American Boy - Larry Watson [31]
9.
I’D HOPED THAT THE REMAINING BOTTLES of Blue Lake Lager would go the way of the first three, but since such a set of circumstances was unlikely to arise again, I could hardly argue for saving the beer when another occasion arose. Otis Unwin’s parents were leaving town for a few days, and so he would have the house to himself. He didn’t want to throw a full-scale party—he was worried that the neighbors would call his parents or the sheriff or both—but Otis did invite a few friends, including Johnny and me, over for a weekend of poker and beer. And so one Friday evening not long after our outing to Frenchman’s Forest with Louisa, Johnny picked me up and we drove to Otis Unwin’s along with nineteen bottles of Blue Lake Lager.
Our arrival completed the short guest list. Only ten of us were in attendance, a small gathering, as Otis had hoped for. The poker game had already started, and Johnny sat in. I joined the rest of the kibitzers standing a safe distance behind the players.
Johnny and I and some of the other fellows in Otis’s kitchen played poker often, and we took the game seriously. Our preferred game was stud, either five- or seven-card, and we scorned wild-card or split-pot games. We didn’t show hole cards when the privilege wasn’t paid for. If a player ran out of money he was finished for the night; there were no loans at the table. The stakes were quarter, dime, nickel, with a limit of three raises, and while that might not seem like much, it was still possible to win or lose enough over the course of an evening to make a difference to your wallet or your spirits for days to come. Outsiders occasionally sat in on the game, and they invariably lost. They drank too much or they didn’t keep track of the cards, they couldn’t stand to fold or they called bets they shouldn’t have, they chased pots or their faces gave away their good hands and their bluffs, and often they relied more on luck than on skill. We called those interlopers “squirrels,” though not to their faces.
Not long after he sat down, Johnny had the largest stack of chips on the table. This was not a surprise. Of our group of regulars, he was acknowledged to be the best player. He was good at math and could figure odds quickly. He didn’t have a poker face, but there was another reason he couldn’t be read—he never stopped laughing and talking and taunting the other players. He kept up a running commentary on the cards and how players were likely to play them. The passivity he displayed in every other kind of competition was absent from the poker table. He had no trouble at all taking another player’s last nickel.
But what really distinguished Johnny as a player was his understanding that money wasn’t money in poker. For him it was merely a way to keep score, a tool to be used in playing a game, much like a racket, bat, or ball. On more than one occasion he’d said to me, “You play poker with money, Matt, not cards.” And with that remark he identified exactly what prevented me from being a better player. I couldn’t get past the fact that chips represented money, and that made me a conservative player. I seldom bluffed, I folded all but the surest hands, and I didn’t know how to buy pots or sandbag players into playing hands they shouldn’t. I usually won for other reasons, to be sure, but in contrast to Johnny, my winnings were modest. In any case, I’d decided not to sit in on the game at Otis’s because I wanted to drink more than a single beer, something I’d never do if I were playing.
There was a player that night who wasn’t one of the regulars, but he was no squirrel. Tim Van Dine’s older brother, Glen, had flunked out of Moorhead State College, and he was back in Willow Falls, pumping gas at the Mobil station and waiting until fall, when he’d enroll in a junior college and try to get his