Heavy

In Quincy the money came out of the ground, and then it came out of a bank, and now it comes out of the arm. Ora's right arm carries Friday's gauze under her sleeve and her right hand holds a foam ball that weighs a grain more than it should. Deacon's powder scale says thirty-one. The other sixty-eight weighed thirty. The heavy one is number nine, her own hand on it in black Sharpie, twelve times around.

"A heavy ball is a wish," Cal says behind her.

He says it the way the Circle K terminal says "Not a winner." He says it every draw night. Cal Ferrell's collar stands off his neck like a ring on a finger that has lost weight. His belt is buckled through a hole he punched himself with a roofing nail, and the tongue of the belt hangs past his fly. He stands close enough that Ora can smell the Dollar General on him, cardboard and floor wax and the sample cologne the stock boys spray on the pallets to make him mad. He manages that store. The stock boys are the only people in Gadsden County who have to do what he says, and they spray the cologne anyway.

She takes the emery board from her apron and sands number nine. Foam dust falls on the plywood like dandruff. She weighs it again. The needle sits on thirty. She seats the ball in its hole in the carton.

"Whose was it?" Cal says.

"Nobody's."

"Somebody wanted nine."

"It's foam. It drinks the air."

"Somebody breathed on it wanting nine." He lifts the carton lid and looks at the ball the way he looks at a stock boy. "Weigh it again."

She weighs it again and it reads thirty. He lets the lid down.

The barn belonged to Cal's daddy and to the shade tobacco before that. Cheesecloth still hangs off the frames outside in rotten flags. Inside, the machine sits on the old stripping bench where women pulled leaves before any of them were born, and the machine is a clothes dryer drum laid on its side with a Plexiglas face bolted over the mouth. A rotisserie motor turns it. A length of white PVC runs out the bottom into a spice rack with six cradles screwed to it. Cal built the whole thing off a video of the Tallahassee draw show paused over and over on his phone, and the video calls the Tallahassee machine a Halogen II and calls it gravity-driven, and Cal says those two words in church voice: gravity-driven. In Tallahassee the balls are foam and each ball wears twelve stickers and a radio tag in its heart, and three people with three keys open a vault to get at them, and a woman in gloves weighs each one before every draw. Cal read all that on the same phone. Out of all of it he kept the gloves.

The scale is Deacon's. Deacon reloads deer rounds at his kitchen table on the nights the barn is dark, and the scale reads to a tenth of a grain, and Deacon says a tenth of a grain is the difference between a deer and a deer you follow into the swamp until morning. He brought the scale the first night and never took it home.

They call the barn the studio, and nobody in the studio eats on a draw day, because an empty body is an honest scale. Ora's stomach turned over at four this afternoon and then lay down, like a dog that has given up at the door.

Deacon Hurst comes in with the cooler full of ice and water jugs and sets it by the tin. Mavis and Tull Pinckney come in behind him, and Tull drops both their phones into the yellow Bustelo can by the door, the one Cal's mama bought for the tobacco crews, and the can goes tonk. Deacon's flip phone goes in after. Ora's went in before Deacon's truck pulled up. Cal's phone stays in his shirt pocket, the one with the button. He alone reads them the official results on Sunday mornings.

The tin is a one-pound Prince Albert tin off the Ferrell mantel and it holds Saturday's tickets, one hundred of them, and each one says the six numbers the barn drew Wednesday for Saturday's game. Ora printed them Thursday morning at five forty on the terminal at the Circle K on Pat Thomas Parkway, one play slip fed through a hundred times, because a wish said once is a prayer and a wish said a hundred times is a claim. That is Cal's line. The rest of the line is that the jackpot splits by ticket. If a stranger in Ohio hits the same six numbers by accident, the pot cuts a hundred and one ways, and the studio holds a hundred of the cuts and the stranger drives home with one.

A ticket costs two dollars, a draw costs two hundred, and three draws cost the week six hundred. Six hundred dollars a week comes out of five arms.