The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

I don’t know why I should be telling you the story of my life like this, mister, but you asked about the stick, and I guess you’ll stop me if I’m boring you. Well, when Dad got along in years to the point where it hurt him to stand up all night, he wasn’t like most stickmen. He’d saved his money. And he quit. You know, like those fellows you read about in the insurance ads in the magazines, that go off to some cabin in the mountains and spend all their time fishing. Well, that’s what my old man did; just quit and bought a shack out near Pikes Peak and there, except for a Christmas card every year, I haven’t heard from him since. At the time he quit, we were both working as stickmen at Rocco’s, up the street. You ever been there? Well, don’t bother. If you ever feel like going there for an evening’s pleasure, as the fellow says, just mail Rocco your money. That way you won’t be pushed around and have to smell all the cigar smoke. And you got just as good a chance to win.

What I mean by that is, Rocco’s joint is just as crooked as he is, which is the same as to say nothing is left to chance. I have an idea that was one of the things that got my old man to quit, Rocco’s being such a crooked house, and him being too old to go traipsing around the country looking for a better job. When he quit, Dad gave me that stick and before he left for the mountains he gave me a quick course in how to operate it. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do with that stick. The way it worked is this: a fellow would come in and start shooting. At the start of his roll he got a whole basket of Rocco’s dice, every one of them honest, to pick from. Any two dice in the basket that he liked, those were the dice he used. Well, as long as he kept shooting for reasonable stakes, he’d keep those dice. Every time he’d shoot, I’d slide the dice back to him with the stick, and he’d roll them out again. The house would be taking its percentage out of the side bets, the guy would win-a-little-lose-a-little, and everybody would be happy, particularly Rocco and me.

That’s the way things usually go at any crap table. The bets fairly even, no arguments, honest dice, pass, miss, pass, and the percentage gradually dragging all the money out of everybody’s pockets.

But there are emergencies that do come up every now and then. Some guy will get hot and start letting his bets ride — which means he doubles his money with every pass he makes. When somebody starts doing that, that’s when Rocco gets glad I’ve got my stick and know how to use it. You see, if a guy does let his money ride, and if he only gets fairly hot, let’s say he makes eleven passes. Now, on that twelfth role he’s shooting two thousand and some dollars for every dollar he started with. What we do when this happens is pretty simple, and, while it’s not foolproof, it very rarely goes wrong.

We give the guy his perfectly honest dice that he’s been shooting with all along for his first throw. If he comes out right there on one roll — if he sevens or elevens, that is — he’s a winner and we’ve got to hope he tries again. He may crap out on that roll, too; that is, he may hit two, three, or twelve, and lose right there, but most likely he’ll catch a point; that is, he’ll roll four, five, six, eight, nine, or ten. And then he’s got to make his point, roll it again before he rolls a seven, and the percentages say he’s not likely to do it. That’s why even an honest crap table (if there is such a thing) would make money. But percentage doesn’t say he can’t make or he won’t do it, just that he’s not likely to do it. That stick up on the wall there, Mac, that’s what says he can’t do it. To put it as simply as I can, that stick has a little slot in it, a kind of panel, and when I grab my end of the stick a little tighter than usual, that panel gets all loose and wobbly. When I push the dice with the stick they just wander in back of the panel and some other dice come flying out about a quarter inch further up the stick. Sure it’s tough to make a stick like that, but it’s tough to make a car, or a watch, or a hat that rabbits can hide in. It’s hard to operate a stick like that and not get caught at it, too, and that’s why Rocco was paying me a hundred and a quarter a week to push the dice back and forth on his table — and this was some years ago, when a hundred and a quarter was pretty good money. I won’t bore you with a lot of details about those other dice, chum. They were made in Minneapolis, and to put it very, very simply, they couldn’t come up anything but seven.

You get the picture now, don’t you, friend? I mean here’s this sucker, all set to try to make his eight or nine or whatever for a couple of thousand bucks, and here he is shaking these dice that can’t come up anything but seven. Of course, real smart gamblers used to notice that nobody ever seemed to make a good score on the crap table, and most of the big-money boys stayed off it. But that didn’t bother Rocco; there were plenty of guys in town that figured they could beat that table, and they used to contribute enough to pay my wages and leave the house with a handsome profit.

Every time a guy would miss out on his big roll, whether he did it because his luck was lousy or with some help from my old man’s stick, Rocco would look at him real sad and say: “Looks like you lose your dough, son. Two rolls, no coffee.” “Two rolls, no coffee” always struck me as a pretty terrible pun, but guys who are winning in crap games all over the world think it’s about the wittiest remark ever made.