The Long Night of Winchell Dear Read online

  Country club players. The usual: drink too much, attention wanders, don’t follow the cards well. Get looser, the more they drink. Texas hold ’em, even though they called for it, is a mystery game to them; apparently wanted to pretend they were part of the heavy Texas action. Obvious bluffers, used to buying the pot in small-time games. Harmon (last name) may try to peek at the discards; stops when he’s been caught once and warned. Other two were good losers, but Harmon was not, complained and talked too much about how he couldn’t get good cards, came close to insulting Luther Gibbons, twice. One of the others (Walker?) likes to “keep everyone honest” = calls even with poor or mediocre hands = makes it difficult to bluff him.

  Later, Winchell Dear would copy his notes onto two sets of three-by-five cards, which he carried in file boxes. One set was alphabetized by last name, the other listed significant games and was arranged by date. If he knew ahead of time what players would be at the table, he went over his notes carefully, like any good journalist, memorizing for the short term the whos, whats, hows, whens, and whys of each player.

  Winchell started the Cadillac and pulled out of the hotel lot, tipping the attendant ten dollars in addition to the ten he’d given him the night before. He liked the Cadillac to be well tended when he wasn’t around it.

  Down the street, two men sat in an old Chevy and seemed to be watching him as the Cadillac moved out of the lot and onto the street. Winchell Dear memorized the license plate and slipped the Banker’s Special out of his right boot, laying it in his lap. But the Chevy stayed parked when he made a right turn and pointed the Cadillac toward Big Spring. Didn’t hurt to be cautious. As Roscoe said, it was getting rough.

  But then—he ran a finger over the thin scar along his upper lip—it had always been rough, and it couldn’t get much rougher than Santa Helena on a Saturday night back in 1941, when he’d ignored one of Fain Bracquet’s basic rules of survival.

  AFTER FAIN DIED in the San Angelo shoot-out of 1940, Winchell Dear gave some more thought to becoming a border patrolman. He had just turned seventeen, time to be doing for himself. College didn’t interest him, no money for it anyway, and his mother was mostly resigned to that.

  Or maybe cowboying. He was a good rider, already had some other range skills, and could learn the rest by day-handing where he could find work. Low pay and not much of a future, though. Other than that, going into the mines was a possibility, but he’d already heard the mines might be closing down before long, and miners seemed to cough a lot. Seemed you got pushed one way and got shoved another, yawing your way into life, chance more than choice picking out the routes for you.

  He grinned to himself. If chance is the master, might as well be a good servant. Hell, play poker. Stop being a goddamn eunuch card wizard and start playing the game. Give it a try, at least.

  He began hanging around the Saturday night game at the Thunder Butte Store, where the miners gambled, watching, studying their play. He didn’t learn much. They were rough and loose and didn’t seem to care whether they won or lost, playing mostly draw and five-card stud. Even though a dime ante and betting limits of twenty cents was pretty heavy action in those days for what amounted to a neighborhood game, and when you could buy a pound of coffee for twenty cents and a hotel room in El Paso for a dollar or a dollar fifty with a bath, Winchell didn’t see how he could go wrong and decided to use two of the five dollars Fain had given him.

  By the next Saturday night, his palms were sweating, and he rocked from one foot to the other as he waited for a seat to open up at the table. Around ten, there was an empty seat. He sat down with two dollars in change spread out before him. His first real game of poker.

  The money was gone in thirty minutes. He was scared, looked as much and played that way, nervous enough that he’d forgotten most of the rules and couldn’t concentrate on the game. Speculating, trying to get his money back, bluffing at the wrong times, staying in with a pair of threes when other players were calling and raising, drawing to an outside four straight with a five on top when the man next to him was showing a possible flush. Dumb, mindless play. He took out another dollar and lost that in ten minutes. Somewhere, Fain Bracquet was rolling his eyes and thinking all his teaching had been futile.

  “Come again, son,” one of the miners said when Winchell pushed back from the table.

  Another grinned. “Thanks for the drinking money, young Mr. Dear. Thank you very much.”

  His father had watched the game and followed him outside. “You got to calm down, Winchell. Those boys are a little better than you might give them credit for. They drink and fool around, but some of them have played a lot of poker in their time. And don’t let their jawin’ bother you; that’s just part of it. Tomorrow we’ll go out to your flat rock and practice a little more. Consider tonight an expensive investment in your education.”

  The next Saturday went a little better. Winchell left the table a quarter up, and his father clapped him on the shoulder. “Any time you can walk with your stake plus something extra, it’s been a good evening’s entertainment.”

  On the following Friday, Winchell went off by himself and began running everything he knew about poker through his mind, practicing, getting it down so cold that, nerves or not, he could play a steady game. He won forty cents the next night.

  It went on that way. Lose a dollar, win two dollars, drop fifty cents, win sixty cents. Somewhere, though—and this disclosed the core of Winchell Dear that would carry him through the years ahead—he shifted to a higher level of play. He lost his nervousness, began concentrating on the game.

  Six weeks into the Saturday night games with the miners, he won four dollars in one evening’s play. The next week he won three, and a week after he walked away with seven. At that point, the miners weren’t laughing at him anymore and made sure there were never any open seats at their games.

  His mother hadn’t been fooled by Sam Dear’s words on those Saturday evenings when he’d say, “Think Winchell and I’ll wander over to Thunder Butte and see what’s going on.”

  As she said to Winchell, looking up at the rangy young man with the thin face and slicked-back brown hair, “All you big ol’ men think you’re so sly and smart. I knew from the beginning what was going on down there at Thunder Butte, on Saturday afternoons with you and Fain Bracquet. Irene at the store told me. But your father assured me it was all harmless.”

  Nancy Dear was talking serious. “Incidentally, ever wonder where he’s been drifting off to on certain Saturday nights all these years? Sam’s always had this romantic idea about the gambling life. It’s a fool’s profession, Winchell, and that’s all I’m saying, except I still think you ought to go up to Clear Signal and enroll in the normal school, become a teacher, and have a steady, honorable way of earning a living. Aside from that, I give up. You’re all the same—you men—wild and incorrigible and without the common sense God gave you.”

  She wiped her hands on her apron and looked out the window. “Sam’s been gone three days, and I’m starting to worry. Lot of rustling and smuggling going on down near Boquillas, he said. He and some Rangers went over there on Monday.”

  And she knew it was bad when a border patrol truck rolled up to their place the following day. Sam Dear lay in the truck bed under a blanket. Three weeks later, Nancy moved back to the home place near Odessa and Winchell Dear became a cowboy on the R9, ten miles from where he’d grown up.

  The cowboys with whom he worked didn’t like the way he played poker. “Winchell, you ain’t cheating us, are you?”

  Winchell said, “If I wanted to cheat you, which I’m not doing, you’d never know it.”

  “Well, no offense, but playing cards with you is like pouring water down a gopher hole. A week’s wages in three hours of playing, not to mention winning Arky’s fiddle and six free lessons from him, is just too much entertainment for us, so we’re asking you to drop out of our games.”

  At night, in the bunkhouse, Winchell practiced his fiddle and his shuffle, r
unning through all the tricks Fain Bracquet had taught him, just to stay sharp and tight. Word got around about a serious game over in Santa Helena on Saturday nights. He was working a little north of Terlingua, and Santa Helena was a good horseback ride, fifteen miles or so. But he saddled up on a Saturday afternoon after the work was done and started out.

  Traveling cross-country, he passed east of Comanche Spring, forded Terlingua Creek, and circled around the south slope of Rattlesnake Mountain. Wind and dust came rolling off the desert from the west, and as he topped a rise near the Rio Grande, off to his left he could see the Mule Ear Peaks catching a late sun.

  He made the river just after six o’clock, darkness coming fast. It didn’t seem like a good idea to take his prized horse across the Rio Grande, so he hobbled the gelding and paid a Mexican five cents for a boat ride. Winchell’s border Spanish was good, and he asked the Mexican about what kind of town Santa Helena was.

  “It is a nice village,” the Mexican said as he rowed and called out, “Buenas noches, señor,” to a gringo mounted on a burro and splashing north across the river. Two five-gallon jugs of sotol were lashed over the burro’s saddle.

  “See the high cliffs where they split over there?” The boatman pointed. “That is Santa Elena Canyon. Yanquis pay for boat rides through there, but my boat is not good enough to get over the rapids farther up the canyon. There is big, mean water in that canyon sometimes. If I owned a better boat, I could earn much money taking yanquis like you for boat rides in the canyon.”

  Winchell looked down at the water sloshing around his boots and believed what the ferryman said about the boat.

  A dead forty-pound catfish floated by, belly up. The boatman said whatever was washing down Terlingua Creek from the cinnabar mines killed any fish hanging around the creek’s mouth.

  Winchell Dear walked up to the town and studied it. He’d been told the main poker game was in a cantina on the left side of the street. Listen for the music, head that way, and stay clear of the señoritas, he’d been told. One wrong move toward the women in a village such as this meant a knife in the belly. He met several of them walking along the street, tipped his straw Stetson hat, and said, “Buenas noches,” but nothing more. Sometimes the señoritas said the same to the lanky young cowboy, sometimes they simply smiled, sometimes they did neither.

  As he watched the señoritas, Winchell Dear’s poker mind left him for a moment. They were lovely, slim and flowery, and ready, it seemed, for dancing and whatever else one did with women. That latter part had never been all that clear to him, but he had a general sense of it. He’d been thinking about women recently, after listening to the bunkhouse conversations where cowboy adventures in the cribs of Ojinaga and San Vincente were described in considerable detail.

  He carried an eighteen-dollar stake plus five extra in traveling money. More money than he could have imagined a few months ago, thanks to the miners in Thunder Butte and the easygoing cowboys at the R9. Winchell Dear was playing with confidence now, developing a style that Fain Bracquet called “getting screwed down tight.” Full concentration and aggressive play, blood poker.

  Predators have different eyes from those of prey, something about a general sense of how the food chain stacks up, and the eyes of Winchell Dear were no longer those of prey. In his self-assurance, he’d also let Fain Bracquet’s warnings slide, having decided Fain must have been exaggerating about all the cheating going on.

  Things went badly at Santa Helena. Seven men, including him, were playing straight draw poker. Winchell felt he was playing well but continued to lose on the larger pots. Two men seemed to be winning most of the big money. One was a sallow-faced little pan of sheepdip with very fast hands. The other, a big, gruff fellow with a beard and wearing a weathered gray fedora above his brown flannel shirt, was sitting to Winchell’s immediate left. The place was lighted by kerosene lanterns, and in another room ten feet away, a Victrola played the same Mexican polka over and over, providing a canvas of sound for the increasingly drunken theater brought on by inclination and the night and the general pain of getting along and getting by.

  Nine dollars of Winchell’s stake was gone before he became suspicious that something more than bad luck was working the table. He started running the list of tells through his head, the tip-offs Fain Bracquet had drilled into him but he had put out of his mind for a long time.

  Then he saw it. A right-hander dealing from the top tends to keep the fingers of his other hand curled around the deck as he deals. But the sallow-faced man’s left-hand fingers dipped down, almost imperceptibly at certain times, as he pulled cards from the bottom. The signature of a less than perfect base-dealer.

  Winchell played cautiously for several more hands and continued watching. The thin man was peeking and culling from the discards and placing what he wanted on the deck bottom before he dealt. The bottom cards went either to himself or the bearded fellow. By that time, Winchell was down to ten dollars and was furious. Maybe it showed.

  “Well, cowboy, things aren’t running your way tonight, are they,” said the thin man who was bottom-dealing.

  “I think there’s a reason for that,” Winchell Dear replied.

  “And what might that be, Mr. Cowboy?” The sallow face wrinkled into a kiss-my-ass smile.

  The table went silent. Four Mexicans were playing, plus the three gringos. The Mexicans looked at one another and started pulling back their chips.

  Winchell pointed at the dealer and started to speak but never got it out; instead, he went violently over backward in his chair when the bearded man hit him with the back of his hand. Winchell Dear was tough and wiry from his cowboy work, but he didn’t yet have a man’s strength. He struggled to get up, but the big man was all over him with fists and boots.

  He woke up a few hours later on the dirt behind the cantina. The village was dark, and he hurt; at least two of his ribs were cracked or broken, and he likely had a concussion as well. Dried blood matted his face, and a deep cut ran along his lip. He guessed that came from the turquoise ring the big man had been wearing on his right hand.

  At sunrise he made it to the river, holding his left side and still woozy. His pockets were empty, of course, but the ferryman took him across anyway. “It is a nice village, señor, but it gets a little wild on Saturday nights. I have seen it before. You can pay me another time.”

  The ferryman pointed to a small boy sitting in the bow. “This is my grandson, Pablo Espinosa. He’s going to be big and strong and work this hard land in the way his father does.”

  Twenty-one years beyond Santa Helena, and in Del Rio this time, in a saloon called the Border Dog where they locked the doors at midnight when the heavy action got under way, Roscoe McMain glanced across the table at Winchell Dear. The cards were running strange, and the smell of the game was a little shy of fine and fair. Winchell picked up on Roscoe’s questioning look and shrugged imperceptibly, conveying something to the effect of, “Let’s wait a few more hands and see.”

  He’d been studying the man sitting one player removed from Roscoe’s left. Some far-back claim on his memory kept pushing at him every time he looked at the man. During a short bathroom break, the man bragged about shooting a card cheat up in San Angelo some years ago. Said the fellow was a real dandy and carried a Derringer in his boot. Winchell Dear was slumped in his chair, thumbs in his suspenders and resting, but he braced up to full inner attention at the reference to Derringers and dandies and a shoot-out in San Angelo. The death of Fain Bracquet.

  Winchell folded early on the next few hands, giving him an opportunity to study the storyteller, who was now dealing. Something about the man’s pallid complexion…and…and the almost indiscernible dip of his left-hand fingers at certain times as he dealt. There it was: Santa Helena. Years and extra weight camouflaged the man, but Winchell Dear now recognized him. Even the words came back from that evening: “Well, cowboy, things aren’t running your way tonight, are they.”

  The next time Roscoe looked ove
r, Winchell Dear nodded, and Roscoe McMain launched all of his 280 pounds across the man next to him and flat onto the dealer. Winchell was up immediately and backed off, eyes flicking to each of the other players, knowing the bottom-dealer wouldn’t have been working alone. A switchblade came out of a pocket, and Winchell Dear’s Colt came out of his boot. The knife dropped to the floor and hands reached for the ceiling while Roscoe punched up the cheat.

  “Enough, Roscoe. Let’s get our money and get the hell out of here,” Winchell growled.

  Winchell Dear yanked the groggy base-dealer into a chair and pointed the Colt at a spot just above the dealer’s nose, angry at the hustle and double angry over the fact that Fain Bracquet, in spite of all that he was not, died at the hands of this scumbag sitting bloody and beaten in the chair before him. “You pulled the gaff on me once before in Santa Helena, when I was just a young cowboy looking for a decent game, and you’re not any better at it now than you were then. And by the way, the fellow you killed up in San Angelo was a friend of mine.”

  Winchell Dear let his eyes sweep over the other players, then stared down and addressed the dealer once more. “In the future, you look out for me, ’cause I’m going to blow your ass away if I ever see you in another card game in Texas or anywhere else.”

  Now these some years later he was aimed west out of Abilene, headed for Big Spring on Memorial Day 1967. In his middle forties and doing pretty well, with nearly a hundred thousand dollars in various Texas banks and ten thousand more hidden in the door panels of his Cadillac, not to mention his stake plus last night’s winnings sprinkled around his suit pockets. Not bad for those days, well before the glory years of big-time poker, when you pretty much kept on the move, traveling from town to town on the southern circuit covering Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. Looking for the games, the good ones, the decent paydays, all the while establishing yourself as an able poker player.