Harris Quinn: FAIRVIEW • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Harris Quinn
FAIRVIEW

I’ve won more than I’ve lost, though I’ve kept no ledger. I’ve lost big, but I’ve won big too. I took 7,000 dollars from a New York man in Aiken after the Masters one year. I could tell he was burnt from the tournament, and he had no business across the river losing more. I cut him off at the knees hand after hand for almost two days, drove home up Highway 25 grinning like I’d done something. Then I lost that car in a game down in Atlanta, a nearly new ‘64 Buick Riviera in Granada Red. There was no grinning on that ride home. I begged a 1,000 dollar marker, and ten hours later I’d won the car back. There’s a confidence in losing, in knowing you can undo it, and I guess I have that. You can always undo it, win it back, make it right.

The country club was hot, even in the middle of the night. My shirt was sticking to my chest and my forehead was damp. The Riverside Room didn’t have windows but my gold watch showed 4:30. It would be light soon and we wouldn’t know it. These Saturday night games usually went to nearly Monday, which was fine because the Riverside Room was closed during Sunday brunch. The tell was our cars. Five or six Buicks and Cadillacs lined up in the parking lot at sunrise and there wouldn’t be a soul in town didn’t know who’d lost come Monday.

Folks knew about my house too. The little house on Seminole Street with white paint and black shutters was fine enough, but it wasn’t the big house on Crescent Avenue where both my boys had been born. Moves were supposed to be in the other direction, and folks noticed. My father could have bailed me out. He had bailed me out before. But losing my house was past some line, and even seeing the kids leaving Crescent for Seminole didn’t move him.

The Riverside Room was thick with cigarette smoke. Packs of Camels and Luckies littered the table and bar. Ashtrays filled up and Carl might empty them or he might not. Carl served our wives white wine on the terrace on Thursday evenings. Carl the game waiter, Carl the card hound. Carl was discreet, off the books. He knew where he stood.

Ansel Thurmond dealt. He would play until his stack of money ran out or maybe until he was up some, but he never stayed in for the real action. Ansel wasn’t a gambler. He liked being there, though. He liked being close to the big losers and knowing about it. He liked that people knew that he knew who the losers were when they saw his car in the parking lot when they walked into Sunday brunch.

The game was me and Walker Cashman. There had been others, the day before, and maybe into the morning, but it was just us now. Walker’s father ran an insurance company. Walker wore cashmere sweaters and bit loafers, and drank brandy. Walker never had to put up his Cadillac because his checks always cleared. I saw him lose 20,000 dollars over two days once. The second night of it had been the same night Kennedy told us about the Russians putting missiles in Cuba. He had made Carl turn the radio off.

The man he lost to was from Richmond, somebody’s college buddy down on business. He had heard about our games and put the word out that he was interested. I lost a few hundred that night. My move to Seminole Street was fresh and I was being cool. Walker went up big and got cocky. It was classic, a slow drain, and by midnight of the second day the man had cut Walker deep. The markers totaled 20,000, and that was on top of the 5,000 of Cashman money already on the table. Walker was white as a sheet when he stood up into all that cigarette smoke. Carl drove him home.

Walker could play poker, though, and by 4:30 that Sunday morning there was thirty-eight hundred dollars on the table between us.

Ansel dealt a hand and Carl set a snifter of brandy in front of Walker. I remember my cards, but they don’t matter now. I knew I had him. I had the nuts and I had Walker too.

Walker had a tell, and it was no small thing. His tongue would shoot out of the corner of his mouth when he was about to bluff. If you didn’t know Walker, you would never see it, but I knew Walker, and he would flick his fat tongue to the corner of his mouth while he thought on a bluff.

I raised him. I raised him and he should have folded. He never doubled down on a bluff and he shouldn’t have then. But he didn’t fold. He didn’t even call. He re-raised. He was bluffing and bluffing again.

I had seen the tell. I had seen him flick that fat tongue like a cornered snake. I had seen him do it before and I knew I had him by the nuts. I had the nuts and I had Walker Cashman by the nuts. I went all in.

There was over 10,000 dollars on the table then, and Ansel was getting antsy. He cleared his throat and said something about us boys being calm and Walker told him to shut up. Carl stood so still it was like he was part of the wood-paneled room, like he was part of the wood itself, and he might stay part of it forever with his shot eyes darting from me to Walker and back again like a metronome set to three-quarter time.

I studied Walker through the cigarette smoke, watched him thumb the rim of his snifter, saw the sweat beading in fine drops on his forehead, heard the hiss of his cigarette as the twin tendrils of smoke helixed up to nothing over the felted table and then, by God, he cut me. He didn’t do it in any way I could reckon with either. He asked me what I had, and he didn’t mean my cards. He meant what did I have to lose. I should have known then I was beat. A man doesn’t ask another man a question like that unless he has him beat.

I watched that flicking tongue and I was as sure as I had ever been that he was bluffing. I was so sure that I told him I had a deed for an apartment building, just built and on choice land, that was worth 35,000 dollars. Well, that about undid Ansel. He got up to leave and Walker and I both told him to sit the hell down. He was all upset, sweating cold, even in that hot old room. Carl hadn’t moved, maybe hadn’t even breathed, since I’d gone all in.

Walker asked how I got the deed and I told him. I told him it was a joint venture with my brother, financed by my father. My brother had seen it through but then needed money for an opportunity in Charlotte. Something to do with rolling up steel companies. My father had bought him out and signed his stake over to me. It was my chance to get back to Crescent Avenue. It was a lifeline, my father’s demonstration of magnanimity, all the faith in the world he would ever muster in me.

Walker re-raised. He was good for the cash and I knew it. I called with the deed as a marker and that was that.

I don’t remember walking out of the country club. I heard some hollering and then it all went quiet except for that constant tone your ear gets during times of heavy stress. My vision was white and my hands tingled like they’d been stung and my mouth was drier than old bone leached of everything but the calcified remains.

I sat in my Granada Red Buick and watched the sun peek over the fourth fairway running away to the east. If it weren’t for the trees there, and just a few quiet hills beyond, I could have almost seen the Fairview Apartments with their new brick and fresh white paint on the second floor balustrades.

Harris Quinn is a graduate of the Converse University MFA program. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Main Street Rag, South Carolina Review, and Wired magazine. He is a US Navy veteran.