Double Down by Tom Kakonis

Author:Tom Kakonis [Kakonis, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941298121
Publisher: Brash Books
Published: 2014-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

The smoke formations—fueled by Drummond’s pipe, Jock’s Macanudos, and Waverly’s chain of cigarettes—seemed to hang motionless in the air above the table, like some miraculously levitated fixture of the room. Over on a couch a nonplayer guest listlessly stroked the heroic bosoms of a woman whose tar-black hair and harlot red lipstick presented a stark contrast to the abundance of creamy flesh. Another couch was ornamented by a nubile nymphet, a natural blonde, looked about fifteen. Her shimmery satin teddy, direct mail, Fredrick’s of Hollywood, lay in a heap on the floor beside a kneeling man whose bald head was buried in her crotch. Both of them appeared to be sleeping. Some giggling, washed-out and faint, could be heard from the kitchen; otherwise all was silence but for the occasional nuanceless utterances of the game. A party rapidly running down.

“Seven-stud, nothing wild,” Waverly said. Dealer’s choice, he chose what he always did when it rolled around his turn. A breath of sanity in the loony medley of games gone progressively more bizarre. Games of suicidal risk, in which the elements of skill and patience and numeration and cunning were all but canceled out and which, in a sinister inversion of the rightful order, seemed designed to punish the worthy and reward the undeserving. Follow the Bitch, Stalingrad, Woolworth, Dr Pepper, Baseball and its baroque offspring No Peekee Midnight Baseball, Pass the Trash—name your aberration and someone at this table, in a stupor of fatigue and drink and other intemperances, was bound to call it.

The cards came out. Waverly played with a cool serenity, soothed by the reassuring machinery of a rational game and the peculiar suspension of time that comes with taking in life through a filter of numbers. By sixth street he sat on the power: two exposed aces, another in the cellar. Everyone had folded but Demerit, who showed three consecutive cards supporting a blind faith in a straight the count dictated as next to impossible to come by. Nothing in that hand but dreams. Waverly bet an unthreatening eight hundred, as though he were seriously entertaining the fiction of the straight. And Demerit, readable as ever, raised five bills. Waverly called. He knew him. After the last card was down Waverly pushed four blue chips to the center of the table. “Two long,” he said. Demerit hesitated. His waxy features registered profound struggle. In his mind he wanted desperately to ride the bluff, but in his heart there was an acute poverty of nerve. He turned over his cards, muttering an ill-natured, “Go on, take it.”

Waverly gathered in the chips. Twenty-three hours of play—four on, one off, following Jock’s mandated formula—and he was up 15K or thereabouts, somewhere in that neighborhood. Ordinarily a tidy take for a day’s work, but measured against that remote and towering quarter mil it was chump change. Like chipping away at an iceberg with a penknife. What he really needed was to score one of those monster pots the garbage games occasionally generated, at least walk out of here with something more than cab fare.

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