“Thanks,” Ralph said.
A horn blared.
Lyman turned toward the restaurant window and waved.
Cassandra waved back.
“Impatient, isn’t she?” Bigham said, and then laughed.
“Yeah. Women. I gotta go,” Lyman said. “My girl’s waiting, and I think she’s waited long enough.”
CHERRY COKE by MILTON T. BURTON
Tyler
Sam MacCord was at the poker game at Matty’s Truck Stop in Kilgore, Texas, the night Cherry Coke got his nickname. Cherry claimed it was his first time playing poker. When he said that, one of the players laughed and remarked that he’d come to the right place to bust his cherry. With a last name like Coke, the handle was a natural, and it stuck with him from then on. It was also easy for the players who’d been there to remember Cherry because he walked away from the table the big winner. And that just doesn’t happen the first time around. At least not in the kind of games Sam MacCord played in. So everybody assumed Cherry was an experienced gambler who ran out a strong line of con about not ever having played before. But after an incident that happened at a game down in Lufkin one cold, rainy night about a year later, Sam wasn’t so sure about that.
Cherry was a slim guy of medium height who appeared to be about forty. He had a face-shaped face that fronted for a head-shaped head and a pair of unassuming eyes whose color hovered somewhere between pale gray and hazel, depending on the lighting. His neatly combed hair was dark brown with a little gray at the temples, and he usually wore dark pants, white dress shirts, and a sand-colored tweed sport coat. Nothing about him stood out. In fact the opposite was true. If you’d asked Sam to describe Cherry and then given him a minute to think before answering, he would have said there was something blurry about the man, something vague and indefinite that made it hard to remember what he looked like even while you were staring directly at his face.
According to Cherry, he’d gotten into poker almost by accident. His car was a coal-black Mercury Marquis he’d bought from a dealership in Henderson. Cherry was an amiable sort who paid the sticker price on the car without quibbling, and the dealer, who was himself a gregarious individual, took an instant liking to him. While the dealer’s secretary was finishing the paperwork, the conversation drifted around to poker. Cherry mentioned that he’d recently acquired an interest in the game and would like to give it a try sometime. Right then the dealer invited him to sit in at Matty’s that coming weekend in Kilgore. This, Cherry claimed, had been his start.
During the year we knew him, he played mostly in East Texas. Though Sam now lived in Dallas, he was from East Texas and gravitated back homeward whenever he got a yen for the cards, even though the really lucrative action was to be found in the western part of the state. “A man can hide better where there’s lots of trees,” he always said with a friendly smile when anybody asked why he’d never tried the big games out around Lubbock and Odessa. The truth was that as far as poker went, Sam was nothing more than a recreational gambler, even though he sometimes won or lost several thousand dollars at a sitting. Back in his younger days he’d been a hijacker whose name was linked in the papers with a collection of Southern criminals who journalists tagged with the lurid name Dixie Mafia. He’d also been the main suspect in a couple of contract killings, but that was back then. Now things were a lot different. That was because one fine fall afternoon a decade earlier, a light of sorts had gone off inside Sam’s head, and he’d suddenly realized that he was the only one of his associates who’d never been to prison. Not one to travel too far on luck, he pulled up on the heavy stuff. Then, after getting the go-ahead from the right people a few weeks later, he opened what eventually became a very successful sports book. And Sam really liked Cherry Coke, which was why he was supremely irked the night Jackie Fats Reed pulled out the.357 snub-nose and stuck it in Cherry’s face during that Lufkin game.
Jack J. Reed, who was still called “Jackie Fats” years after his health had forced him to slim down from 300 pounds to his current 180, was a surly whiner who’d never been known to lose a hand with any degree of grace. Indeed, he was only allowed to play because he lost consistently, and because he was a hoodlum and a known killer who could not be safely excluded from the table. Jackie Fats was not a happy man. The cardiac he’d suffered in his late thirties and the subsequent triple bypass had forced him to get his life and his diet under control, but they’d left him very disagreeable because he missed lolling indolently around and scarfing up gargantuan quantities of whatever caught his fancy-things he certainly couldn’t do anymore unless he wanted an early checkout date. He also wanted to win at poker, which he almost never did. Consequently, everybody had mixed feelings whenever Jackie Fats showed up at one of the games. Regulars were happy to see such a steady loser bring his bulging bankroll to the table, but his propensity for violence also set everybody on edge.
Cherry and Sam became casual friends, and often after a game broke up they went out for breakfast, where Cherry always requested double and sometimes even triple orders of sausage. From time to time they’d meet at some club to hoist a few, though both were light drinkers. Cherry’s real name was Richard, and once Sam got to know him well enough to mount a personal question, he asked if there was any chance he was related to Richard Coke, Texas’ beloved Restorationist governor who ran all the carpetbaggers out of the state at the end of Reconstruction.
Cherry shook his head and said, “No honchos in my family, Sam. My dad was just a dirt farmer.”
“Where, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“A little ways outside Athens.”
At the time, Sam naturally assumed he meant Athens, Texas, a small agricultural town about seventy miles southeast of Dallas. Then, a week later at a game in Longview, somebody said something about Socrates. That was when Cherry, who rarely volunteered anything, smiled and said, “He was queer as a three-dollar bill, you know.”
“Who?” one of the other players asked.
“Socrates.”
“Some people claim that,” said Tom Wilkins, who was a fine player besides being a history teacher at the junior college in nearby Tyler. “But I don’t think anybody really knows for sure.”
“Oh, I know for sure,” Cherry said.
“How so?”
“Because the old rascal made a pass at me the first time my dad took me into town. I was about fifteen at the time, and he was famous. Everybody knew who he was.”
For a few moments there was a befuddled silence at the table. Then one of the players, a boisterous older fellow from Nacogdoches who was reputed to be rich as Midas himself, laughed and slapped Cherry on the back and said, “This boy comes on so sweet and innocent that if a man didn’t watch himself he’d wind up believing everything he says.”
They all had a good laugh and Cherry gave them a bland smile and the game resumed. But that business about Athens and Socrates came back to haunt Sam after Cherry had his little dust-up with Jackie Fats in Lufkin.
Cherry gambled around East Texas for a year or so. After that first night, he rarely took home the big money, but he won steadily if undramatically, and he always left with enough to live well for a couple of weeks. Which was highly unusual. Everybody goes all the way down to broke sometimes. It’s just in the nature of a gambler to do so. But not Cherry. He didn’t cheat either. Too many of the people he played with were far too savvy not to have eventually spotted something if he had. In fact, he seemed to win more consistently when he hadn’t even touched the cards than he did when he was dealer.