Sebastian’s anger fills the apartment with a taste like iron. It seeps between the smiles of the other men and it confuses them. It confuses Caleb most of all because he is winning despite himself. He wins apologetically. He plays weak hands across guilty towers of chips, brushing them with his elbows so that they clatter to the ground. We find embarrassing reminders of his sudden fortune beneath his chair and under the dresser. He wins so much he loses track of how much he’s won. He tries to offload it, tries to hand out little freebies to Eddie when he breaks early one night and leans back in his chair to watch.
Eddie knows better than to touch those chips. There is something dark in them, some brooding superstition that might catch like a disease.
On breaks we hear Caleb pacing in the kitchen, his teeth and pockets rattling. I suspect he pleads to Candy and I wonder if she rolls her eyes at the sudden change of heart. He holds himself together during the games, though. And he wins. I make sure he does.
In the end, it’s not the winning that spreads, but the anger.
Eddie tastes blood as we set up a new coffee display. He squeezes each bag until the smell of the grounds permeates the aisle, his dirty fingernails leaving little indents in the foil.
“It’s supposed to just be this fun fucking thing,” he tells me again, “And Caleb’s got to make it about making money.”
“Yeah.”
“Sebastian’s fucking furious, man. I’ve never seen him like that. He’s playing it cool, but he’s real fucking mad.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s just supposed to be for fun.”
Friday arrives and Sebastian surprises us with a new deck and a new card- the Traitor. He tells us it’s modelled after the manager of the old gas station, a man that held all the cards, so to speak. The Traitor throws off the balance of the entire game. Rounds devolve into chaos and money changes hands wildly.
It isn’t until the end of the night that I find the Traitor in my hand. The man is draped in a hoodie, his over-large hood obscuring everything but a gap-toothed grimace. There is a book in his right hand, shedding pages onto the road. There is a wooden stake in the left (or a pen, it’s difficult to tell).
I try to catch Sebastian’s eyes as I play the card.
He gives nothing away but money.
-traveler
