From one of America's most original and startlingly imaginative writers: A fireman and a gambler enter a poker game with two rich eccentrics, risking everything on the single blind turn of a card. Jim Nashe is the Boston fireman, who needs music as a life crutch. His wife abandons him just before his father dies, leaving him money that he squanders aimlessly while driving around America. Near desperation, he meets a bitter young itinerant gambler, Jack (''Jackpot'') Pozzi, who lures him into a losing poker game with two shady recluses, Flower and Stone.Nashe and Pozzi must retire their debt by building a stone wall on the premises: what this Herculean labor does to them is the novel's leitmotif.