CASHIER

A Short Story

                                                        

  

The night I sold the winning ticket I walked to work. I’d wrecked my Jetta. I hit a small deer by the river west of town. The deer came out of a gulley, from the tall weeds. I didn’t have time to brake. I hit it square. It launched into the air, turned upside down, and landed on its head and broke its neck. I was high, so I saw it happen in slow motion. Then my car died. Blue clouds rose from the hood. The needles on my dashboard sunk to zero. A highway patrolman came along in minutes and parked with his lights swooping blue against the snow and his radio softly squawking in his car. He’d stopped me before and he knew I was a tweaker but he didn’t push me to admit it. He called for a tow and waited until it came, exhaling steam like that coming from my car and stamping his big brown official-looking boots. He asked me if I needed a ride to town but I was afraid to sit inside his cruiser with all of its glowing communications gear and Tasers and clipboards and restraint devices. There was still meth on my breath. It smelled like Band-Aids. Like when you first open a brand-new box of them, before the air gets in.

The night was cold and the walk was good for me. By the time I made it to the store my head felt clear and I was hungry. I drank a fountain drink and ate a beef stick and then had another drink and another beef stick. I was already wearing my uniform, my cap. Our store is part of a chain that covers five states and whose symbol is a whooshing rocket with little stars and atoms in its exhaust. No one came in for an hour except two kids, one of them looking to stash things in his coat while the other one distracted me by fumbling items and dropping them on the floor. I chased them both out and then the man walked in.  

He was wearing a suit and a fancy open raincoat with rows of dark buttons and a patterned lining. No one local dresses in this way. He was probably staying at the Hampton Inn. He bought rolling tobacco, the kind that hippies smoke, and a miniature bottle of mouthwash and a phone cord, one of the cheap ones that only lasts two weeks. It is the only kind of cord we sell and I feel embarrassed whenever someone buys one. The man reminded me of Mr. Merle, my old high-school science teacher who died last year and was the kind of person who I wish I was, with intelligence in his voice and slim, clean hands. My hands are fat. And my nails are bitten down. Now that clerks have to wear gloves for hygiene reasons I don’t have to move so quickly when I scan things, but back when I worked bare-handed I was shiftier and always made sure to talk during transactions. I would also like a longer neck. 

I suggested the man buy a ticket because the jackpot was up to three million and our store is lucky. I said we’d sold two small winners in the last month, one for six thousand, the other for eleven. I didn’t sell the tickets personally but I let him think I had. The man said “Let’s try it” and asked me to pick his numbers, not with the machine but from my head. I thought If these numbers win this man this man will owe me, but then I thought No, he will not, because he paid for them and whoever pays for something owns it, because until it’s paid for a thing is worthless. I picked the numbers for him with no regrets. I picked them at random, not using any system, because I’d learned from Mr. Merle that gambling systems are illusions and randomness is randomness. Her also taught me there’s no such thing as luck, but I believe otherwise. I believe it’s all luck. Your looks. Your job. Your town. Your friends. Your car. I gave him his ticket along with his tobacco and realized my breath still smelled strange and felt ashamed. The man read over his numbers and said, “Great choices.” Then he folded the ticket and slipped it in his coat. He pocketed it carelessly, which scared me. “Don’t lose that,” I said. “It’s important. It’s a winner.” He winked at me and said, “It shall be so.” Mr. Merle smoked a pipe on his breaks behind the gym and sometimes I talked to him there about the universe and the many riddles that it holds, including the mystery of consciousness. He knew all the constellations and all the elements and yet he agreed with me that human thought is probably no match for what it’s up against, which is everything, basically. Everything there is. 

The man in the suit went outside and rolled a cigarette and stood by the newspaper box and smoked and coughed. I could see him on the cameras, coughing. Bursts of vapor appeared and then broke up and then were replaced by new ones of different shapes that eventually formed a mist around the man with twinkling ice crystals in a halo pattern. It was a fascinating, confusing sight that led thought by thought to the edges of a dreamworld and then brought me back to exactly where I was. The drawing was at noon, just hours away. Three million dollars. Three million two-hundred thousand. They give you a choice: take payments or a lump sum. I read on a website that winners should take the payments because you lose less in taxes. This upset me. Jackpots, the way I think of them, are miracles, and miracles should be left alone, untouched. It’s like taxing true love. It’s like taxing a record fish.

It was three in the morning by then and I was roached. I had a half a gram of crystal in my uniform but I’d left my pipe in my wrecked car. (The deer didn’t suffer. I examined its twisted body before the patrolman came. Its death was spinal.) I thought about snorting a line but snorting is wasteful and it also involves a lot of steps that are easily captured by our cameras, while smoking just looks like smoking, more or less, especially if I cup my pipe with my fat hands. The man put his cigarette out on the paper box and headed toward his car, a Jeep Grand Cherokee whose license plates were crusted over with snow. I knew he would win then. I knew it from his walk, the tight, slicing stride of a man of destiny.  If he won we would put a sign up in our window and it would draw players from hundreds of miles away. Lucky convenience stores are not a myth. I saw an online map once of our chain that showed the lottery pay-outs for every outlet. Of sixty-three stores, only twelve were above average, but out of those twelve there were three that blew my mind. Our store ranked eleventh. This kind of made me proud.

I fished in my pocket until I found my bag and held it for a minute and meditated. I’d totaled my car and I didn’t have insurance. It wasn’t the kind of car that you insure. I got it free from a customer who likes me and inherited money from someone she won’t discuss but who isn’t a parent, because they’re both alive. Her name is Flicker. I think she made it up. I took the half gram from my pocket and used a thumbnail to carve off a piece that would hold me until morning. I poked it in under my tongue and let it melt. I knew that if the man won he’d take the payments. He wore glasses. His raincoat had buttons on its shoulders. He looked like a person who viewed existence statistically and was probably already rich because of it.

I sat down on my rotating stool and turned my phone on. My favorite website is by a guy my age who does remote viewing, if you know what that is. He visits foreign cities in his mind and makes drawings of them that he places next to photos that are meant to show his powers are real. He found a dead body once for the Denver police force in a drainage pipe under a clinic. Mr. March said the website was nutty, but I still like it. Except when I went there this time, it seemed irrelevant. A cathedral in Lisbon, Portugal. Who cares? My thoughts were more on numbers, on finances. Three million dollars is not a lot of money. It sounds like a lot but I’ve read that you need six. According to my second favorite website, which is about how to face life as a man, you need to have to six to handle things these days. Insurance. Taxes. Fees. Emergencies. You might think that emergencies should not be in there because they don’t necessarily occur, but the website on manliness argues that they’re certain and that you learn this as you age. It doesn’t say if you learn this lesson gradually or all at once, but it hints that it comes suddenly. And then you’re in awful trouble. Unless you listened.

While I was sitting there growing more awake a girl came in who knew that I had crystal and wanted to smoke it with me. She had a pipe. We went out back, where the camera view was blocked by an abandoned RV that no one’s dealt with. I showed her where Venus would be if it was summer and where the North Star is no matter what the month is, though over the centuries it changes slightly. I told her I’d sold a winning ticket earlier and that the winner was at the Hampton Inn. The girl was named Kite. All the girls here make their names up. They start out as Kate and end up as Kite. Or Kitten. I know a Karla who goes as “Curly.” The names makes them sound like strippers, and some are. 

The next day I found out that the ticket had hit the jackpot and I wasn’t surprised or even that excited. I knew the numbers were perfect when I picked them. I knew that man in the suit was touched by fate. I too have powers. I too have certain gifts. They’re useless to me, but I have them.

Now there’s proof.