Spooky.
Now, as a general rule, it’s not considered polite to ask personal questions across the poker table. But it happens, especially when a group of guys have played together here and there over several months and feel like they have gotten to know one another. After all, even seasoned gamblers are human, and we humans are a snoopy lot whose curiosity sometimes gets the better of us. Finally, one night when a cattleman named Bob Robbins got to bitching about the sorrows of the beef market, a couple of other businessmen at the table chimed in with their grievances about the general economic condition of the country. Then somebody broke the ice and asked Cherry what he did for a living. Cherry ran out a song-and-dance about how he’d sold advertising novelties “up until a couple of weeks ago,” and then went on to say he was out of work and looking for a job. Nobody believed a word of it, of course. But the message was clear, and it was the only thing Sam MacCord ever knew for certain about Cherry Coke: the man might have started late in life and learned fast, but he was a professional gambler.
The Lufkin game that finally ended Cherry’s run in East Texas took place every weekend in the back room of a very successful used car dealership owned by a guy named Eddie Ray Atwell Junior. Eddie Ray Senior had been one of Sam’s Dixie Mafia cohorts. Almost forty years earlier, when Eddie Junior was just a little tyke, somebody had let the hammer down on the old man in a motel out in San Gabriel, a sinfilled little West Texas city that sprawled on both sides of the aptly named Rio Diablo-the Devil’s River. Nobody ever had a clue as to who was behind that dastardly deed, or why they were behind it, not even Sam, who knew as much about the Southern criminal underworld as anybody. Not that it really mattered. In the final years that Senior graced this world with his presence, he’d come to be known as Eddie the Rat, a man willing to screw his own partners anytime the opportunity presented itself. So his passing was mourned by few, and probably not even by his wife, a smart, tough woman who had been the brains behind the car lot in the first place, and who kept the business going while her husband was off running up and down the roads in a fancy Lincoln convertible, cranked to the gills on speed and trying to get something going in the Mexican heroin trade, an endeavor for which he was uniquely unsuited. She never remarried. Instead, she devoted her energies to teaching her kid the ins and outs of the used car trade. Eddie Junior was a fast learner who wound up even more successful than his mother. He also loved poker, and a lot of money passed across his table every weekend.
It was a Friday night in late fall. The area had been plagued with storms and tornado warnings all week. Thunder could still be heard rumbling in the distance, but by dark the rain had slacked off to a steady drizzle. The weather forecasts called for more bad weather in the next few days, and the temperature was expected to drop below freezing before dawn.
The cards were cold that night too. The game was nolimit Texas Hold’em, but nobody could seem to get any traction, not even Cherry. Then, a little before the witching hour, one of those freak hands came along, and two kings and an ace flopped. Jackie Fats bet $200 and Cherry raised him $500. Jackie smiled-which was a rare thing for the cranky bastard-and called even. Cherry smiled right back at him. This sudden heat caused everybody else to fold, and the next card was the king of spades. After that, Cherry knew the die was cast, even though the rest of us didn’t find out until a couple of minutes later. Fats bet $1,000 and Cherry raised him another $1,000. The last card was the seven of clubs, which neither helped nor hurt either of them. Jackie Fats smiled again, and with all the confidence in the world, he laid down twenty brand-new hundred-dollar bills. Cherry didn’t even hesitate. He called and raised $2,500, which only left him a couple of hundred on the table. For all practical purposes he was all in, a move that should have made Jackie Fats study the situation over for at least a few seconds. But Jackie was a natural bully, one who was always eager to stomp down on somebody, and he fell all over himself pushing the call into the pot. Eddie Junior, who was dealing that hand, said, “Showtime, boys.”
Jackie Fats had made the last call, which meant it was Cherry’s obligation to show his cards first. But Jackie was hungry for blood. His eyes were bright and gleeful, and his face was positively vulpine as he reached down with his short, once-plump fingers and flipped over his hole cards to reveal an ace and a king, which gave him an A-A-K-K-K full house. “Can you beat that?”
Cherry didn’t even bother to answer. He just casually turned over his cards to reveal the other two aces for an A-AA-K-K full. As I said, it was a freak hand.
Jackie Fats gaped at the cards for the longest time, his face getting gradually redder and redder. A drop of spittle dripped off his lower lip and hung by a thread as it made its slow way down to the table. Then he bellowed like a wounded bull and lunged to his feet. That’s when the revolver appeared in his hand. Which surprised no one. It was considered the worst of manners to come armed to another man’s place, but etiquette had never been Jackie’s strong suit.
“Get up,” he said, waving the gun wildly under Cherry’s nose. “I’ve never killed anybody who wasn’t on his feet.”
Cherry was unperturbed. “I don’t think so.”
“I said, get up!”
“No. I’m comfortable where I’m at.”
Jackie Fats licked his lips. He’d never had a man refuse one of his “requests” when he was pointing a.357 at his head. It was a new experience for him. Combined with Cherry’s utter calm, it rattled him. “I want to know how,” he said.
“How what?”
“How you always win.”
“He don’t,” Bob Robbins said.
“Shut up, Bob,” Fats said without much rancor. “I’ve paid the price here tonight and I want an answer.”
Ever the gentleman, Sam had left his piece in the car, but now he regretted it. He was beginning to realize just how long he’d been deeply annoyed with Jackie Fats and just how much he wanted an excuse to smoke the man. Still, he said as diplomatically as he could, “Let it pass, Jackie. It’s not worth gunplay.”
“I’ll be the one to decide that,” Jackie barked. “And this bastard is going to tell me how he does it.”
“There’s no reason-” Bob Robbins began.
“Seventy-two percent,” Cherry said, interrupting him.
“What?” Fats growled. His face was almost purple, and he was gripping the gun so tightly his knuckles were white and bloodless. Cherry was as calm as a mortician.
“Seventy-two percent,” Cherry repeated. “That’s how much of the time I know what the cards are. It’s always been that way, though I only started to gamble in the last few years.”
Jackie Fats was baffled. “What are you saying?”
Cherry sighed a tired sigh. “You wanted to know how I do it, and I just told you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Okay, then try this. We sit down and somebody deals a hundred hands. In roughly seventy-two of them I’ll know what everybody has.”
“You mean you guess right almost three quarters of the time?” one of the other players asked.
Cherry shook his head firmly. “There’s no guess to it. Some hands I don’t have a clue, but most of the time I know. And I’m never wrong. I either know for sure or I don’t know anything. It’s either the whole hog or nothing with me. That’s just the way it works, but I’ve got no idea why.”
Sam was more alert than the others. “How did you get that precise figure?” he asked. “The seventy-two percent, I mean.”
“I was tested in the Rhine experiments in ESP at Duke University.”
“But that was…” Sam began, then tapered off in confusion.
“About fifty years ago, Sam.”
“Damn! You can’t be that old.”
“Why can’t I?” he asked. Then he turned and looked at Sam, and his face was full of weariness. For a fleeting moment, Sam thought he saw something in Cherry Coke’s eyes that was deep and dark and ancient beyond knowing. Then Cherry blinked and it was gone, and he was once again the same bland, fortyish fellow Sam had known for a year, staring back at him out of a face so plain and undistinguished that it could hardly be remembered.