The Wager: Solids or Stripes

THE WAGER: SOLIDS OR STRIPES A novel by XXL Bolígrafo A Southern gothic crime novella. Complete in 17 chapters, about 40,000 words. Contents Chapter One: The Kitchen 3 Chapter Two: Bless Your Heart 9 Chapter Three: The Drawer 14 Chapter Four: Old Money, No Money 18 Chapter Five: The Racker 21 Chapter Six: Break and Run 25 Chapter Seven: Keem 29 Chapter Eight: Coffee 32 Chapter Nine: Consideration 36 Chapter Ten: Hill 39 Chapter Eleven: Mister Q 43 Chapter Twelve: Two Devils 48 Chapter Thirteen: Sweeping Up 55 Chapter Fourteen: The Belle and the Face 64 Chapter Fifteen: The Terms 71 Chapter Sixteen: Solids and Stripes 76 Chapter Seventeen: Reservoir 81 Chapter One: The Kitchen Ybor did not cool down at night. It only changed who was awake for it. By eleven the old cigar factories had been dead a hundred years, most of them, but the brick still gave the heat back to the street, slow, the way the South gives everything back slow, grudges and summers and debts. Over the rooftops El Reloj kept its own time, the great clock on the J.C. Newman tower lit amber against the dark, the way it had kept time over the neighborhood since before anyone living was born, indifferent as God to what the hours were carrying. The wild chickens had gone quiet in the big oak on Ninth. Down the block the social clubs stood with their tall windows dark, the Cuban Club and the Italian Club and Centro Asturiano, the mutual aid halls that had once held the whole neighborhood together and now held weddings and quinces and the ghosts of cigar rollers who had paid their dues and died anyway. Up on Seventh, La Séptima, the brick main drag, the neon came on pink and green over the crowd, the club kids and the beach money spilling out between Centro Ybor and the Ritz and Gaspar's Grotto, and three bars played three different songs that did not care to agree, and the last streetcar of the night ran its lit yellow box down toward Channelside and the port, empty, ringing its bell at nobody. Rico Salas watched all of it through the front glass of Reservoir and did not go outside. Res sat where it had always sat, a block off Seventh on a brick side street, in a low red cigar factory building with its tall arched windows painted over green, in the long shadow the clock tower threw when the moon was right. It had been a bolita house before it was anything, back in the numbers days, and the neighborhood had a way of forgetting that out loud and remembering it in private. Inside it was cooler and older and it was his. Everyone in Ybor would have told you that. Fourteen tables under low green lamps, felt kept the color felt is in a movie, a green that promised you something it did not have. A long wooden bar down the left. The place smelled of chalk and lime and the coffee that never stopped going behind the bar, cafe con leche thick enough to stand a spoon in, and under that the faint sweet ghost of a century of cigars soaked into the brick. Everyone called the room Res. Everyone called him Banco. Near the back, a quiet man in a gray shirt was racking the balls on a table nobody was using. Nobody looked at him. That was the thing about Mr. Q, you did not look at him, the same way you did not look at the ice machine or the door. He had been at Res longer than the tables. He swept, he kept the cues oiled, he carried Banco his coffee, and he had told the same joke for thirty years, that Mr. Salas had tried to teach him the game a hundred times and it never once took, that God gave him hands for a broom and not a cue and a man ought to know his hands. He said it now, softly, to no one, racking a rack no one would break, and no one heard him, and that was exactly how he liked a room. At table six a kid from Orlando was learning geography. He had driven over with two friends and a fat roll and the belief, common in young men, that being the best in a room in Orlando meant a thing in a room in Ybor. His name was Trip. He had a smooth stroke and no idea he was already finished. The man taking his money went by Zay, and Zay had a saying he liked at the expense of every kid who walked in sure he was the shark, which was that the fish always thinks he is the one doing the eating, right up until he isn't. Zay was fifty and soft in the middle and shot like the table owed him rent. "Ay, lucky," Zay said, rattling a bank in the jaws on purpose, shaking his head at the felt like it had betrayed him. It was a beautiful miss. He had left the cue ball frozen up under the rail where the kid had no angle, a safety that did not look like a safety, so that a young man would read it as an old man's bad luck and not an old man's whole career. Trip did not read it. Trip kicked one rail out of it, got lucky, and it fell, and he grinned and called the five in the side and ran three balls clean, playing shape from ball to ball the way a real player does, drawing the cue ball back off the eight, following it up the table for the next one, and Banco watched the boy's stroke and thought, not bad, thought, that is a stroke that has been the best stroke in every little room it ever stood in. Then the kid got greedy on the four, tried to cheat the pocket to hold for the six, and came up short on position, and left himself straight and ugly, no angle, hooked half behind the eight.