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  “Then make your bet,” Jesus says.

  “Sure. Sure.”

  Outside Lucky’s RV Round-Up the neon sign hisses. On the sign there is a cowboy that looks a lot like Leon, but his name is Bob—Bob the Round-Up Cowboy. Leon had the name trademarked. Someone once told him that it would be a good idea. He’s still not sure why, but it sounded good at the time. So Leon filled out the forms and sent in the money. A month later, Bob the Round-Up Cowboy was trademarked and legal and all his.

  Leon loves that cowboy. Loves the way his hat sits at a rakish angle. Loves his peeling Dennis the Menace eyes. Loves his mystery. Loves the way Bob always seems to be roping something you can’t see. The spinning neon lasso shoots out and back again. Snaps and pops.

  Sometimes, late at night, Leon stands under the sign and watches it for hours, as if in a dream. From the road, it looks as if the cowboy nearly ropes Leon, but at the last minute the lasso draws back, hissing. Then nearly ropes him again. Then again.

  Leon loves the way Bob does that.

  But with three hearts beating for Ole Daddy Leon—and an itchy right hand—none of that matters.

  “I’ll see you the dealership,” Leon says.

  “This dealership?”

  Jesus looks around the edges of the dark room. Roaches cover a Diet-Rite can tossed in the corner. A paper napkin tumbles back and forth in slow motion. Other than that, the showroom is empty.

  “Just had a big blowout sale,” Leon says, and his right hand stops itching. Left one starts.

  Damn, he thinks, left is losing.

  Jesus is not enthused. He rubs his chin, the bristles of his beard. “I don’t know,” he sighs. “That’s all you have left?”

  Leon knows he’s in trouble. The American Dream is the Fleetwood Corporation’s top of the line. Worth more than a quarter of a million dollars. Lucky’s RV Round-Up is a tin shed with windows. A graveyard of parts.

  Apparently, this Jesus may be crazy, but not stupid. “Stocks?” he says. “Bonds? Stamp collection? Collectibles? Maybe a set of the sixteen original Hot Wheels circa 1968 still in their original boxes?”

  “You’ve already won everything I have.”

  “That’s sad. Doesn’t seem like a lot. Man your age should be more established, don’t you think?”

  Great, Leon thinks, Sheet-Boy feels sorry for me.

  Jesus shrugs. “Well. Okay, then. I guess.”

  Yes, Leon thinks. Now give me a five.

  “Here you go,” Jesus says. Deals the five of hearts.

  Four hearts beating for Ole Daddy Leon, and his own heart does a tango in 4/4 time.

  Then Jesus draws his own card—The king of diamonds. He places it neatly next to the other king. “Two kings,” he says in a level voice. “I’ll see your Round-Up and raise you life everlasting.”

  Leon sucks air.

  “Raise or fold?” Jesus asks calmly.

  Just then Leon’s right hand began to itch again. Right means money. Of course, he can see that Jesus has a pair, at the very least, but Leon’s right hand is itching and in his mind that means a straight flush is about to fall his way. In his mind, he has Carlotta pinned against the silk sheets in the king-sized bed next to the marble bathroom that he knows is standard in a luxury vehicle like the one parked outside. In his mind, he is a happy man. His thoughts are a ticker tape parade.

  Accidentally, his voice slides up three octaves. Pentecostal. “Hit me,” he says. “Hit me, Jesus.”

  “Raise or fold?” Jesus asks again, patiently.

  Leon suddenly understands. He blew it. He has to throw something in the pot, or lose it all. But there’s nothing left to bet. The sight of all those hearts beating just for him confused him. He upped the ante too fast. His stomach sparks. He feels his pockets for loose change. All he has is two pennies and foil from a gum wrapper.

  “Fold?” Jesus asks.

  “Hang on.”

  Leon tosses the coins into the pile. They rattle. He opens his desk drawers. Paper clips. Matches. The ghost of a Bic pen, no ink.

  Then he sees it.

  “Raise,” he says, inspired, and holds up a snack cake, its cellophane wrapper still intact. Two twin rolls of dark chocolate filled with white icing—and dusty.

  Jesus looks at him with what Leon imagines to be a “moneylenders at the temple” kind of frown. “You’re betting cake?” he says, incredulous.

  Leon feels a bead of sweat roll down his spine.

  Sell it, baby. Sell it, he thinks. “It’s not just cake,” he says and holds it in the palm of his hand like one of those models he’s seen on the home shopping channels, “it’s devil’s food.”

  The words hiss like a snake looking for a garden, looking for a girl named Eve. I’m going directly to hell, Leon thinks. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT $200.

  “Devil’s food?” Jesus says, and his voice quivers. His poker face is gone. He leans across the desk and takes the cake. Sniffs it. His breath is shallow and quick. Leon can see his hands sweat.

  Oh, yes. Directly to hell, Leon thinks. “Careful not to squeeze it,” he says and lowers his voice reverently as if the cake is made of gold, or titanium, or something actually worth more than three-fourths of a buck.

  “Sorry,” Jesus says to the cake, not Leon, and puts it down gently in the center of the pile. Can’t take his eyes off of it. It’s then that Leon notices that across the man’s forehead is a series of tiny scars, as if made from a crown of thorns.

  Man, Leon thinks, and wants to know why this guy has to be Jesus so badly, who he was before, how he got this way—but doesn’t ask. Can’t. It would ruin everything. So he says nothing. Tries not to look him in the eye.

  “I’ve never had the devil’s food,” Jesus says. His mouth is slightly open. His hands tremble with longing.

  Leon is nearly pleased with himself. Still got the touch, he thinks, but doesn’t feel real happy about it. The scars around Jesus’ head look ragged and deep. Must be real messed up to do that to yourself. A horrible feeling of sadness washes over him. What am I doing? This guy is crazy and I’m cheating him. On his birthday.

  “Shit,” Leon says, “I can’t do this.” Then he tosses the cake back into the open drawer quickly, before he changes his mind.

  Jesus looks panicked. “Can’t do what?” His voice is shrill. “Put that cake back.”

  Leon shakes his head. Closes his desk drawer. He wants to say, it’s just a cake. No demonic snack treat. Just lots of preservatives with icing so sweet it will make your cavities cringe. But, before he can say anything, Jesus reaches across the desk and snatches the cake from the open drawer. Tosses it back into the pile of keys and cash.

  He’s quick for a guy in a sheet, Leon thinks. And angry.

  “It’s a bet,” Jesus says. “Can’t change your mind. The cake is in play.”

  For a moment, Leon considers the absolute truth of the statement and how sweet the truth is, how it can get him off the hook. A bet is, indeed, a bet. Everyone knows that once the stake hits the table, and is accepted, it can never be taken back. It’s the rules. It’s the truth of the matter. It’s the sweet damn truth. And the truth shall set you free.

  And besides, Leon tells himself, the cake really is devil’s food. It says that on the box. It’s not a lie. Just because the snack cake doesn’t belong to a fallen angel who is now lingering in eternal hellfire doesn’t mean it’s not real—but as soon as Leon thinks this, he envisions the nuns of St. Jude’s, their saintly faces, their disapproving clucks. Leon always thinks of them in moments of what they would call “spiritual crisis,” moments of what he would call “stellar opportunities.”

  Damn those penguins, Leon shudders, and then accidentally leans back in his chair. It squeaks. Scares the roaches.

  “Look,” Leon says. “Game over.” He picks the cake back out of the pile again. Wipes the dust off it onto his pants. Outside the office window, one of the most expensive luxury coaches in America is winking in the moonlight. Leon’s hand stops it
ching. He feels queasy.

  Unfortunately, the crazy guy is not taking no for an answer. He leans across the desk again. His breath is hot. He is angrier than Leon has ever seen anyone be.

  “Are you really willing to walk away from this hand? To lose everything you own?”

  Leon sputters. He hasn’t thought that far. Everything,

  he thinks, is a very big word. “Maybe we can just forget the hand,” he says, half-asking, half-pleading.

  Jesus laughs and it is not a pretty laugh. It is a howling crazy laugh.

  “There’s no going back,” he says, darkly. “If the cake’s not in play, you lose everything you own. Sorry lot that it is.”

  Jesus picks up the deck and deals the two final cards. One for himself. One for Leon. Both are facedown. “So what will it be?” he says, quietly, seems to know a little bit about temptation himself. “Come on,” his voice is reptilian smooth. “You’ve come this far.” He hisses.

  The sight of the final card in front of Leon makes his heart beat even faster. He knows he can play through and win, but it just doesn’t seem right to cheat a crazy fella on Christmas. If only it was the Fourth of July. Still, “I’m in,” is what he says. His legs shake underneath the desk.

  Jesus is radiant. He takes the cake from Leon’s hand. Places it in the pile again, gently. Pats it. “Okay, then,” he says, back to business. “Turn over your card.”

  Leon hesitates, not so much because he knows the game’s not fair—he’s already decided that hell can’t be much hotter than South Florida in August—but because the guy is right. Crazy, but right. Leon suddenly understands that he’s bet his entire sorry pathetic life on this one hand. Well, maybe not his entire life—just his business, his trailer, and his new boots. With a turn of the card, he could be homeless. He could be a man in a sheet with no place to go on his birthday. Could be this guy, he thinks and would like to laugh, but he’s never been fond of irony.

  And so, for a moment, the two men sit quietly in the ice blue sheen of the fluorescent light. They’ve been at this nearly all night. Outside, morning begins to push its way through the darkness like a swimmer toward the surface. The corners of the sky are warming. A cat sitting on the chain-link fence squawks like a hungry blue jay but there aren’t any birds around yet, just bats with their blindness flying effortlessly and silently back to shelter. Leon puts his hand on top of the final card. He’s sweating so badly the card will soon be damp. Even on Christmas he knows he can’t get this lucky, especially playing against Jesus. And cheating to boot.

  He closes his eyes for a moment. Turns the card over. Can’t look.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the man says. “Jesus loves you.”

  Squeamish, Leon opens his eyes. “Jesus must love me a whole damn lot,” he says. The card is, indeed, the nine of hearts. Leon has five hearts beating as one. Five hearts beating for Ole Daddy Leon. At that moment, everything seems to move in slow motion—Leon’s brain, his own heart. His mouth is open, gasping. Jesus reaches across the table and makes of the sign of the cross on his forehead, then on his lips. It is a gesture Leon remembers the priests of Ash Wednesday doing long ago. The touch seems to release him.

  Then the adrenaline hits.

  “I won,” Leon screams, then sputters. Tears run down his cheeks. “Thank you Jesus, thank you.” He presses his face against the window, looks outside at the American Dream, the tin can beauty of it.

  “I can’t believe it’s mine,” he says. His nose is running. “Never had anything this nice before. Women, yes. Plenty of nice women, real good-looking women I had no right fooling with, but I never had anything this nice that doesn’t argue with you. You know what I mean? I mean, man. I may just have to buy a new suit just to test drive this thing. Silk tie, maybe. Pink shirt.”

  Leon wipes his runny nose on his sleeve. “Man, it’s so beautiful.”

  The showroom window fogs from the heat of his breath. He whoops with joy.

  “Look at this! Even when you can hardly see it, it’s still like the most beautiful thing you’ll ever not see!”

  Then he turns around. There’s no one there. The cards on the desk are laid out in four piles, each pile the same suit. It looks as if he’s been playing solitaire, not poker. Everything that Jesus bet is gone. Leon’s stomach turns sour. He looks back out at the Dream. It’s still there and real enough. The keys are in his hand. The title looks right.

  What’s the scam? he thinks. Then remembers the moment when he first met Jesus, when he leaned out of the RV’s window and placed a hand on Leon’s heart.

  “She still thinks of you often,” he said and now, at this moment, those words make Leon feel so alone, more alone than he’s ever felt before.

  “Dang, Dagmar,” he says. “Even Jesus knows we should still be together. And what does he know about ex-wives?”

  The words echo in the empty room.

  Chapter 3

  Before Ricardo Garcia became Jesus, he’d kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. Just bits of information that caught his eye, things he thought he should know.

  For example, in Miami, they’ve cloned Jesus. Raelian leader Claude Vorilhon (aka Rael) was told by an extraterrestrial that he’d encountered on top of a volcano to do so. The extraterrestrial did not leave his name.

  In Tampa, they plan to worship Jesus buck naked. When complete, Natura, the first Christianity-themed nudist colony in the country, will be a 240-acre resort area that will have five hundred homes, a hotel, a water-slide park, and a nondenominational Christian church.

  In New Smyrna Beach, there’s a Jesus Lunch Club at Mom’s Diner. If you say your prayers before you eat, you get a 10 percent discount.

  Dr. Garcia’s scrapbook was filled with things like that, little bits of the world he thought might come in handy some day. Of course, those were the days when he was still a doctor, still answered to “Ricardo Garcia,” still identified himself as a second-generation Cuban, although he was vague about his parents.

  Back then he had a family practice clinic in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa. Coffee-skinned and polite, he was a favorite with all his patients. Gracious in an Old World way. Quiet, which most found reassuring. His practice thrived, though some thought it was odd that he never married. He was, after all, quite a catch.

  “Too busy,” he told everyone. Besides his practice, he volunteered at the AIDS Hospice two nights a week and would sit with the “rough trade” boys and hold their cold blue-edged hands.

  “Do you know Jesus?” he would ask them.

  Everyone said that Ricardo Garcia was a good doctor, kindhearted—some said too kindhearted—and thoughtful. Despite his busy schedule, he’d often stop by the homes of his elderly patients, just to check up on them. Ease their pain with a little morphine and a Bible quote. He was known as a religious man, a gold cross Catholic. His only vice was gambling. He seemed to have a sixth sense about cards and could sometimes tell what they were without turning them over. He could never explain how he did this. It was a gift was all he could say.

  All in all, Ricardo Garcia thought himself a lucky man—the voices only visited him at night.

  But, as is the way with such things, there were eventually, sadly, bodies. That was a problem. So many bodies—each laid out in their Sunday best, their arms crossed, or hands folded in prayer with their eyes sewn shut. Some were eased out of this world with morphine and Bible quotes. Some proved more difficult.

  Still, in the end, they were finally at peace. But Dr. Ricardo Garcia wasn’t.

  And then the forgetting began.

  Chapter 4

  2 A.M. The Pink is closed and Carlotta, drunk and teary, is off to find Leon. It isn’t a good idea. Trot knows it. Tags along.

  “Serve and protect,” he explains. “It’s my job. Strictly professional.” But as they walk together under the rusty moon, Trot finds himself leaning toward her, the warmth of her skin. Carlotta doesn’t notice. She’s too busy rambling though a list of possible excuses for Leon
.

  “Heart attack? Amnesia?”

  Trot can smell her hair, the green grass perfume of it. “Insanity, maybe. Stupidity. Idiocy–”

  “Alligator?”

  In Whale Harbor on winter days gators crawl out of the cold swamp and lie across Main Street like speed bumps. Sun themselves.

  “Not likely,” Trot says. “Gators just chew on you. They eat cats mostly. Limp birds. Stray dogs.”

  Mayhem is a subject of particular interest for the sheriff. As he speaks, he picks up speed. “Could’ve been a panther. That’s possible. They’ll eat you to the bone. Or a vulture—vultures will pick you apart bit by bit. Shred you like taco meat.”

  Carlotta’s stomach swoops and swirls like a circus daredevil.

  “Python,” Trot offers, sounds hopeful. “They just squeeze the life out of you, then suck you up like spaghetti.”

  “There are pythons in Florida?”

  It is more of a cry than a question.

  “Yep. They’re not indigenous, though,” Trot says, as if this makes a difference. “People just buy ’em, get tired of ’em, and let ’em go. Problem is that they live a real long time. Most people don’t know that. So we got generations of them out here.”

  Carlotta’s breath turns shallow. Hands clammy. Heartbeat rapid. Trot continues on.

  “I once caught a twenty-two-footer making a snack of a Yorkie, some tourist’s dog. One gulp. It was really cool. You could see the bulge of this tiny dog in its belly and hear this little tiny yipping sound—”

  It is then that Carlotta squeaks. She wants to scream, but a squeak is all she can manage.

  “Yeah,” he says, smiling. “Just like that.”

  She’s listening, he thinks. And the mantra begins: I am interesting. I have an interesting job. I am an interesting man.

  Trot’s mother recently sent him a set of affirmation tapes she received as a bonus during Pledge Week from the PBS station in Miami. She wanted The Three Tenors, but unfortunately called at the wrong time.