Lucky You (5 page)

And when JoLayne Lucks learned she’d won the Florida lottery, she knew immediately what to do with the money: She would buy Simmons Wood and save it.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, working up the numbers on a pocket calculator, when she heard a sharp knock from the porch. She figured it must be Tom, the newspaperman, giving it one more shot. Who else would be so brash as to drop by at midnight?

The screen door opened before JoLayne got there. A stranger stepped into her living room. He was dressed like a hunter.

Krome asked, “Did you find her?”

“Yes,” said Dick Turnquist.

“Where?”

“I hesitate to tell you.”

“Then don’t,” said Krome. He lay on the sheets with his fingers interlocked behind his head. To keep the receiver at his ear he’d propped it in the fleshy pocket above his collarbone. Years of talking to editors from motel rooms had led him to perfect a supine, hands-free technique for using the telephone.

Turnquist said, “She’s checked herself into rehab, Tom. Says she’s hooked on antidepressants.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Says she’s eating Prozacs like Pez.”

“I want her served.”

“Tried,” Turnquist said. “The judge says leave her alone. Wants a hearing to find out if she is of’diminished mental capacity.’ “

Krome cackled bitterly. Turnquist was sympathetic.

Mary Andrea Finley Krome had been resisting divorce for almost four years. She could not be assuaged with offers of excessive alimony or a cash buyout.
I don’t want money, I want Tom.
No one was more baffled than Tom himself, who was acutely aware of his deficiencies as a domestic companion. The dispute had been brutally elongated because the case was filed in Brooklyn, which was, with the possible exception of Vatican City, the worst place in the world to expedite a divorce. Further complicating the procedure was the fact that the estranged Mrs. Krome was an accomplished stage actress who was capable, as she demonstrated time and again, of convincing the most hard-bitten judge of her fragile mental condition. She also had a habit of disappearing for months at a time with obscure road shows—most recently it was a musical adaptation of
The Silence of the Lambs
—which made it difficult to serve her with court summonses.

Tom Krome said, “Dick, I can’t take much more.”

“The competency hearing is set two weeks from tomorrow.”

“How long can she drag this out?”

“You mean, what’s the record?”

Krome sat up in bed. He caught the phone before it hit his lap. He put the receiver flush to his lips and said loudly:
“Does she even have a goddamn lawyer yet?”

“I doubt it,” said Dick Turnquist. “Get some rest, Tom.”

“Where is she?”

“Mary Andrea?”

“Where’s this rehab center?” Krome asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, let me guess. Switzerland?”

“Maui.”

“Fuck.”

Dick Turnquist said things could be worse. Tom Krome said he didn’t think so. He gave the lawyer permission to round up a couple of expert witnesses on Prozac for the upcoming hearing.

“Shouldn’t be hard,” Krome added. “Who wouldn’t love a free trip to Hawaii?”

Two hours later, he was startled awake by the light graze of fingernails on his cheek.

Katie.
Krome realized he’d fallen asleep without locking his door. Moron! He sprung upright.

The room was black. He smelled perfumed soap.

“Katherine?” Christ, she must’ve run out on her husband!

“No, it’s me. Please don’t turn on the light.”

He felt the mattress shift as JoLayne Lucks sat beside him. In the darkness she found one of his hands and brought it to her face.

“Oh no,” said Krome.

“There were two of them.” Her voice was thick.

“Let me see.”

“Keep it dark. Please, Tom.”

He traced along her forehead, down her cheeks. One of her eyes was swollen shut—a raw knot, hot to the touch. Her top lip was split open, bloody and crusting.

“Jesus,” Krome sighed. He made her lie down. “I’m calling a doctor.”

“No,” JoLayne said.

“And the cops.”

“Don’t!”

Krome felt like his chest would explode. Gently JoLayne pulled him down, so they were lying side by side.

“They got the ticket,” she whispered.

It took a moment for him to understand: The lottery ticket, of course.

“They made me give it to them,” she said.

“Who?”

“I never saw them before. There were two of them.”

Krome heard her swallow, fighting the tears. His head was thundering—he had to do something. Get the woman to a hospital. Notify the police. Interview the neighbors in case somebody saw something, heard something …

But Tom Krome couldn’t move. JoLayne Lucks hung on to his arm as if she were drowning. He turned on his side and carefully embraced her.

She shivered and said, “They
made
me give it to them.”

“It’s OK.”

“No—”

“You’re going to be all right. That’s the important thing.”

“No,” she cried, “you don’t understand.”

A few minutes later, after her breathing settled, Krome reached over to the bedstand and turned on the lamp. JoLayne closed her eyes while he studied the cuts and bruises.

“What else did they do?” he asked.

“Punched me in the stomach. And other places.”

JoLayne saw his eyes flash, his jaw tighten. He told her: “It’s time to get up. We’ve got to do something about this.”

“Damn right,” she said. “That’s why I came to you.”

5

They took turns examining themselves in the rearview mirror, Chub swearing extravagantly: “Goddamn nigger bitch, goddamn we shoulda kilt her.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Bodean Gazzer. They both hurt like hell and looked worse. Chub had deep scratches down his cheeks, and his left eyelid was sliced in half—one ragged flap blinked, the other didn’t. He was soiled with blood, mostly his own.

He said, “I never seen such fuckin’ fingernails. You?”

Bode muttered in assent. His face and throat bore numerous purple-welted bite marks. The crazy cunt had also chewed off a substantial segment of one eyebrow, and Bode was having a time plugging the hole.

In a worn voice, he said: “Important thing is we got the ticket.”

“Which I’ll hang on to,” Chub said, “just to be safe.” And to make things even, he thought. No way was he about to let Bode Gazzer hold
both
Lotto tickets.

“Fine with me,” Bode said, though it wasn’t. He was in too much pain to argue. He’d never seen a woman fight so ferociously. Christ, she’d left them looking like gator puke!

Chub said, “They’s animals. Total goddamn animals.”

Bode agreed. “White girl’d never fuss like that. Not even for fourteen million bucks.”

“I’m serious, we shoulda kilt her.”

“Right. Wasn’t you the one had no interest in jail time?”

“Bode, go fuck yourself.”

Chub pressed a sodden bandanna to his tattered eyelid. He remembered how relieved he’d been to learn that the woman who’d hit the lottery numbers was black. What a weight off his shoulders! If she’d been white—especially a white Christian woman, elderly, like his granny—Chub knew he wouldn’t have had the guts to go through with the robbery. Much less slug her in the face and the privates, as was necessary with that wild JoLayne bitch.

And a white girl, you shove a pistol in her lips and she’ll do whatever she’s told. Not this one.

Where’s the ticket?

Not a word.

Where’s the goddamn ticket?

And Bode Gazzer saying, “Hey, genius, she can’t talk with a gun in her mouth.”

And Chub removing it, only to have the woman spit all over the barrel. Then she’d spit on him, too.

Leaving Chub and Bode to conclude there wasn’t a damn thing they could do to this person, in the way of rape or torture, to make her give up that ticket.

It had been Bode’s idea to shoot one of the turtles.

Give him credit, Chub thought, for figuring out the woman’s weakness.

Grabbing a baby turtle from the tank, setting it at JoLayne’s feet, chuckling in anticipation as it started marching toward her bare toes.

And Chub, firing a round into the center of the turtle’s shell, sending it skidding like a tiny green hockey puck across the floor, bouncing off walls and corners.

That’s when the woman broke down and told them where she’d hidden the Lotto stub. Inside the piano, of all places! What a racket they’d made, getting it out of there.

But they’d done it. Now here they were, parked in the amber glow of a streetlight; taking turns with the rearview, checking how badly the nigger girl had messed them up.

Chub’s multiple lacerations gave a striped effect to his long sunken face. The softest breeze stung like hot acid. He said, “I reckon I need stitches.”

Bode Gazzer, shaking his head: “No doctors till we git home.” Then he got a good look at Chub’s seeping cuts and, recognizing a threat to his new truck’s gorgeous upholstery, announced, “Band-Aids. That’s what we’ll get.”

He made a U-turn on the highway and drove back to town at high speed. His destination was the Grab N’Go, where they would purchase first-aid supplies and also settle a piece of militia business.

Shiner’s teenage years had been tolerable until his mother had gotten religion. Before then, she’d allowed him to play football without a helmet, shoot his .22 inside the city limits, go bass fishing with cherry bombs, smoke cigarets, bother the girls and skip school at least twice a week.

One night Shiner had returned home late from a Whitesnake concert in Tampa to find his mother waiting in the kitchen. She was wearing plastic thong sandals, a shortie nightgown and her ex-husband’s mustard blazer, left over from his days at Century 21—for Shiner, a jarring apparition. Wordlessly his mother had taken his hand and led him out the front door. In the moonlight they’d traipsed half a mile to the intersection where Sebring Street meets the highway. There Shiner’s mother had dropped to her knees and begun to pray. Not polite praying, either; moans and wails that fractured the peacefulness of the night.

Shiner had been further dumbfounded and embarrassed to watch his mother crawl into the road and nuzzle her cheek to the grimy pavement.

“Ma,” he’d said. “Cut it out.”

“Don’t you see Him?”

“See who? You’re gonna get runned over.”

“Shiner, don’t you see Him?” She’d bounced to her feet. “Son, it’s Jesus. Look there! Our Lord and Savior! Don’t you see His face in the road ?”

Shiner had walked to the spot and peered intently. “It’s just an oil stain, Ma. Or maybe brake fluid.”

“No! It’s the face of Jesus Christ.”

“OK, I’m outta here.”

“Shiner!”

He’d figured the Jesus thing would blow over once she’d sobered up, but he was wrong. His mother had spent the whole next day praying at the edge of the road, and the day after as well. Some vacationing Christians gave her an ice-blue parasol and a Styrofoam cooler full of soda pop. The following Saturday, a reporter from a TV station in Orlando came to town with a camera crew. Soon the Road-Stain Jesus was regionally famous, as was Shiner’s mother. Nothing much went right for him after that.

One day he came home to find her burning his collection of heavy-metal CDs, which she had taken to calling “devil wafers.” She forbade him to drink beer or smoke cigarets, and threatened to withhold his five-dollar weekly allowance if he didn’t stay home Friday nights and sing hymns. To get out of the house (and far away from the pilgrims who came regularly to snap his mother’s picture) Shiner joined the army. In less than a month he washed out of basic training, and returned to Grange twenty pounds lighter but infinitely more sullen than when he’d left. To a depressed job market Shiner brought neither an adequate education nor practical work skills, so he wound up working the graveyard shift at the Grab N’Go, doubles on Saturday. Not much happened except for the stickups, which occurred every second or third weekend. Some nights barely a half dozen customers came through the door, leaving Shiner loads of free time to paw through the latest
Hustler
or
Swank.
He was always careful to sneak the nudie magazines back to the frozen-food aisle, the only place in the store that was blocked from the fish-eye gaze of the security camera. Shiner would dissect the magazines and arrange his favorite snatch shots across the Plexiglas lid of the ice-cream freezer—it was colder than a frog’s balls back there, but he couldn’t risk getting caught at the front of the store. His mother would be ruined if her only son got fired for whacking off on the job, especially on videotape. Even though Shiner was mad at his Ma, he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

At 2 a.m. on the morning of November 27, he was hunched feverishly over a
Best of Jugs
when he heard the jingle of the cat bell that was fastened to the store’s front door. He tucked himself in and hurried up toward the register. It took him a moment to recognize the two customers as the same men who’d stopped by earlier in the evening for jerky and Quick Picks. Clearly they’d been in an awesome bar fight.

“The hell happened to you boys?” Shiner asked.

The short one, dressed in camo, asked for Band-Aids. The one with the ponytail requested malt liquor. Shiner obliged—finally, some excitement! He helped the men clean and bind their multiple wounds. The camouflaged one introduced himself as Bodean Gazzer, Bode for short. He said his friend was called Chub.

“Pleased to meetcha,” said Shiner.

“Son, we need your help.”

“OK.”

Bode said, “You believe in God and family?”

Shiner hesitated. Not this again—more pilgrims! But then Chub said, “You believe in guns?”

“The right to bear arms,” Bode Gazzer clarified. “It’s in the Constitution.”

“Sure,” said Shiner.

“You got a gun?”

“Course,” Shiner answered.

“Excellent. And the white man—you believe in the white man?”

“Goddamn right!”

“Good,” Bode Gazzer said.

He told Shiner to take a hard look at himself. Look at where he’d ended up, behind the counter of a miserable motherfucking convenience store, waiting on Cubans and Negroes and Jews and probably even a few Indians.

Chub said, “How old are you, boy?”

“Nineteen.”

“And this is your grand plan for life?” Chub sneered as he waved a hand around the store. “This is your, whatchamacallit, your birthright?”

“Hell, no.” Shiner found it difficult to meet Chub’s gaze; the split eyelid was distracting and creepy. The closed portion hung pale and unblinking, a torn drape behind which the yolky bloodshot eyeball would intermittently disappear.

“I bet you didn’t know,” Bode Gazzer said, “your hard-earned tax dollars are payin’ for a crack NATO army to invade the U.S.A.”

Shiner had no clue what the camouflaged man was talking about, though he didn’t let on. He’d never heard of NATO and in his entire life hadn’t paid enough in income taxes to finance a box of bullets, much less a whole invasion.

Headlights in the parking lot caught his attention: a Dodge Caravan full of tourists, pulling up to the gas pumps.

Chub frowned. “Tell ‘em you’re closed.”

“What?”

“Now!” Bode barked.

The clerk did as he was told. When he came back in the store, he found the men whispering to each other.

The one called Chub said, “We’s just sayin’ you’d make a fine recruit.”

“For what?” Shiner asked.

Bode lowered his voice. “You got any interest in saving America from certain doom?”

“I guess. Sure.” Then, after thinking about it: “Would I have to quit my job?”

Bode Gazzer nodded portentously. “Soon,” he said.

Shiner listened as the men explained where America had gone wrong, allowing Washington to fall into the hands of communists, lesbians, queers and race mixers. Shiner was annoyed to learn he probably would have
owned
the Grab N’Go by now if it weren’t for something called “affirmative action”—a law evidently dreamed up by the commies to help blacks take over the nation.

Pretty soon Shiner’s universe began to make more sense. He was pleased to learn it wasn’t all his doing, this sorry-ass excuse for a life. No, it was the result of a complicated and diabolical plot, a vast conspiracy against the ordinary working white man. All this time there’d been a heavy boot on Shiner’s neck, and he hadn’t even known! Out of ignorance he’d always assumed it was his own damn fault—first quitting high school, then crapping out of the army. He’d been unaware of the larger, darker forces at work, “oppressing” him and “subordinating” him.
Enslaving
him, Chub added.

Thinking about it made Shiner angry, but also oddly elated. Bode Gazzer and Chub were doing wonders for his self-esteem. They gave him a sense of worth. They gave him pride. Best of all, they gave him an excuse for his failures; someone else to blame! Shiner was invigorated with relief.

“How come you guys know so much?”

“We learned the hard way,” Bode said.

Chub cut in: “You say you got a gun?”

“Yep,” Shiner said. “Marlin .22.”

Chub snorted. “No, boy, I said a
gun.”

In more detail Bode Gazzer explained about the impending invasion of NATO troops from the Bahamas and their mission of imposing a totalitarian world regime on the United States. Shiner’s eyes grew wide at the mention of the White Rebel Brotherhood.

“I’ve heard of ‘em!” the young man exclaimed.

“You have?” Chub shot a beady look at Bode, who shrugged.

Shiner said, “Yeah. It’s a band, right?”

“No, dickbrain, it’s not a band. It’s a militia,” Chub said.

“A well-regulated militia,” Bode added, “like they talk about in the Second Amendment.”

“Oh,” said Shiner. He hadn’t read the first one yet.

In a low confiding tone, Bode Gazzer said the White Rebel Brotherhood was preparing for prolonged armed resistance—
heavily
armed resistance—to any forces, foreign or domestic, that posed a threat to something called the “sovereignty” of private American citizens.

Bode laid a hand on the back of Shiner’s neck. With a friendly squeeze: “So what do you say?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“You want into the WRB?”

“You’re kiddin’!”

Chub said, “Answer the man. Yes or no.”

“Sure,” Shiner chirped. “What do I gotta do?”

“A favor,” Chub said. “It’s easy.”

“More like a assignment,” said Bode Gazzer. “Think of it like a test.”