Dealer's Choice

Darlene knows she was asked to play only because they needed a fifth for the game, but she's worked 17 straight days now, and the Friday night options for entertainment on this little island are not good. She is determined to be one of the boys. There's the cook, two maintenance electricians from the fish plant, a Filipino man she's seen driving a fork-lift on the dock and her. She hasn't won a pot all night and is down almost $30, but she's promised herself she's not going to get bent out of shape over every damn thing. That was the whole point in taking the cannery kitchen job on this rain-soaked chunk of Alaskan rock. Getting away from the pressures of city life a little, learning to relax. Anyway, this is only a two-dollar-limit game, and with the salmon season in full swing and the plant running three shifts, there are plenty of dishes to wash and she's getting all the overtime she can handle.

"What's the game again?" Darlene asks. She pours a little more tequila into her plastic cup, another splash of Mountain Dew. The absurdly green concoction looks and tastes like radiator coolant, but it's impossible to get alcohol in Chignik Bay, and the pint of Cuervo was the only thing she'd been able to score under the table. She pours a bit more into the Mountain Dew. What the hell, it's a friendly game.

"I just called it. Seven stud, Follow the Queen," the cook says. He's already dealt two cards facedown in front of everyone and is about to turn the next one up. He's mid-40s, a former Marine--he's told Darlene all about it: Nam, Cambodia--but he's gone to fat now, kept the haircut, lost the muscle. He wears a short cropped beard that extends from just under his eye sockets down across two substantial chins and on all the way into the collar of his bulging Spawn till you die T-shirt. It gives Darlene the impression that his whole body is carpeted with the same half-inch, translucent, gray-white hairs. Along with the belly, the slouch and the watery pink eyes, the effect is undeniable: Everyone calls him Possum.

Possum pauses and lets Billy, the younger of the two electricians, break a twenty and buy more of the red plastic wire connector nuts they're using for chips. The other electrician, Walter, a late-middle-aged man with the full beard and leathery wrinkles of a lifetime sourdough, is the banker for the game. While they work out the transaction, Darlene takes a swallow of her drink and tries to remember what Follow the Queen is exactly. These guys play strictly kitchen-table poker, with so many wild cards and twists on the last card and such that it's hard to keep track of them all: Low Chicago, High Chicago, Blind Baseball, Roll Your Own, Crisscross, Royal Birth--it goes on and on.

They are playing in Possum's room, one of the elementary classrooms at the village school rented out during the summer months to cannery workers. There are chalkboards and bulletin boards, and tiny wood-and-metal desks stacked almost to the ceiling in one corner. The table they are playing on tonight barely clears Darlene's knees, and she can't help thinking they should be working with white paste and construction paper instead of a poker deck. While Billy counts out his new wire nuts, she stands and stretches her legs. She pulls the tail of her blouse out of her jeans and smooths it over her hips with her palms. Leaning into the dish sink all day has put a knot in her neck a sailor would be proud of, and now she throws her head back and rolls it from side to side. When she looks back down she realizes Billy has finished counting and that they are all staring up at her from their tiny molded-plastic chairs.

"Follow the Queen?" she says, easing back down. She raises her eyebrows quizzically. "Tell me again how it goes?"

Possum clutches the deck tighter and pouts, letting Darlene know he doesn't plan to repeat himself. The truth is, when he explained the game she was chatting, doing some innocent flirting across the table with Billy. She casts a needy eye his way again.

"Remember we played it earlier?" Billy says, smiling. He's smitten for sure, and he's a real cutie too--tall and blond with big blue Norwegian eyes a lot like her own. But he's way too young for her, and in any case the other thing she promised herself when she signed on for the summer was that she would do the whole stretch without any of that kind of action, for once in her life. Those were her resolutions: For the next three months she was not going to get angry and she was not going to get laid. She had a vague theory that if she could avoid one of those she might avoid the other.

"Follow the Queen," Billy prompts her again. "You know."

"I think so," Darlene says.

"Follow the Bitch," Possum says. "Follow the mop-squeezing Bitch." He shoots Darlene an exaggerated, fake-apologetic glance, like he's suddenly realized there is a lady present. He makes it look playful, but when he dealt this game earlier he said the same rude thing, and there is a trace of heat in his words that Darlene recognizes right off.

It's just talk, she tells herself. Marine stuff. Construction-guy talk. And she's heard way worse every day of her life--who hasn't? She isn't going to let it bother her.

"What's wild?"

Possum ignores her and begins flipping the cards, announcing each one out loud as though no one else at the table can read them. "Billy gets a six. A nine of hearts for Walter. Roberto gets a--"

"Are queens wild?" She's doing it now half to piss him off. "Are they? Queens?"

Possum closes his eyes and peels the next card off the top of the deck. He holds it there upright in front of him but doesn't look at it. Through clenched jaws he says, "If a queen turns up, the next card, the one that follows, becomes the wild card. Comprendo?"

"Why, thank you," she says. "Thank you, Possum."

When he opens his eyes, his face collapses. "Well, wouldn't you just fucking know it?" He throws the card, the queen of clubs, to the man sitting on Darlene's right, the Filipino named Roberto. Roberto is a good player, quiet and smart, takes every bet seriously. At times, Darlene gets the impression he pretends not to speak English well in order to avoid all the table talk. She's seen plenty of real players like Roberto back in Las Vegas.

"Now you will be getting de wile card," Roberto says to her as the queen settles in front of him. "Next card. See? Pallow de queen."

"Natch," Possum says. "She would get the candy." He turns over another card and flips it to her. "Seven. Sevens are wild. For now, anyway. If another queen rolls, everything changes." He deals himself an ace of diamonds. "It's your bet," he says. "With the seven wild, you got a pair at the very least. You do understand that?"

She peeks at her two down cards, though she just looked at them as they were dealt to her--the move of a rookie, she's aware, because serious stud players, Roberto for instance, always wait until they get their first faceup card before looking in the hole. Who knows why? Maybe it's some kind of macho self-discipline thing. It reminds her of her first husband and the way he used to strut around every time he managed a "one match" campfire. You'd think he'd gained pecker length or something.

"Yoo-hoo," Possum says. "Anybody in there?"

"Wait," she says. "I have to think."

"Don't threaten us." He gets a smile all around.

She takes her time staring at the pair of sevens she has in the hole to match the one faceup. Three wild cards. It sets her heart pounding way out of proportion to the low limit in this game. She feels the heat rising to her face and tugs at the neck of her blouse.

"Two dollars," she says, throwing out eight wire nuts. "That's the most I can bet, right?" She pulls the pin from her hair, which she shakes out so that it falls, blonde and shimmering, over her shoulders and down the front of her blouse. "This is fun!"

"Give a woman a wild card ..." Possum says. He rolls his eyeballs skyward, but Darlene notices that they stop and linger at the point where her hair ends along the ridge of her breasts. She fingers a button as though she might unfasten it. He toys with the pile of wire nuts in front of him. "Oh, how I'd love to raise," he says. "There is nothing in this world I would like better than that. Nothing."

Darlene can think of one or two things he'd like better. She says, "I hope I'm not stopping you."

"I'm not even going to try to explain." He simply matches her bet. Billy and Walter both see the bet as well, though there was no question that they would. They truly seem to be playing for fun, and Darlene believes it's because they probably make the unbelievable wages everyone says that they do.

The Filipino, Roberto, cuts his dark eyes at her, then back to his hand, carefully considering his queen and whatever he's got in the hole, then back to her again. She raises her drink and salutes him with it. He slides in his two dollars' worth of wire nuts. "I don't know 'bout dis one." He motions toward Darlene with his head.

She holds the cup to her lips and barely touches the liquid with the tip of her tongue. Across the table, Billy's neck goes red. Possum glares at her.

"Pot's right," he says. Still looking at her, he takes a sip of his beer, dries his fingers on his T-shirt and starts dealing the next round. "Follow the ballbuster. A jack for Billy. Nine of spades for Walter makes a pair. A jack for Roberto. And a queen for Missy! Free ride's over now, little lady. Sevens are no longer wild, and the next card is mine."

He's puffing up like the big sculpins (continued on page 153)Dealer's Choice(continued from page 108) and irish lords she catches on a hand-line off the cannery pier after work those nights when there's even less than nothing to do on the island. His eyes bulge as though he's come up from a great depth. He's sprouting pectoral fins, gill plates.

"And the new wild card is--" He drags this out good. Holding the deck up to eye level in his left palm, he slides the top card halfway off, peeks under it and flips it faceup on the table in front of him. "A deuce! Deuces are now wild." He pushes a pile of wire nuts into the pot. "Pair of aces bets two." Everyone sees the bet, and Possum reins in his excitement enough to start dealing the next round.

Just to fry him, Darlene is about to turn the charm on Billy again when the door to the room opens and in walks a dark young girl in a Bering Pride Seafoods windbreaker and hot-pink Lycra tights. She's about 15 or so, obviously Aleut, and something else too. The name George is stitched into the too-large nylon jacket in flowery cursive. The girl says to Roberto, "Dad, can I sleep at Mom's house tonight?"

"OK, I don't care," Roberto says. "Long as she's not drinking."

"She doesn't have anything," the girl says. "Nobody does." She looks hungrily at the beer cans in front of Possum and the electricians, at the bottle of Cuervo next to Darlene's Mountain Dew. She turns to leave.

"And that guy's not there either?" Roberto asks her. "Right?" He glances around the table uncomfortably. Billy and Walter make a show of studying their cards, but Possum is staring openly at the girl, as though searching for some mark on her, something that will describe her role in whatever little drama her father is hinting at. Darlene hasn't been on the island long enough to know the particulars, but Roberto's embarrassment gives her a pretty clear picture of what the story is.

"He's out on the seiner," the girl says.

As Roberto considers that, Darlene looks the girl over and sees it all: the suede fringed boots caked with island mud, the look-at-me rings, two and three on a finger, the chipped fire-and-ice nail polish, the lavender eyeliner--way too wide, too thick and all wrong in any case for that beautiful olive-brown skin. She can see in the girl's eyes the despair at her entrapment on this rock, the loathing for this little village. And she sees the romance of an older guy too--a guy with money, fish money, crab money, all those paychecks accumulating for weeks at sea.

The girl catches Darlene studying her and she looks straight back, staring longingly at all that blonde hair, at Darlene's fine, hard breasts. Darlene can see her calculating the wide swath she could cut through the village boys with equipment like that. She wants to say to her, "Oh, honey, slow down. Slow way, way down." And then the girl is gone, back out into the rainy Aleutian night.

Roberto pulls on his face. He looks a little pale. "You have children?" he asks Darlene.

"A boy, 16," she says and hears herself rush to add, "I was only 17 myself when I had him." But it's clear they are not concerned with her age. When she says, "He lives with his father back in Vegas," everybody comes alert at the name of the city.

Roberto's eyes narrow, wariness cresting around the rims. "You a dealer?" The others tense as though he's about to unmask a monster among them, a serial killer, a vampire, a feminist. Billy and Walter look like they are going to make a dash for the door.

"No way," she laughs and pats Roberto's arm. "Keno runner for a while. Mostly, though, I was a stripper."

That does it. Roberto is not interested, his mind on his daughter again. But Billy and Walter sit up a little taller in their seats, and Possum is staring at her shirt-front. OK, if this is the way it's going to be. . . .

"Started at the Palomino Club on my twenty-first birthday. That was the first totally nude club in Vegas." She emphasizes "totally." She doesn't have a clue if that's true about the club, and she doesn't care. "I was so hot." She shakes her head as if remembering times too wild to talk about.

"You never mentioned that before," Possum says. He makes it sound as though he's been cheated somehow.

She pours on the honey. "I feel like I know you guys a little better now and I can open up a little, is all."

Roberto is too inscrutable for her to figure, but she can see the words "open up" stall in the minds of the other three as they ponder the possibilities. She can feel the vibrations coming across the floor under the table. The overhead light flickers. And it's not just the big cannery generators and refrigeration units either. Billy has given up pretending not to stare at her now, and she has to admit it's kind of sweet. Maybe the age difference isn't such a big deal. For a moment she seriously considers it.

Nah. Not this time. But it is tempting. It's always tempting.

You'd think the cold, the constant rain on this island, would put a damper on all that, yet sometimes she listens to the other women in the bunkhouse talking--they're girls really, coeds working on the slime line for the fat cannery paychecks that will give them another two semesters at schools Darlene has never even heard of. She hears them talking about guys, and it amazes her that, even after 12, 14 back-cramping hours packing salmon roe or gutting slimy cod in a room cooled to near freezing, they still have the energy to pair up with their male counterparts. And where do they go? Is there an old mattress, a scratchy wool blanket maybe, frayed and criss-crossed with pecker tracks, out there somewhere under the dripping, fog-drenched alder bushes?

"Come on, deal," Roberto says. He's turning a plastic wire nut over and over again in his fingers, walking it across his knuckles and back again. He's muttering to himself and shaking his head. "Women gonna be whores, you can't stop them. You just can't. No way." Then he looks up suddenly and sees Darlene watching him. "Don't listen to me," he says to her. "My daughter. She's making me estupid."

"There's a lot of that going around," Possum says.

"Whorishness or stupidity?" Darlene asks him.

"Sometimes both," Possum says and starts dealing another round, reading off the cards as they fall now even faster than usual. Darlene can't guess what has him more wound up, the vision of her naked gyrating bottom or the fact that he's the only one in the kitchen crew who knows about it. "Another six for Billy makes a pair. Walter gets a five to go with his pair of nines. A king for Roberto's queen and jack--straightening nicely. And a four for our dancing dishwasher here--no help." When he drops a second ace next to his wild deuce, everyone groans. He's apparently forgotten to swallow since hearing her revelation, and he spits all over himself as he says, "Three aces bets two bucks."

"Three fucking bullets," Billy moans. "I should have gone fishing tonight." But he puts his money in.

Walter shakes his head. "I am fishing." He sees the bet too.

"I can beat three aces right now," Roberto says. He reaches for his chips. "Two dollar, and two more." He slams them down on the table hard enough to knock over Darlene's empty cup.

This stuff with his daughter, his ex-wife, the guy out on the seiner and whatever he's been up to with the girl, it's definitely getting to Roberto. It's a hell of a thing to take advantage of, but, push comes to shove, a woman's got to look after herself, and Roberto is absolutely right in any case: There is no way to stop that young thing now. Nobody knows that any better than Darlene does. She counts out four dollars' worth of wire nuts. "I'm in."

Possum sees Roberto's raise without comment for once, as do Billy and Walter.

"Pot's right again." Possum wipes his forehead. There is a huge mound of the red wire connectors in the middle of the table and still two cards to go--one up, one down. Just as he's about to deal the next up card, Darlene says, "My second husband, James, picked all my music, made me practice my numbers till I ached in the worst places from those deep bends." She directs that at Billy, but she can almost hear the gears grinding in every brain at the table, the fluids backing up in other regions of their bodies. "James was very involved. Used to dress me up for my act and everything."

Possum throws the card so hard it flies past Billy and flutters off the table.

"Your husband?" Walter says as Billy fumbles around on the floor for his card. He takes off his cap and looks at it. He seems to consider the words Otis Elevator for a moment before replacing it on his head. "Your own husband dressed you to strip?"

"Oh yeah. He was always there when I performed too, except at special private functions at the hotels. If I was slack, or didn't look like I really wanted to be there, he'd mark me down. Then, when we got home he'd punish me." It's her turn to roll her eyes, like she's a little embarrassed to be talking about such personal matters.

She mixes another tequila antifreeze while she lets them try to imagine what sort of punishments a man would have to cook up for a woman who did naked squat thrusts for a living. Roberto clears his throat and looks away. Billy and Walter lift their beers to their lips, sip and then lower the cans again in unison so perfect it looks like a move they've been rehearsing for months. Possum deals the rest of the round, sets the deck down and reaches under the table with both hands to adjust the crotch of his pants.

Billy is now showing two sixes, a jack and an ace. Walter has a pair of nines with a five and the last ace in the deck. Roberto caught a ten and so has four to the open-ended straight on board, king high. Darlene has the queen, the four and, to her utter amazement, two sevens showing now to match the two she has in the hole. Possum gets a six to go with his three aces, no help. He bets two bucks anyway, but with all the aces accounted for, it's clear his heart isn't in it. Still, deuces are wild and he's got the only one showing. Billy and Walter call.

Roberto apparently has the straight and is hoping to blast out anyone he can before they catch a full house. "See your two and raise two more," he says. He puts his last eight wire nuts and two damp dollar bills into the pot.

"God, this is fun! I feel like dancing," Darlene says. Four pairs of eyes snap up. "I really do. I wish we had some music. Anyway, I'll see Roberto's raise and raise again." She puts in her six dollars' worth.

Possum squirms, but Darlene knows there's no way he's going to fold three aces at this point. It's a matter of pride. Balls, as they say in the kitchen. He runs his hand over the stubble field of his throat, drops it to his lap and tugs on himself. He calls the two raises. Billy and Walter fold out. Darlene offers them a look of pure sympathy, as though not having cards is an affliction they've all struggled with at one time or another, and she wishes she could just take them in her arms and hold them to her breast to comfort them. Roberto calls her raise with a sigh. The pot is right again.

"Here we go," Possum says. He deals the last cards facedown. One to Roberto, then Darlene, then himself. He looks at his card quickly and she watches his face light up. "Two bucks," he says. "Roberto? You want to raise me now, ol' buddy?" He's wearing a smirk you could park a truck in.

Anyone with eyes can see he caught some power on the last card: Either he paired something up to make a full house, or he got another wild deuce and now has four aces. Darlene feels Roberto watching her on her right as he thinks about his move. She picks at the corner of the card Possum just dealt her, but she doesn't look under it. Instead, she removes her earrings, her necklace and her watch and puts them all in a pile next to her chips.

Roberto shakes his head. "Dealer just got something good. Woman don't even need to look at her last card. What am I doing in this hand?" He turns his cards over and throws them into the middle of the table, muttering something in his dialect that it's probably just as well no one at the table can understand.

"Just you and me," Possum says. "Isn't it romantic?"

"Two bucks," she says.

"And two more back at you." Possum dumps more wire nuts on the pile before she's even finished sliding hers in. His hand brushes the top of hers over the pot. "OK, now tell us about your dancing," he says. "Come on, distract us. Distract me."

She looks right into his pink eyes and says, "I was working a private party at the Hilton one Halloween, conventioneers. I'd given the bellhops a cut to set it up for me. These were computer guys of some sort, very straight looking, math teacher haircuts and white short-sleeved shirts. I wore my cat costume, a real killer. I was down to my whiskers and G-string, on all fours on top of the coffee table, meowing and making them bark at me. I had them howling like farm dogs. But I misread them. Some clown pulled the light switch and said, 'Let's see if pussy can see in the dark.'

"When the lights went on, they had my hands tied behind my back and my G-string stuffed in my mouth. They bent me over the arm of the couch and smashed some seat cushions over my head to keep me quiet. Then they just held my legs and took turns at me. There were a lot of them and some were really drunk, so it went on for a long time, and they had fun with it too, pouring drinks on me, poking around with ice cubes. When they were more or less finished, one wise guy stuck a maraschino cherry inside me and said, 'There, good as new.' It took a very long time. Did I say that?"

Darlene keeps her eyes stitched to Possum's. He's frozen in place, one hand on his cards, the other in his lap. She can sense Billy, Walter and Roberto in the periphery, can feel their eyes on her.

"They left me like that, and when I finally managed to stand upright, the room was empty except for one really drunk slob sitting on the floor between my legs with his back against the couch. He was asleep with one arm around each of my ankles, holding on to my heels, his head jammed between my thighs. I kicked him awake and got him to untie my hands, but I was too tired and sore to do any of the things to him I now wish I had. So anyway, what do you say, Possum? Shall we raise the stakes? I mean now that it's just you and me?"

It takes Possum a moment to snap out of it and realize she's talking about the game again now, that the story is actually over. He swallows hard and croaks, "What have you got in mind?"

Darlene fishes two twenties out of the front pocket of her jeans. She irons them out on the table with her fingers and sets her last four wire nuts and her jewelry and watch on top of them. She pushes it all into the pot. "Call it a hundred bucks, and I'm all in. You up to that? It's all I have to bet."

She yawns like she's unconcerned about the bet, throwing her shoulders back to work out a kink in her spine. With her elbows nearly straight behind her, her blouse barely contains her breasts. Possum is looking at her like she just offered him something altogether different, like he's about to lunge across the table for her. She glances at the others. Billy and Walter are actually sweating; their foreheads are beaded with droplets. Roberto wipes the palms of his hands up and down his pants legs, then does it again.

Possum reaches into the pot and extracts her earrings. He slides them over to Darlene with a grin. "Wouldn't want you to go naked," he says. "But I'll cover the hundred." He licks three fingers and reaches into his shirt pocket for a roll of bills. He counts out the money and holds it over the pile. His hands are trembling.

"Call," he says, dropping the bills. He turns his hole cards faceup and shows the wild deuce he caught on the last card that gives him four aces. He's blinking more rapidly than Darlene would guess was possible. One knee is going up and down even faster.

She arranges her four natural sevens side by side on the table and then, almost as an afterthought, turns her last card faceup. It's the two of spades. Possum springs up out of his little chair so fast it falls over and shoots halfway across the floor. His face is a shade of red you'd want to see a doctor about.

"Five sevens!" Roberto says. "Five!" It's the first time he's raised his voice all night, and his accent has disappeared. "I don't believe it! She didn't even look at the last card!" Possum slumps over the table, knuckles pressed into the Formica top, his mouth hanging open as Darlene reaches out with both hands and crushes the pot against her breasts. Billy and Walter find their voices and start hooting about the odds against two players catching a wild card on the end, the insane way that she bet it. They are both humbled and deeply in love. Possum stands, looming over the table, incredulous. After a moment he collects his chair and lowers himself into it. "You win the deal too," he says, pushing the cards her way. He won't even look at her.

She elbows the big pile of wire nuts and bills aside to make room for the cards. As she stacks and shuffles them, she wonders which will bring her more pleasure: telling him that he is such an oaf that he flashed that two of spades as he dealt it to her, or letting him believe--letting them all believe--that she pushed the bet like that without really knowing she had the five sevens. It's a tough choice.

"And let's keep the table talk to a minimum," Possum says. "No more stories, huh?"

"Sure, Possum. Whatever you say." She winks at the others.

She finishes the shuffle and offers the deck to Roberto, who declines to cut. She prepares to deal.

"So what's it going to be now?" Billy asks her.

Darlene pretends to ponder the possibilities. But there's really no question in her mind. She feels great, and if Possum doesn't want her telling any more stories, that's fine with her. She doubts she could make up another one quite that good anyway. A maraschino cherry? Where in the hell had that come from?

"Well?" Possum says. "Come on, name it." He is furious, absolutely quivering all over.

Hey, better him than her.

"Ante up," she says finally. She undoes one button on her blouse, tosses her hair and starts dealing the cards around the table. "Same game," she says. "Follow the Bitch."

The others tense as though he's about to unmask a monster, a serial killer, a vampire, a feminist.