Chub thwacked the broken television with the flat of his hand. He wasn't in the mood for one of Bode's speeches yet it now seemed inescapable.
Bode Gazzer continued: "Finally we hit it big and what happens? The state of motherfucking Florida is gonna pay us in drips and draps. Then, whatever we get is snatched by the Infernal Revenue!"
Listening to his friend, Chub's high feelings about their good luck began to ebb. He'd always viewed the lottery as a potential way to get tons of free money without doing jackshit. But the way Bode explained it, the Lotto was just another sinister example of government intrusion, tax abuse and liberal deceit.
"You think it's a accident we gotta share this money with somebody else?"
With the mouth of the beer bottle, Chub massaged the furry nape of his neck. He wondered what his friend was getting at.
Bode rapped his knuckles on the dinette. "Here's my prediction: The shitweasel holding the other Lotto ticket, he's either a Negro, Jew or Cuban type."
"Go on!"
"That's how they do it, Chub. To fuck over decent Americans such as you and me. You think they're gonna let two white boys take the whole jackpot? Not these days, no way!" Bode's nose angled back toward the newspaper. "Where's Grange? Over near Tampa?"
Chub was stunned at his friend's theory. He didn't understand how the lottery could be rigged. If it was, how had he and Bode managed to win even half?
During the brief span of their friendship, Bodean Gazzer had invoked conspiracies to explain numerous puzzling occurrences for instance, how come there was usually a big airplane crash at Christmastime.
Bode knew the answer, and naturally it involved the U.S. government. The Federal Aviation Administration was in perpetual danger of having its budget slashed, the crucial vote customarily coming in December before Congress adjourned for the holidays. Consequently (Bode revealed to Chub) the FAA always sabotaged an airliner around Christmas, knowing politicians wouldn't have the nerve to cut the funding for air safety while the world watched mangled bodies being pulled out of a charred fuselage.
"Think about it," Bode Gazzer had said and Chub did. A government plot seemed more plausible than grim coincidence, all those plane crashes.
Corrupting the state Lotto, however, was something else. Chub didn't think even the liberals could pull it off.
"It don't add up," he said sullenly. Plenty of regular white folks had won, too; he'd seen their faces on TV. Speaking of which, he wished the goddamn thing wasn't busted so he could watch football and not have to think about what Bode Gazzer was saying.
"You'll see," Bode told him. "You'll see I'm right. Now, where the hell's Grange, Florida?"
Chub muttered, "Upstate."
"Big help you are. Everything's upstate from here."
From his studded belt Chub took a Colt Python .357 and shot several holes in David Koresh's cheeks.
Bode Gazzer leaned back from the dinette. "What's yourdamn problem?"
"I don't like the way I feel." Chub tucked the gun in the waist of his trousers, the barrel hot against his thigh. Without flinching he said: "Man wins fourteen million bucks, he oughta feel good. And I don't."
"Exactly!" Bode Gazzer charged across the room and seized Chub in a clammy tremble of an embrace. "Now you see" Bode's voice dropping to a whisper "what this country of ours has come to. You see what the battle is all about!"
Chub nodded solemnly, withholding his concern that a battle sounded like damn hard work, and hard work sounded like the last damn thing a brand-new millionaire ought to be doing.
The downsizing trend that swept newspapers in the early nineties was aimed at sustaining the bloated profit margins in which the industry had wallowed for most of the century. A new soulless breed of corporate managers, unburdened by a passion for serious journalism, found an easy way to reduce the cost of publishing a daily newspaper. The first casualty was depth.
Cutting the amount of space devoted to news instantly justified cutting the staff. At many papers, downsizing was the favored excuse for eliminating such luxuries as police desks, suburban editions, foreign bureaus, medical writers, environmental specialists and, of course, investigative teams (which were always antagonizing civic titans and important advertisers). As newspapers grew thinner and shallower, the men who published them worked harder to assure Wall Street that readers neither noticed nor cared.
It was Tom Krome's misfortune to have found a comfortable niche with a respectable but doomed newspaper, and to have been laid off at a time when the business was glutted with hungry experienced writers. It was his further misfortune to have been peaking in his career as an investigative reporter at a time when most newspapers no longer wished to pay for those particular skills.
The Register,for example, was in the market for a divorce columnist. Sinclair had made the pitch at Krome's job interview.
"We're looking for something funny," Sinclair had said. "Upbeat."
"Upbeat?"
"There's a growing readership out there," Sinclair had said. "You ever been through a divorce?"
"No," Krome had lied.
"Perfect. No baggage, no bitterness, no bile."
Sinclair's fetish for alliteration it was Krome's first exposure.
"But your ad in E&Psaid 'feature writer.' "
"This would be a feature, Tom. Five hundred words. Twice a week."
Krome had thought: I know what I'll do I'll move to Alaska! Gut salmon on the slime line. In winters, work on a novel.
"Sorry I wasted your time." He'd stood up, shaken Sinclair's hand (which had, actually, a limp, slick, dead-salmon quality), and flown home to New York.
A week later, the editor had called and offered Krome a feature-writing position at $38,000 a year. No divorce column, thank God The Register'smanaging editor, it turned out, had seen nothing upbeat in the topic. "Four-time loser," Sinclair had explained in a whisper.
Tom Krome took the feature-writing job because he needed the money. He was saving for a cabin on Kodiak Island or possibly up near Fairbanks, where he'd live by himself. He intended to buy a snowmobile and photograph wild wolves, caribou and eventually a grizzly bear. He intended to write a novel about a fictional actress named Mary Andrea Finley, based on a true person named Mary Andrea Finley, who in real life had spent the last four years successfully preventing Tom Krome from divorcing her.
He was packing for the Lotto story when Katie returned from church.
"Where to?" Her purse hit the kitchen table like a cinder block.
"A place called Grange," Tom Krome said.
"I've been there," Katie said testily. A place called Grange.Like she didn't even know it was a town. "That's where they have the sightings," she said.
"Right." Krome wondered if Katie was one of the religious pilgrims. Anything was possible; he'd known her only two weeks.
She said, "They've got a Mother Mary that cries." She went to the refrigerator. Poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice; Krome, waiting for more about Grange. "And on the highway," she said, between sips, "in the middle of the highway, the face of Jesus Christ."
Tom Krome said, "I heard about that."
"A stain," Katie elaborated. "Dark violet. Like blood."
Or possibly transmission fluid, Krome thought.
"I've only been there once," Katie said. "We stopped for gas on the way to Clearwater."
Krome was relieved to hear she wasn't a Grange regular. He tossed a stack of clean Jockey shorts into the suitcase. "What was your impression of the place?"
"Weird." Katie finished the fruit juice, washed the glass. She slipped out of her shoes and took a seat at the table, where she had a good view of Tom packing. "I didn't see the crying Madonna, just the road-stain Jesus. But the whole town struck me as weird."
Krome suppressed a smile. He was counting on weird.
Katie asked, "When will you be back?"