by Martin Clark
Evers drank some more scotch and finished the last of the marijuana. No one said anything, and the men sat in the glow of the bug zapper and watched insects and moths fly into the electric trap. Evers started doing stoner regressions, thinking about his feet, the grass, the dirt, the bugs in the dirt, the center of the earth, China, Chairman Mao, then forgetting the first thought in the sequence and quizzing himself on why Chairman Mao was in his mind. He went through this paradigm about every thirty seconds.
After Pascal finished his drink, he leaned over and put his hand on Evers’ shoulder. The bug zapper was quiet, and Evers heard a whippoorwill start up. “So where is the white lamentation?” Pascal asked.
“They’re in my car, in a cooler. In the trunk. I’ll just leave them here for Rudy to look at when he’s not fucked up.”
“Leave them on the porch.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll get my lab coat and beakers and get right on it. First thing tomorrow.” Rudy started laughing again.
“It may be some sort of hoax, Rudy. Who knows. They may turn out to be glue or skim milk or white paint. That’s why I brought them for you to check out.”
“Check out?”
“Yeah.” Evers scooted forward, put his elbows on his knees. “Check out. See what’s going on.”
“We can start right now, do some science and heavy-duty research, test the luck in those things,” Henry offered. “That’s one way to determine if they’re authentic.”
“What luck? What do you mean?”
“Our good fortune in being blessed by this lady and her pallid teardrops. White things are lucky. Remember the albino crocodiles they found in—I think it was Louisiana. They’re legendarily lucky. White horses, white deer, all lucky. If they’re genuine, we’ll know soon enough.”
“What should we do?”
“Torch another doobie, for starters,” Rudy said.
“Let’s go play the lottery. Drive into Virginia and buy a bunch of lottery tickets. Maybe that will give us a sign,” Henry said.
“Nothing better than scientific analysis that involves travel and gambling. Let’s go.”
Evers, Pascal, Henry and Rudy covered the sofa and climbed into Rudy’s Buick, an Electra 225 with velour seats, cruise control and a Radio Shack cassette system. It was over an hour to the Virginia border, and Evers and Rudy slept in the back of the car until they stopped driving and Pascal shook them awake. Evers was weary and sluggish when he woke up. His stomach felt heavy, and occasionally the scotch would bubble up into his throat.
“Which game are we going to play?” asked Pascal. “The instant one or the long one, the one with the TV drawing?”
“Instant one,” said Rudy.
“Think we can figure it out?” wondered Henry. “I’d hate to be so fucked up that I threw the winning ticket away.” Henry looked at Evers. “We continued to do the correct thing while you were napping.”
“I can probably figure it out, Henry,” Evers offered.
The clerk at the convenience store was a skinny redneck girl in a smock. It was after two in the morning, and she seemed glad to have company.
“What’s the best lottery game?” Evers asked. There were rolls of different colored tickets in clear dispensers, strange color combinations and designs—horses and purple and yellow. The lights inside were clear and electric; the store was lit everywhere, the brightness falling from every part of the ceiling.
“I like ‘twenty-one,’” the girl said. “It’s like blackjack.”
“Great. Give me one of those.” Evers gave the clerk a dollar and scratched the face of his ticket with a penny. The covering scratched off into little black balls. Evers tossed the ticket at Henry. “Great idea. I have nineteen.”
“Sorry.” The clerk smiled.
Pascal took the next ticket. He tried a new game that had worms, hooks, boats, boots and fish. “You need fish to win,” he said after reading the front of his ticket. Pascal did not win. He bought ten more tickets and none were winners. “Fuck this.”
“Do any of the tickets have the numbers twelve-twelve-seventeen?” Henry asked. He looked at Pascal. “The date Sinatra was born. Bound to be good numbers.”
“No. That’s the lotto. They draw the numbers out on TV. Have you guys never played before?” The thin clerk looked at the men.
“No,” said Evers.
“That’s a cute boy,” she said. A small child had walked through the door and asked for a grape drink. He seemed awake and had picked up a rubber dinosaur from a box near the entrance. A lady with cut-off shorts and a plaid shirt had come in after the boy. “What’s his name?”
“Eddie,” the lady said. She looked at Evers, then took the child by the hand and walked down an aisle, past canned meat, pork and beans and cellophane packs of saltines.
“I’ve got two kids. Garth—we named him after Garth Brooks—and Richard—after Richard Petty,” the clerk told the brothers, Henry and Rudy.
“Do you sell fireworks here?” Henry asked. He looked around the store. “I’m not talking about the spectacular kind, the ones that explode and shower sparkles and comets in the sky. We want some of the little runty ones that will blow holes in the dirt and bend drink cans.”
“I know what you’re talking about, but we don’t carry none of them. You can get those at Myrtle Beach and places like that.” The clerk brushed some cigarette ashes off the counter.
“We would like a Chow, too. Pascal needs a Chow for the trailer. A black one, on a chain.” Henry slurred several of the words. “The ultimate trailer pet.”
“Good call,” Rudy said, and he and Henry laughed and cackled and slapped high-fives. Rudy stumbled into a potato chip display after following through on the high-five.
“Shit,” said the clerk. “I know you guys are making fun of Chow dogs, but I think they’re pretty.” She was grinning.
“They’re probably serious about the dog, ma’am,” Evers said.
“So we can’t get twelve-twelve-seventeen on an instant ticket?” Henry asked again.
“Not really. These tickets really aren’t like that. You can get one of the lotto tickets and use those numbers.”
“But then I won’t win right now?”
Pascal laughed because Henry was so earnest. “Just get a ticket, Henry. This isn’t atom splitting or anything.”
“Okay. I want the numbers twelve-twelve-seventeen. The lotto thing.”
“You have to pick six different ones. You can’t have two twelves. Pick four more.”
“Four, because there are four of us. Seven, because it’s lucky. Ten for my birthday. Twenty-four—it’s the two twelves added together.” Henry handed the clerk a dollar.
“Are you going to tell your wife about the clues?” Pascal asked Evers as they left the store. It seemed like an odd question, and Evers noticed that Pascal and Henry both looked right at him to see what he was going to say.
“Why?”
“Just wondered.”
“I hadn’t thought about it, really,” said Evers.
“So far we’re the only ones who know, right?” Henry kept looking at Evers.
“Yeah.” Evers looked at the ground. He was standing next to the car door. The interior light was on.
“I hope you don’t,” Pascal said. “I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I hope you don’t. It’s our trip. That’s the way I see it.”
“You’re probably right. I won’t mention it,” Evers promised.
Pascal looked up. “Rudy, where the fuck are you going?” The car doctor had started walking away from the other men and the Buick, toward the end of the convenience store’s parking lot and the highway. “Rudy. Hey, Rudy! Code blue for Dr. Rudy.” Pascal chuckled and nudged Henry with his elbow. “Check him out.”
Rudy didn’t answer Pascal; he just kept going. Evers turned around, and Pascal raised his voice and called out again. “Rudy. Rudy? The car’s over here, Cortez.” Pascal looked at Evers and Henry. “He’s fucked up.”
Henry laughed. “It’s got to be pretty severe if we notice it.”
“Rudy, don’t wander out into the highway.” Evers started to walk after his friend while he was speaking; Rudy was at the end of the parking lot, in the last shadows of the outdoor lights, standing beside the road. “Damn.”
Pascal and Henry also started walking. A car’s headlights appeared over a crest, dropped out of view, and appeared again. Rudy started a slow, serpentine shuffle in the gravel alongside the road, walking into the dark. The car caught Rudy in its headlights, blew its horn, swerved across the center line and passed him by.
Pascal, Henry and Evers caught up to Rudy, and Pascal touched the car doctor’s arm. Rudy jerked away and walked faster for a few steps, twisting stabs and stumbles that kicked into the stones and dirt beside the asphalt. The men were a good hundred feet from the parking lot, near the beginning of a curve that dropped out of sight.
Evers looked back, and two cars were coming up behind them. “Shit, Rudy, get in the fucking car or you can walk all the way back home. I don’t have time for this nonsense.”
Pascal put his hand on Rudy’s arm again, and Rudy spun around very abruptly, stopped moving. Henry jumped a little, and Pascal’s mouth opened. “Damn,” they said at about the same time.
“Jesus, Rudy,” Pascal said. “Are you okay? Are you sick? What happened?”
Rudy shook his head. “I’m not sure. It’s not …” He quit talking but kept shaking his head.
“It’s not what?” Henry asked. “What are you talking about? What’s wrong with you?”
Rudy shuffled his feet, swayed and pushed his hair back with both hands. “I feel bad.”
“What are you talking about?” Evers asked. “Rudy?” Evers hesitated. “You look … look … ill or strange or something.”
No one moved for a few moments, then Rudy started mumbling and sniffing. He rubbed his nose with the sleeve of his shirt. “Something bad’s going to happen. I have a bad feeling about this money.”
“You’re just drunk and stoned and sick. Come on, Rudy.” Evers looked Rudy in the face. “Let’s go home. You don’t know enough to have any feelings, one way or the other.”
A car slowed down and turned into the convenience store. Another passed the men on the opposite side of the highway, and the sound boomed all around them for a few seconds.
“If anyone touches me anymore … lays another hand on me … I’ll beat the shit out of all of you,” Rudy declared and started off again.
Pascal went back for the car, and the three of them paced Rudy for nearly a mile, following his comatose gait, creeping along in the Buick with the emergency flashers going, until he collapsed onto his knees into the gravel alongside the edge of the road and tipped over onto his hip and arm. Pascal stopped the car, and Henry and Evers got out to pick Rudy up. His knees were cut, bleeding through his pants, and he’d fallen beside some roadkill, a decaying cat or possum or rabbit, bones and a few bunches of gray hair, the remains flat and dry, lying in the dirt beside a pop-top and a paper napkin.
TWO
JO MILLER COVINGTON HAD MARRIED EVERS WHEN HIS THROAT and lungs weren’t singed by devilish streams of cigarette smoke and when he could still bench-press two hundred and five pounds twelve times. When Jo Miller met Evers, she was a sublime, boyish girl with short brown hair and skin that tanned evenly in the summer months. She was gifted and calm, immune to the moods, panics and tumults that ran over Evers like hard blue tides; Jo Miller was smart but not smug, different, clever and playful. The first time Evers saw her, she was standing in line at a vending machine, searching the change in her palm, turning the money over, checking for old, rare coins. Evers and Jo Miller fell in love with each other at the same time. They married before he began law school.
Before that, Evers had lived a fairly good life. In 1961, when his brother Pascal was three years old, Evers was born at North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem. When Evers was growing up, Winston-Salem was a city that had all of the hallmarks of New Southern elegance very early on: museums, a college, a private school for girls, a revitalized downtown with an arts center and, most important, a family-run, ham-at-Christmas industry (R. J. Reynolds Tobacco) that provided the region with both jobs and an aristocracy. For two summers, Evers worked at the tobacco company loading pouches of chewing tobacco into cardboard boxes, and when he was old enough to develop an interest in such things, he and his friends would park their bikes in the forest below the athletic fields at Salem Academy and lie on their stomachs at the edge of the woods and watch the girls’ field hockey team practicing in shorts and kilts.
Purvis Wheeling, Evers’ father, had been a tall man, very frail, with large ears and dark eyes set like two unlit caverns in his skull. Evers’ mother was a beautiful, fair-haired lady, the daughter of a Chicago minister. She was a believer in the New Deal and Dr. Peale, a beneficent, likable woman who hand-sewed name tags into Purvis’ shirts, made cakes and brownies from Duncan Hines mixes and organized trick-or-treat outings for the children in her neighborhood. She and Purvis met and wed in 1949, while Purvis was a student in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia, and they moved to Winston-Salem soon after he completed college because Purvis thought that the area would provide him with the opportunity to earn a good living. Purvis Wheeling had been a paving contractor, a lanky man in baggy pants who bribed state legislators—not something that made him a bad or unfit father in his sons’ eyes—into granting him contracts to build roads and blacken parking lots.
While the boys were growing up, both of their parents cared a great deal about Evers and Pascal, although, in a certain sense, neither had any emotional pitch where their sons were concerned—their ages and interests put them, Evers believed, somewhere between middle C and E flat, no more, no less, no variance. They were good at handling the big things, the highs and lows which occurred in their sons’ lives, but they never had a clear view of the shades between the absolutes. For all the years that Evers could recall, the Wheeling family had been more concerned with equilibrium than depth; not such a bad way to live, really. Evers loved his parents, and he felt good about the way they treated him and his brother.
Not surprisingly, Evers was brokenhearted for several weeks when Purvis Wheeling drove into a tree several hundred yards off Silas Creek Parkway, killing himself and causing a fracture in his wife’s ankle so severe and painful that it never truly healed. Evers and Pascal did all they could to help their mother after she took off her cast, but she never would put any weight on her foot and leaned on a cane when she walked. She died in her sleep two years later, a thin gold bracelet and a pair of emerald rings on the nightstand beside her bed, her robe folded across the back of a chair. For one of the same reasons he had loved her, Evers particularly missed his mother after her death: she resembled him a good deal, in her countenance and in her habits, and he worshiped the frank assurances that came from seeing his parts and image in someone so much like him.
At the time of his father’s accident, Evers was twenty years old, old enough to appreciate the substantial inheritance and trust benefits he would receive. He and his brother each inherited one-third of a good deal of money. Pascal had already graduated from William and Mary College and used his portion of the money to embark on a route of revelry and spectacle matched only by, say, Liberace or a Thai king. Evers was satisfied with two new stereo speakers and a small sailboat.
Although Pascal quickly spent his father’s money—pissed it away, their mother frequently said—Evers considered this Pascal’s prerogative and enjoyed his brother’s tales of long-legged women and wrecked automobiles with a smile, questions and no censure. Evers had cried in the car before his father’s funeral, but whether or not his brother spent the money their father chose to leave them had no bearing on anything, as far as Evers could tell, other than Pascal’s judgment. Evers explained to their mother that he might well have pissed his money away also, but as a college student, didn’t have the tim
e or desire or decadent vision to do so.
When their mother died, she left only one dollar to Pascal, and this struck Evers as so unfair that he gave half of his mother’s estate to his brother, who, true to form, managed to turn it, after several months of sloppy endeavor, into a mobile home, a Lincoln with a broken windshield, a car phone, three Arabian horses and some tin mines in Chile. The remainder of the money, somewhere over nine hundred thousand dollars, evidently was invested in high times and hijinks. Pascal once called his brother from Jamaica—an expensive toll, no doubt—to list his favorite three movies while stoned: Casablanca, Easy Rider and anything with dubbing and Godzilla. “Write that down now, okay? My short-term memory’s fucked-up these days.” Evers laughed, and acknowledged that his brother’s choices were probably impeccable.
Evers was sixteen years old when he left Winston-Salem to enroll at the Woodberry Forest School, a wonderful place near the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in central Virginia. It was a venerable institution; it had roots, a history, an unavoidable solidness. Woodberry was started hundreds of years ago and appeared perpetual to Evers when he was there; like Elastic Man, the school had one leg back in the nineteenth century, its crotch above the First World War and the other leg planted in the 1970s, still stretching. All male, coat and tie at dinner. Not teachers, but masters. Every boy on campus participated in athletics, everyone showed up for the Friday-night cultural performances, and everyone made his bed before nine-thirty or he received demerits. Everything the boys needed was there at the school: a store that sold WFS ties and cuff links as well as Pepperidge Farm cookies, a pool, a golf course, fifty milk cows and seven negroes, who tended the cattle and bought beer for the students.
On weekends Woodberry had mixers. Evers would stand on the front porch of the Walker building, peering out from behind a smooth, white column to watch the girls from Madeira and Saint Anne’s-Belfield step off their buses and giggle out into the late afternoon. These were girls, not ladies or women or womyn or females or broads or dikes or wenches, not jaded or nagging or coy or active or naive or impressionable or anything else—just girls. There were so many things these girls did not know. And so many things they did know. They could sail, cook, speak French, ski, drive a straight shift and shoot skeet. They liked Virginia Gentleman, pinot chardonnay and marihuana, which they spelled, in their perfect-script missives, with an “h,” even though the radicals at the public defender’s office and High Times preferred the hipper “j” alternative. They knew who Petrarch was, who wrote Instant Replay and how to do logarithms. They didn’t care much about Jimmy Carter, Joan Baez or Watergate, didn’t like any illegal drug that came in pill or capsule form and didn’t have time for rallies, protests, marches or fasts. In short, they were not women’s women.