Tom watched the hand play out. They were playing five-card draw, which was almost absurd with only two people, but they went at it with intensity, and on Javier’s part a kind of relief that the pretense of conversation was finally over. The shadows cloaked their faces, emphasizing the severity of Javier’s bone structure. Bare triangles on his cheeks, a rectangle on his forehead. He had grown up in a village in Michoacán and now here he was, sitting on Tom’s deck playing poker. It made the neighborhood seem strangely exotic.

The hand went to Conrad, and without pause, Javier took the deck and shuffled the cards expertly. The stiff riffle repeated three times. Without consultation, Tom was dealt in on the next hand.

“Okay. What are we betting here, anyway?” he said.

“Ten bucks to open,” Conrad said, watching the cards.

Tom watched the cards, too. “That’s a lot,” he said. For Javier, he knew, it was an hour’s wage. As host, he felt it was his duty to watch out for the well-being of all his guests.

“A lot?” Conrad said, scoffing. “What’s the point, then? Come on, man. You want to play or what? Javier’s cool with it. He’s the one who set the ante. Not me.”

“Is that true?” Tom said. He shifted his gaze to Javier.

As if to answer, Javier pulled out his wallet, a ruined slab of leather stuffed with dollars and cards and odd paper clippings, and emptied the bills onto the table. He picked out two five-dollar notes and pushed them to the middle of the glass. In the dim light, Tom could see a sharp intelligence kindling in his features, a fervid opportunism that had previously been hidden. For the first time Tom detected real will behind Javier’s eyes. He might be the canniest one among them, he thought. Who knew what well of experience was hidden inside his Spanish-speaking head?

Conrad clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Now we’re talking. We’re all men here. Doing what men do. I like you, Javier. You’ve got some iron balls. Are you in or what, mother-fucker?”

Tom pulled out his wallet and floated ten dollars onto the glass. Then he lifted his cards and spread them into a fan. He was in possession of two threes, the queen of clubs, and the four and eight of spades.

The hand moved through its cycles and Tom folded with three of a kind. The other two kept going—Javier raising Conrad two dollars and Conrad raising Javier another three, then Javier raising four, Conrad five. In the end, Conrad showed his hand. He had a full house, which soundly beat Javier’s three queens, and he took the seventy-four-dollar pot with relish.