Airtight Willie Me by Iceberg Slim

Author:Iceberg Slim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

GRANDMA RANDY

I

I n 1938, Jay Henderson sat suspect in a klieg of Texas sun, a disheveled rodeo cowboy Apollo. Big green money lay like bouquets of wilted blossoms in front of him and at center table. He felt threatened in the breathy silence beneath a gimlet battery of bloodshot eyes. His insides queased in the rancid odors of nicotine, the emotion stink of his opponent. He felt suffocated by the sour whiskey gusts from the four busted-out hard-faces leaning in with sullen flabbergast to detect a cheat angle, or even a rational explanation of how their perennial sucker had wiped them out.

Atom-deep fatigue stained Jay’s eye sockets like blue shadow makeup. But his violet eyes shone with frantic vivacity behind sunglasses as they scanned the brute face of his surviving opponent: Sol “Wildman” Starkey, rodeo star and high stakes stud poker player—and peerless hard loser.

Starkey grunted and hunched his buffalo shoulders. He pushed his tap-out pile of green into the pot. He rapped his knuckles against the table. “C’mon now, Cutie Face, call that two thou raise or pass,” Starkey drawled. “Call! ’Cause I ain’t got no disrespect for that ten high club flush you maybe got.”

He took a hit from a whiskey bottle, then lit a trademark cigar to signal his win of the first substantial pot in almost fifty hours. The gallery leaned in closer on their chairs.

Jay stared at Starkey’s apparent jack high diamond flush hand on the tabletop. He shifted his eyes to zero in on the center of Starkey’s freckled forehead. In his crucial bet situation he heard, as he had for two days, whirring high voltage electrical sounds inside his skull. Then like from an echo chamber, the infallible read-out tip-off voice of his budding super-sensitized schizophrenia boomed: “Starkey’s bluffing!”

Starkey ribbed, “C’mon, boy, don’t just sit there eyeballing me like a possum in a tree. Play poker!”

Jay smiled as he scooped up his winning hand and shuffled it into the deck. He knew that Starkey considered himself undressed without a pistol. And worse, he remembered Starkey’s penchant to use his pistol to reverse a tap-out. Yes, he told himself, unarmed as he was, it would be hazardous to his health and winnings to tap-out Starkey along with the others.

Starkey grinned extravagantly as he flipped over the black spade jack in the hole that paired the diamond jack. He pulled the pot in. He hee-hawed and winked at the gallery. “Don’t you know, friends, it feels good, real good, to sock a stiff one on him?”

The gallery chuckled.

Starkey scowled as he watched Jay scoop up his bundle of green and stand. “Look here, boy, it ain’t sporting to quit now. We gonna play a few more hands to give me some kinda justice,” Starkey said as his hand fiddled at the butt of his pistol in his waistband.

One of the gallery piped up, “Yeah, give the man a shot to get even.”

Jay shook his head as he peeled off two hundred in walking money for the four losers.

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