“What do you mean?” Sinclair hated letters almost as much as he hated telephone calls. The best stories were those that produced no reaction, one way or another, from readers. “What kind of mail?” he asked.
“Tons,” Krome replied, “if we do a piece saying Jesus is a gambling tout. Can you imagine? Hell, you’ll probably hear from Ralph Reed himself. Next they’ll be boycotting our advertisers.”
Firmly Sinclair said: “So let’s stay away from that angle. By all means.” After a pause: “Maybe this isn’t such a hot idea.”
On the other end, Tom Krome smiled. “I’ll drive up to Grange this afternoon. Check it out and let you know.”
“OK,” Sinclair said. “Go check it out. You want my sister’s phone number?”
“That’s not necessary,” said Krome.
Sinclair experienced a small shudder of relief.
Demencio was refilling the fiberglass Madonna when his wife, Trish, hurried outside to say that somebody in town won the lottery.
“I don’t suppose it’s us,” said Demencio.
“Rumor is JoLayne Lucks.”
“Figures.”
Demencio removed the top of the Madonna’s head and reached inside the statue to retrieve a plastic bottle that had once held the wiper fluid in a 1989 Civic hatchback. These days the jug held tap water, lightly scented with perfume.
Trish said, “You’re almost out of ‘Charlie’.”
Demencio nodded irritably. That would be a problem. It was important to use a fragrance the righteous faithful wouldn’t recognize; otherwise suspicions would be stirred. Once he’d experimented with Lady Stetson and there was nearly an uprising. The third pilgrim in line, a buzzardly bank teller from Huntsville, had sniffed it out instantly: “Hey, Mother Mary’s crying Coty tears!”
The woman was discreetly whisked away from the shrine before trouble started. Demencio had vowed to be more careful. Scenting the Madonna’s tears was a fine touch, he thought. The devout souls who waited so long in the hot Florida sun deserved more than a drop of salty water on their fingertips—this was supposed to be Jesus’ mother, for heaven’s sake. Her tears ought to smell special.
Trish held the plastic bottle while Demencio poured the last of the Charlie perfume. Again she marveled at how small and childlike his brown hands were. And steady. He would’ve made a wonderful surgeon, her husband, if only he’d had the chance. If only he’d been born in, say, Boston, Massachusetts, instead of Hialeah, Florida.
Demencio replaced the plastic bottle inside the Madonna. Clear thin tubes ran upward from the bottle’s cap to the inside of the statue’s eyelids, where the clever Demencio had drilled pinprick-sized holes. A thicker black tube ran internally down the length of the statue and emerged from another hole in her right heel. The black air tube connected to a small rubber bulb, which could be operated by hand or foot. Squeezing the bulb forced the phony tears out of the bottle, up the twin tubes and into the Madonna’s eyes.
There was an art to it, and Demencio fancied himself one of the best in the business. He kept the tears small, subtle and paced at intervals. The longer the crowd was made to linger, the more soft drinks, angel food cake, T-shirts, Bibles, holy candles, and sunblock they purchased.
From Demencio, of course.
Most everybody in Grange knew what he was up to, but they didn’t say much. Some were too busy running their own scams. Besides, tourists were tourists and there wasn’t much difference, when you got down to the core morality of it, between Mickey Mouse and a fiberglass Madonna.
Trish liked to say: “All we’re really selling is hope.”
Demencio liked to say: “I’d rather peddle religion than a phony goddamn rodent.”
He made decent money, though he wasn’t rich and probably never would be. Not like Miss JoLayne Lucks, whose astounding and undeserved windfall he now contemplated.
“How much she win?” he asked his wife.
“Fourteen million, if it’s true.”
“She’s not sure?”
“She’s not sayin’.”
Demencio snorted. Anybody else, they’d be hooting and hollering all over town. Fourteen million bucks!
Trish said, “All they announced is there’s two winning tickets. One was bought down around Homestead, the other was in Grange.”
“The Grab N’Go?”
“Yep. The way they figured out who, the store only sold twenty-two Lotto tickets all last week. Twenty-one is accounted for. JoLayne’s is the only one left.”
Demencio fitted the fiberglass Madonna back together. “So what’s she up to?”
Trish reported that, according to neighbors, JoLayne had not come out of her house all morning and was not answering the telephone.
“Maybe she ain’t home,” Demencio said. He carried the Madonna into the house. Trish followed. He set the statue in a corner, next to his golf bag.
“Let’s go see her,” he said.
“Why?” Trish wondered what Demencio was planning. They barely knew the Lucks woman to say hello.
“Bring her some angel food cake,” Demencio proposed. “It’s a neighborly thing on a Sunday morning. I mean, why the hell not?”
2
JoLayne Lucks didn’t expect to see Trish and Demencio on her front porch, and Demencio didn’t expect to see so much of JoLayne’s legs. She appeared in a peach-colored jogging bra and sky-blue panties.
“I wasn’t ready for company,” she said in a sleepy voice.
Trish: “We’ll drop by another time.”
“Whatcha got there?”
Demencio said, “Cake.”
He was transfixed by JoLayne’s perfectly muscled calves. How’d they get like that? He never saw her running.
“Come on in,” she said, and Demencio—shaking free of his wife’s grip—went in.
They stood, each holding one side of the cake plate, while JoLayne Lucks went to put on a pair of jeans. The small tidy house showed no signs of a post-lottery celebration. Trish remarked on the handsome piano in the living room; Demencio eyed an aquarium full of baby turtles—there must have been fifty of them, paddling full tilt and goggled-eyed against the glass.
To Trish he said, “I wonder what that’s all about.”
“You hush. They’re pets is all.”
JoLayne returned with her hair under a baseball cap, which Demencio found intriguing and sexy—the attitude as much as the style. JoLayne told Trish the cake looked delicious.
“Angel food,” Demencio’s wife said. “My grandma’s recipe. On my mother’s side.”
“Sit down, please.” JoLayne carried the plate to the kitchen counter. Trish and Demencio sat stiffly on an antique cherry-wood love seat.
He said, “Those your turtles?”
JoLayne Lucks gave a bright smile. “Would you like one?”
Demencio shook his head. Trish, by way of explanation: “We’ve got a jealous old tomcat.”
JoLayne peeled the plastic wrapping from the cake and broke off a chunk with her fingers. Serenely she popped it in her mouth. “What brings you folks by?”
Trish glanced at Demencio, who shifted in the love seat. “Well,” he said, “here’s the thing—we heard about your good fortune. You know….”
JoLayne gave him no help. She was savoring the angel food.
Demencio said, “About the Lotto, I mean.”
One of her fine brown eyebrows arched. She kept chewing. Demencio fumbled with a strategy. The woman seemed slightly spacey.
Trish came to the rescue. “We stopped over to say congratulations. Nothing like this ever happens in Grange.”
“No?” With a lizard flick of her tongue, JoLayne Lucks removed a crumb from one of her sparkling cobalt fingernails. “I thought miracles happen all the time around here. Most every Sunday, right?”
Demencio reddened, perceiving a dig at his Madonna concession. Trish, courageously: “What I meant, JoLayne, was nobody’s ever won anything. Nobody I can recall.”
“Well, you mig
ht be right.”
“It’s just a shame you’ve got to split the jackpot with somebody else.” Trish spoke with true sympathy. “Not that fourteen million bucks is anything to sneeze at, but it’d be nice if you were the only winner. Nice for Grange, too.”
Demencio shot a glare at his wife. “It’s still nice for Grange,” he said. “It’ll put us on the map, for damn sure.”
JoLayne Lucks said, “Ya’ll want some coffee?”
“So what’s next, girl?” Trish asked.
“I thought I’d feed the turtles.”
Trish chuckled uneasily. “You know what I mean. Maybe a new car? A place at the beach?”
JoLayne Lucks cocked her head. “You’re losing me now.”
Demencio had had enough. He stood up, hitching at his trousers. “I won’t lie. We came to ask a favor.”
JoLayne beamed. “That’s more like it.” She noticed how Trish’s hands had balled with tension.
Demencio forced a cough, to clear his throat. “Pretty soon you’ll be all famous, in the newspapers and TV. My idea was maybe when they ask where your Lotto luck came from, you could put in a good word.”
“For you?”
“For the Madonna, yes.”
“But I’ve never even been to the shrine.”
“I know, I know.” Demencio held up his hands. “It’s just an idea. I can’t promise hardly anything in return. I mean, you’re a millionaire now.”
Although he sorely hoped JoLayne wouldn’t ask for a commission on his take, he was prepared to part with ten percent.
Trish, quietly: “It’d just be a favor, like he said. Pure and simple. A favor for a neighbor.”
“Christmas is coming,” Demencio added. “Any little thing would help. Anything you could do.”
JoLayne Lucks walked them, one on each arm, to the door. She said, “Well, it’s surely something to think about. And, Trish, that’s glorious cake.”
“You’re so kind.”
“Sure you don’t fancy a turtle?”
In tandem, Demencio and his wife edged off the porch. “Thanks just the same,” they said, and walked home in silence. Trish pondered the possibility she’d gotten some bad information, as JoLayne Lucks didn’t behave like a woman who’d won a free toaster, much less a Lotto jackpot. Demencio, meanwhile, had concluded JoLayne Lucks was either a borderline psycho or a brilliant faker, and that further investigation was necessary.
Bodean James Gazzer had spent thirty-one years perfecting the art of assigning blame. His personal credo—Everything bad that happens is someone else’s fault—could, with imagination, be stretched to fit any circumstance. Bode stretched it.
The intestinal unrest that occasionally afflicted him surely was the result of drinking milk taken from secretly radiated cows. The roaches in his apartment were planted by his filthy immigrant next-door neighbors. His dire financial plight was caused by runaway bank computers and conniving Wall Street Zionists; his bad luck in the South Florida job market, prejudice against English-speaking applicants. Even the lousy weather had a culprit: air pollution from Canada, diluting the ozone and derailing the jet stream.
Bode Gazzer’s accusatory talents were honed at an early age. The youngest of three sons, he veered astray to develop a precocious fondness for truancy, vandalism and shoplifting. His parents, both teachers, earnestly tried to redirect the boy, only to hear themselves lashingly blamed for his troubles. Bode took the position that he was persecuted because he was short, and that his shortness was attributable to his mother’s careless dietary practices (and his father’s gluttonous complicity) during pregnancy. That both Jean and Randall Gazzer were genetically slight of stature was immaterial to young Bode—from television he’d gathered that humans as a species were getting taller with evolution, and he therefore expected to surpass his parents, if only by an inch or two. Yet Bode stopped growing in eighth grade, a fact lugubriously chronicled in the family’s bimonthly measuring ceremonies, conducted at the kitchen doorjamb. A multicolored sequence of pencil slashes confirmed Bode’s worst fears: His two older brothers were still ascending positively, while he himself was finished, capped off at the ripe old age of fourteen.
The bitter realization hardened Bode Gazzer against his MSG-gobbling parents, and society at large. He became “the bad element” in the neighborhood, the cocky ringleader of misdemeanors and minor felonies. He worked diligently at being a hood, taking up unfiltered cigarets, public spitting and gratuitous profanity. Every so often he purposely provoked his brothers into beating him up, so he could tell friends he’d been in a savage gang fight.
Bode’s schoolteacher parents didn’t believe in whippings and (except for one occasion) never laid a glove on him. Jean and Randall Gazzer preferred “talking out” problems with their children, and spent many hours around the supper table “interacting” earnestly with the insolent Bodean. He was more than a match. Not only had he acquired the rhetorical skills of his mother and father, he was boundlessly creative. No matter what happened, Bode always produced an elaborate excuse from which he would not budge, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
By the time he turned eighteen, his juvenile arrest record filled three pages, and his weary parents had put themselves in the hands of a Zen counselor. Bode had come to relish his role as the family outlaw, the bad seed, the misunderstood one. He could explain everything and would, at the drop of a hat. By the time he turned twenty-two, he was living on beer, bold talk and a multitude of convenient resentments. “I’m on God’s shit list,” he’d announce in barrooms, “so keep your damn distance.”
A series of unhealthy friendships eventually drew Bode Gazzer into the culture of hate and hard-core bigotry. Previously, when dishing out fault for his plight, Bode had targeted generic authority figures—parents, brothers, cops, judges—without considering factors such as race, religion or ethnicity. He’d swung broadly, and without much impact. But xenophobia and racism infused his griping with new vitriol. Now it wasn’t just some storm-trooper cop who busted Bode with stolen VCR’s, it was the Cuban storm-trooper cop who obviously had a hard-on for Anglos; it wasn’t just the double-talking defense lawyer who sold Bode down the river, it was the double-talking Jew defense lawyer who clearly held a vendetta against Christians; and it wasn’t just the cokehead bondsman who refused to put up Bode’s bail, it was the cokehead Negro bondsman who wanted him to stay in jail and get cornholed to death.
Bode Gazzer’s political awakening coincided with an overdue revision of his illicit habits. He’d made up his mind to forsake burglaries, car thefts and other property offenses in favor of forgeries, check kiting and other so-called paper crimes, for which judges seldom dispensed state prison time.
As it happened, the hate movement in which Bode had taken an interest strongly espoused fraud as a form of civil disobedience. Militia pamphlets proclaimed that ripping off banks, utilities and credit-card companies was a just repudiation of the United States government and all the liberals, Jews, faggots, lesbians, Negroes, environmentalists and communists who infested it. Bode Gazzer admired the logic. However, he proved only slightly more skillful at passing bad checks than he was at hot-wiring Oldsmobiles.
Between always-brief jail stints, he’d decorated the inside of his apartment with antigovernment posters purchased at various gun shows: David Koresh, Randy Weaver and Gorden Kahl were featured heroically.
Whenever Chub visited the place, he raised a long-necked Budweiser in salute to the martyrs honored on Bode’s wall. Through television he’d acquired a vague awareness of Koresh and Weaver, but he knew little about Kahl except that he’d been a Dakota farmer and tax protester, and that the feds had shot the shit out of him.
“Goddamn storm troopers,” Chub snarled now, parroting a term he’d picked up at a small but lively militia meeting on Big Pine Key. He carried his beer to a futon sofa, where he plopped down splay-legged and relaxed. Quickly his thoughts drifted from the fallen patriots to his own sunny fortunes.
&nbs
p; Bode Gazzer hunched at the dinette, a newspaper spread under his nose. He’d been in a spiteful mood since learning from a state lottery pamphlet that he and Chub wouldn’t be receiving the $14 million all at once—it was to be dispensed in equal payments over twenty years.
Worse: The payments would be taxed!
Chub, who wasn’t bad with numbers, attempted to cheer Bode Gazzer with the fact that $700,000 a year, even before taxes, was still a very large piece of change.
“Not large enough to outfit a patriot force,” Bode snapped.
Chub said, “Rules is rules. The hell can you do?” He got up to turn on the TV. Nothing happened. “This busted or what?”
Bode smoothed the wrinkles from the newspaper and said: “Christ, don’t you get it? This is everything we’ve been talkin’ about, everything worth fightin’ for—life, liberty, pursuit and happiness all rolled up in one.”
Chub thwacked the broken television with the flat of his hand. He wasn’t in the mood for one of Bode’s speeches yet it now seemed inescapable.
Bode Gazzer continued: “Finally we hit it big and what happens? The state of motherfucking Florida is gonna pay us in drips and draps. Then, whatever we get is snatched by the Infernal Revenue!”
Listening to his friend, Chub’s high feelings about their good luck began to ebb. He’d always viewed the lottery as a potential way to get tons of free money without doing jackshit. But the way Bode explained it, the Lotto was just another sinister example of government intrusion, tax abuse and liberal deceit.
“You think it’s a accident we gotta share this money with somebody else?”
With the mouth of the beer bottle, Chub massaged the furry nape of his neck. He wondered what his friend was getting at.
Bode rapped his knuckles on the dinette. “Here’s my prediction: The shitweasel holding the other Lotto ticket, he’s either a Negro, Jew or Cuban type.”
“Go on!”
“That’s how they do it, Chub. To fuck over decent Americans such as you and me. You think they’re gonna let two white boys take the whole jackpot? Not these days, no way!” Bode’s nose angled back toward the newspaper. “Where’s Grange? Over near Tampa?”