Lottery (24 page)

“Now, when did that happen? I can’t see! Shit! I hope this doesn’t stick. It’ll be a bitch to get back to Everett if it does.” He has me open the window and reach around to push the wiper and encourage it to work.

“Come on! You can do it,” I say. After a few pushes it works fine and Keith laughs.

I laugh because he does.

“Sometimes all things need is a little encouragement,” I tell him.

When we get to the neighborhood with all the decorations, the snow is sticking on the ground and Yo slides as we turn a corner. There are a lot of other people that have the exact same idea of looking at Christmas lights. We end up in the middle of a long line of cars and have to go slowly, which is fun because Keith usually drives too fast.

The houses all have colored lights that flash and move.

“These people go all out decorating!” Gram used to say. My favorite is when there are reindeer and stuff on roofs.

“I love the blue lights. Look at that one!” Cherry points out to the left.

“Look over there!” I point to the other side where someone put a giant plastic Snoopy in a sled on their porch.

Poor Keith has to look back and forth each time one of us gets excited. He eventually just stares straight ahead, bites his lip, and tries not to rear-end the car in front. When we come to the end, Cherry and I are hungry so Keith stops at Dick’s Drive-In for milk-shakes and french fries.

“What’s your favorite part of Christmas, Keith?” Cherry pokes him with a fry.

“When it’s over.” Keith looks grumpy. He is picking his teeth with Cherry’s straw.

“Why are you so irked? It’s Christmas,” she says.

I want to tell Cherry to stop asking questions. They are the same kind of questions that Gram used to ask. Keith does the same thing to Cherry that he did to Gram. He pulls out his wallet, opens it up, and flips out a picture.

“See this? Her name’s April. She used to be my wife. And the baby? My son, Jason. It was taken more than thirty years ago. She married my ex-best-buddy, Roger. Last time I saw her was the day I shipped out to ’Nam.” Keith’s eyes squeeze shut and then open again.

“December 24, 1971,” he says in a voice that does not sound like Keith. “I signed both divorce and adoption papers at the same time, hiding my ass under a table in the mess tent while Charlie mortared the fucking hell out of my company. I thought I was gonna die anyway. What did it matter? That’s what all those fucking lawyers do if you really want to know. Take advantage of a grunt’s fear of death. They’re all a bunch of moneygrubbing bastards. I even had to pay for the privilege of losing my wife and son to that backstabbing asshole.”

“So, no.” He puts his picture away and his wallet back in his pocket. “Christmas is a real drag.” He spits this out along with the straw in his mouth.

Cherry is quiet and I am sad now. I would like to meet April and Jason. They look nice.

I know tonight Keith will drink. He will start with beer. Afterwards he will look for the bottles he took from John’s house. I know that he keeps them in a lower cupboard in the galley of his boat. They are almost empty. The next day he will be hungover and sick and then he will not drink for days and then something will remind him, and he will start all over again.

It is after eleven when we get back to Everett. Keith parks Yo in the handicapped space.

“Hey! You can’t park there,” Cherry says. She does not know our rules.

I do not want her to make Keith mad. He is already sad.

“It’s for disabled trucks too. Yo qualifies. He leaks enough oil to be anemic.” Keith glares at her, and then he looks back down at his feet like he is sorry for snapping.

“Hey, Cherry, you coming?” I ask, and start walking up my stairs backwards. Cherry sleeps in my bed and I still sleep on Gram’s couch.

She looks down and kicks her foot in the gravel.

“I think I’ll hang out on Keith’s boat for a while if it’s okay with you, Perry. Just leave the door unlocked for me.”

Cherry lifts her head, stares at Keith, and smiles.

He stares back and his face completely changes. He smiles back at her real slow. They do not say a word. They just stare at each other.

“You guys okay?” I ask.

They do not answer me.

“Cherry?” I say again.

Keith’s eyes get wide like he is just waking up.

“I’ll take care of her, Per, don’t you worry. You go on up to bed.” His voice sounds squeaky, like a mouse in a trap.

“Okay.” I am tired. I need to go to bed.

My arm that got hurt at Marina Handy Mart tingles as I walk up the stairs. It still sometimes bothers me. I have to open and close my fingers to make it un-numb. I take a shower, get into my pajamas, and stand in front of my window looking out at the falling snow. I put Hershey’s Kisses into my mouth one by one and stare outside.

The chocolate melts on my tongue, not in my hand. Ha! That is an ad, I think.

The lights at the pier make the dock look like a Christmas card. It is not good to eat a lot of candy before you go to bed, so I put my bag away, go into the bathroom, and brush my teeth.

When I come back to the window, I can see a yellow glow through the portholes on Keith’s boat. I see them flicker and flash, then go dark. After a while, I notice
Diamond Girl
moving. She is rocking hard back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Her lines stretch and snap. I watch for an hour until she stops moving and floats gently on the water. It is quiet. I yawn until my jaw cracks and go to bed.

40

Christmas is a time for giving. It was hard to decide what to buy Louise, David, and John.
Fruit baskets
. Gram told me in my head.
Send them big fancy baskets of fruit
.

I appreciated Gram helping me out.

I sent them checks too. I had to send Louise’s fruit basket to John’s house because I do not have her real address. I have never gone to visit her. She has a PO, which is a sort of a box. You cannot send flowers to a PO. I think it is too small for a fruit basket. It is only a tiny little place. Louise came by Holsted’s three days before Christmas to ask for another check. I heard her because I was hiding in the back room. I peeked out through the crack in the door. Her hair is brown with yellow stripes now. She still scares me. I could hear her nails rapping on the counter. Keith told her to wait and went over to where I was hiding.

“What do you want to do? You want me to kick her skinny little ass outside?” he hisses.

“No.” I hiss back. We both sound like snakes.

I kneel on the floor and write another check.

“You don’t have to give her money each time she comes. This is just shit!”

Keith doesn’t understand. I give her money to go away. Not to make her come.

“Is she gone?” I whisper through the door.

“Yeah, she’s gone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Keith says.

We spend Christmas Eve with Gary’s family. Gary’s wife, Sandy, is funny and blond and his daughters, Kelly and Meagan, know me from when they come into the store. One is five years older than the other. I used to get them mixed up. Kelly is the older one and Meagan is the younger. Their house smells like turkey, pumpkin pie, and other Christmas food. My mouth is wet and I have to swallow my spit. My stomach is grumbling so loud that Kelly looks at me strange.

“I didn’t eat any lunch,” I tell her.

Keith brings in the presents from Yo and sets them under the tree. It takes him five trips. He is on his best behavior and only says the H-word once and the S-word three times. He pushes open the screen door with his shoulder when he comes into the house and it swings back and smacks his butt.

"FFFshhhoot!” I hear him say. He is trying really hard.

Meagan and Kelly look impressed with all the earrings on Cherry ’s face and the colors of her hair.

“I took out my silver stud because it’s Christmas,” she says, and sticks out her tongue to show them the hole. They both stare into her mouth and then she leads them into the bathroom so she can show them the ring in her navel. Cherry has on a red top with sparkles and a long skirt.

She is so beautiful. I am bouncing because I bought her a present that I think she will really like. If she likes it a lot she might be my girlfriend.

There is a real tree in the living room. Gram and I never had a real one. Ours was made out of aluminum and had a color wheel that plugged into the wall. It was lit by a forty-watt bulb that made our tree change colors until the plastic fell off. We lost first the yellow, then the red, and last Christmas the green fell out. I tried to repair it with construction paper, but the light wouldn’t show through. Gram said it was okay because it already lasted for over thirty years.

Gary’s tree lights have red, green, blue, white, and yellow bulbs. They move and sparkle. I squint my eyes to make them shine. Sandy gives us all special cardboard glasses and when we put them on, they make the lights turn into bells and angels and stars. We all trade to see everybody else’s. I keep mine on even when I unwrap my presents. I am like a movie star. I get shirts, a giant box of Hershey’s Kisses, a Game Boy, which is cool, but I do not know how to work it, and lots of other stuff.

Cherry unwraps her present from me first. A pair of diamond earrings that I bought her from Zales. She is so happy she screams and runs into the bathroom.

“I think she likes them,” Sandy whispers to me. I think so too.

Gram always said the most happiness you can collect is when you give things to other people that you love. I have a lot of happiness in my heart as I sit with my presents in my lap and watch everybody else open presents I bought for them.

On the way home Cherry talks about her mother, I talk about Gram, and Keith talks about how cold it was in eastern Oregon growing up.

“Snow up to our assholes! Shit! It was cold!” Keith cannot help using those words now, because he held them in all night at Gary’s.

“When I was little, before my mom and dad started drinking, we had a tree, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins would visit. After they separated, it just wasn’t the same.” Cherry looks sad as she says this.

“Gram and I had a fake tree. We put it up the day after Thanksgiving and took it down New Year’s Day,” I say. “She put it in our back room when it broke. It was all silver. Remember, Keith? It was in the first load we took to the dump.”

After everyone went to bed, I laid stockings for Cherry and Keith in front of the TV. It is like a pretend fireplace. I am very good at stockings. First, you buy candy and oranges because they last the longest. Then you buy little stuff like key chains, pens, and crossword puzzle books, or maybe tiny flashlights and hand soap samples. I do good stockings.

I sleep on the couch and Keith and Cherry sleep in the bedroom. The thumping noise only keeps me up a little while. I am very tired. The next thing I know, I smell pancakes and Cherry is poking me in the ribs to get up.

“Santa came last night!” she sings.

And oh boy! Did he! Santa, which was most likely both Cherry and Keith, brought me my own laptop computer. Another stocking with my name on it was right next to theirs. I got a hat, new socks with sailboats on them, and a whistle that I blew until Keith yelled, “Shut the fuck up, Per!”

That’s okay.

Cherry showed me how to use my computer and I wrote down all the directions. She said she would give me computer lessons every day as part of her present. Christmas is always a good day. But this Christmas was double wonderful. Keith and Cherry went back to
Diamond Girl
after dinner for a smoke. I sat up until late playing with my computer. Before I went to sleep, I heard Gram’s voice.

Merry Christmas, Perry,
she said.

Merry Christmas, Gram
, I said back.
Merry Christmas
.

41

My words today are
pass, passable
, and
passage
. I type them into my new computer. I started my new book in Word. I like that. Word. That pretty much tells you what it is. Word for my words. Pass. The first definition I read makes me sad. It is right on my computer. Like Gram and Gramp. It means die. To pass on. I had to shut down my Mac, that is what I call my computer. I look for my
Gram Remembers Book
so I can think about her again.

The lottery reminds me of Gram.

When we would buy tickets she would say, “You know, Perry, life’s all just one big goddamned lottery. Some of us have brains, some of us don’t. Some people draw cancer. Others win car accidents and plane crashes. It’s just a lottery. A goddamned lottery.”

I like to think that Gram was happy. I did not win the brains lottery, but I won the other kind. Then I start to wonder. Is there a happiness lottery too? A sadness lottery? Does God sit up in heaven drawing numbers for people? Like for Keith? Like for me? It makes me wonder about God. Is everything in life just numbers?

January is cold and wet in Everett. I send more checks to my cousin-brothers. They still want my Power. Soon it will be February. It will still be gray, but that is the heart month.

I wonder what kind of Valentine’s Day present Cherry would like. I think she might be my girlfriend now. She wears her diamond earrings all the time. Maybe I should buy her chocolate. Girls like chocolate. I like chocolate. They also like jewelry and books. Cherry is always reading a book. They have large brown men with bare chests and hair on the front. Sometimes one is holding a lady who has her boobs hanging out. Big ones. They are not too hard for me to read and the stories are fun, like shipwrecks and men panting over a girl’s crotch, and spies. I learn a lot. When Cherry finishes a story, she lets me read it.

When Keith picks up one of her books, he laughs at us.