I had decided to do it: to cheat. To steal. I am not proud of that but you do the math: shitty job, angry girlfriend, newborn child. Therefore I was looking for the guy whose idea the scam was by the name of Dave Torcek. He told me to find him at Emerald Downs in the suites above the grandstand, he claimed to own a one-eyed horse there named Fuzzy Wabbit.

I took along the Mumbler. His suspension had ended two weeks earlier and he was dealing blackjack again, the only game he knew. All the regulars hated him.

I stopped by his empty game on my way to break. “Bruce, you want to help we with a little project I got cooking? It’s this Saturday.”

“No, I couldn’t. You know, I go… there’s my sister… and Saturdays—”

I cut him off like everyone did. “It’s at the Downs. We could stop at Muckleshoot.”

He thought about it. “Uh-huh. Yeah, it’s not a badl because I got paid. Well, we all got… I shouldn’t, that’s for damn sure.”

The Mumbler always smelled like onions. Nobody in his right mind would want him around, but he stood six foot four, weighed maybe two-eighty, and I thought it would be to my advantage to have him along if things happened to get ugly.

That Saturday we stopped at Muckleshoot Indian Casino. The Mumbler sidled up to a craps table and I walked around hoping to run into C.C.—or Ceci, I guess. Who knows? She plays at both clubs, the one who gets drunk and calls me her husband.

“Pavlo and I are married.”

“Oh, how nice that is,” said the woman seated next to her.

This was the night we first met. I was mucking chips on Roulette 5. “I have never seen this woman in my life,” I said honestly, raising my eyes. I took her all in. There were three other strangers on the game.

“Pavlo is my husband and he fucks me like we are chimpanzees!” she howled.

When the game cleared, I got her number. “One thing,” I said. “You got to stop yelling you’re my wife, it’s going to get me in trouble.”

“Pavlo is my husband and we fuck like chimpanzees!” she hollered again. They don’t throw you out for anything in that place. You could take a dump in the middle of a pit, but as long as you’ve got money.

At first I didn’t call her. She had a face like a horse. But she had a body like a horse also, a real thoroughbred if you know what I mean, speaking of races, which resulted in some unforgettable dreams. When I finally did call her, it was from the bathroom while Della was in the kitchen making sloppy joes, ignoring the baby. I used my lowest voice. The baby’s bawling, with two doors between us, sounded like the quiet rasping of a file on metal.

C.C. had been at the casino the night before but had disappeared. I was in a cranky mood when I got there because the alternator had gone out on my ’98 Escort forcing me to beg for a ride from my neighbor, Match, who was awaiting trial on charges of mayhem and felonious assault. I was late, and when you’re late you lose your craps assignment. You have to deal some shit game like pai gow all night—or worse, blackjack. The guy with no name set the tone early on BJ 25. He wore the same clothes every day—black sneakers, a yellow windbreaker—and chewed gum with a toothpick in his mouth while smoking. We nicknamed him Paddles because of his big hands. “Spank me hard!” was his way of asking for a hit.

Later the Jordanian I always trounce showed up, and I cleaned him out. When I took his last chip, he banged his head against a supporting column. “What do you want me to do?” he said, fighting back tears. “Kill myself?”

I did, actually. And would have minded even less if my last player that night did himself in also. A big fat guy. He played four hours and won over twenty-five grand and never said a word and never tipped a dollar. I was so frustrated I slammed my fist into a locker on break and, the next morning, periodically stood up to bark at the attendant in the emergency room during the four hours they kept me there waiting.

I couldn’t find C.C. at Muckleshoot. I don’t know why I wanted to see her again. The one time we hooked up, she’d agreed to meet me when I got off work, at 3 a.m. She said she had a bike and suggested we go to her place. It was pouring rain. I thought she meant a motorcycle but it turned out to be an actual bike, with pedals.

It isn’t easy to control a bicycle with another person on the seat, not for anyone older than seven. I was struggling to balance when a man slowed up alongside us and began shouting into the rain. I couldn’t understand a word of it.

“Do you know this guy?”

“No,” she said sharply. “You better lose him.”

This guy was driving a Camaro. We were driving a Schwinn. I finally figured out what he was saying, he was shouting the same thing over and over:

“You never said ‘Goodbye, forever!’”

At some point my companion answered him with a shrill, “Goodbye, asshole!”

“No!” he responded, even more agitated. “You have to say ‘Goodbye, forever!’”

You might be surprised to learn that C.C. did know him. If you guessed he was an ex-lover—bingo! You win the pot. It went on like that until I did lose him, which I am proud to relate even now. I swerved into an alley, cut unsteadily across a church lawn. Of course he knew where we were headed. When we arrived at her building, he was parked across the street. He marched our way squealing the same pitiful line.

“You never said ‘Goodbye, forever!’”

She wouldn’t say it. Not those exact words he demanded. Finally, I said it: “Hey—buddy. Goodbye forever.” Very calmly.

For some reason that didn’t satisfy him. He never looked my way. He was scrawny, possibly 40 or 45, nervous, with multiple tattoos. I calculated a low likelihood of some Rambo Special Forces–type shit in his stock of abuse and delirium. No visible weapons. I didn’t relish the idea, but if it came to a fight, I figured I could handle him.

It so happened I didn’t need to find out. After one last “Goodbye forever” and one more defiant “Goodbye asshole” from C.C., she unlocked the vestibule door. I followed her in and the cuck stayed behind. He just stood there in the rain like he was waiting for absolution.

Her apartment must have been 105 degrees. “It’s good for the plants,” she explained, of which there were hundreds. She turned on the television and went into the bathroom while I sat on the bed. A movie was on called The Serpent and the Rainbow; it played the whole time I was there.

“You still dressed?” she said when she came out of the bathroom naked.

We were going at it when the phone rang. Her landline had an old-fashioned handset. I begged her not to answer but she ignored me. Guess who it was?

“You have to say, ‘Goodbye forever!’” His stale, muffled ultimatum sounded like a plea from a gagged hostage.

“Goodbye, asshole!” she brayed before getting back to business. But instead of hanging up she let the receiver hang over the bedstand. She really belted it out for the guy’s benefit after that, a Grammy-worthy performance. Lady Gaga singing the National Anthem. In the middle of it, as I witnessed reflected in the closet-door mirror, the imprisoned protagonist in the movie, who had been strapped to a chair, got a nail driven through his scrotum.

The night the guy won all that money without tipping, one additional player sat on my game afterward, a man alone wearing a bespoke suit with gray around his temples, who smelled like a bourbon cask. I guessed from his ID, because his name ended in vili, that he was Georgian. I knew that Stalin, that mad butcher of millions, was Georgian, that his birthname had been Jughashvili.

“You don’t believe what I see, Pavlo.”

He shuffled chips between beautifully manicured fingers and placed his bets with no evident concern for the outcome, picking them from his stacks at random and replacing them out of reflex or habit.

“Women? I had them all. Most beautiful women all over the world.” He waved an arm to emphasize the breadth of his good fortune. “Monaco, Hong Kong, Odessa—everywhere. Money? Eh. How much money does a man need?”

I was having trouble sympathizing. Me in my uniform of black polyester pants and oversized white shirt with yellow suspenders. My throbbing hand ached. I’d been on my feet for hours.

“How wonderful Russia was under communism,” he recalled wistfully. “How miserable since reforms.”

He gave me that, at least, a way to appreciate the absurdity of his malaise. Consolation, I suppose, for depriving me of that momentary thrill I otherwise would have had each time I snatched away his losing bets, by making clear how little to him it mattered.

The scam with Dave Torcek was simple: I would tip him off to my hole card. The casino was the first in our state after legalization, and they were pretty lax about procedures. Instead of an electronic reader, the blackjack dealers visually checked their hole cards, so they knew, and therefore could tip off the players with the right signal and motivation, whether the best strategy was to take a hit or stand pat. I came to the racetrack to suggest a verbal cue that couldn’t be caught on camera. Torcek had implied he’d provide me the right motivation.

When he’d first started showing up, he would try to get me to cheat by using an ambiguous hand signal. His motion looked the same for both a hit and a stay, a rapid fluttering, like an involuntary tremor. That way he was letting me decide, hoping I would choose in his favor based on what I knew to be my hand. When it became clear I wouldn’t help him, he started tipping bigger, but I am not stupid. I wasn’t about to risk my job for five-dollar tips shared by all the dealers. Eventually he suggested we meet so he could sweeten the deal.

“Oh, you’re going be a pussy.” He said that one night after giving me the option of dropping or betting one of his tips. For a change, I decided to drop it.

“Lots of places I can gamble,” I said. “Here I’m working.”

“Smart, huh? Ever go to the racetrack?”

“Once in a while.”

“I happen to know how a smart dealer could make a little extra dough on the side. No—a lot of extra.”

“I’m listening.”

“Yeah? Who else is listening? They got recording devices around here?”

“No idea.”

“You never know in these joints.”

He told me where to find him, but in the grandstand they steered me upstairs, and upstairs a freakishly large bald man guarded the door, whose elaborate fake directions culminated—a bit crudely, I thought—with a suggestion that I go slap the wink in one of the stable stalls.

Somewhere along the line I lost the Mumbler. Downstairs I read the sheets and got in line at one of the windows, where the hunched-over old woman in front of me quavered, “My mother was a butcher! … Who knew? … You got a cigarette? … You crazy.” I dropped my last double sawbuck on a nag named Town Drunk, the money I’d promised the girlfriend I would use to buy diapers.

Back at the casino the fat guy had returned who’d won all that money. I was already in a rotten mood because the pit boss, Gary, was running hot when I arrived. He’d spent the previous hour taping together a torn-up hundred-dollar bill that Seasick Sam had scattered into a dice layout with the exaggerated two-handed motion of a man passing a medicine ball, the point being to prove to the crew how little he cared about the two grand he’d just dropped. We called him Seasick because he threw up once in a baccarat pit and we knew he’d owned a yacht at one time, before the Feds seized in civil forfeiture.

“Don’t ever walk away from me again, you piece a shit.” Gary at his finest. “Just kidding,” he added sinisterly.

Fat Man sat down on my game almost immediately. Players like to return to the same dealer when they win. About thirty minutes later, things were going about the same as earlier in the week: him winning steadily, not tipping, never acknowledging my presence. Finally, I decided I wasn’t going to take another night of this crap. They could go ahead and fire me.

“You know, pal, it’s customary to tip once in a while.”

He didn’t respond. He motioned for a hit, and won. I paid him but I wasn’t about to let it go at that.

“D’you hear me? You. Fatty. It’s customary to tip.”

Now he looked up. He unwrapped a stick of gum from the pack next to his chips and folded it into his mouth while I started shuffling.

“You want a tip?” he said finally.

“I’m dealing you nothing but winners this week.”

“A friend of mine died on Monday.”

“Boo hoo.”

“I went to the funeral.”

“What am I supposed to say to that? Sorry?”

“A good friend. He liked to gamble. Dice mostly. Some cards. He owned a restaurant called The Blue Nile. Maybe you been there.”

“No.”

“It’s all gone. He lost everything. Wife, restaurant, retirement—everything. When this guy won, he was the happiest son-of-a-bitch you ever seen. Chicks, drugs. He’s hugging waitresses, he’s buying drinks, throwing money around to you shitheads. When he lost, just the opposite. About a year ago he tried to kill himself. That didn’t work out. The good news is, he went into rehab and got his life back together. Finds a job as a restaurant manager. Good salary, corporate—a hundred K. Best of all, no more gambling. He buys a condo in Bellevue and somehow things are going good for him for a change. To be honest, for the first time.”

“I love a happy ending.”

“A few months ago he buys himself this parakeet. A green and yellow thing, very beautiful. The cage is hanging on his balcony. Son-of-a-bitch repeats everything you say. Last week my friend is out there, he wants to change the feeder or something but the chair he stands on to reach the cage has this broken leg, see. So my friend, he pulls out another chair, only this one has those roller things on the legs… what do you call them?”

“Casters.”

“Right. While he’s reaching up to bring down this cage, the chair starts rolling. It rolls right up to the railing and he tumbles over the edge. Twelve floors. When the police arrive, they find this parakeet squawking. Over and over he’s repeating my friend’s last words: ‘Holy shit! Holy shiiiiii—!’”

The people at the table next to us looked over because he’d imitated this parakeet pretty loudly. I finished shuffling and dealt a couple hands before responding. Finally, I said, “Is that it?”

“No, idiot, that’s not it. There’s a moral.”

“What is it?”

He split nines against my six but I drew to a 21 and he lost both hands.

“Don’t buy a parakeet,” he says.

“That’s the moral? Don’t buy a parakeet?”

“That’s the moral.”

“Don’t buy a parakeet.”

“That’s your tip.”

“That’s my tip?”

“That’s your tip.”

“Don’t buy a parakeet.”

“Correct.”