“Because I feel lucky.” Sam was still smiling his easy smile, but there was something else behind it, an edge. He did feel lucky, Josh was sure of it. So lucky, so confident that even those slips of paper weren’t unnerving him. Sam turned around and fully met his boy’s eyes. “Josh, I’m going to play another hand. I’d be happy for you to stay and be my good luck charm. But if you’re worried about getting in trouble, you scoot along home to your mother. I’ll be there directly.”
Josh looked at his father, calm and easy sitting there, his pale blue eyes that trusted him, trusted his son. He had a frog in his throat that made it hard to speak. “I can wait out a hand,” he said.
Travis Denton banged the cards on the table to square them and made a show of shuffling. “You in, Jim?”
Jim sighed. “Yeah, why not. Hell yes. Deal the damn cards.”
Three of them in the hand, Travis and Jim and Josh’s father. Vince and Carl and Uwe all made as if to leave, gathering up wallets and keys and caps, but as the two hole cards went down they stilled, standing around the table. The sky was darkening fast. It would have been hard to read the cards if not for the light that fell through the kitchen blinds to lie in bars across the table. One by one the city’s roosters fell silent. The air seemed to sigh the day’s last breath, rich with cicada song and the smell of magnolia. Night coming.
Josh couldn’t help peeking when his father checked his hole cards. Four of clubs, ace of clubs. Travis dealt Third Street, the third card in the hand and the first one to be placed faceup in plain view. Four of hearts for Josh’s dad. Josh’s heart hammered in his chest. One pair by Third Street, with an ace for the side card. A playable hand. Jack of diamonds to Jim Ford. Dealer showed a seven of hearts.
“Jack to bet.”
“No bet.”
“Sam?”
“Oh. I’ll go in twenty, I reckon. Pass me that notebook of yours, would you, Carl?” He took the notebook from Carl and a pencil and wrote out an IOU.
“I’ll see your twenty and raise you twenty more,” Travis said. He bit another finger off the hand of bourbon in his shot glass.
“Shit,” Jim Ford said, looking at Josh and his dad. He shoveled forty dollars in chips across the table.
Joshua’s father wrote out another IOU.
It is a cold fact that after the Great Hurricane of 1900, the Galveston Relief Committee asked the Dentons to give temporary shelter to a group of orphans and the Dentons turned them down. They said they had no space or food or water to spare. A week later, when Will Denton, Jr., told the Colonel that business was bound to suffer from the exodus of survivors from the Island, the old man uttered one of the most famous comments in Island history. “Good,” he said. “Remember, we both love to hunt and fish. The fewer people on the Island, the better the hunting and fishing will be.” Two weeks after the hurricane, Will Denton. Jr., purchased a thirty-room mansion at 2618 Broadway for ten cents on the dollar.
The Colonel’s great-great-great-grandson dealt out another round. “Nine of spades for Jim, no help there.” He laid the five of diamonds in front of Josh’s dad. “Possible straight. Dealer gets a king of hearts. And that’ll cost you forty,” he added, pushing four blue chips out into the middle of the table. Travis was trying to scare his dad’s money. This was his way of putting the screws into Sam, trying to back him down or make him gamble everything not because he had the cards, but because he had to win.
“Forty?” Jim said. “With only four cards dealt?”
“What’s it matter to you? Pay up or shut up, Jim. You aren’t busted.”
“I’ll see your forty,” Josh’s father said. “And I’ll raise you another.”
Josh’s mouth went dry. They always played a $5-$10 game, but somehow things had escalated and they were playing $20-$40. “Dad, what about putting borders on a game? You said—”
“Hush up, Josh.”
Josh bit his lip until it hurt. He deserved it. What a horrible tell. He had just given away that his dad didn’t have a monster hand.
“I’ll see your raise and reraise again,” Travis said. He pushed eight blue chips into the middle of the table. No more raises allowed on Fourth Street.
“Great blue Christ, Travis!”
“Jim, are you in or out? If you’re in, put up your money. If you’re out, shut the fuck up.”
Jim Ford scooped up his cards. “I’m out, goddammit.” He grabbed up his glass of beer and drank it down and set it back on the table, hard. “Sam, fold up for God’s sake. You think you’re having trouble with Mandy now? Christ, what the hell do you think is going to happen after this?”
Josh’s dad looked up. “I’ll ask you not to speak that way in front of the boy, Jim.”
Jim Ford looked out into the rose garden that had filled up with darkness. “Sorry, Sam. I just…” A little green lizard about the length and heft of a man’s finger slipped along the stone verandah and up the wall, watching for bugs drawn to the light that slivered through the kitchen blinds. Jim’s eyes dropped down to the stone flags of his verandah. “I’ll step in and see if supper’s ready.”
Josh’s dad wrote out another IOU. Travis Denton said, “Feeling lucky, Sam?”
“The whole night, if you’ll believe it.”
Josh was staring at that lizard. It froze as a mosquito bumped up against the kitchen shutters. Bump, bump, bump.
Travis laughed. “But you just keep losing.”
Snap. The tongue shot out faster than Josh could ever hope to see. Sloane Gardner’s mom, the Grand Duchess, still had a dandy computer from before the Flood and plenty of power to run it; they had a picture of a lizard’s tongue snapping out to catch a fly on their CD-ROM encyclopedia. Curling out like a whiplash, no chance for the bug. You had to play it in slow motion, frame by frame, to see it at all.
Please, Josh said. Please, Dad. Don’t do this. But the words wouldn’t come out. He licked his lips, dry despite the sultry Texas night.
“Come on, Sam,” Carl Banks muttered. “Come on, Ace.”
Travis Denton dealt the Fifth Street card: a deuce of diamonds for Josh’s father, a six of hearts for himself. “Still working on a possible straight over there. Dealer has three hearts showing.”
Betting. More chips in the center of the table. More little slips of paper.
Josh’s dad was sitting with a pair of fours, ace high. All he lacked for a straight was a three. Travis might be sitting on a pair, two pair, or possibly a flush. If he was holding pairs, a four in the draw would win it for Josh’s dad with three of a kind. A three would give him a straight; still not good enough to beat Travis’s flush if he did get two more hearts. Another ace or five for Sam would give him two pair. It was a good hand, a good situation, except there was too much money in the pot. There was way too much money in the pot. If Sam didn’t get a favorable draw, he’d have a pair of fours ace high. You might win with that in seven-card stud, but you sure couldn’t bet this high on it. Not as fast as Travis was laying down his bets.
Maybe he had nothing, maybe he was bluffing. “It’s easier to bluff a good player than a bad one,” Sam always said. “A bad player only thinks about winning. A good player is willing to throw in and wait for a better hand. He doesn’t get embarrassed about being bluffed. He doesn’t let it get personal.”
But this was personal. It’s me, Josh thought. He doesn’t want to be shown up in front of his boy.
Why hadn’t he waited in the kitchen with Gloria just a few more minutes? Just enough to let his dad take a licking and then get out while there was still time. Dad and Mom would fight about it later, of course. Even Jim Ford knew that. There had been fights before. But now…Josh tried to imagine how much was written on all those little slips of paper, those little white flags fluttering under chips all around the table in the dark South Texas breeze.
Their Sixth Street card was a nine of clubs. Another rag, no use at all.
A mosquito settled on Sam Cane’s neck. He ignored it. Josh watched it dip its head
and begin to drink.
Travis bet. Josh’s father called. “Let’s get this done,” he said. He never said things like that. He never showed himself anxious to see his last card.
A dove broke up from somewhere in the dim grounds, nothing but a sound of wings slapping until it got high enough to be silhouetted against the last blue ashes of light in the west. Josh prayed. Please, God, let my dad draw a three or a four. An ace or a deuce or a five would be okay, but a three or four would be better. I will be very, very, very good if you do this for me.
The last hole card came. Josh’s father let it lie there what seemed like forever, then drew it smoothly into his hand, close to his chest, almost too fast for Josh to see—except he could tell it was paint. A face card.
Nothing.
Josh looked up and saw Travis staring at him. He couldn’t put on his poker face. He just stood there, transfixed, knowing every line of his body must scream that they had nothing in the hole, nothing nothing nothing.
“Like my boy, Travis?” Sam said easily. “You’re looking at him awful hard. You weren’t peeking, were you, Josh?”
“No, sir. I didn’t see the last cards there, sir.”
“Good boy.”
“I promise. I couldn’t see a thing.”
Travis Denton raised his glass of bourbon to hide his face. His hand was shaking. “Looking right through him, Sam. Thinking hard. Seems like a fine boy, though.”
Maybe he doesn’t know, Josh thought. So what if I looked scared? I ought to look scared with this much money on the table.
“Betting, Sam?”
“I think so.” Josh’s father wrote something on a slip of paper and tore it neatly from the notebook. It looked too long to be a number. “I wonder if you’ll oblige me and take my bet.” He passed the piece of paper over.
Travis picked it up. He stared. “I…I don’t know, Sam.”
“That’s my wager,” Josh’s father said, with just a hint of steel behind his smile. “You aren’t a Banks or a Ford, are you, Travis? You’re a Denton. You can take that bet.”
Josh felt Travis’s eyes return to him. He looked away, staring hard at the lizard clinging to the wall. Another dove went up and time seemed to open out forever, years and years of it between each slapping wing beat.
Travis took the piece of paper and laid it in the pot. “I call,” he said.
Josh burst out crying. He hated himself for it; he grabbed a hand across his mouth and held it there, as if he could shove the sobs back down his own throat, but they tore out, sudden water blurring the stars above him. Tears spilled down his face as his father turned over his cards one by one.
“Pair of fours, you bastard!” Travis Denton whooped. “By God you were bluffing after all, you son of a bitch! Three fat sevens over here, my friend. Read ’em and weep.”
The air came out of the three men watching. Carl Banks leaned over and gave Joshua a hug. His arm was big, and he smelled of sage soap. Josh cried helplessly against his chest. It had been his tell that gave it away. His eyes that doomed his daddy’s bluff.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Vinny Tranh. He was holding Sam’s last IOU.
Jim Ford was standing at the back door. “What’s on it?”
For the first time Joshua’s father wasn’t smiling. His blue eyes were bewildered. “My address,” he said.
Travis Denton gave Josh and his family two weeks to move out.
A thin ribbon of sand only thirty miles long and less than three miles from the Texas coast, Galveston Island had been baptized twice: twice thrust under and twice born again, gasping, into a new life.
The Island’s first rough cleansing of the modern era came on the evening of September 7, 1900, when a hurricane that seemed destined for the Louisiana coast veered suddenly to the west and caught Galveston square. At that time the Island’s highest point was eight feet above sea level. The storm surge crested at twenty. Sustained winds in excess of one hundred fifteen miles an hour ripped roofing slates off the houses and sent them screaming through the air like saw blades. The sea and the wind obliterated everything near the beach, gathered the debris and smashed it into the next line of buildings, over and over. The grinding thresher of rubble, twenty feet tall, scoured 1,500 acres bare, including nearly one third of the city. Where it had passed nothing remained standing: no house, no building, no dock, no tree, no shrub.
One out of every six Islanders died in the hurricane. Thirty-six hundred houses were destroyed. One man counted forty-three bodies left dangling among the trestles of an unfinished railroad bridge. Of the ninety-seven children in St. Mary’s Orphanage, three survived. The bodies of nine, still roped with clothesline to a drowned nun, were found washed up miles down the beach. By sundown on September 8th, it had become clear that there were far, far too many dead to bury. Casualty estimates went from fifty, to three hundred, to a thousand, to six thousand killed. Bands of Negroes were rounded up at gunpoint to load the dead and the pieces of the dead onto barges. By the time they got to open water it was too dark to work, so the blacks were forced to spend the night with the stinking corpses. When morning came they tied stones to the bodies and heaved them into the sea.
The next day the dead came back, floating up all along the beach. The stones had not held them and they had slipped their ropes. After that the bodies were cremated on pyres that smoldered for weeks. The Island reeked with the smell of corpses burning.
The Island’s second baptism came in 2004, during the week of Mardi Gras. This time Galveston drowned not under water, but magic. It had been rising since the end of the Second World War, a little more every year. When enough magic gathered at a certain time and place, it could be catalyzed by strong emotion. From that reaction a precipitate would fall, a minotaur: a secret lover for the lonely, or, for the bitter or the dispossessed, a nightmare made flesh.
In the spring of 2004 a cascade reaction began, magic kindling magic, the world awash in dreams. The bright rational day of the twentieth century was eclipsed, passing into a long night of spirits, where ghosts walked and a house or tree or road might wake to find its voice and will. In Texas, where people still knew their Bible, they called this cataclysm the Flood.
Over the seven days of Galveston’s Mardi Gras, seventy percent of her population was lost. Hundreds died trying to flee when the sea threw down the causeway that linked the Island to the mainland. The mayor put out his own eyes to stop from seeing the ghost of his oldest son, killed years before in a car crash. The sound of screeching metal and shattering glass followed him into his blindness, stopping only when he blew out his brains with a Colt .45 he had grabbed from a policeman detailed to guard him. Hundreds of others followed his example, killing themselves with guns or pills or gas leaks, or running off the long jetties to drop, arms windmilling, into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The citizens of Galveston were hunted by more than memories. Terror and madness birthed scores of minotaurs: scorpions the size of dogs, the Crying Clown and the Glass Eater and the Widow in her black dress, whose touch was death and who ate her victims.
However many died, more still fell into the Endless Carnival, where it was always Mardi Gras and always night, where revellers danced on with bloody feet and the singing never stopped. It was a wonderful, glorious riot of a party, thrown by cruel moon-headed Momus. Of the thousands who wandered into his dominion, only a handful ever came back to the real world again.
Each Mardi Gras Krewe sponsored a different event during Galveston’s busiest tourist season, a dance or beer garden or concert. The Krewe of Harlequins were marching in their parade when the Flood hit. They were the first to see the magic jump from reveller to reveller, setting the drunks and drug users off like roman candles. When the carnival streets mazed up and the clowns went mad and the ghosts of Galveston’s dead floated through the Strand on a chest-high tide, it was the Krewe of Harlequins, still marching in costume or gripping their floats, white-knuckled, who were of the magic enough to ride its wave, apart
from it enough not to be rolled under and drowned. Lucky Samuel Cane had been marching in that parade.
Just as minotaurs were forming out of fear and pain, the strongest Krewes brought their own gods into existence. The drowsing sea, on waking, crystallized around the Krewe of Thalassar. From the hopes and fears of sailors and fishermen she took her form and character, and she gave to the members of her Krewe some measure of protection. As people realized what was happening, they joined any Krewe they could, hoping that the demons of Mardi Gras would spare them. Some Krewes made it, others were broken. The Krewe of Brewe, for instance, was a gang of UT frat boys and party animals who thought of the Galveston Mardi Gras as a cut-rate Daytona Beach scene. If any god formed around their drunken fear, it had no use for them, and their Krewe shredded like wet newsprint in the Flood.
In the end, five major Krewes came through with their people intact: the Harlequins, the women of the Krewe of Venus, the socially active Krewe of Togetherness, the Krewe of Thalassar (originally the Texas A & M boat club), and the ancient and honorable Krewe of the Knights of Momus, which had been celebrating Mardi Gras in Galveston since the 1860s and was ably directed by their grand duchess, Jane Gardner.
Two women saved the Island, Jane Gardner and Odessa Gibbons. Cool, practical, and resourceful, Jane Gardner took advantage of her family name and position as the leader of the most powerful Krewe to direct her fellow citizens after the first tide of magic had receded. She formed work crews and volunteer fire brigades, set survivors to work tapping the natural gas lines that ran in from the Gulf of Mexico for power, and rationed water until the pumping stations could be repaired.
Odessa Gibbons was an angel, a person with a talent for feeling and using magic. She could move back and forth between the real Galveston and the endless party of Momus’s Carnival. Her job was to push all magical things into Mardi Gras: to stand in Galveston like the little Dutch boy with her fingers in the dike, holding the magic back. In the beginning the magic spilled everywhere, but in time Odessa wrestled her island back to some semblance of the world as it once had been. She was merciless in her duties. Islanders came to think of her as a witch; the Recluse, they called her, and their gratitude for her work in the Flood was gradually replaced with fear. Should a child begin to hear the speech of birds, or a woman gain a gift for healing beyond what medicine could explain, sooner or later the Recluse would hear of it. In a day or a week or a month thereafter, the person stained by magic would disappear. Taken into Mardi Gras, or “gone to Krewes,” as the saying was.