The next morning, still showering curses on the memory of her presence, he took the $632 he had to his name, packed a suitcase with a change of clothes and nine jars of Ol' Death Whisper, and hit the road playing cards. Players in the northcoast cardrooms still talk about it in the same tone they talk about the fire of '41: his age and ferocity were intimidating, but it was his plain, bald, Godgraced, unadulterated, shithouse luck that wiped the tables clean. In three months he won nearly $90,000, and everytime he left town he mailed a cashier's check to the San Francisco law firm of Gutt, Cutt and Freese, a group of ruthlessly brilliant attorneys who specialized in custody cases, and who responded to each check like piranhas to blood, unleashing another frenzy of writs, motions, and suits. Finally, through sinuous maneuvering lubricated with tidy envelopes of well-placed cash, the case was assigned to Judge Wilber Tatum, an octogenarian with 17 grandkids, a honky-tonk road map of broken veins on his face, and a $100,00 credit line in Las Vegas despite the alimony he paid his eight ex-wives.
Granddaddy Jake, as everyone began to call him at his request, drove his young grandson out to the ranch in a new Jeep pick-up. He talked to the boy continually, pointing out places they would go fishing and hunting, the swimming holes and shortcuts, the name of every waving neighbor they passed. Tiny stared straight ahead, nodding slightly.
When they arrived at the ranch house (which he'd had Lottie Anderson spruce up), he sat Tiny down at the table with a gallon of milk and a pound of Oreos, then unloaded the truck and fixed up the boy's room. When he returned to the kitchen, Tiny was sitting on the floor by the woodbox, building a miniature split-rail fence out of the redwood kindling. Jake went out and chopped some more. Above him he saw a ragged V of ducks flying high against the sunset, following the light south, but they didn't stir him like they usually did. He had a grandchild to look after now, the responsibility of care. He felt himself settle into himself. The ducks could take care of themselves.
2 The Great Checker Showdown of '78
In the early spring of '77, Johnathan "Tiny" Makhurst, just turned 22, was going crazy. After a five day drenching in early February-seven inches of cold rain, limb-snapping winds-the weather cleared to a false and balmy spring, and held till the second week in March. Tiny didn't believe it at first, but after 20 days he went out and checked the ground. It was perfect. He'd planned the fence all winter, scaling it on graph paper, cleaning and oiling his tools every Sunday afternoon till Granddaddy Jake swore they'd squirt out of his hand, and now, finally, preparation met perfect conditions: the ground was just right for posthole digging- not so mushy that the blades wouldn't scour, yet not so dry they couldn't get a bite. He dug 120 postholes the first day in the field, each exactly three feet deep, precisely seven feet apart, and in a line as straight as the shortest distance between two points. He walked home that evening whistling, ate half a venison roast and a pile of hash browns for dinner, did up the dishes, whipped Granddaddy five straight in checkers, downed his nightly shot of Ol' Death Whisper, and started for bed just as Granddaddy Jake started for the door.
"Off to see your lady friend?" Tiny grinned, for that was the only explanation Granddaddy had ever offered when he'd started his nightly rambles a few weeks before.
"Better'n whacking it," Granddaddy grunted, and was gone.
The sudden, stark incandescence shocked Tiny from sleep. Dazed, confused, he seemed to hang in the bare light for hours till the heavens finally tore apart and a wrenching crack of thunder rocked the house. As it faded, the wind rose to howl at its ghost. The first drops of rain came in nervous flurries; then it poured. In a rare display of temper, Tiny hurled his pillow against the wall.
The storm was the first of three that swept in from Hawaii. Each lasted about two days, with about 15 hours of humid calm betweeen the tropical soakings. The lulls were torture for Tiny: they beckoned, then denied. Grand-daddy Jake was nearly as bad. Caught out in the first storm, he'd come down with a cold (the first of his life, he claimed) and promptly took to bed. Tiny cooked and cared for him, which mostly meant fetching his whiskey and playing hours of checkers each day (Grand-daddy Jake figuring that as long as he was laid up he might as well sharpen his moves before challenging Lub Knowland for $100 a game). Tiny had beaten Lub Knowland for $2700 before he was old enough to shave and, ten years better, could demolish his Granddaddy with the regularity of an atomic clock.
On the first day they agreed to play to the first five out of nine, and when Tiny won five straight, Granddaddy insisted they make it the best of nineteen ("so as to eliminate fluke luck," he argued), and two days after the storms had passed and Tiny was aching to get back to his fence, they were playing the best 500 out of 999,the score at 451 Tiny and 12 for Granddaddy Jake, or exactly twelve games after Tiny realized that Granddaddy was not going to get well until he won, prompting Tiny to throw as many games as he could-which, considering his Granddaddy's increasingly eccentric play, wasn't always possible.
For another three days they faced each other across the board. To look at them you'd never thought they were kin. Tiny was 22, but his round soft face made him appear six years younger, still in the stammer of adolescence. Granddaddy was 99, generally lucid, but prey to the stuttering lapses of senility. Tiny, like most men burdened with that nickname, was 6'5" standing in a hollow, and punished the Toledoes at 269. Granddaddy was 5'5" in his cowboy boots and weighed just a notch over 100-though he often allowed, upon the slightest provocation, that he was once 6' and 200 pounds before hard work and harder women shrunk him down, and that if he was still within hooting distance of his prime he'd kick your ass into cordwood and have it stacked before the slash hit ground. Tiny, fortunately, was as amiable as his Granddaddy was ornery, as placid and benign as the old man was fierce and belligerent.
The differences in temperament carried over into style. Tiny enjoyed the open, linear purity of checkers. Granddaddy favored games with hole cards, where your strength was in your secrets and you flew into the eye of chaos riding your ghost. Tiny started work at dawn. Granddaddy stirred at the crack of noon. Tiny didn't mind doing dishes. Grand-daddy cooked-a skill forced upon him with Tiny's adoption, and one which he came to strangely enjoy-but he only cooked dinner because that was the only meal he ate, breakfast skipped in sleep, lunch a cup of coffee and a shot of Ol' Death Whisper. Tiny drank a little, usually just a swallow before bed to hold back the dreams; Granddaddy drank a lot, often a pint a day, to keep the dreams moving.