Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PRESTON L. ALLEN is the author of eight works of fiction, including Every Boy Should Have a Man, Jesus Boy, All or Nothing, and the award-winning collection Churchboys and Other Sinners. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Brown Sugar, Miami Noir, and Las Vegas Noir. The creator and host of Accents: A Poetry Jam, Preston L. Allen is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Miami Dade College. He was born in Honduras and lives in South Florida. I Disappeared Them is his latest novel.

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All or Nothing

Akashic Books

Chapter One

You call your job and whisper, I don't feel good. I can't come in.

Then you shower, put on your uniform, and tell your wife, Well, goodbye, hon, I'm off to work.

Then you go gamble.

That time you went to the airport to pick up your aunt coming in from out of town, you left home three hours early so you could get a couple hours of gambling in.

Good plan.

Brilliant.

The allergic son gets sick in the middle of the night. Choking and wheezing. A stroke of luck. You tell the wife, No, hon, stay home, you need your rest, I'll take him to the emergency room. You leave your cell phone number with the nurse at the desk. You tell her, I'll be outside in my car catching some winks, please call me when they release him.

This has happened many times before. You know it takes the doctors at least three hours to treat and release him. This gives you time to get some gambling in. If anything goes wrong-flat tire, car accident, or maybe you get carried away and stay too long gambling-what's the worst that can happen? The kid is safe. The kid is at a hospital, right? Good plan.

This is a good plan?

You should be ashamed.

Shame on you.

But for a gambler it is a good plan. Shame is only temporary. No shame gets in the way.

A gambler wears all his shame like yesterday's dirt on skin. He washes it off at night and gets up in the morning ready to gamble again because today just might be the day.

2.

There was the famous no-name storm.

The no-name hurricane. It shows up on the weather map as a tropical storm. At the very worst, the weather guy says, it might make a very weak category 1 hurricane. Furthermore, it is aiming at the west coast of Florida, which is far, far away from Miami. The mayor decides to do nothing. The storm is too weak and too far away. There will be no school closings. Everything will be open tomorrow as usual. We all go to bed.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the storm strengthens and begins to move east, toward Miami. In fact, it is guaranteed to hit Miami by 6 a.m., says the weather guy. And it is a hurricane, technically, but just barely; it is a very weak hurricane. So the mayor decides, again, to keep the county running. There will be school in the morning-despite the fact that there is going to be a hurricane. Can you believe the mayor? Sending kids to school in a hurricane? In some ways, he's worse than a gambler. The mayor must be a gambler. But secretly.

So 5 o'clock in the morning, the sky is black and starless and the wind is lashing the landscape with rain. I've got my radio on as I drive to the depot. The announcers are still relaying the mayor's orders: business as usual in Miami. There will be school today. But me, I gave my wife strict orders before I left home: Do not send the boys to school in this mess; screw the mayor; the mayor's an idiot.

By the time I get to the depot, we've got flood conditions. Seven inches of rain on the ground. Trees bending from the stress of the wind. We are soaking wet in our raincoats and water boots and our umbrellas trying to fl y out of our hands from the wind. The storm is sitting right on top of us now. We can hear it screaming like a locomotive. We look up into the blackness and imagine we see an eye. We run inside the depot, listen on the radio, and take bets on how long before the idiot mayor reverses his decision. It comes just before 5:45. Harry gets the pot: $12. He had 5:44. I come in second. I had 5:48. Bundled in our raincoats, we dash out to our buses instead of our cars. Lots of gas. Higher wheelbase. We'll bring them back tomorrow. Of course, I don't head home because Indian casinos stay open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, come rain, come shine, come category 1 hurricane.

It takes me forever to get there, despite the higher wheelbase of the bus. There's so much water on the ground I can't make any better than 15 miles per hour. When I get there, the parking lot is full of cars so I have to park far from the building. I leave my school bus and try to get through the parking lot fast as I can, wading through a foot of rain. Kinda like running with boots full of water. My boots are full of water. Inside they have blankets waiting to dry me off, and robes to wear from their hotel rooms upstairs. It's tough to get a table because there are too many players waiting and so many of the dealers couldn't make it in because of the storm. See, it's too stormy for dealers, but the players are all here. What does that tell you? So I play the machines. I put in a lucky $20 and play for like two hours in my Indian casino hotel robe. Up, down, up, down, up. Someone jokes, They've fixed the machines to not kill us today on account of the storm. Maybe he's right. When they finally call my name for cards, I am up $120. I go to the card table and I do all right there, as well. Maybe they've fixed the cards to not kill us, too.

The storm ends around noon, and I'm still winning, but I figure I'd better leave or the wife will know what I'm up to. I surrender my Indian casino hotel robe and make my exit.

Outside the wind is gone and so is the rain. The sun is shining bright in the sky. I have never seen a bluer sky. But there is still so much water on the ground. It's like driving through a lake. There are many stalled cars on the road. Everybody on the radio seems pissed off at the mayor for not shutting things down sooner. With all of that water on the ground, it takes about an hour to get home.

The wife says, Where have you been?

I tell her, I was stuck in it. What a mess it was. Can you believe that idiot mayor made us go to work in this?

They said on the TV that they canceled school, she says.

Yeah, but when we got the news, we had to go back to the schools and pick them up all over again and take them home. What a mess. We had to wait around to make sure they were all accounted for.

The mayor is an idiot, she says.

Yes, he is, I agree.

Then I go into the bathroom to count my winnings. It was a good day, though I could have been killed.

I am up $300.

3.

There was the time one of my ATM cards started acting up.

You would slide it through the little slot in the machine, and it would give you an error message-CARD NOT READ. You had to hold your hand just right to get it to work. You had to have a steady hand to make it work. Then, after a while, not even a steady hand was good enough. It was crazy. The fickle card would pick which ATMs it wanted to work in, and it would work in none other. Sometimes the magnetic strip starts acting up like that and you have no choice but to contact your bank and order a replacement card.

Wouldn't you know it? The ATMs that mine chose not to work in were at the Indian casino. The damned card will work everywhere except at my favorite place in the whole wide world.

So one night I'm playing and I run out of cash. I have already burned through the one bank's ATM card that is working and hit my daily limit there. I pull out the bad ATM card from my other bank, the replacement for which still hasn't arrived. I pray to God because I need this cash to get me some luck to get me back even. I try the steady-hand method like ten times, but no luck-all I'm getting...