Across Market Street there’s a boarded-up gaming parlor—FORTUNE BRIDGO in faded letters on its southern wall—and this is where the boy has set up his game. The king of hearts, the seven of hearts, the seven of diamonds, each creased lengthwise up its middle. Three tiny roofs, gliding across a flattened Wheaties box.
Picture him there, kneeling under the roman arches: small and muscular, maybe sixteen years old, cropped curly head already balding. He’s dressed in bluejeans and a freshly stolen pair of crepe-soled Pedwins; his pink seercheck sleeves are rolled past his elbows. A battered workjacket rests within easy reach, but though the evening air is cool and gooseflesh rises on his arms, the boy doesn’t put it on. The pavement is gritty with sand, littered with shards of windowglass and chunks of stucco from the crumbling fa?ade. The boy rests his knees on a folded-over tabloid, a Mirror-News from last week. FAISAL, HUSSEIN PROCLAIM ARAB FEDERATION, it reads. DODGERS CLOSE TO COLISEUM DEAL. It’s seawater-warped, already yellow from the sun.
The boy has lately taken to calling himself Stanley. When he hopped the southbound B&O in Staten Island last April he began using the alias Adrian Crivano, and that name carried him as far as Little Rock before he was rousted by cops twice in five hours and had to come up with something else; he pulled STANLEY off the side of a Rollorama coach parked at a mechanic’s shop. He was Adrian Stanley in Oklahoma and Missouri, Stanley Welles in Colorado and New Mexico, and when he finally crossed the California state line in mid-December he briefly considered taking the name Adrian Welles—like certain spiders that lure their quarry by resembling it—before deciding that that could only cause problems for him.
Most of his names have come from a book in his jacket’s inner pocket, a book of poems that he has read many times and now knows by heart. It’s a strange book; there’s very little in it that he can claim to fully understand. But it has taught him one rule about which he has no doubt: calling a thing by its name gives you power over it. Therefore you must be careful. The boy’s own given name he does not use and never has.
The boardwalk fills as the beach empties. The shadows of passersby lengthen and strobe, and the shuttling cards seem at times to hang in midair.
You are thinking these things; the boy is not. His mind contains nothing but the sensation of regular motion, the steady click of the falling cards. Memory is a skill, as well as a habit. The boy is still young. What do you remember?
15
The sun is gone. The cloudbank, now solid, erases the mountains, blotting out the lights of Malibu across the bay. The amusement pier on the Ocean Park town line is quiet, closed for renovations, but Lawrence Welk is packing them in at the Aragon Ballroom: stocky Rotarians and their wives from Reseda and Van Nuys, pulling up in Imperials and Roadmasters, hurrying through the shabby streets in the hope of getting themselves on television. A mile to the south, the boardwalk swarms with a different crowd—roughnecks from the oilfield, airframe welders from the Douglas plant, dredger deckhands from the new marina, furloughed airmen from Edwards AFB—looking for different entertainment.
Stanley keeps a wad of bills in his breast pocket—singles, plus two fins—and he takes small bets from people who stop, moving their money around, working the throw to keep his bankroll steady. It doesn’t take him long to spot a mark: a broad-shouldered hotrodder with a duck’s-ass haircut, a little too old for the style. The guy’s getting towed around by a fast-looking teenage girl in a neckerchief and pirate pants; he seems sober enough to be alert, drunk enough to be cocky, in the mood to spend some cash. Stanley leans back, cracks the knuckles of his right hand.
Under a lamppost about fifty feet away, a young man has been smoking a cigarette; now he walks toward the arcades. He takes measured, unsteady steps—although he has not been drinking—and he buttonholes the hotrodder and his young date at the boardwalk’s edge. He speaks to them for a moment, gestures at Stanley, then closes the rest of the distance, flicking his smoldering stub into the shadows as he staggers to a stop.
You want another shot, chum? Stanley says, not looking up from the three cards.
I feel lucky now, the young man says. I will win it back.
He pulls a new IN GOD WE TRUST dollar bill from his pocket, drops it, and it flutters onto Stanley’s cereal box.
The young man—his name is Claudio—is slim and angular, with large dark eyes and a neat black pompadour; he wears a thin tie, a crisp Van Heusen, and a brown-flecked gray sportcoat that hides the deep creases in the shirt. The fingers of his right hand tap nervously against his thumb, one at a time, ascending and descending.
Stanley flattens Claudio’s dollar on the pavement, spreads out one of his own, and puts the cards in motion. His hands rise and fall languidly. The cards stop. Claudio picks one of the red sevens, and a dollar bill goes back into Stanley’s pocket.
I will play again, Claudio says.
The girl walks over as Claudio is losing his second dollar; her date lags a bit behind. They watch as Claudio wins one, loses two more. The hotrodder is getting interested now.