TEN

The weekend came and I made my first appearance at the Weilbach poker game. There had been a bit of lingering concern in the back of my mind that my newfound greed born of the oil boom was distracting me from my original purpose for being in town. Even though I wasn’t facing a deadline, I had other people counting on me, people whose respect and goodwill I valued and did not want to lose. So it was with a special eagerness that I showered and shaved that Friday afternoon. After I’d toweled myself dry, I donned one of my new blue suits. It was double breasted, with wide, pointed lapels, and it fit perfectly; the tailor had done his work well. I picked a tie of dark maroon that matched the suit’s pinstripe and knotted it around the collar of one of the stiffly starched cotton dress shirts I’d had custom made in a small shop in Manhattan. I folded back the French cuffs and selected a pair of gold-and-onyx cuff links out of the box on the dresser. With the addition of a matching tie pin and a fine Wimberly Panama hat, I looked like a prosperous executive. But I wasn’t an executive; I was just a gambler who dressed like one because I’ve always believed that part of the psychology of winning at cards is rooted in looking better, smoother and fresher than your opponents.

Della had packed my overnight bag with a spare shirt, tie and underwear, along with my razor and a few necessary toiletries. About dawn Saturday I would catch a few hours’ sleep, then shower, shave and change into the fresh clothes and be ready for another round at the table. Before we left the house, she made a couple of those minuscule adjustments to the knot of my tie that women always seem compelled to make, patted down my lapels, and I was ready to go. Fifteen minutes later she dropped me off in front of the hotel.

Except for the few years the Weilbach was boarded up during the Depression, the game had been held in the Plainsman Suite every weekend for over half a century. It had lasted through two world wars and a lot of history, and in that time it had acquired certain customs and conventions. It began at 6:00 P.M. each Friday afternoon and ended at precisely 6:00 A.M. the following Monday, or as soon after that time as the hand then in play was finished. Around nine on Friday night the porter called “Split the rent!” and the players who were present at that time were expected to divide the payment of the rent for the suite among themselves. It was then their responsibility to collect from later arrivals their share of the tab, though in recent months the game had run a surplus of several thousand dollars from which the rent was paid when the porter made the call. To try to shirk one’s share of the rent was considered bad manners, and anyone who did it too often would be dropped from the game.

Each player who arrived was also asked to “feed the jenny” before he sat down at the game. This meant that he had to throw fifty or a hundred dollars into an ancient wooden cigar humidor called the jenny. This money went to pay the bill for food and drinks and to tip the personnel of the hotel for the service. The jenny also ran a surplus, and the service people were tipped generously.

The Plainsman Suite consisted of four bedrooms, a spacious living room, two bathrooms and a kitchen, all located on the top floor of the old hotel. The furniture was heavy and the carpets thick. Near one corner of the living room sat a round gaming table big enough for eight players. Its top was covered in green felt, and the chairs that ringed it were deep and comfortable. Nearby stood an elaborately carved rosewood sideboard that functioned as a bar. In the center of the room there was a long, deep sofa and a handful of plush armchairs. One of the Weilbach’s waiters was assigned to the suite, and on weekends a cook was kept on duty around the clock in the kitchen.

The game itself was dealer’s choice, but the types of poker permitted were limited to draw and five- and seven-card stud. Draw was rarely played anymore, and five-card stud was preferred by most of the players over the seven-card version, though perhaps every fifth or sixth hand was seven-card. It was a pot-limit affair, which meant that no bet could exceed the amount of money that was already in the pot. Theoretically it was a table-stakes game, meaning that no player could buy a pot by forcing a player out of the hand with a bet greater than the stake that player had before him at the time. However, this convention was a gentleman’s accord rather than a fixed rule, and had been broken in the past, but only on the agreement of both players.

The regulars were a mixed lot. On that first visit the most interesting was a colorful fellow named Zip Zimmerman, a mining heir in his fifties who was chauffeured in each Friday from El Paso in a Cadillac limousine that was equipped with a bar and a leggy redhead. Zimmerman had been losing heavily for years, and it was said that the earnings from his gold and silver holdings piled up so fast that he had a hard time reinvesting it. He played a wild, swashbuckling and senseless game, sometimes plunging heavily when he held nothing and often folding when the odds were in his favor. He was there simply to have fun, and when he won an occasional big hand it was a matter of luck more than skill. He could well afford it, and the tension of the game never penetrated below his surface.

The rest of the men at the table were local businessmen and cattleman, and while some of them were at least fair hands at poker, only one of them was truly skilled. He was a quiet, courtly rancher named Wilburn Rasco, a smallish man in his late sixties, with a fine-boned face and weathered skin. A superb player, he was able to dissociate himself emotionally from the game, and when he dealt he handled the cards with a smooth precision. A gentleman to the core, he never crowed over his victories. When he lost he always smiled, but when he won his face remained blandly impassive.

I played on through the night and got a few hours’ sleep Saturday afternoon in one of the bedrooms. Then I went back to the table until Sunday morning, when I decided to call it quits and phone for a cab. The cards never heated up and I won only eighteen hundred dollars that weekend. But that was fine. I wasn’t there to get rich. Or to have fun either, for that matter, though I must admit I enjoyed the calm smile I got when I turned over the third of three tens against a pair of aces showing in a hand of five-card stud and raked in seven hundred dollars of Wilburn Rasco’s money.

The only drawback had been that the man who was the object of my trip to town wasn’t present at the table that weekend. But I wasn’t worried; he was a regular and he’d eventually show up. Then the real game would begin.