Devil's Luck

by Carolyn Crane

  His song in the dark, Packard had called it.

  A terrible thing to be sixteen and dying—and three months had been the rosy view. Doctors wanted to perform a complicated and risky heart valve operation, which would have left him greatly diminished, unable to do the things he loved—if he survived it at all.

  He knew all about that operation; he’d had a less drastic version of it when he was thirteen and it had done nothing except to lay him up in bed for two years. He wouldn’t go through it again—to be so savagely diminished, just to die early anyway. He’d wanted to spend his three months living as he pleased.

  So he’d informed his parents that he wouldn’t go through with it.

  His parents meant to force him to the operation—he could tell. He had this suspicion that he’d be drinking a soda and the next thing he’d know, he’d be back in the OR. Even if they didn’t force it, he couldn’t stand the looks in their eyes, and how careful they were around him.

  So he ran away. He’d long dreamed of seeing the world, or at least the Deep South, and he had a good amount of savings—he’d been a diligent, hardworking boy and a big saver, but now he aimed to blow it all and live in the opposite way he always had, as if there were no tomorrow. Which, technically, there wasn’t.

  So at the age of sixteen, he blasted around Georgia and South Carolina doing everything a boy dreams of: staying up late eating french fries at all-night diners, living in hotels, going to baseball games, having sex with pretty ragamuffin girls who were as lost as he was, and who would even sleep over sometimes. He wrote letters to his parents, always arranging for them to be mailed from other states—he couldn’t risk being found, because he was on a roll—four months, five months, then six months.

  He took his plate to the sink, remembering the fugitive feeling of that time. Like he was playing hooky from fate.

  Simon had always been fascinated by the concept of New Year’s Eve, the way the stroke of midnight created a margin between years, a kind of blank, ungoverned space of pure possibility where the laws fell away and people went wild and kissed people they ought not to kiss.

  As the months wore on, he formed the belief that he’d kept himself alive by dwelling in the margins, in a kind of no-man’s-land of life itself. It seemed like the more risks he took, the more strongly he dwelled there.

  He just had to stay there.

  And really, he grew to love it—his existence on the dangerous, magical margins of life, doing the opposite of what he ought, casting his fate to the wind each and every day.

  At seven months, he ran out of money and started taking day-labor jobs in construction. It was his most reckless move yet—lifting heavy things, climbing ladders during dizzy spells, hiding his breathlessness while hammering away. It was all dangerous…yet not. The more chances he took, the freer he felt—and the more alive he felt, too. And he’d felt even stronger the first time he’d gotten beaten up, and then again the first time he recklessly lost everything he owned.

  Simon disdained the angels-and-crystal-goddess-set, the whole New Age and power of prayer bit. But he was vaguely aware that he was working on those same principles, that in a way, recklessness was his private version of prayer—a prayer for cheating the fuck out of fate. The more reckless he got, the safer he became. Being out of control was a way to seize control.

  He went back to see his parents years later, but the way they clung to him, the way they saw him—as a man with a death sentence—it had greatly sapped his mojo.

  He preferred people to view him as indestructible—needed it, really. People seeing him as indestructible had become part of the magic; it carried him in a way that he couldn’t explain. And, in spite of his breathlessness, and the random chest gurgles and wheezing and all the rest, he felt that he was winning. Every time he did something foolish, every time he found himself in a ditch with a bloody face or taking the bet nobody in his or her right mind would take, he won.

  Contrary to public opinion, he didn’t have a death wish. He had a life wish.

  So he didn’t exactly love the idea of a brand-new doom prediction. Prognosticators destroyed possibility. They crushed hope and formed prisons with their fixed visions of the future. He wanted nothing to do with prognosticators. Except for Fawna.

  He wanted her, just not her predictions.

  He put the Spanish book back on the shelf, wondering what she was doing. How would she get home from class? Did she know how to drive?

  He could teach her, though he’d need a car. He felt sorry for his poor old car, burnt out in the Tanglelands. But cars came and went. Everything came and went. It was okay—it had to be.

  He could call her.

  He smiled. That would be so regular of him. It seemed almost novel. Did she even have a phone? She might not, and he liked that about her—her sheer weirdness. She was like the modern version of a girl raised by wolves. A prognosticator who was defying fate. There was no reason she couldn’t keep on with it, no reason that they couldn’t defy it together. She didn’t have to look. No law said she had to look.

  The problem of Barrington still remained. He’d seen the man from afar once, surrounded by a legion of thugs. You didn’t get close to Bobby Barrington—Simon meant it when he’d told Packard that. And he’d heard enough about Barrington to know that Packard was underestimating him. Even Fawna was underestimating him, traipsing around in public as she was, assuming Barrington wouldn’t find out until Packard was good and ready with his plan.

  A knock at his door startled him out of his thoughts. He knew it was Fawna, and, smiling a big, unbridled smile—a smile that made him feel a little like he was undressed, as if the smile revealed too much, but what did he care?—he flung open the door.

  There she was, eyes piercing, hair wild, his barbarian sugar demon. But something was different. She seemed tentative. Smaller somehow. Concern shone in her eyes.

  His smile fled, leaving him hollow.

  She’d looked.

  She walked in and spun to face him, coat decorations swaying, then coming to rest as she planted herself next to his kitchen island.

  “That didn’t take long,” he said, managing to sound casual. The casual tone was a minor miracle; in truth, he’d never known that his heart could break so completely. “Now get out.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and seemed to be about to say something else, but then she just shook her head.

  He opened the door further. “Out,” he whispered.

  She was a traitor—it was as if they’d been fugitives from fate together, and she’d decided to turn him in. He burned at her—burned, burned, burned.

  “I looked long ago, Simon,” she said. “I always knew. But not the timing. You’re this age. You’re wearing those same shoes. It’s soon. And afterward, the doctor says you knew all along it would happen, but you wouldn’t do anything.” The bad girl gleam was out of her puppy eyes now. Her gaze was all gray sorrow. “I don’t understand! You know about your condition? And you don’t care?”

  A crush of emotions clogged his chest, his throat, his mind.

  “We have to change it. We have to find a way.”

  Mindlessly, he focused on the pink bump on her lip where she’d been hit before the crash; he wanted her to get out, and also to stay forever. No, that wasn’t true—he wanted the Fawna who hadn’t looked, the Fawna who had been his one true ally—that’s who he wanted. “Out, or I throw you out.”

  “In every scenario, you’re not willing to go and help yourself, not willing even to consider helping yourself. And you die. An operation with a great success ratio. And you won’t consider it.” She seemed on the verge of tears.

  “You got the won’t consider it part right.”

  “Don’t you care? Even when I beg you, when I promise you everything I can offer, in every possibility, you refuse to go to the hospital, and you die. But I could help. I could look ahead at what would happen if you had the operation. Except the possibility of that doesn’t exist for me to even
look at. There’s no momentum or intention behind it, because you won’t even consider it.”

  She didn’t understand, and she never would—he couldn’t consider it. “I had that operation once, and it didn’t work out so well. This is my way now. It’s my way, Fawna.”

  “The way of death?”

  He managed a smirk, though his heart was hardly in it. “I actually prefer the way of doom—doesn’t that have a better ring to it?”

  “You’ll just stupidly let yourself die?”

  He widened his eyes. “Stupidly!” he repeated, packing pure vitriol into the word. “My goodness.”

  “Why don’t you care?”

  “Because it was bullshit when they told me I had three months to live lo some thirteen years ago, and it’s bullshit now. Old saying.” He held up a finger and smirked some more. “When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And I am not, in any way, a nail.”

  “You’re in denial. It’s crazy.”

  “We were crazy together a little while ago. We were glorious. And you wrecked it.” More than wrecked it, but he couldn’t think of a word to describe it. His sense of betrayal cut beyond words.

  “Don’t leave,” she said.

  “I’m not the one leaving.” He went to her now. He took her arm and began to march her out.

  “You know what I mean.” She slammed herself against the door, shutting it with her back. “I don’t want you to die.”

  “I’ll die either way.”

  “Doesn’t have to be that death.”

  “Out.” He pulled at the knob, but she dug in her boot heels. He let go and gripped her arms, fixing to move her, but he didn’t move her, he just held onto her. Not the thing to do, to hold a woman tight with all your might while throwing her out.

  She whispered, “I don’t want to be alone.”

  He tightened his grip. Today he’d imagined she was the one person who wouldn’t try to pull him away from the edge. He’d imagined her staying there with him. He didn’t want to be alone, either.

  Except there was still this, the way she felt in his hands, the feel of her breath on his face. And anyway, he was a master at taking what didn’t belong to him. She knew how to do it, too—he’d seen her do it today. They could steal this together. He saw the consciousness of it in her eyes.

  “Don’t leave me alone here,” she whispered. She meant a million different things by that, and he understood them all. She, too, longed to be free.

  And he kissed her, kissed into the whisper, kissed into the wild margins of life where months were decades, and where soft, warm, cotton candy-eating women stayed with you forever.

  She fisted his hair, kissing, mauling him. It made him feel wild and alive, and so unquenchably hungry for her. He consumed her with his lips and his tongue, pushing relentlessly into her with his hips.

  “Please,” she said, sliding off his shirt. He drew up as she trailed her fingers up over his chest and shoulders, as if a cord pulled him toward the clouds, and then she traced down his back, taking his shirt with her, pushing it down off his arms and hands. She swelled against him, coat and breasts, and rubbed her cheek on his jaw. He wrapped his arms around her under her coat and pulled her to his hungry body and found her lips again, and he lost himself in kissing her.

  When he finally pulled away, tears swelled out from the corners of her closed eyes.

  “I’m here,” he said. “Stop it. Stop, I’m here.” He picked her up and carried her to his bedroom.

  She got up on her knees, there on his bed, and threw off her coat in one big crazy motion.

  He went to her and she put her fingers on his chest, kissed him there. She liked the dragons, and he knew that she was kissing them. Probably their faces: he automatically knew so much about her. Then she fought off her pink dress in a fast, furious motion that made him want to die of adoration.

  Her nipples were the color of faded roses against her pale skin, and she had big freckles across her chest, each one perfect. She pushed him back onto the pillows, and he pulled her down with him, and she nuzzled his neck and moved against him.

  In the past he’d used sex to ride to the margins of existence, but this was different—it was real. He wouldn’t pretend otherwise.

  Together they fought off their pants, and they rolled around, tangled in each other’s limbs, in each other’s gazes. He touched her everywhere, sometimes pressing his face into her messy, bejeweled, sweet-smelling hair. He kissed her in every tender and hidden place, and when she touched his cock, he thought he might explode with lust.

  His damaged heart felt endless and powerful in his chest as he entered her, hot and wet and tight.

  She gasped and moved—sometimes even writhed in delight—as they made love, so abandoned into it. And sometimes things slowed, and they would watch each other. Her gray eyes looked endless, like a million days of gray sky, and he had to squeeze his own eyes shut tight, because it was just too much feeling.

  She said his name as she came. It felt like a treasure when she said it—a lonely little treasure he would take and keep. And then he got lost in the most powerful orgasm he’d ever had, gasping shamelessly.

  They lay quietly together afterward. Things were so quiet that her hair whispered when he ran his hand over it, and so did her arm, a slightly higher whisper under his slow, careful fingers. All of her skin whispered to him.

  After some more silence, he went to his kitchen and got them each a ginger ale and they drank them in bed and talked about stupid things, like the difference between their thumbs, and a painting of a sheep he had on his wall. Yes, it was silly. No, he didn’t know why he liked it.

  He touched a blue bead in her hair. “What does it mean?”

  With a faraway look she pushed away his hand.

  A normal man might ask why, but he knew. Fool that he was, he’d imagined that they’d stolen it all back, everything they’d had before.

  “Why won’t you even consider it? Just tell me that.”

  He propped his head on his hand, lying on his side. “That’s like, looking at a row of dominoes and saying, Why can’t I just knock this one down? It doesn’t have to affect the rest of them. But if you knock one down, they all go. They’re all connected.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “You won’t see why. This is my way. It has to be. It’s what works for me.”

  “But it’s so full of shit! You’re like those guys in the race—shining the engine, kissing the ground, or arranging fuzzy dice for good luck. It doesn’t do anything to stick your head in the sand. Meanwhile, you die of something perfectly preventable. If you saw what I see—”

  “What you see is irrelevant.”

  “It’s not irrelevant at all!”

  His chest tightened. He didn’t know how to explain it in a way that would cut through her fear, a way she’d understand. He couldn’t change the entire game now. He couldn’t turn back to an existence of worry, fear, hanging on test results, and retreating from danger. It worked for others, but he’d prevailed doing the opposite of that. It’s what he was made of now. It’s what he loved.

  It wasn’t just how he survived. It was how he remained alive.

  “You just don’t care?” she demanded. “You don’t care what happens to you?”

  “I thought that was part of my charm.”

  She shoved his arm off of her and rolled off the bed.

  “Fawna, come on.” He wanted her to understand so badly—it would mean everything to him. If only he could touch her again. He reached out to her.

  “Get away from me.” She grabbed her dress and her panties. “I won’t do this. You’ll refuse to save your life? To let me help you? To consider another’s feelings? Fine.” She pulled her dress roughly over her head, talking through the fabric. “You’re a coward! You’re a coward in denial, refusing to save his life, taking the coward’s way out.”

  “I’m so glad we had this talk, and that you understand.” Defeated, he lay down on h
is side, on her bumpy coat, knowing how his words would cut, and hating himself for it.

  “You won’t even help yourself.”

  “Oh, I help myself all the time, Fawna.”

  She glared at him, and then searched around for the rest of her stuff. “So you just die stupidly and needlessly. With that attitude, I’d be better off if I’d never met you.” She found her boots.

  For a brief moment, it had been them against the world. She’d needed that as much as he had, or so he’d thought. Even now, he wanted nothing more than for her to lie back down beside him, and he would hold her, and kiss her, and love her with all his heart. He’d been angry before, but he wasn’t now.

  He didn’t want Fawna to be worse off because of him.

  He routinely hurt people, pushed them too far, and left them worse off—in terms of money, certainly—but also in spirit, or maybe innocence. He’d imagined Fawna as a danger to himself, but never himself as a danger to her.

  She buttoned up her dress.

  She was so vulnerable, so lost, and so beautiful. And funny and weird. And wild and surprising. She’d been with him—in mind, in spirit, in heart. It had been a kind of gift. He didn’t know what love was, but he guessed that it was something like this, where she made him the happiest man alive for a few moments while she smashed a hole in the fabric of his universe. It would take lots of doing to get it patched up.

  He ran his hand over the doodads on her coat. He needed to reaffirm his place in the fugitive margins somehow. Earn back the mojo she’d ruined.

  “I can’t even look at you,” she said, glaring into the space to the right of him. But he could look at her. And he could still love her.

  And he could leave her better off.

  She held out her hands. “Give it to me.”

  “This?” He rolled off her coat.

  She was crying as she took it, angry tears. He forced himself to stay still as she left the room, as she blasted out the front door. The slam shook the walls of his house.

  He lay there for a long while, fingering the golden chip that he’d nabbed off of her coat sleeve. He’d use metallic silicone to fill in the hole Fawna had drilled in. The chip would take him straight to the high-security back room of the Midas Tropicali where he would deal with Bobby Barrington.