The Cardturner (5 page)

About what?
I thought, then noticed him fumbling with his wallet. "She didn't say," I said. "Just whatever you paid Toni is fine."

"This has nothing to do with Toni. We have a different arrangement. How about seventy-five?"

"Sure."

He handed me his wallet. I removed three twenties, a ten, and five ones, then gave it back to him.

Teodora opened the front door. "Thank you so much, Alton," she said as she shook my hand, using both of hers. "This means so much to him."

"It's just a card game," groused my uncle.

She led him inside, and I returned to the car.

Okay, I admit it. When he handed me his wallet, the thought did occur to me that I could take any amount of money I wanted and he wouldn't know the difference. Not that I would steal from a blind person. Not that I would steal from anybody, even if he was so rich he'd never notice, and even if he did call me an imbecile and a moron in front of a roomful of people.

Besides, I was no longer angry at him, and it wasn't just because he paid me. I think the girl-boy-cat-dog thing was his way of apologizing.

"You will return that money!" my mother said the second I stepped into the house.

She had obviously chatted with her dear friend Mrs. Mahoney.

"Get back in that car, drive straight to his house, and tell him you have no interest in taking any money from him. You're doing it for the joy of spending time with your favorite uncle."

"He'll think I'm crazy!" I protested.

"No, he'll respect you for your integrity."

"I'm not being unintegritary," I replied. (Don't bother looking up that word.) "I've been gone for almost six hours. Seventy-five dollars is barely minimum wage. And then there's the price of gas."

I thought "the price of gas" would be my trump card. I couldn't remember a single day when my parents didn't complain about gas prices—not that it stopped my father from buying an SUV.

"You think you're doing this for a measly seventy-five bucks?" asked my mother. "Seventy-five dollars is squat! In a few months Uncle Lester will be . . ." She didn't finish her sentence. For a brief instant I thought I saw a flash of sadness on my mother's face, as if the words she was about to say suddenly meant something to her. But that was only for an instant. "All right, you can return it to him on Monday."

"What's Monday?" I asked.

"He goes to his club every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday."

So this wasn't a onetime thing.

"What about my job?" I asked.

"What job?" she scoffed.

"I was going to get a job this summer."

She stared at me, hands on her hips.

I turned and skulked into my room.

Okay, I was too lazy to get a job, and my mother knew it, but I wasn't as lazy as she thought I was. I was fairly certain that I could have packed groceries or hauled boxes from one end of a warehouse to the other with as much vim and gusto as anyone. My problem was I couldn't get motivated to actually get into my car and drive to every supermarket, restaurant, movie theater, and appliance store just to ask to fill out a job application. Especially since I was pretty sure they'd throw my application in the trash the second I walked out the door.

I phoned Cliff and told him about the bridge club. "It's crazy," I said. "These people are like from a different planet. Planet Bridge. They even speak their own language."

"They're just a bunch of old people," said Cliff. "It's either bridge or bingo."

For some reason I felt offended by that remark. Bingo was just a game of luck. Bridge seemed more like a sport, a mental sport, like chess, only with a partner. And my uncle was a superstar of the sport.

"My uncle is amazing," I told Cliff. "Everybody's always coming up to him and asking ‘How should I have played this hand?' or ‘How would you bid this hand?' And he can't even see the cards."

Cliff wasn't impressed. "You told him what cards he had, right?"

"Right, then he told me which card to play."

"Well, what's so amazing about that?" Cliff asked. "Now, if he could somehow know his cards without you telling him, that would be amazing."

I tried again, but he showed little interest. In fact, he didn't seem all that interested in talking to me, quickly dismissing whatever I said.

Then it hit me: Katie was over there.

I can be such an idiot! I told him I had to go, and hung up.

11
Tiger Woods's Caddy

I didn't have to return the seventy-five dollars after all, thanks to Leslie. She pointed out to our mother that if I returned Uncle Lester's money, he might think we were so rich we didn't need it. Then he wouldn't leave us anything in his will.

I drove Trapp to his bridge club Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and continued to get paid seventy-five dollars each time. Maybe I should have given Leslie a cut.

I no longer wore a jacket and tie, but my mother worked during the week, so I had to drive my car. One time it lurched a bit, and almost died, but I doubted Trapp noticed. We were driving back to his house after the Wednesday game, so his mind was on some bridge hand.

Every bridge hand is a unique puzzle. If Trapp failed to solve the puzzle at the table, he would figure it out on the way home. He would think not only about what he should have done differently, but also about what the opponents should have done, and what he would have done if they had done that. I could have driven into a ditch and he wouldn't have noticed.

Gloria was Trapp's partner on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday, but on Wednesday he played with Wallace, a tall black man who taught physics at the university. Wallace and Trapp argued with each other after every single hand, saying things like "I asked for a club switch! If I wanted a spade returned I would have led a low one," and "How could you bid three spades? Didn't you hear my double?"

Listening to them, you would have thought they were in last place, but they ended up with a 72 percent game, which was huge. Apparently it was very rare to break seventy percent.

I learned what I was supposed to do if Trapp was dealt a hand with no cards in one suit. I'd say the word
void
. So when telling him his hand, I'd say something like "Spades: ten, nine, eight, seven, six. Hearts: king, queen, jack. Diamonds:
void
. Clubs: ace, nine, six, three, two."

I also began to understand how the game was played. I learned what
trump
meant. I wouldn't admit it to my uncle, but the game began to intrigue me. I would sometimes try to guess what card he'd play before he told me to play it, but don't worry, I never asked, "Are you sure?"

Toni Castaneda must have been out of her mind.

In all, we came in first three times and finished third once. I say "we" because I began to think of myself as part of the team. I imagined I was like Tiger Woods's caddy. I had once heard Tiger Woods on TV saying how important his caddy was to him, how he wouldn't have won some golf tournament without him.

Trapp never actually said anything like that about me, but he wasn't big on compliments. One time I heard him say "Nicely played" to an opponent. That was it.

12
The Basics

Do you see that picture of a whale? It's going to be our secret code. (Okay, maybe it's not so secret.)

This past year I had to read
Moby-Dick
in my Language Arts / English class. It seemed like a pretty good adventure story about a monster killer whale, but just when I started to get into it, the author, Herman Melville, stopped the story and went on page after page describing every tiny detail of a whaling ship. I zoned out. I never finished the book and had to bluff my way through the test.

The reason I'm telling you this is because I'm about to attempt to explain the basics of bridge. My guess is that there's going to have to be more bridge in this book as well.

I'm not going to try to teach you how to play bridge. There's no way I could do that. I'll just try to explain enough of the basics that if you want, you might be able to understand some of the bridge stuff that happens.

I realize that reading about a bridge game isn't exactly thrilling. No one's going to make a movie out of it. Bridge is like chess. A great chess player moves his pawn up one square, and for the .0001 percent of the population who understand what just happened, it was the football equivalent of intercepting a pass and running it back for a touchdown. But for the rest of us, it was still just a pawn going from a black square to a white one. Or, getting back to bridge, it was Trapp playing the six of diamonds instead of the two of clubs.

Well, there's nothing I can do about that. I'm sorry my seventy-six-year-old blind, diabetic uncle didn't play linebacker for the Chicago Bears.

So here's the deal. Whenever you see the picture of the whale, it means I'm about to go into some detail about bridge. If that makes you zone out, then just skip ahead to the summary box and I'll give you the short version.

There are two parts to a bridge hand, the
bidding
and the
play
. For now, I'm just going to explain how the play works.

It's all about taking tricks. Somebody sets a card on the table. Then, going clockwise around the table, the next three people all must play a card of that same suit, in turn. After all four people have played, the person who played the highest card wins the trick.

That person is then
on-lead
for the next trick. That means he or she chooses any card to play, and once again everyone else has to
follow suit
.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the four players is the dummy. The dummy hand is set out on the table for everyone to see. When it's the dummy's turn to play, the dummy's partner tells the dummy which card to play. So when Trapp's hand is
dummy
, Gloria tells me which card to play.

Everyone begins with thirteen cards, which means there are a total of thirteen tricks for each bridge hand. Since Trapp and Gloria are partners, it doesn't matter whether Trapp wins a trick or Gloria wins it. It counts the same.

"What happens if you can't follow suit?" Leslie asked me when I explained this to her.

You have two choices. You can
discard,
which means you just choose some card in your hand that's no good anyway and basically just throw it away. Or you can win the trick by playing a
trump
card. Trump cards are like wild cards in poker.

Let's say diamonds are trump. Somebody leads a club, but Trapp doesn't have any clubs left in his hand.

He can win the trick by playing a diamond. Any diamond will do. The
6 will beat the
K. That's called
trumping
or
ruffing
. Everyone else still has to play a club if they have one.