Recapitulation (31 page)

Bailey crashes down, blowing, and without comment sweeps up his hand. He has a face like a Hawthorne Mephistopheles—not a face, a
visage
, gleaming with wicked delight. In his whole life it has never occurred to him to doubt himself for a second, which means that both memory and thought are short-circuited. Yet Bruce feels sullenly that confidence like Bailey’s, however inferior morally and philosophically to his own self-doubt, is probably attractive, perhaps irresistible.

He wishes passionately that they were somewhere else—anywhere else, even in her apartment with her featherbrained roommates around, even parked on Wasatch Boulevard with the cloud of his departure growing darker between them. Anywhere.

“And now, Brothers and Sisters,” Bailey says, “everybody should be getting ready to lay down.” He raises a finger. Everything about his face is pointed—eyebrows, cheekbones, chin, the sporty little mustache, ears, the light reflected in his eyes. Glee grows in his face like flame in kindling.

“It isn’t fair,” Muriel says with her cards held against her chin. “If you guys lose, you just lose a sock. I’d lose
everything
.”

“You’ve already lost everything, baby.” He pats her thigh, but his eyes are on Nola, and he is saying to her silently: You too,
kid. Don’t pretend around me. You lost it and liked losing it. “Everybody set?”

A knot has gathered under Bruce’s breastbone. He has to break this up, but how? Bailey will never let them forget it if they back down. But if they don’t back down, there goes Nola’s skirt or brassiere. Bailey sits there with a straight, a flush, a full house. With all those cards, he has to have something good. For a second he wishes he had cheated as wildly as Bailey, and yet, as Muriel says, what difference would it make? He can’t beat Baily without beating Nola, too. The only way she can get out of this is to beat Bailey herself, and she isn’t going to do that with the two pair she probably holds.

Expose Bailey’s cheating? He hasn’t been the only one. Still, that may be the only way. Let it break up in accusations and denials. He lights a cigarette, takes a drag or two, and passes it to Nola. The fog around them is thick and blue.

Muriel is still grumbling. “I don’t care! You get all the good hands. You’ll beat me and say I should take everything off, and I’m not going to be the first.”

Bailey can discern an injustice when one is called to his attention. “Two to one, I’ll bet you. How’s that?”

“Two socks against my pants!”

“Two socks
and
my pants?”

The look of a sly bargainer comes into her eye. “You’d still have your shorts, and I wouldn’t have anything.”

Bailey, after a moment of thought, smacks his knee. “All right! I’m ahead, like you say. I’ve got the biggest stack.” Mirth convulses his face and is at once wiped away. “Here’s what we’ll do. This is the last hand. Everybody bets whatever he’s got left. Brother Mason shoots his wad, Brown-Eyes risks her all, Muriel hangs her last rag on the line, the Great Bailey puts everything at hazard.”

He says it to all of them but he is talking to Nola. Bruce can see her face settling into stubbornness, resentment, and determination. She thinks she has a chance. But why is
he
staying? What does he expect to do with his pair of nines?

Abruptly he throws down his cards. “Not me. I’m out.”

Bailey is scandalized. The honor of the company. The code of the sportsman.

“No,” Bruce says, shaking his head. “I fold.”

He will not look at Nola. He looks at Muriel instead, and Muriel is as scandalized as Bailey. “Well,
all right!
If that’s the way you …”

She makes a gesture of throwing in her hand, too, and Bruce’s hope leaps up. But Bailey has grabbed her wrist. For a moment a pink nipple-eye goggles free and is clapped under again.

“Wait, wait,” Bailey says. “You can’t, Mason.”

“Why can’t I? Why should I stay with a pair of nines?”

“Because this is the last hand. If you back out now you’re a welsher.”

“You’re darn right,” Muriel says. “You get me practically naked and then you quit. I’m not undressing unless the rest of you do.”

“Somebody won’t,” Bruce reminds her. “Somebody’s going to win this pot. Guess who. He called it the last after he saw he had it cinched.”

“Who says he has it cinched?” Muriel says. “I’m still playing, if the rest of you are.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Bailey says. “I’ll strip anyway, even if I win. Whoever wins has to strip, too.”

“Then what’s the use of playing the hand?” Bruce says.

To his dismay, Nola says in her husky whisper, “Come on. Are we playing?”

Bailey is galvanized. “Now you’re talking! You’re damn right we’re playing. I’ll bet you, by God. Everything against everything. Showdown. Brown-Eyes, I think you’d like to see me put up or shut up.”

“Just once in your life.” Nola says.

She gives Bruce an unreadable sidelong look. Anger glows in her temple. She twists to free the ends of her hair from under her, and pulls a sheaf of it forward over each shoulder. Perhaps that is what she is counting on, like Lady Godiva. She has more nerve than Bruce has. He feels desperate and put in the wrong, and it gives him a pang to see her there, proud, erect, stubborn, sure to lose.

“Let’s see,” he says, and leans against her to look at the cards she spreads slightly to show him. What he expected. Two pairs, kings and sevens.

“Mmm?”

He shrugs, carefully noncommittal, hoping that his lack of
enthusiasm will warn her. But his mind has seized on a fact: in the hand he just threw away there is a king.

“I don’t know,” he says, and picks up his cards again. “Maybe I ought to stay in.”

Muriel squawls in outrage. “After you’ve looked at her hand? Oh, no sir, I’m not going to …!”

“Keep your shirt on,” Bruce says, and looks at her and snickers. He throws down the cards, but now the king is in his palm. Again he leans against Nola to look. He takes the cards from her, dropping a kiss onto the point of her shoulder, and studies them and passes them back with a shrug. Bailey might still have her beaten, but at least now she has a chance. Leaning back and stretching, he manages to scuff under the blanket the five of clubs he has removed from her hand.

“Are you ready, finally?” Bailey says. “Christ sakes, Mason, she’s already said she’s in. She doesn’t need your chicken advice. Are you betting us, Brown-Eyes?”

“I’m betting you.”

“Yahoo!” Bailey says, and lifts his pious eyes. “This may be the greatest unveiling since they took the sheet off Brigham’s statue and found the coconuts. What’ve you got you’re so proud of?”

“What have
you
got?”

“I dealt. Here, we’ll do it in order. Muriel, lay it down.”

She lays it down, leaning far forward and endangering herself at several points. “Three eights?”

Bailey shakes his head sadly. “Too bad, kid. Nice try.”

“You haven’t won yet. What’ve you got?”

“Wait. First Miss Coverall.”

“Two pairs,” Nola says.

“Two
pairs?
Is that all?”

“I guess it’s enough.”

“Mason, Mason,” Bailey says. “Why didn’t you instruct this innocent Sister better? Your two pairs don’t even beat Muriel’s three eights.”

Nola’s eyes fly to Bruce’s. The color in her temples spreads slowly into her cheeks. “Don’t they?”

For some reason Bruce leaves her exposed. She has put down her cards, face up, but not spread, so that not everything shows clearly. He compresses his lips and shakes his head, trying to
read in her wide eyes what she will do if she loses, as she thinks she has, and may yet. Or what she would do if she won, and Bailey started stripping off there, six feet away. But he can’t read her. Her eyes tell him no more than an animal’s would. They glisten, that is all.

Bailey is weaving back and forth like a cobra. “What a pity,
what
a pity! Oh, Sister Gordon, if you had only sought the right counsel. Because … I’ve … got … here … in … my hand …” He lays down the nine of hearts, then the ten, then the jack, then the queen. Their eyes are on the withheld last card. Bailey’s eyes bug out, his mouth opens, he slams the card down with a yell. Deuce of hearts. “A flush,” Bailey says.

Sweet, wonderful triumph has replaced the tension in Bruce’s insides. He is in no hurry. He stays leaning back on his hands while Bailey stops his weaving and says, “Now, ladies and gentlemen! See it here! See it all! Spectacular, revealing, first time in the Western Hemisphere!” Beatifically he smiles. “Losers first.”

Nola looks at Bruce, then at Muriel. Muriel looks at Nola. Muriel sets her mouth and stares with dislike at Bruce and hugs herself tighter. “Not me. Not in front of him. He backed out. He has to leave.”

Disgust makes Bruce move more violently than he planned to. He jerks forward onto his knees and with his fingers spreads Muriel’s hand, three honest eights. He spreads Bailey’s dishonest but undeniable heart flush. Then he spreads Nola’s full house, and his eyes find Bailey’s and hold them. He says nothing.

Bailey leans and stares. “You stacked them!”

“The hell I did. She just misread her hand. Ha, ha, you old bugger, you walked right into it. Off with the duds, Bailey old boy. Off with the last rag, Muriel. We’ll run it up on a pole as a signal of distress.”

But Muriel, sitting angry among her inner tubes, spits out, “I’m not undressing in front of you!”

“You stacked them when you looked at her hand,” Bailey says.

“Horsefeathers, Bailey. You lost. You called me chicken, what are you?”

Promptly Bailey tears off a sock, then the other. “Don’t call
me
chicken!”

“Oh hell, who cares whether you peel or not?” Bruce says. “Come on, Nola, let’s get some air.”

He pulls her to her feet, suddenly shocked at seeing her in her underwear. She grabs up her blouse, then his shirt and sweater, and comes along. Barefooted, they go out into the mountain night, so clean and cold after the shack that he feels his first lungful as a sword swallower must feel the steel. The stars are blue-white and brilliant, the sky is narrowed by the dark spiked tops of firs. On the doorstep they struggle into their shirts. He hands her his sweater and she pulls it over her head. He kisses her as her head emerges.

“Wait.”

Reaching back inside, he picks the flashlight off the bench by the door and slams the door shut. Following the path that leads out to the road, they walk behind the yellow puddle of light.

“Why did you put that king in my hand?” she says.

“Because he’d have beaten you if I hadn’t.”

“I thought two pairs was a good hand. I wanted to beat him so bad he’d crawl.”

“You couldn’t have beaten him. He was cheating.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw him.”

“Why didn’t you call him?”

“Because I’d been helping him. The whole game was crooked.”

She says nothing. Hunting smooth ground for their bare feet, he squirts the flashlight ahead. As they come out on the road the big old abandoned Silver Lake Hotel looms in the starlight, and beyond it, like a watermark on the sky, the dim granite of Mount Majestic. A meteor streaks down the sky and leaves a living blackness where it was consumed. He feels sad, old, guilty, and misunderstood.

“Why?” Nola says tightly. “Were you that anxious to see Muriel?”

“Why would I want to see her?” he says violently. “That cow. I don’t know why. I ought to have my head examined. Bailey can get you doing things you’d never do. I wish we hadn’t come up here.”

“So do I.”

“Would you have undressed, if he’d won?”

“I suppose I’d have thought I had to.”

“Even though he was cheating.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No,” he admits, and then, overwhelmed by guilt, “I was the one who knew that! Oh, I’m sorry, Nola! Why did I get us into this? I hate to take you back in there.”

“I know.”

They stop at the edge of the clearing to cling and kiss. Her hair is clean and slippery under his hands. All around the cirque the mountains stand high and dim. There are only a few lights, and no sounds. It is late. Mason, who has followed them here, feels how love, which was first a wonder and an awakening, has brought them already to a kind of desperation, a kind of pollution, a kind of woe. Innocence would have been their happiest choice. In the dark path he rocks her body against his and feels the hot stir of desire and knows that they have brought death into the world.

At last she says, “We’d better go back. I’m cold.”

“Why don’t we just get in the car and go home?”

“What would they do if we stranded them?”

“Probably just what they’re doing now.”

“How would they get back?”

“That’s their problem.”

“If we did that to them, they’d talk to get even.”

“They’ll probably talk anyway.”

“Maybe only to me. Jack thinks it’s smart to pretend he knows everything you do. He likes to get the goods on people. He wants everybody to be as dirty as he is. But he might not talk except to me.”

“Damn Bailey.”

“We should have known better.”

“I should have, you mean. I know the bugger. I’ve known him from away back.”

He is shivering, running his hand up and down her back, his nose in the fragrant part in her hair. “Can you imagine us making love in there while those two listen? With nothing but that curtain in between?”

She makes no response for a long time. The response she finally does make has a grudging, argumentative quality: “They’ll be too busy to pay attention to us.”

“Maybe.” Overwhelmed again, he cries, “Ah, why isn’t it like the Capitol Reef?”

“It will be again.”

“But we’ve only got two weeks more!”

In his arms she goes quiet. It is the wrong thing to have said. For at least a minute he stands there crowding her against him, kissing her, moving his hands on her back and sides, trying to revive the passion that was there only seconds ago. But he seems to have put it out. Finally her husky whisper says, “Let’s go. I’m cold.”

In silence, following the slash of the light, they go back into the woods along the narrow path. Short of the cabin Nola stops. “Give me the flashlight.”