Lucifer's Lottery

Up the road he wheeled around to the Fourth Street Shrimp House, one of his favorite restaurants before he’d shipped out. He knew it was his subconscious that had brought him here—the same cruel mechanism that had sent him into that bar last night. As he stared at the specials sign, he realized that his ruined kidneys now precluded him from eating fried seafood because it would raise his creatinine levels and force him into an emergency dialysis session.

Fuck! he thought.

Today just wasn’t Gerold’s day.

“Hey, I remember you,” said one of the cooks. The slim, straggly man stood outside the restaurant, smoking. “You used to eat here all the time, but then . . . Oh, you went into the army, right?”

Gerold remembered the guy, because the restaurant had an open kitchen. “Yeah. Got back a year ago . . . like this.”

“Sorry to hear it, man, but, shit, my uncle was in a chair for thirty years and he always said ‘walking or rolling, it’s still a beautiful world.’ ”

Gerold couldn’t reply.

“You guys are hard-core,” the cook went on. “I hope you know that all of us peacetime candy-ass civilian punks honor your service.”

“Thanks,” Gerold said.

“Come on in. Your lunch is on me. All-you-can-eat clam strips, man, and they’re hand-dipped. None of this pre-breaded frozen shit.”

Gerold felt dizzy in despair. “Thanks but . . . I can’t now. I don’t even know why I came here. I’m on a restricted diet ’cos of my kidneys.”

“Shit, that sucks. Those fuckers.” The cook paused. “Did you . . . Well, never mind. None of my business.”

“What?”

“Did you get any of them?”

Gerold didn’t look at him when he said, “Four, I think. With a machine gun called an M2. It tore them apart.”

“Fuck ’em.”

“Half hour later . . . this happened.”

The moment collapsed into cringing awkwardness. “I gotta go,” Gerold said.

“Sure. See ya around.”

I doubt it. Gerold wheeled away, back up into scorching sun. His throat felt swelled shut; he didn’t want the cook to see the tears in his eyes. Eventually he made it to one of the covered bus shelters—finally, some damn shade—but when he wheeled in, a squalid face peered over very quickly. It was a woman, probably a lot younger than she looked. She wore dingy shorts and a baggy men’s white T-shirt. “Hey,” she said and smiled.

“Hi.” Gerold knew at once what she was, from the smile. Her teeth were gray, from either meth or crack. A street whore, he knew. There seemed to be twice as many of them now, since the recession had bitten in.

“You know,” she began, and now her bloodshot eyes were intent on him. She stood up. The sweat-damp T- shirt betrayed flat, dangling breasts. “We could go over by them trees.” She pointed.

Gerold saw one of many stands of trees around the park. Gerold sighed. “I’m not looking for any action, if that’s what you mean.”

She walked over and without warning began to rub his crotch.

Gerold frowned.

Her desperate whisper told him, “Let’s go over to them trees. Twenty-five bucks. I’ve done guys in chairs before; some of ’em get off.”

“I don’t get off!” he spat.

“Hmm? You sure?” She kept rubbing, her grin knife-sharp. “You feel that, don’t you?”

“No,” he grumbled. He was enraged and humiliated. “I’m paraplegic. You know what that means? It means dead from the waist down.”

“Come on, just let me play with it anyway. Twenty bucks. You’ll like it.”

“Get away from me!” he bellowed.

“Well fuck you, then!” she yelled back. “Fuckin’ cripple.”

“Yeah,” he said, grimacing. He got out his wallet. There was his bus pass and a fifty-dollar bill. “Do you have a knife or a gun?”

“What?”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks, my bus pass, and my bank card—”

“For what?”

“I want you to kill me.”

The junkie face seemed to pucker like a pale slug sprinkled with salt. She left the shelter and jogged away.

Anyway, that’s what had brought Gerold down here in the first place. That’s why he’d been in the library: to use their computer, go online, and read about castor bean poison, which he’d found quite easily. Just as easily, however, he’d found that the extraction process was way too complicated, save for anyone but a chemist; and then when he’d looked up some other poisons, he’d caught the librarian eyeing his screen with a troubled frown on her face. He’d felt idiotic so he’d left in a rush.

SWOOOSH!

The next bus drove right by, its driver pretending not to see Gerold waiting in the shelter.

No. Today just wasn’t Gerold’s day.

(IV)

When Hudson finally fell asleep, he dreamed almost in flashback: the recent past. A year ago when he’d graduated from Catholic U., he’d taken a summer job for a Monsignor Halford, the chancellor of the Richmond Diocesan Pastoral Center. Hudson needed a letter of reference to get into a quality seminary, so here he was.

Halford had to have been ninety but seemed sharper and more energetic than most clerics half his age. He did not beat around the bush with regard to spiritual counsel. He said right off the bat, “The only reason you’re working here is for a reference, but I won’t give you any manner of reference or referral unless you do this: take a year or two off, go into the work force—not volunteer work or hospices—you’ll do plenty of that during your internship.” The pious old man chuckled. “Work a real job, live like real people, the other people. You have to be one of them before you can be one of us. Work in a restaurant, a store, do construction work or something like that. Earn money, pay bills, know what it’s like to live like they do. Go to bars, get drunk, smoke cigarettes, and, above all . . . familiarize yourself with the company of women, like St. Augustine. There’s nothing worse than a young seminarist going straight from college to seminary and taking all his idealism with him. Those are the ones who fold halfway through their pastorship.”

Hudson sat agog. St. Augustine was a whoremonger before he found faith . . . “You don’t mean . . .”

“I mean as I’ve said,” the elder replied in a voice of granite. “Am I ordering you to engage in sexual congress outside of wedlock? No. But hear this, Hudson. A venal sin now is much more forgivable than a grievous sin later, later as in after your ordination.”

Hudson couldn’t believe such an implication.

“Are you receiving my meaning, son?”

“I’m . . . not sure, Monsignor.”

“In the real world you’ll be subject to the same temptations that Christ faced. We in the vocation all need to know that.”

“But I’m perfectly happy with a vow of celibacy.”

The monsignor smiled, and it was a sardonic smile. “Go out into the world first,