Chapter 9: The Night Crawler

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Isolem Treff called the Night Crawler a ‘dung hole’ bar. If dung hole meant the owners didn’t care enough about the bar to trim the weeds growing from between the cracks in the sidewalk, washing the windows, cleaning the cobwebs from around the lights on the overhang, or applying a coat of paint more often than twice per century, then he was right. The name Night Crawler suggested a creature crawling its way from beneath the ground, inching its way toward no specific goal, and that name was fitting.

Digger half expected to see batwing doors leading in as he approached the front of the building, but instead, a solid tan door with flaking paint greeted him. He tucked the necklace in so it was underneath his shirt, pushed his way inside and made his way to the bar. The smell of bacon dove for his nose the moment he was inside, but it wasn’t the only odor. Underneath, lying there like yesterday’s coffee was the smell of stale beer, cheap perfume, and bleach covered puke.

There were less than ten people in the bar and two of them worked there. It looked to Digger like the one working behind the bar was the owner, and there was a waitress serving the only table in the place with any customers. Her shorts trimmed dangerously short for a place tucked so far from civilization, barely covering her curves, and her tank top invited as much trouble as her shorts. Digger couldn’t imagine how many times the girl must have to swat away groping hands on any given night, but he was sure it wasn’t an isolated incident.

“What are you drinking?” the man behind the counter asked.

“Something stiff,” he replied. “I don’t even care what.”

“Lady troubles?” the bartender asked.

Hmm, let’s see. Should I answer that question? He thought to himself, but elected not to say more than he had to. “In a sense,” he said.

The bartender reached beneath the counter, directly in front of him, and came back up with a green tinted bottle. The bottle looked as if it were older than the person holding it. He grabbed a shot glass, tilted the bottle, carefully pouring brown liquid as if measuring for a science experiment, and slid the shot glass toward him. “Five bucks,” the bartender said.

“Stiff price for a stiff drink,” Digger commented, but he pulled his wallet out and paid it.

“Don’t slam it,” the bartender said. “I’ve cleaned enough puke for the week.”

Digger brought the glass up to his nose, and sniffed. “Cripes,” he said. “I think you could clean sinks with this.”

“We do,” the bartender answered with a smile. “You can join the game if you want. It might take your mind off whatever’s bothering you.”

Digger turned around to see to what the bartender was referring. He didn’t notice when he came in but the occupied table wasn’t a regular table. It was large, oval, and covered in green felt. The men sitting there were playing hold’em, his favorite, and each of the players had a nice stack of chips in front of him.

“I’d love to but I think I should pass. I’m waiting for someone, I think.”

The bartender shrugged and went back to wiping down the bar. “Probably a wise choice,” he said. “In that game you either lose your money, or risk a broken leg. They don’t like strangers coming in and winning.”

Play the game, idiot, Isolem cut in.

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It wasn’t the first time Digger ever played Hold’em. Any game a person could walk in with fifty bucks and leave with hundreds, or even thousands, was a game he considered to be, ‘right up his alley’. He sat in seat eight and waited.

“Welcome to the table, sir,” the dealer said. Digger was surprised at how polite the dealer was. The Night Crawler didn’t seem like the kind of place workers treated like you were at the Bellagio, but he wasn’t going to complain. “Put your buy-in on the table and Gus will convert it to chips.”

Digger looked around the table. They were only using one-dollar and five-dollar chips and as he gazed around the table, he guessed the average stack was six hundred dollars. There was only one short stack sitting at the table (an older retired man) and he had almost two hundred dollars in front of him. The rest of them were stacked pretty well.

“Hey, zip,” one of the players, said. “It looks like we got some fresh meat here. I think his tell is that he’s already making skid-marks in his pants!”

The rest of the players thought the comment was hilarious, but Digger didn’t find it funny. He mostly disliked the comment, because it wasn’t that far from true. The player who said it wore an all-black t-shirt, had a pack of cigarettes rolled up into one sleeve, and looked like he worked out by bench pressing his pickup truck in his back yard. His scraggly hair and unkempt goatee only added to the fierce look in his eyes. Digger labeled him as Foo Man Choo.

“Nah,” one of the other players said. “I can tell his type. He probably won’t play a hand. Gettin’ money outta this guy will be like sifting turds from a flushed toilet.”

They thought that was funny too.

Put it all on the table, Isolem ordered.

Come on man, Digger begged, I still gotta get the hell out of this state!

Isolem didn’t answer him with words. Instead, Digger began to feel like he did after he gave a pint of blood at the Red Cross, just after he graduated from high school. It was the last time he ever attempted to help someone out of the good of his heart, and he was repaid for it by passing out from lack of energy. White dots began to dance in front of his eyes, and it felt like his fingers were going numb.

Put it all on the table or you never leave this bar, Isolem repeated.

Okay, okay! Digger said. He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet and pulled out the four one hundred dollar bills that he brought.

You taste like rotten grapes. But don’t you forget that rotten is just as up my alley, as playing this idiot game, is yours.

A bald headed man walked out from behind a curtained doorway in the back of the bar. He carried a tray full of red and white chips, which he deposited in front of Digger. He took Digger’s money and disappeared behind the curtain. Digger labeled him, Oz.

“You’ll be the big blind this hand,” the dealer informed him. “The big blind is five dollars.”

It wasn’t until he posted the five bucks that Digger began to realize just how much trouble he was in. He began to look around the table and none of the other players, other than the old retiree, looked like they were too keen on losing. Quite the contrary, they all looked like they belonged on motorcycles, skinny blonde-haired women wrapping their arms around them, looking for heads to pound. Winning wasn’t a very good option.

He and the retiree were the only exceptions and he half wondered if the retiree knew what winning meant.

The dealer dealt him his two cards and he peeked to see what they were. His heart skipped a beat as he realized they were A-frames.

Normally you waited for this hand all night. Pocket aces was the best starting hand before the flop and it’s a hand you raise with, but Digger just sat down, wasn’t liking the situation he was in, and wanted to get a feel for whether or not he could win money from these brutes and still walk on two legs. When the action came to Digger, he folded.

Sissy, Isolem stated with a laugh.

Digger ignored his tormenter and watched the hand play out. There were two men playing the hand and there would be a flop. Digger’s heart really started to pound when the dealer turned over the three cards of the flop. Two of them were aces. If he’d stayed in the hand, he’d have had four of a kind, which is only second to a variation of a straight-flush.

The player to Digger’s left made a bet and the other player folded. The hand was over and the dealer shipped the few chips in the pot to the winner, but as those chips were shipped, Digger noticed one of the players eyeing him.