The Winner (7 page)

She shook her head clear and squeezed her hands together. That kind of thinking wasn’t going to help her now. LuAnn pulled her handbag over and slid out the steno pad. What she had found at the library had greatly intrigued her.

Six lottery winners. She had started with the ones last fall and continued up to the present. She had written down their names and backgrounds. The articles had carried a photo of each winner; their smiles had seemed to stretch across the width of the page. In reverse order of winning they were: Judy Davis, age twenty-seven, a welfare mother with three young children; Herman Rudy, age fifty-eight, a former truck driver on disability with massive medical bills from an injury on the job; Wanda Tripp, sixty-six, widowed and subsisting on Social Security’s “safety net” of four hundred dollars a month; Randy Stith, thirty-one, a recent widower with a young child, who had recently been laid off from his assembly line job; Bobbie Jo Reynolds, thirty-three, a waitress in New York who after winning the article said had given up her dream of starring on Broadway to take up painting in the south of France. Finally, there was Raymond Powell, forty-four, a recent bankrupt who had moved into a homeless shelter.

LuAnn slumped back in her seat.
And LuAnn Tyler, twenty years old, single mother, dirt poor, uneducated, no prospects, no future.
She would fit in perfectly with this desperate group.

She had only gone back six months. How many more of them were there? It made for great stories, she had to admit. People in dire straits hit the jackpot. Old people with newfound wealth. Young children with a suddenly bright future. All their dreams coming true. Jackson’s face appeared in her thoughts.
Someone has to win. Why not you, LuAnn?
His calm, cool tones beckoned to her. In fact, those two sentences reverberated over and over in her head. She felt herself beginning to slide over the top of an imaginary dam. What was awaiting her in the deep waters below, she was not sure. The unknown both scared her and drew her, fiercely. She looked at Lisa. She could not shake the image of her little girl growing into a woman in a trailer with no way to escape while the young wolves circled.

“What’cha doing, sweetie?”

LuAnn jerked around and stared into Beth’s face. The older woman expertly juggled plates full of food in both hands.

“Nothing much, just counting up all my fortune,” LuAnn said.

Beth grinned and looked at the steno pad, which LuAnn quickly closed. “Well, don’t forget the little people when you hit the big time, Miss LuAnn Tyler.” Beth cackled and then carried the food orders to the waiting customers.

LuAnn smiled uneasily. “I won’t, Beth. I swear,” she said quietly.

I
t was eight o’clock in the morning on
the day.
LuAnn stepped off the bus with Lisa. This was not her usual stop, but it was close enough to the trailer that she could walk it in half an hour or so, which was nothing to her. The rain had passed and left the sky a brilliant blue and the earth a lush green. Small clusters of birds sang the praises of the changing season and the exit of another tedious winter. Everywhere LuAnn turned as she tramped along under the newly risen sun there was fresh growth. She liked this time of the day. It was calm, soothing, and she tended to feel hopeful about things.

LuAnn looked ahead to the gently rolling fields and her manner grew both somber and expectant. She walked slowly through the arched gateway and past the patinated sign proclaiming her entrance into the Heavenly Meadows Cemetery. Her long, slender feet carried her automatically to Section 14, Lot 21, Plot 6; it occupied a space on a small knoll in the shadow of a mature dogwood that would soon begin showing its unique wares. She laid Lisa’s carrier down on the stone bench near her mother’s grave and lifted out the little girl. Kneeling in the dewy grass, she brushed some twigs and dirt off the bronze marker. Her mother, Joy, had not lived all that long: thirty-seven years. It had seemed both brief and an eternity for Joy Tyler, that LuAnn knew. The years with Benny had not been pleasant, and had, LuAnn firmly believed now, hastened her mother’s exit from the living.

“Remember? This is where your grandma is, Lisa. We haven’t been for a while because the weather was so bad. But now that it’s spring it’s time to visit again.” LuAnn held up her daughter and pointed with her finger at the recessed ground. “Right there. She’s sleeping right now, but whenever we come by, she sort of wakes up. She can’t really talk back to us but if you close your eyes tight as a baby bird’s, and listen real, real hard, you can kinda hear her. She’s letting you know what she thinks about things.”

After saying this, LuAnn rose up and sat on the bench with Lisa on her lap, bundled against the chill of the early morning. Lisa was still sleepy; it usually took her a while to wake up, but once she did, the little girl wouldn’t stop moving or talking for several hours. The cemetery was deserted except for a workman LuAnn could see far in the distance, cutting grass on a riding mower. The sounds of the mower’s engine didn’t reach her and there were few cars on the roadway. The silence was peaceful and she closed her eyes tight as a baby bird’s and listened as hard as she could.

At the diner she had made up her mind to call Jackson right after she got off work. He had said anytime and she figured he would answer the phone on the first ring regardless of the time. Saying yes had seemed like the easiest thing in the world to do. And the smartest. It was her turn. After twenty years filled with grief, disappointment, and depths of despair that seemed to have endless elasticity, the gods had smiled upon her. Out of the masses of billions, LuAnn Tyler’s name had turned the hat trick on the slot machine. It would never happen again, of that she was dead certain. She was also sure that the other people she had read about in the paper had made a similar phone call. She hadn’t read anything about them getting in trouble. That sort of news would have been all over, certainly in as poor an area as she lived in, where everyone played the lottery in a frantic effort to throw off the bitter hopelessness of being a have-not. Somewhere between leaving the diner and stepping on the bus, however, she had felt something very deep inside of her prompting her to not pick up the phone but, instead, to seek counsel other than her own. She came here often, to talk, to lay flowers she had picked, or to spruce up her mother’s final resting place. In the past, she had often thought she actually did communicate with her mother. She had never heard voices; it was more levels of feelings, of senses. Euphoria or deep sadness sometimes overtook her here, and she had finally put it down to her mother reaching out to her, letting her opinion on things having to do with LuAnn seep into her child’s body, into her mind. Doctors would probably call her crazy, she knew, but that didn’t take away from what she felt.

Right now she hoped for something to speak to her, to let her know what to do. Her mother had raised her right. LuAnn had never told a lie until she had started living with Duane. Then the fabrications seemed to just happen; they seemed to be an inextricable part of simply surviving. But she had never stolen anything in her life, never really done anything wrong that she knew of. She had kept her dignity and self-respect through a lot over the years and it felt good. It helped her get up and face the toil of another day when that day contained little in the way of hope that the next day and the next would be any different, any better.

But today, nothing was happening. The noisy lawn mower was drawing closer and the traffic on the road had picked up. She opened her eyes and sighed. Things were not right. Her mother apparently was not going to be available today of all days. She stood up and was preparing to leave when a feeling came over her. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. Her eyes were automatically drawn to another section of the cemetery, to another plot that lay about five hundred yards away. Something was pulling her there, and she had no doubt what it was. Eyes wide, and her legs moving of their own accord, LuAnn made her way down the narrow, winding asphalt walkway. Something made her clutch Lisa tightly to her bosom, as though if she didn’t the little girl would be snatched away by the unseen force compelling LuAnn to its epicenter. As she drew nearer to the spot, the sky seemed to turn a terrible dark. The sounds of the mowing were gone, the cars had stopped coming down the road. The only sound was the wind whistling over the flat grass and around the weathered testaments to the dead. Her hair blowing straight back, LuAnn finally stopped and looked down. The bronze marker was similar in style to her mother’s, and the last name on it was identical: Benjamin Herbert Tyler. She had not been to this spot since her father had died. She had tightly clutched her mother’s hand at his funeral, neither woman feeling the least bit saddened and yet having to display appropriate emotions for the many friends and family of the departed. In the strange way the world sometimes worked, Benny Tyler had been immensely popular with just about everyone except his own family because he had been generous and cordial with everyone except his own family. Seeing his formal name etched in the metal made her suck in her breath. It was as though the letters were stenciled over an office door and she would soon be ushered in to see the man himself. She started to draw back from the sunken earth, to retreat from the sharp jabs that seemed to sink in deeper with each step she had taken toward his remains. Then the intense feeling she had not realized beside her mother’s grave suddenly overtook her. Of all places. She could almost see wisps of gauzy membrane swirling above the grave like a spiderweb picked up by the wind. She turned and ran. Even with Lisa, she hit an all-out sprint three steps into a run that would have made many an Olympian bristle with envy. Without missing a step and gripping Lisa to her chest, LuAnn snatched up Lisa’s baby carrier and flew past the gates of the cemetery. She had not closed her eyes tight like a baby bird. She had not even been listening particularly hard. And yet the immortal speech of Benny Tyler had risen from depths so far down she could not contemplate them, and had made its way ferociously into the tender ear canals of his only child.

Take the money, little girl. Daddy says take it and damn everyone and everything else. Listen to me. Use what little brain you’ve got. When the body goes, you got nothing. Nothing! When did I ever lie to you, baby doll? Take it, dammit, take it, you dumb bitch! Daddy loves you. Do it for Big Daddy. You know you want to.

The man on the mower paused to watch her race away under a sky of pristine blue that begged to be photographed. The traffic on the road had picked up considerably. All the sounds of life, which had disappeared so inexplicably for LuAnn during those few moments, had once again reappeared.

The man looked over at the grave from which LuAnn had fled. Some people just got spooked in a graveyard, he figured, even in broad daylight. He went back to his mowing.

LuAnn was already out of sight.

The wind chased the pair down the long dirt road. Sweat drenched LuAnn’s face as the sun bore down on her from gaps in the foliage; her long legs ate up the ground with a stride that was both machine-like in its precision and wonderfully animalistic in its grace. Growing up she had been able to outrun just about everybody in the county, including most of the varsity football team. God-given world-class speed, her seventh-grade gym teacher had told her. What exactly she was supposed to do with that gift no one ever told her. For a thirteen-year-old girl with a woman’s figure it had just meant if she couldn’t beat up the boy who was trying to feel her up, at least she could probably outrun him.

Now her chest was burning. For a minute she wondered if she would keel over from a heart attack, as her father had. Perhaps there was some physical flaw buried deep within all the descendants of the man, just waiting for the opportunity to cleave another Tyler from the ranks. She slowed down. Lisa was bawling now and LuAnn finally stopped running and hugged her baby hard, whispering soothing words into the little girl’s small pink ear while she made slow, wide circles in the dense shadows of the forest until the cries finally stopped.

LuAnn walked the rest of the way home. The words of Benny Tyler had made up her mind. She would pack what she could from the trailer and send somebody back for the rest. She would stay with Beth for a while. Beth had offered before. She had an old ramshackle house, but it had a lot of rooms and after the death of her husband her only companions were a pair of cats that Beth swore were crazier than she was. LuAnn would take Lisa into the classroom with her if need be, but she was going to get her GED and then maybe take some classes at the community college. If Johnny Jarvis could do it then she could, too. And Mr. Jackson could find somebody else to “gladly” take her place. All these answers to her life’s dilemmas had come roaring in upon her so fast she could barely keep her head from exploding off her shoulders with relief. Her mother had spoken to her, in a roundabout manner perhaps, but the magic had been worked. “Never forget about the dearly departed, Lisa,” she whispered to the little girl. “You just never know.”

LuAnn slowed as she neared the trailer. Duane had been rolling in money the day before. She wondered how much he had left. He was quick to buy rounds at the Squat and Gobble when he had a few bucks in his pocket. Lord only knew what he had done with the wad he had under the bed. She didn’t want to know where he had gotten it. She figured it was only an additional reason to get the hell out.

As she rounded the bend, a flock of blackbirds scattered from the trees overhead and scared her. She looked up at them angrily for a moment and then kept walking. As the trailer came into her line of sight, she abruptly stopped. There was a car parked out front. A convertible, big and wide, shiny black with white sidewalls, and on the hood a huge chrome ornament that from a distance looked vaguely like a woman engaged in some indecent sexual act. Duane drove a battered Ford pickup truck which had been in the impoundment lot the last LuAnn had seen it. None of Duane’s cronies drove anything like this crazy machine. What in the world was going on? Had Duane gone flat-out loco and bought this boat? She stole up to the vehicle and examined it, keeping one eye on the trailer. The seats were covered in a white leather with inlays of deep burgundy. The inside of the car was spotless, the dashboard clock polished enough to hurt your eye when the sunlight hit it just so. There was nothing in the front or rear seats to identify the owner. The keys hung in the ignition, a tiny Bud can attached to the ring. A phone rested in a device built specifically to hold it and attached to the hump between the front seat and the dashboard. Maybe this thing did belong to Duane. But she figured it would’ve taken all the cash under his mattress and then some to buy this rig.