Blind Luck (2 page)

The driver extended the change, but’ Dave waved it off. He waited for a break in traffic with his eyes locked on the name RICHTER ACCOUNTING in block letters on the window of the boutique accounting firm. Positioned between a photocopy centre and a used record store that reeked of marijuana, this was clearly not the city’s business core. The driver of an SUV flashed Dave the middle finger as he jogged past the vehicle to the sidewalk, but he didn’t have the time or energy to respond.

The familiar jingle of the same bells he heard every workday greeted him, but in his hung-over state they clanged like the sound of church bells at noon. He reached for his temples and did his best to smile for his colleagues. The office was well decorated but small. With sturdy furniture from the seventies, generic colours, and more wood than plastic, the place was a throwback. This was where Dave spent fifty-some~hing hours a week. He’d never envisioned a place like this when his dad had told him as an undergrad that he had never met an accountant without money.

Four cubicles and a front reception desk made up the visible working space. Shannon, a thirty-something receptionist in black pants and a black top just barely acceptable for the workplace, raised her eyes from a flat screen.

“Good morning:’ she said in a tone far too sexy for the office.

They’d bonded after they’d stayed later than anyone at the Christmas party, shared stories about university and made out until she’d panicked about being intimate with someone from work.

Mr. Richter turned from the water cooler, glanced up to the clock then returned his eyes to Dave. Neither his boring suit nor shaggy grey hair fit his wealth, but money didn’t matter to Richter the way it did to most people in the accounting business.

Richter loved the work. He valued the interaction with the clients, the trust, and the responsibility. Many sixty-six-year-olds with that much money retire, but Richter never mentioned the word.

“You look tired.” He gestured at Dave with his cup of water.

Dave offered a meek nod while walking past the boss to a pot of coffee adjacent to Irene’s desk. Dave had never figured out why Richter had hired Irene. She was in her mid-twenties, full of energy, and chose play over work every time. She talked on the phone to friends, took numerous cigarette breaks, surfed the Net, and kept eBay on her desktop. She pressed hold on her phone, lowered her headset and spun her chair towards Dave.

“Out late last night?”

He raised his mug of coffee as if toasting success. “Very.”

She opened the top drawer of her desk, and the white tips of her French manicure stood out against the black surface. .

“Headache?”

“I’m feeling the burn.”

She removed a bottle of Aspirin from her desk and held it up as he passed so he could take it from her without breaking stride.

“You’re the best.”

“I know.”

Dave wished he’d made out with
her
at the Christmas party. Irene was someone with panache. He scolded himself while he walked past Todd, who smelled like hot dogs. The man didn’t even raise his eyes from a document long enough for a perfunctory exchange, but Dave liked it better that way. Todd was so bland, so overweight, such a shell of who he wanted to be, that all he did was remind Dave of the ultimate futility of life as a number cruncher.

Dave stepped into the washroom, opened the first stall door and stepped away with disgust when he saw a toilet full of shit. He thought of Todd’s heavy frame hunched over, with his cheeks flushed and his podgy fingers flexed around his newspaper.

“Christ.”

He wanted to say more, to open up the door, drag Todd back into the washroom and yell,
Is this any way to leave a toilet?
But he couldn’t. Todd wasn’t the one who was almost late and already on a bathroom break.

He entered the next stall, removed a few strips of toilet paper to cover the seat and sat down. In a smooth motion, as he had done many times before, he tapped two Aspirin into his right hand and chased them with coffee before putting the coffee cup and Aspirin bottle on top of the toilet paper dispenser. Bent over, with his hands cupped on his head, as if by stabilizing it he could stop the pounding, he pleaded for a dear thought, until a loud rumble warned that he should look up.

This was the type of noise he knew shouldn’t be happening. Too random and violent to be deliberate, it was the type of chaos that instinctively provokes fear.

He listened carefully to assess the situation, but an explosive sound followed the rumble, so he put a hand on each side of the stall in anticipation of the ceiling caving in.

He waited for paint chips, then plaster chips, or the entire second floor. The sound of glass shattering and metal crumpling filled the room as his arms flexed, but the ceiling never fell. He raised his eyes with caution to the lights above him to see that there wasn’t even a crack in the surrounding paint, then it became that clear the noise had come from the main room. Two deep breaths and he pulled up his pants from his ankles, exited the stall and walked towards the main room, unsure whether or not he wanted to see what awaited him.

The washroom door creaked as he opened it, so he pushed it hard to get it over with and stepped into the main room to see two-thirds of an eighteen-wheel big-rig truck filling the space. Steam blew from the grill, making everything hazy, but Dave could still make out the tail end of the truck on the sidewalk and road, which made it clear that the vehicle had blown through the business’s front windows.

He scanned the room, but it took a moment for the details to work past the shock. Shannon’s legs stuck out from the debris, Mr. Richter lay face down beside her, and Todd’s back and broken arms were visible beneath the truck’s side. Dave had expected more noise, but the room was remarkably quiet except for the faint sound of plaster dust, glass and metal settling. The quiet confused him, as if this were all a bizarre nightmare, until he looked across the room to where Irene lay partially covered by rubble.

A human-sized dent in the wall above her body provided evidence that the truck’s impact had propelled her into the plaster. The room looked surreal, but everything about the pool of blood around Irene’s head was real. The colour, the mess and the finality were all vivid enough to force Dave to admit that this was really happening. He wanted to rush over to all of them and help somehow, but he couldn’t move.

The truck had destroyed the building and killed everyone he worked with. Shock defied his will, so he stood there absorbing the unbelievable until the sound of approaching sirens tore through the quiet with increasing intensity.

Two

Ruby Bolden looked at her husband like she wanted to shake him. “The front lawn really needs cutting, Jack. The neighbours are starting to stare.”

Jack was too engrossed in the pages he held to hear anything beyond the possibilities running through his head. In the previous minutes, he had completed more math than he had in four years of high school. Number of races, multiplied by the horse’s odds, multiplied by the wager. If only the rest of life was so linear.

“Do you think you’ll get to it today?” Ruby persisted.

Jack still didn’t respond, so she put both hands on the table where he sat and leaned forward so that only a glass bowl of marbles separated them. “I said, are you going to get to it today?”

Jack looked up, and the nerves above his right eye twitched so strongly, he had to rub the socket. “Get to what?”

“The lawn. The neighbours are starting to stare.”

“So let them cut it.”

His eyes returned to the pages. Number of races, multiplied by the horse’s odds, multiplied by the wager.

“For Christ’s sake, Jack. It’ll only take you fifteen minutes.”

Jack looked up again, folded the pages and rose from the seat. “I’m joking. I’ll do it after Dave’s game.”

He kissed her on the cheek and stepped towards the living room, where Dave played with a collection of miniature cars in front of a T.V. tuned into a game show.

“You ready, buddy?”

Dave hopped to his feet, nodded and grabbed his baseball glove from the couch. Ruby hadn’t said a word since Jack had risen from the table.

“Wish him luck,” Jack said, kissing her again.

“Good luck, David. Have fun.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Jack didn’t say much during the drive to the ballpark. Sports talk radio debated whether or not taxpayers should have to contribute to a new stadium while Jack waited for injury reports and odds.

Number of games, multiplied by the odds of each team winning, multiplied by the wager. A station wagon cut in front of them on the way into the parking lot, prompting Jack to lean on the horn, drop the window and fire a middle finger into the air.

Eight-year-olds only play six innings. By the bottom of the fifth, Dave had ten strikeouts in a one-nil game for his team. Jack leaned into the heavy-set man beside him. With a thick red beard and a protruding brow, the man looked almost primitive.

“Your son playing?” Jack asked.

The man turned his head. “What’s that?”'

“What number is your son?”

“Fifteen,” he said, pointing to a kid a good thirty pounds heavier than anyone else sitting in the dugout. “What about yours?”

“Mine’s the pitcher.”

“The kid’s got a good arm. He must have half a dozen strikeouts.”

“Ten.”

“Ten?”

“Yep. And I’ve got a fifty that says he’s at a dozen by the end of the inning.”

“No way. Ritchie’s up soon, and there’s no way he whiffs again. He’s leading the league in home runs, you know?”

“So let’s make it a hundred.”

“Two more strikeouts by the end of the inning?”

Jack extended his hand. “Guaranteed.”

“You’re on.”

The man with the red beard cursed Dave’s next four pitches, but after opening with a ball, he fired two strikes past the batter. His next pitch was a fastball that left the batter swinging for air and sent the crowd into a loud series of oohs. Jack didn’t even smile. This was his son. He had watched Dave many times before and knew he didn’t pitch like an eight-year-old.

Dave almost hit the next batter with a curveball that sailed high enough that the boy dropped his bat and headed for the dugout. The coach tried to steer him back to the plate, but the kid shook his head until snickering from his teammates forced him back into Dave’s line of fire. The kid couldn’t keep his bat steady as Dave reared back for the next pitch, and when the ball came, he closed his eyes as he swung. He must have surprised himself by making contact, because as the weak grounder rolled towards the shortstop, he remained at the plate. After his coach screamed him into the moment, he got about three steps towards first before the shortstop threw him out. Jack stirred in his seat while the man beside him with the red beard clapped awkwardly.

Jack wanted to cheer for Dave, but all he saw were the mistakes the kid had made with the last two pitches.
Keep your head down; drive the pitch with your lead leg; stop looking at the homeless guy picking through the garbage can beside the stands.

The man with the red beard rose to his feet as his son Ritchie approached the plate from the batter’s box.

“Let’s go, Ritchie. It’s your field, son.”

Ritchie looked even bigger close up. With large hands, chubby cheeks, accentuated by the helmet pressing against them, and feet the size of many men’s, he looked more like a ten or eleven-year-old.

Dave’s first pitch bounced into the gravel before the catcher secured the ball.

The man with the red beard shook his head. “That’s right kid, you don’t want to put it anywhere near the strike zone with my boy.”

The second pitch avoided the ground, but it still landed too far away from the strike zone. Frustration surged through Jack’s arms until his fingers wrapped around the bottom of the bench.
Eyes up, snap your wrist.

Dave raised the peak of his cap and wiped his face with his forearm. He looked over at the homeless man, who was only visible from the waist down as the rest of him stretched for something he wanted at the bottom of the can. Dave pivoted towards Ritchie, cocked back and fired a fastball right across the plate. Ritchie swung so hard, he fell to one knee. The crowd and both teams chuckled.

“The kid’s got a rocket for an arm,” a man with a ponytail sitting behind home plate repeated to anyone that would listen.

Dave chose a slider for the next pitch, and Ritchie caught enough of the ball to send it spinning three feet backward into the cage. The man with the red beard rose to his feet again.

“He’s catching up with it. Attaboy, Ritchie. You’ve got a beat on it now.”

Jack didn’t hear a word of the trash talk. He never did. What he saw was Dave focussing on everything but the next pitch. The boy heard his teammates screaming his name, his opponents cursing him, and he was watching the catcher’s mother—a woman of no more than thirty wearing a pink top that struggled to contain oversized breasts.
This boy’s got to learn to focus.

Dave exhaled, reared back and side-armed a curveball too low for the strike zone, but Ritchie didn’t see a curve. He guessed a fastball and swung another full-weight swing as the pitch zipped past him.

“Strike three,” the umpire yelled.

The man with the red beard dropped to his seat. Jack nodded while tapping the empty wood between them. The hundred dollars felt like a hundred thousand. The next inning

the coach decided to sit Dave, and the closer allowed four runs in a four to one loss.

“How about some ice cream?” Jack asked in the car. “You’ve earned it.”

Dave didn’t respond.

“I don’t want you feeling bad about the loss. You threw twelve strikeouts. That’s more than one for every year you’ve been on the planet. You’ve got nothing to feel bad about.”

“We lost.”

“
They
lost. You pitched twelve strikeouts and went two for three with a double and an RBI.”

The words didn’t remove the frustration from Dave’s face. His eyes narrowed to form the look that accompanies all eight-year-olds learning the humility of defeat, but Jack gave the horn a honk anyway.