The Luckiest Man

The newspaper ran his picture three times that year. Each time the photographer caught him from the same angle. He held the cardboard check flat against his chest, and the casino chandeliers hung over his head, and every one of them was heavy enough to kill a man if the casino ever stopped paying the fellow who checked the bolts. The headline never changed. It said LUCKIEST MAN ALIVE every time, and after the third picture the casino manager bought him a porterhouse and asked him, very kindly, to gamble somewhere else.

People stopped him on the sidewalk to touch his coat. They believed it rubbed off. A woman at the deli counter pressed a rosary into his palm and asked him to hold it for the length of one Hail Mary while her son lay in a bed across town with a tube in each arm. Tomás held it. He was thinking about his pastrami. When he gave the beads back she kissed them where his fingers had been, and the next time he saw her at the counter she wore black, and she watched the floor until he had paid and gone.

His name was Tomás Vela. He was thirty-eight years old, and he had never lost a thing he wanted to keep.

The first win came when he was twenty-two. He bought a scratch ticket with the change from a tank of gas and worked the silver off with his thumbnail against the hood of his car, skritch, skritch, and the numbers came up in a row, and he carried it back inside, and the kid at the register read it and put both hands flat on the counter and called the manager out of the back. It paid forty thousand dollars. Tomás drove home with the ticket inside his shoe. Soledad cried at the kitchen table, and the light from the window lay across her hands, and he understood, the way a man understands the floor will hold him, that the world had selected him.

It kept selecting him.

He found money in coats he had worn for years. He missed a flight to Lisbon because a parking garage lost his car, and the plane went into the Atlantic, and the next morning he read about it over coffee. The paper printed the names of the dead in a column beside the box scores. He bet horses for their names. A filly called Bad Penny came in, and a gelding called Widow's Mite came in at forty to one. A doctor found a shadow on his lung. A second doctor found nothing, and the first doctor apologized for his machine.

Mercedes, his daughter, came out blue, and the cord was looped twice around her neck. The nurse got her fingers under the loop. Tomás stood at the foot of the bed and wanted his daughter to breathe, wanted it with his fists and his whole face, and the cord slid free, and the baby opened her mouth, waah, and the nurse ran back to the next room, where another woman's baby had come out blue with nobody there to get a finger under the loop.

By forty he had a house on the hill above the harbor, a wife who slept badly, and a daughter who still laughed in the next room. His porch looked out at the water over one empty lot. He sold life insurance for a firm on Water Street, because a man needs somewhere to go in the morning, and people liked buying it from a man who would never need it.

Soledad slept badly because of the dreams. She never told him the dreams. She told her sister, and her sister told the priest, and one afternoon while Tomás was at the track the priest drove up the hill and sat at her kitchen table over a glass of water he never drank. She told him the one that kept coming back. Her husband walked through a field of people, and every person he passed went down, quietly, the way wheat goes down, and he never once looked back, and the field ran on to the edge of the world.

The priest turned the glass a little on the oilcloth. "The soul does its books at night, Mrs. Vela. Yours sounds like it's been writing down names."

Soledad got up and brought her sewing tin from the pantry. Under the spools she kept the clippings from the paper. She laid them on the oilcloth face down, so that LUCKIEST MAN ALIVE lay against the table. On the backs, over the tide tables and the want ads, she had started a list in pencil. Beside every name she had set down what that one had been standing in front of.

There was a man named Barrera, who had the corner office at the insurance firm. The office had the big window over the harbor, and Tomás used to stand in its doorway with his coffee and look past Barrera at the boats. One clear night Barrera drove his Buick off the coast road and into the bay. The inquest blamed the brakes. The receipt in the glove box said the dealership had put new brakes on that spring. Tomás moved into the corner office before the funeral flowers went brown, and from his new desk he could see the spot where the tow truck had dragged the Buick out. The firm paid Barrera's widow in full. Tomás signed the check. Beside Barrera's name Soledad had written "the office."

There was Anselmo Lindero, the old man next door, who owned the empty lot between Tomás's porch and the harbor and would not sell it at any price Tomás named. Lindero fell down the cellar stairs he had climbed for forty years. His widow sold Tomás the lot for less than her husband had ever asked for anything, and she brought a tuna casserole to the closing. Beside his name Soledad had written "the view."

There was Leticia. Mercedes loved her at sixteen, and Leticia wore Mercedes's sweaters home and never once brought one back. At a party that winter Leticia said one small cruel thing to Mercedes in front of everybody and left her crying in a stranger's bathroom. Tomás drove across town at midnight to get Mercedes. The chains on his tires rang on the packed snow, chink, chink, chink, and the heater roared, and his daughter sat against the door and kept her face to the glass. Tomás kept his eyes on the road. "She won't do that to you again."

Leticia's mother came to the door with her daughter's school picture before the snow had filled in the tire tracks on the road. They found Leticia in the spring when the snow went off the mountain. Beside her name Soledad had written their daughter's name.

The priest put the clippings back in the tin face down and drove home. He left the water on the table.

Mercedes stopped laughing in the house after that. She laughed on the telephone in her room, and he heard it through the wall, and it stopped when he opened her door. The year she turned eighteen, a college on the other coast offered her money nobody had applied for. Tomás signed the forms at the kitchen table without looking up.

He found the tin himself the winter after she left, when he went looking for a needle to sew a button back onto his coat. He stood at the pantry shelf and read the backs of the clippings. Then he laid them in the tin again, face down, in the same order, and sewed his button on with black thread, and he never said a word about any of it to Soledad.

Tomás believed in the check against his chest and the chandeliers and the men who touched his coat, and a man does not argue with the floor for holding him up. All the same, he began to keep a distance. He stood at the back of every funeral. He let other men go first through doorways, and his clients called him a gentleman. When Soledad's sister went into the hospital that winter with her lungs full of water, he drove in every evening and sat by the bed and wanted her to live. He wanted it while the monitor over her head went beep, and he wanted it while Soledad watched him from the other chair. Before Easter her sister walked out of that hospital and carried her own suitcase to the car, and after that Soledad slept with the lamp on.

He quit the firm. He gave up the track and the tickets. He told the priest, who had started coming up the hill to see him instead of Soledad, that he was trying to want nothing.

The priest laughed into his wine. "That's the hardest want there is."

Tomás liked him. He liked him enough to lie awake over it, and he began to want the priest somewhere far off with no Tomás in it. By spring the bishop had moved him to a parish in the high desert. The priest's postcard had a dry lake on the front, and on the back he had written one line about a church roof that leaked in a place where it never rained.

Waiters brought Tomás the special before he had closed the menu, and the special was always what he wanted. At home the plate was on the table before he knew he was hungry. The field never waited for him to finish a wish. Whatever he hoped for Mercedes he kept folded small, somewhere the field could not find it, and she stayed across the country, and every birthday card she sent came addressed to her mother alone.

The year he turned sixty, Soledad still stopped whatever her hands were doing when he came into a room. A knife would stop halfway through an onion. A page would stop halfway turned. She kept a suitcase packed on the floor of the hall closet and never carried it farther than the closet door. One night he stood at the foot of their bed with the lamp still burning and watched her pretend to sleep, and he wanted her to stop being afraid of him. He wanted it the way he had wanted the corner office and the empty lot.

In the morning she was not afraid of him anymore.

The doctor called it a mercy. Her suitcase went to the church rummage sale, and her folded blouses were still inside it.

He stood at the back of the church. At the grave he stood behind the last row of umbrellas while a young priest with a head cold got Soledad's name wrong once and corrected himself. Mercedes had flown in from the other coast. She wore a black coat, and her face had her mother's lines in it now, and she stood on the far side of the grave, and the open ground lay between them.

Afterward, in the parking lot, the rain started, tk, tk, tk on the roofs of the cars, and Mercedes walked toward him for the first time in twenty years. His feet took a step toward her before he could stop them. The field gathered at his back, patient and enormous, and he did the only thing he had ever found that worked.

He wanted her to leave.

He bent his whole soul to it. He stood in the rain and wanted her to turn around and get into her rental car and drive to the airport and never come back to this coast. He wanted it harder than the corner office. He wanted it harder than the lot. He wanted it harder than he had wanted the cord to slide off her neck. He pictured her safe in some city he would never visit, where she lost every raffle and every coin toss and lived to be a hundred.

She stopped close enough to touch him. She pressed a knuckle into the corner of one eye the way her mother used to, and the rain ran off her chin. "I forgive you for whatever it was. I don't know what it was. I don't know if it was anything. I just can't carry it anymore."

She took his arm. The rain kept on over the cars, and they walked to her rental, and she drove him up the hill to the house above the harbor, and she stayed.

Mercedes is with him still. He is old enough now that she cuts his meat, and she reads to him in the afternoons from books he never finishes, and in the mornings she makes the coffee, and the light comes off the harbor through the big window and lies across both their hands on the table. This morning a tanker is coming in. Mercedes gets up with the pot and stands in front of the window to watch it, and her shadow slides across the table and takes the light off his hands.

She turns around with the pot. "You want some more?"

His hand is already moving to cover the cup.