The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [229]
big boy for a game of cards, poker most of all. We played at Hilario's at first, and when Hilario kicked about these long sessions that lasted far into the night we moved over to the filthy BP-" Chinese restaurant. Very soon I began to put all my time into gambling. It seems the ancient Huron tribe thought gambling was a remedy for some illnesses. Maybe I had one of those illnesses. Moulton must have too. He had to be betting continually. I matched pesos with him, cut for high card, played fribble--which was what he called pinball-- and even put-and-take, with a little top. I was lucky and also skillful at poker, which I had learned in a great school, Einhorn's poolroom. Moulton complained, "Brother, you must have studied with the Capablanca of poker. I can't tell when you're bluffing because you always look so innocent. Nobody can really be as innocent as all that." This was true, though I would have said I actually did intend to be as good as possible. That's how much I myself knew. But Jesus, Lord! Dissembling! Why, the master-dissemblers there are around! And if nature made us live and do as worms and beetles do, to escape the ichneumon fly and swindle other enemies by mimicry, and so forth--well, all right!! But that's not our problem. With Thea too I behaved as though nothing was wrong, and yet I knew we were slipping. If I didn't show what despair this caused it was a lead-pipe cinch to bluff Moulton out with only a jack. Why these snakes? Why did she have to hunt snakes? She came back with heaving sackfuls, which made my intestines go wrong with reaction; and then she gave them such loving treatment that I could see nothing in it but eccentricity. You had to be careful not to provoke them into striking the glass, because it gave them mouth sores hard to cure. And in addition they had parasites that got between the scales,. and they had to be dusted or washed with mercurochrome; some had to be given inhalations of eucalyptus oil for their lung ailments, for snakes get tuberculosis. Toughest of all was the casting of the skins, which was like labor when they couldn't writhe out of the epidermis and even their eyes were clouded with a dirty milk. Thea sometimes took forceps to help them or covered them with damp rags to soften the skin, or she put the more restless ones in water and in the water set a block of wood afloat so the beast might rest its little head when fatigued with swimming. But then they would gleam out, one day, and their freshness and jewelry would give even me pleasure, their enemy, and I would like to look at the cast skin from which they were regenerated in green or dots of red like pomegranate seeds or varnished gold crust. Meanwhile Thea and I were not satisfied with each other. I was resentful of the snakes and that she tended them. I felt myself between two peculiarities, hers and the peculiarity of the town in full .369 stride of its season. But I didn't tell her. When she asked me how about coming out with her to hunt I said I wasn't well enough yet. So she looked at me, and the thought was very prominent that after all I was lushing and playing cards, so if I stood before her skinny, ill, and with secret thoughts smoldering, what remedy could we ever agree on? "I don't like that gang you're with," she said. "They're harmless," I casually answered, but it was not a harmless kind of answer. "Why don't you come out with me tomorrow? Talavera has a safe horse for you. There are some places I want to show you, wonderful places." "Well, that'll be swell," I said. "When I feel more ready." I had tried to put Caligula over and that was enough of a trial; I had stretched myself as far as I could and had no more stretch. I'd be damned if I could get myself into Thea's excitement about catching snakes. It was too extreme a way of making out, with that vigor that couldn't be satisfied in ordinary pursuits. If she had to go and snatch these dangerous animals by the throat with a noose, and keep them and milk their venom from them, okay. But I knew at last that definitely there was one thing that was not