by Tom Hogan
The group agreed on a coffee house run by one of their friends. The owner rented him a back table for a nominal fee that became his office Tuesday through Thursday afternoons. Within a month he had a waiting list and had to hire an answering service just to keep the appointments straight.
“I watched him work the other day,” Carol told Donna one evening over coffee. Josh was doing the dishes, Harry and Pete were down in the cabin. The rest of the men were down at The Gimp’s. “He didn’t know I was there. I just wanted to see the master at work.”
“And…?”
“And he’s good. Even without hearing a word, I could tell. He’s like half-priest, half friend. He touches every now and then, but in a supportive, completely asexual manner. And if they start to cry, he lets them cry.”
Donna nodded. “William’s one of those rare men who doesn’t try to solve everything.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but what’s someone like William doing up here? I mean, the guy’s got two doctorates…”
“That he can’t use. The altering of files was a felony. No university—or state institution, for that matter—will hire him.”
“Is he married? He wears a ring.”
“The short answer is no. But it’s more complicated than that. You know what William was in for. The first time?”
“The draft files.”
Donna nodded. “That was going to be a stroll in the park. Minimum security. Twelve months, out in four, six tops. William was lionized by the university community. Rallies in his behalf. And his wife…” She called over. “Josh. What was William’s wife’s name. Sharon?”
“Shauna.”
“Shauna was a part-time instructor in the English department. And when William was jailed, she became a campus celebrity in her own right. Invited to every function, asked to speak at every political rally. Heady stuff for a part-time instructor, no?” Carol nodded.
“As I said, William was going to do four months, six max. And then he was going to come out of jail a hero, with a book contract and academically set for life.”
“And he goes and screws it up.”
“It was a courageous thing that William did. Courageous but naïve. If he’d known how traceable his actions were, I don’t know if he would have done what he did. Everyone in the system benefited from what he did, since it undid some wrongs and put the authorities on notice that their more flagrant abuses of power could now be documented.”
She sipped her coffee. “But now six months of soft time turned into three years of hard time, with no real chance at parole. And liberals have short memories.”
“Meaning?”
“The university and his old liberal cohorts were on to the next cause. And William—and by extension Shauna—were yesterday’s news. Which was fine with William. But Shauna took it hard.”
“Were there any kids?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure exactly what happened there.” She looked over to the kitchen. “Josh? Can you come here for a minute?” There was no answer from the kitchen, other than the running of water and the plates clinking the sides of the sink. Donna looked over at Carol and raised her eyebrows. “Did you hear me, honeybunch? You’re needed out here.”
The water shut off. A moment later Josh appeared in the doorway, a dish towel over his shoulder and the coffee pot in his hand. He topped off the women’s coffee, then pulled up a chair. Carol looked over at Donna: it was the first time Josh had sat down with her since she had moved up to the camp. She tossed her notebook gently on the floor.
“We want to know what happened with William’s son.”
Josh got up from the table without saying a word. Donna looked over at Carol and shrugged. But a moment later he was back, an empty coffee cup in his hand. He poured himself a cup and watched the steam for a long moment.
“Shauna wasn’t built for the long haul. After that first year she took up with one of the other professors and filed for divorce.” He shrugs. “It happens when you go inside. A lot. Can’t blame her for that. But I can for what she did with their son.”
He took a sip. “Twelve years old, worshipped William. You should have seen them together on visitors’ day. All of a sudden, though, Shauna’s no longer visiting and she’s not letting the boy come either. There’s a new man in her life, she doesn’t want the pull of the old one screwing things up. So she tells the boy that William’s turned queer and doesn’t want any reminders of his old life.”
“Nice,” Donna muttered.
“It took William a few months to figure out what was going on. There was always a reason for the cancellations, his son was always somewhere else when he called. It was only when I contacted her and threatened legal action that she let him talk to his son. And the kid starts crying about how can William suck another guy’s cock and what’s it going to be like when the kids at school find out his dad’s a fag. How he hopes William never gets out of prison.”
“By this time Josh and I were friends,” Donna continued. “So he asked me to look into the options. Could we get the boy moved to William’s parents until he got out and could contest custody. Could we require visitations. You can imagine how successful those two approaches were, with a convict on the other end of the requests.”
Josh continued the story. “Shauna got wind of what we were up to and she came down for a last visit. She laid it out for William this way: She’d met someone else. It was time for both of them to move on with their lives. That if he tried to find her when he got out, she knew enough folks from their campus radical days that she’d just take the boy and go underground. Then she handed him a letter from his son. William never let me read it, but you can imagine what it contained. That letter took all the air out of William. He gave up after that.”
He looked over at Carol. “Have you been to his cabin?” When she shook her head, he said, “He’s got a photo of that kid by his bed. I see him talk to it sometimes.”
CHAPTER 14
Carol sat at the table with William, a half-empty bottle of wine on the table between them. “Look at that,” she said, motioning towards the bar, where two of the locals plus Lucky were playing Liar’s Dice. One of the men was hooting and picking up the pot, Lucky shaking his head. “You don’t see that very often, do you?”
“See what?”
“Lucky losing.”
“Lucky loses all the time. It’s good for business.”
“Then why does everyone say he’s…”
“Even the most addicted, least intelligent gambler won’t keep gambling if he never wins.” He nodded towards the game. “How much do you want to bet that the game you just watched was for a dollar?”
“What do you mean?”
“Earlier this evening they were playing for five bucks a hand. Guess who won most of those?”
She looked over at the game. “The Gimp says he cheats. Does he?”
“Sometimes. And the only with strangers. Once he gets a read on them, he doesn’t have to cheat. He just knows.”
“What about the games he plays down the hill? Poker. Craps.”
“He’s a math savant. He can calculate the odds of any situation instantaneously. And he never lets emotion get in his way. Ever.”
“So you’re saying he’s misnamed?”
“At one level, sure. It’s a name his victims gave him.” He looked back to the bar. “On the other hand, he’s the luckiest sonofabitch I’ve ever met. Without a doubt.”
It was later that evening and they were on their second bottle. “And that’s really his job?”
William shrugged. “More like a calling.” He smiled slightly. “He heard the tone in Josh’s voice when he told us we had to go legit and knew there was no room for negotiation. Trouble is, he had no idea what a legitimate job was. Not a clue.”
He topped off her glass. “So he asked me to be his occupational
therapist. I called in a few favors from my university contacts and administered both the Meyer-Briggs and MRPI. The results weren’t encouraging. One of my friends said it was the most complicated profile he’d ever seen, going back and forth across the line from genius to sociopathy.”
“Tough diagnosis.”
“But accurate. So I tried a different approach. We divided up his life into stages and analyzed both the signal events and contributing events in his development. The stories…” He shook his head. “I thought I’d heard them all, being his cellmate. Not even close. But as I charted the events and looked for a common thread, anything to build on, I was totally stumped.”
He took a sip of wine and held the glass up, watching the legs form and dissolve. “Finally I asked Clark in, to give me a fresh perspective. He listened as we walked him through Lucky’s timeline, which we had up on the wall in butcher paper. Finally he grabbed his pen and paper and wrote: ‘Circle every place where he beat the odds or should have been dead.” And he left.
Looking back at it later, Lucky told Carol the next day, the solution was there from the start. Except that, to his or William’s knowledge, no one had ever tried to make a living by leveraging their luck. But once the unifying theme was determined and the decision made, Lucky went at it with the same determination and discipline he had brought to his illegal ventures. Every Sunday he drove down the hill and bought the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Kinsella Herald, then spent the mornings scanning the pages, clipping out every contest or sweepstakes advertisement. Regardless of the sport, he watched the channels, pencil in hand, for the car and beer commercials and the contests they held.
Mondays he drove down to San Tomas and bought a full range of magazines—women’s, sports, outdoor adventure, food, Reader’s Digest. He took Tuesdays off. Wednesdays he borrowed Josh’s truck and drove the two towns, keeping an eye on the windows for new promotions and contests. He test-drove so many cars that after a while the dealers just waved him to the counter, where he filled out the form, received the small giveaway, and walked out—all in less than five minutes. Once a month he drove up to San Francisco and repeated the process on a grander scale.
Thursdays were also free. Friday mornings he went down to the Kinsella card rooms to keep his fallback skills sharp. Saturdays, he told William, were for the Lord.
Three months of steady labor yielded nothing. Lucky vacillated between worry and panic, concerned that he had jinxed himself by trying to alter or control his karma. Winning a 10-speed bike from a local sporting goods store only deepened his depression, as it looked like he was going to be scrambling for crumbs.
But the bike was a harbinger. That Saturday he went down to McDonald’s for his weekly ritual meal of Big Mac, coke and fries. He took his McRushmore game card from the smiling cashier and retreated to his table, where he scratched off the silver coating on his card.
Lucky froze. The name on the card was “Teddy Roosevelt.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the master game card, a depiction of Mt. Rushmore with Ronald in Washington’s place. Lucky had long ago filled in Ronald, Jefferson and Lincoln. But Roosevelt made him a two thousand-dollar winner.
A week later it was a round-the-world cruise that he sold through the classifieds for three thousand dollars. Then a speedboat and free gas for a year, then a six-week drought that yielded only a charcoal grill and three free buckets of golf balls from a local driving range.
But then came what would thereafter be referred to as ‘Big Monday.’ Lucky opened the mail that morning and found he had won a new Jeep from one of his hunting magazines. While the lunch celebration was in full swing, the phone rang in the L. Josh listened for a moment, then handed the phone wordlessly to Lucky. It was Publishers’ Sweepstakes. Lucky was a grand regional winner, the new owner of a Vacation Dreamland House up in Lake Tahoe.
The Jeep became community property. Lucky sold the Tahoe house for seventy-five grand and put a lump sum in the Moetown account that made him whole for the next ten years. He could have retired at that point, but, as he told William on the drive down to Kinsella for the Sunday papers, he had gotten a feel for good honest work. And it felt good.
CHAPTER 15
Donna hung up the phone and addressed the dinner table. “That was the Kinsella PD. There’s been another rape. They want to talk to Josh.”
“Did you tell him we didn’t know where he was?” William said.
“I don’t think they believed me.”
“Why? He’s been cooperative in the past.”
“This is a new detective. He told me he’s investigating links between this one and the two from last year.”
“Well, tell him to take a number.”
It was Tuesday night and Josh had been gone four days. Moetown was in a grey, suspended state, with no mention of Josh’s absence, save from Harry, who asked about Josh each morning. Tonight he had been agitated by the evening’s mood and Josh’s continued absence, so Pete had taken him down to the cabin earlier than usual.
“Look,” Carol said, honing her cigarette to a fiery point against the ashtray wall. “Tell me to shut up if I’m crossing a line. But I have to ask: you really don’t know where he goes?”
“We really don’t,” William said.
“Josh is like the military,” Lucky said. “He works on a ‘need to know’ basis. And we don’t need to know.”
“But he comes back so beaten down. How can you help him if you don’t know…”
“He doesn’t want our help. Isn’t that clear to you by now?” William said, his tone harsh.
“Not really. Where I come from…”
“Where you come from,” William snapped, “your friends don’t spend twenty-two hours a day in a sixty square-foot piece of concrete. They don’t room with someone who beat his wife to death with a claw hammer and likes to talk about it. Or live next door to someone who kidnapped two kids and poured Drano down their throats before he slit them.”
His tone softened. “With people like Josh, who’ve been through what he’s been through, you don’t ask what’s wrong. It’s not a fair question. Because even if they wanted to answer, they wouldn’t know where to begin.”
Two days later, Carol woke up earlier than usual and raised her curtain. There, parked in front of Two, was Josh’s truck. Behind it, a ribbon smoke curled from the L’s chimney. She stared at the ceiling for a minute, then pulled the covers away and got to her feet.
The head of curls—cropped short, as she’d been told to expect—was bent over a cup of coffee, the paper spread out on the table. “Welcome back, stranger,” she said, closing the door behind her.
She smiled slightly, but when he turned, her lips caught on her teeth. She cocked her head and frowned.
At that moment, Josh came in from the kitchen, two bowls of cereal in his hands. “This’ll have to do for now. We’ll go to the store after we get you…”
He stopped when he saw Carol. The man at the table was now on his feet. Josh looked from one to the other. “Carol, I’d like you to meet my brother, Paul. Paul, this is Carol.”
Carol stared at Paul with a slight, frozen frown. “Nice to meet you,” she said finally.
“My pleasure,” he said in a soft, pleasant voice.
WHAT
CHAPTER 16
“Look at them,” Carol said to Donna, as the brothers finished their stretches and started off on into the woods, clad only in running shorts and shoes. “They even run alike.”
It was ten in the morning the day after Paul’s introduction to Moetown, and the two women were sitting out on the L’s porch with their coffee. The previous day had focused on getting Paul settled in. Clark and Josh had cleared out the trailer behind the L, at Paul’s request. That evening everyone—minus Donna and Harry, who had crashed after all the excitement—headed down to The Gimp’s, where Lucky had introduced Paul around.
/> “How did last night go?” Donna asked.
“A lot of initial curiosity at first, but no one—not even The Gimp—had the nerve to ask Josh why he hadn’t told anyone about Paul. So everyone just got on with their evenings.”
“How did The Gimp take it?”
“Like you did. You could tell his feelings were hurt, the way he kept looking over at Josh. But he didn’t say anything.”
“And Paul? How did he do?”
Carol looked at the trailhead where the two men had disappeared. “If those guys are brothers, then one of them was raised by wolves. An hour at The Gimp’s and you couldn’t tell who the newcomer was. Paul told some stories, flirted harmlessly with Sheila, lost some money to Lucky. By the end of the evening it was like he’d been up here as long as anyone.”
The door behind them opened and Harry scuffled out on his knees, pushing his jeep ahead of him. He wove in and out of the women’s feet, his mouth alternating between a tonguing engine purr and the shriek of cornering wheels. Then he moved down the stairs and out into the yard.
Pete trailed him, his heavy boots making a soft clumping sound before he settled into an empty seat, careful not to spill his coffee. “Let me guess. You’re talking about me.”
“You wish. By the way, don’t get your feelings hurt, hon, but I think you and I just slumped to Numbers Two and Three in Harry’s hierarchy.”
“He is smitten, isn’t he?”
Carol looked over. “What’s your take on him?”
Pete considered the question. “Well, The Gimp seemed to like him. Zeke, too. Bartenders and dogs—you can’t fool them both.”
“That’s not an answer, Peter,” Donna said.
Pete considered the question, until the silence looked like he wasn’t going to answer. Finally, he said, “He’s smooth. Not slick-smooth, just smooth. Trouble is, everyone up here is pretty rough.”
“Doesn’t he remind you of someone?” Lucky asked the room later that night. Josh and Paul were in the trailer, the rest up in the L, either making dinner or having Happy Hour.