The Cane

The idea flashed lewdly before him – like a nipple peeking momentarily above the cut of a dress. He felt a lascivious guilt in seeing it, but he was entitled. After all, Clem was on his arthritis kick again.

    "Tell me again why the hell we can't play a game that that doesn't involve us usin' our fingers?"

    "What?" asked Sam, having heard and understood completely what had been said.

    "You heard me," Clem continued, shaking his cane at them like a craggy old schoolmaster that had suffered one too many juvenile delinquents. "All we do here is talk about our goddam arthritis, and how expensive the medicine is, and all that. Yet all we do is sit around here all day and play poker."

    "So what about it?" barked Willard.

    "What the hell is wrong with you? Why ya gotta talk about things like that?"

    "Cuz I'd like an answer," retorted Clem. "Ya gotta shuffle 'em. Ya gotta pick 'em up off a flat surface. Ya gotta pluck 'em outta yer own deck..."

    "Oh who gives a good God damn," murmured Jerry, delivering not so much the words but the tone that reminded everyone about the state of things. The sorry state of things. Perhaps the last state of things that they would ever know in their limp, listless lifetimes. Another day and he would leave it at that, and let the game crawl forward, but the sinister notion that had so beguiled him moments before surfaced anew, so he threw them all a curve by continuing.

    "Clem's right, you know. What the hell's the point of playing poker when there's nothin' to win? Christ, we're playing for extra puddings at dinner for Christ's sake. How'm I supposed to get all poker faced and competitive over a cuppa goddam tapioca?"

    "Well what do ya wanna do - play for benefit checks?" spat Willard incredulously. "Or control of the remote during TV time?"

    "Yeah, what the hell d'ya wanna play for?" chimed Sam. "None of us got nothin' anymore."

    "I dunno." He couldn't bring himself to say it. It was wrong and he knew it. It was also personal – and therefore unfair. Plus he could lose - though he knew he was the only one of the assembled that would have the guts to go through with it if he indeed won.

    Clem dealt. Jerry looked hard at his royal flush, then put it face down on the table. "I'm out."

    "Can't you just stay in a little longer – for the rest of our benefits?" asked Clem condescendingly, brandishing the cane once again. Clem was the one he wanted. Clem and that goddam cane of his. And now it almost seemed as if fate was baiting him.

    "Why should I?" Jerry retorted. "I couldn't eat all the fruit cups and Brownies I've got coming to me from all a you old farts if I lived to a hundred."

    "You could do it for the sportsmanship, that's why," Clem lectured. "The game works better when everybody's in."

    Whatta you know about it y'old bastard, he wanted to say. But he bit his tongue and instead inched closer to his awful suggestion.

    "Yeah, I could stay in. But only if we sweeten the pot a little bit. I mean, let's really play for somethin' for once."

    "Like what? We just talked about this," moaned Clem, cane in hand.

    "How about that?" replied Jerry, tilting his gaze onto the cane.

    "What? You mean this?" asked Clem, raising the cane in the air. "How the hell'm I s'posed to walk without it?"

    "You could manage. If y'ask me, ya just tote it around with ya so the nurses give ya extra attention."

    Clem cut the soft murmur of agreement short. "Ahh whatta you know? That idea's looney."

    "Well actually, I wasn't quite thinkin' that the winner would keep it," explained Jerry, somewhat cautiously. "I had kind of a different idea. Probably wouldn't work much better, though. At least not with this gang, anyway."

    "Well...out with it!" chirped Willard. "As ya said yerself before, we ain't got nothin' to lose."

    "I'm not so sure," Jerry purred. "This is pretty different than what we're used to. Very different. There's some stakes involved."

    Oh for Christ's sake Jerry," Clem hissed. "Just spill your guts already. I can always have my daughter get me a new cane."

    "Well, its like this. I think the winner of the game should get a little something special. A special...well...privilege with that cane."

    "Whatta you talkin' about?"

    "I'm talkin' about three whacks," Jerry said flatly. "That's what I'm talkin' about. Winner gets to give out three whacks with that cane to whoever he pleases."

    Jerry had expected outrage, truth be told. Instead, only a mild grumble filtered through the group, followed by what seemed to be earnest contemplation. So Jerry seized his chance.

    "C'mon you old bastards," he growled in a low, conspiratorial voice. "Don't ya ever just want to give some of us a good whack once in a while? Willard with his phony folksy sayings? Sam with that rotten habit of sucking on his denture plates when we're tryin' to eat? And Clem. Clem with that goddam moralizing and that silly..."

    No. He couldn't make it too obvious. So he stopped. And let not the words, but again the invective, permeate the room and incubate in the minds of his partners.

    "It is all a little much, sometimes," Sam stated in a low, tired voice. "Being stuck here. Not havin' control over anything that's goin' on. Gripin' about our problems. Not havin' your old buddies around to give ya a break from each other."

    "Ya get so angry," added Willard, "but there's just nothing you can do to get it out."

    "Yeah but turn on each other?" gasped Clem, shaking the cane much less forcefully than usual. "We're all we got now. Like it or not. We're like blood."

    This struck a momentary chord with the men, which Jerry sensed.

    "Yeah, but sometimes there's bad blood that boils up between guys. And sometimes ya gotta figure out a way to let it drain out. Before it poisons yer whole set up. Ya can't let it boil up and fester. You gotta find a way to get it out that doesn't bring the whole thing down."

    For a long time nobody spoke. Mostly, the men stared at their cards, stealing fleeting glances at each other, trying to read faces and figure out which way the whole thing was going. It actually felt like a real poker game again.

    Without a word, Jerry picked up his cards and began to arrange them to his liking. Ten minutes later, he felt the shabby, worn-down finish of the brown wooden cane in the palm of his hand. He squeezed it indulgently, massaging his wrinkled old fingers into the grain.

    "Maybe just one whack, Jer," he heard Willard suggest. "Just one across his backside."

    "Yeah," added Sam. "He's got plenty of padding back there still."

    And then his second hand was on the cane. His creaky joints reared it high and back behind him – poised to strike. And it felt like old times. Running through alleys from the salty Prussian shopkeeper on 63rd and Ashland. In hot pursuit of a mangy stray, or the latest foreign kid from fuck knows where. Or that time the colored kid got fresh with his girl. When that Jap surprised him that night on patrol. When the neighbor, Mr. Snedden, thought he could take liberties with disciplining his Mikey without taking the matter up with him first. Or when that parking attendant called him an old geezer and tried to pinch a 20 off of him, saying it was only a ten. It felt like all of these at once – like life itself. And his arms became numb with the anticipation of striking one more blow against the world that had shunted him aside. One more life-giving blow with this exquisitely shabby cane.

    The paramedics where there in no time, it seemed to Willard and Sam. Clem remembered it as having taken them a little longer. He was worried about the fate of his cane – and understandably so. Neither EMT could pry it from Jerry's clenched fist as they wheeled him out. They simply zipped it up in the bag with him and pulled away.