Steadman's Blind

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 8

Steadman watched as the dealer swept his little pile of poker chips into the pot, each one representing a little piece of lost hope as he endured round after round of bad calls and worse timing. He thought he’d learned something during those two weeks under Rafferty’s tutelage, but classroom instruction didn’t always hold up against the battering ram of real world experience.

Nausea rose within him. The strident dings and trills of a hundred slot machines, with their flashing lights and occasional rush of coins, did nothing to help settle his stomach. He tried to block out the permeating stink from filth-encrusted ashtrays and the mingling smoke of a dozen brands of cigarettes, tinged by cheap cigars and the unmistakable scent of m*******a. Staring again at the dwindling pool of chips that held the last of his sister’s worldly wealth, he felt the weight of failure crushing down on him. Six stacks of chips he’d thrown into that drain, and Hank’s life depended on getting them back tenfold.

That wasn’t happening.

Tossing his cards into the muck, Steadman let his eyes go out of focus and drew deep breaths into his lungs, trying not to think too much about second-hand smoke. He needed to clear his head and keep his nerve. One off the button now, in the small blind, he placed the obligatory five-dollar bet and without much hope, peeled up the corners of his hole cards, fighting to keep his face neutral when he saw that he had a pair of queens. One by one, the other players folded as the action moved around the table until only Steadman and the big blind player to his left remained. That’s the way his luck had been falling—he finally got a decent pre-flop hand, and no one stuck around to play.

Somewhere, devils were laughing.

Steadman raised, like Rafferty taught him. Three times the big blind plus one, in the hopes the last remaining competitor would see him through. He tossed down forty dollars in chips.

And the big blind called.

Steadman struggled to keep the surprise and relief from showing in his face or demeanor. The man he faced was whippet thin, with sunken cheeks and a forehead that stood out like a shelf above Marty Feldman eyes. A very hard read. Steadman studied his opponent as the flop went down and thought he detected a flicker of excitement. The cards on the table were an ace, a five, and a queen. Steadman now had three queens.

Rafferty had schooled him in how to observe the players whenever he wasn’t engaged in figuring out his own hand or deciding how to bet. In fact, Rafferty had reiterated that he needn’t worry about his own hand—that it didn’t matter so much what he held, only what the other players thought he had. But that was a level of strategy above what he could manage at this point. He concentrated on trying to read his opponent and guarding his own reactions.

His experience of the man next to him suggested he had a loose aggressive style, a difficult type to play against. He bluffed often and lacked consistency in his betting patterns, making it hard to predict what he’d do or what his hole cards might be.

And that face!

How do you read a man who always looks like he just swallowed a firecracker? Steadman figured the guy for an ace and probably a face card. The ace in the flop would have him chasing the pot.

Sure enough, the man threw in a hundred. Steadman swallowed and tried not to look down at his dwindling stack of chips. He raised to two hundred. The man with the Eyes reraised to four hundred, and Steadman called. The reraise suggested to Steadman that the man now held two pair, aces over fives. That still wasn’t good enough to beat Steadman’s set of queens.

The dealer burned the top card and placed the turn. A nine. His opponent bet two hundred, Steadman raised to four, and the Eyes called. Now, everything hung on the last card to be flipped. The river.

It came up a five.

Steadman’s heart squeezed inside his chest. The best he could figure, his opponent now had a full house, three fives and two aces. But Steadman had a full house, too. Three queens over fives, making his the winning hand.

He controlled his breathing and tried not to let his hand tremble as he raised the bet and watched the Eye man reraise. Steadman called, pushing all but a handful of chips into the pot. Straining valiantly to keep in check the huge grin that wanted to bust out across his face, Steadman flipped over his pocket queens.

And his opponent showed a pair of fives.

A stab of shock, like a rain of pins and needles, crossed Steadman’s chest. Feldman Eyes had beaten him with four of a kind, a freak occurrence that couldn’t be happening. But it was. Somewhere, those devils were having a knee-slapping good time.

Steadman hadn’t seen it coming. This whole thing was a lousy idea and he should have worked harder to find a better solution, or talk Nan out of this one. But everything in him shrank from forcing her to play the guilt card, though he knew she would have done it to save her husband in the only way she knew how. Thad’s name hung unspoken in the air between them, and that had been enough.

The tips of Steadman’s ears burned as shame and disappointment flooded through him. He thought of the hours of instruction Rafferty had lavished on him, the confidence expressed, the expectation rendered. He remembered that first game with Rafferty’s cronies. The old guys had fleeced Steadman, cleaning him out of plastic money and taking great delight in it. But at the end of the evening, when Rafferty shooed the grinning grandpas out the door he told them, “Come back in two weeks, fellas, and the fish’ll take every chip you got.”

It had happened almost that way.

Steadman got a top-notch education out of Rafferty, but it hadn’t stopped him from losing all but six hundred bucks of Nan’s stake. She was depending on him to do this and the thought of going back to her, empty-handed and bereft of hope, was more than he could bear. He wasn’t in the right state of mind for playing poker, leaning far too heavily on emotion rather than reason, but an irresistible force made of equal parts despair and resignation pushed him toward the bitter end.

Still reeling from the shock of his defeat, he pushed forward the big blind bet, his hand seeming to move without his conscious volition. The dealer distributed the hole cards and Steadman peeked at his, registering a five and six of spades. A flicker of hope flared deep in his chest as the dealer laid out the flop—a four and a pair of sevens—but he allowed the wave of negativity within him to douse it. Two women sat across from him. The first met the pot requirements, and the second raised the bet. Her neighbor—a man wearing an ascot printed with spear-wielding pygmies—called, and the gum chewing man to Steadman’s right, who’d dispatched an entire pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint in three rounds of play, also stayed in.

May as well end this now.

Steadman set his jaw and ground his teeth, knowing he’d lost his grip on rational thought and gone fatalistic. Rafferty had warned him against this. He felt his cheeks flame as he pushed the last of his chips to the center of the table, going all in. The dealer set up a side pot for the other players and flipped over a jack for the turn. The players made their bets and Steadman watched the dealer place down the last card.

An eight.

Steadman stared, not daring to believe. He had a straight—a fine, strong hand. His opponents settled up the side pot and Steadman showed his two cards, good enough to win the main pot, a little over three thousand dollars. Some of the heaviness floated out of his chest. He’d just made a huge step toward recovering Nan’s stake and her hope for Hank’s future.

Before anyone at the table could move, the lights flickered and went out, plunging the windowless room into inky blackness. A siren wailed in the distance, and then another. Flaring red lights strobed into the darkness, striping a sea of frightened faces with crimson splashes, reminiscent of blood. Steadman’s heart lurched, sending little electric shocks through his veins. Something bad was happening.

A murmur, and then a roar of panicked voices rose and people ran in the dark, slamming against tables, scattering chips and knocking over cocktail glasses. A woman screamed. Someone heavy plowed into Steadman’s table, sprawling over the top of it, and the pot of chips—his chips—flew out into space.

“What’s happening?” shouted a man’s voice, harsh with fear.

“It’s Mt. Rainier,” someone screamed back. “It’s gone and blown. A tidal wave of mud is headed our way!”