Luck has a sound. If you listen close you can hear it in the New Orleans box shuffle. It has a certain cadence, a rhythm broken only by the cutting of the deck. It took the trained ear of a career gambler to detect the off key note of a fixed deal, and most people who played cards were none such. James Garnett was, and he’d practiced for years until in his hands the deck was true as a wife and honest as gold. It was a masterful performance, and like any accomplished stage show it wasn’t even noticed when it was done right.
The man who’d taught him to deal crooked diamonds had been a great apostate of luck. He didn’t believe in luck enough to bet on it, but he believed that it would come for him like an angry god out of some sailor’s tale if he bucked it too hard. It was why a dealer had to be very good if he was going to slip the ace along the pot. It was why he demanded perfection, and in time Garnett had learned to deliver it reliably. As all sons do to their fathers, Garnett had scoffed at the idea that he might be strapped to the wheel of fate one day. But as he’d grown wiser he’d begun to wonder about the rambling sermons fueled by swamp whiskey that his old man had occasionally given him. Garnett had wondered about the happenstance that had driven him from town to town, always hungry for that next big stake.
It was in Gallow’s Hill, identical to a dozen other small cow towns that dotted maps of the West like a frontier rash, that Garnett was sure he’d found a place to recoup his losses. A herd had come through, and the drovers mixed with the town folks at the Hangman’s Laugh. There were drinkers and diners, men that had money they’d earned with sweat and grit who weren’t averse to trying to earn a little more with a friendly game. They’d come and they’d gone; some only played a hand or two, some had played significantly more, and Garnett had charmed them all. Hearty handshakes, standing them to a drink and a kind smile were sometimes enough to make a man that had lost a month’s pay feel as if he’d come away a winner.
That had all changed when the green eyed gambler had come to sit at Garnett’s table. He was a pale young man in an old fashioned high collar, like bad luck dressed up in his Sunday go to meeting. Garnett had stood the man a drink, and he’d given his name as Fawkes. Garnett had waited until Fawkes had taken a sip of the coffin varnish they passed off as real whiskey, and then asked if he’d be interested in a gentleman’s game. Fawkes had agreed, offering Garnet a smile that didn’t touch his feverish eyes.
And so the performance had begun. Garnett had dealt Fawkes several good hands. Then Garnett had slowly started to stack the court. A few Jacks here, a few Kings there, and the chips that Fawkes had won began to trickle back across the river to his stacks. Fawkes just smiled and ordered another drink. Then he’d asked a question in his cheap tobacco voice.
“Brought that shuffle a long way, didn’t you Jim?” And then, just like that, the cards had begun to fall over one another like dead soldiers. The chaos of battle overwhelming any sort of proper formation. Garnett laughed, trying to repair the damage and dealing blind.
“No one calls me Jim except my mother,” Garnett said.
“Is that so?” Fawkes replied, tossing a few more chips into the pot. “Odd that. Ah well, I suppose there’s more than one Louisiana gambler handles a deck as well as you do that’s come out West.”
Garnett lost that hand. As befitted the custom of the times, he offered the deck to the winner to shuffle. Fawkes took the deck with his left hand, and he did something that was hard for the eye to follow. A smooth flick of the wrist and slide of the fingers, cutting the cards once, twice, and a third time before he offered the deck back to Garnett.
“I don’t shuck another man’s deck,” he said, humor dancing in his sea glass gaze. “You keep the cards. I don’t need to deal you, Jim.”
Garnett took the deck back, and realized his hands were clammy with sweat. His mouth had gone dry as trail dust, and there was something niggling at his mind. Something that he should remember, but the thought was shy and wouldn’t come. So Garnett put on his performer’s smile and shuffled again. From that hand on it seemed he couldn’t win. Aces deserted their posts, full houses stood empty and once he’d dealt himself the cards he’d meant to give Fawkes. It wasn’t every hand, but it was enough to bleed Garnett of the winnings he’d managed to amass since he sat down in the saloon over the course of the evening.
The place had died like a snake with a broken back. There had been some music, some other games, but as he and Fawkes had their duel the life bled out between the cracks. Men whose money had run out and who had a long ride on the next day, or a wife waiting at home had deserted the place. The piano stopped playing, and soon it was just the two men, with a bored looking tender behind the bar. It was, in Garnett’s estimation, time to bring the game to a close.
When Garnett picked up the cards again he was careful to skim them over his fingertips. As he shuffled he felt for the subtle curves and barely there pockmarks. This time there weren’t any mistakes. There weren’t any wandering loyalties, and the cards danced the box social just like he told them to.
“Headed back East?” Fawkes asked as he tossed in his ante.
“Wasn’t terribly set on one direction,” Garnett said as he anted up as well. He looked at his hand; aces full of jacks with the two court pages wall-eying one another. Just as he’d known they would be. “What about you? Heading that way?”
“Yes,” Fawkes said. “I’ve got business with a man. Been asking all around for him.”
As Fawkes spoke he rearranged his cards on the table with a single finger until they curved in a sickle moon like a huckster’s fortune telling. He didn’t lift them, didn’t even look at them, but he tossed three of his blue chips into the pot. As gambits went Garnett had seen some strange things, but he’d never seen a man bet blind in a game of Bluff. Garnett matched and raised.
“Who’s the man?” Garnett asked. “Always happy to help when I can.”
“Fellow by the name of Ruby. Jim Ruby,” Fawkes said.
“Gentleman Jim Ruby?” Garnett asked. “I’ve heard the name. I thought that he died? Something about a falling out with Johnny Ringold and his bunch?”
“No, Ruby isn’t dead,” Fawkes said. He matched Garnett’s raise, and then added another stack of chips with a casual push of his hand. “Had the words straight from Ringold himself.”
“I thought he was dead too?” Garnett asked, looking at the pot. He could have stopped right then and taken his earnings. It was more than he’d come to town with, and it would have been enough to see him on to the next burg. But he had never been a man to walk away from good odds. So he pushed the remainder of his chips into the pot.
“Ringold? Oh yes indeed, dead as Latin,” Fawkes answered, pulling his lips back from his teeth. The expression transformed his face into something unpleasant; a rattlesnake smile, all poison and pain. “Ringold, Harlan Sanders, Mickey Connors and Adam Fredricks. Terrible ends one and all.”
As he spoke each name, Fawkes dropped a stack of chips into the pot. They crashed and slid, echoing in the mostly empty bar. His head was tilted slightly to one side, and in the dim light of the kerosene his eyes seemed to burn like the copper powder in a Chinaman’s firecracker. That look made Garnett’s mouth go numb and his throat clench tight, like a memory of a dream that had left a hot, wet fist in your guts but you just couldn’t remember. Garnett licked his lips, and then laid his cards down.
“Shall we see what it is you have?” He asked Fawkes. As the one hand moved, Garnett slid the other to the hidden pepperbox in his waistcoat. A little insurance just in case some unpleasantness should result from a friendly game. Or in case he caught someone cheating, which broke the first rule his father had ever taught him.
Fawkes kept smiling, and he turned his cards over one at a time. His movements were smooth, a simple turn that Garnett seen before. He smelled the dead ghost of incense, and licked dry lips as he watched. One by one the hand was revealed, and Garnett felt the trap drop out in his guts. All four of Hoyle’s painted ladies stared up at him, the four queens clustered around the Ace of Spades. But there was something different about the high card. The Ace was upside down, the tip of the black spear pointing at Garnett like an accusatory finger. The edges of the card were blackened as if it had been in a fire, and the face was a miniature masterpiece, painted with careful brush strokes. He had seen that card before. Five years ago on the day that he and all the others had been cursed.
“How did they die?” Garnett asked. His voice didn’t shake, and there was no sweat on his brow. He slid the pistol into his hand, distracting the eye as he swallowed the rest of his drink. “The others that you mentioned, I mean.”
“Their luck just ran out,” Fawkes replied, assuming a similar position of ease. He didn’t reach for the pot, and he took a long swallow from his own glass without turning a hair. “Fredricks was thrown by a spooked horse and broke his neck. Connors was prospecting when a rock fell on him and crushed his ribs. Body was found a week later in a miserable state. Sanders fell asleep with his cigar in his teeth while stealing away in a farmer’s hay stable. And I think you know how Ringold went, don’t you Jim?”
“Shot, wasn’t he?” Garnett offered, cocking the pistol as he spoke, raising his voice to cover up the hammer. “In the back I’d been told. Five times, terrible thing to do to a man.”
“It is,” Fawkes agreed.
The two men had no words for a time. Garnett shifted in his seat, and Fawkes sipped at his glass as casually as if he were at home in his own parlor. Just like he couldn’t feel the budding storm. He met and held Garnett’s eyes, and after a time Garnett began to nod. He kept nodding, as if he’d forgotten that he was doing it.
“The witch,” he said. His voice was raw, like someone had ripped it out of him. Fawkes nodded once. “Are you a ghost?”
Faux didn’t reply, but he reached to his collar with one hand and unbuttoned it. The fabric folded down, and Garnett leaned forward to look. Faux tilted his head back, stretching the skin of his throat. There was a rough scar there, the brand of a rope cinched tight and left to swing. Garnett couldn’t look away from it, fascinated by the tiny, puckered whorls in the skin. He remembered now. The house in the hills that none of them knew was there. The fortune teller who lived in it, and who had laid the cards for each of them. The woman that Sanders had taken, and then passed to the others. He remembered her green eyes, burning with gypsy fire. She had spoken her curse, and Sanders had struck her. He kept doing it, laughing with breath that smelled like an All Sorts barrel. Then Garnett remembered the boy, pale and dark haired. How he’d tried to run, and how they’d drug him back with a rope. How they’d left him standing on his tip toes on a three legged stool, wearing nothing but a noose as the house burned around him. No witnesses to what they’d done.
“No,” Fawkes said with a smile as he saw the whole scene flash across Garnett’s face. “I’m just lucky.”
“Nobody’s that lucky,” Garnett snarled. He raised the gun, holding it at arm’s length. Fawkes saw the gun, but he didn’t move. He just tilted his head to one side, a garish imitation of the Hanged Man.
“Don’t do it,” Fawkes said, his voice low and soft. Garnett pulled the trigger, and the gun exploded.
All it took was a second. The hammer fell on a jostled load, the powder sparking to the other chambers. The whole mechanism flew apart like a devil’s sneeze, hot lead and sharp steel gouging the tabletop and digging into the floor. Garnett’s hand was gone, a blackened ruin of bone and slag with raw, red meat showing through charred flesh. His mouth had been opened to scream, and it had stayed there. The hammer had flown free and pulped the gambler’s silver tongue, slivers of lead burning and popping his eyes so that they ran down his face like thick, egg-white tears of contrition.
The thing that had once been Gentleman Jim Ruby, the keenest sharp in the deck, tried to get to its feet. But the body knew it was dying even if the spirit wasn’t ready. The shattered hulk crashed to the floor, choking on its own blood and bile before the flesh released the ghost inside.
The green eyed gambler lifted his drink in a toast and knocked back the blackberry whiskey neat as pips. He stood and sifted through the winnings, clearing the green felt like a priest wiping off an altar. The young man with the hangman’s smile set the Ace he’d brought all the way from that backwoods cabin where he’d been raised and placed it carefully in the center of the table. He reached to his face, touching a small cut from where a bullet had whizzed past, and let a drop of his own blood fall onto the center of the spade. Finally he placed every red chip he’d earned, a small stack of five bloody vouchers, atop it. Just for good luck.
For other tales by Neal Litherland, check out the following:
The Watchmaker’s Daughter- In the 3rd installment of New Avalon, a new discovery is made at the University. Old Makato’s daughter was always precocious, but now she’s solved the puzzle of time itself. And she has seen that it is a terrible, heartbreaking thing indeed.
Tears of Pandora- In Alchemist’s Alley you can buy the dreams of a king with the purse of a pauper. Of course everyone that lives and works in the alley knows it’s smoke and mirrors… and that if you did somehow get your dream, it could very quickly turn into a nightmare.
Love is a Broken Clock- In New Avalon you can find miracles in every day breakthroughs, and damnations are a dime a dozen. In the Grates you can find anything for the most refined, or the most ruined, palates. If you look hard, you can find something as rare as true love.
Monster- An introduction to a grittier, more horrible world of monster hunting than most texts will go into. The man called Scar, the monster to the monsters, who stared so long into the abyss that now he calls it home.