Lucky Triple Seven

 

 

The dirt alley that Nolee drove her motorbike down as a shortcut to reach the local lottery office was strewn with small slips of paper like shed cherry blossoms. When she drew close to the building itself, the end of the dirt alley where it met the street was fully carpeted with these little paper slips, which were white on their back sides but brightly colored on their fronts. They were unsold and obsolete lottery tickets, torn and discarded like so many unfulfilled dreams.

The air here was poisoned with the smell of ink from the presses that churned out the tickets. Even these short visits—two a day—gave Nolee an instant headache. She wondered how the workers inside the building could tolerate the chemical atmosphere. It was the overpowering smell of money.

Nolee stopped her bike and dismounted, glancing back at her son Cee as if to reassure him as she approached the lottery office’s chief, Bolun Sep. Standing outside to smoke a cigarette, the rest of his many street people having already reported back to him, Sep pointedly glanced at his watch as Nolee quickened her pace to reach him.

Sep said, “Do you come late on purpose, Nolee, to avoid a line? Or do you like to see me alone because you’re in love with me?”

Nolee smiled at his joke nervously, but stammered because his face was not good natured. “I’m sorry, Bolun…forgive me.” Lowering her voice, she motioned with her head back toward her bike. “It’s my poor son, you know that. Getting him in and out of the sidecar is difficult.”

“Don’t try to wring pity from me, Nolee; that may work on your customers, but not on me. If it takes time to put the boy back in the sidecar, then you should start here earlier. You know the cut-off point is three. It is now three twenty.”

Nolee extended a stack of lottery tickets bound with a rubber band. In her other hand, she proffered a thick wad of faded, grubby bills also held together with an elastic. “Please, Bolun…I’ll be more careful next time. Look, I sold sixty of one hundred tickets. Isn’t that good?”

The lottery chief snatched both bundles from her. He snapped the band from the money and began counting it, muttering around the cigarette in his mouth, “If you’re late like this again I’ll make you pay me for the cost of every unsold ticket…you hear me? You know that’s the way it works. After three, unsold tickets are yours.”

“I understand, Bolun. Never again.”

“Never again until the next time, eh? How many times have you taken advantage of me this way?” From the wad of money he extracted the dirtiest, most crumpled bills and shoved them at her. Ten percent of the money she had collected.

Nolee bowed to him as she accepted her day’s wage. “You are kind, Bolun.”

“Huh!” he snorted. “Take that poor monster home now and make him some dinner. Or do you starve him on purpose to make him look more frightful?”

“It is hard with no husband to help me feed him. I do what I can alone.”

She knew if she were as pretty as she had been when she was young, Sep might take this as a cue to proposition her. And if her situation then had been as lamentable as it was now, she might even have accepted his proposition. But he had younger ticket sellers to seduce, so he only said, “Huh!” again, and into her hand slapped a batch of one hundred new tickets for tomorrow’s drawing. The tickets were almost hot to the touch and reeked of ink.

Then Sep turned and went back inside the lottery office to wait for the four o’clock radio broadcast, and the stream of winners who would descend on the office to collect their winnings. But before he passed through the door, he pulled the rubber band from the forty unsold tickets Nolee had handed him, tore them in half, and tossed them back over his shoulder. They fluttered in the air like butterflies, scattering in the street and adding to the carpet at Nolee’s feet.

She felt like running up behind him and stabbing him in the back for what he had said about her son. “Monster,” eh? But she hadn’t a knife. And hadn’t the nerve. And if she killed everyone who said insulting things about her son, then she’d have to kill many a citizen of her town indeed. If she were to kill even one of them, then what good would she be to Cee in front of a police firing squad? Who would take care of him then?

So she turned back to him. All this time, she knew, his eyes had been roving across his surroundings and the sky without direction. Though he didn’t acknowledge her, Nolee smiled at him as she straddled her dusty bike again. “Home now, my ruby,” she told him.

It was what her husband had once called her—“my ruby”—back when she had been young and pretty. Long before he had met that young and pretty little street food vendor, whom he slept beside now.

As if in response, Cee rolled his head, twitched his bent and useless arms, and grunted something. It sounded like garbled words, but if they were Nolee couldn’t make them out.

 

***

 

Nolee, her husband, and Cee had lived with her husband’s three brothers and their families, all in one good-sized two-story house. But now that her husband had gone off to live with his sly little whore, Nolee had moved herself and Cee in with her cousin, Maik, and Maik’s husband and two small children. It was an uncomfortable arrangement. Nolee knew Maik’s husband didn’t want them there, even though Nolee paid for her expenses. More than once she had overheard Maik’s husband, when he’d been drinking, refer to Cee as “unlucky.” The blighted creature would bring misfortune to all of them. Just look at him. Cursed. No wonder Nolee’s husband had wanted to be rid of them.

In fact, Nolee’s husband himself had often mourned his bad luck in having a deformed monstrosity as his only child. What an heir! What must this town think of him for siring such an abomination? He wasn’t a drinker and had said these things while sober.

It was the fear of the mutant, her cousin Maik had told Nolee. (Maik had always been a smart one in school, a reader.) Maik apologized for her husband and Nolee’s husband both, explaining their prejudice was an instinctual kind of reaction. Reject the tainted…shun the bad genes. Keep the lineage pure. An animal instinct. It had nothing to do with luck. Modern-minded, rebuffing superstition, Maik didn’t believe in luck. At least, not in the sense of blessings and curses. To her, luck was only arbitrary, random, senseless.

The problem was: Nolee did believe in luck. Both good and bad. Luck as a cosmic, celestial force. Luck was, after all, her trade.

But she had found, since going to work for Bolun Sep and the local branch of the government lottery, that Cee didn’t hamper her work selling tickets in the streets. Cee didn’t bring her bad luck. On the contrary, once she had started bringing him with her on her daily rounds, she had found herself selling many more tickets. Because people pitied Cee…pitied her. By buying their lottery tickets from her instead of some other street dealer, they were showing charity that the gods themselves might take note of. In a way, they were buying more than a stab at winning a large sum of money. They were investing in the good fortune of their eternal souls.

Nolee had staked as her primary territory a long string of outdoors cafés and restaurants pressed right up to the bank of the sluggish green river that flanked the town. She went out with Cee twice every day: once from ten till two, and again after dinner from six to ten. (In the morning and afternoon, selling tickets for that day’s drawing…and at night, beginning the sale of the next bundle of tickets for tomorrow’s drawing.)

Nolee preferred selling at night. It was cooler. At night, the colorful strings of lights decorating the open-air cafés and restaurants shone in the river, now as black and wide as the sky above it. And at night, men drank beer and rice wine and were looser with their earnings. They became gallant, sometimes buying a can of soft drink for Cee, which Nolee would hold for him, as he sucked sloppily from a straw.

Whether day or night, she would leave her bike at home and go on her rounds on foot, pushing Cee in a pink plastic stroller she had hoisted him into. The stroller, shaped like a cute-faced rabbit with its back gouged out, was intended for a much younger child than her malformed son. Sometimes when she pushed him along and the stroller jostled over a rock or a broken section of sidewalk he would laugh. His laugh was deep, barking, did not sound human.

Tonight Nolee wheeled her boy amongst the tables of the Banyan Café. The owner never gave her any trouble, as long as she didn’t press customers who weren’t interested. And why should he protest? Gambling was as natural as eating, in her country where belief in luck was as natural as belief in fickle gods.

All the strings of lights in the Banyan Café were green, flashing like hordes of fireflies, making the trees seem preternaturally alive, irradiated with life. The thick, ropy trees rose like columns between the little tables, supporting the glowing green canopy. Nolee wheeled Cee to one of these tables, where three men in their thirties sat smoking, drinking, and admiring the model-pretty waitresses in their miniskirts and high heels. Green lasers strobed, and painfully loud disco music pounded but no one danced to it; her shy countrymen were not dancers.

One of these men had motioned Nolee to come over, smiling at her. She knew him. His name was Uhi. Uhi as always wore his uniform of dark blue shirt and trousers. He was a funeral man. He collected the dead in the back of his truck (even their motorbikes if they’d been in an accident) and brought them to their homes, for several days of rites and feasting, after which he would return to drive their cheap coffins to be cremated. He was very good looking, and polite, and a regular customer, so Nolee liked him.

“Hey, boy,” Uhi said to Cee, reaching out to take hold of one of the child’s gnarled hands. “Keeping your mother company like a good son, are you?” Uhi was in the good humors of drink. Still holding Cee’s useless paw, he grinned up at Nolee and asked, “How old is your boy now?”

“Seven,” Nolee said. With a touch of pride she elaborated, “And he just had his birthday a few weeks ago. He was born on the seventh day of the seventh month.”

“Ah!” Uhi exclaimed, widening his eyes and switching his grin back to Cee. Everyone knew that seven was an exceptionally lucky number. Any year of one’s life with seven in it (beginning with age 7, of course, and continuing to 17, 27, and so on) was supposed to be especially auspicious. “Triple seven! This is a special year for you, boy! Mark my words! So are you going to share your luck with me tonight…hm? Will you help me pick a good set of numbers?”

Uhi reached a hand out to Nolee, and she handed over her entire stack of tickets for him to sift through in search of a promising group of numbers (each ticket printed with a string of seven numbers). As he flipped through the tickets, he leaned in close to Cee…put his ear right to Cee’s mouth. “Tell me a good number, boy!”

Uhi’s two friends laughed, but they also looked repulsed. Nolee recognized the look by now. Cee’s body was tiny, monkey-like, shriveled, his limbs atrophied and stiff. His head, on the other hand, was disproportionately large, which was why it lolled and bobbed so on his skinny neck. It was shaped like an inverted triangle, and he had a harelip besides, his skin also too dark as if it had been burned leather-brown in the sun. His eyes were impossibly far-spaced. And yet they were beautiful in themselves, Nolee felt, in their form and shape and brightness. Maik had said it, too, though maybe only agreeing with her to make her feel better.

Over the throb of music, Nolee thought she heard Cee gurgle softly in the funeral man’s ear.

She saw Uhi’s eyes grow large. He sat back and said to Cee, “Really?” Then he studied the tickets in his hands more carefully, shuffling through them until he found a series of numbers that obviously agreed with him, because he said, “Aha!”

His two friends laughed again. One of them said, “Told you the winning number, did he? Are you going to match all seven tomorrow?”

“He didn’t tell me all seven,” Uhi said, “but he told me three, and three is enough to win a nice sum.”

“So what numbers did he say?” chuckled the other friend dubiously.

“Ha! As if I would tell you, so you’d search for another ticket with those same three numbers in a row! Get your own good luck charm!”

“I’ll ask him for different numbers, then,” said this man, and he scraped his metal chair closer to Cee and overcame his revulsion to bend down close to him as Uhi had. “Okay, little wise man, give me some lucky numbers, too.”

Nolee watched, and heard her son quietly gurgle again. What could he be saying? Nothing…that was what…because she had put her own ear to his mouth on numerous occasions when she’d thought he was trying to wrestle out a word or two. Oh, how even a single word would have made her soul soar! “Water.” “Cookie.” “Mama.” But nothing. Never anything. Not a word.

With the music so loud, and the drink in their ears, they were hearing things…first Uhi, and now this one, for he too sat back with a surprised grin and clapped his hands for Nolee to pass him her tickets. Like Uhi, he flipped through them until he apparently found a row of seven red printed numbers that in whole or in part agreed with what he believed Cee had just said to him.

 

***

 

In the next room, Cee sat on blankets spread on the floor, positioned in front of the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. A Western cartoon played, a cat chasing a mouse. Sometimes they heard Cee’s braying laughter.

In Maik’s kitchen, Nolee and Maik and several older neighbor women sat cross-legged on the tiled floor, playing a game with tiny glossy cards and betting with small denomination bills worn thin as tissue. They were waiting for the four o’clock radio broadcast, which was imminent, Maik with notebook and pen ready because she was the educated one. She kept a record of every day’s winning numbers, to study later for trends in lucky numbers, which she swore turned up again in some kind of cycle or formula that she one day hoped to crack, like a pioneering mathematician. Up until recently the winning numbers had been selected from a fan-driven air mix machine, in the form of plastic balls, but now the government proudly utilized a modern computer system that selected randomly generated numbers. Nolee was suspicious of this new process, since she knew nothing of computers; plastic balls with numbers printed on them had been a much more tangible concept.

Maik’s husband arrived home from work, and as he stepped through the kitchen’s open wall from the dusty courtyard he sneered at the circle of women. “Gambling my earnings as always, woman?” he said to Maik—though he had many times joined in their games, and for more serious stakes. He passed around the women to check on his dinner boiling on the stove top.

Spreading her colorful miniature cards in a fan, Nolee glanced into the next room when there came a particularly loud burst of laughter from Cee. She heard a commercial playing; had he laughed at that, or was it some mysterious thought in his mind? She stared in at him for a long moment, and then said to Maik seated beside her, “Who will care for him when I am gone, cousin? He may not outlive me, but what if he does…by many years? Will he be thrown into a hospital like a prison, to be beaten and neglected? If I were truly a good mother, I would kill him now and myself, too, so we could go on to the afterlife together.”

“Hush!” Maik slapped Nolee’s leg. “I will begin teaching my young ones to feed him, do small things for him, to prepare them…so that one day they will see to his needs.”

“Oh!” cried Maik’s husband Teng, leaning beside the sink to watch the card game and wait for the government radio broadcast. “Of course! Burden my children! How can they work and lead normal lives if they have to care for that sorry soul?”

Maik glared up at her husband. “Cee is our blood.”

“Your blood.”

“Your children’s blood.”

Nolee lowered her head, seemingly examining her cards but on the verge of tears, sick inside with anger. It was not an alien state. When, she wondered, would she come to peace with the cruelty of people, and of fate? Seven years and it was like a freshly bleeding wound. She ached for numbness. If not death, at least a kind of living death.

“Shh,” said one of the neighbor women to the bickering husband and wife, pulling the radio closer and turning up the volume until the air in the kitchen crackled and sizzled. “It’s time!”

Maik snatched up her notebook and opened it, her pen poised as the broadcast began. It sounded sandy with static, the woman announcer’s expressionless voice echoing strangely as it always did, as if she sat in a tiny metal room. Maik had once said to Teng and Nolee that the daily broadcasts of eighteen winning number combinations sounded like the mysterious coded readings one could hear on shortwave, known as “number stations,” transmitted from around the world, but the others hadn’t known what she was talking about.

The announcer began to recite the eighteen winning number combinations. After each string of numbers, a male voice repeated it. His voice was also a monotone, and echoed as if he were crowded in the same tiny metal room with the woman. Their voices were so cold, hard, and dead. Was this how the gods would sound if mortals could hear them, dealing out their fates?

Every one of the women, but for the furiously scribbling Maik, stared hard at her own lottery ticket as if willing the numbers to favor her. Nolee herself had bought one from the stack she had sold last night along the riverside, and this morning and afternoon among the neighborhoods. Today she had made sure to return the unsold tickets to Bolun Sep well before three.

But when all the numbers had been announced, not a single one of the women had won anything.

Teng laughed and said, “And so the government pigs grow fatter! Better luck next time, ladies. Back to your card game, then…maybe you’ll find your fortune there!”

In the next room, Cee shouted out a loud laugh. All of them turned their heads to look in at him.

 

***

 

After dinner, Nolee and Cee set out onto the streets again, this time in the vicinity of the river. The sky had already gone purple, with a few dragon tails of orange.

She had been pushing her son in his pink rabbit cart along the sidewalk, passing big shade trees that grew through the pavement. The center of the sidewalk consisted of individual cement plates, any of which could be lifted away to get at the water pipes in their trough beneath. At night, huge cockroaches came swarming up from beneath these plates and scurried to and fro. Nolee barely noticed them, but sometimes Cee looked down at them and laughed.

Nolee had stopped now to sell tickets to two female street vendors who sold sugarcane juice. The sidewalk was heaped with the sugarcane press’s crushed pulp. As one of the women prepared a cup of juice for Cee, a motorbike pulled up to a rumbling halt right beside Nolee. She turned, and there was the funeral man Uhi in his blue uniform. Behind him on the bike rode his friend who had also bought a lottery ticket from her last night.

“Sister!” Uhi said to her with cheerful familiarity. “We’ve been looking all around for you! I need to buy another ticket from your gifted son!”

“Me too!” exclaimed Uhi’s friend, dismounting. “We both won last night…from the numbers your son told us!”

“What?” said Nolee, looking to Cee in disbelief. How could that be possible? Surely the two men, with too much drink in them, had only heard what they’d wanted to hear in Cee’s inarticulate noises.

“Yes!” Uhi confirmed. Now that it was safe he revealed his numbers. “He gave me 725. He gave Chep 617. We both bought tickets from you that had those numbers in them, and today on the radio our numbers came up in the eighteen! We both won two hundred thousand veng!” Two hundred thousand veng was the equivalent of twenty Western dollars—a nice little sum.

“What’s this?” asked one of the two sugarcane vendors, marveling, and maybe a little resentful that Nolee’s son had never given her a tip before. “Nolee, your son is picking lucky numbers?”

“Yes!” Uhi told the woman, and explained what had occurred. He wiggled his fingers for Nolee’s tickets, then bent low beside Cee as he had last night. “Give me more luck, Lucky Triple Seven!”

“If this really worked,” Nolee said to the vendor from the corner of her mouth, “then don’t you think I myself would be rich by now?”

“He doesn’t give you numbers, then?” the vendor asked.

“Cee can’t talk!”

Uhi straightened up with a perplexed expression. He said to Nolee, “He only mumbles. I can’t hear anything this time.”

“Let me try,” said Uhi’s friend Chep, nudging past him to crouch beside Cee. “Give me some winning numbers, little wise man, just like last night!”

They all heard Cee make some guttural sounds, but this man too eventually stood up looking disappointed and frustrated. “I can’t understand him tonight, either.”

Uhi beseeched Nolee, “Can you try to talk to him for us, sister?”

Nolee was going to protest that Cee could not speak, no matter what they thought they’d heard, but to humor the men she moved close to Cee and put her ear to his riven lips. “Tell me some numbers for these friends of mine, my ruby. Tell Mama.”

Cee burbled, and there was nothing at all in these sounds that Cee could stretch her imagination into interpreting as numbers or words of any kind.

She looked to the two friends and held up her hands. “I’m very sorry.”

“A one-time gift,” Uhi sighed, contemplating the great mystery that was Nolee’s idiot son.

“Let me try this,” said the sugarcane vendor, taking Nolee’s place beside Cee. “Tell me something, little boy,” she coaxed him, as if listening at a keyhole in the door to some unknown world. Did heavenly miracles churn behind that door?

They all watched the woman. Watched her expression become astonished, then delighted…though they, themselves, had only heard more of the same animal sounds. The woman reached to Uhi for Nolee’s wad of tickets. “Give those here!” she cried. “He gave me three numbers!”

“What?” Chep cried, looking more disappointed and frustrated than ever.

“You see,” said Uhi. “It’s like I told you—only a one-time blessing.”

“I suppose we should be grateful for what we got,” Chep grumbled. “But if I could have won that same amount every day, I’d never have to work again!”

“Here! Here!” The vendor at last pulled a ticket from the stack of tickets, jumping in place as if the numbers had been called on the radio already, to confirm her win. “This ticket has the numbers he told me!”

“I want to try!” said the other sugarcane vendor, shoving past her friend to get at Cee.

A few pedestrians had stopped to watch what was going on with these excited people and the horribly deformed boy.

That night alone, Nolee sold forty-five tickets. And she still had tomorrow morning and afternoon, yet, in which to continue selling this batch.

“My lucky boy,” she said to Cee as she pushed him home that night. “My precious ruby.” And yet he was already asleep, perhaps exhausted from playing liaison to cosmic forces, his huge head slumped down upon his bony chest.

Nolee was beginning to believe there really was something to this…that some greater power was at work here…for what were the odds that her son would give every one of her customers (except Uhi and Chep) a trio of numbers that appeared in her group of tickets? Even assuming he had the abilities of a savant, he had never even touched her tickets, so how could he memorize them?

It was as though Fate had laid an intricate and unknowable plan…sending those particular red numbers to those little slips of paper, and placing all those particular customers in Cee’s path. And sending this unordinary night’s profit—ten percent!—into Nolee’s pocket.

Once she had thought her life lay in the shadow of a curse. Now, she thought the opposite situation might be true. Maybe Uhi was right—maybe this sudden burst of luck was due to Cee having reached the age of seven only a few weeks ago. On the seventh day of the seventh month.

Did that mean the gift was only temporary, to last just throughout Cee’s seventh year? Or only through this, the seventh month? Whatever the case…she would gladly accept all the luck that fell her way.

When Nolee arrived home, she told Maik what had happened. Maik’s husband Teng scoffed and left the room. Maik looked dubious but was, of course, more polite. And though Maik embraced religion only in the context of tradition, as opposed to faith, that night she joined Nolee in kneeling before the family altar and burning incense in thanks to their ancestors, and to the gods.

Nolee especially thanked the Ruby Empress, goddess of benevolence.

 

***

 

News of Nolee’s little prodigy spread through town, and the next day she sold the remaining fifty-five tickets Bolun Sep had allocated to her. She ran out of tickets by one o’clock. It was the first time since she had begun selling tickets—when her husband had abandoned her—that she had sold all one hundred.

When Nolee arrived a little late at the lottery office, Bolun Sep drew in a deep breath to berate her…until she presented him with an extra-thick wad of bills, and no unsold tickets. Then his face lit up with wonder. But she didn’t tell him about the source of this wonder: Cee. In a far more pleasant frame of mind, Sep gave Nolee her one hundred tickets to sell for tomorrow’s drawing. “Keep it up!” he told her, then both he and Nolee headed in opposite directions to await the four o’clock radio broadcast.

Straddling her bike, she whispered to Cee in his sidecar, “Now we shall see, my ruby.”

 

***

 

Nolee had not bought a ticket for herself from her batch. There had been no tickets left from which to pull one. So when the numbers were announced by the dead-voiced radio spirits, there was no immediate indication in Maik’s household that any good fortune had favored anyone. And yet, though maybe it was only her imagination, Nolee thought she heard (or was it felt?) a distant rising of voices, like when a chorus of agitated dogs barking floats from the distance late at night…when the source of that disturbance is unknown to the listener in her bed.

Soon enough, though, that excited wave descended upon Maik’s house, in the form of visitors. One after another in quick succession, like an audience arriving at an appointed time for a performance. Uhi and Chep were among them. A group of about thirty people, and they all wanted the same thing.

“Let me try this one more time!” Uhi begged. “Maybe this time Cee will favor me again.”

“He is sleeping,” Maik reported sternly, having checked on Cee in the living room, where they had placed him in front of the television.

“Please wake him!” a woman who lived on the next street over pleaded.

“What is all this about?” Teng asked, coming from upstairs. But Nolee hadn’t had to ask. She knew. Impossible as this was, she knew.

The neighborhood woman said, “Haven’t you heard? It seems that every person who bought a ticket from Nolee has won! How can that be, hm? How can it be that every ticket was a three-digit winner? But it’s true! It’s true!”

“You’re right—it’s impossible,” Teng said. “What are the odds? It has to be an error with the government’s stupid computers. I’ll be surprised if the lottery office honors these tickets, when the winners all come banging on their door this evening.”

“They must honor the winning tickets!” protested another neighbor, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other. “If you hold a ticket with winning numbers the government must accept that, fair and square! If they didn’t, there would be riots!”

“Please, please,” begged a young taxi driver Nolee had never seen before, who had parked his little vehicle on the other side of the courtyard. “Bring your son out here! If he has a gift, it was meant to be shared!”

Maik started to argue again that her cousin’s child was sleeping, but then they all heard his odd guffaws coming from the next room.

 

***

 

More people came to replace those who left, clutching their precious tiny slips of paper. The only people who departed unhappy were Uhi, Chep, and the two sugarcane juice vendors, all of whom had already won two hundred thousand veng over the past two drawings.

“My cousin’s son grows weary, don’t you see that?” Maik scolded as people continued to arrive at her home. “He has to go to bed now!”

“You can come back tomorrow,” Nolee called to the people who her cousin shooed away.

“If any tickets still remain by the time I come back,” one man complained gruffly as he returned to his motorbike.

“He’s right,” Nolee whispered to Maik, showing her only fifteen remaining tickets. “Maybe I should get two hundred tickets from Sep tomorrow, huh? Or even more?”

“Cousin, listen to yourself…you’re too giddy. It sounds like you sold one hundred winning tickets yesterday. Whether it was a computer error or not—and it has to be!—how happy do you think Sep is going to be about that?”

“It isn’t my fault!” Nolee cried. “Nor Cee’s!”

“All I know is the lottery office hates winners. It isn’t supposed to work that way.”

“Tell that to the gods.”

“Don’t you see? The gods aren’t putting winning numbers in Cee’s head. Even if Cee hadn’t given anyone a winning number, all they needed to do was select any ticket at random and they would have picked a winner. That stupid funeral man…Cee didn’t give him some numbers so he left empty-handed, when all he needed to do was buy one of your tickets.”

“Then how does Cee know the winning numbers, when he has never seen the tickets?”

“I thought you said he couldn’t possibly be speaking to them.”

“I used to believe that, but now…now I think there must be truth in it! How could so many people be deluded, and coincidentally believe they’ve heard numbers that just so happen to appear on one of the tickets—tickets they haven’t yet seen?”

“It’s like mass hysteria.”

“Mass what? Your explanations are no more logical than mine!”

“Cousin! What would you have me believe? That when Cee speaks numbers to someone, the numbers on one of the tickets actually change to conform to that? That he can change the numbers through the force of his mind?”

“Maybe,” Nolee said defiantly. “But not through the influence of his mind. Through the influence of the gods!”

“Pah!” said Teng, leaning nearby, lighting a cigarette.

“We can perform an experiment,” Nolee said. “When I pick up my tickets from Sep tomorrow, you can write down the numbers from every ticket in your record book. Then we can compare those numbers later, after I’ve sold them, to the winning numbers announced on the radio to see if any of them were winners…and if so, if Cee changed the numbers somehow.”

“Oh cousin, it’s nonsense!” Maik groaned. “When they fix the computers your son’s magic abilities will be ended.”

Another motorbike pulled up in front of the house. Glaring, Maik looked past Nolee and prepared to scare this latest visitor away, but when he strode out of the evening and up into the bright kitchen the cousins recognized him. It was Hiok—Nolee’s estranged husband. And he was grinning like a drunk, though the man didn’t drink.

“Hallo!” Hiok cried. “Where is this marvelous son of mine? The whole town is chattering about him!”

“He’s ready to sleep,” Maik snarled. “You aren’t to bother him.”

“This isn’t your affair,” Hiok told her, his grin short-lived. “I’ve come to see my son and I shall see him…I’m his father and you can’t stop me.”

“So you’re his father now?” Nolee said. She had begun trembling all over, within and without, the moment she had recognized him. “Now you claim him as your son? But how well I remember your words! ‘He can’t be my child! You must have fucked some sick man, bitch! You must have fucked someone who uses drugs! Nothing like that could come from my loins!’”

“I spoke from pain, woman!” Hiok cried, spreading his arms. “Pain! Can’t you understand that?”

“Oh, I understand pain, Hiok. I understand it only too well.”

“I am his father and we both know it. Neither of us understands what affliction caused his condition, and has brought us both such frustration…but I must accept him as my son. In fact, I have decided today that I want him to come live with me. My job brings me more money than yours, and my future bride has her job at the soup stand. We can take the burden from you.”

“Oh, what a saint you are!” Nolee laughed, though her trembling had doubled. She was shaking badly, and wild-eyed. “And such a sly saint, too! You turn your back on your son, you don’t give me anything to help support him, and now suddenly you hear of his talent and you come here thinking I will just hand him over to you and your whore. I’m sorry: ‘future bride.’ Well you can forget it, Hiok. You are not taking my son from me.”

“I have been considering my decision to take him for some time, to help you, and here you insult me!”

“You shameless, selfish liar!”

Hiok hissed through gritted teeth, pointing a finger at her face, “Don’t make me bring this to court!”

“Go ahead and do so!”

“I am the man, here—you know they will favor me.”

“I tell you, I won’t let you have him even if the court orders it. I will run away with him…you’ll never find us.”

“Bitch!” Hiok cried, and he lunged toward her, cocking his arm across his chest to deliver a backhanded blow to her face.

“Hey!” Teng shouted. They all looked to him, startled: Hiok with his cocked arm, Nolee who had begun to flinch back, and Teng’s own wife Maik. Teng held a dirty cleaver in his fist, which he had picked up from inside the sink. “That’s enough. If you strike my wife’s blood-cousin I will bury this blade in your sorry skull.”

Now it was Hiok’s turn to flinch. “How dare you threaten me!” he exclaimed. “If I should tell the police, they’ll lock you in a hole!”

“You’ll have a hard time talking to police,” Teng said, raising the cleaver, “with your head hanging from a strip of skin.”

Nolee smiled. She had never loved her cousin’s husband before today.

“All right, all right!” Hiok cried, backing away. “I won’t take him, all right? But you…you can’t deny me the right to see him!”

“You can visit him anytime you like,” Nolee said. “So long as my cousin’s husband is here at the time.”

Hiok muttered curses to himself, but then said, “Very well. And he’s here now, right?” Sarcastically he waved an arm at Teng, who had lowered but not set down the cleaver. “So let me see my son.”

“If he’s awake,” Maik said. “I’ll go check.”

It was determined Cee was awake still, lying on blankets on the floor and propped up on pillows and a giant stuffed tiger. Watching cartoons, of course. Nolee’s husband left his sandals in the kitchen and stepped into the living room, with Nolee, Maik, and Teng trailing close behind.

“Hey, my dear boy!” Hiok said, squatting down beside his child and patting his lumpy head with its sparse, thin hair. “There you are! Can you look at me? Do you remember your dad?” When Cee didn’t take his eyes from the screen, Hiok repositioned himself and leaned down directly into the child’s view.

Standing a bit apart, Nolee saw Cee’s far-spread eyes turn up to take in his father’s face, but whether there was recognition there she couldn’t tell.

“Dad’s going to buy a ticket from your mama tonight. A ticket with numbers you’re going to give me…isn’t that right, Cee? And not just three numbers like the others: you’re going to give me seven, right? Seven lucky numbers, Cee! Then I can win big, and I’ll have enough money to give some to your mother.” He glanced over at Nolee to be sure she’d heard him. Looking back to Cee, he continued, “I’ll help you and your mother…but you must help me first. Give me the numbers, son!” And he brought his ear close to Cee’s mouth.

Nolee heard her son’s familiar deep gargling sounds. All three of them heard, and later they’d agree they had discerned no words in them. But Hiok jerked back from his son so abruptly, as if he’d received an electric shock, that he lost his balance on the balls of his feet and fell on his bony bottom. He scrambled to his feet and whirled around, showing the adults his long, shocked face. Then he fled toward the doorway breathlessly.

“Wait!” Teng said. He caught Hiok’s arm and held him. “What did he say to you?”

Looking into Nolee’s face, rather than Teng’s, Hiok said in a horrified hush, “He told me I would die. He told me, ‘You will die on the sixteenth day of the eighth month.’ But he didn’t tell me what year. He didn’t say what year!”

With that, Hiok wrenched himself free of Teng’s grip and bolted outside. They heard his motorbike start up, and then rumble away. Nolee and the others trailed after him belatedly into the kitchen, its open wall facing out onto the blackness of deepening night. Nolee looked from Maik to Teng, and then down at the sandals Hiok had forgot to put on again before he fled the house.

“He couldn’t have said that,” Maik said at last.

“So we said with the winning numbers,” Teng mumbled thoughtfully, glancing back toward the living room as if he were afraid to reenter it himself.

Thinking of the future date Hiok had claimed Cee had given him, supposedly the date of his impending death, Nolee turned her gaze to a calendar mounted on the kitchen wall, with individual daily sheets. Today was the 25th. The 25th day of the seventh month.

If Hiok had heard correctly, and the prophecy was to come true, did that mean he would die on the 16th next month? Or the 16th of the eighth month a year from now? Ten years from now?

No, Cee couldn’t have said that. He could never formulate a sentence like that. Hiok’s mind, expecting wonders—and maybe filled with much suppressed guilt—had played a nasty trick on him. And all those winning tickets…a computer error, yes, Maik was the voice of reason. It had to be.

When Nolee returned to the living room, Cee had dozed off. She muted the volume of the TV, covered him with a blanket, and then stood staring down at him a long time. In the colorful flutter of the TV’s light, he didn’t look human. He resembled the beings from other worlds one saw in Western movies. But without familiarity with the word “alien,” to Nolee he was more a misshapen angel. Tears in her eyes, she wagged her head and murmured, “My ruby.”

 

***

 

Early the next morning, people started appearing at Maik’s house again, seating themselves at Teng’s cement picnic table to smoke or standing around in the courtyard chatting while they waited for the occupants to appear. They all looked up and hushed themselves when Nolee drew back the kitchen’s metal shutter, then stepped out pushing Cee in his bunny cart, with its huge painted eyes and molded grin.

Once Nolee had determined who had arrived first, she allowed these customers to seemingly genuflect before her son for his blessing. She sold her remaining fifteen tickets very quickly. Some of those who had waited squabbled about who had come ahead of who, but no serious conflicts broke out.

While she was selling her next to last ticket to an elderly neighbor man, he said, “Very sad about that funeral worker Uhi, eh? The first one to discover your son’s gift. His luck did not last him long, did it?”

As she took the old man’s money, Nolee seemed to freeze into a statue, but managed to croak, “What do you mean?”

“So you didn’t hear? He was killed last night in a motorbike accident, coming home from a café. Well, he’d been drinking too much, hadn’t he? Maybe the gods frowned on him for misusing the gift they’d given him.”

“Oh my.” Nolee put a hand to her chest. A number appeared before her eyes, stark black against white. Was this how the numbers came to her son’s inner vision? But instead of three numbers, what she saw were only two: 25.

The 25th, on the calendar page she remembered staring at in the kitchen last night. The 25th day of this, the seventh month.

And then she did see three numbers, after all.

725.

The numbers Uhi had claimed Cee spoke to him. The numbers Uhi had discovered amongst Nolee’s tickets. The numbers that had been part of the eighteen strings of seven numbers recited by the impassive, echoing, otherworldly voices on the radio.

“It is a curse,” Nolee said to herself, as the old man walked away with the ticket he had purchased.

At that point only the final ticket remained, and a woman who worked at a downtown salon called Superior Nails wanted it. Nolee tried to tell her she had intended to keep the last ticket for herself, but the woman grew angry and snatched it out of Nolee’s hand. The nails technician said, “I suppose where it’s the last one it’s a little late to hear what your son has to say, but maybe it won’t prove lucky if I don’t listen.” She stepped beside Cee’s cart. “And this way I can see if he says the same numbers that appear on my ticket.” Hiding the ticket in the front pocket of her rhinestone-embellished blue jeans, the young woman bent down to Cee and asked for her numbers.

Nolee watched, now understanding the expression with one’s heart in one’s throat.

The nails technician smiled, nodded, stood erect. “Yes!” she pronounced. “He told me three of the seven numbers that appear on my ticket—in the correct sequence! How do you do this, Mrs. Nolee? What’s the trick?”

“There is no trick,” Nolee said numbly. She felt like she was gazing at a woman who stood under a falling boulder, without warning her to dodge out of the way.

“Well, in any case, now all that remains is to see if the stories are true and I win anything.” With that, the stylish young woman turned and strutted away, her high heels clacking on the old courtyard pavement.

Nolee faced her son. “What is it you’re doing, my child? Tell me you don’t understand any of it, the good or the bad. Tell me you are innocent, only a vessel for powers we can never understand.”

But he told her nothing, only barked a single loud laugh as he watched a rooster in beautiful metallic colors chase a younger rooster away from the chickens that pecked in the courtyard.

 

***

 

Nolee arrived at the lottery office at three thirty…a full half hour late. Bolun Sep was standing outside, as if waiting for her specifically, smoking a cigarette. But when Nolee stopped her motorbike beside him, and swung herself off its saddle, instead of growling at her as usual he only nodded. It was as though they had agreed to meet when all the rest of his numerous ticket dealers were gone.

She gave him the money, and again no unsold tickets. And then she stared at him expectantly.

“Do you know,” Sep told her, “that every single ticket you sold last time was a three-number winner?”

“So people have said. But I didn’t print those tickets, Bolun.”

“True enough. But I’ve been hearing that the winners all received a number from your son.” Sep gestured past Nolee at Cee, seated in the bike’s sidecar. “A prediction, or a blessing.”

“He can’t speak. They’ve all imagined it.”

“And now these tickets you sold.” He held up the thick wad of money. “Are these all winners, too?”

“I don’t know,” Nolee said. But in her gut she did. She knew they would contain, in part at least, winning numbers. The radio broadcast in only a half hour would simply confirm it.

“Nolee,” Sep said uncomfortably, “I’m sorry, but whatever magic your son has—”

“Do you believe in such things?”

“Who is to say?” he snapped, defensive. “You must believe, if you allowed your customers to consult him! Whatever the case may be…I won’t be giving you any more tickets to sell. I can’t have workers who are influencing this process in an unnatural way. How can I explain that to the lottery department, if they should look into this strangeness?”

“I understand,” Nolee said solemnly. And truly, she did. She had not wanted any more tickets to sell. If Sep hadn’t just now cut her—as she had expected him to—she would have reassigned. But she was relieved that he hadn’t mentioned Uhi’s death. Relieved that was not the reason he was letting her go.

He paid Nolee her ten percent share of the sales. “I am sorry,” he repeated, and he looked like he was sincere.

“Thank you for having allowed me to work for you,” Nolee said, then returned to her bike and started it up.

She saw that Sep continued to stand there in front of the lottery office, clutching the wad of worn dirty bills as he watched her leave. Beside her, Cee lifted one of his stick-like arms and jerked it as if he might be waving goodbye.

 

***

 

They listened to the government radio broadcast. As always, Maik wrote down the mechanically recited numbers. And then they waited for the inevitable flood of people who would descend upon the house wanting to buy tickets. Nolee knew she would be sending away many disappointed people this evening.

While they anticipated the inevitable, Nolee, Maik, and Teng sat on the kitchen floor with the now silent radio in the middle of their circle, like a ouija board. In the living room, they heard the TV, and Maik’s ten-year-old daughter Laiki speaking to Cee in a sing-song voice, encouraging him to eat the thick rice and pork soup she was feeding him with a spoon. Maik had told her two children they needed to start helping take care of their poor cousin.

Earlier that afternoon, before leaving for the lottery office to give Sep his money, Nolee had told Maik her beliefs about the death of the funeral man, Uhi. At first Maik had impatiently dismissed such a thought, but Nolee had kept on about it in an intense whisper, until Maik ultimately grew quiet and thoughtful. At last, Maik herself had said, “Poor Mr. Uhi. No wonder Cee wasn’t able to give him any more numbers. A person only has one death day.”

Now, as they sat on the kitchen floor, Nolee said quietly as if speaking to herself, “I haven’t heard of any more deaths. I hope no one connects Uhi’s death or any others that might occur with Cee and the numbers he gave them. If they make any such connection, mobs will come here to kill my son.”

“None of us will ever speak of this matter outside these walls,” Maik swore severely. “Right, husband?”

“Of course,” he grumbled. “Do you think I’m stupid, woman?”

Nolee took Maik’s hand and squeezed it, her eyes going wet. “Thank you, dear cousin. You are my greatest blessing.”

“Your son is your greatest blessing,” Maik said. “Hear me…Cee did not kill Uhi. He did not curse him. He only…he only saw. Saw Uhi’s destiny.”

“How do you know that?” Teng said.

“I know it in my heart.”

“Since when do you believe in such things?”

“I believe what’s in my heart,” his wife stated. She reassured Nolee, “You will find other work. Until then, Teng and I will care for you and Cee. Don’t be afraid of anything.”

“Aren’t you afraid for us?” Teng asked Maik. “And our children? Who knows if Cee is cursed or not? Who knows how dangerous he might be to our family?”

“Teng!” Maik cried.

“We can go,” Nolee said, lowering her head. “We can go far from here…to some village where there are few people whom we might harm.”

“No!” Maik said, shooting her husband an angry look. “We’ve been fine all this time. We will continue to be fine. You aren’t going anywhere.”

Teng rose to his feet and pulled out his pack of 777 cigarettes. “Whatever you crazy women want. I’m going outside for a smoke.” Then, he jerked his head suddenly, his expression one of alarm.

“What?” Maik asked him.

But Nolee had heard it, too. Her son Cee’s deep, gurgling voice in the next room.

Teng darted toward the living room. Jumping to their feet, Nolee and Maik rushed after him.

Ten-year-old Laiki was kneeling close to Cee, on his blankets spread upon the floor, the spoon of rice soup poised in her hand. Teng swept Laiki up in his arms and swung her away from Cee. The soup spilled from her spoon.

“What did he say to you?” Teng demanded of Laiki, spinning her around to face him. “Did he tell you numbers? Did he?”

Nolee stood behind Teng, her fingers pressed over her mouth. She looked at Cee with horror, and guilt, and crushing sorrow. She should kill him. And then kill herself. It would be the kindest thing for all of them.

But Laiki laughed with confusion and pushed herself out of her father’s arms. “Dad,” she said, “what do you mean? Cee can’t talk. He was only making those sounds he makes.”

Teng sighed, and dropped his face into his hands, wagging his head.

Maik put an arm around Nolee’s shoulders and said, “It’s all right, cousin. It’s going to be all right now.”

Teng stood up again, and wheeled back toward the kitchen. “I need that smoke!” he called back over his shoulder.

All through this, Cee had continued to watch the Western cartoon on the TV mounted on the wall. A cat chasing a mouse all around. He brayed laughter. He laughed and laughed.

 

***

 

People died in the town, as people die everywhere, on many different dates and in many different ways.

And two years after Nolee stopped selling lottery tickets, her husband Hiok—who had never come to visit his son Cee again—was hacked to death with a machete by his girlfriend’s secret lover, when Hiok caught them in bed together and the confrontation escalated.

It was on the sixteenth day of the eighth month.