GAMBLING

THE WINDOWS AT DOÑA CUCA’S SALOON WERE DRAPED from the inside with velvet curtains so that if, like Abraham Shein, a patron happened to come through the swinging doors earlier and earlier each day, by the time he’d had a whiskey or a lemon brandy he couldn’t quite remember just how much daylight there was on the other side; by the time he finished placing his second bet he forgot there was any light besides the small, red lamps on each of the low tables. Sometimes, after enough losses and enough liquor, a man could even forget who he was. A mirror was hung above the bar as if to serve as a reminder; the glass was clear enough so that the reflection was unmistakable but cloudy enough to bring a soft focus to the remainder of the game. It also reflected the crowd around the bar. Brass-buttoned officers were a common sight but after a while they all blurred together in an arrogant echo of laughter.

There was Benoit, the sodden French Canadian, who spoke lyrically of fur, the luxurious beasts he had trapped and traded in order—or so it seemed—for him to gamble and drink in a far-off territory, miles away from home. And Don Perez, who herded twenty thousand sheep to California, sold the sheep, and returned just before the season’s first snowfall with his life and his earnings intact. Perez had left Santa Fe a headstrong boy and returned as a man with dark shadows under his eyes, toughened and emboldened by his profits even as he’d begun to lose them to Cuca. Once every so often there was a mystery guest, and today’s came in the form of a thin Southerner with a diamond stickpin in his black lapel. He drank an egg yolk, sugar, and soda before he began to bet, and as the hours passed and he accumulated more silver, whispers began to circulate even among those dulled souls whose interests lay solely in drinking: that the thin man was a professional, arrived from New Orleans, that he was seeking revenge on Doña Cuca for something that happened years ago—whether it was for a game lost or because he had been her lover, either way she had done him wrong.

Abraham was working on his third whiskey and, as he did during every other waking moment of his borrowed and questionable life, he was thinking about the letter. When the letter arrived, he hadn’t lingered on the envelope for long; it was delivered by a low-level soldier, and there was no wax seal or return address to give the sender away. It was not even written on official military papers, nor was it graced with decent calligraphy or anything resembling an official stamp. Abraham pictured the flimsy thing—the tossed-off message, already memorized, was emblazoned in his mind. What galled him was the utter lack of respect. He was a war veteran of this country! While plenty of his fellow immigrants, including his brother, fled Germany to avoid military service, he had arrived in America and enlisted for a war whose significance he could only now begin to understand, giving all of his youth and strength and skill to a new language, new people, new bloodshed. He’d been a member of the United States Army before he was anything in this country—before he was a businessman or a husband or a debtor—and if that didn’t cap the climax, it had been the general himself who had shook his hand and said, Yessir, you tell that brother of yours that this year’s contract belongs to Shein Brothers’!

He thought of the letter when the gap-toothed girl approached him. Months ago, after he’d first secured the contract with Fort Marcy, he would have let himself be escorted by his favorite through the black, pink-swathed door like a cow being led to pasture, but because last month when his girl wasn’t there and he was forced to go with another (a tall, proud one with a horsey jaw and surprisingly large, dark nipples) and he had taken her on the floor before ending a losing streak, since that day (or night—he wasn’t sure) he had established a firm rule of going with a different girl each time before going to the gambling table. He always did it before the game—never after; it simultaneously relaxed him and goaded him on, reminding him of just how far he had fallen from any life of respectability, just how desperate he’d become.

“Buenos dias, Señor,” said the gap-toothed girl. He had screwed this sloe-eyed cherry countless times; he had seen her bite down on her bottom lip as he drove too hard; she had seen him in the early morning twice, when he was piss proud and full of cursing, enraged that he had stayed until morning; he had done all of this and still she approached him as if they’d just been introduced, as if this were a picnic and he had come a-courting.

He grumbled something about his rule, how she knew they had been together last night, and when she looked as if she meant to slap him, he wasn’t surprised; only he would be dumb enough to get this tied up with a whore. “Donde está Carlota?” he asked, sounding miserable even to his own exhausted ears.

The carpenter and his men had finished the house, and he and Eva had moved in. The house was enormous and full of imported luxury items, and this had all been possible because of the contract, because of the government funds that were forthcoming. If there had been trouble—if he had made trouble before—this was an altogether different shade of it; there was a physical foreboding, a sharp sense of vertigo that only grew worse when he closed his eyes. He hadn’t had a moment of peace since he had read those words the previous day in unevenly spaced script: The general regrets to inform you that due to an unfortunate report of your conduct as a gentleman, the contract has been awarded to another outfit.

It would be hours, maybe even days, before Eva eventually found out the news, but he knew he would never tell her that the contract had been lost, and he wondered, not exactly sadly, what kind of lies he’d end up telling instead. His gap-toothed girl nodded with her chin toward the red door, where Carlota was waiting.

Later—it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes—as he approached the bar and asked for another drink, he felt not relaxed, not motivated, but disgusted and tired.

“You don’t go home no more for supper?” There came the husky voice, the dampened tease. As Cuca sidled up beside him, he knew she had been there watching him since the diamond stickpin man had left, taking far too much of her silver (without having the decency to run up a reasonable bar tab) for her to be in any kind of neutral mood. He could also tell that she knew. She knew about the contract and she knew about its loss. And she had watched how Abraham spoke to her girls, whom he went with and whom he rejected, as if he had any right to reject a single one of them, as if he had any rights here at all. Those girls were busy all times of year but these winter months were the most fruitful. Men were cold, men were lonely, and whether they were married or not didn’t seem to make much of a difference. As far as Doña Cuca was concerned, Abraham could see in her eyes that he was nothing but desperate, a desperate, marked man. He heard her disgust—implicit in the way she asked this simple question—You don’t go home no more?—and he saw it in the very flick of her fingers as she rolled a thin cigarette.

“I’m here to play Monte.”

“I thought you were here for a little something else—at least this is what my girls say—and these tough girls, they don’t lie.”

“No, not when they’re being paid.”

She laughed, surprisingly, but he had a feeling she would have just as easily shot him dead.

“Beautiful Cuca,” he said slowly, “whose mind is sharp as a knife, and yet she is missing her heart.”

“Believe me I am all heart. Why do you think you are in such good health?”

He smiled tightly without showing his teeth. “Are you dealing?”

“First you must pay what you owe,” she replied, exhaling a deep cloud of smoke. “Your time has come. Entiendes?”

He turned to her, holding everything back, his long, boring tale of personal decline, his seemingly special excuses. “Entiendo.”

They sat in silence for a moment and not for the first time that day did Abraham think of his wife with her swollen belly, the familiar and yet wholly unknowable fact of her. In his mind she was always alone, behind a closed door. “Let me play,” he said quietly. “Give me one final chance. Because you know I will make it back. I will always find a way to get you your money.”

“No,” she said, “no good.” She waved her hand dismissively, as if she were bargaining in the market for fancy soaps, baskets full of corn. “I’m afraid this is not so.”

“You know what happened with the contract,” he said, trying to cap his anger. “I know you know.”

But she only gave him a look empty of everything including pity.

“It was definite,” he said, even as he heard how insubstantial the words were. “It was as good as official. Those bastards did me in.”

She turned away and only nodded and smoked, smoked and nodded, like some kind of goddamn seer. He suddenly realized that of course she’d played no small part in the loss of the contract. He felt deeply ashamed that it had taken him this long to understand this: She had worked with the Spiegelmans against him. “I want the house,” she finally said, without even having the courtesy to look at his face while making such a request.

“You want my house?”

She nodded as if he’d asked if she might like something to drink. “And everything in it. Every last scrap of your wife’s French lace.”

“This I cannot do.”

She stood up and smoothed her gaudy taffeta skirt. “No?” she asked unsurprised. “Bueno, you’ll be hearing from my friends soon.” She stumped out her cigarette until it was nothing but bits of ashy leaves. “Abe”—she leaned in closely; he could smell her: sour perfume and pungent tobacco, hints of charred onions—“you do not think of stepping through these doors again until you give me my money. My money. Whose money you think built that house? And guapo,” she added, raising her ringed finger, “you don’t have much time.”

“You can have it,” he muttered. He said it so softly, not even he could hear. She had already turned her back so that he was forced to say it again.

When she turned around, she seemed prepared to settle.

“You can have it; we’ll make arrangements. Only let me play now. Give me one chance to earn it back.”

“Earn it?” she said bitterly. “Is that what you think you can do? This is a game, amigo. It’s a game.” Then her face softened, and, “You want to play?” she asked him, sweetly, cruelly, as if he were an unappealing child.

         

WHAT HE REMEMBERED OF HIS FINAL GAME OF MONTE WAS THE queen of cups and how as soon as he placed his bet on that bitch, he knew he was doomed to failure.

He remembered using what felt like the very last dregs of his charm in order to recall old times, old favors. Give me time, he finally begged, because he finally understood he was begging for his life. It costs you nothing. It’s like asking for air. But this request was met with nothing but scorn. He looked to see if the gap-toothed girl—if anyone—noticed he was leaving, but the room could have been any gambling hall anywhere. As he stepped out into the chilly evening, he was no more than a stranger who had lost everything and there was nothing special about that.

The sunset was eerily stunning, blinding one half of the plaza in a blazing white light. His pocket watch had stopped and he hadn’t an idea of the time, only that time was now valuable and this day was nearly done. He watched his own storefront, how the handsome black sign bore his father’s good name; a surname bestowed on his great-grandfather the goldsmith by a grateful patron, a baron who—after the Code Napoléon had taken effect—had announced that he would be honored to share his name with such a talented fellow, that surely such a Jew deserved the dignity of a surname. Abraham gazed at this name next to a word that always filled him with a sense of incommunicable goodwill: Brothers. He’d always liked being a brother, had always been proud—even with all its petty injustices—of the fact that Meyer was his, and now he was afraid to look at him; he couldn’t recall the last time they had shared a meal. Their exchanges were limited to business hours, mostly consisting of Meyer reminding him (at first patiently and then not-so-patiently) about orders he’d forgotten to fill.

Just the day before, he had opened the letter in the back room of the store. He had read the letter and his very first instinct had been to find his brother. He had stumbled outside in a state of shock, finding not Meyer but young Levi Ehrenberg, who was engrossed in conversation with a cluster of Mexican workers. He couldn’t imagine what they were discussing, or, for that matter, how the skinny German could possibly understand their talk. And he’d envied that frail young man just then, for his life was clean. He might have had nothing but the job Meyer had given him, but he had no responsibilities either. Still, there was something so insouciant about the kid; his general expression was one of collusion, as if he knew Abraham’s secrets and was pretending not to judge him. Even though he said nothing outright, it wasn’t unusual for Abraham to feel subtly mocked by Ehrenberg and he could never decide if this suspicion was insightful or paranoid. And he still clung to the idea, his secret idea, that Levi Ehrenberg had brought with him to Santa Fe some kind of goddamn curse.

He realized that he’d stopped walking and he was standing dumbly in front of Spiegelman’s store as if he might, at any minute, make a scene, or perhaps—more realistically—walk in and ask for a job. A laborer yelled at him to get out of the way, as he’d thoughtlessly stood right in their path as they hauled final crates of goods from carriage to store, and he hoarsely yelled right back for no sane reason, just as the cold sweat stench of worn-out burros propelled the whiskey he’d swallowed earlier spiraling up into his gullet. After somehow finding the will not to vomit, he looked out at the plaza and the church, up toward the mountains and the burning horizon—as if to gain some kind of broader perspective, as if he couldn’t see far enough. And, as it happened, he saw something specific, something that indeed changed his point of view, even as he couldn’t quite believe it.

His wife was in the plaza, his tiny, pregnant wife, and she was speaking with Levi Ehrenberg. Even though Abraham knew she was in the habit of taking walks, even though he had in fact encouraged her to do so, and even though he saw nothing but two people talking, he had never seen his wife out of doors unescorted like this, and the whole tableau unnerved him. There was a squirrel at their feet and the rodent didn’t move; the very trees seemed to lose their sway. He came closer to where they stood and hid behind a large oak as if he were a goddamn assassin. She didn’t see him, that was for certain, and it was the sight of her face—so unsuspecting and animated—that told him what he needed to know.

         

LONG AFTER NIGHTFALL ABRAHAM FINALLY WENT HOME. HE HAD wandered the borders of town and had finally headed into the hills, out toward the bishop’s garden, when he realized he could no longer feel his feet and that there was no more light in the sky. He came home to the house he finally had built, a house he had described as already built when he’d asked Eva’s father for her hand, and after nearly falling off the makeshift platform that was there in place of front steps, he silenced his cursing as he walked forward, deliberately. He had managed to find men generous with whiskey on his rambling walk and he was still drunk, he knew this, though he would have flatly denied it to Jehovah himself. As he walked through the door into the darkened house, he tried to focus on the solid nature of the hand-planed wood floors, but all he felt was instability, a viscous sensation in his limbs and eyes, as if he’d reached the end of his earthly limit and he might in fact dissolve. He didn’t call out; he had no idea what time it was, but he saw small flickers of candlelight in the distance, listless patterns on the dining room walls.

The table was beautifully appointed. A ship of white linen on a murky sea, it beckoned with cooking smells of stewed meats and freshly baked bread, obviously long gone cold. There were bowls of soup and polished silver and his wife was asleep in her new dark-green, silk-upholstered chair with her head laid daintily on the edge of the table as if she’d placed it there along with the serviettes, the salt and pepper crystal pots, and the sharpened, gleaming knives. He sat down without removing his coat or hat, as if he suspected he might still be outside, hallucinating, having walked for so long that he was past the bishop’s garden, standing under newly falling snow.

When Eva opened her eyes, he almost didn’t notice, he had been staring at her for so long. “Your hat and coat,” she said finally, smoothing her upswept hair. She was visibly shaken but this did nothing for him. He didn’t even stop to think of how he must have looked—cold-blasted and filthy—and that he smelled like the women, the drink and filth of the street; when he looked at his wife, he didn’t think to wash a single part of himself.

“My hat and coat?”

“May I take them? May I hang them on their pegs?”

Her hair was messed by such an awkward slumber; it curled tightly around her reddened face, which bore the faint impression of the scalloped edge of the silver on which her cheek had rested. “I saw you,” he said. And he rested his hat (a hat that had fallen more than once today into foul puddles of the backstreets) on the clean white tablecloth. He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t react; this was her trick when she thought he was drunk and she was very good at it. “I saw you,” he repeated, and louder this time, skipping right to it.

She sat up straight and looked him in the eye, as if she didn’t care what he was going to say, as if this was nothing but a dare.

“I saw you in the plaza. I saw you talking to him.”

She sighed elaborately, and that sigh was so simple, so condescending, that before he’d given it a moment’s thought, before he even believed it, he cried out: “Is that goddamn baby mine?”

She stood and began clearing the china off the table—the bowls full of soup were first—and he followed closely in her wake, not failing to notice her rounded figure, which now looked strange and slovenly. She brought the bowls into the newly tiled kitchen as if she were playing at being an orderly wife. “You tell me right now—you speak to me!” But she didn’t turn around until the bowls were set down on the sideboard, and even then she tried to pass by him, to continue clearing the untouched meal.

“Let me pass,” she said. “Let me pass right now.”

But he couldn’t let her pass, he couldn’t let her out of his sight, and he moved in closely, backing her up against one wall, then another, walls that were no longer his walls, not even in his mind. “I told Meyer not to trust him—”

“Abraham,” she said, evidently using all of her self-control, “please step away from me. Darling, you don’t know anything right now.”

“I know everything,” he said, leaning into her. He would leave tomorrow, he decided right then. He would take her jewelry box.

“All right,” she said, blinking back the tears that he wanted to see—that he craved seeing—but she wasn’t going to allow it. “All right then.”

He suddenly backed away as if she’d kicked him, when all she’d done was lower her voice. “I know everything about it,” he repeated, and his breath ricocheted like the beginnings of fire, those soundless vapors gathering force even as no one can see. She continued clearing useless possessions: china, crystal glasses, candlesticks, some brought from Germany but some purchased recently with money he did not have. And Abraham simply followed her back and forth without offering any help, hulking and silent like a lonely monster—the kind that only existed in children’s tales. His every footfall, his every gesture echoed through this stolen house that suddenly seemed too big.

He tugged at her shoulder and she said nothing. She kept moving. He heard her silence and it was damning and as he pulled her around, he knew he would hit her before he did it. He knew it was the only way that he could leave. When he hit her (such a small and soft cheek, he found himself thinking), he was afraid of what he might do next. It wasn’t that he’d overcome his anger, but he had become aware of his fear.