* * *
We played poker together, like one team. Hendo liked to make jokes while playing. Nobody else laughed as much or made jokes like he did.
“So the chicken and egg are in bed together,” Hendo said.
“Can you just deal?” the Fat Man said.
Hendo passed out cards and kept talking. “So the chicken is really happy. Big fucking smile on its face.”
He finished dealing the cards and everyone picked them up.
“And then the egg, really frustrated, goes, ‘Well, I guess we answered that question.’ ”
“Ha ha,” one of the other players said.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What was the question?”
The man in the red hat lit another cigarette and turned to the Fat Man. “Is she for real?”
I said that I was for real, but that I still wanted to know what the question was. Hendo said that the joke was that the egg and chicken just had sex, and that the chicken got off first and the egg was angry because it wanted to get off but it wasn’t going to happen.
“Why wasn’t it going to happen?” I asked, and was going to add, “and what is it?” but people do not like it when you ask too many questions at once.
“Is she retarded or something?” the man in the red hat asked, and the Fat Man punched him in the arm.
“That’s actually not an okay thing to say,” I said. “Like the n-word.”
“Like the n-word,” the man in the red hat said. “What planet are you from?”
“The planet where we keep taking your money,” Hendo said, because we had won again. He made a smaller pile for me, where I got a little bit of money every time we won.
While we played I told him about runes and drew one for him on a napkin.
“It is supposed to protect you in battle,” I said, and Hendo liked that.
“That’s perfect. Poker is like a battlefield. Winner takes all.”
Before the part of the card game where everyone takes turns and decides what to do, whether to bet more money or give up, he wanted to rub the rune for good luck.
“How much do you think I should bet?” he asked me, and even though I could not tell how good the cards in his hands were, I told him more or less. And he would always listen.
There was a break in the game when the Fat Man went to get more beer, and the man in the red hat went to the bathroom, taking all his money with him. The other two players went for a smoke. Hendo apologized for how rude the man in the red hat was being.
I told him that I was used to it. “People call me a retard all the time.”
“Well, you don’t look it,” Hendo said, counting up the money in front of him. “I think he’s just jealous because you’re sitting over here and not with him.”
Hendo stacked the five-dollar bills in front of him in one pile, the one-dollar bills in another. I helped him by putting the coins into piles, one for each number of cents.
“Like if you hadn’t told me,” he said, “I wouldn’t have known you and Gert were related.”
“Gert is more gargantuan than I am,” I said.
“Yeah, but I just mean… you’re a good-looking girl. And good frigging luck. Those runes are for real.”
The Fat Man came out with a six-pack of beers. He put one in front of Hendo, one where the man in the red hat was sitting, and the rest in front of himself.
I thought about what Hendo said—how I was a good-looking girl, and how he could not believe I was Gert’s sister. While we played poker I pretended I was not Gert’s sister at all, and that I was a normal person playing poker. Things happened very fast in the game. I watched and tried to learn which cards were better than others. Hendo did not get mad when I picked the wrong cards or said what to do, and he high-fived whenever I told him to do something and he won.
This made the man in the red hat madder and madder, because even when we didn’t win, the Fat Man won. The man in the red hat was the only person who wasn’t winning at all.
“Why don’t I get my own retard,” he said, and turned to the Fat Man. “Do you think she fucks like a retard? Hey, do you swallow, retard?”
“You’ve got a rotten mouth on you, you know that?” Hendo said, putting his cards down.
“Swallow what?” I asked.
The man in the red hat started unzipping his pants. “You want to see? It’ll be like sex ed—”
“Goddamn it,” the Fat Man said. “Nobody wants to see that. Can we just play?”
“And you don’t want to deal with Gert when he’s pissed,” Hendo said, holding his cards so I could see.
One of the other poker players got up and said he was leaving. But the man in the red hat told him to sit back down.
“Just because he’s Toucan’s new butt boy doesn’t mean I have to suck him off like everyone else,” the man in the red hat said.
“Gert is nobody’s new butt boy,” I said.
“Toucan tells him to jump, and Gert asks how high.” The man in the red hat put another handful of coins into the middle of the table. “Raise.”
A “raise” means that he believed he could win and wanted to bet more money to see if anyone else was just as confident.
Hendo threw in all of his bills, even the twenty-dollar bills, before I could even say anything. I knew that his cards were not very good cards, since there were no same numbers, and they did not count in a row like two, three, four, five, six. Altogether with the cards on the table, he had a four of diamonds, a king of hearts, a two of diamonds, a six of spades, and a seven of clubs.
“Put your money where your mouth is,” Hendo said.
The Fat Man threw his cards down. “Well, I’m out.”
“What about you?” Hendo asked the man in the red hat. “Going to spit or swallow?”
There was so much money in the middle of the table that I couldn’t count it. But I knew that Hendo had at least fifty dollars in the bills from when we counted before. And then there were the coins and also the money that the Fat Man had put in the middle before giving up, and the money the man in the red hat put in.
I felt my heart thump in my chest. Hendo was smiling and did not seem to realize that he had bad cards that would not defeat anything.
Something incredible happened. The man in the red hat gave up too, throwing his cards down.
“That’s what I thought,” Hendo said, pulling all the money toward him. “Like a bitch.”
Hendo and I dabbed and the man in the red hat stood up and started swearing. I said that the honorable thing to do was accept defeat with courage. That was when he flicked his cigarette at me.
Hendo stood up and they got in each other’s faces and started pushing each other, the man in the red hat saying ugly things about me and Gert and how Gert probably fucked me every night, which was a gross thing to say.
Before they could fight, Toucan came in and asked what the fuck was going on, right when the man in the red hat was saying more things about me being a retard. Gert was with him, and when he heard the word retard, his eyes got wide and I knew that he was going into Berserker mode. Toucan put his hand on Gert’s shoulder and went up to the man in the red hat.
“What did you just say?” Toucan said, pushing Hendo out of the way until he was almost nose to nose with the man in the red hat.