A flash for G; Trains, crickets and one eyed jacks in Flash Friday

He bought a seat at the corner table with a girl and a horse, broad shouldered beast with hair at the ankles. Every time he raised the pot he’d say ‘What the hell, just fun tickets, right?’ The game was jacks or better to open and a single draw and for all his talk he had just the one tell; he didn’t sit to win.

Even over the cat calls and the jukebox, the ‘Motherfucker!’ and ‘More Beer!’ he could hear the union pacific rumbling down the tracks. Out here it never whistled; nothing sat on the tracks by accident. When he was a kid he threw rocks at the flat cars stacked with cars heading west from Detroit. Lou Bob would throw some too; staring down the barrel of a broken flush he couldn’t remember whether lou bob left or he had.

Lou bob had this girl, a child, that could sing like a cricket. On a summers night she could call the stars out and bring down trains for harmony. Even he didn’t know who the mother was and all lou bob would say is ‘ Venus left her on her way back home”

Yeah, no one talks like that except when they do. Fun tickets. Venus. If you say it once you have to say it the rest of your life or it sounds like an accident. Most folks play to win. When you play like that everything has to look deliberate. He had a tell; he didn’t sit to win. He wasn’t playing either.

Later when every one but the raconteurs and the kid who sweeps the floor had stumbled back to from where the came, somebody would say ‘He made a deal with the fox to keeps the boys sitting while he ransacked the hen house’ and someone else would say it was a wolf and the shepards herd.

Truth is everybody is always a little wrong. He wasn’t even the hero of his own story, the story wasn’t even about him. It was about the girl. It’s always about the girl. You know how somebody makes a wise crack when someone else says ‘I don’t owe nothing to nobody?’ Yeah, that doesn’t mean he owes everything to everybody or even he owes something to someone, it means it’s about the girl. It’s always about the girl.