Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online Page A

Dauphin, however, and under its in fl uence two Baptists lured him into a game
of Deuce to Seven and he lost everything. A few days later a heart attack
felled him. He placed his last bet on a football game that was showing in
preop, and was dead a week later. When Dorn went to identify him, the orderly
pulled back the sheet and they saw the Jack of Hearts tattooed on his calf, a
mistake of taste from his youth.
That left Mancini the winner. (He continued his cicada-length relationships
with women and surprised everyone by eventually becoming a drug counselor in
Iowa.) They gathered in his apartment at eleven the morning after The Dauphin’s
death. The colour TV was on mute. There was some coverage about the buildup of
the war in the Gulf, and Mancini switched channels and stopped when he found a
programme with a female snakehandler wearing shorts. They watched her in
silence, remembered anecdotes about The Dauphin, then got in the car and took a
drive around the lake. They were more than six thousand feet above sea level
and it was easy to get drunk.
They played shorthanded poker among themselves and learned new games and broke
down percentages. Dorn ’ s fi rst principle had always been (as in the
song) that you go with ‘ the one with hair down to here
and plenty of money. ’ In the lull after The Dauphin ’ s death, Cooper decided to show them how good a card
mechanic he could be. He tore open a new pack, discarded the guarantee cards
and jokers, cut at twenty-six and gave a series of faro shuf fl es, eight times in under a minute, so the
deck ended in exactly the same order he started with. He confessed all this to
them, even if it was something he would never use in a game, so they would
trust him. ‘Watch carefully,’ he said at the start. ‘You have the fi ngers of a good Catholic with his rosary, ’ Mancini noted. ‘Why do you do this?’
There is a great history of people being given the wrong book, at some key
moment in their lives. When Coop had been scammed a few years earlier in
three-card monte on the pier in San Francisco, he went to a game shop to
discover how he had been cheated, and instead found a reprint of The Expert
at the Card Table, published as far back as 1902. Apart from explaining the
three-card-monte hustle, the book became a Pandora’s box for him. He found a subterranean world.
I thought I should discover everything that might come against me, Coop said. I
found a treatise on the ‘Science and Art of Manipulating Cards.’
Well, someday you must meet The Gentile, Dorn said, and learn a few more things
from him. He’s an old-time faro player. Maybe I will write you a brief letter
of introduction.
A few days after The Dauphin’s funeral, they scattered. Dorn returned home to
Nevada City, where Ruth, his perennial girlfriend, worked as a speech
therapist. He invited Coop to join him, and they drove a winding road bordered
by pines and were caught in a swirling snow until they left the mountains. Dorn
changed the radio dial to KVMR as they entered its frequency. In Nevada City,
he turned out to be a pillar of the community, active with the local public radio
station, and with helping transform an old forge into a community centre. At
the same time, he remained obsessed with conspiracy theories that, like poker,
had a disguised structure, revealed only by footnotes and glances. Dorn could
always sense the contours of a setup or read a deceit. What frustrated him in
his dealings with the Vegas Brethren, the born-agains, was that he hadn ’ t broken their code, couldn ’ t fi gure them out; he felt fi nessed by them. He was unsure whether
Pounce Autry was a great poker player who hated to lose or whether he was
always assisted by a mechanic or cardsharp who stacked or beagled every deck.
Recently, during the buildup to the war, he kept seeing their lapel fl ags. Coop, disgusted by their adamant
political self-righteousness, wanted to take them on.
Can’t be done.
I think I