The Best American Noir of the Century

I tried to read their faces much the same as they would the cards in their hand. There was Jerry McReynolds, wide smile as always plastered across his face, a forty-year-old straight and single man free of the weight of day-to-day worries, a millionaire many times over due to a $5,000 investment in a small computer start-up outfit working out of a city he had never heard of, let alone visited. Jerry never missed a Thursday-night game, boasting of his streak as if he were a ballplayer about to make a move on Cal Ripken Jr.’s long-standing record of consecutive games played. He came outfitted in the same casual manner in which he approached the cards dealt his way, catalog-ordered shirts and jeans, nothing fancy, nothing wild. I could count on him to come in with two high-end bottles of Italian reds and quickly ease into the steady flow of cards and chatter that filled our weekly five-hour sessions. Jerry was the guardian of the chips and kept a small pad and a pen by his side, starting off the game with a $50 feed and dispensing out whites and blues to any player running low or chasing empty. Jerry kept his cards close, doing a quick fold if he felt his hand weak, playing the table as he did his life, on the up and up and without a hint of bluff. In five years of play, I could never recall a time when Jerry left the room with less in his pockets than he had at the start.

I sat back, rubbed the stiffness from the nape of my neck, and tried to recall how I came to know Jerry in the first place and couldn’t quite place it, my cloudy memory confining it to one of the holiday receptions my wife used to host on a semiregular basis back in the days when our marriage still had the scent of salvation. God, how I hated every one of those parties, forced to make small talk in a room packed mostly with her friends since the few I had were seldom invited or welcomed into her cloistered world. I took a long gulp from a glass of scotch and looked back on those long and tedious nights and did a quick flash of Jerry being dragged by the hand in my direction, a glass of white wine in one hand, my wife’s in the other. “You two will be good friends in no time at all,” she said as she made a quick U-turn back into party traffic, her short and tight black skirt giving strong hints of the curvy body that rested beneath, long red hair hanging just off the edge of her shoulders. She was about forty-two then, give or take, and looked at least ten years younger, the quick smile and easy laugh a sweet antidote to the onslaught of age. I wasn’t quite sure how Dottie and Jerry came to know one another and I never did bother to ask, but there was always more to their friendship than they were willing to let on. There was that look between them. You know the kind I mean? As if someone was in front of them telling a joke and they were the only two in on the punch line.

“Five-card draw, jacks or better to open,” Steve said, giving the deck one more shuffle before the deal, waiting for us all to ante.