Ravens (2 page)

“Well I do have
that
,” said Mom.

And Tara made her move. Melted silkily away while Mom was too dazzled by the numbers to notice.

In her room, Tara shut the door and sat at the laptop on her desk. Clio had just posted:

u still "studying" bitch? do u think jonah wrights sperm has beneficial properties of healing? wil it help u lose pounds from
hips waist and thighs? he wasn't at headquarters tho just creepy seth from jax. I h8 the wick. die if I dont getout of the
wick.

Tara wrote back:

Havent started yet. Caught by Mom. She's watching the drawing. In 20 seconds she'l lose and go skitzo.

And right on time: Mom’s hell-on-the-loose shriek from the living room. Worse even than usual. Then: “TARA! TA-
RA
!”

Tara typed brb and opened the door. “Yes?”

“TARA!”

Particularly anguished tonight. Tara returned to the living room to find her on her knees before the TV, with Jase cowering
in the corner. Mom had utterly lost it. Her mouth was open and she was holding up one of her tickets and tears were pouring
down her cheeks, and this wasn’t just another drunken display of self-pity: there was true fear. “GRACE OF GOD!” she cried.
As though she were beholding His face at that very moment. She clutched the ticket in her fist and rocked back and forth.
“GRACE OF GOD! GRACE OF GOD! GRACE OF GOD!”

Shaw
was roasting to death. So feeble the a.c. in this ’91 Tercel that he had to leave the windows open or die. Though the air
that came in was as hot as jet exhaust, so he was dying anyway. For a while he crowded up to a big rig in the next lane, for
the shade. But the truck turned off at a weigh station and left him in the oven again, and he hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four
hours and he’d been behind the wheel all night with only the one nap at that rest stop near Charlotte, and he was jacked to
the gills on Red Bull, coffee, and Dextrostat. And the Georgia landscape was nothing but slash pine and ribbon-of-highway,
forever. Also Romeo’s sleeping was getting on his nerves. Romeo had been sleeping ferociously since the mountains: sweating,
shivering, sometimes grinding his teeth, which annoyed the hell out of Shaw. It was high time to wake him up.

But not yet. Less than an hour to Florida. He could deal with the heat. It had been another cold miserable Ohio spring and
now Florida by his calculations was fifty-six minutes away. If he endured the heat and the boredom, and stayed at eighty-one
miles an hour, they could be in Florida in fifty-five minutes and… forty seconds — more or less, and stop for breakfast in
Florida
.

Then he noticed the pull. There was a slight shimmy in the wheel, coaxing him to the left. He thought he knew what it was.
The left front tire had a slow leak, which Romeo was supposed to have checked before the trip, but he must have forgotten.
Shaw took the next exit. There were four gas stations, but all he wanted was air, so it didn’t matter: he chose one at random.
He drove up to the air hose at the side of the lot.

After he cut the engine, it still seemed that the world was hurtling along.

He got out and picked up the air hose, and found that the pressure gauge was busted. He knew Romeo wouldn’t have one. He went
into the store. It called itself ‘Chummy’s Gourmet Shoppe’, but it was just standard convenience-store junk. Chips and salsa,
banks of candy, a great wall of electrified soda. The air was sweetly cool though. And the counter girl had nice upstanding
breasts under her T-shirt.

“Hi,” she said, and it had a Southern flip at the end. His first Southern girl. He’d met girls from the South before but this
was the first girl he’d met
in
the South. Her nametag said Cheryl. He ran his tongue over his teeth to clean them, and wished he had something clever to
say back. But he couldn’t think of anything.

“You got like a tire gauge?” he asked. “I have to check my tires.”

She placed a much-worn gauge on the counter. “Don’t drive off with it.”

“I won’t.”

She gave him a warm smile.

He went out to the Tercel and squatted beside the left front tire and tried not to touch the hubcap. He read the pressure
at 28 psi, which seemed not too low considering. He gave it a few jolts of air, then went and read the rear tires, which were
right at 30 so they were fine.

Romeo’s door swung open, and his voice came out: “Sup?”

“Car’s sort of pulling.”

“Where we at?”

“Georgia.”

“They weren’t shitting about the heat, were they?”

If it wasn’t the tires, Shaw thought, it was probably the alignment. Or even the bearing. It had better not be the bearing.
He’d agreed to split costs on this trip, but he wasn’t paying half on a new fucking bearing when it was Romeo’s car. Maybe
they could ignore it. Just nurse it as far as Key West and then sell it (the plan was to hire out on fishing boats and work
their way to Trinidad and never return to their zombie jobs at Dayton Techworld).

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 from 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 —”