(This one was inspired by a particular local lurker whose real-world name happens to be Frank, which may well be why the other characters' names are Jesse and Shane. Real Frank's real family seem to me to be about as different from Brenda, Carol, Larry, and Shane as real children and grandchildren get; I think that's all that was in my mind as I made Frank's family up as I went along. The main inspiration for the story was "speculative," and I chose to speculate about local concepts of "luck," "justice," and also "old.")
The Luck of Jesse Barclay
1
They said Jesse Barclay had all the luck. First he had
all the good luck, then he had all the bad luck, then he had all the good luck
again...
His parents had the best farm in the county, but no
money.
When he was seven years old, the year before the Salk
vaccine became available, he had polio.
When he was fifteen, he won the track and field trophy
anyway.
Three weeks after graduation, his girlfriend fell out
of a canoe and drowned in the TVA lake.
He went to the city and did well in the construction
business. At thirty he owned the firm. He married a Northerner.
When he was forty, his wife died and the building that
housed his office burned down. The fire had been set by someone with a
grievance against another firm on a lower floor. Barclay was insured; he even
went to court and was awarded payment on his claim by a judge. The insurance
company never paid.
His parents died, so he came back to live on the best
farm in the county. He neither planted nor harvested. Some said he had mental
problems; others said he just didn’t have enough money left to buy seed, and
didn’t trust his luck enough to borrow. He inquired about job openings. Younger
people were hired. He stopped inquiring. He made a little money from selling
things he’d carved out of wood, a little from picking up cans along the road, a
little from his AB-negative blood.
2
Frank Hatchett had been considered a friend of
Barclay’s at school. Both were quiet boys who kept to themselves; both were on
the track and field team, and used to run home from school together. They now
owned adjacent woodlots, although Hatchett had bought a house in town.
“I ought to offer old Barclay a job,” Hatchett said to
his married daughter as Barclay walked past their house.
“Oh, Daddy, don’t,”
said his daughter. “Why would you want to risk our, I mean your, money? He’s
such a weird old man.”
“Old, is he?” said Hatchett grumpily. “He’s a year
younger than I am.”
“Well, he seems older. That’s the kind of thing I mean.
Why is he walking on a day like this? Why doesn’t he have a car?”
“Can’t afford one I expect,” said Hatchett.
“Well, you see.
What kind of fifty-year-old man can’t afford a car?”
3
“Hey, Hatch.”
“Whad’say, Bark.”
“Going to market?”
“I am. Thought you’d a been there already.”
“Would a been, if that Blevins had shown up. Want to
give me a lift?”
“No, I better not. Daughter’s been after me about that
kind a thing. If anything was to happen, the insurance wouldn’t cover you,
y’know.”
4
Frank Hatchett had already passed through the Farm
& Craft Market, speaking to everyone, buying nothing, by the time Jesse
Barclay pushed his wheelbarrow through the door. Most of the shoppers had
passed through. Barclay set up his display anyhow, and collected $19 beyond the
rent of his space when the rain, which had been predicted for about the time
the market closed, blew in on a wind that knocked someone else’s tent flat on
the ground. Barclay helped the other man pick up his tent, loaded his wet
carvings back into his wet wheelbarrow, and trudged back home in his wet shoes.
Hatchett drove past him, again, on the way back.
“Hatchett,” Barclay spat. Where he’d spat he noticed a
four-leafed clover. Lucky, he thought, to have good enough short-range vision
to see that, at his age. He picked the mutant clover and put it in his pocket.
Maybe, he thought, he’d be lucky enough to trap something that was fit to eat,
over the weekend. Or maybe he’d finally muster the fortitude to stop eating.
5
Barclay had inherited several traps, though he often
thought that his father’s biggest success as a trapper had been to train all
the local wildlife to recognize a humane trap when they saw one. He refused to
buy the inhumane kind. With his luck he’d fall into one himself. In any case,
if God had wanted him to eat more meat, God would have made it easier for him
to afford bullets.
As usual, all the squirrel traps had been robbed, and
no snare contained a rabbit. One of the raccoon traps contained a stray cat,
two contained possums, and four were empty.
On the ground, near the boundary between the woodlots,
he saw the garish colors of a half-dozen lottery tickets. Downhill from those
he saw part of a broken cell phone. Looking for the other part, or parts, he
found Hatchett, lying head down on the ground, one arm curled under him at an
angle that looked painful.
He knew Hatchett to be a heavy drinker when he was
alone at home, especially after he’d quarrelled with a woman. Hatchett had kept
his figure; his hair was still mostly black; he’d been a member of the church,
in good standing, and since his wife had left him several church ladies had
added Hatchett to their prayer lists. He seldom went out with the same one
twice, though, because of a solemn vow he’d made to himself when his wife left.
That promise had been: “Since doing what other people want didn’t even keep
Brenda with me, I will do only what I want for the rest of my life.” As a
result he was always quarrelling with women who didn’t feel like doing exactly
the same things he did, including his four hours a day of video-simulated
target shooting.
But Hatchett had not, so far as Barclay knew, ever
drunk more than one hangover-busting shot before he went out in the woods. This
was a new thing. Lifting Hatchett’s body slightly, Barclay felt no broken bones
in the right arm. The pistol concealed in Hatchett’s right side pocket hadn’t
gone off, either; lucky, since it was loaded and ready. When Barclay carefully
drew out the pistol, keeping it pointed away from their bodies, he pointed it
wistfully at a bird flying overhead, not knowing whether the bird was a hawk or
crow...until the pistol cracked and the bird fell.
It was a mallard drake.
6
Frank Hatchett saw a thing, ahead, like a huge
shimmering egg. He spent a long time walking uphill to get closer to it. His
head and chest still hurt; his feet still felt as if he were wearing cement
boots. When he could see the egg-shape clearly, he saw that it was divided by a
narrow path. Hours later, or what felt like hours, he looked into the passage
and saw a teenaged girl whose t-shirt showed a deep, dark tan cleavage.
Then he fell, floating slowly—or, although he could
see no bottom to the nothingness through
which he fell, nothing to gauge his speed by, he might have been spinning fast,
because he was sick. Something, probably a pickled cucumber seed, lodged in his
nose. He tried to twist in the air so that his head would be above his feet,
and merely gave himself another dose of gall and acid that drove the pickle
seed back to an even more uncomfortable position.
His feet were cold, too, and wet. In fact he was cold
and wet all over. That three-day rain, in an interval of which he’d gone out,
must have drenched him. He was shivering. He was going to be sick again. He
could feel things stuck to his face, but not see any of them; his eyes weren’t
working. what he seemed to see was more like a shimmering mist than like a
darkness, and in it was neither light nor shadow.
Then he felt that he had landed. Though there had been
no shock of impact, his own weight on his own skin pressed painfully against
big bare rocks at the bottom of a pit. He could not stand up, or move his right
arm out from under him. Around him he seemed to hear the shrill scornful
laughter of a crowd of children.
“Stand, blind man,” said a shrill childish voice.
Whether it was inside or outside his head he couldn’t say.
“Blind man,” said another voice—a mother’s voice? a
teacher’s?—“how came you here?”
“I was walking with my dog in the woods,” he slurred, finding
it hard to move his mouth. His entire right side was useless. “Must have had a
stroke.”
He was sick again. He felt the acid burning into the
skin on his left side. More of it must be on his right side, but his right side
felt nothing but the pressure of the rocks, against which he couldn’t move. The
shrill voices giggled. The teacherly voice shushed them.
“And before that?”
“I hadn’t been up very long. Ate breakfast...”
“And before that?”
“It was Fri. night. I went to Drones Club.” Had he
really? He wasn’t sure whether he’d lost memories of last night as different
from other Friday nights at the club, or whether there’d been any; the
sing-alongs tended to be much the same every week. “Alone,” he said, choking
down bile. (Mary McLaughlin, who had food allergies and didn’t want to go to
restaurants! Pearl Jarvis, who picked up her knitting and ignored his simulated
shooting scores!)
“And before that?”
“I played my video games I always play in the
afternoons. Had a hamburger for lunch. Did some errands in town. I had a
sausage biscuit for breakfast.”
“And before that?”
“Thursday’s pretty much the same’s Friday. I stayed
home and practiced, stead a going to club...”
“Blind man,” the teacherly voice said, “when did you
last speak to another human creature?”
“Well...I said hello to a bunch of’em at the club, but
that’s mostly singing. Saw my daughter on Wednesday. Talked to old Barclay...I
always used to like old Barclay, but he doesn’t even own a car any more.”
The pressure was stabbing little needles of pain along
every nerve he had.
“What did your daughter have to say?”
“I don’t remember. Fussing about me. She had her way,
I’d never go out, nor talk to anybody, nor spend a penny. Worrying about that
sickly son of hers. Like I’d know what’s the matter with him.”
“She told you the doctor found out what is the matter with him,” the voice said
wearily. “He has leukemia.”
“Something like that. Got the can’t-help-its.”
“Leukemia is a form of cancer. It is usually fatal.”
The needles of pain seemed to radiate from his liver,
up through his scalp, down through his toes.
“Can we have him now? Pleeease?” a child-voice whined.
“Not yet.”
“That sounded like little Arnie Fliegenwasser in
primary school,” Hatchett observed.
“It is,” teacher-voice said. “Little bullies like that
come to the Bad Place and spend eternity torturing people. Most of them never
feel any better about themselves and never grow any wiser. We’ve not seen much
hope of progress for you, either, Frank Hatchett.”
“I never was a bully,” he tried to protest, but
somehow it came out more like “I never was busted.” His mind flashed back to
playing “stagecoach” at his grandmother’s house, “driving” a six-year-old
cousin around the yard, using her pigtails as reins.
“If not a bully, you certainly failed to become any
kind of friend or lover. You used to sing with your wife and children. What was
your wife’s favorite song?”
That, at least, he thought he knew. “Down by the Old
Mill Stream.”
“No, that was yours. No one else liked that one. You
see. What’s your daughter’s favorite color?”
“Blue and white.”
“Those were the school
colors. What she always liked was
purple. What’s the primary avoidable factor
in your grandson’s cancer?
“Never knew he even had cancer. Heredity? But nobody
in my family had cancer...”
“That stuff you sprayed in the yard to kill the weeds,
that killed your wife’s flowers, right before she left,” teacher-voice sounded
wearier, “has never been confirmed to affect humans in one specific way,
because it affects different people in different ways. It gave your wife
hayfever. It aggravates your kidney trouble.”
“I don’t have kidney trouble.”
“It’s not been diagnosed yet, but you have. Every time
you spray the yard you fall asleep during the day, and wake up during the
night, for a few days. That’d be your kidneys all right. Your grandson
inherited your weak kidneys. When he was little his mother blamed it on fresh
fruit, so he never eats fresh fruit. So the poisons are not flushing out
properly, and he’s not eating enough antioxidants. That’s a recipe for cancer.”
“Is he going to die?”
“I’ll never meet him. His kind go to the Good Place.”
“You mean you...”
“Not your Devil, by a long stretch.” He saw her, at
last, or an illusion of her: young or at least well preserved, smooth tan skin,
enormous black eyes, heavily lined, a lot of black frizzy hair. She was
child-sized, but not a child. “I am an archetype. You’ve heard me called Maat,
the one who judges the lost and metes out punishments.”
He didn’t remember the name.
She sighed. “Like all selfish men, Frank Hatchett, you
are boring company. Ordinarily that’s not a problem. We chain two or three of
you to one post and let you torture each other. But I need to delay you a
little longer.”
“Why?” he asked, and after a pause, “Am I allowed to
ask why?”
“I’m even allowed to tell you why. Your story has not
even begun yet. You’re still a character in Jesse Barclay’s story. You’re not
dead. You’re lying in the mud along the property line. He’s picking up the
things you were carrying, and deciding whether to take them home and leave you
for dead, or try to rouse you and return your things to you.”
“There any way to make him decide to help me?”
“If there were, I wouldn’t use it.” Maat pouted,
slightly. “His kind never stay here long. The weight that presses a near-dead
soul down here is sin. When people like Barclay realize where they are, they
repent, and float away. If he decides not to help you, that’s likely to start a
chain of events that would keep him in this dimension longer. I am sending
thoughts up to him of what a bad friend and neighbor you’ve been.”
7
Retrieving the mallard, Barclay saw money scattered on
the ground. Coins strewn about like pebbles; wet bills stuck to wet dead
leaves. Finders were keepers. He scooped up money by handfuls.
Hatchett’s money? How many pockets would Hatchett have
needed to hold this much?
Returning to the body, he felt for pockets. Keys were
still in place. He felt no billfold. He looked, and found that on the ground
near Hatchett’s feet. It still enfolded bills—ninety-some dollars, and cards
and pictures. He tucked it into the pocket from which he’d removed the pistol,
and resumed picking up money.
Uphill, it was even thicker. Finally he discovered the
source: a broken vase. Near the vase, a bit of paper was taped around a stone.
Unwrapped, the stone gleamed like a real iron pyrite. The paper crumbled when
unfolded, as if it had been wet and dried a few times, but part of a message
could be read:
“...unduly alarmed. This is wood ashes...this cash to
reward whoever...ashes in a forest...want no superstitious
hypocritical...remains when I do die...”
More had been written, mentioning “so called friends”
and a school, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble to read the poor kid’s
handwriting. The signature was the kind that are meant to look distinctive
rather than legible. The initials might have been S.H.
“Stuff happens,” Barclay said to himself, noting a
plastic shopping bag wrapped around a branch. He retrieved the bag and began
putting cash into it.
8
“Could I repent
and float away?” Hatchett asked.
“Probably not. You might be more amusing if you
tried.”
“So this is the afterlife? The Bible was wrong? The
ancient Egyptians?” His mind rebelled. “You’re not God.”
“Even the ancient Egyptians never mistook me for God,”
said Maat. “Archetypes are creatures of mortal minds. And you’re not even close
to the afterlife yet. Whether you live or die depends on Jesse Barclay.”
Hatchett groaned. “I should’ve shared my car. I was a
selfish bunghole. I’ll always share my car.”
“You’ll do more than that!”
He thought back. “He wanted to try another business.
He wanted to take over that store that closed down last month. So I’ll give him
the money to open the store, all right?
No, lend it to him, say I’m lending it to him. He’d feel better that way. But
no interest.”
“And what else?” Maat almost whispered.
“I’ll call Brenda.” Somewhere a rock crashed to the
floor.
“And what else?”
9
Barclay thought he’d found all the pieces of the phone,
but when he put them together they didn’t work. He felt strangely uninclined to
walk into town and summon help for a man who wouldn’t even share his car with
an old school friend on a wet day.
At least, he thought, he might as well scratch
Hatchett’s lottery tickets for him, before more rain fell and ruined them. They
were the ten-dollar kind, often good for a five-dollar prize. Barclay had never
formed the ticket-buying habit. He often found discarded tickets, though, among
the cans and bottles he collected, and he’d found a few unclaimed five-dollar
winners. People bought two-sided tickets and failed to scratch the back sides,
or bought tickets for elaborate new “games” and misread the instructions.
Finders were keepers; he deserved something now and then for cleaning up their
mess.
The first card he scratched was his very first
ten-dollar winner.
“Hatchett?” he said. “Get up, Hatchett. This one’s
yours.”
Hatchett didn’t move. Barclay scratched another
ticket: nothing. The third: nothing. The fourth: $500.
The dead beady eye of the mallard seemed to twinkle at
him.
The fifth ticket: nothing. The sixth:
JACKPOT
“And enough to live on while they fiddle around with
the money before they actually send me any,” he said to himself. “Had to get
lucky some time or other.”
10
“Shane can stay with me.” Hatchett had been talking to
this not very lifelike dream image for what felt like all day and all night.
“Would’ve said that sooner if I’d thought there was any reason why he’d want
to. I don’t know that he does want
to. Don’t know why he would. But I’ll ask.”
Maat smiled. “Botheration!” Her image, which had never
seemed quite like a real woman and now seemed like a big paper doll, tore up
the middle.
The jagged stones had gone. He was lying on a smooth
floor and now, as it rocked under him, he saw that it was one pan on a huge
oldfashioned balance scale. A feather shifted in a breeze in the other pan.
Above the scraps of her body Maat’s face was radiant.
“Goodbye, Frank Hatchett.”
Just for a few moments he felt himself floating up
through the air, and then he knew he was indeed lying on stones, real ones,
small, not really jagged but still bumpy, and wet leaves, and mud. The left
side of his body had subsided from a solid scream of pain to a set of deep,
sharp, but bearable pinpricks. The right side was still numb. He tried raising
himself off the ground. His right arm and leg were still deadweight.
“Hey, Hatch.” He wondered where Barclay had come from,
but he was grateful. “What happened?”
“Stroke, I think.” It came out sssrohhh...henhhh.
“At your age?” Barclay’s voice cracked. “At your size! Do you want to go to the
hospital?”
“Guess I better.” (Gehh
a behhh.) He fumbled with his left hand for the keys in his right side
pocket. “You ca’...dry...my cahhh.”
11
At the hospital they wanted to call Hatchett’s
daughter. On the back of a picture in his billfold someone had written “Carol
(Mrs. Larry Hall).” Somebody found a listing for Larry Hall in the phone book
while the doctors were fussing over Hatchett. After an hour or two she picked
up the phone and agreed to come to the hospital to see her father.
“You can go home now,” a conceited young thing, not
unlike Carol (Mrs. Larry Hall), suggested to Barclay, but he told Hatchett’s
daughter he’d wait to hear what the doctor had to say. He sort of liked the
idea that his damp, muddy clothes were disturbing Little Madam; he almost
regretted the shower he’d taken earlier in the day, and hoped the cash bulging
in his pockets suggested weapons or at least all a homeless man’s worldly goods
to her mind.
He sat and ignored a stupid TV show, and Carol (Mrs.
Larry Hall) sat and ignored it five chairs away, and after a while someone
pushed Hatchett out in a wheelchair and told Carol, “He can go home now. Could
I get you to sign...”
Barclay waved at Hatchett, not asking him to try to
talk any more, and waited while Carol fussed with papers before he said,
“Carol, Mrs. Larry Hall, can you two stand to hear some news?”
“Whah kin’ news?” Hatchett slurred.
“One of those lottery tickets won the jackpot.”
“Shee...”
“Seriously.”
“Shlihhh.”
“What,
Daddy?”
“Shlihhh. Fihhuh...fihhuh.”
12
They decided to open the store anyway, “to provide
em-ploy-ment for the younger gen-er-ation,” Barclay told the reporters. “Won’t
matter if it ever shows a profit.”
It showed a profit.
Working in the store seemed to agree with Shane Hall. “Marvellous
remission,” Carol said. “I was starting to wonder why they weren’t starting
treatment for cancer by now...Y’know that doctor said it was all a mistake?
Some other kid has leukemia. All Shane had was mononucleosis. There might have
been some secondary infection in the kidneys, but they think that’s all cleared
up now.”
Shane had medical clearance to sign up for the trade
school course he wanted in September. But in October he came to work looking
glum.
“Some guys got their financial aid and have money
left, so they were going to Gatlinburg for the weekend, if I’d had money to
chip in. I don’t have any money.”
“What you been doing with all the money I sent you all
these years?” they understood to be what Frank Hatchett was trying to say.
“Spent it all, or have you invested it in some kind of fund? There was enough
of it.”
“This is so dumb,” Shane said, but he seemed to want
to confess. “I’d saved most of it in penny banks at home. So it was going to be
like a test of friendship, since I was dying anyway, right? I picked out an
urn, like a cremation urn. I put the money in it, and some ashes out of the
fireplace, and a note saying that if any of my friends was loyal enough to
smash the urn and scatter the ashes in the woods, they got the money. So Monica
was taking helicopter pilot’s training last winter? So she dropped the ashes
out of the chopper. She remembered where
she dropped the urn. We went up to look, but we only found a few pennies.
Reckon some hunter or trespasser got most of the money. ’Cos I’d sort of let
Monica imagine it was like my other grandfather’s ashes in the urn, and in any
case she was watching the helicopter. She never even looked down, she said. So
my savings are just gone with the wind.”
“Think so?” said Barclay. “Whoever found’em must a
thought that was his lucky day! Not
going to get drunk or take drugs, are you? Just food and gas and stupid kid
stuff, be enough for you guys? I reckon the company can afford a little bonus
to send you to Gatlinburg.”
“Because you oldies won the lottery,” Shane said
cheerfully. “Some people have all the luck.”
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