2025 Submission to NYC Midnight’s Short Story Challenge
By Jim Janus
In the backroom of the Frolics the game of twenty-one was dealt by a kid who didn’t look it himself. He’d been a sailor for a year and loved it. Except for the water. He feared drowning so much that he couldn’t pass the swim test. That earned him the name Kedge and a discharge he didn’t want.
Though the Navy couldn’t teach him to swim, his shipmates taught him blackjack. One night he won big and celebrated by getting a tattoo. It wasn’t Ace-Jack. Instead it was eight, nine, three, ace. The design almost didn’t fit. It’s how the cards came.
The failed sailor disembarked at Navy Pier and stumbled along Kinzie until Wabash, where portraits of showgirls drew him into the Frolics. The owner felt bad for him and made him blackjack dealer. DeCarlo and his wife didn’t have kids, so they cared for Kedge like he was their college dropout. Eventually Kedge dealt so many games he got comfortable with the clientele. He made them laugh and everyone liked him. Then, Edward “Eddie” Esposito took over the club.
The final night of the Frolics was in ’58. The agreement between old and new was fair and square. After the last performance Eddie would get rid of staff and change the theme of the club. No burlesque dancing. No backroom blackjack. He was bringing in Jazz and he would name the place…Eddie’s.
That evening before the doors opened, bright bulbs blinked a border around the marquee’s movable letters: FROLICS FINAL NIGHT! In the lobby DeCarlo came down from a stepstool. In his hands was a 1940s framed portrait of a platinum blond who was the mainstay of the club. DeCarlo looked at it and reminisced. Decades of running the place wore him down. He didn’t mind the takeover, didn’t mind the dull new name. What troubled him was finding work for Kedge and keeping the portrait without Eddie catching him. Eddie already claimed it for its collector’s value.
Kedge arrived through the framed glass door and DeCarlo pulled him aside. “After tonight I’ll get you a new gig.” He handed Kedge the address of his new home outside the city.
In the back room Kedge got the blackjack table set up. The club’s doors weren’t open yet but someone stepped in to gamble. It was Eddie. Kedge barely knew him but despised him for putting everyone out of work. Kedge was a straight dealer, meaning he always dealt the first card from the deck. But he mastered being able to deal the second card while keeping the first for later. He could help a player win or make him bust. Now he’d make Eddie bust to make him feel bad. What’s to lose, Kedge thought. I won’t see him after tonight.
Eddie Esposito was known in Chicago not only for his nightclubs but for his trumpet playing. His head was nearly bald and he always wore gray slacks with a gray sport coat. He weighed over three hundred pounds. Maybe he got big from the steaks he ate, maybe he just had a big frame. Either way his massive stomach and chest gave him bulk to bounce unruly patrons and wind to blow his horn. And he did blow his horn. Not only during smoky performances but a blast or two as he was about to enter a club or a restaurant or a business deal. He always carried it. Because of this, some called him “the Elephant.” They said it behind his back. He was sensitive about his weight.
The final night, the Frolics headlined Eddie himself. The master of ceremonies skipped out that night and DeCarlo needed a fill-in. That’s when Kedge got his big chance. The audience roared at his intro. Everyone loved it, except Eddie and DeCarlo.
“He works for peanuts?” DeCarlo was dumbfounded when Kedge met him offstage. “I ask you to introduce Eddie the…” he caught himself, “and you finish with that old joke?”
“Aw, come on DeCarlo.” Kedge smirked. “He’s got thick skin.”
After Eddie’s performance all seemed good. His trumpet playing was as mellow as ever, the audience got what they came for, and DeCarlo smiled at the notes in the till. He then got in his Cadillac and headed home.
Twenty-five miles northwest of the city, ranch houses of fresh brick were being bought by newlyweds planning families. Nightclub operators also bought houses there. In one a man was sitting across from his wife at the breakfast table. The two were noticeably older than newlyweds. The woman sipped orange juice while wearing dark sunglasses, a leopard print robe, and a silk scarf over her blond hair. The man held the Tribune and was reading an article.
“Tipsie,” the man said. But he wasn’t stating a level of inebriation. He called his wife by her stage name. She was the burlesque dancer from The Frolics, the one in the portrait. DeCarlo, continued to speak. “They pulled a guy out of the Chicago River yesterday.”
“That’s awful!” She gasped. “Is he dead?”
DeCarlo read aloud. “Early Sunday the fire department rescued a young man found treading water just east of the Wabash Avenue bridge. He said he was working late Saturday and didn’t know how he ended up in the river. The man appeared to be hit on the head and didn’t remember his name. The rescue crew noted his bicep tattoo as a series of playing cards.”
“Kedge!” Tipsie was stunned.
“Thrown in by Eddie,” DeCarlo figured.
“I hope he didn’t swallow river water.” Tipsie joked to calm herself. “That’d do him in.”
She thought about the news and what DeCarlo told her of the closing. Tipsie knew how her husband did things and there were times she wanted him to be stronger. This was one of those times and she told him.
“You shoulda stood up to Eddie after Kedge made that joke about him. Maybe then Kedge wouldn’t have ended up in the river. You gotta stand up for me too. Like with my portrait. You shoulda told Eddie to his face he can’t have it. Instead you stole it behind his back. You think he ain’t gunna come looking for it?”
“He doesn’t know where we live.”
“You think he ain’t never heard of the phone book?”
DeCarlo drove downtown, found the hospital Kedge was in, and by dusk they were back at his house. Kedge wasn’t too badly hurt and his memory was fine. He wanted Eddie to think he was dead. It’s why he didn’t give his name when they found him.
In the suburbs Decarlo got away from his persona of nightclub owner. He wore a khaki button-down shirt and shorts, and spent time in his basement with its dark paneling, leather couch, walnut bookshelf, and wet bar. On the wall hung an oversized panoramic print of the Serengeti at sunset. Next to it was mounted a replica long gun and a safari helmet. There was another framed composition but it wasn’t hanging. At floor-level leaning against the wall was Tipsie’s portrait.
The basement den, DeCarlo thought, could be a good place to run a part-time blackjack operation. Now that Kedge was down there they would discuss it. DeCarlo turned a knob on the wooden hi-fi console and from within the orange glow of vacuum tubes escaped through its seams. He moved the turntable arm over a black vinyl disc, set the needle down, and let the player spin-out a tune of jazz piano. From a closet he brought out and set up a blackjack table. Kedge moved his hands across the flat green felt. He opened a deck of playing cards, cut it, and rifled them back together.
The piano notes were calming until a different instrument joined in. Just for a moment, a harsher sound, a brassy burst. The two men realized the clashing notes came not through the cloth-covered speakers. They sounded from the top of the stairs.
Heavy footsteps thudded down and there in DeCarlo’s basement, in gray sport coat and gray slacks, stood Esposito. In his right hand he held his brass trumpet with its bell showing a dent, the concave curve from Kedge’s convex head.
DeCarlo at that moment was behind the bar. He moved his foot in an attempt to slide the portrait out of view, but it was too late.
“That portrait is mine,” said Eddie. He stepped to the wall and with his hornless hand lifted the frame. Then he turned and stomped toward the staircase.
“Esposito,” a man’s voice said in a grave tone.
Eddie turned and saw the low African sun eclipsed by DeCarlo–wearing the safari helmet and pointing the double barrel at him.
DeCarlo continued, “The Frolics you can keep, but not the portrait.” Eddie surrendered the frame and DeCarlo demanded one more thing. “I want the trumpet too.”
Tipsie was upstairs at the start of the commotion but now stood among the three men. Seeing DeCarlo pointing the gun both startled and impressed her. She knew it wasn’t loaded.
Sweat showed on Eddie’s forehead. “Keep the portrait,” he said, “but I gotta have my horn.”
These guys needed a way out of the situation, that was clear to Tipsie. It wasn’t her first time in the middle of a fight and she had experience calming men down.
She called to Eddie, “Come sit at the bar, fella. I’ll make you a drink.” Eddie took his horn to a stool and Tipsie mixed a Manhattan. “Ya know what I think, Eddie? You’re scared of being vulnerable. I know ‘cause I make time with a lotta fellas. They tell me things they don’t tell no one else. Some, like you, think they can only get their way by bullying. You blast somebody with a note from your horn or hit ‘em over the head with it. And that’s just one of your problems. The other is that you’re afraid of lettin’ your feelin’s out. Your feelin’s are normal, Eddie. But you keep ‘em to yourself ‘til you play ‘em on stage. They make your music beautiful. But imagine if instead a blowin’ your feelin’s through your horn you whispered ‘em into some doll’s ear. I got it figured, Eddie. You’re scared without your trumpet. Scared you won’t get your way and scared your feelin’s will bottle till you burst.”
Kedge chimed in. “Let’s make him win his horn back. One hand of blackjack–and you gotta hit twenty-one exactly. You do that and you get your trumpet.”
Everyone liked the idea but Eddie. He couldn’t object because DeCarlo still had the gun on him. Kedge got himself behind the blackjack table, opened a fresh deck of cards and removed the jokers. He noticed Eddie’s forehead beading with more sweat. Kedge froze all of the sudden and the others could see that his mind was somewhere else.
Kedge was back on a Navy ship, a night when his shipmates were giving him grief for fearing water. They were gunna make him swim by throwing him overboard. Then one of the sailors said, wait. Let’s make him play a hand of blackjack. If he don’t get twenty-one exactly, we toss him. Otherwise, from now on we leave him alone.
Kedge remembered seeing the hand being dealt: eight, then nine, then three. He remembered himself sweating and starting to feel sick. Then came the ace. He wouldn’t drown.
Now, back in DeCarlo’s basement, Kedge remembered the sailor who dealt to him. He remembered seeing something different about how the last card came out. The moment he won, the dealer looked at him. Kedge sensed he was about to wink.
“Snap out of it!” Eddie blurted.
Kedge dealt the first card, a two. Next a three. Then a four.
“Hey, what’s the big idea,” Eddie protested. “Ya gotta mix them cards.”
“Too late.” DeCarlo said, keeping the empty gun on him.
Kedge continued. A five, then a six. He stopped. The total was twenty and it seemed certain the next card would be a seven. Eddie was pale and looked like he’d get sick. Then Kedge drew the last card, the one he’d been saving.
Ace.
Eddie thought he lost until Kedge declared, “That’s twenty-one!”
Eddie was frozen for a few seconds. Then he rose from the chair and lifted his horn. He looked at Kedge and Kedge looked back, almost giving him a wink.
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