Cherry got leisurely to his feet and stood looking across the table at Jackie Fats. “If you’re going to shoot me, go ahead and do it,” he said.
Sam looked across at Jackie Fats. For some reason, all the fight had gone out of him, and he wasn’t in a shooting mood anymore. His hand trembled a little as he slowly lowered the gun. His gaze was riveted to Cherry’s face, and his expression was unreadable. Sam reached out and took the.357 gently from Jackie’s hand and tucked it in his belt. Cherry slowly and carefully stacked his winnings and slipped them into his inner jacket pocket. Then he looked around the table and smiled. “It’s been a real pleasure,” he said. “You were fine fellows to be with.”
When Cherry walked out, Sam MacCord followed him. The air was cold and bitter and full of a fine mist. In the parking lot Sam came abreast of Cherry and asked, “If what you said in there about the Rhine experiments is true, then…” Sam let his voice taper off.
Cherry didn’t look at him. He just kept walking, but he said, his voice resigned, “Then what?”
After a moment’s thought, Sam decided not to push the matter. “Nothing,” he replied with a shake of his head.
When Cherry got to his car, he turned and stuck out his hand. “I’ve enjoyed knowing you, Sam,” he said. “I’ve always liked having friends, but it’s never paid me to try to hold on to them too long.”
A few seconds later the Marquis whisked softly off into the night. That was the last time Sam MacCord ever saw Cherry Coke, but he heard stories. About a year later, a couple of regulars at the Lufkin game took their wives out to Las Vegas on vacation. One evening they left the women parked at a show and took a cab over to sample the delights of the Mirage. That’s where they saw Cherry at the five-dollar-minimum blackjack table, still clad in his dark pants and sand-colored sport coat. Whatever warm reunion they might have expected wasn’t forthcoming. Cherry was civil but unsmiling and distant. After a couple of aborted attempts at reliving old times, they gave up and left him there amidst the clatter of chips and the whir of the slot machines, a loner in a lonely land. Six months after the game, Jackie Fats Reed was found sprawled on the living room floor of his Houston apartment with a.22-caliber bullet hole in the center of his forehead and an expression of pure amazement frozen on his ugly face. Speculation was that Cherry Coke had extracted his revenge for that dreadful night in Lufkin, but Sam MacCord knew better.
After he heard about Cherry turning up at the Mirage, Sam made a point of asking everybody he knew who went to Vegas about him. Word filtered back to Texas that the man had become a minor legend on the Strip, a sort of silent specter who never won heavily but who rarely lost, and who moved from casino to casino taking a thousand or so a week away from the tables-enough to live on reasonably well but never enough to annoy the Powers That Be. Then he vanished.
It was several months before Sam managed to shake loose from his affairs long enough to travel out to Nevada and try to run down the story. The trail led to an elderly Texas road gambler named Diamond Red Nash who now worked as a gaming consultant for one of the casinos. He and Sam had always liked one another, and their reunion was cordial. Sam quickly learned that Diamond Red had been Cherry’s only real friend in Vegas. He also learned that Cherry had left town on his own.
“Didn’t nobody run him off or do nothing to hurt him,” Red said. “He just told me that he hadn’t seen Europe in a long, long time, and then he was gone.”
“Europe?” Sam asked in surprise. “Why there?”
“Well, he claimed he wanted to revisit some old memories. And he said he intended to try the baccarat at Monte Carlo.”
Sam nodded and looked out the window into the desert air shimmering in the bright noonday sun and thought back to that cold, rainy night when he’d last seen Cherry. It seemed a whole world and a lifetime away, and for the first time he felt the full weight of his sixty years. “What was your estimate of him, Red?” he finally asked.
“I think he was the best blackjack player I ever laid my eyes on.” Then he grinned. “And I believe he loved good pork sausage more than anybody I ever knew.”
Sam smiled and nodded. “And…?”
“I really liked the boy, Sam. I believe he’d do to ride the river with.”
“I thought so too, Red. I thought so too…”
Sam shook the old man’s hand and caught a late-night flight back to Dallas. The next day he called in a marker with a couple of local detectives who stayed a few hundred in debt to his book year-round. It wasn’t long before one of them phoned to tell him that a Richard Coke had flown from Las Vegas to Atlanta and then on to Munich, where he had leased a brand-new BMW from a German agency. After that, there was no trace of him.
Sam decided to drop it. He considered Cherry a friend, and friends were entitled to their privacy. He also did his best to put the matter out of his mind. But from time to time, especially when he awoke in those lonely hours after midnight and sleep wouldn’t return, he found himself thinking about Cherry Coke. He finally decided that besides being the best gambler he’d ever met, the man had been a consummate actor who could convince anybody of almost anything. That’s what he believed because that’s what he wanted to believe. The only other explanation that fit the facts led down a dark road that Sam MacCord did not want to travel.
PART III. BIG-CITY TEXAS
Lips so sweet and tender, like petals falling apart…
– Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys
MONTGOMERY CLIFT by SARAH CORTEZ
Houston
Every time I looked at him I saw Rosalie’s first husband. The same thin shoulders. Pupils too dark to read their meaning. He felt me staring at him as I asked the same question every morning before I walked to work.
“What you doing today, son?”
“My lesson’s at two.”
Another one of Rosalie’s dreams. That her son Monty would be a singer. She had found a man to tutor him at the small Catholic college in the neighborhood. Her son loved voice lessons and we found the money. Sometimes Nichols, the voice teacher, came into the hardware store I’d worked at since arriving to Houston in the late ’40s after the war. I knew his face from a concert program Monty’d brought home and left in the kitchen. The man, about forty-five years old, was well fed, but only talked in a raspy whisper. The potential of his strong body was not borne out in his oily muttering.
I drained the last bit of coffee. “What else you doing today?”
Monty pulled his eyes up to meet my face for the first time that morning. “Practice. I have a piano studio reserved beginning at ten.”
“Make sure you do your chores first.” You’d think I wouldn’t have to remind a boy fixing to begin college about his responsibilities. But this one-her son-had as much common sense as a domestic rabbit. All ears and big teeth. He was as useless as the movie star she’d named him after-that little shrimp, Montgomery Clift, with the dreamboat mug he sold for money so he’d never have to work a day in his life. Just pace around decked out in fancy suits and leather dress shoes while getting smooched by a beautiful actress. Montgomery, no kind of name for a man.
I glanced at the few keepsakes I displayed as decoration in my repair space at Southland’s. A black-and-white photo of our squad before getting shipped out to the Pacific, all smiles and bravado. A keychain doodad of tubular, see-through plastic, about three inches long. Three red rings floated in the clear fluid. The game was to place all three thin rings onto a woman’s lone leg extended in the liquid. Rosalie’s gams had looked like that when I married her. The long line of perfect white skin extending up and up from her dainty knees. With her illness, the blood got throttled in her legs’ thick blue veins and splotched her thin skin with a thousand red lines like smashed spiders. Just looking at them gave me the heebie-jeebies.