“Puh. Silly game.” He swung back to the duffel bag, stopped short, turned and gave me a prolonged look as if making up his mind. Then thrust an arm in again. Scrounging through the bag up to his shoulder, he felt around until he grunted and produced another deck of cards even more hard-used than the first.
“The Kate is not to know,” he warned as he handed me the deck and pulled out a box to serve as a table. “Man-to-man, yah? Here, fill up your eyes good.”
I was already bug-eyed. The first card, when I turned the deck over for a look, maybe was the queen of hearts all right, but like none I had ever seen—an old-time sepia photograph of a woman grinning wolfishly in a bubble bath, her breasts out in plain sight atop the soapy cloud like the biggest bubbles of all.
With a gulp, I spread more of the cards faceup on the box table, which meant breasts up, legs up, fannies up, pose after pose of naked women or rather as close to naked as possible without showing the whole thinger. Who knew there were fifty-two ways of covering that part up? That didn’t even count the joker, a leggy blonde wearing a jester’s cap and coyly holding a tambourine over the strategic spot. Mingled with the Manitowocers’ shadow pictures from the photographic panes overhead, the frolicsome set seemed to be teasing the portrait sitters into what a good time could be had if they simply took all those clothes off and jumped into bathtubs and swimming pools bare naked.
“French bible,” Herman defined the fleshy collection with a shrug, as I still was pop-eyed at it. Scooping the deck in with the tamer one, he shuffled them together thoroughly, the kings and queens and jacks now keeping company with their nude cousins and the ghostly Manitowocers.
He had me read out canasta rules from Hoyle while he dealt hands of fifteen cards each as if four of us were playing, the same as Aunt Kate had just tried, but that was the only similarity, the cards flying from his fingers almost faster than the eye could follow. I felt justified to hear him let out an exasperated “Puh” at the various rules that threw me. After scooping up his hand and studying it and then doing the same with the other two and mine, he instructed me to sort my cards into order, from kings—in the girly deck, even those were naked frolickers around a throne or doing something pretty close to indecent with a crown—on down, left to right, with aces and wild cards and any jokers off the end together for easy keeping track, something Aunt Kate had never bothered to tip me off to. I will say, the bare parts of the French ladies peeking from behind the usual queens and jacks garbed to their eyebrows did cause me to pay a good deal more attention to the display of my cards.
His eyeglasses glinting with divine calculation—or maybe it was a beam of light focused through a photographic pane of glass overhead—Herman lost no time in attacking our phantom opponents. “First thing after everybody melds, freeze the pile, yah? Throw on a wild card or a joker even, so they must have a natural pair to take what is discarded. Get your bluff in, make it hard for the hens to build their hands.”
That made more sense than anything Aunt Kate had dinned into me in all the afternoons. I had to part with a wild-card deuce featuring a sly-looking brunette skinny-dipping in a heart-shaped swimming pool, but reluctantly figured it was worth it to place her crosswise on the discard pile to indicate it was frozen.
About then, Herman noticed my hand visiting deep in my pants and tut-tutted with a frown. “Donny, sorry to say, but this is not time for pocket pool.”
Turning red as that seven of hearts, I yanked my hand out at the accusation. “No, no, it’s not that, honest. What it is, I carry, uh, a lucky charm and it’s got to be rubbed for, you know, luck.”
He cocked his head in interest at my hasty explanation. I still was flighty about letting anyone see the arrowhead. But something moved me, maybe the spirit of Manitou, and I suppose somewhat ceremoniously I dug out the arrowhead and peeled back its sheaf of Tuffies enough to show him.
He laughed and laughed when I explained the need for protection from the sharp edges. “First time in history ever those are used that way, I betcha.” When I handed him the condom pouch with the arrowhead catching enough light through the glass panes to glisten like a black jewel, he fell silent for a minute, holding it in the palm of his hand as if it were precious beyond any saying of it. At last he murmured, “Bee-yoot-iffle,” and handed it back to me with great care. “Where did you get such a thing?”
I told him about finding it in the creek, right where some Indian dropped it, way back before Columbus, adding none too modestly, “It’s rare.”