A quiet farmer in overalls who told Emmett to just call him “Bud” would always steal a glance at Mackey when his cards were promising, which Emmett took to mean there was some sort of personal rivalry between the two.
Sometimes the “tells” were about not just the cards themselves but personalities. A man who wanted to beat one player more than another might bet more recklessly when that player stayed in, for example, which was good to know. Emmett had a natural instinct not just for poker but for human behavior, which is what separates the good players from the great ones.
Emmett looked at the clock. A quarter to nine. He figured he’d better make a move, since farmers and ranchers would no doubt make it an early night.
He ran his fingers through his hair and glanced at the clerk.
The man was dozing in the corner!
Emmett cleared his throat and ran his fingers through his hair once more, and this time, the clerk noticed. Bud took the next pot, and the clerk leaned across the table, intercepting the old deck, which was being passed to Mackey. “You fellas about ready for another deck?”
Everyone either nodded or grunted their assent, and Emmett sat up slightly, sharpening his concentration.
A gambler never knows when he’s going to win. A winner always knows, Emmett always said.
By ten o’clock, Emmett had won nearly a thousand dollars. He took care to fold early once or twice, but he won the majority of the hands for the rest of the night. He also took care never to show any emotion, no matter how large the pot.
As the game was breaking up, Mackey suddenly bellowed, “Hell’s bells, Anderson, what kind of cheatin’ cowboy did you let in here?” The big man was staring intently at the clerk, who, to Emmett’s horror, completely froze.
Emmett knew immediately that John was playing with the clerk, basically doing the same thing to him that he’d done to Emmett when he’d stopped shuffling the cards at the beginning of the night.
The clerk was about to blow the whole thing with that guilty look on his face, and as one second of silence stretched to three and then four, Emmett knew he had to do something himself.
So, he answered the question.
“Emmett Long from Pottsboro, Texas!” he said, in a passable impression of the big man’s earlier exclamations.
The entire table looked from the clerk to Emmett, and then Mackey busted out laughing again, followed by the rest of the men.
“I like this kid,” Mackey said. “Even though he’s one lucky son of a bitch!”
As the men filed out of the room, Emmett nodded slightly to the clerk and went outside for a smoke, waving to the men as they left.
He didn’t notice Mackey wasn’t among them.
Emmett went back inside. The hotel was quiet, and the clerk was nowhere to be found, so he went upstairs to his room, savoring a successful night.
He unlocked his door and entered the room, which was dark except for a sliver of moonlight peeking through the tiny separation between the curtains. Emmett walked over to the bed and then froze. Someone was in the room with him.
“Turn around nice and slow, cowboy.”
Emmett’s mind worked furiously as he turned around in the darkness, assessing the distance to the window, which was unfortunately shut, and the door, which was closed as well.
Two dark figures slowly moved toward him. Emmett tensed and balled his fists. He was never one to back down from a fight, and he wasn’t about to start now.
Then the light went on, and Mackey was standing there with a serious look on his face. Behind him, the desk clerk looked slightly sheepish, because he’d obviously let the big man into Emmett’s room.
“You can go, Anderson.”
The clerk turned and left the room quickly, not meeting Emmett’s eyes.
Emmett relaxed his fighting stance and waited. He figured the big man was armed, although he didn’t show it. A man like that wouldn’t go up to a stranger’s room, particularly a stranger who’d just cheated him out of several hundred dollars, without the odds stacked in his favor.
“I got a proposition for you, Emmett Long from Pottsboro, Texas.”
It just so happened that Mackey had known Emmett was cheating as soon as the decks were switched, but he couldn’t figure out how, and that impressed him. Emmett accepted the compliment warily. He was pretty sure by now that Mackey hadn’t come up to his room to do him harm, but he was still on guard.
When Mackey finally revealed his purpose, Emmett couldn’t have been more surprised.
The big man wanted to hire Emmett as a ranch hand.
“Uh, no thanks, Mister Mackey,” Emmett said. “I’ve had my fill of that kind of work.”
The big man shook his head. “I don’t want you to actually work, son. I want you to play poker.”
The cowboys who worked Mackey’s ranch typically played poker every night, and their boss had gotten an idea about how he could take back some of his payroll while watching Emmett fleece the table of ranchers, himself included.
Emmett thought about it. “How does it go?”
“I hire you on, make sure you’re ‘in training’ with an easy job so you don’t have to work too hard. You stay fresh for the games, and you win as much from those cowboys as you can. Fifty-fifty split.”
“What about your men?”
“Hell, son, they’d just blow it on girls and liquor, anyway. You’ll be savin’ ’em from the evils of alcohol and a case of the clap!” he said, laughing.
“You can buy liquor out here?” Emmett asked. Prohibition had been passed earlier in the year.
Big John put his arm around Emmett and walked himself to the door. “Son, this is America. You can buy anything you want if you have the money. Pick you up first thing in the morning. Don’t disappoint me and run off, now.”
Emmett got the distinct feeling that Big John Mackey would be a little more than just “disappointed” if he didn’t cooperate.
He stayed put, and for the next six weeks, Emmett “worked” all day and played poker all night, winning several thousand dollars until the well ran dry and the cowboys were ranch bound without the money to spend on liquor or women or, more importantly, gambling. So Emmett decided to take his stake even deeper into the Wild West. This was fine with Mackey, as Emmett was leaving him with the equivalent of several weeks’ free labor from his ranch hands.
“Where you headed, son?” Mackey asked.
“Always wanted to see the ocean,” Emmett answered.
“California, huh? If I was a younger man, I’d tag along.”
Emmett laughed at that, and Mackey joined him. They both knew there were probably lots of places not big enough for the two of them.
They shook hands, and the big man took Emmett to the bus station, and he rode out to the West Coast in style, with a fistful of cash in his pocket.
Now all he needed was a car.
Chapter 2
On the ride to San Diego, Emmett flipped through a magazine he’d picked up at the bus station. He wasn’t that big of a reader until later in life, when he began to study the Bible,