Running with the Pack

A single four, and another, and the dice passed to Miranda’s partner. She rolled one, three, three, and before Lydia could seize the dice there was an exasperated shriek and the clang of a bell from the head table and the round was over.

Miranda’s bunco was worth twenty-one points, so Sandy and Lydia stayed in the pit, while Miranda and her ex-partner, a short plump pink creature whose name Sandy couldn’t recall—G-something, who sold Avon and left a few catalogs in an unobtrusive way on the kitchen table—moved on to the center table and split, finding new partners, the losers from the head table. Lydia grabbed an M&M from the bowl on the pit and waved a cocktail-ringed hand at Sandy when she made to move.

“Stay where you are, Sandy-Candy,” said Lydia, plumping her rather wide butt on the seat next to her. “That chair’s bad luck for me.”

“Shall I keep score?” Sandy asked innocuously, reaching for the pad Miranda’s partner—Gretta? No, more Brit—had left behind. Lydia nodded vaguely. No one really liked to keep score, it meant you had to concentrate on top of your dinner and a wine cooler, and the uninhibited caterwauling of yourself and your fellows.

But if you were willing to keep score, and were subtle about it, and good at misdirection, keeping score was a good way of making sure you won a few more times, at least on paper, than you really had.

Bunco is a supremely simple game requiring only the skill to toss the dice. Six rounds, sometimes twelve: roll ones, then twos, threes, and so forth. Three of a kind—ones in round one, twos in round two—is a bunco. The only possible strategy is to throw as fast as possible, because the more you roll the more the chance of getting a bunco.

There are modifications, embellishments. Mini-buncos and triple-buncos and one-two-three sequences and extra points at the head table. The buy-in can be five bucks, ten, twenty, sometimes you get dinner, sometimes you get cake. These are flash and fancy icing, the true spine and soul of the game is only this: roll the dice, bitch. All the menfolk and children had fled the premises, here are your girlfriends, and you can do no wrong here—eat and drink as you will, and talk as you will about your brother’s ex and your high school friend’s divorce and your jewelry business. Talk and roll the dice.

It’s a game of chance, not skill, so there’s not many ways you can cheat. If the game is going fast and the other three women are chatting and not paying attention you can say you got one or two more points than you did—you passed on the dice and the scorekeeper would ask what you got and you said four instead of three. No one would know. And if you were keeping score yourself it was even easier.

Sandy liked winning other people’s cash, liked free food, liked even better the idea that she controlled the outcome behind the fa?ade of a pleasant face and manner, without anyone else suspecting. She felt a friendly kind of contempt for Cass and her friends, their overpriced game, their shrieking and stretch marks. They’d do very well for her, she thought.

Sandy won the round, fair and square, and moved ahead to partner small pink Gretta—no, Gwynne! That was it. It took the head table a long time to score twenty-one; the game was long and Gwynne buncoed, but before she could seize the green bear, Tessa buncoed too, and then Gwynne got three fives, not a bunco but good for five points, and in the hilarity that resulted from that and from everyone overhearing Maggie tell Harriet-called-Harry and Mia about losing her virginity, lo these many years ago, at Disneyland, Sandy claimed six fives when she only rightly had four, winning the round for Gwynne and herself when the bell rang. Dionne tallied her points without demur but Sandy didn’t see Gwynne and Lydia glance at the table and then at each other.

Sandy buncoed at the head table, getting the bear and three buncos for the price of one, then Cass buncoed and sent Sandy back to the pit, her second loss of the night. She moved quickly from pit to center table to head for the final game. She wouldn’t win for having most buncos—Tessa had that pretty much in hand, but she might score most wins if she was careful. She took the score pad automatically as she sat, letting the game draw out as it would: another long one. The chatter quieted as the last match, sixes the goal, drew out.

One more win was all she needed. The game was close: nobody would notice—Dionne rolled one six, then nothing. Sandy moved the pencil as if to give Dionne her point, but left no mark. Opposite her Miranda rolled and crapped out, and Dionne’s partner Cass got one six, bringing their score to twenty. Sandy held her breath and Cass rolled again: two, five, five. They were tied, at least on paper if not in truth. Sandy rolled, saw two sixes, and whooped. That ended the round and the game and gave her nine wins; she’d won the lion’s share of the pool. She grabbed the dice to roll again—might as well try for last bunco and win that pot too.

The silence struck her like a fall of bricks. The three women at her table stared at her stone faced, when they should have been shrieking and cursing at her win. She felt the grin solidify on her face and clacked the dice nervously in her hand as she stared back.

The other eight, four at one table and four in the pit, were staring at her as well. Sandy’s smile faded as she looked around: there was a strange, sharp tang in the air that, more than the somber gaze of eleven other women, made her hackles rise. The scattered pencils on each table, a spill of honey-glazed peanuts from a bowl across the stained cloth of the pit, the bright green bear crumpled on the floor, a cluster of half-filled water bottles and a lone, lipstick-stained martini glass gave the impression of a room abandoned in haste, and the group of women that once belonged so intrinsically to this milieu, with their good-natured vulgarity and dull jobs and side businesses and recipes and husbands and boyfriends was gone, this predatory, alien coven in their place.

Sandy grasped the dice hard until the pointed edges bit painfully into her palm, then laid them carefully on the table. She tried a final placating smile, directed at Miranda’s grim expression opposite her, then let it fade.

“I think we won. Did I make a mistake on the scoring?”

Miranda regarded her under lowering brows for a few seconds, then smiled, hugely, showing all her teeth. With a dull shock Sandy saw they were very white, and very pointed. More like a dog’s teeth than a person’s, she thought.

“No,” said Miranda. “No, I don’t think you made a mistake.”

The sharp smell—a kerosene kind of smell, Sandy thought in her back brain—got stronger suddenly and she shifted backwards in her chair. The path to the front door was blocked by the two tables to her left, but the arch to the kitchen was directly behind her and on the other side, the front hallway.

But that was silly. No one was going to hurt her. Not over bunco. It wasn’t that important. Not like they had skin in the game. Not like her.

Then Miranda and Cass rose; Cass’s chair fell with a clatter—she ignored it, poised in a semi-crouch, just like Miranda. The way they stood, knees bent not quite right, the planes of their faces not quite right—they had changed, shifted in some indefinable way, and as she watched Sandy saw it: the base of Cass’s nose broadened between the eyes, lips lifting from teeth that were not made the way they were before.

“I told you,” growled a voice from the pit. Shel. Her partner four rounds back. They had lost, Sandy making sure it was her last loss. “I told you she cheated. Second time she subbed.”

Dumb bitch, thought Sandy with useless clarity through her pooling fear. I fooled you the first game too, and you though it was sub’s luck.

Miranda growled, her lips lifting, her snout—it was a snout, her face shifting, malleable as Play-Doh—extending out of her formerly placid face. Sandy scrambled backwards, tipping her chair over in front of Cass to give her a few more seconds, retreating into the kitchen and, abandoning purse and coat, making for the hallway. The blinds over the sink were up and a small part of her, seeing the moon rise over the neighbor’s rooftop, understood.

It wasn’t even a full moon, a blobby something somewhere between full and half, not even photogenic. Seemed like cheating to her.

Of course, that was only fair, considering.

The arch to the hallway was blocked by three looming forms—small plump Gwynne, her back humped up under a pink silk blouse, her fangs protruding over her lower lip, her petite fingers now claws. Lydia and Shel loomed behind her, their faces molded flat and feral like Miranda’s.

Sandy whirled around, her heels slipping on the linoleum. Cass’s shoulders, enormous and hairy, were bursting out of her dusky purple jacket, part of the suit she wore every Monday, or when clients were in the office. Sweet, kind-of-frumpy Cass, eating yogurt every morning and heating up her Lean Cuisine at lunch. Harriet-called-Harry, who had a meeting with her fifth-grader’s teacher that afternoon and was bemoaning the fact that she only came up with fantastic retorts three hours later at dinner, drooled down her T-shirt, her eyes huge and yellow.

Sandy backed into a table loaded with the dirty dishes from dinner; one tipped to the floor and spun around with a clatter of silverware. More crowded into the kitchen: Tessa, Maggie, Mia—whose ears had grown up pointed, still pierced with Cookie Lee earrings. Lexie, impossibly broad and squat. Dionne, her body still human, her face a beast’s.