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 a nice 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. Nothing 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 close
d.”
“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’re 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.”
Shiner’s expression clouded. He hated tests, especially multiple choice. That’s how he’d blown the SATs.
Chub sensed the boy’s consternation. “Forget ‘test,’” he told him. “It’s a favor, that’s all. A favor for your new white brothers.”
Instantly Shiner brightened.
When Tom Krome saw JoLayne’s living room, he told her (for the fourth time) to call the police. The house was a mother lode of evidence: fingerprints, plenty of blood to be typed. JoLayne Lucks said absolutely not, no way, and started cleaning up. Reluctantly Krome helped. There wasn’t much to be done about the gutted piano, or the bullet hole in the wood floor. The blood mopped up with ammonia and water.
Afterwards, while JoLayne took a shower, Krome buried the dead turtle under a lime tree in the backyard. When he came back inside, she was standing there, bundled in her robe.
Dripping water. Shredding lettuce into the aquarium.
“Well, the others seem fine,” she said quietly.
Krome led her away from the turtles. “What’ve you got against calling the cops?”
JoLayne pulled free, snatched up a broom. “They wouldn’t believe me.”
“How could they not? Look in the mirror.”
“I’m not talking about the beating. I’m talking about the Lotto ticket.”
“What about it?” Krome said.
“I’ve got no proof I ever had it. Which makes it damn hard to claim it was stolen.”
She had a point. Florida’s lottery computer kept track of how many winning tickets were bought and where, but there was no way of identifying the owners. That’s because Lotto numbers were sold over the counter with the beer and cigarets; trying to keep track of customers’ names—hundreds of thousands—would have been impossible. Consequently the lottery bureau had one intractable criterion for claiming the jackpot: possession of the winning ticket. If you didn’t have it, you didn’t get the money—no matter what your excuse. Over the years, once-in-a-lifetime fortunes had been lost to hungry puppies and teething infants and washing machines and toilets and house fires.
And now robbers.
Tom Krome was torn between his sympathy for JoLayne Lucks and the realization that he’d stumbled into a pretty good news story. He must have done a poor job of masking his anticipation, because JoLayne said: “I’m begging you not to write about this.”
“But it’ll flush the bastards out.”
“And I’ll never, ever get the money. Don’t you see? They’d burn the damn ticket before they’d go to jail. Burn it or bury it.”
Krome lifted his feet to make way for JoLayne’s fierce, metronomic sweeping.
“If these guys get spooked,” she went on, “that fourteen-million-dollar stub of paper is garbage. They see a newspaper headline about what they did … well, it’s all over. Same if I go to the police.”
She probably was right, Krome thought. But wouldn’t the robbers assume JoLayne would report the theft? That’s what most people would do.
He no longer heard the manic whisk of her sweeping. She was in the kitchen, leaning on the broom in front of the open refrigerator, letting the cool air soothe the cuts and bruises on her face.
Tom Krome said, “I’ll put some ice in a bag.”
JoLayne shook her head. The house was silent except for the drone of the aquarium pump and the turtles’ steady munching of lettuce.
After a few moments, she said: “All right, here it is. They said they’d come back and kill me if I told anyone about the lottery ticket. They said they’d come back and shoot my babies, one at a time. Then me.”
A chill went down Krome’s arms.
JoLayne Lucks went on: “They told me to say my boyfriend beat me up. That’s what I’m supposed to tell the doctor! ‘What boyfriend?’ I say. ‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’ And the short one goes, ‘You do now,’ and he punches me in the tits.”
Suddenly Krome couldn’t breathe. He stumbled out the back door. JoLayne found him on his knees in the tomato patch. She stroked his hair and told him to take it easy. Before long, the crashing in his ears faded away. She brought him a glass of cold juice, and they sat together on an iron bench facing a birdbath.
In a raw voice, Krome said: “You can identify these guys?”
“Of course.”
“They belong in jail.”
“Tom—”
“Here’s what you do: Go to the cops and the lottery bureau, and tell them everything that happened. About the robbery and the death threats. Give a statement, file a repo
rt. And then let the authorities wait for these bastards—”
“No.”
“Listen. These guys will surface soon. They’ve only got six months to claim that jackpot.”
“Tom, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t have six months. I need the money now.”
Krome looked at her. “What in the world for?”
“I just do.”
“Forget the money—”
“I can’t.”
“But these guys are monsters. They’re going to hurt someone else the way they hurt you. Maybe worse.”
“Not necessarily,” JoLayne said. “Not if we stop them first.”
The incredible part was, she meant it. Krome would have laughed except he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
JoLayne, pinching his right knee: “We could do it. You and me, we could find them.”
“To borrow an old expression: No fucking way.”
“They’re driving a bright-red pickup.”
“I don’t care if they’re in the starship Enterprise.”
“Tom, please.”
He held her hands. “In my business, fear is a sane and very healthy emotion. That’s because death and disaster aren’t abstractions. They’re as goddamn real as real can be.”
“Suppose I told you why I need the money. Would it make a difference?”
“JoLayne, I don’t think so.” It tore him up to look at her, at what they’d done.
She pulled away and walked to the aquarium. Krome could hear her talking—to herself, to the turtles, or maybe to the men who’d beaten her so badly.
“I’m truly sorry,” he said.
When JoLayne turned around, she didn’t appear upset. “Just think,” she said mischievously, “if I get that lottery ticket back. Think of the fantastic story you’ll be missing.”
Tom Krome smiled. “You’re ruthless, you know that?”
“I’m also right. Please help me find them.”
He said, “I’ve got a better idea. May I borrow the phone?”
Shiner awoke to the sight of his mother hovering over him. She was dressed in the white bridal gown that she always wore on Mondays to the Road-Stain Jesus. The outfit was a smash with the Christian tourists—it wasn’t uncommon for Shiner’s Ma to come home with two hundred dollars in cash from donations. Monday was her best day of the week, pilgrimwise.