“Stay aggressive, that’s rule number one.” He laid out three cards, ace and seven in the hole, another ace showing. “Your amateur calls on this hand, hoping to lure as many people into the game as he can to fatten the pot. Trouble is, the more people you have in the game, the weaker those aces are. Say you’re sitting over there with a four-five-six. I let you drift along without paying for the privilege, then by the time we come to the River, you draw out on me.”
“The River?”
“The last card down.” Ace dealt out one complete hand for seven-card stud. “Two cards go in the hole. Then Third Street. Fourth street, also called the Turn, because after Fourth Street bets double. Fifth Street. Sixth Street.” He laid the last card facedown. “The River.”
“Where did that come from?”
“Never stopped to think about it.” Ace turned up the down card. “Styx, maybe. Lethe. The rivers of Hell. You wouldn’t know any of this stuff, you never went to school.”
“It’s very annoying to be constantly told how ignorant you are by a generation of people who can’t ride a horse or live without air-conditioning.”
Ace laughed. “You know I can remember saying the exact same thing to my mother once, only it was ‘can’t program a VCR.’” He went back to the hand he had put down first, ace-seven-ace. “So if you’re holding that ace-seven-ace, the right play is…?”
“Raise. Drive out the drawing hands.”
“Good. And the same goes for you. When you see an ace door card raise, respect the aces and throw away your cards. Don’t play from behind.” He gathered the cards up and squared them on the tabletop. “Winners throw their bad cards away. Losers stay in on hope. Hope is a sin, and you must punish it severely.”
“All right.” Sly laughed. “You don’t have to get so excited.”
“It’s important.” Ace dealt out six new hands up to Third Street. “Dealer shows paint, next is a rag, another rag. You’ve got a suicide king,”—the king of Hearts: for the first time Sly noticed that he seemed to be sticking his sword through his own head—“rag to your left, ten for the door card at the last position.”
Sly looked at the hole cards in front of her: a four of diamonds and a six of clubs. Useless. What Ace would call “rags.” “How do you bet?” he said.
(A brief unpleasant bubble of Sloane’s memory drifted up, the taste of her mother’s mouth as she tried to give her artificial respiration. Jane Gardner’s strong eyes terribly frightened. The arms that had held Sloane as a baby hung useless at her sides. Jane Gardner at the River.)
“Sly? How do you bet?”
“I fold,” Sly said. Letting the high, blank energy of the mask fill her and lift her up again.
AFTER what seemed like weeks of practicing he sent her out to play in a $5-$10 game. She went in with a two-hundred-dollar bankroll, made one hundred forty more on a run of good hands, then lost sixty of it back and cashed her chips.
“You should have quit sooner,” Ace said, when she returned to Asylum. “Once you win thirty times the minimum bet, make a note to yourself to quit if you slip back to twenty times minimum. That’s a money-management thing. We called it a ‘stop-loss,’ back when I was going to be a stockbroker. I should have told you that.”
Sly rubbed her face through the thin leather of the mask. “Sorry.”
“You were getting tired, probably. Don’t stay at the table once that happens. I boiled some water if you’re thirsty.”
Sly picked the candle off the kitchen table and looked through the cabinets over the sink, picking out a dusty mug with You might consider thanking your lucky stars you were born in TEXAS! on the side. The water was in a pot on the stove. “Hey. You cleaned the burners. And the counter. And the sink.”
“And the window over the sink,” Ace said.
Sly cocked an eyebrow. “Nesting?”
“Bored,” Ace said. But he didn’t meet her eye.
“If this is for me—”
“No payout required,” he said. He looked at her square. “Nor wanted.”
Sly leaned back against the stove, letting her dress ride up a little on her leg. “You might hurt a girl’s feelings.”
Ace said, “Sly, that’s one hand I folded a long time ago.”
THE next day she went back to the $5-$10 game in the Pullman car behind the Railroad Museum. Ace made her take his revolver, in case the game got ugly or the players lecherous. She played for a short time and lost. Ace was sweeping the foyer of the Asylum when she returned. “The Rake’s in the game,” she said. “He raises everything. I kept folding out; only made it to the River two times. The first time he had the cards. The second I was sure I was over him, but a third player drew out for a flush.”
Ace nodded and resumed sweeping. “Bad luck. Your instincts were basically right.” Clouds of dust billowed around him, making Sly cough and sneeze. “Anyone who fast-plays all the time we call the Animal. This is one time you don’t have to control the table. Throw in your rags, and be ready to make big money on your monster hands. With him, you drift. Let the Animal build the pot for you. With him at the table you can easily disguise a monster hand without worrying about giving anyone else a free card to draw out on you. The Animal does the taxing for you.”
“Okay. I got it.”
Ace pushed the screen door open and swept a cloud of filth onto the porch, and then down the steps into the yard. Sly lounged in the doorway, watching him. “You can’t see dirt in the dark, Ace.”
He returned to the porch and stood a moment with his hands on the broom handle, regarding her. “I keep trying to put you on a hand, Sly. There’s paint for sure, you’ve had money and you’ve had some good life. You walk into the manager’s office and Momus lets you go again. You’re holding some cards, all right, but damned if I can figure what they are.”
Pair of queens in the hole, dear—Jane Gardner and Odessa Gibbons. “Do you like this smile?” she said, grinning. “That’s my poker face.”
“You’re learning,” Ace said.
She went back to the $5 and $10 game. This time she won and won steadily, finishing seven hundred and twenty-five dollars up. She was high and clear, laughing and calculating at the same time.
She learned a new way of being invisible that Sloane had never thought about. It involved using her smile and her breasts and her laughter as a screen, her mind slipping out to do its work unnoticed while all eyes attended to her body. Dietrich Bix, the Harlequin, had shown her a couple of magic tricks once, pulling nickels from her ears or making shells disappear, and they had all operated on the same principle. It was never the hand making the big gesture that worked the magic; it was the sly one, unnoticed, that did the stealing.
She picked up a bottle of wine and returned to Asylum in high good humor, humming and swaggering with the weight of Ace’s revolver on her hip. She sat the older man down at the kitchen table, regaled him with war stories, and fished two hundred fifty dollars out of her purse. “One half of five hundred dollars! Not bad for a morning dusting the lintels or whatever you did, eh?” She brandished her bottle of wine. “Have a drink!”
Ace folded up the money and put it in his pants pocket. “No thanks.”
“Come on! I want to celebrate! Next time I can move up to a bigger game, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. You decide.” He pulled on his worn black preacher’s jacket. “I have a game of my own to go to.”
“Good God, you’ve cleaned the whole first floor. How bored can one man be? What do you mean you have a game to go to? I thought you had been banned from every game in town.”
“Every game but one.” Ace slipped a pack of cards into the breast pocket of his jacket.
Sly blinked. “Momus?”
“You were right about me being a coward that first time I went back. I should have faced up to him.” Half to himself. Ace said. “It’s how we lose that counts. Keep the gun,” he added. “I won’t need it.”
“Ace!” She grabbed him by the arm, which she h
ad never done before. He had always been very scrupulous to make sure they did not touch. “You want to go back to Galveston? Why? You threw in those cards, remember? What are you trying to do?”
He lifted her fingers gently off his arm. “Making my best five-card hand.”
SHE found a $15-$30 game Ace had told her about. As he had warned, the players were much more aggressive, raising and reraising at a pace that put tremendous pressure on her bankroll. Sly played very tight at first, folding anything less than a premium pair on Third Street, watching the other players carefully to study their tendencies and the flow of the game. Ace had told her that the more competitive the game, the worse the winning hands were likely to be, and he was right. Nobody was allowed to limp along in the hopes of drawing out on Sixth Street or the River. Instead she saw more than one showdown won by a pair of jacks over rags ace high.
In time she began to play more actively, stealing one pot on Third Street with an ace door card and a quick raise-reraise. She won another hand on pure luck, kings in the hole with a jack at the door that filled out to a full house by Sixth Street, where she checked for the first time, appearing to waver to her opponent’s probable trip queens. She brought the hammer back at the River, taking the table for nearly fourteen hundred dollars. Then she stayed in one hand too long and lost most of it back.
She finished three hundred dollars ahead and went barhopping. She picked up a handsome fellow with snake scales all over his skin, had a great time flirting and then cooled him off with a game of dares. On her turn she straightened out a safety pin and pushed it through her palm until the tip broke out the back of her hand. There was no blood, of course, and it barely hurt. She grinned at Snake and passed the pin over, watching the bulge in his pants wilt. He begged off the dare, to the derision of his buddies. She laughed until there were tears in her eyes.
On a whim she left the bar and wandered by Ashton Villa. It was her mother’s house, and yet it wasn’t. No roosters strutted behind this mansion, no pigs either, and the party going on inside was far more lavish and decadent than anything Jane Gardner would have countenanced. Looking up to her bedroom window on the third floor, Sly saw a woman staring out at her. It was Miss Bettie. As she watched, the old ghost tapped her wrist where a watch might have been, like a woman asking to be told the time.
Sly turned and hurried away.
SHE found Ace in the kitchen when she got home. He was leaning over the sink, holding a damp towel to the left side of his face. “You’re back!” she said. “Are you hurt?”
“Lost my eye,” he said. Red stains flowered slowly on his towel.
“I told you it was stupid to play Momus.”
“On the first hand I put him on two pair and took him to the River on trip tens, but he drew out a diamond flush.” Ace looked at her. “You’re Sloane Gardner,” he said.
She froze.
“In case you wondered,” Ace went on, “you’ve got a tell when you’re trying to think up a lie. Your mouth comes open and the tip of your tongue just touches your top lip. I can read you well enough, Sly. Sloane, I should say.”
If I had a heart, it would be racing, she thought. It was crazy, childish really, how strongly she didn’t want him to know she had once been Sloane Gardner. Didn’t want anybody to know. She licked her lips and smiled. “That was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now.”
Ace turned to face her, the bloody towel still held up to his ruined left eye. “Yes, it does. The city is all upset. Sly. Jane Gardner’s dead. And Sloane Gardner, that lovely, gentle girl, Sloane’s been murdered. That’s what they think.” He grimaced. “Goddamn, this hurts.” He poured steaming water from a pot on the stove onto his towel, wrung it out, and then slapped the hot cloth back onto his eye socket. “It wouldn’t matter to me, Sly, only it’s my boy they think killed you.”
“Your son?” Sly said, blinking.
“They put him on a boat last night and set off to maroon him. Headed up Beaumont way.” Ace shrugged. “Josh and Amanda never had an ounce of luck after she left me. There was a day I was glad of that, but not now. Not for a long time. I would have given them every break I ever got, ten cents on the dollar.”
“Joshua?” Sly said. “Joshua Cane! The apothecary.” She laughed shakily. “And you must be Samuel Cane, the one who lost his house to Travis Denton. And the friends you gave money to, to look after your boy—that would have been Ham’s family.”
“Jim and Alice Mather. Real dependable folk. But not Joshua’s family,” Ace said. “I’m the only real family he has left.”
“Goddamn,” Sly said. “What a fix.”
Red dribbles from the towel were staining Ace’s undershirt. “Of course it’s too late for Amanda now. But my boy’s going to die if you don’t get back and straighten things out.”
“I’m sorry, Ace, but no.” For once Sly’s smile was nervous. “I’d do anything for you, you know that. Well, not anything. Quite a lot. But not this. I’m not going back. I like it here. I belong here.”
“He’ll die.”
“So will I if I go back.” Sly took out her winnings. With her left hand she heaped them on the table. Her right hand crept toward the .32 holstered at her hip. “Take the money. I’ll keep a hundred for a stake. Well, two hundred. The rest is yours.”
“Take off the mask, Sly.”
“No!”
She had just gotten her hand on the butt of the revolver when he tackled her around the waist and drove her back over the kitchen table. She twisted furiously underneath him, trying to get her gun hand free. He grabbed for her mask, and she screamed and turned sideways and pulled the trigger of the .32. It bucked and roared, blowing out the bottom of its holster. A burst of fire ripped along the length of her leg, and their bodies crashed off the table together—
Chapter Twelve
SCARLET
SUDDENLY Ace wasn’t there anymore and Sloane was falling to the floor of a ruined house in Galveston, the real Galveston where she had left her mother to die.
She wasn’t Sly anymore. The mask was gone. Ace had it, back in the Mardi Gras.
She hit the floor and lay there, gasping. This house was very different from its double in the Mardi Gras. In Mardi Gras it smelled of mildew and the walls sagged, gone blowsy in the humid years, but it was still a house. Here Samuel Cane’s home had been blown apart by a gas line explosion two weeks after he lost it to Travis Denton in a game of cards. Grey daylight poured in through broken windows and a giant rip in the smoke-blackened ceiling. Splintered rafters poked at the sky like shattered ribs. Sprigs of withered tansy and sea purslane grew up through the broken floor. Where the kitchen counters should have been there was only charred wreckage: burned boards and chunks of drywall, bits of glass and plaster, flecks of metal paint, blackened pieces of crockery. A ceiling fan blade, split and charred.
Sloane lay on the floor, waiting to be torn apart by guilt. She had abandoned her mother, and her mother had died. And yet, when the grief and guilt came she could feel them only faintly and far away, like bugs bumping against the glass windows of Ashton Villa.
There was a tang of gunpowder in the air. Sloane looked down. She still held the .32. The bullet had blown out the bottom of its holster and left a burn line along her leg. She could barely feel it. She had no heart. That was it. Momus had taken out her heart.
She crawled across the floor to a pile of rubble and found a broken drinking glass and slashed her wrists with it. The glass bit and ripped through her skin, exposing the pink meat underneath, but she had no heart and no blood would come. Sloane dropped the glass.
Okay. Next plan. Well, she supposed she ought to put things right for Joshua Cane. She owed that much to Ace. Lucky for him.
But then, he was the luckiest man in Galveston, wasn’t he? So everybody had always said. But what, exactly, did that mean? How could the luckiest man in Galveston, one stroke of fortunate chance at a time, come to be wifeless, childless, wordless, alone? Was his luck so shortsighted? Or maybe
there were things Sloane didn’t know, aspects of his story hidden from her, or even Ace himself. Maybe all his alternatives were worse. Could Joshua’s exile somehow be part of Ace’s good fortune? And if so, had it really been chance that Sloane had met Josh in the first place? Maybe the two men who attacked her as she stumbled out of the Mardi Gras had been merely the agents of Ace’s luck. Or Momus’s cunning. Maybe the whole web of events in which she was trapped was part of a sinister pattern that she would never understand.
Or maybe life was the best poker player of all. Win or lose, Fate never shows her cards, Sloane thought. You can never bluff her, never put her on a hand. All you can do is pick up each new card and form your best hand and play, and play, and play, until Fate takes your last chip and sends you from the table.
IT was hard to move in the real Galveston, as if the press of gravity was much greater. It was hot, too. In the endless night of Mardi Gras she had forgotten how hot the day could be. Sloane stirred, picking through the rubble until she could find a moldering stick of charred two-by-four. She rubbed her fingers over it until they were black. Then she marked her face: one long line above each eyebrow, turning up; one merry tilt at the corner of each eye. One high line on each cheek, marking the edge of Sly’s fine, sharp bones.
Her mother’s ghost whirred somewhere in the room, a distant mosquito. Unable to get to her.
It was nigh on noon when she stumbled out of the ruins of Ace’s house. The sun was painfully bright. She felt it pushing on her, a dull ache of heat that beat in waves against the Island. There were no clouds; the sun had burned them and smeared them into a high white ash in the blank sky. Withered palm fronds rasped against her ankles as she walked home. The asphalt road burned her feet, but she did not notice it. Galveston’s streets were empty. Everyone hiding from the sun. Rich folks’ windows were shut tight to keep the air-conditioning in. Poor folks had their windows wide open in hope of a breeze. We fear Momus because he has a face, Sloane thought, but this is Texas, and the sun will always be more deadly than the moon.