“She make any bread?”
“They finished off the johnnycake, too.”
I stuck my head in the kitchen and saw the kettle and plates and forks soaking in a washtub, walked over to open the icebox, and there wasn’t a scrap of food in it except for a half-empty jar of mustard and the top stub of a pickle floating in a canning jar. Same as yesterday and the day before. Looking around in that icebox put me in a worse mood than I was in already. The thought of that hash made my mouth water.
“You been at Hoke’s this whole time?” Uncle Ray asked.
I walked back in the living room and nodded.
“Make any jingle manning the broom?”
Uncle Ray had put his straight razor, whetstone and flask away. He was staring at me with eyes set close together like a hawk while training his new wide mustache that went all the way down to his chin. Wasn’t his business whether I made anything or not so I kept quiet, but the fact was I didn’t make anything.
“Until they let you back in the poker games, that violin is what’ll earn you a living. The way you fiddle on it all the time, you should be down in the saloons making it work for you.”
I’d been thinking about trying my luck in the music business, being the gambling business had been going so poorly. Uncle Ray had told me I had an ear for making music the first day he’d gave me that fiddle after winning it in a knock-rummy game. I was playing “Cripple Creek” and “Don’t Hit Your Granny With a Big Ol’ Stick” and a bunch of other old mountain tunes before that evening was over.
Music did come easy to me, the same way Ma had always fretted that most things did to me. I wasn’t as sure about that as she was, but she feared the easy, because she believed people became lazy if they don’t end up venturing to where things are hard for them. And to Ma, there weren’t but a hair of difference between laziness and evilness. She kept all her boys busy and I guess tried her best not to raise lazy, evil sons, but I believe it was a bigger job than one woman by herself could sometimes handle.
I just figured music came easy to me because I’d always loved to listen to it so much. But what I couldn’t do was sing like good singers can, so I didn’t see profit or future in making music, and my goal in life was to make money however it could be made the quickest and the easiest and the most. I wanted to be rich because I’d seen how the rich are treated so different than folks are with nothing but holes in their pockets, and I’d never owned nothing without a hole in it somewhere.
Anyway, I was still standing there in the hall next to Ma’s kitchen and had just gotten back from Hoke’s Billiards Emporium. I’d been there all the last night and into that morning, waiting on a new shooter I’d spotted coming into town with a loud cowboy hat and fancy cue.
Hoke had rented me a broom to lean on as a prop so I might be able to hustle up a game and not look like a real player. He told me that he’d have to eyeball the shooter I was hunting before he’d assign him to me, because the hat and cue could be a ruse.
Even though Hoke knew I was one of the better poker players in Shady—so good it was rare anymore when I could get anybody to deal me a hand—he thought I needed more time watching the other shooters.
It was the same way I’d learned to play poker, by studying the players as much as the cards, and by abiding by the unwritten rules more than the written ones. Like I learned young that cheating’s always fair, an unwritten rule, but only as long as you can get away with it.
After getting too famous for my own good at poker, I was determined to not let the same thing happen shooting pool. The one poker lesson I picked up too late was not to win as often as I could. That was one hard lesson Hoke drove into me every chance he got. I’d been trying as hard as I could to beat off the nickname I’d taken on: Luck.
Nobody wanted to play a sporting game of anything against a feller nicknamed Luck.
Hoke always got his forty percent share from the takings in his place. The bad thing for me was if I didn’t make nothing, I’d have to pay him a quarter just to lean on his broom, it being part of my role as the floor sweeper who’d just like to shoot a game for a cold bottle of pop while on break. He controlled the whole place while watching eight tables at once from the window of his small upstairs office. Hoke was as round as he was tall, and he smoked two cigarettes at a time by the way he always had one lit, and he reminded me of those puppet masters who would float into Shady now and then with all of those strings dangling from their fingers. Everybody who worked for Hoke were his puppets. And the ones who came through the door just looking to shoot an hour away became his puppets, too, if they weren’t mindful. One game or one drink too many, and Hoke would own them and everything they had.
But my mark never showed. I suspected he got sidetracked early by the whores and now probably didn’t have a penny left on him, and that’s why I was in a surly mood that late Sunday morning when I got back to Ma’s apartment.
I turned my eyes away from Uncle Ray to a pair of muddy trousers stuffed with straw hanging over the kitchen door. They looked like they’d been run over by the tire tracks on them. I’d seen odder things in Ma’s apartment, but couldn’t figure why half of a scarecrow would be dangling in her kitchen. I figured it was a charm Ma had hung up to ward off some sort of evil.
“Want a lesson?” Uncle Ray asked. He didn’t say it too loud because he only taught things when Ma was away or working. Ma frowned on the lessons he taught, except for the times he’d tried to teach me to read and write, which I never had any interest in.
“I got to find something to eat,” I said, studying on those burlap pants.
“I’m about to teach you something about being able to keep a full belly. But if you think tending to your empty belly at this particular moment is more important, then we’ll forget about it.”
Ma always said Uncle Ray was half angel and half outlaw. He had to be the most educated man in Shady because he’d went to college and was the only person who knew what to do with all the things in a doctor bag. And he always liked to talk up a storm in his half Southern and half Yankee accent about things in the world nobody else knew much about or cared much about. I feared he was going to preach book learning to me again and pull out a pen and pad of paper like he’d do from time to time.
“Teach what?”
“You can’t scare up a game of cards, aren’t having much luck at the tables and you don’t want to fiddle for your breakfast, so I thought you might want to learn how to use this.”
Uncle Ray stood from Ma’s couch and turned a half step. He pulled his straight razor from a sheath he carried in the small of his back. He put it up to the window light where it caught a glare and then he stared at me. I’d just seen him honing on it but he made a pretty big deal out of flashing it around.
He walked into the kitchen and over the next hour I soon forgot about my empty stomach as he made me practice over and over how to pull a razor and hold it. Then he had me walk up to that pair of pants a hundred times practicing how to cut the side of a back pocket without cutting in too far but far enough.
“Pair of pants like this, you don’t cut the bottom, you cut the side. Not too far and it has to be done quick,” he said.
Before I started the actual cutting, he took his razor from me and he cut both pockets so fast that I missed how he did it, even thought I was watching with wide eyes. I never even saw the razor in his hand.
“Goddamn, Uncle Ray,” I said.
“Sew them up,” he said.
After I sewed those pockets up, which he showed me how to do, too, he gave me back the razor and then he moved my fingers around to the right position.
“Keep the handle against your wrist, and your thumb and middle knuckle of your pointing finger way down on the blade. That way no one will know what you’re