The Cardturner Page 5

  I had to force myself to think about something else. Sometimes I would deal out bridge hands. I'd play all four hands, pretending I didn't know which cards were in each hand. Leslie would sometimes join me, but on this night, I was alone.

  It was Wednesday. Trapp had played with Wallace earlier in the day, and they had won with a 61 percent game. They had argued after every hand, but not as much as they had when they'd had their 72 percent game.

  There was a knock on my door. A moment later my parents entered, Leslie in tow. Her eyes were red, and my parents wore very somber expressions.

  My first thought was that Uncle Lester had died.

  "What's wrong?"

  My father got right to the point. "My company is having to cut back," he said. "I was fired."

  "You weren't fired," said my mother. "You were laid off."

  I'd heard vaguely about something called "the housing crisis," but it didn't mean much to me until that moment.

  What happened was this. A lot of banks made bad loans. People couldn't pay them back, and many people lost their homes. The banks lost a lot of money and stopped making new loans, which meant people stopped buying houses, which meant builders stopped building houses, which meant nobody needed insulation material. Which meant my father was out of a job.

  "Are we going to have to move?" Leslie asked.

  "We'll be fine," my mother assured her, or maybe it was herself she was assuring. Then, turning to my father, she said, "You hated that job anyway, always itching all the time."

  "So, how are things going between you and Uncle Lester?" my father asked me. "Are you two bonding?"

  "I guess."

  "Has he mentioned his will?" asked my mother.

  "No."

  "Do you know if he even has a will?" asked my father.

  "No, Dad, strange as it may seem, Trapp and I haven't talked about his will."

  "Well, you need to find out if he has one," said my mother.

  "And when it was last updated," said my father.

  "A lot of people don't like to think about death," my mother said.

  Yes, I was one of them.

  "And so they don't make the necessary preparations," she continued. "You may have to remind him to make sure he completes all the paperwork."

  "What, if he doesn't fill out all the forms, they won't let him die?" I asked.

  They ignored my sarcasm.

  "You can be very clever when you're not being stupid," said my mother, her version of a compliment. "I'm sure you can figure out some way to bring the subject up with him. Mrs. Mahoney says he listens to audiobooks. Find out what books he likes. People die in books all the time. Maybe he likes murder mysteries."

  "Start with that," said my father, "then guide the conversation around to wills."

  I realized my parents were worried because my father had been fired. Hell, I was worried too, but what did they expect me to say to him? "Hey, Trapp, you're going to die soon, which is too bad for you, but my dad lost his job, and we could really use a few bucks, like maybe ten million dollars."

  "And quit calling him Trapp," said my mother. "It's disrespectful. He's your uncle Lester. You need to remind him that you're family."

  Leslie remained in my room after our parents left. We looked at each other, but didn't know what to say. We were both scared.

  Leslie noticed the cards on the floor. "What's trump?" she asked.

  "Hearts."

  We played out the hand, without either of us mentioning our father or our worries about our future.

  19

  Captain and the Radio

  I'm ashamed to admit it, but I actually tried to talk to Trapp—excuse me, Uncle Lester—about his will. No, I didn't ask him if he liked books that had dead people in them. But as my mother says, I can be pretty clever when I'm not being stupid. I decided I'd get him talking about religion, because if you think about it, most religions are all about death.

  "Why don't you play bridge on Sunday?" I began as we drove to the bridge studio.

  "Four times a week is about as much as I can take," he said.

  It wasn't the answer I had hoped for. "Do you go to church on Sunday?" I asked.

  "Hah!"

  This was getting me nowhere.

  "Do you believe in God?" I asked.

  Another "Hah!"

  Maybe my idea wasn't so great. I once had a teacher who told me I'd be twice as smart if I was half as smart as I thought I was. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

  "I'm aware there is a greater reality, of which I'm totally unaware," my uncle said, surprising me. "I imagine I'm a lot like Captain and the radio."

  He explained that he had been listening to his radio earlier, and that his dog, Captain, had been in the room with him. He said there was a report about Barack Obama, then one about global warming and the melting ice caps in Greenland.

  "Let me ask you something," he said. "Which part of the radio broadcast do you think Captain understood?"

  I didn't think his dog actually understood any of it, but of course I didn't say that. "Maybe global warming," I tried. "Like the way animals can predict earthquakes."

  "Don't be absurd," he scoffed. "Do you really think Captain knew what the newscaster was saying?"

  "Well, no," I said, feeling stupid. "But that seemed like too obvious an answer."

  "Do you think my dog even knew that the noises coming from the radio were words, meant to convey ideas?"

  "Not really," I said.

  "Captain was oblivious," said Trapp. "Not only did he not understand a word the newscaster said, he did not even know there was anything to understand. I've got an atlas in my bookcase. Do you think it might help Captain if I showed him a map of Greenland?"

  "No," I said. "I'm aware dogs can't read maps."

  "Not only can't they read, they don't even understand the concept of reading. Dogs, like every other animal, have evolved to be able to function in their limited world. They know what they need to know, and are oblivious to everything else. So what makes you think you and I are any different?"

  "I can find Greenland on a map," I said.

  "Congratulations, you're smarter than my dog, hah!"

  I laughed too.

  "Humans have evolved in order to function in our own limited world," he said, "just like every other animal. Yes, we're smarter. We couldn't outrun tigers or outfight bears, so we had to out-think them. But just because some of us are smarter than kangaroos, it doesn't mean we know everything."

  I laughed at "some of us."

  "Of course, I don't have to worry about tigers or where my next meal is coming from," he said, "so I use my brain and its two hundred and fifty thousand years of evolutionary development to play bridge, but that's beside the point."

  "And the point is?" I asked.

  "Okay, you were probably taught there are five senses," he said. "We see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. But how do we know those are the only five? What are the senses we don't have? What are we failing to perceive?"

  It didn't seem right for me to point out that he no longer had all five senses. Or maybe, I considered, it was his loss of sight that made him wonder what else he was missing.

  "We may be surrounded by some greater reality, to which we are oblivious. And even if we could somehow perceive it in some entirely new way, it is extremely doubtful we would be able to comprehend what we perceived."

  "Like Captain listening to your radio," I said.

  20

  Toni Castaneda

  We entered the bridge studio and made our way through the clutter of people, tables, and bridge gibberish.

  "Aces and spaces . . ."

  "I had nine points, but it was all quacks. . . ."

  "Odd-even discards?"

  Talk about being oblivious!

  This being Thursday, I had assumed Gloria would be Trapp's partner again, but when we reached table three, someone else was sitting in the North seat, someone a lot younger.

  "Hi, partner," s
he said brightly.

  I guessed who she was even though I hadn't seen her for eleven years.

  "You think you're ready?" Trapp asked as he settled into his seat.

  She took a breath, then blew it out the corner of her mouth. "I hope so."

  Did you notice that she didn't acknowledge my presence, even though I was sitting directly across from her? At least she didn't tell me to shut up and leave her alone, like she had the last time I'd seen her. She was pretty, with shoulder-length dark hair, pale skin with some freckles across the bridge of her nose, and a shy smile. "I'm really nervous," she said, and then, as if to prove it, she knocked over her bidding box. "Oops!"

  "What happened?" my uncle asked.

  "Sorry. I just knocked over my bidding box. Sorry."

  "That's all right. Alton will clean it up."

  I reddened. That wasn't part of my job description. Nonetheless, I got down on my hands and knees and began picking up the various bidding cards scattered across the floor.

  "I hope I remember everything," said Toni.

  "You won't," said Trapp. "That's how you learn. But after you make the same mistake one, or two, or five times, you'll eventually get it. And then you'll make new mistakes."

  I gathered all the bidding cards. There were thirty-five possible bids, plus a number of pass cards, double cards, and redouble cards. They all had to be put back in a certain order, placed in such a way that each bid was visible.

  "Thanks," Toni said to me when I put the box back where it belonged. "This is my first time, and I'm really nervous. I'm Toni, by the way."

  I told her my name, then had to repeat it. She obviously didn't remember meeting me at Trapp's sixty-fifth birthday party, and I saw no point in mentioning it.

  "I used to do what you do," she said. "Whatever you do, don't ever ask, ‘Are you sure?' " She smiled.

  "Hah!" laughed my uncle. "You don't have to worry about that with Alton. He has no idea what's going on. He thinks we're playing Go Fish!"

  The director came around and placed two boards on our table. West shuffled one, and I shuffled and dealt the other, placing the cards in their slots when I was finished.

  The director made a few announcements, and then the game started.

  "Well, here goes," said Toni, removing her cards from the North slot.

  I removed the South cards, then led Trapp to the coffee alcove and told him his hand. His Go Fish remark had stung me. And I was mad that he hadn't bothered to warn me about who his partner would be.

  I found myself rooting against them. After a hand is over, bridge players often discuss what they could have—and should have—done differently. It's called the post-mortem. I remember the first time I heard such a discussion, I felt like screaming, "Why do you care anymore? The hand's over!"

  As I already told you, Trapp and Wallace yelled at each other after every hand. So you would have thought that Trapp would have plenty to say to Toni.

  Nope.

  It wasn't that he was unaware of her screwups. Even when he was dummy, he asked the other players to please say their cards aloud, so he could follow along.

  Yet all he said to Toni were things like "That was a very tough hand. At least you recognized the problem." Then he'd compliment her on what she did right.

  The worst thing he said to her was "Make a note of board eleven. We'll talk about that one later."

  "Uh-oh, I'm in trouble now," Toni said to me, smiling. I didn't smile back.

  I had been wrong imagining myself like Tiger Woods's caddy. A caddy gives advice. Tiger Woods and his caddy discuss club selection, wind conditions, and overall strategy.

  Trapp would never take advice from me, I realized. He had no respect for me.

  Toni Castaneda was his protégée. I was his trained monkey.

  And I hated her for it.

  21

  Fixed

  A fix is when your opponents do something really stupid, like make a ridiculous bid, or choose an inferior line of play, but, lo and behold, it works! Most of the time it would be the wrong bid, or the wrong line of play, but because of some lucky distribution of the cards, it turns out to be right this one time.

  "We got fixed on that board," Gloria or Trapp would occasionally say after their opponents had left the table. They would never say it when the opponents were still at the table. That would be rude, since basically they'd be calling their opponents stupid and lucky.

  I'm bringing it up now because Toni Castaneda must have fixed the opponents at least half a dozen times. Her luck was unbelievable. She'd make a play that even I knew was wrong, so you can imagine how bad it must have been, and then it would turn out to be right. Or else, the play would so confuse the opponents, they'd make an even worse play.

  I wasn't just imagining this. Trapp actually apologized twice to the opponents for fixing them.

  With Toni's amazing luck, combined with Trapp's ability, they finished in fifth place with a 52 percent game.

  "Congratulations," he said to her. "You just earned your first masterpoint."

  She beamed.

  It wasn't actually a full masterpoint. For coming in fifth, she had earned .29 masterpoints. That's 29/100 of a point. Yet from the look on her face, you would have thought she'd just become a Life Master.

  "Nice game, partner," said Trapp.

  "Thank you, partner," said Toni.

  I wanted to throw up.

  Trapp told me to go fetch boards eleven and twenty-three. He didn't actually say the word fetch, but that was how it felt to his trained monkey.

  I had to sit around for at least another half an hour while they went over the two boards. "I led the five of hearts and you played the queen."

  Toni scrunched up her freckled nose. "I did?"

  "Yes. You should have played the jack. It might not have seemed like there was any difference whether you played the jack or queen, but when you played the queen, you were telling me you didn't have the jack. Remember, good defense requires teamwork. Every card you play gives information to your partner."

  By the way, even though I had to wait around an extra thirty minutes, I still only got paid seventy-five dollars.

  22

  The Blind Lady Bowler

  I was still in a bad mood when I got home, and I took it out on my mother. "You can forget about Uncle Lester leaving us any money," I said, hitting her where it hurt. "Guess who his bridge partner was today?"

  She already knew about it, having talked with Mrs. Mahoney.

  "She's his protégée," I said.

  "It's part of her homeschooling," said my mother. "That's all. I wouldn't worry too much about it. She'll do something crazy and that will be the end of that."

  "She seemed normal enough to me," I said. "A little nervous, maybe. She knocked over her bidding box."

  My mother nodded knowingly, then said, "You can bet she was heavily medicated."

  "She's really pathetic," I told Cliff. "She pretends to be all interested in bridge—‘Gee, you're so smart, Trapp, why didn't I think of that'—when really all she's doing is sucking up to him so he'll leave her a bunch of money in his will."

  "I thought that's what you were doing," said Cliff.

  We were at the country club pool. Cliff had come down off his lifeguard perch and was sitting on the edge of my lounge chair. I had signed in as Robert Mays, a country club member who, according to Cliff, was vacationing in New Zealand.

  I hadn't told Cliff about my father losing his job. For some reason I felt ashamed.

  "Check out the diving board," Cliff said.

  A girl in a pink bikini stood at the far end of the diving board. She shook her hair back, smiled at us—well, at Cliff—then raised herself up on her toes, took two steps, bounced, and dived into the pool.

  "Oh, I forgot to tell you," Cliff said. "You'll like this. There was this blind lady bowler on the news the other day. She'd been in a car accident, but before that she'd always been this great bowler. They showed her bowling. Her husband g
ot her all set up, and then she took three steps and rolled the ball down the alley. At first it looked like the ball was headed straight for the gutter, and I thought, you know, Well, big deal, what's so great about that? but then, when it was an inch away from being a gutter ball, it suddenly curved back and hit smack in the center of the pins for a perfect strike."

  "Great," I said, without a whole lot of enthusiasm.

  "Everyone was all excited," Cliff said, "not only the people on TV, but at my house watching it. Katie had tears in her eyes."

  "Katie?" I asked, trying to keep my voice at an even pitch.

  "Sorry," he said.

  "No, it's fine," I said.

  "Really, she was just leaving," he said, as if that was supposed to remove the sting. "My dad had the news on, and we stopped to watch."

  "It's no big deal," I said. "I'm glad you and Katie are together. Better she's with you than some jerk."

  The girl in the pink bikini climbed out of the pool and passed right in front of us, this time not looking at Cliff, content that he was watching her.

  "She's like fourteen years old," I pointed out.

  He blew his whistle and yelled at some kids to quit running.

  "You got to admit," he said, "bowling a perfect strike is more amazing than just memorizing a few cards."

  Not that there's a contest to see who the most amazing blind person is, but I don't admit that. A bowler does the same thing every time. The same three steps. The same arm motion. It's muscle memory.

  Every bridge hand is different. I looked it up on the Internet. There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands. And those are just the cards one person holds. There are 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 possible deals, each one a unique puzzle.

  Trapp had to memorize every card in his hand and in the dummy, while at the same time keeping track of every card the opponents played. Hand after hand after hand.

  Don't get me wrong. I was happy for the blind bowler. I watched her bowl her strike on YouTube. She was inspirational.

  All I'm saying is, I bet she's better at strikes than spares.