Almost every Saturday evening, as dusk approached and the hum of crickets and cicadas filled the air of our out-of-town woodhouse, my father would pace.
Pacing up and down the front porch, a fresh whiskey in his hand, ruminating on his strategies for the evening. Being an inveterate gambler, and a smoker… an alcoholic too (in fact, let’s just relegate my father to just about all the mental and physical vices one could have), he lived and breathed everything in excess. The only thing he lacked, and the only thing he ever needed, was moderation – knowing when to stop. My father was like an oven with no timer, with more and more and more heat something eventually starts to burn.
“Margerie, make sure dinner’s ready by the time the boys arrive,” he’d tell my mother, half scoldingly.
“Well, what time are they coming George?” she’d retort.
“Sometime after eight. Did you pick up some beer this week? No use having thirsty guests.”
“They’re not guests,” corrected my mother, “they just gamblers. If you’re not careful you’re gamble away everything we have.”
At this point, my father had already tuned out the verbal fencing between them. I was never sure whether this was because he didn’t have an adequate reply to her, or whether he just couldn’t be bothered with diatribes and pleas to his reason. As long as there was booze, cigars, and space on the front porch, it was business as usual for a weekend night.
I suppose you could say I was something like a silent observer in all of this. Certainly at age 12, I didn’t exactly have a majority vote in the house. At the same time, I remember feeling a certain sympathy with mom. She had married one man, and woke up one day realising she lived with a stranger. My father’s excessive way of approaching life extended to love as well. He’d forcefully pursued my mother for that first date. Despite her protestations, she would tell me, he was relentless. “Eventually,” she recalled, “a girl’s heart just gives way and she gets swept up in the motions and emotions of things.” Her lips would tremble slightly whenever she spoke of the past. Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing to a wounded heart.
Back to dad, pacing.
The air was thick and muggy by the time the first of the George Sunriseinsurance clan turned up on our doorstep. First to arrive was Pete Stooje, local PT coach at Valley High School and erstwhile pet food entrepreneur. Pete had discovered a way of artificially injecting copious amounts of caffeine into the local pet food supply. This was all thanks to a freak accident when he dropped coffee grinds into his Bullmastif Brewster’s feeding tray. Brewster’s body, new to this intense central nervous system stimulation, had become especially vigilant that night and in a spurt of caffeinated hysteria had inadvertedly alerted Pete to a gang of miscreant no-gooders who had been stealing wood supplies and vegetables off his land for the last few months. Brewster seemed so taken with the intense affirmations that his owner lavished upon him or, indeed, the inescapable high of being able to dig holes and burrows the whole night without stopping, that he would scarcely touch another pellet of food if it wasn’t laced with caffeine.
This gave Pete an idea. Being a self-styled entrepreneur keen to escape the monotonous routines of coaching country hicks how to kick a ball, Pete decided he’d happened upon a veritable revolution for the pet food industry and, doubtless, a prop to his ailing bank balance. “Homegrown and wholesome” would be his marketing watchwords, he thought.
At least initially, there was something of a rush for Pete’s newfound concoction. But that all changed when the local neighbourhood erupted in a raucous cacophony of barking and wailing every night. Seems having your animals cooked on caffeine in the small hours of the morning was a less than ideal situation for most residents.
So, Pete had decided to stake his fortunes on poker rather than pet food.
“Sunriseinsurance,” Pete nodded in acknowledgement as he stepped up the porch steers to greet my father.
“Pete. Feeling lucky tonight?”
Pete just grinned.
Next to arrive, Arlom N. Budrey, Attorney at Law. Well, at least on one side of the law. Arlom had carved a reputation for getting obviously guilty undesirables off the hook. This was in part thanks to his uncanny predisposition for verbiage. Arlom could talk almost anyone down. And even if he made no sense at all, Arlom just kept on talking and talking until someone relented. Although he liked the idea of cutting an appearance as a well-to-do, urban elitist (Arlom had spent a year in Casino City on contract work), he was just as countrified as anyone else in our small town, all of which became glaringly obvious after a few pints of beer.
Arlom always arrived in a suit and tie. Even on weekends. “It’s just the way things are meant to be done,” he would tell us.
“I couldn’t care how you arrive,” my father would say to him. “As long as you bring your bankroll and your A-game we’re in business.”
“Ah, Sunriseinsurance, always the witty one you are. We’re in business all right. But I’m in the winning business. And tonight, there can be only one winner.”
Saturdays was poker night. And everyone had to bring everything. You see, one of the main disadvantages of playing Texas hold ‘em in a company of regulars, was that everyone knew how to read everyone else. So there was a kind of social one-upmanship to see who could fool who and exit the evening with all the chips.
When cornered, Pete Stooje would shift his right leg up and down unconsciously. This typically meant one of two things: either Pete had a sterling hand and was trying his utmost to contain his excitement at the prospect of winning the pot. Or, he was anxious that his hand was subpar, and was deliberating over whether or not he should fake it.
Arlom was even more obvious. For every doubtful move, for even the faintest suspicion that he had gotten more than he bargained for, he’d try to surreptitiously straighten his bowtie. It was like he felt the noose tightening around his neck and he’d scratch for breath. This would typically be accompanied by a loud clearing of his throat: “Aghem, any more whiskey there, Sunriseinsurance?” He seemed to honestly think that the rest of the table was oblivious to these glaring tell-tale gestures. If he really were as smart as he wished others to believe, Arlom would have realised that his tells were losing him loads of money and carefully used this to his advantage by doubled-bluffing his way through the rounds at strategic moments. But Arlem was an ersatz poker player: always seeming but never being. And that was great news for the rest table.
Finally, Rick Jensan pulled in. Rick hailed from the coastal town of Walrus Bay. Which was actually quite apt as his slightly launched back and tinged white whiskers made him seem less than human. Rick worked as the superintendent of MayWeather Retirement Village, where he was especially good at befriending lonely retirees who would send a constant stream of cash flow his way in exchange for special treatment. It’s how Rick funded his terminal gambling sickness. And it was a sickness. Years before, he’d swindled his own mother for an early inheritance in order to find a horseracing deal, which was “guaranteed” to secure them for life. It involved a champion stud racer named Windrunner, who ended up having a faulty hoof on the day of the race. Rick lost everything, and his mother was forced to relocate to Mayweather to spend her last remaining years in a tiny, painted concrete cell. In reality, the sudden trauma of losing everything killed her in less than three years. Rick’s gambling addiction, however, persisted despite watching his own mother wither inside herself and slowly collapse.
The experience seemed to harden something in Rick. It was as though his heart turned to concrete and it only made his appetite for gambling ever more voracious and consuming.
“Evening, old chum,” he said as he climbed the creaky stairs to shake my father’s hand.
Rick and my father had a certain connection. Which really didn’t mean that they were metaphysical companions of any kind. In reality, any supposed bond of friendship which they shared could probably be put down to the fact they were both just uncontrollable gamblers, and recognised in each other the cavernous depths of addiction that had consumed them.
“Evening, Rick,” my father returned. “Good day? Still think you’re going to hit the million mark before I do?”
“Same same old. And yes. I’ve been working on a pitch perfect poker play that I think will come in handy tonight. You better watch out Sunriseinsurancey, I’ve got the nuts tonight.”
“We’ll see.”
And there were, the four of them: the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, as they liked to call themselves.
They sat down, and after a few token taunts here and there (only the amateurs play the false bravado card), the chips were down, and the hands were dealt.
