Nothing In Her Way by Charles Williams Page A

time as if they were playing a slot machine. I waited until they came around to me, put five dollars on the line, and picked up the dice.
    I had no business in a crap game now, and I knew it. I had about fifty dollars to eat on until payday, and I hadn’t even started to work yet. If you have to win, don’t gamble. That’s not a sermon; it’s a brutal piece of truth. It doesn’t mean you’re going to regret it if you lose; it simply means you probably will lose. Gamblers have another way of saying it, which implies the psychological basis: A scared buck never wins. They call luck a lady, and gamblers found out a long time ago that scared indecision gets you about as far with one as with the other.
    I tried to tell myself now to stay out of it because I needed the money if I was going to eat. The only trouble was that I didn’t care whether I ate or not—or very much about anything else that I could think of. I shook the dice and threw.
    They came up aces. Craps.
    I put down another five dollars and bounced the dice against the end of the table. It was eleven this time. I let the ten lie on the line and rolled. I read four. Three rolls later two deuces came up and I shot the twenty. The stickman changed dice on me and I rolled two sevens in a row. I had eighty dollars on the line, got six for a point, and made it on the next throw. I was warming up, but when the stickman shoved them back he shook his head.
    “You’ll have to pull down sixty,” he said. “Hundred-dollar limit.”
    I handed the chips over. “Cash me in. I’ll come back and match pennies with you some other time.”
    You can feel it when it’s like that. I don’t know how to explain it except that there’s an uncanny certainty about the whole thing. You couldn’t lose if you tried. I felt that way now as I walked up the street through the snow, but it meant nothing at all. It just didn’t matter.
    This was a gambling house instead of a bar, and there was a table with a limit you could work with. When the dice came around to me I dropped forty dollars on two straight craps and then started throwing passes. I banged into the limit on the sixth one, pulled part of it down, and then threw two more before I lost the dice. When they came around again I racked up five passes, bumping the limit every time, before I fell off.
    It was crazy. It was the wildest, most erratic streak of luck I’d ever run into in my life. They changed the dice on me until they got tired of it. I made wild bets—the field, on elevens, hard-way sixes and eights, and nothing made any difference. I won just the same. The crowd started to gather. I cashed in, went outside, took a cab to shake them, and moved on to another place.
    I lost a thousand dollars there before I made a point; then I got hot and ran out a string of nine consecutive passes. My clothes, even the coat pockets, were full of money because I kept cashing in and moving around. The crowds made me angry. The word had spread now, and there was no getting away from them. Sometime around midnight I hit a run of bad luck and started losing heavily. I cut down the bets and zigzagged up and down for hours before it started running my way again. And it didn’t seem to matter whether I was winning or losing. I felt just the same. It was just something I was doing to pass the time because I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t remember when I’d slept.
    It must have been around five in the morning. I was no longer conscious of anything but a blur of faces ringing the deep-walled pit of the dice table and of the dice themselves rolling out, bouncing, and spinning, and then being raked back. My eyes hurt. There was a tense quiet except for the stickman singing the point. I was trying to make a nine, and had five hundred dollars riding on it. Every number on the dice except nine and seven rolled up, over and over, until my arm grew numb. I wanted to take the dice and throw them against the wall or into the sea of blurred, white