Devil's Luck

by Carolyn Crane

Only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Bobby used to say it. She crumpled up the cone and tossed it in a nearby garbage, feeling tongue-tied and awkward. She should say something.

  “Well …” he looked away. He wanted to get away from her. He always had.

  “I suppose you’re going to try again,” she blurted. “Like you’re going to win your own damn way.”

  “Nah. Game over.”

  She planted her hands on her hips. “Just like that? ‘Cause you know you can’t win? Is that why?”

  “That’s not why.” He tipped an invisible hat. “Catch you later, Fawna.” With that he walked off.

  No, no, no, they weren’t done. She couldn’t let it be just that.

  She caught up to him, walking alongside him even though he clearly wanted to get rid of her. He wasn’t even being a jerk to her—that’s how much he wanted to get rid of her.

  “I think you should.” She said this in her fun and conspiratorial voice.

  He stopped, looking at her sideways.

  She widened her eyes. “Do it.”

  The shiny fabric of his shirtsleeves tightened around his muscles as he crossed his arms, making the tattooed dragons on his chest appear to be peeping up from a silky sea of red lava. “Why?” he asked.

  “I think it’ll be hilarious.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have any more tickets. Or money. Sorry, sister.”

  “I’ll buy you some.”

  “You want to buy me tickets?”

  She dug around in her coat pocket and pulled out some bills. She needed him to play; that’s all she knew. “I have seven bucks. I need a couple bucks to get home but the rest…”

  He snorted and gazed around, blatantly wishing to be elsewhere. Even in his annoyance, he seemed larger than life. Magical, somehow. She had the thought that if anybody could defy the future, Simon could. She studied the dragons on his chest. Up close, she could see that they were slightly faded, and that they were covered with sparse hairs. She had the impulse to draw close to him and touch the dragons, to splay her hands over them. To touch him. “Why not?”

  He tipped down his head, as if to get a closer look at her. “I don’t get it. Where’s the suspense? You said yourself you read the game.”

  “Maybe I enjoy how right I always am.”

  “I don’t do command performances.” He turned and walked.

  Again, she caught up with him. “Come on! What are you scared of?”

  He kept on walking, refusing to slacken his pace though he seemed quite out of breath. It was hard to keep up, what with his long legs.

  “Why don’t you play?” he asked.

  “I don’t play.”

  “Says who?”

  “I want you to.”

  He stopped. Then he plucked the bills from her hand. “You’ll play against me, then.”

  Without waiting for her consent, he headed toward a ticket booth.

  Yay! she whispered to herself.

  By the time she caught up, he’d already handed over the bills to the seller and was requesting seven dollars’ worth of tickets.

  “No, tell him five bucks’ worth. I need two to get home.”

  Simon seemed to suppress a grin. “Yeah, I heard you the first time.”

  She motioned toward the burly ticket seller. “Hey, we’re rethinking—”

  Simon turned to her. “You want me to play? This is how we play.”

  “How will I get home? I didn’t bring my bike.”

  “You’re the fortune-teller.”

  “I can’t see my own future.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Well, isn’t that lucky.”

  This surprised her. Few people ever got that—how not being able to see her own future was the one grace of her gift.

  “You want me to play or not?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Seven,” he said to the ticket seller. Then he smiled down at her. “If you win, I’ll give you a ride. And wash your windows. How about that?”

  “I live in Packard’s old place. It’s practically all windows.”

  His eyes twinkled. “All the more incentive for you to win.”

  She rolled her eyes. Why did he love to gamble so much? With a flash of horror, she thought about his demise—him dead underneath that poker table. Maybe it was far off. It could be years off—she hadn’t studied the vision all that hard.

  Before she knew it, they had the tickets, and they were heading back to the ringtoss.

  “What if I lose?”

  He tapped a finger on his sheriff’s badge. Oh, this guy was the limit!

  “Two to play.” He handed over all their tickets to the ringtoss hawker. “Whatever this buys.” The hawker counted the tickets and gave them each a pile of rings, and then he went back to his seat and his magazine at the back of the tent.

  And then Simon looked at her and smiled. It startled her, because it was a beautiful smile.

  Oh. Her heart sank. He was smiling because he had her now.

  Yeah, Simon was good. He would use the information she’d stupidly given him to win—on her dime—and leave her stranded at the Tandy Folly. A perfect trifecta of payback. She’d been so desperate for him to play again. God, she’d practically begged him to screw her over. His gambit was sheer elegance in its complete screwing of her.

  She fingered a ring. She’d felt so free and happy when she was watching his defiant play. The world had seemed to hold so many possibilities. All that time, he’d simply been playing her.

  Let it be just this, Monica always said. Couldn’t she have taken Monica’s advice for once? Let it be just that?

  Simon lowered his voice. “Still ripe for the picking.” He slid his eyes toward the corner. “Your precious lone-tilted bottle.”

  She couldn’t look at him. “Go for it,” she said glumly.

  “Ladies first.”

  She screwed up her lips. Maybe she could still win it; the rings she’d foreseen on that bottle could’ve been hers. She aimed carefully and threw. The ring glanced off.

  Simon’s turn. He threw his ring. At his old place. Was he messing with her?

  “Shut up. Don’t even,” she said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Right.” She gave him a sassy smirk; she knew when she was being toyed with. She tried again for the winnable bottle, and again he went for the near right. The same thing happened on the next round.

  And the next.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Are we back to this?” he asked wearily.

  She looked into his strange blue eyes, and, with a surge of something that felt like joy, she realized he was still going for it, still defying fate. “Yes,” she said. “I guess we are.”

  “Your turn.”

  She fingered her ring. What if she did it, too? She could! She could defy what she’d foreseen. She felt this sudden hate for the bottle one down from the upper left corner. It was Bobby Barrington all over again. No—worse than Bobby Barrington, because she imprisoned herself with it. She was finished with it. Done. She’d been fate’s bitch long enough.

  With that, she tossed her next ring at the near right patch of bottles. It glanced off and hit the floor. She felt like laughing and punching the air.

  She turned to find Simon watching her, his pale face brightened with interest. “Well now,” he said simply. Then he threw at that spot, too.

  And then she did.

  They took turns trying to win the wrong way against all odds. Sometimes she went for the middle area, just for the hell of it. They were together in their defiance, and they would win their own damn way, or not at all. She’d never felt anything like it—it was wild and wonderful, and she wanted to zoom, zoom, zoom deep into the heart of it. She had just a few rings left, and she threw one of them overhand—hard—beaning it at the bottles. “Fuck you!” God, it felt good, and she laughed. She couldn’t help it!

  “Well,” Simon said casually, “if I’d known it was going to be that kind of a party�
��”

  “Oh, it is that kind of party,” she said.

  Simon smirked. “You have to try. The point is to win. It’s still to win.”

  “I am winning.” She threw her remaining four rings all at once. They clattered violently off the bottles in all directions. And then she grabbed a few of Simon’s and threw them, too.

  The games hawker rose from his chair. “Take care,” he said.

  “Hell with that,” Fawna muttered under her breath.

  Simon just stood there all cool, fingering his last ring. Was this old hat to him? Well it wasn’t to her. Fawna hadn’t felt so free in ages.

  She grabbed Simon’s ring.

  He kept hold of it. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Come on.” She tugged on it. He resisted, all sly humor, and then he let it go. Slow smile.

  She felt even more intensely that they were together in this. If this was how he corrupted people, well then, bring it on! She wanted corruption, ruin, oblivion. She wanted to hurl herself into the jaws of the dragon. Anything. Everything!

  “Go for it,” he said.

  She stared at the game, pictured again how it could be won, and threw defiantly in the wrong direction, because she begged to differ. No, she wasn’t begging at all. The future could screw itself.

  The ring glanced off a bottle and hit the dirt floor.

  “There,” she said, feeling light. Free.

  She’d been oppressed by fate for so long. But here she was—free. She loved the feeling, wanted to never lose the feeling.

  She looked over at Simon, and she knew that he understood it completely, that he lived in this feeling. It was so strange to share it with him, as if she was home. Like she’d found her people after years of wandering the wilderness.

  Home.

  The feeling broke her heart and she thought she might cry. Oh, God, she was having an experience.

  She shut her eyes, trying to compose herself. He mustn’t see her cry. She concentrated on something else—a few of the rings from her wilder throws had bounced and rolled near her feet. She crouched down and picked them up, slipping one into her pocket. Later, she would sew it to her coat to mark this experience. Her Hello Kitty Visigoth coat—that’s how Simon had once described it. Much as she disliked him back then, she’d liked that. She liked it even better now.

  She stood and casually tossed the other ring to the hawker, who put it aside. He was coming toward her—had he seen her nab one? No, he just wanted to award her a sheriff’s pin.

  “Thanks,” she said. She pinned it to her coat, then smiled up at Simon, but the warmth in him was gone now. He was back to being wary.

  “What?” she asked.

  He appeared not to understand the question, but he understood, dammit. “Thank you for the game,” he said.

  “Thank you for the game?” She searched his face, incredulous. They’d come to each other, she and Simon—she didn’t know any other way to think of it. And she knew Simon knew. She would not let him lie to her about that.

  “Gotta go.” He rapped his knuckle on the ledge, nodded to the hawker, and walked off.

  “Wait.” She caught up to him, walked alongside him.

  “What?”

  What…what …she couldn’t think what to say. “You have to give me a ride. I spent all my money.”

  He raised one brow. “Did you win?”

  “No.”

  “Then how is it you’re entitled to a ride from me?”

  “Come on.”

  He stopped, turned to her. “You wanted to play. We set rules that you agreed to. You can’t change them now because you lost. If you do that, then it means nothing when you win.”

  “But how do I get home? And I have a class later.”

  “That’s not my problem, is it?”

  “But …”

  His gaze dropped to her coat, and he reached out and touched the golden poker chip pinned near her shoulder. “This gets you into a very exclusive part of the Midas Tropicali Casino. But probably not with the hole you’ve drilled into it.”

  Midas. “You would go for that stupid thing,” she said.

  He touched a folded-up piece of tinfoil that was hanging from a loop. She usually didn’t like people touching the things she’d affixed to her coat. She let him do it because she didn’t want him to leave. “What’s this one?”

  “It’s nothing. From a wrapper,” she said. “Just a burger wrapper.”

  “From when?”

  “This past spring.” A meal she’d bought—the first, right after she’d gotten free of Bobby. It had been her first solid food in weeks. She threw up after.

  His hands moved to the squirrel’s tail, but he didn’t ask about it. Another meal. One she’d hated herself for, but she’d put the tail on her coat anyway. Good and bad, they both belonged on her coat. The coat was real and true. The coat was everything.

  Finally, he arrived at the Trixie doll head. Of the hundred or more things on her coat, he had to pick this one out, to go for the jugular. Her Trixie before she’d been taken—she’d found the exact version at a flea market. It represented precious lost things. He looked at her and she looked away, feeling too exposed, too invaded.

  “What’s this one?” he asked.

  “I’m not going to tell you about my coat,” she snapped.

  “You just did.” Then he let Trixie’s head go. “Try not to be such a poor loser, Fawna.”

  His words felt like a fist to the gut.

  By the time she gathered her wits, he was walking away, the distance between them growing. No way. She would not let him leave!

  CHAPTER THREE

  Simon hated fate and destiny and all the rest of it with a nearly mystical fervor and fascination. His hatred extended to prognosticators, too. And it definitely extended to a long-term prognosticator like Fawna, Midcity’s new high voodoo priestess of fate and the future.

  When she’d thrown those rings at the bottles—at them, with all the crazy ferocious energy…hell. Just hell. Yeah, he’d enjoyed it. But it didn’t matter if she was unraveling; she was still a prognosticator. Whatever jag she was on, it was about her and the future and Simon wanted nothing to do with it.

  A soft jangling behind him. He could picture her clipping along, sugary-hot candy demon, all sweet and dirty and determined, with bright baubles braided into her long, messy blonde hair. And the pink dress half hidden by that coat of hers—a silky, quilted layer thing with strange tokens affixed to every inch of it—bright bits of cloth, shiny doodads, the kinds of debris a bird might collect: no differentiation between jewels and garbage.

  He burned to know about that coat ever since he met her, and it was as he suspected: it functioned as a kind of insane charm bracelet. And her reaction when he’d touched the doll head? It didn’t take much to put it together: childhood stolen and all that. He’d heard about how she’d been kidnapped away from the ruins of the old school where she and Packard and the other highcap kids had lived. Reportedly sent to a lab. The doll symbolized before in some way. A girl who saw the future, wrapping herself in the past.

  He’d always had a thing for the lost ones.

  But prognosticators, that’s where he drew the line. Even ones who were unraveling, or strangely mesmerizing. Let Packard and his team of therapists sort her out.

  “Wait!” She caught up to him, grabbing him clumsily by the shirt and the belt.

  He hadn’t thought her clumsy, and he shook her off, continuing on. “You’ll mug me for the ride now?”

  “I won’t have to,” she said, just a little bit singsong. “You’ll give me one.”

  He stopped, felt the blood rise to his face. “Don’t ever tell me my future.”

  Something flashed in her eyes. Fear. Surprise. “I didn’t look at your stupid future! It’s just what I’m saying.”

  “I’m saying you don’t get a ride. You lost.”

  It took all his strength to turn and walk away from her and her baubles and her long nec
k and her pink nails. And her desperation. Fawna’s eyes were tilted downward at the far edges—sad puppy eyes on anybody else, but Fawna’s down-tilted eyes contained that kind of glinty dangerousness you got from being damaged. Fawna was a mix of vulnerable and vicious: easily wounded, quick to taunt. Hot and a little bit crazy.

  Yeah, she had her charms.

  But none of that mattered. She was a long-term prognosticator, and long-term prognosticators were a type of killer. They killed you before you were dead. They poisoned your time.

  He reached his car, a big blue Oldsmobile Cutlass, metal creased and rumpled from where the dents and crunches had been banged out over years. He noticed with a sense of triumph that his meter had expired, yet there was no parking ticket on his windshield—a victory, considering how ruthless the meter maids were around Tandy Folly Fairgrounds. He took a deep breath, savoring the moment. When he won like that, he felt almost invincible. Anything was possible in this world—anything.

  He went into his pocket for his keys. Then his other pocket. Then his shirt pocket.

  Empty. He was sure he had his keys at the ringtoss. Had they fallen out since?

  He’d have to trace his steps back, he thought, fingering the lone quarter he’d found during the key search. He should drop that quarter in the meter.

  But he wouldn’t.

  He’d risk it again: he’d try to find his keys and get back before the meter maid tagged him. And then he’d make it to the race on time. The race would give him a chance to work out some of the recklessness that was building so crazy high in him. It always built high when he hadn’t zinged somebody for a while.

  He set off, scanning the ground all the way back and in through the Tandy Folly gates and past the sideshow acts. It was a lot of walking he hadn’t planned on, and he was winded by the time he got to the games midway.

  And there she was, sitting on the stone wall, swinging her legs, eating yet another cotton candy.

  She gave him a sunny smile. “Check the lost and found?”

  He went to her. “Hand them over.”

  “What?”

  He leaned next to her. He wished he could sit and rest, but he’d have to wait until he was in the car. “You know what.”

  She swept up a pink clump with her pink tongue, closed her pink lips and smiled. “I wish I could make this stuff at home, don’t you?”