You could hear ghostly doors slamming, voices in the entryway.
It was supposed to be elegant once, but now the soft and threafful dusk of it gave me the creeps.
Poker?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Five-card stud.
“Deuces wild.”
I like the deuce wild. I like that puny little card becoming strategy.
We started playing. The dark came sifting gently down, so we put the lights on. The place seemed almost cozy when there wasn’t any reason to have windows anyway. I was all full of milk and cereal like a good child. The meal had perked me up; Lynette made coffee, and although it tasted like dishwater run through a car battery, I sipped it gratefully.
If this evening around mat how.” the table, with King in a state of rare normality, was the most brotherly we’d ever get, I decided it was enough. One thing you’ll notice. I did not let on I knew that both our backgrounds were sprung from the same source. And I hadn’t asked about Gerry yet. I felt better keeping it to myself For the moment, I didn’t even care to flaunt that I belonged. Belonging was a matter of deciding to.
Through many trials I had seen this to be true. I decided I belonged, whether or not King thought I did. I was a real kid now, or halfway real. I crimped myself an ace.
I’d had to learn the knack of cheating at cards when I worked as an attendant at the Senior Citizens. Otherwise they’d beat your hide. It wasn’t cheating to them, anyway, just second nature. The games were cheerfully cutthroat vicious, and the meanest player of them all was Lulu. She’d learned to crimp, that is, to mark your cards with little scratches and folds as you play, when she started losing her eyesight.
It was just supposed to keep her even in the game, she said. I learned to crimp from her before I ever knew she was my grandmother, which might explain why I took to it with such enormous ease. The blood tells. I suppose there is a gene for crimping in your strings of cells.
At any rate, I was getting to know the cards pretty good. I always like to keep my eye on where my jacks are going in the deck, because other people like to call the one-eyed jacks wild. I got aS Oft Spot fDTthe ‘ack. The jack of hearts is me-who doesn’t hold a sword in his hand, but a banana peel.
I raised King a moon. We wasn’t playing for change but bits of cereal.
There wasn’t any change around and he was short on matches, so we used the marshmallow bits that came in the box.
Stars were a hundred dollars, hearts fifty, moons were twenty, and the diamond was ten. The pieces of cereal themselves was all worth one.
That’s how it went. Every so often we would munch a little from the pot, to keep us going.
He took me with a full, swept the marshmallows to his side, home.-, and threw them one by one in his mouth. We started over again.
In the next room there was some show on with lots of guns burping. I wondered how to bring up Gerry.
Again, I decided to take the bull by the teeth. King was dealing.
“So you knew Gerry Nanapush when you was both in Stillwater,” I said.
The cards spurted evenly from his hands. He didn’t miss one.
“Oh Gee,” he said with an awkward boasting laugh. “We were like this. ” He put the last of his cards down, and held up his first two fingers, clenched together.
“That is, we were buddies until those asshole Winnebagos started spreading rumors about me.”
“Oh?” I tried leading him. I was out of stars and betting hearts.
But he wasn’t going to get no further into that. I waited a little while before I tried anything else.
“Well is it true,” I said, “they have him in maximum security with the real big-time criminals?”
“Not that I heard,” King said, for sure now uncomfortable. “I heard he’s back in Mandan. It’s … not all that secure.”
King pouted his cheeks and pushed his moons over, I asked him if he thought Gerry had really killed that smokey or was it pinned on him the way so many people said after the trial.
“I really wouldn’t know,” was all King muttered.
I wished he would have told me, because that’s one thing I really wondered now that Gerry was my father. Had he really cut a living man down? I wanted to know what kind of seed I had sprung from. The television guns were chattering. We played in silence, and it came to me after a while that something was definitely wrong and agitating King.
A couple of times he blurted bits of a tuneless song as though he was keeping his mind from touching a sore subject. He lit his Marlboros one off the other’s end, and sometimes left two burning in an ashtray. He couldn’t have been so deeply absorbed in a game where the stakes was a bowl of cereal, so I had to wonder what was wrong. I had a clue it was related to my questioning him on Gerry. After that, I’d had trouble letting him win a single game.
Long about nine he got to really looking jumpy. He was wiping beads of sweat off his upper lip, biting on his thumb. Finally he got it out he wanted to go in the next room, catch the news. So we quit playing.
Lynette was curled up on the couch underneath an old coat, and the boy Howard was sitting rigid in the chair.
Newsbreak came on, sure enough, and that’s when I had my inkling of what was bothering King, what was strange here all along, maybe even why he was on the wagon.
He had to keep his wits about him.
The newscaster was talking. “Federal criminal Gerry Nanapush escaped while being transferred to the North Dakota State Penitentiary. He is believed to be at large in the tri-state region.
Nanapush is six feet, four inches and weighs three hundred and twenty pounds. He was last seen wearing a ripped black nylon jacket, jeans, and a pair of white leather running shoes with red stripes. Nanapush may be armed and should be considered dangerous. ” I whooped. “Treat with caution! Handle with care! Armed and dangerous Chippewa!”
I looked at King. “Can’t keep an Indian down!” I said. “Right on brother!”
That was when I noticed King and Lynette weren’t laughing or excited in the least. They said,
“Shut up,” in unison and turned back to the television. I was hardly bothered though. I couldn’t have cared less.
I only cared that I’d known that this was happening and now it was happening. All signs pointed to it.
For hours we sat as if paralyzed, there in the blue smoke wreaths and fissures of drifting dust. I was happy in the television radiance. They were not. All four of us were waiting, though, for what happened next.
I was listening past the shows, past the noise and jingles, as hard as I could. That is why I heard. I was not surprised. I heard it clear with my extra special sense. Down on the first floor a door shut softly. steps paused at the bottom of the skylight shaft. There was a delicate scrabbling of mice beneath the stars, and a foothold was suddenly gained. In my mind’s eye I saw him spring into the close air.
The copper pipes bowed outward in his hand.
The hot ones, wrapped in asbestos, ringed or joined every three feet, led up the inside of the dusk-filled hollow shaft. I didn’t have to look down the fake window in order to know he was climbing. I thought the whole building must have heard.
I thought so, but when I glanced over at King and Lynette they were still gazing slack-jawed into the ions like their futures was prefigured in the flashing shapes. They didn’t blink when he knocked an ashtray off the windowsill in the kitchen. They didn’t start when his tender footsteps slid along the warped floor. Only when he stood, enormous, gentle, completely blocking the silvery rays, only when he pointed his hand at them like a gun, did they stop drifting and bunch themselves in sense. Their shapes detached from the couch even as the boy’s shape flattened into the chair. I looked down at the man’s feet.