspired, he added, ‘That’s why we’re meeting at the Wildwood – there’s supposed to be a rather promising poker game there. Poker, you see, is my business.’

  ‘A gambler! How fascinating. You must tell me more.’

  Daniel started to oblige when a black limousine hushed to a stop beside them. A chauffeur ushered her inside, inquiring, ‘And how was your trip, Miss Haruh?’

  ‘Work, as usual.’ Then, indicating Daniel, ‘This gentleman will be riding into the city with us, Phillips. Please drop him at the Wildwood Hotel.’

  ‘Of course, Miss Haruh.’

  The limo was opulently appointed. ‘You travel very well,’ Daniel said as they pulled away.

  ‘When you travel as much as I do, luxury becomes a necessity.’

  ‘I can appreciate that, though in my business forsaking luxury is more often the necessity, especially if you play badly. My name, by the way, is Daniel Pearse.’

  ‘Mine is Imera Haruh,’ she said, bowing her head slightly.

  There was something about her that Daniel suddenly didn’t trust. Her speech and gestures seemed too self-consciously graceful or formal – as if rehearsed. ‘Haruh?’ he said. ‘Is that Pakistani?’

  ‘Close. Indian.’

  ‘Your English is exceptional.’

  She smiled. ‘It should be. I was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. My parents were Brahmins who did not like Gandhi any better than the British.’

  ‘So, what takes you on these travels where luxury is a necessity?’

  ‘I’m a model with the Sebring Agency. I just shot a spread for Elle with Raoul Villela – it seems only an hour ago I was in Madrid – and next month I’ll be on the cover of Vogue. Look for it. I’ll be wearing Oriental make-up, a bamboo hat, and halter-top pajamas. It’s their Vietnam Remembrance Look or something equally tacky.’ She arched her lip in distaste. ‘The editors, the advertisers, even the photographers – none of them have souls.’

  Daniel said, ‘You don’t have to do it.’

  ‘Mr Pearse,’ Imera said tartly, ‘the world gives women very little of financial value other than their beauty, which it then wastes. I intend to – how do you gamblers say it? – cash in while I can.’

  Daniel thought, That explains the brittle, practiced grace. A model, a Brahmin, and a pound of righteous feminine bitterness. ‘Miss Haruh,’ he said gently, ‘please don’t mistake my intentions, but after I’ve finished making arrangements with my friend at the Wildwood, would you be my guest for dinner? And not merely to reciprocate the generosity of this ride, but to sustain the pleasure of your company.’ That was good, Daniel thought, impressed.

  Imera’s smile seemed more relaxed. ‘As long as it’s no place where I’d usually be recognized by the fawning flesh-dealers of this city.’

  ‘Anywhere you choose.’

  She cocked her head slightly, a gesture that would have seemed coy if not for the strength in her voice, ‘And please, Mr Pearse, don’t mistake me.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Daniel assured her, thinking, I dreamed; now maybe I can make love to the same woman twice.

  They ate at a small Greek restaurant, then, having dismissed Phillips earlier, took a taxi to her Upper East Side apartment. He didn’t wait for her to turn on the lights. Taken with the sudden dizziness of desire, he put his arms around her.

  ‘Daniel,’ she warned, breaking away. ‘Don’t. You’ll be disappointed, I’m afraid.’

  ‘More likely, that would be your complaint, not mine.’

  ‘I doubt that sincerely,’ she said, flipping on the lights.

  Daniel, whose attention had been riveted on her, was startled to see her apartment was more like a small warehouse, most of it devoted to makeup tables and racks of clothes. He looked at her, the intimation of betrayal like a weight in his lungs. But before he could even imagine what it was he hoped she could explain, Imera swept of
f her wig and hung it on a nearby rack. She was bald.

  And when she spoke, it seemed her voice had dropped thirty-nine octaves. ‘Daniel, allow me to introduce myself properly. I’m Jean Bluer, Master of Disguise.’ Jean Bluer smiled hugely at his little joke.

  ‘I’m going to kick your ass,’ Daniel promised, taking off his coat.

  ‘I seriously doubt that will occur. Besides being a master of disguise, I am also a master of Tao Do Chaung, the almost extinct art of Ninja foot fighting, and I will defend myself.’

  ‘I think you’re the master of bad jokes and bullshit.’ Daniel lunged.

  Jean Bluer spun sideways, whipping his right foot around into Daniel’s thigh with an excruciatingly precise force. Daniel went down screaming.

  Jean Bluer looked at him as he writhed in pain. ‘Daniel,’ he said, vaguely disappointed, ‘you must develop a larger appreciation for the essential humor of identity.’

  Since Jean Bluer was never entirely himself, any description was provisional. His eyes most often were blue, but through the adroit use of contact lenses and the application of special drops he prepared himself, they might be twenty shades of hazel, brown, or grey. His hair color, length, and style were a function of whatever wig he chose for the day, just as his nose and ears depended on putty and makeup for their shape. He altered his body with girdles, lifts, padding, postural changes, and the warehouse of costumes, many of which he’d sewn or otherwise assembled himself. When Smiling Jack had called Volta’s attention to Jean Bluer, Jack had claimed that given enough preparation time, Jean could pass for any adult from twenty-nine different cultures – and Jack was notoriously frugal with exaggeration.

  Daniel received his daily lessons in the warehouse where Jean dwelt among his manifold identities. Jean was a passionate and exacting teacher. Study began at seven in the morning and lasted till nine in the evening. At Daniel’s insistence, instruction in Tao Do Chaung was added, beginning at 5 a.m. After the smoky rancidity of the gambling life, Daniel embraced the physical exertion of Tao Do Chaung’s dervishlike exercises.

  Daniel had revered – even loved – Wild Bill. Mott Stoker he’d admired for the exuberance of his excesses. He’d hated and adored Aunt Charmaine’s glacial grace and piercing mind. He’d respected Bad Bobby’s skill, style, and raptor’s eye. He was enthralled by Jean Bluer. The warehouse, like Jean’s psyche, was a hall of mirrors, and while Jean, like his student, examined each image for its elemental accuracy, teacher and student were both compelled to look into themselves for who they might possibly become.