A Drop of the Hard Stuff

to his face.”

One result of anonymity is that we mostly know each other by our first names, so we come up with handles to distinguish one Jack from another. At St. Paul’s, we’ve got Tall Jim and Jim the Runner and my own sponsor, Army Jacket Jim, because of the beat-up garment he’s rarely seen without.

If I’ve got a nickname—or a sobriquet, if you prefer—I don’t know what it might be. Matt the Cop? Gumshoe Matt? I’m the only Matt at St. Paul’s, so they probably haven’t needed to come up with a name for me.

“There was no insult implied,” Greg added. “Jack’s prison experience figured in a lot of his shares. How he got what he deserved, and how he’d never have wound up in prison if he hadn’t been drinking. So if you were looking for something to call him, it was a logical choice. But High-Low Jack. What does it even mean?”

“I don’t know. I heard the phrase from a cop at the Sixth when I was on the job myself, and I never heard it since until this evening.”

“From—?”

“A source,” I said, and wondered if Danny Boy was a nickname or a sobriquet. I’d never heard him called anything else, and for all I knew you’d find Danny Boy Bell right there on his birth certificate.

“And this source knew Jack?”

“Never met him, and didn’t know very much about him.”

“But he knew what people called him, or used to call him, which is more than I knew. It wasn’t in his Fourth Step, and I think I’d remember the phrase if I’d ever heard it before.”

“Was he a gambler? A cardplayer?”

“Jack? I don’t think so. He did mention a day he’d spent at a racetrack some years ago, but more in the context of drinking than gambling. Something about how he couldn’t ever seem to get to the window in time to get his bet down, because he’d hang around at the bar and have one more drink.”

“In other words, drinking saved him money.”

“So it wasn’t all bad.”

They did have a pay phone in Poogan’s Pub, and I know it was in working order because I’d seen people talking on it while I sat watching Danny Boy drink enough Stolichnaya vodka to restore the Soviet economy. It was free when I was ready to leave, but instead I walked to the corner. The first phone I tried was out of order, but there was a working one across the street, and the first call I made was to my sponsor.

“No, it’s not too late,” he assured me. “I hear the squeal of brakes, not the cries of the inebriated, so my guess is you’re calling me from the street.”

“You’re the one who should have been a detective. What do the words High-Low Jack mean to you?”

“There’s a card game,” he said, “the name of which is Spit in the Ocean, if I remember correctly. Or just Spit for short. I forget how you play it, but there are four things you get points for—high, low, jack, and the game. That’s the phrase, as I recall. ‘High, Low, Jack, and the Game.’ That help?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t see how it would,” he said. “High-Low Jack. High-low in poker is what you call it when the best and worst hands split the pot. I don’t know how Jack enters into the equation.”

“Jacks or better,” I suggested.

“Which brings to mind another game, a form of draw poker. You need a pair of jacks to open—”

“Right.”

“—but if nobody has jacks or better, then the hand turns into lowball, and the low hand takes the pot. That would be five-four-three-deuce-ace, or six-four-three-deuce-ace, or even seven-five-four-three-deuce, depending on the house rules.”

“I didn’t know you were a poker player.”

“Just buck-limit games, mostly printers, we played in the back room of a shop on Hudson Street. I lost my enthusiasm for the pastime when I came out of a blackout in the middle of a hand with no idea why I’d been betting it so hard. Jacks and Back, that’s what we called that particular variant. But that can’t be any help either. It go all right this evening?”

“It went okay,” I said. “It was good to see Danny Boy, and I put some things in motion.”

“And you didn’t pick up a drink.”

“No, I didn’t. When I left, Danny had just given the waitress a Rubik’s Cube and you’d have thought it was the Hope Diamond.”

“Isn’t that the one with the curse?”

“Well, unless she’s the one with the curse, I’d say he’s going to get lucky tonight.”

“I teed that one up for you, didn’t I? You can thank me another time. High-Low Jack. You hit ’em high and I’ll hit ’em low. Or is it the other way around?”

After he’d agreed to sponsor me, one of the first things Jim did was give me a little red leather change purse as a present. There was a quarter in it, and a subway token.

“That’s a starter,” he’d said. “Make sure you’ve always got a dozen quarters in there, and half a dozen tokens. So you can always make a phone call and you can always hop on a bus or a subway home.”

“Like a mob guy,” I said, and explained that every wiseguy we brought in always had a ten-dollar roll of quarters in his pocket. They’d learned to avoid wiretaps by making all their calls from pay phones, and a roll of quarters came in handy other times as well; wrap your fist around it, and you could punch a whole lot harder.