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The Poker Game
by John P. Kristofco Peter Allen wasn’t grim, though most of the kids on Portage Street thought he was.They never saw him smile, and he always yelled at them when they cut across his yard orjumped the hedges that ran along the sidewalk the length of his property. “Don’t ever buy a house on a corner,” he told his son Alex once, shaking his head.“Worse thing I ever did.” The ten year-old nodded like he often did when his father said things that didn’t seem to matter to him, even though he was perhaps the best hedge jumper on the block, practicing his craft when his father was at work and his sisters weren’t home. They would be only too happy, he knew, to rat him out to dad. Peter Allen would burst from the side door and shake his bony fist. “Damn kids!” he’d yell, then walk his quick, stiff gait out to the hedge to make sure it wasn’t damaged, pulling and placing it back into shape. Having a tidy hedge line, both on top and on the side, was an important matter to him.He had just this summer started to let Alex clip a small section of it, watching as he did. It would be another year before he’d let the boy trim the entire length. That was his way with so many things, orderly, one right way to do them, and he did them with precision and on schedule. He was a timekeeper after all. But he did not do them with joy, at least not as far as Alex could tell, and he countedhimself something of an expert on that subject, though he almost certainly would not havethought to call it that. His Saturdays on bicycles with friends, wiffle ball and little leaguein the summer, Charlotte Crowe sitting next to him at school all brought smiles to his face,even when he wasn’t doing them. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, did that for his dad. It wasn’t that he was grim exactly, though Mikey Richert called him that once, saidhe was the “grim keeper.” Alex felt guilty when he heard that from his friend, because hecouldn’t help but laugh. His father was, as Alex named it, “serious.” It seemed as though everything he did was important, that it somehow mattered to the world. “You know, Alex,” his mother told him once, “things were tough for your father when he was a boy.” Alex had already gained a sense for that from the two trips back to his father’s home town in Pennsylvania. “He was one of eleven children. Grandpa Allen worked in a coal mine, and hey neverhad much, so the kids had to pitch in with what they could.” Alex nodded. “Like when he picked up scrap coal from the dump and hunted ginseng in the woods.” He had heard these stories many times. Mrs. Allen nodded. “Yes, and helping to keep the garden and the chickens.” “So, that’s where his ‘do what you’re supposed to do’ came from?” Mary Allen smiled. “Yes, I suppose so.” As far as Alex could tell, his father didn’t have friends certainly not like Alex and his sisters had. Even his mom had Eleanor Poole down the street and Mikey Richert’s mother who she talked with now and then, met with to go down to Terry-town Shopping Center. He heard her on the phone with them, heard his mother talk about them. But his father didn’t mention anybody in that way. Sure, he talked with John Zomsky across the street who cut his hair once a month, and he mentioned his boss The Paymaster at work, and there were the guys he bowled with on Friday nights, but there wasn’t a Mrs. Poole or an Irene Richert in his world. Surely, there was no Mikey Richert. Alex heard him talk about a Joey Petrok a couple times, best man at their wedding and apparently his ‘best friend.’ But Alex was almost eleven, and he had never met the man. As far as he knew, he had never been to the house. It was a cold evening in January when Alex first heard about the poker game. “George Willis said he won’t be able to host us at his place,” he overheard his father telling his mother in the kitchen. “He said they’re having some trouble with the pipes. He asked me if we could do it.” There was silence except for the sound of dishes in the sink. “Well,” his mother finally said, “it has been a while, hasn’t it.” “George said it was about three years ago.” “Then I guess it’s our time.” “Okay, I’ll tell him at work tomorrow.” The kitchen door opened, and Alex leaned toward the television as if he was intent on the new episode of Ozzie and Harriet that Wednesday night. “Alex,” his father paused on his way to the bedroom, “get your stuff off the table downstairs and put it in the fruit cellar,” and before he the boy could respond, his dad disappeared around the corner. “Okay,” he said to the back of his dad’s leg. A moment later, his mother appeared at the kitchen door. “Alex, would you mind tidying up down the basement?” He squinted and tilted his head. “Uh,…..sure….what’s up?” Mary Allen draped the dishcloth across the stove handle. “Your dad’s having the card game here on Saturday.” That didn’t sound familiar. “Card game?” “Yeah. Dad plays cards a couple times a year with some men from work.” “I didn’t know that.” “Yep. They’ve been doing it for maybe seven-eight years now.” “How come they never have it here?” “Oh, they did a while back, when you were seven or so.” For the next two days, the house took on a sense of urgency. Alex and his sisters putaway their things from the small basement. Mary Allen mopped the linoleum floor, took downthe clotheslines, washed the old kitchen table that had been down there for as long as Alexcould remember, cleaned her old white ringer washer, and, with the help of her daughters,cleaned and ‘prettied-up’ the house’s one small bathroom. Storage boxes with their odds-and-ends were closed, stacked, made to stand in order. Air fresheners were bought and strategically placed in corners out of sight. The only two of the six basement windows that actually worked were opened an inch or so to let in cold,fresh air. For his part, Peter Allen’s already serious countenance took on an even sharper focus.He picked up two cases of beer: one Gold Bond and the other Carlings. He bought bags of chips and pretzels, even some sour cream and onion dip, all things usually reserved for the holidays or the infrequent visits from relatives. He bought cans of mixed nuts and bags ofM&M’s. It was like a hive until Saturday when they ate dinner early, and Alex’s sisters went off to spend the evening with friends. Only Alex was unable to make the same arrangements, so he would be at home, admonished in words that allowed no room for interpretation or latitude that he was to “stay quiet and out of the way.” The plan for that was simple: watch t.v. with his mother and just go to bed by ten. It seemed a straight forward if not inspired strategy. But, like so many human designs, it did not anticipate every contingency, and when Mary fell asleep in her chair while they were watching Gunsmoke, Alex was left to his own improvisation. Below him were the voices of men he did not know except for one in the house that he helped clean, laughing, calling out, lowering the register for ‘shit’ and ‘godammit,’ sometimes sharing them as if there weren’t a ten year-old and his mother just above them.Twice he heard his father scold an offender, and Alex would hear, “sorry, Pete, okay?”to the squelched laughter of the others. It was unlike anything he’d ever heard in their small bungalow. He thought maybeIt would wake his mother, but she was much too competent a sleeper to allow that to happen.He began to imagine what it looked like down there. It had long ago been discovered by the children in the Allen house that one could geta pretty good view of the basement from the top of the steps, especially when only the fartheraway of the two overhead lights was in use like it was tonight. He was certain that his dad would not want him to do it, that it would indeed qualify as“getting in the way,” and that there might be a debt to pay if he were detected, but the sound was too enticing, surely much more compelling that Miss Kitty’s doe-eyed looks at Marshall Dillon. Alex walked quietly into the kitchen and stood a moment at the door to the steps. The voices grew louder. He could smell the cigarettes and cigars, bottles being set back down on the table his mother had cleaned. It was all too irresistible. He flicked off the kitchen light and opened the door slowly, quietly, just enough to peeka head through. He stretched out on the floor and looked down the stairs. There in the hazy halo around the table, six men sat, two of them facing the stairs; oneof those was his father. They sat as if they ran the world, some secret group hidden from the sun. Smoke driftedup to the single light as if it bore the burden of their lives breathed out, cleansed by lukewarmbeer pulled from cardboard cases by the wall. These men from the factory, the offices that took the days away like canceled pages from their calendars, faces, hands lined and tired, so far distant from the time they dreamt of what they might become some day, sheltered for this gauzy island’s five-hour respite. They slapped down cards and coins, chided one another, drew smoke deep into their lungs, tossed their heads back for more beer. And there among them, with a green visor on his head and his shirtsleeves neatlyrolled, Peter Allen sat with a smile on his face that Alex had never seen. It cut through thesmoke to him as if a veil had been lifted for a moment. The smile was wide, unfettered, set free if only for this time, as if the man knew his car and all the others owned by the bank sat icing in the January night, and he didn’t care. None of that mattered. For those five hours all thatmattered was that hazy circle in his basement. Alex felt his own face smile in a way it never had before. He slowly shook his head,rose, closed the door, and went back into the living room. He never forgot that evening, the night the poker game came to his house. |
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