Write me a Letter

his fingers. ”There’s only one thing I’d like to do before I leave, and what d’ya think that is, friend?”
    ”Say good-bye?” I ventured. I swung around on the stool and took a casual look again at the assemblage without seeing anyone who looked like what I thought Lethal Lou looked like.
    Mike laughed and slapped my arm in a comradely fashion. I had a good idea of what he was about to claim he wanted to do before leaving town, but what the hell, I always like watching hustlers in action, there is always a chance to learn something new without it costing more than a leg. Thus I let him run his string out.
    ”See, it’s like this,” he confided. ”The boss won’t be on the lot tomorrow, he’s going to a funeral or something over to Orinda, so what I’m going to do is put the shaft in him, twist it a couple of times, then break it off. You want an Impala, under five thou on the clock, air-conditioning, radials, tape deck, you name it, Blue Book says thirty-two five, give me a grand, drive it away, fuck him. I got a gun-metal Porsche, make your mouth water, but she’s already promised to Jerry over there, that big guy shooting pool? Fifteen hundred, fuck him.”
    ”Gee, I sure wish I could stop by, Mike,” I said, shaking my head regretfully, ”but me and the little woman got to get the camper on the road by seven-thirty latest, we got a goddamned shower of one of her cousins to go to in Sac.”
    ”No sweat, Slim,” Mike said. ”Just trying to do you a favor.” Sure he was, he was trying to do me the great favor of selling me some overpriced clunker that might make it up the hill out of town if there was a following wind. While his fat-assed boss, if he even had one, watched the transaction out of the back window and laughed till his sides split. A slightly more sophisticated version of the same scam is for the hapless salesman to get shat on or otherwise deeply insulted by the boss right in front of the sucker. The boss takes off immediately for lunch or some make-believe errand, leaving the salesman a clear field to take his ”revenge.”
    Then Mike wanted to try me out on dollar-bill liar’s poker, where you each take a dollar bill supposedly at random from your pocket and, using the serial numbers, proceed as you do with poker dice, alternately announcing higher hands until one calls the other, who either has the hand he claimed, and wins, or is caught bluffing, and loses.
    Of course your opponent is inclined to get suspicious if you play with a carefully preserved dollar bill you take out of your wallet’s secret compartment, so Mike’s version was to offer to use any one of the bills Jenny had given him in change when he’d bought the last round of drinks. Would pretty Jenny slip him a bill with, say, five of a kind in its serial number and sporting, say, a slightly crinkled corner for easy recognition if Mike gave her the wink? What an idea. Oh—I forgot to mention that Jenny’s T-shirt said NO LAYTEX? NO LAY, TEX.
    Anyway, when I declined, on the grounds that I was a terrible liar and couldn’t even fool the little woman one time out of ten, he immediately suggested a new version of Marienbad, that match game where the guy who has to take the last match loses, only in Mike’s version he wins. Again,
    I declined politely. Then he offered to take me on wronghanded on the shuffleboard game; no luck there. Then he tried to snag me with a couple of sucker bets, in one of which he offered to bet me a buck that Joan of Arc wasn’t French. I must admit he almost had me with that one, what else could she be?
    Finally, when he’d done everything but try and sell me a map of a lost gold mine, and he was probably warming up to that, I said to him, ”Mike, give up. Cease. Desist awhile. Whoa. I wouldn’t even bet you Joan of Arc was a woman. I’m just country folks, I know when I’m out of my league.”
    ”No sweat, Slim,” he said again, looking around for some livelier action. He didn’t find any. I ordered up the next round. Mike shifted from actively trying to skin me to merely amusing me with coins, wooden matches, swizzle sticks, and various tidbits of local lore. He laid out five coins alternately heads and tails on the bar and wanted to know if I could reverse their faces turning over any two at a time three times. I couldn’t. He could. 2 He arranged six coins in a pyramid and wanted to know if I could shape them into a circle in three moves, each coin moved being