Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [14]
Claire should have burned the cabin down then.
She walked out into the sunlight. She untied the reins and rose onto the horse with the cat in her arms, talking to both of them.
The Red and the Black
The Deadhead, or hippie, would be the one true ally Cooper found when he arrived at Tahoe. And the thing about ‘the hippie’ was that he seemed the healthiest person in the casino. He was a salt-of-the-earth hippie, cow-shit-on-his-Tevas hippie. From the first time Cooper heard rumours of him to the last night he saw him sitting at that card table with The Brethren, there was never a change in his outfit. There were his unironed Hawaiian shirts, there was the long hair, the loose beads that jangled whenever he moved, and the uncomfortable-looking necklace at his throat made from seashells. Cooper had been sitting on a banquette when he first overheard talk about him.
That friend of yours, that hippie …
Dorn’s not a hippie. You can’t gamble and be hippie.
Man’s a hippie. He goes way back. Lives with that speech therapist he met at a Grateful Dead concert. That’s hippie.
Dorn, slouching and robust, was the most collected card player to come down from the Sierras. He had a theory that two hours of handball a day justified and cancelled the drinking and cocaine and sitting in the presence of smokers during the long evenings.
Are you the hippie? Cooper asked. They were both watching a game.
Could be.
There’s that line—’Hippies are living proof that cowboys still fuck the buffalo.’
I wonder how many times I heard that one.
Cooper had spoken to almost no one since he’d arrived. Now, in thirty seconds, he realized he had managed to insult one of the smartest and most anarchic players in Tahoe, who, the rumour went, had twice skunked David Mamet in a game. His new acquaintance put his hand on his shoulder.
Excuse me. Have to meet someone. My name is Edward Dorn. Like the poet.
The hippie left, and Cooper followed him outside and watched him get on a bicycle, and drift down the street.
Cooper was twenty-three years old when he first arrived in Tahoe and fell into the company of Dorn and his compatriots. He had begun his gambling career watching and playing pool in bars and halls along the coastal towns. He’d studied how the quickly aging players slunk around the pool tables, how they forgave themselves too easily with a grimace, how some were falling in love with the stroke. And he recognized those who were too bitter or ambitious, as well as those who could conceal the larger range of their talent. Cooper had known little about people before this. But pool was by necessity a game of disguises by which you coaxed your mark to the table. And then, when he started playing cards, discovering a technical skill in himself, he saw that in poker you did not need to hide your talent. No one refused a game because you might be a better player than you seemed. This was furious mathematics, a stone in your heart, luck, and the chance of an eventual card—the River—that would glance you towards your fate. He found himself at ease within all this chaos and risk. When he saw drunks steer themselves uncertainly between the card tables in Tahoe, as if avoiding whirlpools, he recognized the same look that had been on him and the other fooled youths coaxed back towards the great Anaconda hoses on the floating platforms of the Russian River.
The group around Dorn took Coop under their wing. There was Dorn, Mancini, and ‘The Dauphin,’ so named because he had been seen reading a European novel. They would enter gambling halls like royalty from Wyoming—save for Dorn, in sandals and beads, flash-frozen in the sixties. Gamblers scarcely remembered the name of the president of the United States, but Dorn followed politics with an obsessive