Coffee and Sugar

by C. Sean McGee

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “So why do you do it?” asked Joao.

  “Do what?” said Charity.

  “Steal from those people,” he said.

  Charity laughed.

  When she did, she threw herself forward; pulling her hands tightly over her stomach and casting her head towards her knees so that her long fringe baited Joao’s discerned stare and took him with her, aside from his concern and into hilarity.

  “I don’t steal from them, Joao. Those people, I help them, all of them” she said.

  “But I saw you reaching into their bags. The woman at the café, I caught you reaching into her bag and you took something.”

  “Left something.”

  “What?”

  “I left something, Joao. Do you really think that of me? That I am a thief?” she said, pulling at his shame string.

  Joao went red.

  He lowered his head so that his eyes anchored upon his two fragile and clammy hands, clasping together between his knobbly knees, trying to squeeze the stupid out of his pores as if his mind were a pimple that made him always say the wrong things.

  “So you’re not a thief?” he asked.

  “No of course not, I’m a good girl,” she said.

  “Do you mind if I ask?”

  “What I was doing? Sure. Do you play the lottery?”

  “No. I don’t know what it is.”

  “Really? You never gambled? You never played the lottery?”

  “Yes, no and no. Is it fun?”

  “Yeah, if you play it right. For most people, though, it’s a bit of a trap. But I know how to play it. I know how to win” she said.

  “What happens? What do you have to do to win?”

  “You just buy a ticket with numbers and if the numbers are called, you win a lot of money”

  “Have you won?”

  “I win every week,” she said.

  “Wow, is it easy? What do you win?”

  “Happiness,” she said.

  “But how? Does everyone win happiness?”

  “No, Joao, they don’t. The lottery is a bit like god really, like religion. It’s kind of an escape for everyone”

  “To escape what?”

  “This. All of this. Don’t you dream of escaping this? Getting off this hill? Having a nice house on the beach somewhere? Meeting someone famous and living happily ever after?”

  “No. I like my house. The people here are not very nice, but nobody has ever been nice to me so I’m kind of used to it, well except you and Fatts, you’re nice,” he said, turning red, trying to emphasize both she and Fatts but the burning lust in his eyes, the crackle in his voice, the soaking at his knees, the sweating from his palms and the air of awkwardness hinted that the ‘you’, was singular.

  “Well I wanna get out of here and I will you know, I just need something big to happen and then I’m off. You could come if you like” she said, posing her gesture as a question making Joao panic in a brief instant as to whether she was joking or serious and whether he should say yes and if so, should he be zealous or should he feign interest and act in cool reservation and would this coolness amount to insult or on the other hand, would she get turned off by his jumping zest and oh my god, maybe she was just joking and how the hell should he respond?

  “Yup,” he said, croaking like a frog.

  “Most people, they play the lottery every week and they spend a lot of money and they play it wrong. They even know it’s just a game, or it can be a game; like a roller coaster or a movie or a drug” she said.

  “It’s like a competition yeah? And competitions are fun, yeah?”

  “Not really. You see everyone is really screwed up here and well, everyone wants more money and more money is never enough so they’re always gonna need more and they’re always gonna be more miserable until they need so much and are so miserable they just kill themselves. And that’s why they play the lottery, to escape. Every Monday they buy their ticket and they imagine winning the fifty million bucks and they dream about all sorts of stuff like paying off their bills, buying a big house for everyone in their family, going on holidays, buying lots of cool stuff, giving some money to poor people and charities and never feeling bad again” she said.

  As she spoke, Joao closed his eyes and imagined what he could do with money. This was the idea of he and The Bishop, coming to the city so that they could make it rich like the man from ‘The Carriage of My Heart’ so they could send that money back home and save the farm before the bank or the devil’s thirst took everything.

  With his eyes shut, he imagined his father standing on a podium and preaching to a packed church, maybe where they lived now or maybe somewhere even bigger. In the front pew sat Mother and she was wearing her Sunday floral dress and because the air conditioner was on really high, her normally white stubby legs looked all blue and reddish and she looked at his father with a proud content emptiness as if she were waiting for him to finish before she addressed her consideration and care and before she distracted him with how she felt.

  He imagined that at that moment, everybody he knew was in some way happy and content; even his annoying brothers and sisters who were more like scorpions in that he remembered them, not for the good they could do, but for the harm they had done and even they; in this image in his mind, seemed happy.

  And this was what money could bring, happiness.

  “Sounds great,” said Joao.

  “Yeah, until Saturday comes.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, on Monday people buy their ticket and start to get all high and that, daydreaming about what they will do when they win. Not what they would do, but what they will do cause god is listening to their wants and this time they can feel it, everything is aligned and they’re gonna win. It just feels right. So then Saturday comes along and at 6 pm, they sit down in front of the TV with their numbers laid out in front and a pen in their hands, watching the screen like a drunk will watch someone else’s beer being poured. Then as the numbers get called, they start to have these short stabbing sensations, like little electrical shocks in their system. It’s depression. It’s reality, breaking through their dream, about to smash down their house of cards. Then one by one, game by game they start to lose, not once, not twice cause they bought twelve, fifteen, fifty games and they lose fifty times and every time they lose, it’s another cruel foot on their hopes and aspirations, it’s the pillow being pinned over the face of their dreams. Then when they scratch off the last game they fall back into depression and anger, realizing that they didn’t win, they didn’t escape. They are still stuck with their dead end wife and their dead end kids listening to the same old bullshit from their dead-end friends and apologizing to their dead end boss for the poor work they did in their dead end job so they can struggle to pay their bills again this week cause they spent all the money on the fucking lottery tickets and so they’re gonna have to borrow money off their father in law and listen to him go on about responsibility while his wife is in the other room buying things they don’t need with a card they can’t afford to pay and his kid is on drugs and his wife is bangin his brother who is staying with him while he finds a job and he’s coming up to the hill every Saturday night to binge of beer, cachaça, coke and cheap whores so that he can even out the mess that is his life, all so that on Monday morning, he can wake up at 6 am go back to the job he hates and do it all again. And on Monday afternoon, when he gets that fifty game ticket, he starts smiling and dreaming once more” she said.

  “That’s kinda sad,” said, Joao, as if he were being told that Santa was not real. “What about you? Are you that sad too?”

  “The lottery is a game, like a rollercoaster. I like to play it like a game. Like I said, I’ve played every week since I moved here and I always win. I haven’t lost a game yet” she said smiling loftily.

  “You must be real lucky. But if you win all that money every week, why aren’t you living on a beach somewhere and friends with famous people?”

&n
bsp; “I give it all away?” she whispered.

  “Really? Why? Are you crazy?”

  “Every Monday I buy a ticket and I give it away. Sometimes I see a purse or a bag nearby and I sneak the ticket into the person’s bag, quick so they don’t notice. Other times I leave the ticket in a cigarette packet, with like a couple of cigarettes still in the packet, sticking out from the top, to catch attention. Smokers have got really good eyes when it comes to seeing a full cigarette lying on the floor. Funny that. Anyway, I do that when I buy the ticket. It’s good when I can pick a person cause it’s fun to be able to remember their face when Saturday comes around” she said.

  “What do you do? How do you know you won if you gave away your ticket?” asked Joao.

  “When the numbers are called, I write them down with the pen and I imagine the ticket I gave away; that I put in the packet or the woman’s purse, and I imagine her sitting in front of her television and she’s scratching away at every number and it’s the first game on the ticket and every number is a winner and when they call out the sixth number, the woman jumps up and down screaming and when she does, my heart almost explodes cause I can feel how happy she is and her family all come in running and they’re crying cause they can’t believe that they won and all of their problems have gone away, all of them and they are so happy and she calls everyone she knows and she tells them what happened, that she opened her purse on Monday and there was this ticket there that she didn’t buy it and she didn’t know how it got there, but it did and she can’t explain it, but that’s ok cause she just won fifty million and she’ll never be as happy in her life as she is right now because someone gave this to her, someone gave this to her. And I cry. And I get so happy I cry. I don’t cry like other people do because they are sad. I cry because, well, because of me, that woman and her family can be happy forever, they get to escape. And all the things I dreamed about when I bought the ticket on Monday and snuck it in her purse, all the things about her going on holiday, paying for an operation for her sick mother, buying her children the toys they want, taking her husband finally on that honeymoon they never got, giving their house to charity because they wouldn’t need to sell it to buy another one and never having to worry about money or debt or problems ever again. And never having to do bad things that she struggles to forget, just to make ends meet. So I cry, cause she gets all of this because she is happy and I saved her, I saved her” she said weeping into her echo, smiling as she sniffled lightly and wiped a tear from her eye.

  “It must feel good, to help those people,” said Joao.

  “It does and every week I do the same thing. I find someone to help, someone, to save. I wait and I follow them and when I have the perfect opportunity, I sneak the ticket into their bag, their wallet, their cigarette packet, their baby’s jumpsuit, their car door, their purse and sometimes, their hand. And every week I imagine how they would be saved and every week I imagine them saved and they all are” she said.

  “But how do you know they won? The numbers could be different. Do you write the numbers down?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t look at the game. I look in their eyes, I remember their faces. I don’t ruin it by trying to remember the numbers. The first time I see the numbers is when they’re being called out on the screen and I see them on the ticket in my mind. Everyone wins, every week. They all get saved and I help to save them all. And I never feel bad. I always feel good. I get to imagine and dream when I buy the ticket like everyone else except I don’t come crushing down to earth when the game gets played. My high gets higher. It’s like filling a balloon with helium and it’s going up, up, up into the sky. It goes up and up and up and it flies so high into the sky that it looks like a tiny little dot before the wind takes it far away to somewhere so impossible for you to see and you can imagine it going up and up and up and up forever till it leaves our galaxy and it enters another and floats up into a sad world with no colour and no balloons and it floats upwards, past the sad eyes of a sad, little boy and his fingers catch the string just before it floats away and it’s the only colourful thing in his world and it makes him the only happy boy in his world”

  “Won’t that make him sad?’

  “Why would he be sad? He has a colourful balloon.”

  “Well if he’s the only happy person then he’ll feel guilty for being so happy when everyone is so sad and then he will feel sad again, like everyone else.”

  “True, ok, well this story isn’t about the sad little boy in a world with no colour or no balloons, it’s about the balloon so it; the balloon,” she said enforcing her words, “keeps going up and up and up to infinity like the screen of a broken television. That’s how I feel, always. Like that balloon. And every week I fill another one and every week I let it go.”

  “But the balloon has to come down somewhere”

  “Only if you imagine it so. If you accept that it crashes then you’ll be sad, thinking about the balloon falling on a roof somewhere far from where a child might play with it. But if you imagine that it doesn’t fall, that it keeps flying forever then what’s the harm? Who can prove either way” she said.

  “That’s real nice Charity,” said Joao, feeling cleansed of his nervousness or his shame by the namesake of her words and the way she lived her life.

  Joao twitched his left pinkie slightly so that it grazed the thumb of Charity, nothing forceful, just a slight passing of skin but for Joao, this movement sounded out in his heart so that his ears pounded with impending event, something catastrophic like the pulling of a drape over a sleeping Kong and the rounding percussion that plays out as his eyes widen, his voice gruffs and his fists waken to beat against his chest.

  Charity curled her hand around his, holding it tight and Joao’s heart ignited.

  He was in love.

  “Joao,” she said. “Can I stay here tonight?”