“Train leaving the station,” says Coop, rattling the dice next to his ear now. “You boys better jump on board.”
Some of the boys he knows and some he doesn’t get on it while he heats them up and then Too Tall shouts “Come out, brother!” and he whips them down on the felt. It really is felt, too, recently razored off a billiards table from the marks on it, and an easy eight bounces off the rail.
“No pass,” says the Chink with the bowler hat. “Point is eight.”
Coop will play whatever is running but he likes craps the best. Straight poker is slow, feels like you’re slaving at the mercy of all that royalty on the cards, and roulette you can’t ever hold nothing in your hand, but craps is ever-shifting, like trying to catch fish in a river while bouncing through its rapids. And he’s always been good with numbers.
“What you paying for hard-ways?” he asks as he scoops the dice up.
“Nine to one.” Jerome, who is black as a wood stove and twice as wide, is dealing and wielding a bamboo cane for a stick at the same time. “But for a sportin man like yourself we make it ten.”
Coop smiles. “Put me down five, Willie.” Cheers and whistles from the boys. “Gone roll me a hard eight.”
The floor man is a tough-looking cracker who sits on a high stool with a shotgun across his knees. Coop has never seen a white man shoot craps, one of the things he likes about it, but has no doubt that’s who owns the bank here. Willie puts the cash on the layout.
Coop rolls a five, and then a ten. Fagen, a big old local boy from the Scrub who soldiers with the 24th, leads a few men over from the other games. Coop feels their heat around him, feels snug and happy in the smoke and noise and music, gulps whiskey and bangs for more. He knows the secret and they don’t. He rolls a four.
“The man is hot!” Willie calls out. “Keep back or you catch fire off him.”
Yes, there is luck, he knows, but it smiles on nobody. The rain is going to fall or not fall whether you put a crop under it or not, enough people scratch for gold someone is likely to find it, and you can be the slickest thief in the Carolinas but a day will come when you’re in the wrong place with the wrong mule.
“Show me a five, keep it alive,” he chants and snaps them down on the table and yes, it is a five but it could have been anything. He starts to laugh.
“He got the power,” calls out Rufus Briscoe from A Company, who is sweating the way he does when thoroughly drunk. “He got the touch.” And doubles his bet on the point.
Most of them are making deals with God, but Coop knows better. He knows the secret. “Oh Jesus, if You love me slip me a queen on the draw.” Jesus don’t play that game — Jesus is the house and the house always wins. The black come up five times in a row it’s just as likely to come up a sixth as to go back to red. Company of men go running at a lot of people shooting a lot of bullets and some number of them, good soldier or bad, is going to get killed. That’s the odds Jesus will give you. You have to forget about winning and just be happy to hold the dice for a while.
Coop hurls them down and the twin fours come up. There is a cheer and men slapping him on the back, half the room following his game now, and even fat Jerome pretends to smile.
“The Lady didn’t just smile at this boy,” says Fagen when the shouting settles down. “She done sat on his face.”
Coop nods and Willie pockets his winnings. He rolls an eagle to the Chink. There are shots then, just outside the door.
“Bout time the show got started,” says Coop before he rolls boxcars and craps out.
Tampa is a fever dream.
When they step out of the arcade there are men with guns and a woman screaming and a child held upside down. It is hard for Royal to focus at first, he’s been looking at the views in the little machine, a train coming straight at him but contained on the rectangle and if he looked away it wasn’t there. But this is all around him on the street and won’t go away, a black woman screaming and cursing as the white boys, Ohio Vols, laugh and hold her back and another down the street holds the child, who is screaming too but with an animal terror, swinging by his ankles gripped in another soldier’s hand, the man holding him out like a rabbit just killed, a shell on a leather thong dangling down from the boy’s neck, and then Junior grabbing Royal’s arm, Watch out he’s saying and then the shot, coming from behind him. Yet another Vol, feet spread apart but body swaying with liquor, one eye closed as he aims his Colt at the swinging shell.
“You don’t hold that pickaninny still,” he calls, “Imonna plonk him for sure.”
The man fires again and then the street seems to brighten under the gas lamps, colors flaring as Royal steps toward the one with the Colt, Junior dragging on him and the woman screaming “God damn you! God damn you to hell!”
But before Royal can reach him the Vol with the Colt grunts and collapses on one knee, a dark stain blooming on the man’s light blue trousers just below the hip. He looks around, stupid with drink, sees Royal and raises his pistol but his balance is all gone and he pitches sideways to the street. More shooting then and there are others, Coop is one of them, running out from a raw-pine building across from the arcade, many of them firing and it’s then Royal realizes he left his pistol in camp. Junior said it would be best, but Junior is now shouting and waving to get off the street, dammit, and a blue shock cracking behind his ear and the pavement comes up fast to thump him hard. There are night-pass boots in his face, stomping, he can smell the wet polish, and then he’s rolled under falling bodies.
Junior pulls him up out of the writhing pile and he sees the weeping woman holding her child, the child still shrieking and the street filling up with white men.
“This is no good,” says Junior, seeming to have a clearer idea of what is happening. “We got to run!”
How do they know what it’s about so quickly? These white men, a few of them soldiers but mostly shopkeepers and corner sports and family men in white skimmers with their shotguns and pistols already, their bats and pool cues — how do they know the moment they step into the heat of the gas-lit street that it’s get the niggers and not some other disaster, some other entertainment, here on a block full of drunken men and a dozen clashing musics and gunfire commonplace since the encampment began? Some instant signal, some electric connection has hurled them out here and every white man is searching for a black one to shoot, to beat, but now suddenly there is a counterrush of black and blue out from Miss Sadie’s on the north end of the street, Miss Sadie’s Lovely Ladies where Little Earl has been spending his pay, a wave of black men wearing bits and pieces of their uniforms and several of them firing pistols and the ground is sparkling, sparkling with broken glass as Junior pulls him back into the arcade.
Royal is coming and going now, dizzy, hurting sharp behind his right eye and missing some pictures in between like the Mutoscope he was viewing before when you crank it too fast and each time he comes back the Orchestrion is still playing Goodbye, Nellie Gray, pumping the piano and drums and cymbal and tambourine but the shots outside not in time with it and then he’s gone for a moment, the pictures blurring together till they slow and he reels, caroming off the bagatelle table they were playing at then stopped hard at the hips and doubled over, vomiting on the surface of the beanbag toss, looking up woozily into the goggle eyes of the target, a monstrous laughing jigaboo head, its open mouth the hole you have to aim for.
“You get outd of heer!”
The proprietor, a big German with pop-eyes, comes at him from a tilted angle, raising an ax handle in his boiled-ham fists.