Crows & Cards (4 page)

"That's it!" Chilly slapped me so hard on the back, he nearly knocked me over. "That's exactly the answer, son. He ought to share it. That surely would make him a great man."

He grew real thoughtful then and checked around the chicken crates to make sure no one had sneaked up on us. "But rich men never do," he lamented. "They don't seem able. If you was to ask 'em what they wanted out of life, they'd tell you they hoped to be remembered as great men. I know. I've asked. I see 'em on these steamers, mooning around the railings and looking miserable as fleas, and I've asked. They generally get kind of choked up about it too, 'cause they know it ain't likely to happen, don't matter how many factories or plantations they own.

"But when I tell them how they can pull it off, they blush like schoolboys and say they couldn't ever do it. No sir, not on a dare. It wouldn't be right to share their money, they say. Don't ask me why they cling to it so. I've never heard a satisfactory answer to that one. Why, you'd think it ought to be the easiest thing in the world to dip in their pockets, pull out a bankroll, and pass it around. They can't though. It's a bona fide mystery." Putting a hand on my shoulder, he gazed dead into my eyes and said, "What if I told you that I knew someone whose lifework was helping these rich gents become great?"

"I wouldn't be surprised," I said. "Not a bit."

"What if I told you that this fellow was on the lookout for a helper, an apprentice of sorts?"

I gulped and nodded, too afraid to ask the obvious.

"What if I told you he was a gambler?"

"A gambler?" His answer had sneaked up on me something fierce.

"And not just any kind of penny-ante card shuffler either," Chilly sailed on. "He's a genuine riverboat gambler, top of the breed."

"Riverboat?" I whispered, going weakish in the knees 'cause of course riverboats meant rivers and deep water.

"What if I told you that he was me?" Chilly went on.

My mouth most flopped open like a door in a high wind. You could have hung a lantern on my jaw. In the backwoods where I grew up, you heard about creatures like riverboat gamblers, same as you heard about herds of buffalo flowing like rivers and desert spiders big as your dinner plate. Romantic hogwash, my pa always called it, but for me they was mythical and wonderful as them ancient Greeks.

And here stood one of them before me. I was spellbound, honored, parched, and speechless. Mr. Chilly Larpenteur was saying something, but I didn't catch it and he had to repeat himself.

"You interested?" he said.

The whole world cocked an ear to hear what leaked out of me next, or at least it felt that way. I had encountered my first real decision as an adult, without Ma or Pa yeaing or naying over my shoulder. Not wanting to bungle it, I closed my eyes to concentrate and sort it all out.

And that's when it happened. One of them crated chickens we was standing next to managed to peck the back of my hand a good one. In addition to hurting like the dickens, drawing blood, and proving I was right to be wary of them birds, it also cleared my head considerable. All of a sudden the way my folks had forced me out of my home to become something I didn't want to be—even if it was for my own good,
especially
if it was for my own good—stuck in my craw so bad that I knew I wasn't going through with it. No sir. If I had to pick out something to be for the rest of my life, then the decision ought to be mine. That's what I told myself. Praying that I could somehow or other get over my fear of the rivers that a riverboat gambler would be floating on, I summoned up all the spit I could muster and told Mr. Chilly Larpenteur, "You bet."

He chuckled as though that was a pretty witty thing for a would-be gambler to come out with, then got down to business fast.

"For a hundred dollars I'll take you on."

"I only got seventy," I told him, swallowing hard and holding out the envelope with my money. "Plus a couple of coppers I been saving."

Before my eyes had a chance to go smeary on me, he snatched the envelope and said, "Done. You can pay the balance out of your share of the winnings."

Winnings? Right off I started wondering how much I could send home to Ma and Pa, to show them how well I was doing without Great-Uncle Seth. Chilly tucked the seventy in a vest pocket so fast that I never saw his hands move, and I've no idea where he stowed those coppers. He ripped up the envelope the money had been in, along with the directions to my great-uncle's tannery, and after glancing all around us—even up to the sky—he seemed satisfied that no one was watching and sent the paper scraps fluttering over the brown waters. Why would anyone care about those directions? Don't know, didn't ask, wasn't time. Soon as the last piece of paper touched the river, Chilly declared I was overdue to be introduced to a game of chance. That marked the first thing I learned about my new profession: if you saw an opportunity, you didn't let it spoil.

CHAPTER FIVE

C
HILLY
L
ARPENTEUR RAN ME UP
some rear stairs to the
Rose Melinda's
second deck, what's known as the boiler deck. Fast as he moved, you might have thought someone was chasing us. On the way we had to weave in and out of cords of wood higher than my head and stacks of lead rods that rose up to my chin. Pigs of lead, they called those rods. Don't ask me why 'cause I never heard 'em oink.

Before we hit the stairs, I sneezed my way past horses, chickens, mules, goats, pigs—live ones—and a small flock of sheep. I heard three or four languages being jabbered, saw an Indian wrapped up in one of them bright-colored Hudson Bay blankets, and had a mountain man in buckskins wink at me.

We passed a bunch of soldiers lounging around and bragging over who could spew a cheek full of tobacco juice the most accurate. The deck was plenty slippery in spots.

Chilly talked the whole way, though I didn't catch but half of what he had to say 'cause we crossed paths with a side paddle wheel that drowned out all conversation. One step before the boiler deck he stopped to shout in my ear, "Watch close now. We'll double our seventy dollars faster than you can blink."

Then he plunged through the doors leading to the second deck's main cabin, which stretched most of the boat's length. The whole distance was lined up with dinner tables and chandeliers fit for kings and dukes and whatnot. The ladies and gents at those tables—why, every one of them held out their little pinkies as they sipped their midday tea or sarsaparilla. Cigar smoke blued the air real pretty, and somewhere down the line a piano was being plinked at while a woman was singing "The Last Rose of Summer." That main cabin was almost quiet enough to hear every word of her song, and she sang it in tones so honey-sweet, they nearly melted your heart with worry over what would befall that last rose.

We didn't stop for none of it though, just dashed on till we reached some glass doors, first such doors I'd ever spied. As if being made of glass didn't make them special enough, they had a pair of eagles painted in gold on 'em. Chilly held up before those doors but a second, just long enough to make a sign of the cross, kind of secret-like, as if we was entering a church. Then we plowed past those gold eagles to a bar beyond them, where fifteen to twenty fellows were crowded around a single table. The men in back had to stand on chairs to see what was happening.

"Pearl Gulliver's dealing," Chilly said in my ear. "Game's called faro. He's a cheat and a bluffer, but I've about figured out the spots on his deck, so we're set. Watch careful now."

Chilly waded into the crowd, elbowing and whispering his way closer and closer to the table till he disappeared beneath the hatted heads leaning over the game. I heard a low, crackly voice that must have been Pearl Gulliver's. "Back so soon?"

That got a round of guffaws from the crowd, but as soon as it died down, Chilly called out real even-like, "Come back for my money."

"This ain't no house of charity," Pearl Gulliver advised. "It's a game of chance, and I ain't huge on lending losers back their bankroll."

"Nobody's asking you to," Chilly said.

"Not but a half hour ago you was broke and begging these gents to spot you some," Pearl Gulliver pointed out.

"I've come into an inheritance," Chilly answered, which brought on another round of snickers, during which Chilly must have dropped my seventy dollars on the table. That brought on a bout of quiet.

"Mighty puny leavings," Pearl Gulliver observed.

"If you're running an honest game, it ought to be enough."

The drumroll I heard must have been the beating of my heart. Several men tensed up and leaned away from the table, as if about to dive for cover, and Pearl Gulliver didn't settle any nerves by saying, "If you think the table ain't square, don't sit."

That set off a ripple of yeses.

"And leave you with my money?" Chilly laughed. "Deal 'em out."

It took some doing, but eventually I found me a wobbly chair to stand on and tried to forget about how high I was climbing. (Anything much above a footstool gives me second thoughts.) From my perch I had a clear look at Pearl Gulliver, a shrivelly old man with a gray beard full as a brush fence. His eyes skipped around that table so fast, you might have thought someone was trying to sneak up on him. The rough way he handled the cards and chips almost made it seem as if he hated 'em. And wasn't the oilcloth covering that table something? Green as a pasture, it was, and with pictures of cards where the gamblers placed their bets.

As for how the game of faro was played, I never did entirely get the hang of it. Not that day, anyway. Pearl Gulliver slid two cards out of a shiny, silver box that was all decorated up with mother-of-pearl. The cards were face-down and players bet on them by laying money on the pictures of cards that decorated the oilcloth. The face-down card that Pearl Gulliver slid to his right was the losing card, and any money bet on it went to him. The face-down card that ended up to his left was the winner, which meant that Pearl Gulliver had to pay out to anyone who bet on it. Money placed on any cards other than those two rode till the next hand.

To place bets, hands crisscrossed the table worse than summer lightning, shoving money this way and that, collecting winnings, replacing losings. There was more cackling and crowing than the time a raccoon hit our hen house.

Sometimes players won. Mostly, they seemed to lose. All the while Chilly wagered small and studied the cards hard enough to see clear through them.

And I learned that a whole tribe of blacksmiths couldn't have been more superstitious than the men crowded round that table, and I didn't know anyone who spewed out more charms and signs than the ornery smithy back home. Why, nearly every man present was rubbing a rabbit's foot or kissing a clamshell or crossing himself three times—minimum—before every new hand got dealt. I hadn't ever seen such excitement around a table, not in my whole life. Even Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners couldn't hold a candle to it. Those men watched Pearl Gulliver's hands the way a starving man would keep an eye on a loaf of bread that was about to be sliced. The roof might have blown off the boat and I got my doubts they'd have looked up, unless it was to see what cards got sucked away.

The contorting around the table tickled Pearl Gulliver, though he kept his trap shut and never poked fun, not even at the rough fellow who had named his lucky clamshell Sherry-Ann. He just waited for everyone to settle down. The only player who kept his distance from all the good-luck hocus-pocus was Chilly. All the fandango chafed on him some, and he lifted out his gold pocket watch a few times to check on how long all the messing around was taking, but otherwise he bided his time. It left me feeling puffed up as big as all outdoors to be with the one man who took it all in stride.

CHAPTER SIX

O
NCE A GAME COMMENCED, EVERYONE WENT SERIOUS
as a flock of ministers. Eventually, a couple of gents got up, saying their wells were dry, but Chilly held his own with my seventy dollars, gaining here, losing there. Mostly he was still as a toad waiting for the buzz of a fly. Then all of a sudden Chilly must have seen something on the backs of those cards that he liked, 'cause he bet all we had on a single hand. Everybody around the table took a deep breath and held 'er in, waiting to see.