“If I hear the word ‘honeysuckle’, for instance,” Miguel said, “or if I see honeysuckle growing somewhere, or a picture of it, my mind will always go back to one particular Summer night in Georgia when I was twenty-two, when I intentionally pursued a woman with the intent of having a one-night stand. I’d had a couple before that, but this was the first time I decided to try to get a woman to spend a night with me for no other reason than that I wanted that one night.”
He lay down four cards: a Four of Diamonds, a Four of Clubs, a Nine of Diamonds and a Nine of Clubs.
“Mixed doubles,” he said, and put a Trey of Cups on the discard pile.
“Did you get her?”, I asked, silently cursing that mixed doubles were on the table, which meant I couldn’t lay down the two Treys of Clubs and two Aces of Clubs that were among the thirteen cards in my hand. If there were mixed doubles on the table, you couldn’t play same doubles.
He smiled.
“When I was twenty-two, I could probably have had a night with any woman I took a fancy to. Well, compared with how I am now, anyway.”
“Don’t fish for compliments,” Laea said. She was twenty-two herself, the youngest person at the table, who could probably have had Miguel or I or Bezunesh, the other woman playing with us, if she wanted to.
Laea lay down a King of Diamonds and a King of Clubs.
“On yours, Miguel. I know what you mean. If I smell burning newspaper-it smells different from wood, or burning books-I always think of a time I had no firewood and tried to warm a room with just the huge pile of yellowed newspapers that were nearby.”
She put a card on the discard pile, neatly lined up with Miguel’s discard, and the Trey of Wheels which I’d laid down when I’d dealth the hand. The card was face-down, a “dat card” instead of a “discard”.
Bezunesh put down the first run of the hand, a Queen, King and Ace of Hearts, and discarded a card which had begun life as a Joker holding a banner on a staff, but which had lost its Os, Ks, Es and Rs, and the banner from its staff, all carefully scraped away, and gained in their place two Spade pips under its Js, and a shovel blade to the end of the staff, turning it into a Jack of Spades.
“That line of belly hair that runs down from the navel,” she said. “The first time I saw a man wearing shorts that exposed his navel, and who had that hair, I couldn’t take my eyes off the sight. It turned me on incredibly. Ever since then, I have watched for that whenever I see a man in shorts, or swimming trunks. It always sets me off. Which is funny, because it was absolutely the only time my uncle ever turned me on. But hey, I was thirteen, and everything turned me on.”
The play had come to me. Could I lay anything down at all? I didn’t see anything - oh, there it was.
I picked up the entire discard pile, all the way down to that Trey at the bottom. It was hard to hold all sixteen cards and still have their faces showing, but I immediately lay down the four Deuces. I was about to discard when I saw that Bezunesh’s dat card had been a Ace of Diamonds. I quickly lay down an Ace of Diamonds, saying, “On yours, Miguel. Fireflies.”
I smiled fondly at the thought.
“I’d never seen fireflies until a night when I was walking along U.S. Route 2, a two-lane highway that runs parallel to the Canadian border from Michigan to Washington. I was in a stretch of countryside, walking along on a night so dark I had to bring one foot down on pavement and the other on gravel to keep from either wandering into the middle of the road or into the ditch. I saw a moving light ahead, and realized it was a firefly, blinking away in midair. A little further on, I saw a couple more. Such beautiful little green lights. Then I came around a bend in the road and I saw a whole field full of them, blinking on and off as they perched on blades of grass, like an immense diagram of synapses opening and closing in a brain. I stood there watching, mesmerized, for a long time before I moved on. A couple of years later, I moved here, where you can see fireflies most Summer nights, but they always remind me of that night.”
I discarded a Jack of Hearts.
“Gin!” Miguel said, a fraction of a second before Bezunesh did. I sighed as I saw Miguel lay the Jack down in front of himself.
http://whatisfoundhere.blogspot.com/2018/05/letter-to-local-police-by-june-jordan.html
The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Be cautious in what you discard."
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