More Twisted

stepped into the room. He wore baggy slacks, a T-shirt and a stocking cap and he toted a Starbucks coffee. Such a goddamn teenager, Keller laughed to himself.
    Introductions were made. Keller noticed that Stanton seemed troubled. “It’s okay. I checked him out.”
    “Well, it’s just that, he’s a little young, don’t you think?”
    “Maybe you’re a little old,” the kid came back. But he smiled good-naturedly and the frown that crossed Stanton’s face slowly vanished.
    Stanton was the banker and took cash from everybodyand began handing out chips. Whites were one dollar, reds were five, blues ten and yellows twenty-five.
    “Okay, Tony, listen up. I’ll be telling you the rules as we go along. Now—”
    “I know the rules,” Tony interrupted. “Everything according to Hoyle.”
    “No, everything according to me,” Keller said, laughing. “Forget Hoyle. He never even heard of poker.”
    “Whatta you mean? He wrote the rules for all the games,” Lasky countered.
    “No, he didn’t,” Keller said. “That’s what people think. But Hoyle was just some Brit lawyer in the seventeen hundreds. He wrote this little book about three bullshit games: whist, quadrille and piquet. Nothing else, no Kankakee, pass the garbage, put-and-take stud or high-low roll ’em over. And try going into the MGM Grand and asking for a game of whist . . . . They’ll laugh you out on your ass.”
    “But you see Hoyle books everywhere,” Wendall said.
    “Some publishers kept the idea going and they added poker and all the modern games.”
    “I didn’t know that,” Tony said distractedly. He shoved his geek glasses higher on his nose and tried to look interested.
    Keller said sternly, “Sorry if we’re boring you, kid, but I got news: It’s knowing everything about the game—even the little shit—that separates the men from the boys in poker.” He looked him over carefully. “You keep your ears open, you might just learn something.”
    “How the hell can he hear anything even if he keeps his ears open?” Lasky muttered and glanced at the boy’sstocking cap. “What’re you, some kind of fucking rapper? Lose the hat. Show some respect.”
    Tony took his time removing the hat and tossing it on the counter. He pulled the lid off his Starbucks cup and sipped the coffee.
    Keller examined the messy pile of chips in front of the boy and said, “Now, whatever Jimmy Logan told you about playing poker, whatever you think you know from Hoyle, forget about it. We use the big boys’ rules here, and rule number one: We play fair. Always keep your chips organized in front of you so everybody at the table knows how much you’ve got. Okay?”
    “Sure.” The kid began stacking the chips into neat stacks.
    “And,” Wendall said, “let’s say a miracle happens and you start to win big and somebody can’t see exactly how many chips you have. If they ask you, you tell them. Down to the last dollar. Got that?”
    “Tell ’em, sure.” The boy nodded.
    They cut for the deal and Wendall won. He began shuffling with his fat fingers.
    Keller gazed at the riffling cards in pleasure, thinking: There’s nothing like poker, nothing like it in the world.
    The game went back nearly two hundred years. It started as a Mississippi riverboat cheaters’ game to replace three-card monte, which even the most gullible slickers quickly learned was just a scam to take their money. Poker, played back then with only the ten through the ace, seemed to give them more of a fighting chance. But it didn’t, of course, not in the hands of expert sharks (the innocents might’ve been more reluctant to play if they’dknown that the game’s name probably came from the nineteenth-century slang for wallet, “poke,” the emptying of which was the true object of play).
    “Ante up,” Wendall called. “The game is five-card draw.”
    There are dozens of variations of poker games. But in Keller’s games, five-card draw—“closed poker” or “jackpot” were the official names—was what they played, high hand the winner. Over the years he’d played every kind of poker known to man—from California lowball draw (the most popular poker game west of the Rockies) to standard stud to Texas Hold ’Em. They were all interesting and exciting in their own ways but Keller liked basic jackpot best because there were no gimmicks, no arcane rules; it was you against the cards and the other players, like bare-knuckle boxing. Man to man.
    In