“Are you about done?”

“No, I’m not,” he said. “I came here to give you an ultimatum. I’m not leaving until you choose. Either I take you to the airport and put your ass on a plane to Moosehide, or you come play poker with me tonight.”

“Poker? Where, at the Glasgow?”

“No, in the Soo. At this guy’s house. You haven’t met him.”

“Since when do you go out playing poker?” I said. “Who’s gonna run the place?”

“We usually play at the bar,” he said. “Not the old crowd you used to play with. This is a new thing. You’d know that if you ever came by. Win wants to show off his new poker table, so I figured I’d let my son look after things. It’s called a night out, Alex. It’s what sociable people do sometimes.”

“Jackie, I really don’t feel like playing poker with a bunch of guys I don’t know.”

“Too much of a strain, I understand. Okay, I’ll help you get packed.”

“Knock it off. I’m not going to, where you’d say? Moosehide? Is that really a town in the Yukon?”

“I told you, Alex. One or the other. I’m not leaving until you pick one.”

“None of the above, Jackie. Thanks for the offer.”

“You’re gonna have to forcibly remove me,” he said.

“Since when do you use words like ‘forcibly’?”

“Poker or the Yukon, Alex. I’m waiting.”

What else was I going to do? I sure as hell wasn’t going to the Yukon, and I didn’t feel like forcibly removing him. So I chose poker. It seemed like the easy way out.

Little did I know.

Jackie has a silver 1982 Lincoln Continental that he supposedly bought for three hundred dollars in 1990. Since then he claims to have put on another 200,000 miles on top of the original 150,000. But then Jackie has been known to exaggerate. No matter how much he had paid for it, and how many miles he had gotten out of it, somehow he kept driving it every year, even in the dead of winter when four-wheel-drive vehicles were sliding off the road all around him.