Eleven in Twelve

by Oswald Jacoby, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The surgeon had said eleven in twelve, and Leonard Pruitt had done the division before the man reached the end of the corridor. Ninety-one point six six, repeating. He had not asked for the figure. Dr. Abernethy had offered it the way some men offer a cigarette, to give his hands something to do, and then he had pushed through the swinging doors with Marian's chart under his arm and the doors had gone on swinging after him, four times, three, two, and stopped.

That was at ten past six. It was now a quarter to seven, and the waiting room on the third floor of the hospital on Fannin Street smelled of floor wax and somebody's burnt coffee, and the ceiling fan turned slowly enough that you could count the blades, which Leonard had done. Five. One of them was warped and ticked at the top of every turn.

He took the deck out of his coat. He always had one. At Gulf States Life, where he had spent nineteen years building mortality tables for men who sold policies in Beaumont and Lufkin and Port Arthur, the other actuaries kept slide rules in their desk drawers, and Leonard kept a slide rule and a Bicycle deck, and nobody had ever asked him which one he used more.

He shuffled. Riffle, riffle, bridge, cut, and again, seven times over, because fewer left the last game's order lying in the pack like sediment, and more did not help.

"You play gin?"

The man across the room had come in at half past five, before Leonard. He was perhaps thirty, in khaki work trousers and a khaki shirt with a name stitched over the pocket, Teo, and there was a smell coming off him that the floor wax did not cover. Not smoke, exactly. Something chemical underneath smoke. His hands were clean in the way hands are clean when someone has scrubbed them with a brush and a solvent and they still look grey at the knuckles.

"I play gin," said Leonard.

"Penny a point?"

"I don't play for money in hospitals," said Leonard, which was not a rule he had known he had until he said it. "But I'll keep score."

"Teo Garza."

"Leonard Pruitt."

Garza pulled a chair over to the low table where the magazines were, swept Life and two copies of Look onto the floor, and sat. Leonard dealt ten each and turned the upcard. Six of hearts.

---

The first hand told him most of what he needed. Garza picked up the six of hearts, looked at it a while as if it might say something, and threw a queen. He drew from the stock with his eyes closed. Twice he held a card above the discard pile and took it back and threw a different one. When Leonard asked him, without meaning to ask, why he had kept the king of clubs over the eight, Garza said, "Felt like a keeper," and knocked two turns later with nine points and won the hand by fourteen.

Leonard wrote it on the back of an envelope from his inside pocket. G 14.

The second hand Garza won by gin. The third he won by eleven. He began to tap the table with the edge of his cards before he discarded, a little drumroll on the Formica.

"I'm running hot," he said.

Leonard said nothing. A run of three hands was not information. It was what three hands looked like, sometimes, and in a hundred hands it would look like something else, and in a thousand it would look like arithmetic. He had a hand to play.

He held the six and seven of hearts, and a pair of nines, diamonds and spades, and the rest was a three-card run in clubs and some low trash. Two places to improve. For the hearts, the five or the eight would do it: two cards. For the nines, the hearts nine or the clubs nine: two cards. Even. Except that the nine of clubs was lying face up in the discard pile, under a jack, where Garza had thrown it on his first turn. So the nines had one live card and the hearts had two.

He broke the nines. He threw the nine of spades, and Garza picked it up, grinning, and Leonard wrote down that Garza was collecting nines, or thought he was, or felt like he was. Then Leonard drew the eight of hearts off the stock and went gin on the next turn.

L 25 + 32.

"Huh," said Garza.

---

At twenty past seven a nurse came through in a starched cap and both men looked up, and she went to the desk and asked the clerk something about a laundry cart and went out again. Garza looked down at his cards. Leonard looked at the swinging doors.

"Who've you got?" Garza said.

"My wife. Mitral valve. They go in through the side and open it with a finger." Leonard heard how he had said it, as if he were reading it off an underwriting form. "Rheumatic fever when she was a girl. It scarred the valve shut."

"They tell you how it goes?"

"Eleven in twelve come through."

Garza whistled through his teeth, softly. "That's good. That's real good." He picked up a card and laid it down. "My brother Beto. Over at the plant in Pasadena, on the ship channel. The cat cracker flashed yesterday, about four in the afternoon. He was on the walkway." He did not say anything about what Beto looked like, and Leonard understood that he could not. "Doctor said fifty-fifty."

"I'm sorry."

"You're a numbers man." Garza nodded at the envelope. "I can see that. You write it all down. So tell me what fifty-fifty means."

Leonard knew exactly what it meant. It meant that of a hundred men burned as Beto was burned, of his age and in his condition, on the record of this hospital and the hospitals whose records this hospital trusted, fifty would be alive at the end of some stated period, and fifty would not. He had built tables out of sentences like that. He had built them out of Beaumont pipefitters and Lufkin pulpwood cutters, out of drawers of death certificates, and the tables were good, and Gulf States Life had never once lost money on them.

"It means," he said, "that if there were a hundred men like your brother—"

"There ain't a hundred," said Garza. "There's Beto."

"Yes."

"So what's it mean for Beto?"

Leonard squared the deck. The ceiling fan ticked.

"Nothing I can calculate," he said.

Garza looked at him for a long moment, and then laughed, short, not unkindly. "Well," he said, "deal, then."

---

They played. The sun came up properly over the parking lot and laid a yellow bar across the linoleum, and it crept toward the table a few inches each hand. Garza won, and won again. Leonard played correctly and lost small; once he played correctly and lost large, when Garza filled an inside straight of spades with the only card in the deck that could fill it, after throwing away a perfectly good seven to keep the draw open.

"Hot," said Garza, and drummed.

The score on the envelope stood at a hundred and twelve to sixty-one. Leonard counted it twice. He also counted, because he could not help it, that Garza had won seven of the eleven hands; that the chance of a player of exactly equal skill winning seven or more of eleven was a little better than one in four; and that Garza was not of equal skill. He kept the third figure off the envelope.

At ten past eight Leonard picked up a hand that was nearly made. He had the three, four, five and six of clubs, and the nines of diamonds, hearts and spades, and the ace of spades, the deuce of hearts and the four of spades. Seven points of deadwood, on the fourth draw.

Garza had not thrown a club all hand. He was holding something in hearts. He was holding, Leonard thought, the nine of clubs, because it had not shown up anywhere, and because a man who kept cards that felt like keepers would keep that one.

Knock early: every book on gin said so, and Leonard had read them all. He had also kept his own count, over some thousands of hands in the lunch hour at Gulf States, and by his count a man who knocked with seven points on the fourth draw beat the defender four times in five. The defender's hand had not had time to come together. Gin wanted the deuce and the trey of spades, both of them, out of a stock of twenty-odd cards, and nothing else would do. Every turn he waited, Garza drew another chance to go down first.

Four in five. Leonard laid down his hand.

"Knock," he said. "Seven."

Garza looked at Leonard's melds a long time. Then he took the seven of clubs out of his hand and laid it on the end of Leonard's club run. Then he laid the nine of clubs alongside Leonard's three nines. Then he spread the rest: kings of hearts, diamonds and clubs; five, six, seven, eight of hearts. One card left over. The ace of diamonds.

"One," said Garza.

Undercut. Six points' difference and the undercut bonus, to the man who had kept the seven and the nine of clubs because they felt like keepers.

Leonard wrote it down. He did not wish he had played it differently. He had played it at four in five, and it had come up one in five, and if he sat at this table a thousand mornings with that hand he would knock with it a thousand times and be glad of eight hundred of them. The envelope did not know that. The envelope said G 31.

"You see that?" Garza said. He was not drumming now. He was looking at the cards on the table as if somebody had spoken out of them. "You see that? I'm hot. I'm running hot all morning. That's got to mean something. That's got to be—"

He stopped.

Leonard knew what he was going to say, and so did Garza, and neither of them said it. Leonard felt the correct sentence come up in him, the one he had said to new clerks at Gulf States for nineteen years: a run of results is not information. It was true. The cards did not know about the walkway over the cat cracker. They did not know about Beto. They were fifty-two pieces of pasteboard that had been shuffled seven times, and the seven of clubs had no opinions.

He looked at Garza's hands, the grey still in the knuckles.

"It's a good run," Leonard said. "I've been at this thirty years and I don't see many better."

That was also true. He made the figure work in his head, to be sure of it, and it did.

---

The nurse with the starched cap came back at a quarter to nine. This time she did not go to the desk.

"Mr. Garza?"

Garza stood up so fast his chair went over. He did not pick it up. He looked at the nurse's face and Leonard looked at it too, and it was a face that nurses learn, and it told neither of them anything.

"Doctor would like to talk to you, honey. Down on two."

Garza went. At the door he turned back, as if he had left something, and Leonard held out the envelope, and Garza looked at it and shook his head.

"You keep it," he said. "I'll come back up and finish."

Then he was gone, and the swinging doors swung, four, three, two, and stopped.

Leonard set the chair upright. He gathered the cards off the table — Garza's kings and his hearts, the long run of clubs with the seven on the end of it, the four nines — and he counted them back into the pack without looking, as he always did. Fifty-one. He bent down. The ace of diamonds had gone under the table when the chair fell, and he picked it up and put it on top. Fifty-two.

The doors at the end of the corridor opened. It was Dr. Abernethy, still in his cap and gown, untying his mask as he came, and walking neither fast nor slow.

Leonard put the deck in his pocket, and put the envelope in after it, and stood up to hear which one he was.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Oswaldō Iacobiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Oswald Jacoby, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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