The Long Night of Winchell Dear by Robert James Waller
Winchell Dear nodded but wasn’t sure he understood. What Fain Bracquet was saying ran contrary to everything he’d been taught at home.
“I see by the obvious puzzlement on your face, Winchell, that what I just said may not fit with what you’ve learned thus far about how to treat others. And therein lies a sticky problem, which is separating the attitudes necessary for winning at poker from those required for living decently and well the rest of the time. Some never can make the distinction. You will if you work at it. Live one way when you’re not playing poker, then go another way when you sit down at the table. Takes some practice, but it can be done.”
Fain let his words settle in for a moment, then went on. “One of the kindest, gentlest men I ever knew went by the name of Sailor Rollins. Sailor came out of East Texas all warm and nice, like the April sun moving against the winter, but when he sat down at the table, you’d have thought a Mojave rattler was playing against you. After the game, win or lose, he’d revert to his old form and be just as sweet as you please, bouncing babies on his knee and palavering about the weather.”
Winchell remembered his father talking about Sailor Rollins. Sam Dear had watched him play up in Clear Signal years ago and said it was one of the highlights of his life. “Oh, that Sailor Rollins was tough, Winchell. Made the other fellows want to fold on the first betting round by the way he played the game. As if they knew they hadn’t a chance and just decided to let him have the ante without challenging him.”
Fain Bracquet took out a small pocketknife with an ivory handle and began cleaning his nails, looking up at Winchell Dear between strokes and providing this: “Just remember, Winchell, in poker, and sometimes in life, there is no true and worthy gain unless there is a similar true and worthy loss by one or more of the participants. And no poker game is the genuine article unless the losers experience real pain. Without pain, you can be sure it wasn’t an authentic game of poker. That’s why you should never play with friends when their grocery money’s on the table. You following all this okay?”
Indeed, Winchell Dear was following it and wasn’t sure he liked what he was hearing. All this business of pain and loss and cruelty seemed a long way from the sweet blow of Mexican wind through the chollas, the good smell of sweaty horses, and the sound of pigeon wings in willows along the river. But he figured there was nothing to lose by learning what Fain Bracquet could teach him. After all, he didn’t have to play poker for a living. If nothing else, he could end up being the best campfire poker player in the Southwest if he decided to become a cowboy. Or maybe pick up a few dollars of extra spending money in the back room of the Thunder Butte Store and other such places, if he became a border patrolman. It couldn’t hurt to know what Fain Bracquet knew. Couldn’t hurt at all.
“Couple more things before we get started, Winchell. I’m assuming your style will be to play honest poker, perhaps as a living. You seem like a quiet, gentlemanly sort of fellow, so I’d suggest owning at least one good suit and keeping it sharp pressed; that way you’re always presentable. Gray’s a good color since it don’t show the dust quite so bad.
“Wear suspenders instead of belts, and walk around with custom-mades on your feet, because poker games can go on for a long time, and you don’t want nothing binding you and destroying your concentration. Have the boots made just a tad wider at the top, and that’ll leave you room for a small handgun, something like a Colt Banker’s Special. The Colt’s only got a two-inch barrel, but in the poker rooms of this world we are not talking long-range, my friend. Hope you’ll never need the gun, but occasionally it can get pretty dark out there on the road. Have the bootmaker sew a little leather sling on the right inside of your boot, place for the gun to ride.”
Fain reached down and pulled a Derringer from his boot. “This is my backup, a forty-one Third Model Derringer. I’ve gotten used to it, nice and light and so forth, and the walnut grip against the brass frame is pleasing to the eye…to my one good eye, at least. It’s removed me from peril on several occasions. But I worry that one shot might not be enough. So, in spite of my preference for the Derringer, I’d recommend something a little heavier.
“Now, let’s sit down to this table here. I’m going to deal us a few hands and show you a couple of things. Your daddy says you understand straight and regular draw poker pretty well, so we’ll start with those. Straight poker first, which almost nobody plays anymore, but it’s good for illustrating certain things without introducing a lot of complications.”
Fain Bracquet dealt five cards to young Winchell Dear. “We’ll ignore the betting rounds, Winchell, and just proceed to the showdown, as if we’d completed the betting. What have you got?”
Winchell laid out five unmatched cards. “Nothing. Junk. Runt hand.”
“Well, I’ve got a pair of fours. Not much, but I’d have beat you.”
Fain Bracquet shuffled again, asking Winchell how his homeschooling was getting on and what subjects he liked best. While the boy replied, Fain dealt cards.
“Let’s see what you got this time, Winchell.”
“Little better, three of a kind, nines.”
“Too bad, I’m holding a queen-high straight, which puts me up one better’n you.” Fain Bracquet laid out an eight, nine, ten, jack, and queen in mixed suits.
Third hand: Winchell Dear pulled a jack-high flush, Fain Bracquet managed a full house, with three kings and two sevens.
He gave Winchell a whomper-jawed grin. “Sorry, kings full. Maybe your luck’ll pick up as we go along, son. Here, maybe you’d like to look at my Derringer a little closer.”
He broke the gun, removed the single cartridge, and closed the Derringer again before handing it to Winchell Dear.
Shuffle and deal, the fourth hand.
“Things looking any better for you?”
Winchell put down the Derringer, picked up his cards, and smiled. “Some.” He laid out his cards for Fain Bracquet to see.
Fain wriggled his eyebrows again. “Oooh, four of a kind, jacks. Very nice, very nice indeed. Not quite nice enough, though.” He showed Winchell spades, six through ten. “Straight flush, ten-high. Not often you see that particular hand.
“I’ll deal one more hand, then we’ll discuss things a bit.”
Fain Bracquet swept up the cards and talked about the weather, saying things ought to be cooling down before long and didn’t Winchell think so, too. Winchell agreed, said it felt that way. He also had the feeling something else was going on besides forthcoming changes in the weather.
Winchell Dear couldn’t believe his hand when he picked it up. It was a straight flush, with exactly the same cards Fain Bracquet had held on the last deal.
Fain looked at him. “I haven’t seen your cards yet, but I’m guessing you feel pretty good about what you’re holding, Mr. Winchell. Not much can beat your ten-high straight flush”—Winchell Dear blinked twice in disbelief as Fain laid out his cards—“unless it’s a royal flush.”
He displayed an ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of hearts. Odds of 650,000 to 1, and Fain Bracquet had made it.
“How you feeling at the moment, son?”
“Like I’ve just been run over by a Brahmer bull, that’s how.”
“Well, in a way you have. First off, you let me distract you by giving you an earful of mouth and showing you my gun. You were looking at the Derringer or thinking about what I was asking you and talking all the while instead of watching me shuffle and deal.
“Now, the second thing is the somewhat curious nature of the hands you received and how mine were always one better. Maybe you’re a little suspicious. Would you like to accuse me of cheating? That’d be the first instinct of most folks.”
Winchell didn’t say anything, just sat cool and looked at Fain Bracquet.
“Son, you just did a very intelligent thing right there, keeping your mouth shut. Accuse a man of cheating at cards and tempers get high fast, oftentimes backed up by fists or knives or guns.
“Besides, how you go
“How’d you do it?” Winchell asked.
“Whoa, not so fast. You can’t spot sophisticated moves until you learn the less elegant stuff the second-raters will try to pull. You don’t have a stake and won’t be playing in high-stakes games for a long while; high stakes and no-limit, that’s where you find the true professionals, honest and otherwise. So we’ll start with the basics, the vulgar stuff, the stuff you’re most likely to find in small-town poker rooms or fraternal organizations or conventions of people who don’t make a lot of money at their work.”
From there it went on, Saturday after Saturday when Fain Bracquet was not on the road. He started off by showing Winchell what he called crude techniques, and Fain seemed to have in-the-flesh examples of each of them, which he drew from a suitcase he’d carry to the store. There were the marked cards available from so-called magician supply houses, where diluted aniline dyes were used for blockout work, subtle alterings of the floral or scroll patterns common to most decks of playing cards. Bee brand cards were particularly susceptible to alterations in the diamond shapes on the card backs.
Fain showed him how an almost indistinguishable clock-face code could be used on Bicycle brand—a nine o’clock mark for a nine, and so on. He continued on through other and more complicated marking techniques, such as sandpapering the cards, and in each case showed Winchell how to spot the markings, which wasn’t all that easy to do without going over and over the cards. And once you saw them, you were amazed you hadn’t seen them right off.
After that came the mechanical devices and extra pockets used to hide cards. And the small mirrors, called “glims,” which could be fastened to a coffee cup or stuck in the end of a cigarette, allowing the hustler to see the card faces as he dealt them.
Fain Bracquet took his time, working his way up the trellis of cheating systems. It took him two years’ worth of Saturday afternoons to exhaust his repertoire. The second year was spent on more refined approaches. Subtle moves on the shuffle, such as culling from the discards and stacking or using crimps and hops to beat the cut.
In each case, Fain was not content with Winchell Dear merely observing the technique. He insisted that Winchell become reasonably adept at the moves, not at a professional level, but good enough so he could understand what might confront him out there in the cutthroat world of poker.
“Got to get proficient at spotting the ‘tells,’ Winchell. That is, tip-offs, things that give away what the opposition is thinking or doing. Both cheats and honest poker players got ’em, whether it’s the look and feel of the cards or the way a man holds his body at certain moments.”
Some of the moves took Winchell hours of practice to get down, others took months. Second-dealing was hard, but he learned to hear the difference in sound between a legitimate top-deal and the slightly louder scrape as a second was dealt, since it rubbed against the top card and the one below it. And Fain showed him how all but the very best second-dealers would change the movement of their thumb as it pushed off a card when they were dealing seconds—the tell.
Riffle stacking, where a first-rate mechanic could arrange cards as he riffled them during the shuffle, was particularly difficult. Winchell never did master the technique to Fain’s satisfaction. It became one of his personal challenges, and years later, in his twenties, he finally could do it pretty well.
Periodically, Fain Bracquet would bring up the subject of bluffing. “Not of much use in low-stakes games. Man’s got little to lose, he’s hard to bluff. It’s only in the high-stakes or no-limit games that bluffing’s got any real power. Particularly at the no-limit tables, you don’t have any other choice than bluffing now and then.
“But only in the right situations, not to steal a pot with a bluff, which you might do every so often against lower-caliber players, but rather to keep people from running over you. Sometimes, even just the possibility that you might be bluffing is a good way, the only way, to keep the other fellows on the straight and narrow, keep ’em in line. If you never bluff, there’s never a threat that you’re bluffing. Pick your spots, however, and be careful with its use, since bluffing loses its effectiveness entirely if you try it too much and people catch on to you. And always play a bluff hand exactly as you’d play a good hand.”
Then there were the bets and raises and money management strategies. Fain Bracquet didn’t seem to be very strong on these subjects, not the way he was on gaffs and hustles, and that puzzled Winchell Dear.
In circumspect fashion, he asked a question that had been bothering him. “Mr. Bracquet, if a man really knew how to play cards well, why would he ever need to cheat?”
Fain Bracquet thought for a while, and Winchell could see some combination of sadness and something else he couldn’t identify across the man’s face. Fain twiddled with the emerald stickpin in his tie, straightened the handkerchief in his pocket, and then pulled out his gold watch and studied it.
Finally, he looked up at Winchell Dear. “I suppose it’s in the nature of some men, Winchell, something to do with pulling fast ones and getting away with it. The lift of the grift, maybe. On the other hand, maybe it’s nothing more than laziness and greed.
“Son, I got to be going, need to make San Angelo by tomorrow night.” He stood up and winked at Winchell Dear, then smiled and, for about the millionth time since Winchell had known him, wriggled his eyebrows. “Got a card game and a lady friend up there, and what more could a man ask for in the late middle of his life?
“Also, I think this is the conclusion of your lessons with me. I’ve taught you about all I can teach. You’re only standing in the foyer of real card playing, and it’s more’n past time for you to get in there and start playing cards for money. Nothing else I could say would be as valuable as the experience you’ll acquire while sitting at the table with your best suit on.”
Fain Bracquet took five one-dollar bills from his pocket. “Here’s your beginning stake, and don’t insult me by getting all thankful. Five dollars is a month’s wages for a border Mexican and a lot of groceries for anybody in these times, so hold it close and make it grow for you. And just keep in mind what I’ve said over and over: When you run into an absolutely first-class mechanic, and you will, you’ll never know for sure if he’s cheating. But remembering what I’ve taught you, you’ll get a sense that not all is right. That’s the time to cash in and leave…polite but fast.”
Then he laughed, tipped his head sideways, and gave Winchell a squinch-eyed look. “Be on your guard for those riffle stackers and second-dealers. Just get up and walk away, like I’m doing now. Just walk away, Winchell. There’s always another game somewhere down the line.”
Dust again, blowing up from Chihuahua, and a late afternoon sun headed toward the Carmens. Fain Bracquet picked up a carpetbag valise in his left hand and gave Winchell a firm handshake with the other. “You’re a fine boy. Play the cards well and straight; you’ll do all right without resorting to funny business. Yessir, young Winchell Dear, you’ll do all right. You’re not only smart, you’re also a Texan, and Texas has always produced the best poker players in the world.”
He clapped a brown fedora on his head at the appropriate angle and walked through the front room of the Thunder Butte Store. After purchasing three cigars at the cash register, he stepped off the porch and headed for the lash-up serving as a one-room train station a hundred yards away, checking his gold watch as he moved along.
To Winchell Dear, the old hustler seemed smaller than when they’d first met. Part of it was Winchell’s growing five inches over the last two years, and at five eleven, he was now four of those inches taller than
Cutting it close, as always, Fain Bracquet boarded the train exactly two seconds before it jerked out of the station and began chuffing north. Along with the hopper cars carrying cinnabar ore, there was a single Pullman plus the caboose. Fain Bracquet was standing on the caboose platform and waved when he saw his student watching him go.
A hundred yards up the track, blowing dust enclosed the train. But twice through the swirls, Winchell caught a glimpse of Fain Bracquet leaning on the iron railing of the caboose, looking back at him or the border or perhaps life itself. From that distance and in that moment, Fain seemed old and possessing at best a kind of tinhorn majesty, not as smooth and high-hat urbane as Winchell Dear had once thought him.
Five days and two hours later, word came down from San Angelo that Fain Bracquet had been shot and killed during a no-limit poker game. Something to do with dealing seconds, so the talk went. The talk went on to say Fain went for a Derringer stashed in his boot but never made it.
It was 1940, and Winchell Dear was just sixteen when he heard the news. The following day, he turned seventeen and went out to the flat rock, where he practiced second-dealing, kind of a tribute to Fain Bracquet and all that he was and wasn’t.
And Fain had been right—when you pulled a second, the sound of the card rubbing against two other cards was far away soft as mice in the walls. But still plain and clear if you knew what to listen for.