Ravens

by George Dawes Green

  He went up to check the right front. He thought about the clerk again. At least this would give him an opening with her. He could go back in and say, “The tires were OK. I guess my car was just pulling me — it wanted me to come in here.” Should he leave it like that? Subtle, mysterious? Or should he explain how there were lines of power running under the Earth, called ley lines, and vortices where they crossed, and how these vortices could act as huge magnets? Well. That might strike her as too weird.

  Maybe he should just say, “My car likes blondes.”

  God. Yes. He was a thousand miles from Piqua, Ohio, and nobody was here to judge him except Romeo, and his judgment didn’t count. Why not say whatever comes to mind?

  As he was going back into the store, a truck pulled up: one of those TV satellite trucks. WSAV from Savannah. It wasn’t coming for gas. It pulled off quietly to the side, and Shaw watched for a moment as the driver got out, and then this smartly dressed dude who was probably the reporter, then some other guy. They conferred amongst themselves. Shaw felt stupid just standing there watching, so he went in.

  Cheryl wasn’t at the counter anymore. Some Asian guy now. On his cell phone, talking animatedly in Chinese or Korean or whatever. Shaw handed over the tire gauge and the guy took it without a glance and went back to chirping into the phone.

  Then Shaw noticed Cheryl standing by the front window, looking out at the TV truck. She had her back to him. He approached her, thinking he could still say the thing about blondes. But she was also on the phone, and she seemed excited about something. Saying, “He’s like friends with my brother? They’re both in third grade? And he’s bragging how it’s his family that won.”

  A little pause. Then she said, “Yeah, but Ashley, nobody even knew this was the store! It hasn’t been announced yet! And they buy tickets here all the time.”

  Another pause. Then she said, “No, he owns that copier place. They’re like, I know them, they go to Renewal. Oh shit. Well, you’ll hear about it tomorrow!” She laughed.

  She became aware of Shaw. “Hold on,” she told her friend. She asked Shaw, “Help you?”

  “I brought your gauge back.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, it wasn’t the tires. It was the, just, it was, you know, pulling.”

  “Pulling?”

  “Like my car was pulling me here.”

  “Oh.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about, and didn’t care. She was checking out another TV truck pulling into the lot. She told the phone, “Oh my god, there’s another one! From Jax! Ashley, I gotta go.” Calling out, “Mr. Hu! Here’s another TV station!”

  The Asian guy said, “Call Courtney, tell her come in! And find Wes!”

  When she turned away from the window, she was surprised to find Shaw still standing there. “You all set?” she said.

  He asked her, “How come those trucks are out there?”

  “Um. ’Cause we sold the ticket outta this store.”

  “What ticket?”

  “For the jackpot.”

  “Out of this store?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How much?”

  She gestured to a sign, by the lottery display. THIS WEEK’S MAX-A-MILLION JACKPOT IS WORTH… Under which someone had written, in magic marker: “$318,000,000.00.”

  The reach of it, the vastness, caught him in the gut.

  “That’s. Millions?”

  She nodded. Already dialing another friend.

  He tried to steady his breath. “And you know the winners?”

  She shook her head. “No. Nobody does. They have to come forward. Could be weeks.” Her call went through and she left him, telling the phone, “Hey, Rosemary. Guess what?”

  Why had she lied to him? Telling him nobody knew who won, when he’d just heard her gossiping about the winners. She’d probably seen him checking the tires on the Tercel, which looked like an old beat-up filing cabinet on wheels — and had zero respect for him, and thought he wasn’t worth sharing this secret with.

  And did he give a shit? The girl was a clerk in a palace of crap in the middle of nowhere, she was empty-headed and kind of unpretty, and did he give a damn what she thought about his car?

  But he did, he realized. He was all worked up. A shaft of anger had opened inside him.

  He walked down the aisle that led to the ATM. Planning to withdraw some cash, but then he couldn’t bear to. He couldn’t face his paltry balance. He stopped beside the Party Time ice chest, which looked like a pirate’s chest, with loose pieces of ice glittering and smoldering, and he considered that while he had all of nine hundred fifty dollars to spend on this whole vacation, someone else had just won three hundred eighteen million. Out of the blue! Thrown away on a family of South Georgia nothings! And would they even have a clue how to use it? No. In fact it was bound to destroy whatever meager happiness they had. Leave them feeling unloved, untrusting, miserable. Prey to any scavenger who got a whiff of their feast. He heard Cheryl laugh into her phone, and the sound came to him like fingernails scraping down a blackboard, and he walked out into the sunlight just as the TV crews were coming in, and he thought, goddamn this shitshack to hell.

  Romeo was awake by now but still sleep-paralyzed. It seemed like a good idea to get out of this frypan and go take a leak. But that would have required unfolding his legs, raising up the seat, brushing the crumbs off his shirt. So he stayed where he was. He lay there and looked out idly at the TV trucks and wondered what all the commotion was about. He was still turning this over when Shaw opened the door.

  “What’s with the TV trucks?”

  “It’s ’cause you’re such a star, Romeo. They’re stalking you.” Shaw snapped off the music and started the engine. To deal with the scorching steering wheel, he grabbed a T-shirt from the backseat and made it into an oven pad. He drove out of the lot.

  He was in one of his moods. The kind of mood he got into only when some girl had snubbed him.

  Said Romeo, “I gotta take a leak.”

  “Should have thought of that sooner.” Shaw pulled out into the four-lane — but away from the interstate. A sign said DOWNTOWN BRUNSWICK.

  Said Romeo, “I was asleep. Could we go back there for a second?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Place is full of shit.”

  “She was that fuckable?”

  “Who, the clerk? Who cares about the clerk?”

  So he had been dissed. The clerk must have flirted with him on account of his charming skewed smile — but then he’d come on a little too odd, or too needy, and she’d shut him down. Happened all the time. And these rejections always got him going. But this time his pique seemed to be mixed with a kind of ebullience. His lips were moving; he glistened with sweat. He said, “You know what I do care about? Here’s this universe filled with power, right? These energies, all around us, in every molecule. And you and me, we’re smart, we’re capable, we’re clever. You know? But we might as well be ghosts. We can’t seem to get hold of a fucking thing. You notice that? Everything just passes right through us and gets pissed away. Everything goes to someone else. It’s amazing.”

  “Yeah,” said Romeo. “I hear that.” But really he only half-heard it. Mostly he just wanted to piss and for Shaw to let go of whatever was burning him up.

  Tara was at her desk at the bank, closing out her accounts, when she looked up and saw Mrs. Potro approaching. Oh this is great, she thought. Last day here, last hour — and what do I get for my parting gift but the meanest and lyingest of all the mean lying bitches who’ve made working here such hell.

  “Hello, Mrs. Potro. What can I do for you?”

  The woman had a long blue vein in her neck that throbbed when she got upset. Which was every frikkin time she came in. She slapped a letter on Tara’s desk: Notice of Insufficient Funds. She really did slap it down, and said, “Twenty-five dollars? You’re charging me twenty-five dollars? For what, for the privilege of having you steal fro
m me? No no no. This time you will not get my money.”

  Tara tried to remember what life had been like when anything Mrs. Potro said had mattered. But she couldn’t. Already the world before the jackpot was beginning to seem remote. Just don’t laugh in her face, she thought, just let’s get through this one final demon and I’ll be done with this moronic job forever. Then I’ll let it fall away and never think of it again.

  She checked her computer and said softly, “Well, ma’am, um, it shows here that the funds in your account on June 11 were not —”

  “I made a deposit on the eleventh! You don’t see that?”

  “I see one for June 13 —”

  “Right! Because, on the eleventh, my sister had a diabetic attack. Do you have any idea of how debilitating that can be? Any idea?”

  “Sounds horrible.”

  “I wasn’t making deposits on the eleventh because I was at the hos-pital. You think I like going to the hospital? So I made a deposit first thing on the twelfth —”

  “Or the thirteenth.”

  “Young lady! I’ve been a customer of this bank since before you were born. I used to think I was a valued customer. I used to imagine …”

  But Tara was thinking of the flowing blue skies of the jackpot. The jackpot which overruled and eclipsed everything, including Mrs. Potro, and which held the silver keys to the future. And in less than an hour she’d be telling Nell about it! Should I just lay it on the table, or should I tease her first? Make it a guessing game? So every time Nell guesses wrong I can say, “No, bigger. Think bigger,” and then should I —

  “Are you ignoring me?” said Mrs. Potro.

  “What.”

  “You’re? Ignoring? Me?”

  “Well yeah. I was sort of in my own thoughts there.”

  The neck-cobra pulsed. “Let me speak to Mr. Allen this instant.”

  “Why? You gonna get me fired?”

  “I want to speak to Mr. Allen!”

  “Mr. Allen’s gone home. You can come see him tomorrow. But you can’t get me fired, ’cause I don’t work here anymore. This is my last day. Actually, this is my last minute in this dump. So. What is it you were whining about again?”

  Right before her eyes the woman was turning into an openmouthed gargoyle. A pleasure to witness.

  “So what was it again?” Tara asked her. “Twenty-five?” She reached into her own purse and counted out a twenty and five ones, and set these down before the wounded duchess. “Here. Little farewell gift,” she said. Then added two quarters and a nickel. “With interest.”

  She turned away, went back to her monitor, her accounts. After a while she heard Mrs. Potro sniff significantly and totter away.

  But only after scooping up the money. This is the crowning touch, thought Tara. This makes this day perfect.

  She finished her paperwork and said goodnight to the tellers like it was any other day, and took off. On the way back to Brunswick she played Santogold as loud as she could. “Break it break it you can’t stop me in this race!” The sky over the marshes had no end, the whole world was in her grasp, and it seemed as though she was lifting off above herself; tooling along in her Geo and at the same time lifting into the sky, and so filled with excitement and freedom that she had to open her mouth and scream.

  Then her phone beeped. Message from Clio.

  Headquarters. Code Blu.

  Code Blu meant a full-on panic attack — usually brought on by some bass guitarist messing with Clio’s head.

  Tara wrote back:

  Cant.

  A moment later she got:

  Code INSANELY frikkin Blu!

  Tara gave up then. What else could she do? She went to Headquarters, which was the name they’d given to Skeet and Bobbie’s condo. It was out on Altama Avenue, in the gloomy whitetrash hive called Spanish Gardens (nothing Spanish about it except a crude Moorish archway on the sign, and no gardens either). Bobbie let her in. Everyone was smoking weed and watching Sarah Silverman on TV. Tara went looking for Clio. She found her in the kitchen heating a frozen pizza. The guy Jonah from Kings of Unsnap was with her. He was trying to look languorous and slouchy and world-weary, but his big quivering Adam’s apple spoiled the effect. He wasn’t uncute though, and his band was not unbearable, and yesterday Tara had even been considering him a little. But now the jackpot had swept him off the planet. Now, when he drawled “Heyyy, Taraaa,” she found she had no interest. She scarcely nodded. She looked to Clio, who gestured toward the sliding back door.

  Jonah said, “Where you going? You doing lesbo stuff? Hey, I’m a dyke too.” They ignored him. They went out to the yard (weeds, beer kegs in the weeds, a rusted weedwhacker) and slid the door shut.

  Tara said, “Sup?”

  Clio said, “Sup with you? Sup with all this I’m too busy, I’m too busy shit? ’Cause what you’re doing is like, I’m not your bitch anymore?”

  “Well no, I really have been busy —”

  “Rat, don’t lie to me. Just tell me. You guys win the lottery?” Meteor crashing. Try to keep your wits. Try to look bewildered. “What?”

  “Do not lie to me. You’re a terrible liar.”

  “I just don’t understand what you’re asking.”

  “Laurie Massey told me you guys won the Max-a-Million jackpot.”

  “The what?”

  Enough variations on what. Fight back or you’re finished. “Is she, like, joking? Is she nuts?”

  Said Clio, “Apparently your brother told some kid y’all had won it.”

  Clio was a big girl, striking, with tattoos up and down her arms and a silver serpent that looped through her cheek. Her stare was demanding. Tara loved her, and hated to lie to her. But she’d made a solemn pact with her family: we won’t tell anyone. If Jase had broken this vow, that was Jase’s business, but Tara wasn’t going to let her family down. She met Clio’s gaze and said, “My little brother is delusional. As well you know.”

  “Well, somebody won the thing.”

  “Yeah? Not us.”

  “But here you’ve gone into hiding and all —”

  “Hiding? For shit’s sake, dude, I’m just busy. I just got out of the bank. You think I’d go work at that bank if I’d just won like all the money in the world?”

  Clio took a long thoughtful pull on her cigarette. She said, “It’s just, if you had won, I’d be so happy for you I’d be peeing my pants. But if you’re like, hiding this from me? And if it’s like I’m losing you or something — then I don’t know what I’d do. I’d kill myself. I mean it. I would.”

  “Oh shut up. You’re not gonna lose me. Who’s my bitch?”

  She put her hand on Clio’s neck.

  Said Clio, “Let go of me now, degenerate.”

  Tara said, “You’d love it.”

  Said Clio, “Hey, guess who got his snake milked last night?”

  “Oh God. Not that FLETCY guy? Oh god. That’s too gross.”

  “You have no frikkin idea.”

  I just have to keep this safe for another day or two. Then we’ll let the truth out and I’ll take her to New York first and then Paris, and it’ll be the sweetest trip of a lifetime and she’ll forgive me, she has to; she loves me. And anyway winning the jackpot means you get everything; love, riches, dreams, forgiveness, sky, ocean, shoes, power over the Mrs. Potros, everything, nothing denied: this is how I intend to proceed.

  Shaw surfed. The motel room had a back door which he left wide open, and the outside came pouring in — the heat, pollen, salt air, and some heartbreaking vineflower that was blooming just outside the door. All this was mixing with the cinderblock-mold smell of the motel itself; also there were the shouts and sudden splays of music from unsavory folk trawling past on Rt. 17. It was paradise. He took deep guzzles from his Wendy’s ice tea, and searched the web.

  Cheryl at that convenience store had said that he, whoever he was, had a copier store. Shaw went to Yellowbook and found there were only two independent copier businesses in Brunswick, Georgia: Murray
Copiers and Boatwright Office Supply and Copiers.

  He clicked on Murray’s, which was painfully slow to load, and when it did there was a notice from ’06:

  Dear Customer. Due to rising costs and

  foreign competition…

  Belly-up. Gone.

  He went back and clicked the link for Boatwright Office Supply and Copiers, and got a pic of Mitch Boatwright, CEO. Studio halo. But with slightly bulging eyes that made him too bulldoggish, too eager looking. And that shadow in your ear, Mitch — is that earhair? In your business photo? Are you a simpleton?

  More important: are you my quarry?

  mitch boatwright brunswick ga brought him oceans of useless stuff. For example he discovered, in the 1870 City Directory for Scranton, Pennsylvania, that Henry Boatwright had been an ironworker, and that Greta Schuleit, laundress, hailed from Brunswick, Germany. He wondered if they had ever met. Were they lovers? Did she come to his room above the ironworks?

  I better focus here.

  Look at this: “Joseph Boatwright deceased 1892 survived by his wife Kathleen, two sons, Abner and Edgar, also by his daughter Louise who is married to Dr. Mitchell Vermillion of Brunswick, Georgia.”

  Vermillion: now there’s a name. Should I change my name to Shaw Vermillion?

  He kept floating. Boatwright after Boatwright, but most of them were in the ground: in the graveyards of Brunswick, Georgia, Brunswick, Maine, and New Brunswick, New Jersey. And the few that were living were uselessly faraway. He placed half a dexie on his tongue and let it dissolve. It tasted like a Sweet Tart but drier, more businesslike. He drank from his Wendy’s giant cup of tea.

  Behind him, Romeo, sound asleep again, started grinding his teeth.

  That bitch Cheryl had said, “They go to Renewal.” What would Renewal be? Some kind of church? Or gym, or club or something? He typed in renewal brunswick ga and found he was right the first time: the first two hundred entries were for the Faith Renewal Church on Altama Avenue. He typed faith renewal mitch boatwright brunswick — and was granted a vision: