Bluff Page 11

  They lived in South Montgomery, he told me, which sounded exactly right. South Montgomery was the epicenter of type-A Jersey suburbanites with means.

  “A few years back,” Brock said, “our kids were in the same soccer league. Lou’s kid tripped my kid twice in the same quarter. Ref didn’t even blow his damn whistle, because terrific players get away with murder, and Lou’s kid was fast and athletic and big. But guess what he wasn’t?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t eight.” Brock let me chew on that a moment. “Lou had lied to get his nine-year-old into the eight-year-old league. And let me tell you, a year makes a big difference at that age.”

  After the soccer game, Brock had acted on a hunch and cashed in a favor with a guy at the vital records office. Sure enough, Lou’s son’s birth certificate said September 30. Which happened to be the very last day of the year for school cutoff, league cutoff … basically, the kid was facing a lifetime of always being the youngest.

  “Dear old dad must have seen this baby in his arms—future soccer star, baseball star, whatever—and realized how much better it would be if only his birthday were a couple of days later. So he decides, October 2—why not? And suddenly his kid goes from being the youngest to being the oldest. It’s a lifelong edge,” Brock said, “and Lou is all about edges. I mean, the kid himself thinks his birthday is October 2.”

  I tried to imagine what kind of man would lie to his own son about his birthday just to gain an edge in youth soccer. The answer, of course, was a man like Lou Husk.

  “Is that illegal?” I asked.

  “What, forging a duplicate birth certificate for schools and sports leagues? Yeah, it’s illegal. But the bigger issue is that if the other parents were to find out, they’d kill him. His son would suffer. They’d be pariahs. You can’t imagine what these people are like. And Lou knows it. If he ever found out that some neighborhood dad did that to give his kid an unfair edge, Lou would be the one leading the lynch mob.”

  I was still trying to get my head around it. “Soccer, huh?”

  “I’ve been holding on to that little secret a long time,” Brock said, “waiting to leverage it. And I have to be honest—I could probably get a lot more out of him. But I happen to like you.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I was going to call Lou on Monday, but I was driving this morning and passed him on the road walking his dog. Some designer ball of hip dysplasia. Anyway, we had a chat about what it might mean to him and Junior if the original birth certificate from vital records were ever to make the rounds. And Lou’s thinking about your lawsuit suddenly … evolved. Didn’t hurt that his eye is healing well. He looks good. No more eye patch. He’s driving again.”

  “I’m really glad,” I said. “So does this mean …”

  “It means you’re a very lucky magician.” And just as I was beginning to feel like one, he added, “We’re settling for fifteen thousand.”

  “What?”

  “With your approval, of course.”

  “Fifteen thousand dollars?”

  “Yeah.” He paused. “Wait. You aren’t disappointed, are you?”

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said.

  “No.” His voice hardened a little. “Two hundred thousand is a lot of money. That’s how much he was going to sue you for. Don’t forget, Lou is an ass, but this isn’t a frivolous suit. You did fuck up the guy’s eye. He’s had expenses. This is a legitimate claim.”

  Brock was right—I knew that. But it was so much money. Money I didn’t have. I told him so.

  “We can work out a payment plan with Lou,” Brock said. “Or if he insists on getting paid quickly, we could probably get you a loan. We’ll work it out. But can I please tell him you’re okay with this deal?”

  What choice did I have? I told him yes, but evidently without sufficient enthusiasm, because Brock reminded me that this was “good news, an excellent outcome,” and then we hung up and I told myself You are lucky, you are lucky, even though it felt less like luck than like drowning.

  And I’d be lying if I didn’t think of Ellen and her poker game. A cut of whatever she was planning would go a long way right now. Of course I thought that. Of course I was tempted. But to do it would be to cross over, that was how I saw it. I’d be betraying my art and my livelihood. I’d be betraying my father, who was not a criminal.

  While I had my phone out I checked my email. I was hungry for the details about my convention performance. Not that the details mattered, but whatever they were, they would make everything feel more real. I needed that to look forward to. My fastest route to fifteen thousand dollars, I knew, was a string of solid bookings. That meant building from the ground up again, and the WOM convention was the ideal way to start—the way to remind all the people who mattered that I was still in the game.

  No new emails.

  Just as I set down the phone, it buzzed. I figured it was probably Brock calling again, having forgotten to relate some other bit of wonderful news, like maybe I had herpes. Turns out it wasn’t a phone call at all: it was a reminder I’d set on my calendar.

  Oh, shit. I’d been so focused on the convention I forgot I had a show tonight.

  Kyle Horowitz was becoming a man.

  5

  The bar mitzvah was a fancy evening affair at the Talmadge Inn in Metuchen. With formal dress and a six-piece band, it was just like a wedding except for the fifty kids plus the two high school girls in spandex whose job it was to keep them all corralled on the dance floor.

  And me.

  Maybe there was no shame in entertaining a room of spiffed-up thirteen-year-olds, but whenever I did a show for kids, even when it paid well, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was no different from anyone who’d ever floundered through a dozen off-the-shelf tricks for some six-year-old’s birthday party, maybe twisting balloons into poodles for good measure.

  Still, tonight’s gig paid just over five percent of my settlement. And because kids always want what the other has, I knew I could count on a few referrals over the next year.

  Money, right? It made the world go around. Unless you were Incan.

  For real. The Incas didn’t use currency. They were a unique empire, full of master architects and sophisticated farmers, constructing pyramids and irrigation systems, but never needing dollars or pesos or gold coins.

  My mother told me this when I was fifteen. By then my father was vast and ruined, and my mother was explaining to me that she and Chip Dawkins were in love and wanted to get married, which meant finally filing for divorce.

  I’d known about Chip for a while. My mother still dropped me off periodically at Jack’s magic store, but she and Chip had gotten bolder, and my mother would go out at night with the flimsiest of excuses. My father said nothing. At least nothing I overheard.

  I don’t want to hurt him, she would say to me. You know that. I suppose I did. But I also knew she hadn’t forgiven him for losing all that money and never would. The money wasn’t the only thing, but it was the biggest thing. And now we were broke, and Chip Dawkins wasn’t, and she must have decided that her life, and mine, would improve if she were to hitch her star to his.

  She didn’t say it like that. What she said, sitting at the foot of my bed one night, was, We aren’t Incas, you and I. And I said something like, Huh? And she explained how the Incas didn’t need money but we did. There were tremendous medical debts, still, and legal bills for dealing with the medical bills, plus all the ordinary expenses of being alive in America. But Chip had been selling her on his aircraft parts business and what it could do for them. I’d met Chip a few times by then. He had a smoker’s cough and a voice like wet sand and, as far as I could tell, a personality to match his voice. He wanted to move to Nevada, where the air was dry and where he could build a manufacturing plant and warehouse. The opportunity was incredible, the way he explained it to my mother and my mother explained it to me. And there would be opportunities for her, too. She could get her real esta
te license. Housing prices out West were rising, rising, and you had to jump on an opportunity like that while it was red hot. The houses practically sold themselves to all those Californians wanting to retire inland where their dollar went further.

  Had we gone then, when I was fifteen, maybe we’d all be rich right now. But my father’s reaction to receiving the divorce papers was to get himself killed in a bar fight, and my mother was so guilt-ridden that she dropped Chip cold turkey for a year. Then she picked him up again, but they delayed their move West for another year so I could finish high school. They put off staking their claim, and by the time they finally went to Reno they were too late. They bought a home at the peak of the market, and then the recession blew in, and Chip never did open his factory, but he did open his wallet and become a frequent patron of the Grand Sierra casino and the Gold Dust West casino and the Peppermill Resort Spa casino.

  That’s what my mother did. She married gamblers. My father had gambled once and lost everything; Chip spent more than two years going broke. In Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World, he and my mother became poor and stayed poor. But they stayed together.

  I sometimes fantasized about sending my mother a big fat check, totally out of the blue. At my current savings rate I could do that in about ten thousand years.

  I missed my father. I missed my mother. I missed the days when I never would have imagined that I could miss them.

  The bar mitzvah kids were as attentive as one could expect for thirteen-year-olds hopped up on Shirley Temples and a chocolate fountain. When my show was over I packed my gear and collected my check. Then I nursed a glass of house Cab in the mostly empty hotel bar. I’d worn the top hat tonight—not the tall kind, more like a bowler—and the bartender complimented me on it. I caught him smiling at me a few times. He was tall, with floppy hair and a nice chin, and I kind of hoped he’d ask for my number but he never did.

  When my drink was gone, I left a large tip and carried my gear outside and across the dark Talmadge Inn parking lot to my car. Loaded everything into the backseat and started the engine. Before pulling away, I checked email on my phone. And there it was: a new message from Brad Corzo.

  Subject: WOM Schedule of Events

  Dear participants:

  The conference schedule is now posted on the WOM website (link below). Please be sure to make it to your venue at least 15 minutes ahead of time. Stage magicians requiring longer setup should contact me individually.

  If you have not yet registered for the conference or uploaded your bio and photo, please do so at your earliest convenience.

  Looking forward to seeing everyone soon!

  Yours in magic,

  Brad Corzo

  Chair, Panel Selection Committee, World of Magic

  The link opened a PDF grid that was hard to navigate on my phone, but I did my best. Some of the names I knew from years ago, though many were new to me—just as my name would be unfamiliar to the newer magicians attending.

  I scanned the grid, scrolling, looking for my name. Finally, there it was.

  Reading the event title, I felt my stomach twist.

  Room: Exhibition Hall E

  Event Title: Magic Safety with Cal Murrow

  Event Type: Presentation/Discussion

  Event Details: Working with flash paper? Knives? Firearms? Rope? Even magicians working with everyday objects can expose themselves and their audience to risk and injury. Renowned stage magician Cal Murrow, with the help of Sergeant Roy Sturgis, NYPD, and New Jersey native Natalie “Card-in-the-Eye” Webb (have no fear, folks, she’ll only be talking!), will lead this discussion aimed at reducing the chance of accidents, injuries, and lawsuits.

  I stared at my phone, thinking: What a sucker I am.

  Thinking: I should have fucking known.

  I should have known I wouldn’t be forgiven. Not after ten years, not ever. Not as long as they could still remind me I didn’t belong. Who exactly “they” were I could only wonder. The whole selection committee? Or just its chair? My email to Corzo should have been nicer, fine, I should’ve left out the Boy Scout stuff. But damn.

  Mick Shane, it occurred to me, must be getting a good laugh.

  The question of exactly how the selection committee had come to learn about my playing-card incident interested me for all of about two seconds. Then I realized one of the lawyers must have tweeted it, or posted about it, or blogged about it, or mentioned it in a discussion forum … all it would have taken was for the Venn diagram of personal injury attorneys and magic enthusiasts to have an overlap of one. One lawyer to get the magic community gossiping. The only real surprise was my own foolishness in assuming that somehow word wouldn’t get out. That the story of my Newark mishap would have died quietly in the Hyatt ballroom on that icy night, or at worst been the subject of some water-cooler gossip the next day.

  I screamed in my car. I wanted to hit someone and took it out on the steering wheel, which blared in the parking lot. How could I have been so naive as to think the magic fraternity, this brotherhood, would simply welcome me back?

  I would think long and hard about the email I was going to send Brad Corzo.

  Except: No, I wouldn’t. I was done with all that. And there were far more pressing matters.

  It was late, almost midnight. So what? I made the call. When it went to voicemail I hung up and, frustrated, furious, I stomped on the accelerator and pulled onto the road way too close to another car. His horn blared. I gave him the finger in my rearview—it wasn’t his fault, but fuck him anyway—and then my phone buzzed and I took the call.

  “Do you still need a partner?” I blurted out.

  Ellen’s pause, only a second or two, felt endless. “What’s going on? Are you having a change of heart?”

  “Yes or no. Do you still need a partner?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “And you would teach me? Show me what you know?”

  I sped through a yellow light.

  “Natalie, if you agree to this, I’ll teach you everything. Then we’ll play one night of poker and walk away with a million dollars.”

  I almost drove off the road. “Say that again.”

  “Your take would be twenty percent.”

  My god, what was she involved in? What the hell was this? I had been hoping for maybe a couple of thousand dollars to jump-start things—some dollars into the Lou Husk fund, or maybe I could get my car repaired. But two hundred thousand?

  “I can’t do that,” I said, cursing myself. I couldn’t believe I was already reneging. But it was too much. Too criminal.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “Of course you can.”

  “For that kind of money…. it’s too dangerous.”

  “I promise you it isn’t,” she said.

  “You have to be straight with me.”

  “I’m being straight,” she said. “The players are all businessmen. They’re really wealthy, but they’re respectable. I’m telling you, this isn’t some floating, high-stakes, backroom game.”

  Two hundred thousand dollars. To say no would be madness. To say yes would mean committing to being … what? A cardsharp? No. That was just some fancy word. A thief. A criminal. Webbs weren’t criminals. When I told Brock that, I’d meant it.

  “It’s just a high-dollar home game,” she was saying. “The guy hosting it has this mansion on the water. You even know him.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not know him. I mean you know who he is. He’s running for office. They have this monthly game at his home, and once a year—”

  “Wait,” I said.

  Businessman. Mansion by the water.

  “They do this special thing where—”

  “Wait. Stop. Ellen, just stop talking.” My fingers felt numb on the steering wheel. I tried to catch my breath. “Is it Victor Flowers?” Silence on the other end. I thought the call might have been disconnected. “Ellen?”

  Then: “Am I allowed to talk now?”

  “Yes.
Talk.”

  “Victor Flowers. That’s right. He’s actually a huge gambler. Nobody knows it. But yeah.”

  “Your plan is to take Victor Flowers’s money,” I said.

  “His and three other guys’, yeah,” Ellen said.

  I wasn’t in my car any longer. I was at a mansion by the water. “Victor Flowers takes a helicopter to work,” I managed to say. It was the best I could do.

  “Does he? Well, that makes sense. He’s rich as fuck. I’m telling you, Natalie, for these guys it won’t even be a big loss. We can do it. It’ll work. But there’s a lot to prepare, and not a lot of time. So Nat?”

  I was still vaguely aware of hearing Ellen’s voice on the phone, but my car’s interior, the dashboard, the doors, the windshield, everything had dissolved around me, and I was smelling meat cooking on a grill and seeing the green lawn and the endless view off the bluff.

  “Nat?”

  I was inside Victor Flowers’s mansion again, going from room to room, searching for musical instruments, a scavenger hunt, and through a closed door I heard a voice, and it was a voice I had never heard before. It was my father, afraid.

  My father, who refused to be a criminal. My father, relentlessly honest even in the face of temptation and coercion. I had been clinging to that fact, that nugget of family history, as if it were itself a full credo, a complete thought, when in actuality, I now realized, there was an entire other half that I had always conveniently overlooked: My father was no criminal—and look where it got him.

  My very honest, very dead father.

  A New Jersey Transit train rumbled past in the opposite direction on tracks so close to the road that I felt the vibrations shake my whole body, and I was on Route 27 again in my shitty, busted car on a dark two-lane road at midnight, heading toward my empty Rahway apartment.