Blind Luck (7 page)

Thorrin walked around the desk and past Dave into a connecting room, where Grayson sat on a couch watching stock tickers on two flat screens. Thorrin removed a pack of playing cards from a shelf filled mostly with books before gesturing to Dave. “Take a seat.”

Thorrin sat down in a chair closest to the windows so that the three of them formed a half-moon around a glass coffee table with a ying/yang sculpture the size of a candy dish in its centre. He removed the cards from the package and shuffled the deck three times. Each shuffle made Dave more uncomfortable.

“What we need is a concrete demonstration of your capabilities. Grayson, can you choose a card for me, please?”

Grayson turned his attention from the screens for the first time and responded as if he’d been waiting for the question. “Ace of spades.”

“Of course. The ace of spades it is.” Thorrin fanned the cards in his hands and extended them to Dave. “Pull me out the ace of spades.”

Dave looked at the cards for a moment. The stupidity of the request annoyed him as much as the situation unnerved him. “It’s not going to happen.”

“Choose a card.”

“We can do this a hundred times, and it won’t happen.”

“Choose a card.”

“Okay, to stop this insanity, gladly.” Dave picked the third card from the left, smiled and flipped it towards Thorrin and Grayson to reveal the six of hearts. “You see? No magic. I’m just like anyone else you put a deck in front of.”

Thorrin nodded at Grayson, who got up to walk over to Dave’s far side. Thorrin pointed the cards at Dave. “Don’t confuse luck for chance; there’s nothing random about you. For luck to kick in, you need to have something at stake.”

Grayson removed a gun from somewhere in his suit jacket. It wasn’t the first time Dave had seen a gun, but it was the first time a barrel had hovered inches from his head.

“Something to gain or lose,” Thorrin continued.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Thorrin fanned the cards before extending them again. “Now, choose a card.”

“You’re going to kill me over this?”

“Choose a card.”

“Because that’s what’s going to happen. I’m not what you think I am, and I don’t want to get killed over it.”

Grayson cocked the gun’s trigger and pressed the barrel’s cold steel against Dave’s temple. “Choose a card.”

Dave snatched a card to get it over with, looked at it with disbelief and turned it slowly towards Thorrin to reveal the ace of spades. Thorrin smiled the universal smile of being right. “There we go.”

Grayson took a few steps back with a sly grin before opening the revolver to reveal the gun as a starter’s pistol.

Thorrin unfolded a stock sheet and spread it out on the table. “Now you can choose a stock.”

Sweat beaded on Dave’s face. The room seemed too bright. Each breath felt filtered, and only his disbelief kept him from passing out or running for the door. “I don’t know what you did to the cards, or how you fixed the outcome, but that wasn’t luck.”

Thorrin tapped the sheet. “Enjoy your gift, Dave, pick a stock.”

The moment overwhelmed him. He was trying to figure out how they set the cards up when Thorrin raised his voice. “Pick a stock.”

“It’s your money. You want me to pick a stock, you’re willing to stick a gun to my head, I’ll pick a stock.”

With closed his eyes, he fired an index finger to the page. Thorrin circled the name Dave pointed to with a blue Sharpie.

“Thank you.”

“Can I leave now?”

“Absolutely. Grayson will take you wherever you like. I hope you understand I would’ve been doing you a disservice not to show you what you possess.”

Dave’s face showed no expression. In any other surroundings, Thorrin’s words would be dismissed as crazy, but when you own five thousand square feet decorated with leather, mahogany and the finest technology, the words pass as business.

In Grayson’s car, Dave looked out the passenger window in an effort to create as much distance as possible. Advanced Japanese lessons played on the stereo. Grayson mouthed the words for ‘Would you like to stay the night?’ then turned to Dave. “Why so quiet?”

The question surprised Dave. “You pointed a gun at me.”

“It was a starter’s pistol.”

“You sure about that?”

“You were never in danger, you just had to believe you were.”

“I almost pissed myself.”

“It’s unfortunate we had to startle you, but you needed to see for yourself.”

“All I saw were two crazy people capable of a cheap card trick.”

“Your selection had nothing to do with us.”

Dave turned his head back to the window until he pointed at a low-rise apartment building up ahead. “This is me up here. The corner is fine.”

Grayson pulled the car to the curb before shutting off the engine. He turned off the Japanese lessons and locked those intense eyes on him. “I have another offer for you.”

“I pass.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“No.”

“Well, I do, and my sister, she’s wonderful, but she has to have the worst luck on the planet. I want you to spend an hour with her so she can absorb some of yours.”

“Do you hear yourself?”

“Your hour is worth two thousand dollars to me.”

Dave wanted to get out of the car, but two thousand dollars triggered the learned response. He had senior’s home payments and loan payments, and he wanted a trip to the Bahamas.

“She must be in bad shape if you’re willing to pay me two grand for an hour.”

“I wouldn’t take her to Vegas with me. You won’t repeat a word of this, but you need the context to appreciate her situation. She’s divorced, suffered four miscarriages, developed a wheat intolerance in her twenties; she’s on her eleventh broken bone, and she’s colour blind.”

Dave didn’t listen past the miscarriages. “That’s no fun.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Save your money, though, hanging out with me won’t do anything for her.”

“I disagree.” Grayson removed a thick envelope with an address written on the front. “There’s half the money and her address.”

Dave knew it was risky, but loan shark interest and unemployment made resisting the size of the envelope impossible.

“Meet me there tomorrow at four.”

“What do you want me to say to her?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just be around her for an hour.”

Dave stepped out of the car. He considered handing the money back until Grayson leaned across the passenger seat. “Thank you.”

Dave shut the car door and watched Grayson drive away. Dave knew what it felt like to wish change for a family member, and if it was as easy as paying someone two grand to fix his dad’s problems, he would have done it years ago.

Eight

Dave saw a gun for the first time when he was thirteen. That night he’d dreamed of track and field day at school. His relay team positioned him lead off, but when the starter’s pistol fired, he couldn’t move, no matter how hard he tried. All he could do was watch the other runners get smaller down the track. The part of him that observed the dream play out as if he were God knew that it was an anxiety dream. This part of him was most frustrated, because he couldn’t will any movement.

A school bell rang loud as he tried to move, until everyone on the track surged en masse towards the school. He wanted to scream, to beg for another chance to race, but the moment passed. He stood alone on the track and prayed for the bell to stop ringing until a part of him recognized that the noise came from the waking world. His mind rushed from sleeping, to groggy, to terrified. The doorbell should never ring at two in the morning. He thought of his mother, who was full of enough sleeping pills she would sleep through a car crash, let alone a doorbell. Two weeks earlier, he’d broken a picture while wrestling with his friend Marlon, and she hadn’t woken up-not when it smashed to the floor, not when they swept up the glass, and not when they giggled while doing a pathetic job of staying quiet.

The doorbell cut through the silence again. Ding-dong. The sound was far too friendly a noise for someone at the door at six minutes after two. The bell sent shivers down every limb. He considered staying put and hoped to avoid going to the door, but there was no way it was a salesperson at two a.m., so he decided he had to answer. Someone might be lost or hurt.

But then it occurred to him that maybe the person was checking to see if anyone was home. At that moment, he decided it was better to answer the ring than to wait and see if the next step was for someone to break into the house.

A quick glance through the door’s half-moon of small windows revealed that the porch light was out. His mother never turned the porch light off until daylight, so he flicked the switch up and down a few times, but still no light. Ding-dong. The sound made his fingers tingle. Fear made his hands stiff, but he didn’t want his mother to deal with whoever stood on the other side of the door, so he turned the deadbolt fast, and the loud click of metal on metal broke through the silence.

He could hear the sound of shoes or boots moving on the porch, so he grabbed the doorknob and pulled in one motion the way people remove band-aids to get the pain over with. A rush of cold air came through the gap between the door opening and the safety chain, and his heart pounded harder than he ever imagined possible as he peered into the darkness, until a face appeared in the gap. He drew his head back. Reaction told him to scream, but no sound came out.

“Relax,” the face said. “I’m a friend of your father’s. Is he home?”

Dave looked at the stubbly face. The man’s eyes were a striking hazel that looked too soft for the shaved scalp and stubble they centred. Dave shook his head.

“He’s not home?”

Dave shook his head again. His dad hadn’t been home for two days. His mom said he was at his friend Craig’s, but he knew better than to offer that information.

“I need you to open the door for me, kid.”

Dave saw another man beside the first. This guy was shorter, and parts of his blond hair showed beneath the toque fitting tightly on his head. Dave smelled something like smoke wafting from the men, only sweeter. The smell made Dave think of incense.

“Are you listening to me, kid? I need you to open the door.”

“I can’t do that.”

Dave’s words sparked the man with the toque. He positioned himself in front of the gap so that Dave could see him from the waist up and lifted his jacket to reveal a gun tucked into his pants.

“Do you see this? This will he in your mouth if you don’t open that door.”

The other man pushed the man with the toque to the side, saying, “Are you retarded? Put your fucking jacket down and lower your voice.” He turned back to Dave. “I understand why you don’t want to let us in, but you’ve got to understand, your father owes me money. Money he hasn’t paid me, and I need to clear that up.”

“My dad’s not home.”

“I understand that. And I know your mom probably is, and I know that scares you, so I’ll let you know up front that we’re not here for her. Now you’ve got two choices here, kid. You either let me in, I’m gone in fifteen minutes, and your mother never has to see me, or I kick in the door, wake your mother, and things might get a lot crazier. That make sense to you?”

Dave nodded. He lifted the chain and waited for the door to burst open, but that didn’t happen. The man gave Dave a moment to step back before coming inside.

Both men wore dark jackets and jeans. The man who did most of the talking maintained eye contact with Dave while the other one lit a cigarette.

“Here’s how it’s going to work. Your father, the piece of shit that he is, owes me two thousand dollars. Two thousand that he refuses to pay me, so I’m going to take two thousand dollars worth of stuff out of his home. Now, you’re a good kid. You’ve got spunk, and this isn’t your fault. If someone came into my home and did this to my kid. I’d kill them, but where’s your dad? Hiding out somewhere over two grand while his kid has to deal with this. This isn’t your fault, so I’m going to do you a favour. I’m going to let you choose two things in here that you don’t want me to take.”

Dave wanted to cry. He could feel his eyes squinting, his lips pouting, but nothing ran wet. He thought of his baseball glove, the T.V., and his hockey equipment. Then he thought of his mom’s jewellery box, the ring she’d showed him that her mother had given her and the copper brooch that had been in the family for over a hundred years.

“Anything on the first floor. Just please don’t go upstairs, I don’t want my mom to see this.”

The man looked at him before turning to his partner. “Looks a lot like Terry, doesn’t he?”

“Fucker could be his brother,” the man with the toque said as a cloud of smoke drifted from his mouth. He walked to the T.V., unplugged it and picked it up with a groan.

Dave didn’t look, he just sat at the foot of the stairs.

The man who did the talking pointed to the T.V. “Do you have another T.V. anywhere?”

Dave shook his head. The man gestured to his partner, who struggled with the T.V.’s weight.

“Leave the T.V.”

“What?”

“Put the T.V. back.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“I’m serious. Put the T.V. back.”

“You’re telling me because this little shit looks like your son, you’re going to leave a T.V. like this?”

The nicer man’s eyes burned so intensely that he didn’t have to respond, and fifteen minutes later they were gone, just as he’d promised. Dave checked on his mother, and it was clear she had no idea what had happened. He wondered whether or not some of the noises had penetrated her psyche and caused a nightmare, or if she had simply slept the dead sleep of pills.

Dave didn’t go back to sleep that night. He just pulled the covers over his head, thankful to lose only the stereo, a crystal lamp, a leather chair and a set of golf clubs. If he’d had red hair instead of brown, or blue eyes instead of hazel, the house would have lost a lot more. If he didn’t look so much like the man’s son, his mother could have been hurt. But he did, and even though he spent the rest of the night awake from the adrenaline flowing through him, he did so grateful for his brown hair and hazel eyes.