The Lucky Numbers

Chris Coles

January 2006

Metal-on-metal, hope there's no spark. Always the same thought, quick and barely conscious whenever he took the gas nozzle out of a car's filler neck.

It never quite slid and it didn't quite grind, but it always made him think about the spark.

Ralph bent over at the waist to avoid that stubborn, inevitable last drip of gasoline that would fall from the nozzle as he placed it back in its home on the pump, and preserve his call-on-the-client shined shoes and creased slacks. Whoever had the white company Taurus yesterday left it bone dry, the jerk. These people, Ralph thought, am I the only one who cares? He went inside the Stop-N-Go's little store for a bottle of water. Candy bars, plastic bottles of oil, key rings with car logos, refrigerator with the frosted sliding doors. He slid the glass door open, took a water bottle, and unhooked a bag of peanuts from the rack at the counter. Hmm, he thought, the Lotto's up to $43 million. Drawing's on Saturday night. "And give me five dollars on the Lotto," he said, "Quick pick, cash value."

The cross-eyed Pakistani counter man, who didn't believe in luck, gave Ralph the ticket and his change and said, "Good luck to you."

On the way to visit his small crew of materials testing technicians at the Benicia Mega-Mart project, Ralph thought about his Lotto ticket. Five dollars, he thought, that really increases my chances, even if my chances are one in thirty billion, at least it makes them five times better than just a dollar, isn't it? Thirty billion divided by five is six billion, right? And somebody has to win, right? On his way up Highway 80 between gray soundwalls and among the other cars and trucks he thought about what he would do with the $30 million or so he could clear after taxes. Start his own business, maybe. Retire and buy a big house in Mexico. Or an apartment in Paris where he could wear a beret at a brasserie every day and sip espresso. He would learn French and paint. He would paint in Paris in spring and fall, and in the winter in Mexico. Where? In Cancun? Too humid. Cabo San Lucas. He would paint the hillsides and valleys of France, and those great French faces on blue and red backgrounds and French stone buildings seemed built to be painted. He would do that five or six months a year, and take lessons with real good artists, and he would spend, hmm, four months a year in Cabo, painting Mexican faces, brown men with their sombreros, serious children on red and blue backgrounds looking straight at him, women with flashing eyes and colorful blouses on finely detailed landscapes like the ones the Old Masters made, like the hilly terrain behind the Mona Lisa, misty and mysterious, but this is Mexico so they will be arid and dirt tan and rock brown with clear blue-blue skies like a Dali landscape. No melting clocks or monsters though, Ralph thought, I'm a realist.

He turned into the Mega-Mart construction site and crunched over the gravel to the project manager's brown trailer. He opened the door and stuck his head in, smelling sour coffee burning on the plate too long, ammonia from blueprints, men's sweat, the dirt on the floor.

"Hello?"

"Yeah."

"Hi, I'm Ralph Perry from Kastracorp. I'm the PM for your testing program? Just came by to see how things are going."

"Well," said the short round brown-eyed man who came out of the office at one end of the trailer, "Other than you're expensive as hell and your guys sit around most of the time and don't hardly ever do shit and your test reports never get here unless we call your office, which we shouldn't have to do, everything's fine."

Ralph saw the challenging, amused look in the man's face and said, "Whew, I was worried that we were exceeding your expectations!" Kastracorp's latest slogan was Expect Us to Meet Your Expectations.

"Here's my card in case you want to report me to my boss. He hates me so he'd really like you to call."

The little brown-eyed man put out his hand and said, "I think I'll do that. Edd Williams. Edd with two D's, don't know why so don't ask. Two L's though. Here." They exchanged business cards. "Nah, your guys are OK. We'd like a lower price but everybody does I guess."

"Edd," Ralph said the name so he would remember it without looking at the card, "The hourly rates and the lab charges are set at corporate by your guys and our National Accounts guys. I think they set them based on what you pay a guy in Arkansas, so we lose our ass on it here in the Bay Area. We probably pay a guy three times as much here."

"Whatever. Nothing either of us can do."

Ralph gave Edd a few promotional trinkets: a Kastracorp pen that glowed in the dark, a maroon sack with golf tees and two golf balls, and a maroon Kastracorp golf shirt with a squirrel embroidered on the left breast because somehow this squirrel had become the company mascot. A lot of people thought the squirrel sent the wrong message. But Ralph liked the squirrel, especially its little buck teeth and fuzzy tail, and there was something appealing about the look in its face: amused, crazed, innocent, wicked.

They talked about football and told construction stories for a while, about accidents mainly. Then Ralph said, "Mind if I walk around the site a little?"

"Sure," Edd Williams said, "Knock yourself out, but don't get hurt. I hate all that paperwork." Ralph told Edd he would look into why the reports took so long, although Ralph knew, as Edd suspected, that it was just the way it worked.

Ralph walked around the site on the rough tracked ground that was chocolate brown sticky mud a month ago and would be chalky dust next month. He meandered between gravel piles, cardboard boxes on pallets, various yellow equipment on wheels or tracks, and piles of sheet-metal studs. He snapped pictures with his little silver camera of men working and plywood concrete forms with ridgebacks, the blue plastic cone ends of snap-ties showing through to hold the forms together. He needed the pictures for the project description they would write to include in proposals for new jobs. He took pictures for himself, too, pictures of things that he thought came together in a nice way. He took pictures of some masons leaning straight-legged over a tool box looking for a trowel. They looked like Millet's Gleaners. He took a picture of a crane crew lifting a concrete wall panel into place because he liked the way the 30-feet-high by 20-feet-wide slab looked angling, heavy, with the crane tilting behind it and the cables taut, pulling its top and the riggers waving and watching as it went up, standing back 20 feet in case anything went wrong. As the panel rose slowly in Ralph's viewfinder, in the lower right corner one big-necked, big-bellied man wearing a yellow hardhat and khaki bib overalls stood solidly with his head tilted back and fists in big brown gloves on his hips, green oak and brown grass on the soft-contoured hills far in the background. When Ralph framed the man in a zoom close-up the hardhat looked glued onto his big head and his meaty red face looked calculating, competent, judgmental, satisfied.

Later, Ralph took a picture of a dead gopher snake, muscular and limp, and with the imprint of a truck tire visible on its body.

"I'll start a development business with my Lotto money," Ralph thought as he watched. "I'll build shopping centers and malls, and commercial buildings.

I'll turn my $30 million into a fortune and buy a football team. Then I'll travel with them during the season and sit in the luxury boxes at all the stadiums around the league. Then in time we could win the Super Bowl and I'll be the owner that turned them around. I'll be a hands-on owner, too, not some guy who just turns it over to the GM and sits around. I'll walk the sidelines during games and slap hands with the players and encourage them. But I won't get in the way, I'll let the coaches do their jobs.

Ralph roamed the sidelines, old and gray because he had stuck with the team and rebuilt it, a loyal guy, committed, a peach of a guy, number one fan.

He strolled in the stands with an entourage that included his sons in red and blue team colors, gray at the temples now, proud of him, smiling at the way the old man cared for the fans and shook their hands like a politician, but sincere. He would be like their benevolent king, who didn't need anyone's votes and would do good as he pleased, because he had won the Lotto thirty years ago. They loved him because he was their benefactor, the man who gave them that special mania when your home team wins, wins again, and keeps on winning. The crowd roared and some of the women even cried.

Ralph found Virgil de la Cruz casting concrete cylinders from a wall pour.

As the workmen slid the wet concrete down the chute and into the forms to drop and push and shovel it into place, then screed it flat with a long board, then vibrate it to get out the bubbles and condense the sand and gravel, then work the surface with the big flat board floats on long poles to finish the surface, Virgil shoveled the mix into a bucket and carried it to the side, away from the action and noise to place it in the black plastic testing cylinders and tamp it down in the approved three layers with 25 pokes of the aluminum rod of the approved shape and length. Each cylinder would be broken in the lab to measure its strength. Ralph went across the floor slab and greeted Virgil, "Mr. de la Cruz," he said. Virgil, a relatively tall, lean, sun-baked man in his fifties from the Philippines, looked over and gave Ralph a creased smile. He said, "Ralph. You're here."

Virgil's hardhat was battered, stained with asphalt, covered with contractor stickers, and speckled with concrete spatter like his khaki shirt, faded jeans and brown abraded boots.

"Well how are you, my friend?"

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