The Cardturner: A Novel About Imperfect Partners and Infinite Possibilities Read online

  My uncle threw up his hands. “He just starts rattling off cards!”

  “Well, did you explain how you wanted it done?” asked Gloria.

  He sputtered a moment, then admitted he had not.

  “Then I suggest you do,” said Gloria. “But first you owe him an apology.”

  She gave me a sympathetic smile, then returned to the table.

  He didn’t apologize, but he did explain how I was supposed to tell him his cards. I had to sort them into suits first, and then tell him his spades, highest to lowest, then his hearts, then diamonds, then clubs. Always that order.

  “You got that?” he asked.

  “Spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs,” I repeated, trying to sound bored and uninterested, as if I found the whole thing beneath me. I was angry that he’d called me a moron and an imbecile in front of everyone.

  I gave him his hand as directed. “Spades: ace, jack, nine, three, two. Hearts: king, nine. Diamonds: ten, six, four. Clubs: ace, queen, three.

  “Is that better?” I asked, filling my voice with contempt, both for him and for his stupid game.

  He didn’t seem to notice my tone, or care about what I thought. His mind was focused on those thirteen cards.

  We sat back down. On each corner of the table there was something called a bidding box.

  Gloria reached into her bidding box, took out a green pass card, and placed it on the table. “Pass,” she said aloud. At every other table, the bidding was done in silence.

  The man next to her, in the East seat, also passed.

  “One spade,” said my uncle.

  I reached into my bidding box, removed the 1♠ card, and set it on the table. “One spade,” I repeated.

  I should mention that nobody bothered to explain bidding boxes to me. I figured out what I was supposed to do all by myself, but do you think my uncle gave me any credit for that?

  No.

  Over the next two and a half hours we played twenty-six hands of bridge. “Nine of hearts,” my uncle would say, and I’d set the 9 on the table. “Queen of clubs,” and I’d lay down the ♣Q. He never once forgot what cards he held. His voice remained flat, so I had no clue how well he was doing, but after a while I got the impression that my uncle and Gloria were doing very, very well.

  Each time, one of the hands became the dummy. That hand was placed faceup on the table for everyone to see. The dummy’s cards were said aloud for my uncle’s benefit, once and only once, always in the same order: spades, hearts, diamonds, then clubs. So not only did he have to memorize every card in his own hand, he had to memorize all of the dummy’s cards too. That’s twenty-six cards, half the deck.

  Every North-South pair was a team, and every East-West pair was a team. When we finished a hand, everyone would place their cards back in their original slots on the board. We played two boards each round; then the East-West pair would leave and a new team would sit down against us. We would pass the boards we had played to table two and get new boards from table four.

  It was like some sort of odd dance, with the people moving in one direction and the boards moving in the other. After the seventh round, every East-West pair skipped a table to avoid playing boards they had already played.6

  At least three women commented on Trapp’s “handsome” new cardturner. Gloria always had to introduce me since my uncle still didn’t know my name.

  It might not have been just the jacket and tie. Women over a certain age tend to think I’m handsome. Girls under twelve too. According to Leslie, all her friends think I’m hot. Whenever her friends are over, I can hear them giggle when I walk past. The first few times it happened, I checked to make sure my fly was zipped.

  When it was all over, Trapp and Gloria had played against every East-West pair except for the team that had skipped them. (I’ll call him Trapp, since that’s what everyone else called him.) They’d played twenty-six of the twenty-eight boards. The director gathered all the score sheets and entered the results into the computer.

  “Did you win?” I asked.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” said Gloria.

  It was odd that after playing for almost three hours, we had to wait for the computer to tell us who won.

  “Thank God for computers,” said Gloria. “In the old days, we had to wait around for almost an hour while the director tallied the scores by hand. Sometimes we didn’t find out until the next day.”

  Gloria explained that the final score depended on how she and Trapp did on each board, compared with every other North-South pair. So even if they only took two tricks on board nineteen, they would still get a high score on that board if most other North-South pairs only took one trick.

  I liked that. I was unlucky when it came to cards. Cliff always beat me at poker. He must have won close to a hundred dollars off me, and we only played for quarters.

  I guess that was the one good thing about him being with Katie. We hadn’t played any poker for a while.

  But in this game, luck wasn’t a factor. It didn’t matter if Trapp was dealt bad cards. It was just how well he played those bad cards, compared to every other person sitting in the South position, who had to play the same bad cards.

  A woman came up to my uncle and asked his result on board fourteen, a hand we probably played an hour and a half ago.

  My uncle thought for no more than seven seconds. “We set three no-trump two tricks.”

  “You set it? They made an overtrick against us!”

  “You have to knock out dummy’s king of spades,” said Trapp, “and then hold up twice on your diamond ace.”

  But he still couldn’t remember my name.

  The printer spat out the results, and the director posted them on the wall. The scores were given in terms of percentages. Trapp and Gloria won with a 65 percent game. That might not sound like much, but second place was only 56 percent.

  I take back what I said about luck. The East-West pair who skipped table three was very lucky.

  10

  An Apology of a Sort

  We drove back in silence, which was just fine with me. I was having a difficult enough time trying to follow the directions from his house to his club, in reverse.

  “I’m going to give you thirteen letters,” he suddenly said. “I want you to repeat them back to me.”

  Before I could even say “What?” he began rattling off random letters. “G-b-c-d-i-o-a-o-r-y-t-g-l.”

  I gave it my best shot—“Um, g, b, c …”—but then stopped. “Look, I get it,” I said. “Your memory is better than mine.”

  “It’s not memory. It’s context. I’m going to give you the same thirteen letters, but in a different order. Concentrate really hard now.”

  I sighed.

  “G-i-r-l, b-o-y, c-a-t, d-o-g.”

  I didn’t bother saying them back to him.

  “Hah!” he laughed, then said, “They’re the same letters. I just sorted them into suits for you.”

  Half an hour later we were parked in his driveway and I escorted him to the front door.

  “How much did Mrs. Mahoney tell you?” he asked.

  About what? I thought, then noticed him fumbling with his wallet. “She didn’t say,” I said. “Just whatever you paid Toni is fine.”

  “This has nothing to do with Toni. We have a different arrangement. How about seventy-five?”

  “Sure.”

  He handed me his wallet. I removed three twenties, a ten, and five ones, then gave it back to him.

  Teodora opened the front door. “Thank you so much, Alton,” she said as she shook my hand, using both of hers. “This means so much to him.”

  “It’s just a card game,” groused my uncle.

  She led him inside, and I returned to the car.

  Okay, I admit it. When he handed me his wallet, the thought did occur to me that I could take any amount of money I wanted and he wouldn’t know the difference. Not that I would steal from a blind person. Not that I would steal from anybody, even if he was so ric
h he’d never notice, and even if he did call me an imbecile and a moron in front of a roomful of people.

  Besides, I was no longer angry at him, and it wasn’t just because he paid me. I think the girl-boy-cat-dog thing was his way of apologizing.

  “You will return that money!” my mother said the second I stepped into the house.

  She had obviously chatted with her dear friend Mrs. Mahoney.

  “Get back in that car, drive straight to his house, and tell him you have no interest in taking any money from him. You’re doing it for the joy of spending time with your favorite uncle.”

  “He’ll think I’m crazy!” I protested.

  “No, he’ll respect you for your integrity.”

  “I’m not being unintegritary,” I replied. (Don’t bother looking up that word.) “I’ve been gone for almost six hours. Seventy-five dollars is barely minimum wage. And then there’s the price of gas.”

  I thought “the price of gas” would be my trump card. I couldn’t remember a single day when my parents didn’t complain about gas prices—not that it stopped my father from buying an SUV.

  “You think you’re doing this for a measly seventy-five bucks?” asked my mother. “Seventy-five dollars is squat! In a few months Uncle Lester will be …” She didn’t finish her sentence. For a brief instant I thought I saw a flash of sadness on my mother’s face, as if the words she was about to say suddenly meant something to her. But that was only for an instant. “All right, you can return it to him on Monday.”

  “What’s Monday?” I asked.

  “He goes to his club every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday.”

  So this wasn’t a onetime thing.

  “What about my job?” I asked.

  “What job?” she scoffed.

  “I was going to get a job this summer.”

  She stared at me, hands on her hips.

  I turned and skulked into my room.

  Okay, I was too lazy to get a job, and my mother knew it, but I wasn’t as lazy as she thought I was. I was fairly certain that I could have packed groceries or hauled boxes from one end of a warehouse to the other with as much vim and gusto as anyone. My problem was I couldn’t get motivated to actually get into my car and drive to every supermarket, restaurant, movie theater, and appliance store just to ask to fill out a job application. Especially since I was pretty sure they’d throw my application in the trash the second I walked out the door.

  I phoned Cliff and told him about the bridge club. “It’s crazy,” I said. “These people are like from a different planet. Planet Bridge. They even speak their own language.”

  “They’re just a bunch of old people,” said Cliff. “It’s either bridge or bingo.”

  For some reason I felt offended by that remark. Bingo was just a game of luck. Bridge seemed more like a sport, a mental sport, like chess, only with a partner. And my uncle was a superstar of the sport.

  “My uncle is amazing,” I told Cliff. “Everybody’s always coming up to him and asking ‘How should I have played this hand?’ or ‘How would you bid this hand?’ And he can’t even see the cards.”

  Cliff wasn’t impressed. “You told him what cards he had, right?”

  “Right, then he told me which card to play.”

  “Well, what’s so amazing about that?” Cliff asked. “Now, if he could somehow know his cards without you telling him, that would be amazing.”

  I tried again, but he showed little interest. In fact, he didn’t seem all that interested in talking to me, quickly dismissing whatever I said.

  Then it hit me: Katie was over there.

  I can be such an idiot! I told him I had to go, and hung up.

  11

  Tiger Woods’s Caddy

  I didn’t have to return the seventy-five dollars after all, thanks to Leslie. She pointed out to our mother that if I returned Uncle Lester’s money, he might think we were so rich we didn’t need it. Then he wouldn’t leave us anything in his will.

  I drove Trapp to his bridge club Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and continued to get paid seventy-five dollars each time. Maybe I should have given Leslie a cut.

  I no longer wore a jacket and tie, but my mother worked during the week, so I had to drive my car. One time it lurched a bit, and almost died, but I doubted Trapp noticed. We were driving back to his house after the Wednesday game, so his mind was on some bridge hand.

  Every bridge hand is a unique puzzle. If Trapp failed to solve the puzzle at the table, he would figure it out on the way home. He would think not only about what he should have done differently, but also about what the opponents should have done, and what he would have done if they had done that. I could have driven into a ditch and he wouldn’t have noticed.7

  Gloria was Trapp’s partner on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday, but on Wednesday he played with Wallace, a tall black man who taught physics at the university. Wallace and Trapp argued with each other after every single hand, saying things like “I asked for a club switch! If I wanted a spade returned I would have led a low one,” and “How could you bid three spades? Didn’t you hear my double?”

  Listening to them, you would have thought they were in last place, but they ended up with a 72 percent game, which was huge. Apparently it was very rare to break seventy percent.

  I learned what I was supposed to do if Trapp was dealt a hand with no cards in one suit. I’d say the word void. So when telling him his hand, I’d say something like “Spades: ten, nine, eight, seven, six. Hearts: king, queen, jack. Diamonds: void. Clubs: ace, nine, six, three, two.”

  I also began to understand how the game was played. I learned what trump meant. I wouldn’t admit it to my uncle, but the game began to intrigue me. I would sometimes try to guess what card he’d play before he told me to play it, but don’t worry, I never asked, “Are you sure?”

  Toni Castaneda must have been out of her mind.

  In all, we came in first three times and finished third once. I say “we” because I began to think of myself as part of the team. I imagined I was like Tiger Woods’s caddy. I had once heard Tiger Woods on TV saying how important his caddy was to him, how he wouldn’t have won some golf tournament without him.

  Trapp never actually said anything like that about me, but he wasn’t big on compliments. One time I heard him say “Nicely played” to an opponent. That was it.

  12

  The Basics

  Do you see that picture of a whale? It’s going to be our secret code. (Okay, maybe it’s not so secret.)

  This past year I had to read Moby-Dick in my Language Arts / English class. It seemed like a pretty good adventure story about a monster killer whale, but just when I started to get into it, the author, Herman Melville, stopped the story and went on page after page describing every tiny detail of a whaling ship. I zoned out. I never finished the book and had to bluff my way through the test.

  The reason I’m telling you this is because I’m about to attempt to explain the basics of bridge. My guess is that there’s going to have to be more bridge in this book as well.

  I’m not going to try to teach you how to play bridge. There’s no way I could do that. I’ll just try to explain enough of the basics that if you want, you might be able to understand some of the bridge stuff that happens.

  I realize that reading about a bridge game isn’t exactly thrilling. No one’s going to make a movie out of it. Bridge is like chess. A great chess player moves his pawn up one square, and for the .0001 percent of the population who understand what just happened, it was the football equivalent of intercepting a pass and running it back for a touchdown. But for the rest of us, it was still just a pawn going from a black square to a white one. Or, getting back to bridge, it was Trapp playing the six of diamonds instead of the two of clubs.

  Well, there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m sorry my seventy-six-year-old blind, diabetic uncle didn’t play linebacker for the Chicago Bears.

  So here’s the deal. Whenever yo
u see the picture of the whale, it means I’m about to go into some detail about bridge. If that makes you zone out, then just skip ahead to the summary box and I’ll give you the short version.

  There are two parts to a bridge hand, the bidding and the play. For now, I’m just going to explain how the play works.

  It’s all about taking tricks. Somebody sets a card on the table. Then, going clockwise around the table, the next three people all must play a card of that same suit, in turn. After all four people have played, the person who played the highest card wins the trick.

  That person is then on-lead for the next trick. That means he or she chooses any card to play, and once again everyone else has to follow suit.

  As I mentioned earlier, one of the four players is the dummy. The dummy hand is set out on the table for everyone to see. When it’s the dummy’s turn to play, the dummy’s partner tells the dummy which card to play. So when Trapp’s hand is dummy, Gloria tells me which card to play.

  Everyone begins with thirteen cards, which means there are a total of thirteen tricks for each bridge hand. Since Trapp and Gloria are partners, it doesn’t matter whether Trapp wins a trick or Gloria wins it. It counts the same.

  “What happens if you can’t follow suit?” Leslie asked me when I explained this to her.

  You have two choices. You can discard, which means you just choose some card in your hand that’s no good anyway and basically just throw it away. Or you can win the trick by playing a trump card. Trump cards are like wild cards in poker.

  Let’s say diamonds are trump. Somebody leads a club, but Trapp doesn’t have any clubs left in his hand.

  He can win the trick by playing a diamond. Any diamond will do. The 6 will beat the ♣K. That’s called trumping or ruffing. Everyone else still has to play a club if they have one.