Sam MacCord was at the poker game at Matty’s Truck Stop in Kilgore, Texas, the night Cherry Coke got his nickname. Cherry claimed it was his first time playing poker. When he said that, one of the players laughed and remarked that he’d come to the right place to bust his cherry. With a last name like Coke, the handle was a natural, and it stuck with him from then on. It was also easy for the players who’d been there to remember Cherry because he walked away from the table the big winner. And that just doesn’t happen the first time around. At least not in the kind of games Sam MacCord played in. So everybody assumed Cherry was an experienced gambler who ran out a strong line of con about not ever having played before. But after an incident that happened at a game down in Lufkin one cold, rainy night about a year later, Sam wasn’t so sure about that.
Cherry was a slim guy of medium height who appeared to be about forty. He had a face-shaped face that fronted for a head-shaped head and a pair of unassuming eyes whose color hovered somewhere between pale gray and hazel, depending on the lighting. His neatly combed hair was dark brown with a little gray at the temples, and he usually wore dark pants, white dress shirts, and a sand-colored tweed sport coat. Nothing about him stood out. In fact the opposite was true. If you’d asked Sam to describe Cherry and then given him a minute to think before answering, he would have said there was something blurry about the man, something vague and indefinite that made it hard to remember what he looked like even while you were staring directly at his face.
According to Cherry, he’d gotten into poker almost by accident. His car was a coal-black Mercury Marquis he’d bought from a dealership in Henderson. Cherry was an amiable sort who paid the sticker price on the car without quibbling, and the dealer, who was himself a gregarious individual, took an instant liking to him. While the dealer’s secretary was finishing the paperwork, the conversation drifted around to poker. Cherry mentioned that he’d recently acquired an interest in the game and would like to give it a try sometime. Right then the dealer invited him to sit in at Matty’s that coming weekend in Kilgore. This, Cherry claimed, had been his start.
During the year we knew him, he played mostly in East Texas. Though Sam now lived in Dallas, he was from East Texas and gravitated back homeward whenever he got a yen for the cards, even though the really lucrative action was to be found in the western part of the state. “A man can hide better where there’s lots of trees,” he always said with a friendly smile when anybody asked why he’d never tried the big games out around Lubbock and Odessa. The truth was that as far as poker went, Sam was nothing more than a recreational gambler, even though he sometimes won or lost several thousand dollars at a sitting. Back in his younger days he’d been a hijacker whose name was linked in the papers with a collection of Southern criminals who journalists tagged with the lurid name Dixie Mafia. He’d also been the main suspect in a couple of contract killings, but that was back then. Now things were a lot different. That was because one fine fall afternoon a decade earlier, a light of sorts had gone off inside Sam’s head, and he’d suddenly realized that he was the only one of his associates who’d never been to prison. Not one to travel too far on luck, he pulled up on the heavy stuff. Then, after getting the go-ahead from the right people a few weeks later, he opened what eventually became a very successful sports book. And Sam really liked Cherry Coke, which was why he was supremely irked the night Jackie Fats Reed pulled out the .357 snub-nose and stuck it in Cherry’s face during that Lufkin game.
Jack J. Reed, who was still called “Jackie Fats” years after his health had forced him to slim down from 300 pounds to his current 180, was a surly whiner who’d never been known to lose a hand with any degree of grace. Indeed, he was only allowed to play because he lost consistently, and because he was a hoodlum and a known killer who could not be safely excluded from the table. Jackie Fats was not a happy man. The cardiac he’d suffered in his late thirties and the subsequent triple bypass had forced him to get his life and his diet under control, but they’d left him very disagreeable because he missed lolling indolently around and scarfing up gargantuan quantities of whatever caught his fancy—things he certainly couldn’t do anymore unless he wanted an early checkout date. He also wanted to win at poker, which he almost never did. Consequently, everybody had mixed feelings whenever Jackie Fats showed up at one of the games. Regulars were happy to see such a steady loser bring his bulging bankroll to the table, but his propensity for violence also set everybody on edge.
Cherry and Sam became casual friends, and often after a game broke up they went out for breakfast, where Cherry always requested double and sometimes even triple orders of sausage. From time to time they’d meet at some club to hoist a few, though both were light drinkers. Cherry’s real name was Richard, and once Sam got to know him well enough to mount a personal question, he asked if there was any chance he was related to Richard Coke, Texas’ beloved Restorationist governor who ran all the carpetbaggers out of the state at the end of Reconstruction.
Cherry shook his head and said, “No honchos in my family, Sam. My dad was just a dirt farmer.”
“Where, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“A little ways outside Athens.”
At the time, Sam naturally assumed he meant Athens, Texas, a small agricultural town about seventy miles southeast of Dallas. Then, a week later at a game in Longview, somebody said something about Socrates. That was when Cherry, who rarely volunteered anything, smiled and said, “He was queer as a three-dollar bill, you know.”
“Who?” one of the other players asked.
“Socrates.”
“Some people claim that,” said Tom Wilkins, who was a fine player besides being a history teacher at the junior college in nearby Tyler. “But I don’t think anybody really knows for sure.”
“Oh, I know for sure,” Cherry said.
“How so?”
“Because the old rascal made a pass at me the first time my dad took me into town. I was about fifteen at the time, and he was famous. Everybody knew who he was.”
For a few moments there was a befuddled silence at the table. Then one of the players, a boisterous older fellow from Nacogdoches who was reputed to be rich as Midas himself, laughed and slapped Cherry on the back and said, “This boy comes on so sweet and innocent that if a man didn’t watch himself he’d wind up believing everything he says.”
They all had a good laugh and Cherry gave them a bland smile and the game resumed. But that business about Athens and Socrates came back to haunt Sam after Cherry had his little dust-up with Jackie Fats in Lufkin.
Cherry gambled around East Texas for a year or so. After that first night, he rarely took home the big money, but he won steadily if undramatically, and he always left with enough to live well for a couple of weeks. Which was highly unusual. Everybody goes all the way down to broke sometimes. It’s just in the nature of a gambler to do so. But not Cherry. He didn’t cheat either. Too many of the people he played with were far too savvy not to have eventually spotted something if he had. In fact, he seemed to win more consistently when he hadn’t even touched the cards than he did when he was dealer.
Spooky.
Now, as a general rule, it’s not considered polite to ask personal questions across the poker table. But it happens, especially when a group of guys have played together here and there over several months and feel like they have gotten to know one another. After all, even seasoned gamblers are human, and we humans are a snoopy lot whose curiosity sometimes gets the better of us. Finally, one night when a cattleman named Bob Robbins got to bitching about the sorrows of the beef market, a couple of other businessmen at the table chimed in with their grievances about the general economic condition of the country. Then somebody broke the ice and asked Cherry what he did for a living. Cherry ran out a song-and-dance about how he’d sold advertising novelties “up until a couple of weeks ago,” and then went on to say he was out of work and looking for a job. Nobody believed a word of it, of course. But the message was clear, and it was the only thing Sam MacCord ever knew for certain about Cherry Coke: the man might have started late in life and learned fast, but he was a professional gambler.
The Lufkin game that finally ended Cherry’s run in East Texas took place every weekend in the back room of a very successful used car dealership owned by a guy named Eddie Ray Atwell Junior. Eddie Ray Senior had been one of Sam’s Dixie Mafia cohorts. Almost forty years earlier, when Eddie Junior was just a little tyke, somebody had let the hammer down on the old man in a motel out in San Gabriel, a sinfilled little West Texas city that sprawled on both sides of the aptly named Rio Diablo—the Devil’s River. Nobody ever had a clue as to who was behind that dastardly deed, or why they were behind it, not even Sam, who knew as much about the Southern criminal underworld as anybody. Not that it really mattered. In the final years that Senior graced this world with his presence, he’d come to be known as Eddie the Rat, a man willing to screw his own partners anytime the opportunity presented itself. So his passing was mourned by few, and probably not even by his wife, a smart, tough woman who had been the brains behind the car lot in the first place, and who kept the business going while her husband was off running up and down the roads in a fancy Lincoln convertible, cranked to the gills on speed and trying to get something going in the Mexican heroin trade, an endeavor for which he was uniquely unsuited. She never remarried. Instead, she devoted her energies to teaching her kid the ins and outs of the used car trade. Eddie Junior was a fast learner who wound up even more successful than his mother. He also loved poker, and a lot of money passed across his table every weekend.
It was a Friday night in late fall. The area had been plagued with storms and tornado warnings all week. Thunder could still be heard rumbling in the distance, but by dark the rain had slacked off to a steady drizzle. The weather forecasts called for more bad weather in the next few days, and the temperature was expected to drop below freezing before dawn.
The cards were cold that night too. The game was nolimit Texas Hold’em, but nobody could seem to get any traction, not even Cherry. Then, a little before the witching hour, one of those freak hands came along, and two kings and an ace flopped. Jackie Fats bet $200 and Cherry raised him $500. Jackie smiled—which was a rare thing for the cranky bastard—and called even. Cherry smiled right back at him. This sudden heat caused everybody else to fold, and the next card was the king of spades. After that, Cherry knew the die was cast, even though the rest of us didn’t find out until a couple of minutes later. Fats bet $1,000 and Cherry raised him another $1,000. The last card was the seven of clubs, which neither helped nor hurt either of them. Jackie Fats smiled again, and with all the confidence in the world, he laid down twenty brand-new hundred-dollar bills. Cherry didn’t even hesitate. He called and raised $2,500, which only left him a couple of hundred on the table. For all practical purposes he was all in, a move that should have made Jackie Fats study the situation over for at least a few seconds. But Jackie was a natural bully, one who was always eager to stomp down on somebody, and he fell all over himself pushing the call into the pot. Eddie Junior, who was dealing that hand, said, “Showtime, boys.”
Jackie Fats had made the last call, which meant it was Cherry’s obligation to show his cards first. But Jackie was hungry for blood. His eyes were bright and gleeful, and his face was positively vulpine as he reached down with his short, once-plump fingers and flipped over his hole cards to reveal an ace and a king, which gave him an A-A-K-K-K full house. “Can you beat that?”
Cherry didn’t even bother to answer. He just casually turned over his cards to reveal the other two aces for an A-AA-K-K full. As I said, it was a freak hand.
Jackie Fats gaped at the cards for the longest time, his face getting gradually redder and redder. A drop of spittle dripped off his lower lip and hung by a thread as it made its slow way down to the table. Then he bellowed like a wounded bull and lunged to his feet. That’s when the revolver appeared in his hand. Which surprised no one. It was considered the worst of manners to come armed to another man’s place, but etiquette had never been Jackie’s strong suit.
“Get up,” he said, waving the gun wildly under Cherry’s nose. “I’ve never killed anybody who wasn’t on his feet.”
Cherry was unperturbed. “I don’t think so.”
“I said, get up!”
“No. I’m comfortable where I’m at.”
Jackie Fats licked his lips. He’d never had a man refuse one of his “requests” when he was pointing a .357 at his head. It was a new experience for him. Combined with Cherry’s utter calm, it rattled him. “I want to know how,” he said.
“How what?”
“How you always win.”
“He don’t,” Bob Robbins said.
“Shut up, Bob,” Fats said without much rancor. “I’ve paid the price here tonight and I want an answer.”
Ever the gentleman, Sam had left his piece in the car, but now he regretted it. He was beginning to realize just how long he’d been deeply annoyed with Jackie Fats and just how much he wanted an excuse to smoke the man. Still, he said as diplomatically as he could, “Let it pass, Jackie. It’s not worth gunplay.”
“I’ll be the one to decide that,” Jackie barked. “And this bastard is going to tell me how he does it.”
“There’s no reason—” Bob Robbins began.
“Seventy-two percent,” Cherry said, interrupting him.
“What?” Fats growled. His face was almost purple, and he was gripping the gun so tightly his knuckles were white and bloodless. Cherry was as calm as a mortician.
“Seventy-two percent,” Cherry repeated. “That’s how much of the time I know what the cards are. It’s always been that way, though I only started to gamble in the last few years.”
Jackie Fats was baffled. “What are you saying?”
Cherry sighed a tired sigh. “You wanted to know how I do it, and I just told you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Okay, then try this. We sit down and somebody deals a hundred hands. In roughly seventy-two of them I’ll know what everybody has.”
“You mean you guess right almost three quarters of the time?” one of the other players asked.
Cherry shook his head firmly. “There’s no guess to it. Some hands I don’t have a clue, but most of the time I know. And I’m never wrong. I either know for sure or I don’t know anything. It’s either the whole hog or nothing with me. That’s just the way it works, but I’ve got no idea why.”
Sam was more alert than the others. “How did you get that precise figure?” he asked. “The seventy-two percent, I mean.”
“I was tested in the Rhine experiments in ESP at Duke University.”
“But that was …” Sam began, then tapered off in confusion.
“About fifty years ago, Sam.”
“Damn! You can’t be that old.”
“Why can’t I?” he asked. Then he turned and looked at Sam, and his face was full of weariness. For a fleeting moment, Sam thought he saw something in Cherry Coke’s eyes that was deep and dark and ancient beyond knowing. Then Cherry blinked and it was gone, and he was once again the same bland, fortyish fellow Sam had known for a year, staring back at him out of a face so plain and undistinguished that it could hardly be remembered.
Cherry got leisurely to his feet and stood looking across the table at Jackie Fats. “If you’re going to shoot me, go ahead and do it,” he said.
Sam looked across at Jackie Fats. For some reason, all the fight had gone out of him, and he wasn’t in a shooting mood anymore. His hand trembled a little as he slowly lowered the gun. His gaze was riveted to Cherry’s face, and his expression was unreadable. Sam reached out and took the .357 gently from Jackie’s hand and tucked it in his belt. Cherry slowly and carefully stacked his winnings and slipped them into his inner jacket pocket. Then he looked around the table and smiled. “It’s been a real pleasure,” he said. “You were fine fellows to be with.”
When Cherry walked out, Sam MacCord followed him. The air was cold and bitter and full of a fine mist. In the parking lot Sam came abreast of Cherry and asked, “If what you said in there about the Rhine experiments is true, then …” Sam let his voice taper off.
Cherry didn’t look at him. He just kept walking, but he said, his voice resigned, “Then what?”
After a moment’s thought, Sam decided not to push the matter. “Nothing,” he replied with a shake of his head.
When Cherry got to his car, he turned and stuck out his hand. “I’ve enjoyed knowing you, Sam,” he said. “I’ve always liked having friends, but it’s never paid me to try to hold on to them too long.”
A few seconds later the Marquis whisked softly off into the night. That was the last time Sam MacCord ever saw Cherry Coke, but he heard stories. About a year later, a couple of regulars at the Lufkin game took their wives out to Las Vegas on vacation. One evening they left the women parked at a show and took a cab over to sample the delights of the Mirage. That’s where they saw Cherry at the five-dollar-minimum blackjack table, still clad in his dark pants and sand-colored sport coat. Whatever warm reunion they might have expected wasn’t forthcoming. Cherry was civil but unsmiling and distant. After a couple of aborted attempts at reliving old times, they gave up and left him there amidst the clatter of chips and the whir of the slot machines, a loner in a lonely land. Six months after the game, Jackie Fats Reed was found sprawled on the living room floor of his Houston apartment with a .22-caliber bullet hole in the center of his forehead and an expression of pure amazement frozen on his ugly face. Speculation was that Cherry Coke had extracted his revenge for that dreadful night in Lufkin, but Sam MacCord knew better.
After he heard about Cherry turning up at the Mirage, Sam made a point of asking everybody he knew who went to Vegas about him. Word filtered back to Texas that the man had become a minor legend on the Strip, a sort of silent specter who never won heavily but who rarely lost, and who moved from casino to casino taking a thousand or so a week away from the tables—enough to live on reasonably well but never enough to annoy the Powers That Be. Then he vanished.
It was several months before Sam managed to shake loose from his affairs long enough to travel out to Nevada and try to run down the story. The trail led to an elderly Texas road gambler named Diamond Red Nash who now worked as a gaming consultant for one of the casinos. He and Sam had always liked one another, and their reunion was cordial. Sam quickly learned that Diamond Red had been Cherry’s only real friend in Vegas. He also learned that Cherry had left town on his own.
“Didn’t nobody run him off or do nothing to hurt him,” Red said. “He just told me that he hadn’t seen Europe in a long, long time, and then he was gone.”
“Europe?” Sam asked in surprise. “Why there?”
“Well, he claimed he wanted to revisit some old memories. And he said he intended to try the baccarat at Monte Carlo.”
Sam nodded and looked out the window into the desert air shimmering in the bright noonday sun and thought back to that cold, rainy night when he’d last seen Cherry. It seemed a whole world and a lifetime away, and for the first time he felt the full weight of his sixty years. “What was your estimate of him, Red?” he finally asked.
“I think he was the best blackjack player I ever laid my eyes on.” Then he grinned. “And I believe he loved good pork sausage more than anybody I ever knew.”
Sam smiled and nodded. “And … ?”
“I really liked the boy, Sam. I believe he’d do to ride the river with.”
“I thought so too, Red. I thought so too …”
Sam shook the old man’s hand and caught a late-night flight back to Dallas. The next day he called in a marker with a couple of local detectives who stayed a few hundred in debt to his book year-round. It wasn’t long before one of them phoned to tell him that a Richard Coke had flown from Las Vegas to Atlanta and then on to Munich, where he had leased a brand-new BMW from a German agency. After that, there was no trace of him.
Sam decided to drop it. He considered Cherry a friend, and friends were entitled to their privacy. He also did his best to put the matter out of his mind. But from time to time, especially when he awoke in those lonely hours after midnight and sleep wouldn’t return, he found himself thinking about Cherry Coke. He finally decided that besides being the best gambler he’d ever met, the man had been a consummate actor who could convince anybody of almost anything. That’s what he believed because that’s what he wanted to believe. The only other explanation that fit the facts led down a dark road that Sam MacCord did not want to travel.