So Wenzel said he waved Lyman over to the booth where he was sitting with Harry Barnes and a couple of other men, playing poker and drinking tap beer from a pitcher. They poured Lyman a beer and he tasted it, but he apparently didn’t like the taste of it much, because he set the glass down and looked around at the faces watching him as if he was a kid at school and they were waiting to see whether he could detect the dog manure they had put in his buttermilk.
“He probably hadn’t never tasted beer before,” my dad said.
“Most likely,” Wenzel said. “It ain’t like drinking orange soda pop.”
But Lyman drank his glass of beer finally, without tasting it any more than necessary, just throwing it down quick like he was taking cod liver oil or prune juice. Wenzel Gerdts poured him another glassful, and Lyman drank it the same way, with both hands on the glass.
“But he ain’t no kid,” Wenzel said. “And I ain’t no nursemaid, neither.”
So Wenzel poured him one more. He threw that one down too, with his Adam’s apple snapping hard above the yellow tie. So by this time Lyman had drunk three of their beers, and about all the profit they had to show for it was that Lyman’s eyes had begun to look like they were glass marbles.
But glass marbles must have been enough for Harry Barnes, a bald-headed man of fifty-some and the best poker player in Holt County. Harry studied Lyman’s eyes for a minute, and then said, “Boys, I believe Lyman’s ready. Deal him in.”
“But he didn’t know how to play poker, did he?” my dad said.
“No,” Wenzel said. “I had to show him.”
“Then he got a good taste of that too,” my dad said. “How much money did you and Harry Barnes take off him?”
“Now wait a minute,” Wenzel said. He shot that quick neat spurt of his over into the gutter and licked the drop off. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “Sure we was playing for money — a nickel ante with a dime bump — because Harry Barnes ain’t going to play for matchsticks, is he?”
“Not unless they’re gold matchsticks,” my dad said.
“Sure,” Wenzel said. “But it wasn’t like you think it was. I tried to explain it to him — what a ace is and about pairs and full houses and straight flushes. But goddamn it, he just don’t get it.”
“So what you’re saying is,” my dad said, and I could see he was smiling in his eyes. “You’re saying you ain’t going to tell us how much money you took off him.”
“Now, damn it,” Wenzel said. “That ain’t either what I’m saying. I’m saying I tried to explain it to him but he just don’t get it. He keeps asking me things like how come a flush’ll take a straight, or how come three deuces is better than four cards even when them four cards is two aces and two kings. What in hell was I supposed to tell him then? If I started talking percentages, we was going to be there all night and never get no cards played. Let alone get any money to change hands.”
“Okay,” my dad said. “So what’d you do? Because you already said how he played poker.”
“That’s right,” Wenzel said. “Lyman played poker. He played poker all right. And that’s just the damn hell of it. Call it just a middle-aged farm boy’s dumb luck that never had time to play cards before, or say it’s because Harry Barnes finally wrote it down for him on one of them bar-room napkins. Because that’s what Harry done: he wrote it all down for him, all that poker knowledge down there in black ink on a paper napkin. Why hell, even somebody that never played poker before in his life, let alone a hand of whist or old maids, even somebody as green as Lyman is is bound to win if he can just manage to get Harry Barnes to write it all down for him on a Holt Tavern napkin. And the only thing that seemed to bother him was he hadn’t drawed no royal flush yet.”
“You mean he won some money then,” my dad said.
“Won hell,” Wenzel said. “Won hell — he won the first five hands he played and he was still drinking our beer.”
“Well sir,” my dad said. “I guess old Roy Goodnough did you and Harry Barnes a favor keeping Lyman buried out there all these years. You might have to stay home at nights.”
“It might be less taxing,” Wenzel said. “It surely might.” Then he laughed and spat into the gutter again but didn’t snap it off clean enough, so that a brown spit string hung from his bottom lip. He wiped it off with his hand and smeared it onto his pants cuff.
“But how long’d Lyman stay there?” my dad said. “How long did you and Harry Barnes let him pocket your nickles?”
“About five dollars’ worth,” Wenzel said. “And that wasn’t near long enough.”
Because, according to Wenzel, after Lyman had won the first five hands of poker he played, it began to appear that he was getting bored. It was as if he was saying to himself, So this here is the game of poker that I been hearing so much about all these years. Well, shoot now, it ain’t so much. It ain’t a tall what it’s cracked up to be. So I reckon I’ll just see what else there is to do on a Saturday night. And what Lyman did was, he stood up in the middle of a hand that had already been dealt and he went over to one of the waitresses. It didn’t seem to make any difference to him that the men in the booth were trying to play cards and that Harry Barnes had finally managed to deal himself three aces and a king of spades. Because when Harry called him back, asked him where in the hell he thought he was going, all Lyman said was, “Oh. You want your money back. Here, you can have it. I don’t want it none.”
“So he give it all back,” my dad said.
“Every dime,” Wenzel said. “Dumped it all out on the table.”
“Well, it ain’t like planting corn or stacking hay,” my dad said. “He hadn’t sweat enough for it.”
“Sure,” Wenzel said. “Only you ain’t played poker with Harry Barnes.”
“Just once,” my dad said. “I could see it wasn’t gambling. But then you was saying how Lyman went over to some waitress.”
“Agnes Wilson,” Wenzel said. “He went over to Agnes Wilson, that big hefty gal with pink hair and them big legs that some boys claim is soft as pillows. Anyway, she ain’t been working at the tavern long — come over here from Norka when her husband run off to Denver with some telephone operator. She’s got that kid that got hisself kicked out of school for playing with ladies’ corsets.”
Then for the first time that afternoon I said something. I had been listening to them talk and watching Wenzel spit tobacco, but now they were talking about something I knew about. I said, “No, Mr. Gerdts, I believe it was garter belts.”
Wenzel Gerdts looked at me as if he was shocked, as if someone had come up behind him and buzzed him with a cow prodder. He seemed to have forgotten that all that time I had been standing there with them in front of Wandorf’s Hardware Store. It was as if I was a stray calf that had suddenly decided to speak, even if all I had to say was: “Garter belts.”
“Was it?” Wenzel said, looking at me. “I heard it was corsets.”
“No, I believe it was garter belts all right,” I said. “He was making slingshots with them and selling them to kids for a nickel, three for a dime.”
“Did you buy one?” my dad said.
“No, sir,” I said. “The elastic was all pooped out. It was too stretched.”
My dad started laughing then, and Wenzel Gerdts choked a little on his Red Man chewing tobacco. I didn’t know what I had said that was funny, but I grinned and felt pleased that I had been able to make my dad laugh. He didn’t laugh much, not openly or loudly. The amusement would show in his eyes, but I don’t remember him laughing very often. He laughed that time, though, and maybe because I was the cause of it is the reason why I remember that afternoon so well.