Carol sat at the table with William, a half-empty bottle of wine on the table between them. “Look at that,” she said, motioning towards the bar, where two of the locals plus Lucky were playing Liar’s Dice. One of the men was hooting and picking up the pot, Lucky shaking his head. “You don’t see that very often, do you?”
“See what?”
“Lucky losing.”
“Lucky loses all the time. It’s good for business.”
“Then why does everyone say he’s…”
“Even the most addicted, least intelligent gambler won’t keep gambling if he never wins.” He nodded towards the game. “How much do you want to bet that the game you just watched was for a dollar?”
“What do you mean?”
“Earlier this evening they were playing for five bucks a hand. Guess who won most of those?”
She looked over at the game. “The Gimp says he cheats. Does he?”
“Sometimes. And the only with strangers. Once he gets a read on them, he doesn’t have to cheat. He just knows.”
“What about the games he plays down the hill? Poker. Craps.”
“He’s a math savant. He can calculate the odds of any situation instantaneously. And he never lets emotion get in his way. Ever.”
“So you’re saying he’s misnamed?”
“At one level, sure. It’s a name his victims gave him.” He looked back to the bar. “On the other hand, he’s the luckiest sonofabitch I’ve ever met. Without a doubt.”
It was later that evening and they were on their second bottle. “And that’s really his job?”
William shrugged. “More like a calling.” He smiled slightly. “He heard the tone in Josh’s voice when he told us we had to go legit and knew there was no room for negotiation. Trouble is, he had no idea what a legitimate job was. Not a clue.”
He topped off her glass. “So he asked me to be his occupational therapist. I called in a few favors from my university contacts and administered both the Meyer-Briggs and MRPI. The results weren’t encouraging. One of my friends said it was the most complicated profile he’d ever seen, going back and forth across the line from genius to sociopathy.”
“Tough diagnosis.”
“But accurate. So I tried a different approach. We divided up his life into stages and analyzed both the signal events and contributing events in his development. The stories…” He shook his head. “I thought I’d heard them all, being his cellmate. Not even close. But as I charted the events and looked for a common thread, anything to build on, I was totally stumped.”
He took a sip of wine and held the glass up, watching the legs form and dissolve. “Finally I asked Clark in, to give me a fresh perspective. He listened as we walked him through Lucky’s timeline, which we had up on the wall in butcher paper. Finally he grabbed his pen and paper and wrote: ‘Circle every place where he beat the odds or should have been dead.” And he left.
Looking back at it later, Lucky told Carol the next day, the solution was there from the start. Except that, to his or William’s knowledge, no one had ever tried to make a living by leveraging their luck. But once the unifying theme was determined and the decision made, Lucky went at it with the same determination and discipline he had brought to his illegal ventures. Every Sunday he drove down the hill and bought the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Kinsella Herald, then spent the mornings scanning the pages, clipping out every contest or sweepstakes advertisement. Regardless of the sport, he watched the channels, pencil in hand, for the car and beer commercials and the contests they held.
Mondays he drove down to San Tomas and bought a full range of magazines—women’s, sports, outdoor adventure, food, Reader’s Digest. He took Tuesdays off. Wednesdays he borrowed Josh’s truck and drove the two towns, keeping an eye on the windows for new promotions and contests. He test-drove so many cars that after a while the dealers just waved him to the counter, where he filled out the form, received the small giveaway, and walked out—all in less than five minutes. Once a month he drove up to San Francisco and repeated the process on a grander scale.
Thursdays were also free. Friday mornings he went down to the Kinsella card rooms to keep his fallback skills sharp. Saturdays, he told William, were for the Lord.
Three months of steady labor yielded nothing. Lucky vacillated between worry and panic, concerned that he had jinxed himself by trying to alter or control his karma. Winning a 10-speed bike from a local sporting goods store only deepened his depression, as it looked like he was going to be scrambling for crumbs.
But the bike was a harbinger. That Saturday he went down to McDonald’s for his weekly ritual meal of Big Mac, coke and fries. He took his McRushmore game card from the smiling cashier and retreated to his table, where he scratched off the silver coating on his card.
Lucky froze. The name on the card was “Teddy Roosevelt.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the master game card, a depiction of Mt. Rushmore with Ronald in Washington’s place. Lucky had long ago filled in Ronald, Jefferson and Lincoln. But Roosevelt made him a two thousand-dollar winner.
A week later it was a round-the-world cruise that he sold through the classifieds for three thousand dollars. Then a speedboat and free gas for a year, then a six-week drought that yielded only a charcoal grill and three free buckets of golf balls from a local driving range.
But then came what would thereafter be referred to as ‘Big Monday.’ Lucky opened the mail that morning and found he had won a new Jeep from one of his hunting magazines. While the lunch celebration was in full swing, the phone rang in the L. Josh listened for a moment, then handed the phone wordlessly to Lucky. It was Publishers’ Sweepstakes. Lucky was a grand regional winner, the new owner of a Vacation Dreamland House up in Lake Tahoe.
The Jeep became community property. Lucky sold the Tahoe house for seventy-five grand and put a lump sum in the Moetown account that made him whole for the next ten years. He could have retired at that point, but, as he told William on the drive down to Kinsella for the Sunday papers, he had gotten a feel for good honest work. And it felt good.