W e showered in the cement block building, ignoring as best we could its sour odor of rotting garbage and soiled laundry. I changed into another pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I kept thinking about Em’s car being back in her parking lot. Maybe somebody brought the car back and she was still wherever. Or maybe something had happened to her and they just brought the car back, but she was laid up somewhere or worse. You know how you start thinking some bad thoughts and they just get worse and worse? I’ve never had good thoughts that just got better and better. Does that happen to everyone?
“Skip, let’s tap a couple bucks from last night.” James pulled on a Bob Marley T-shirt and walked out of the building. I ran to keep up.
“James, we talked about this, man. If we’re going to run this like a business, then -”
He turned, and with a very sober expression said, “Poker is a business too, Skip. The kind of money those guys were playing for? Come on. Five hundred dollars.”
I took a very deep breath. “It comes out of your share. No questions about it when we do the split.”
“Do you realize how upset you’re going to be when I win big tonight?” He gave me a sad look.
I wasn’t too concerned about how upset I might be. I’d had a feeling that the regulars weren’t quite playing fair the last time. I believed there was a little cheating and sleight of hand going on. Even the shuffle and deal seemed a bit off, but then, James had put eight bucks in the collection tonight and Cashdollar had promised him a return. I’m sure I heard the reverend say something about “if you give, God will make you rich.” I was probably blowing a perfectly good chance to make a lot of money.
I opened the truck and reached back to get our cash. I’d transferred the cash box to the small closet behind the passenger seat. Pulling it out, I opened it. Nothing.
“James. You took the money?”
“No, man. Not me.”
“James?”
“Skip?”
I looked again. Then I looked back in the closet. I leaned in and ran my hands along the wooden floor, picking up a sharp splinter. I jerked the sliver of wood out of my index finger.
“Skip, what’s the problem?” He stood behind me in the wet grass.
“There’s no money in the box, buddy.”
“Don’t buddy, me, Skip. I don’t have it. I didn’t take it.”
“No?”
He gave me a stern look.
“Damn.”
“Dude, how much did we lose?”
I’d put in $500 for change, plus the $500 we made. “A grand.”
“Jesus. That hurts. Had to have happened when we showered.”
I sat down on the passenger seat and rubbed my eyes. We didn’t know these people, we didn’t know anything about these people. I remembered when I was really young and my dad took me to a carnival. Probably the only carnival he ever took me to. Some guy with greasy hair, a bright red scar on his cheek, and two or three teeth in his mouth ran the Tilt-A-Whirl. I did not even want to get on. Not because of the ride, but because the guy was so scary. Dad laughed and said, “He’s a carney, son. A carney. He’s a guy who works for a carnival. They’re all scary. And you can’t ever trust ’em, but don’t worry. I’m right here to protect you.”
Dad didn’t stick around a whole lot longer to protect anyone in our family and I have never trusted carneys since. I was guessing the same guys who worked carnivals worked traveling salvation shows as well.
“We can’t afford to lose that money, James.”
“No we can’t, pard.”
“So we’re out of the card game.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve got to win that grand back. I’ve got a hundred right here. I was just hoping for a bigger stake.”
I watched him pull a one hundred dollar bill from his shoe.
“Ben Franklin, here I come.”
“James, are you crazy? Think about it.”
“About what?”
“Chances are very good that someone in this group of food vendors stole the money.”
“Skip, we’ll never find it. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Not my point.”
“The point is?”
“That same person may be playing poker tonight. And things are not necessarily as they seem. The game may be fixed. You may lose more than a grand tonight.”
“Ain’t gonna happen, amigo.”
He lost fifty bucks in the first five minutes. Another fifty in the next ten.
“Hey, pard. Lend me twenty. I know you’ve got it.”
“Beer money, James.”
My roommate gave me a pleading look. I gave him a twenty. My last twenty. Our last twenty. I wasn’t sure what we were going to use for tomorrow. Maybe James could hit Brook up for another five hundred dollar stake. And I had no idea where we were going to get more beer money.
“So you’re in?” Mug shoved some chips to the center of the table. He had a big head and a jowly face. His cheeks kind of bulged and when he talked it was as if he had a wad of cotton there. I wondered what the three felonies entailed. I remembered what Stan had said. You don’t want to fuck with Mug.
James matched the chips.
“You boys do any business tonight?” Mug smirked.
“Matter of fact, we sold a little.” I defended our meager night. Meager, hell. With the theft, it was a total loss.
Stan squinted at me. “I told you, you can’t be a weekend vendor and make any money. It’s a full-time commitment. You take Henry over there.” He pointed to lemonade-and-hotdog Henry. “Henry, how long did you go before you were full time with the rev?”
Henry studied his cards, moving them around, never looking up. “ ’Bout a month.”
“See, Henry worked in a tool and die shop, did this part time, but he realized he needed a full-time commitment.” Stan reached out and touched Dusty’s arm. “Tell ’em I’m right, Dusty.”
“Right as rain.” Dusty looked up, apparently realizing he might anger the rain god again. We all looked up. The god remained quiet. The former schoolteacher let out a sigh.
James took the pot. With two pair. And just like that he was up $150. Then he took another one and he was flirting with $400.
The rain had washed the grease smell from the air, and had hosed down some of the more offensive odors of two of the poker players themselves, so I could smell pine trees on the cooling night air. A hundred feet or so away, I could hear the soft lapping of the Intracoastal Waterway, and there were murmuring voices coming from the community of tents, trailers, and campers where the faithful and the vendors lived for the weekend.
I looked around while James played, and I tried to figure out if one of these full-time vendors had taken our money. Stan and Crayer, with their cryptic threats, Mug, who may have done jail time for theft, Dusty the school teacher who didn’t look like he could hurt a fly, Henry the tool shop guy, and the silent man sitting to my right. Any one of them could have done it. All they had to do was pop open the truck, bang the door behind the passenger seat, and it usually popped right open, even when it was locked. There’s a false wall there and a narrow closet. I’d just put the cash box there. If someone had seen me do it, stealing it would be a snap. It could have been any one of these guys, but I had suspicions about Crayer. He was right next door, and he’d probably seen me open that little closet several times. I watched him, thinking maybe I’d see something. A glance, a guilty look. Obviously, I’m not a detective. I had no idea what to look for.
The night grew quiet and I could hear crickets. Crickets and the sound of someone walking down to Stan’s pizza wagon. The footsteps made a faint sucking sound, as the soles of the shoes walked through the wet dirt and gravel left after the day’s downpour.
Somebody called from the dark. “Yo.”
Stan stood up and walked out onto the dark path. The game came to a halt and I could see James’s eyes darting around. He was on a roll. Don’t fuck with Mug? Heck, don’t fuck with James.
I struggled to see who the man was in the dim light. Taller than Stan, someone with a jacket on.
In a minute, Stan walked back to the table. “Men, the collection tonight was pretty good.”
James and I looked at each other, wondering how Stan knew.
“Share was a little up from last time.” He held a canvas bag in his right hand. “You see boys,” he looked hard and long at James and me, “for the full-timers among us, Cash shares the wealth. Like he says, if you give, the Lord will give back.”
The assembled, as one, murmured, “Amen.”
I knew who the visitor was. Thomas LeRoy.
James looked at the bag, then up at Stan. “How much?”
“Tonight? About $800 per man.”
“No shit?”
Stan stared down at James. “No shit.” He held James with his eyes, as if daring him to make another comment. Just a little tension, bubbling beneath the surface. Stan didn’t seem to like us too well.
“Bruce,” I looked at the donut man sitting next to James, “you never told us about this.”
“Are you ready to be full-time vendors?”
We spoke in unison. “No.”
“Then there was no reason for you to know.”
“Will somebody deal?” Obviously irritated, James had lost all patience.
Henry dealt the cards and James won the pot. Three more times. I know it sounds crazy, but we walked away from the table with $620 in cash and three free beers for each of us.
Stan stood up, stretched, and picked up the canvas bag of cash. “Gonna get some air.” He reached into the bag and pulled out prewrapped bundles of cash, handing them to the full-timers. No one bothered to count it. They just shoved the bundles into their pockets as if someone gave them $800 every day of their lives. Stan surveyed the assembly then pulled a silver-looking palm-sized item from his shirt pocket. He used his thumbs like he was text messaging, nodded, and put it back in his shirt. “Well,” he nodded to the guys, “right now I need to get rid of some of this beer.” He walked away from the group, heading up the path toward the row of portable johns.
The others stood, picking up chips and counting their remaining money from the poker table. Crayer, Dusty, Henry, Mug, and the guy who had been stone-cold silent both nights. I could barely make him out in the dim light.
Crayer tapped James on the shoulder. “Got kind of lucky tonight, didn’t you?”
“I’ve played a lot of poker. When I should have been working, when I should have been studying.” James smiled. “I hope it was more than just luck.”
“Yeah. Well, we’ll see how it goes tomorrow night, okay?”
“It’s a date.” It would have been like stopping a runaway train, trying to get James not to show up.
“We’ll see you guys tomorrow,” Mug mumbled.
Finally, James turned to me. “I’ll make up the other five hundred tomorrow night, pardner.”
“James, did you notice Stan, after he handed out the cash bonuses?”
“What about him?”
“He pulled out a pocket organizer and punched some stuff in.”
“Yeah? So what?”
“He and Thomas LeRoy. They really depend on those.”
“It’s like I told you, we’ve got to get us one of those.”
“I just thought it was a little strange that they both use the same -”
“Skip,” he jumped in, “I swear you are worrying this thing to death. Just drop it, man.”
I thought about the night. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was paranoid. I felt like we were surrounded by crooks, thieves, and murderers. And I was even wondering about the card game. All I had done was watch, but it just didn’t feel right. It was as if they were setting him up, hoping tomorrow he’d lay it all out. So they could take it all away. Because when James thought he was hot, no one could convince him he wasn’t.
“Okay, you’re right. I’ll get it under control. And by the way, quite a comeback, James.” I nodded. At that point, I didn’t want to burst his bubble. Tomorrow night would be a different story.
“I’m the comeback kid, Dude. Remember that.”
And in some ways, he really was.