The Wild Card by Mark Joseph

all.” Thin and compact, no more than five foot five, dressing up made him feel like a giant. He blew on his fingers and rubbed the tips against his lapel. Not for luck. Luck was for suckers.
    Benny’s room in the Laguna Honda Home for the Aged was scrupulously devoid of sentiment. He didn’t need mementos; instead, he had living memories conveniently edited to forget the bad times and remember the good. Long gone were a Bronze Star from the first world war and a winning ticket from the 1949 Kentucky Derby, yet those days stood out like bright stars in the sky of his mind. The medal had represented a day in France in 1918 that Benny would have preferred to forget. Lance Corporal Benny Goldman had endured a frontal assault on a German machine gun position, and when it was over he was the only one in his company still breathing. The Derby was a more pleasant memory. The 1949 Derby had been a lock—that Citation was a hell of a horse, but his winnings from that race and the rest of the money he’d ever won or earned had vanished. Women, booze, cards, horses. Benny didn’t go to the track anymore. He was broke except for a small annuity that was doled out by the Home as walking around money. Two hundred a month
was nowhere near sufficient for a stake in a real game, but it was more than enough for Monday nights.
    Laguna Honda was the penultimate address for many San Franciscans before they moved permanently to Colma, city of the dead, a suburb of cemeteries whose most notorious inhabitant was Wyatt Earp. Life in the Home was stultifyingly dull, and so, to relieve the tedium, every Monday night a party of old men assembled in the lounge for a poker game. A few minutes before seven an attendant covered a large, round table with felt, distributed ashtrays, and arranged Benny’s red, white, and blue clay chips neatly into stacks of ten. The game had six or seven regular players and an equal number of kibitzers who occasionally sat in for a few hands.
    The game began when Benny took his seat, broke open a new deck, shuffled, and flipped a card face up to each player in turn until the first jack appeared, signifying the dealer of the first hand. Unless he dealt himself the jack, Benny would push the deck across the table and bark, “I’m not ready to play with Wyatt yet, boys, so I ain’t plannin’ on losin’. Ante up and roll ’em.”
    The game had strict rules—no sandbagging and no wild cards—and the stakes were low, but the old men took their poker seriously. Benny was a stickler for rules and etiquette. Any player who bet out of turn or dealt a hole card face up had to toss a white chip into the pot. Benny presented a figure so elegant and intimidating that no one dared contradict his edicts.
    On this balmy spring night Benny won the first three pots in a row. This was no surprise. None of the other players could shuffle properly, and the cards stuck together from one hand to the next. As often as not, Benny was able to guess the sequence before the cards were dealt. Furthermore, since octogenarians Tom Wilson and George Schilling flashed almost every card they dealt, he could instantaneously verify the accuracy of his guesses. The Monday night game was no challenge for an old hustler like Benny, but he never failed to approach the table with all the dignity due the honorable game of poker. Poker was not about cards, Benny often lectured the codgers. It wasn’t even about money. It was about drama, risk, courage,
foolhardiness, character, life itself. It was about the essence of being a man.
    On the fourth hand of the evening Tom Wilson dealt a game of seven card stud. As was his custom, Benny glanced at his hole cards, gave them a gentle tap, and then carefully watched his opponents for tells that gave away their hands. George Schilling had an ace showing and bet the minimum, a nickel. Everyone stayed in. On the next card George got another ace and bet a dime.