Spoonbenders

Buddy checked his watch. “I’ll find you,” he said, and headed into the crowd.

Frankie didn’t like it, but he kept his cool. And after a few more spins, it was clear his friendly relationship with the pill was intact. Other players started to copy his bets, and he could feel the crowd’s attention on him. It was like being onstage again with the Amazing Telemachus Family, but better. He was the solo act. The closer. The top bill. If only his mother could see him now.

“Twenty-eight,” Frankie said. “Straight up.” One number, thirty-five-to-one payout.

The croupier gave him the merest glance, and Frankie could read her disapproval. Well, fuck you, lady! he thought. I’m here to win. I know it, the crowd knows it.

Then the pill dropped onto the twenty-eight, and the laughter and applause broke out around the table. Someone clapped him on the back. The woman next to him, a chubby redhead with friendly green eyes, giggled and rested a hand on his forearm.

On the next bet, Frankie said, “Let it ride.” The redhead gasped. Very satisfying. Myriad hands pushed chips onto the layout, everybody wanting to get on the party bus. He barely needed to look at the wheel to tell the pill where to drop.

The shouts went up like fireworks.

He suppressed the urge to take a bow. In front of him was more money than he’d ever dreamed of making.

A man in a dark suit and gold name tag had appeared behind the croupier, whispering into her ear. The croupier nodded, then stepped away from the table. The man with the name tag waved another croupier forward, this one a burly white man.

The new croupier called for bets. Frankie took a small stack, just a thousand bucks, and bet on red. It was a double-or-nothing payout, like hardly playing at all, but it gave him time to think. This time he didn’t try to control the ball, just let it run around the track, off the leash.

“Red! Thirty-two!” the croupier said. Another win. The floor manager or pit boss or whatever he was had not left the table. He looked at Frankie with a blank expression that could have meant anything.

Shit, Frankie thought. Now even blind luck was fucking him over. He needed to lose, and now. He left the small stack on red, and matched it with another thousand. The crowd seemed disappointed. To go from a straight-up bet to a time-waster?

He couldn’t leave the table, though. That would break the vision. And what would happen then?

“Tissue, champ?” It was the redhead.

He’d started to sweat. Nixon-versus-Kennedy sweat. He took the handful of Kleenex and mopped his eyes. The pill was humming along the track, and he was thinking, Black black black black—

“Red!” the new croupier said. “Red seven. Seven red.”

“Fuck,” Frankie said.

“What’s the matter?” asked the redhead.

“Pick a number,” Frankie said. Belatedly he put a smile on his face.

“I think you’d better do that,” she said.

“Please. Any number.”

“Twenty-one,” she said.

“Great.” Frankie pushed five thousand onto twenty-one, then watched with dread as the croupier replaced the stack with the marker. The pit boss was staring at him. Frankie glanced at his watch. He just needed to last five more minutes. Five minutes! Then he could cash out and get the hell out of here.

The redhead gripped his arm more tightly as the pill slowed. “Come on, twenty-one!” she said.

“Jesus, just shut up,” he said under his breath.

“What did you say?” She pulled her arm away.

“Nothing, just—” His eye was on the ball. Months of practice had taught him to judge velocity. And God damn if the pill wasn’t heading for the neighborhood of twenty-one: nineteen, thirty-one, eighteen, six…and then it dropped. Twenty-one.

“FUCK ME!” Frankie shouted.

Later, he realized that it looked very much like a bomb going off. The roulette wheel jumped ten feet into the air and spun away like a flying saucer. The pill shot into the crowd. Every chip around the table—Frankie’s huge stacks, the croupier’s supplies, the winnings of every player at the table—exploded ceiling-ward and rained down. Every customer within fifty feet of the table became a shouting, grasping, delirious animal.

The redhead looked at him in shock. “What did you do?” she said.

Firm hands grabbed him under his arms. Two large men in dark suits had seized him. “This way, asshole,” one of them said, and they hauled him toward a door.

“It wasn’t me!” he shouted. “It wasn’t me!”

He left Mitzi’s Tavern, thinking about big numbers. Big numbers and contingency plans. How the hell was he going to raise twenty grand? There was only one way.

“God damn it!” He’d pulled into the driveway and had banged into a line of big plastic buckets, sending them tumbling. Farther up the driveway sat bags of cement mix, a stack of blond lumber, and a pallet of something covered by a tarp. He backed up and parked in the street.

Buddy squatted by the front door of the house. He was hammering away at a wooden frame that he’d erected around the cement step. Frankie marched down the driveway, heading for the garage and the back of the house, ignoring him.