“Hang him,” said the blond man. “But not too high. I want to watch his face.”
As Hota was yanked off his feet, the crowd’s roar ascended with him, and blended into another roar that issued from within his skull. The roar of his life, of his constricted blood. It was as if he had been made buoyant by the sound. His face was forced downward by the rope and his vision reddened. He saw the upturned faces of the crowd, their gaping black mouths and widened eyes, and he also saw his legs spasming. He had kicked off a shoe. The inside of his head grew hot, but slowly, as if death’s flame were burning low. Fighting for breath, he flexed the roped muscles of his neck. The heat lessened.
They had set the knot in the noose incorrectly.
Air was coming through.
Barely…but enough to sustain him.
That became a problem, then. To breathe, to hold out against fate, or to relax his muscles and let go. Soon the decision would be made for him, but he wanted it to be his.
A terrible new pressure cinched the rope tighter.
Two children had shinnied up his lower legs and were humping themselves up and down. Trying to break his neck, he realized. The little shits were giggling. He squeezed his eyes shut, focusing all his energy and will on maintaining breath.
Fiery pains jolted along his spine. White lights exploded behind his lids. One such flash swelled into a blinding radiance that opened before him, vast and shimmering and deep, a country all its own. He felt a shifting inside him, a strange powerful movement that bloomed outward…and then he could see himself! Not just his legs, but his entire bulky figure. The children jiggling up and down, and the crowd; the exhausted town leached of every color but the redness of his dying sight.
Then he lost interest in this phenomenon and in the world, borne outward on that curious expansion. He recalled Magali and he thought that this—here and now—must be the fulfillment of her promise, the beginning of fulfillment, and that his soul was growing large, coming to enclose the material in the way of a dragon’s soul…
And then a violent crack, like that of a severing lightning stroke or an immense displacement, and a thought came to mind that stilled his fears, or else it was the last of him and there was no fear left…the thought that it was all a dream, his dream, how he had run and felt joy, how he had leaped—sprawled, really, but that was close enough—and been borne aloft and now he was soaring, and the crack he had heard was the crack of his wings as they caught the air, and the roaring was the rush of first flight, and the light was the high holy sun, and soon he would see Magali and they would fly together along the pattern of their curving fate, with the child flying below them, above the green hill of their religion, and this was his reward, this transformation, this was the fulfillment of every promise, or else it was the lie of it.
DEAD MONEY
I knew slim-with-sideburns was dead money before Geneva introduced him to the game. Dead money doesn’t need an introduction; dead money declares himself by grinning too wide and playing it too cool, pretending to be relaxed while his shoulders are racked with tension, and proceeds to lose all his chips in hurry. Slim-with-sideburns-and-sharp-features-and-a-gimpy-walk showed us the entire menu, plus he was wearing a pair of wraparound shades. Now there are a number of professional poker players who wear sunglasses so as not to give away their tells, but you would mistake none of them for dead money and they would never venture into a major casino looking like some kind of country-and-western spaceman.
“Gentlemen,” Geneva said, shaking back her big blonde hair. “This here’s Josey Pellerin over from Lafayette.”
A couple of the guys said, Hey, and a couple of others introduced themselves, but Mike Morrissey, Mad Mike, who was in the seat next to mine, said, “Not the Josie? Of Josie and the Pussycats?”
The table had a laugh at that, but Pellerin didn’t crack a smile. He took a chair across from Mike, lowering himself into it carefully, his arms shaking, and started stacking his chips. Muscular dystrophy, I thought. Some wasting disease. I pegged him for about my age, late thirties, and figured he would overplay his first good hand and soon be gone.
Mike, who likes to get under players’ skins, said, “Didn’t I see you the other night hanging out with ‘A Boy Named Sue?’”
In a raspy, southern-fried voice, Pellerin said, “I’ve watched you on TV, Mister Morrissey. You’re not as entertaining as you think, and you don’t have that much game.”
Mike pretended to shudder and that brought another laugh. “Let’s see what you got, pal,” he said. “Then we can talk about my game.”
Geneva, a good-looking woman even if she is mostly silicon and botox, washed a fresh deck, spreading the cards across the table, and shuffled them up.
The game was cash only, no-limit Texas Hold ’em. It was held in a side room of Harrah’s New Orleans with a table ringed by nine barrel-backed chairs upholstered in red velvet and fake French Colonial stuff—fancy swords, paintings with gilt frames, and such—hanging on walls the color of cocktail sauce. Geneva, who was a friend, let me sit in once in a while to help me maintain the widely held view that I was someone important, whereas I was, in actuality, a typical figment of the Quarter, a man with a few meaningful connections and three really good suits.
It wasn’t unusual to have a couple of pros in the game, but the following week Harrah’s was sponsoring a tournament with a million dollar first prize and a few big hitters were already filtering into town. Aside from Mad Mike, Avery Holt was at the table, Sammy Jawanda, Deng Ky (aka Denghis Khan), and Annie Marcus. The amateurs in the game were Pellerin, Jeremy LeGros, an investment banker with deep pockets, and myself, Jack Lamb.
Texas Hold ’em is easy to learn, but it will cost you to catch on to the finer points. To begin with, you’re dealt two down cards, then you bet; then comes the flop, three up cards in the center of the table that belong to everyone. You bet some more. Then an up card that’s called the turn and another round of betting. Then a final up card, the river, and more betting…unless everyone has folded to the winner. I expected Pellerin to play tight, but five minutes hadn’t passed before he came out firing and pushed in three thousand in chips. LeGros and Mike went with him to the flop. King of hearts, trey of clubs, heart jack. Pellerin bet six thousand. LeGros folded and Mike peeked at his down cards.
“They didn’t change on you, did they?” asked Pellerin.
Mike raised him four thousand. That told me Pellerin had gotten into his head. The smart play would have been either to call or to get super aggressive. A middling raise like four thousand suggested a lack of confidence. Of course with Mad Mike, you never knew when he was setting a trap. Pellerin pushed it again, raising ten K, not enough to make Mike bag the hand automatically. Mike called. The card on the turn was a three of hearts, pairing the board. Pellerin checked and Mike bet twenty.
“You must have yourself a hand,” said Pellerin. “But your two pair’s not going to cut it. I’m all in.”
He had about sixty thousand stacked in front of him and Mike could have covered the bet, but it wasn’t a percentage play—losing would have left him with the short chip stack and it was too early in the evening to take the risk. He tried staring a hole through Pellerin, fussed with his chips, and eventually mucked his hand.
“You’re not the dumbest son-of-a-bitch who ever stole a pot from me,” he said.
“Don’t suppose I am,” said Pellerin.
As I watched—and that is what I mainly did, push in antes and watch—it occurred to me that once he sat down, Pellerin had stopped acting like dead money, as if all his anxiety had been cured by the touch of green felt and plastic aces. He was one hell of a hold ’em player. He never lost much and it seemed that he took down almost every big pot. Whenever he went head-to-head against somebody, he did about average…except when he went up against Mad Mike. Him, he gutted. It was evident that he had gotten a good read on Mike. In less than two hours he had ninety percent of the man’s money. He had also developed a palsy in his left hand and was paler than he had been when he entered.