The Winners Circle (19 page)

“
What in the world are you doing here?” Breck asked.

“
I want a job. I think I said that.”

“
Why?”

“
Why not?”

Breck lowered his voice. “Did you blow the whole wad of cash?”

“
No.”

“
Are you yanking me?”

“
I’m serious.”

“
You’re qualified, but …” Breck motioned toward the waiting room, where men shuffled through stale copies of
Sports Illustrated
and
Time
magazine. “Can I explain it to them? There aren’t enough jobs for everyone.”

Jerry felt terrible. Breck was right. Jerry was being selfish. He wanted to slink from the office and retreat to the Hopewell hills. Forget about a job. What was he thinking?

“
Since I have you here, Mr. Nearing.” Breck’s tone changed, no longer discerning the applicant before him. He got up and shut the door. “I have this idea.”

“
What is it?”

“
Do you wear eyeglasses?”

“
Not yet.”

“
Lucky son-of-a-bitch.” Breck guffawed, his words meant as a compliment. “Don’t get me wrong.”

“
I’m not getting you at all.”

“
Let me explain. What do you think of glasses without fingerprints?”

Jerry waited for the punch line. Was this a joke? Occasionally people became giddy around him, as if dollar bills might fly from his pocket if they made him laugh. For some unexplainable reason, he thought about reaching into his wallet and offering Breck a twenty for his trouble.

“
That’s right,” Breck said, “smudge-free eyewear.”

“
I don’t wear glasses.”

“
But lots of us do, and our lenses constantly have to be cleaned.”

“
I guess.”

“
Check these out.” Breck pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket and plunked them in Jerry’s hands. They were black frames, taped and glued in spots. The lenses appeared yellowed, like old dog’s teeth.

Jerry turned them over, indulging the eager shop manager. He pictured himself in the parking lot, where his Porsche waited beside a collection of late model American vehicles and economy cars.

Breck leaned forward, blocking Jerry’s exit from the chair. “You can get in on the ground floor. My buddy and me invented them. They’re made of a special polymer. It resists the grease on a human hand.”

“
That’s interesting.”

“
Great, huh?”

Jerry imagined his keys in the car’s ignition. Breck repulsed him, especially the pushy attitude. Yes, coming here was definitely a bad idea.

“
Try them,” Breck said. “Press your fingers on ‘em.”

Jerry realized that he was mixing with the wrong people, and this bothered him, not that it was true but that he noticed it, sensed the difference. He was no longer one of those men in the waiting room. How many times had Dick tried to tell him?

“
Go ahead,” Breck pleaded. “Don’t be shy.”

Jerry pinched the lens between his finger and thumb. He held the glasses up to the light. He wasn’t sure what he saw through the amber haze.

“
Come on,” Breck said. “Get your fingers all over them. You can’t smudge ‘em.”

“
Nope.”

“
What did I tell you? Un-smudge-able. Want in on the next great invention?”

“
In?”

“
My wife’s developed a marketing plan. I think we can do the whole deal for under a million to start—plant, production, marketing, sales.”

Jerry stood up and returned the glasses. “Let me think about it.”

“
Good. I have your number.”

Jerry rushed through the trailer and pushed outside. Breck held onto the door, launching a final pitch for capital funds. Mercifully, a jet plane thundered overhead and deafened the rambling hole in Breck’s face.

The Porsche waited beneath the sun like a big red bug with mag wheels. Jerry plodded forward. His steps were heavy. He felt more dejected than the day he received his pink slip.

He dropped into his car. Why didn’t he see this coming? His perception was skewed. At the Winners Circle, people often blamed the lottery money for fostering a loss of reality. Money made you view the world as you wanted, not as it really was. Dick often reinforced this precept, but Jerry knew the true reason behind his own lack of clarity. A rattlesnake had altered his brain cells, and a slick of venom still pulsed through his veins, tainting every thought he conceived.

“
Who wants to comment on that?” Dick commanded room 201B at the Trenton JCC. He scanned the faces in the circle of plastic chairs, slapping his pen in his palm. He resembled a well-dressed prison guard pressing for answers. “Tom thinks he’s better off without the money.”

“
I don’t think being broke is the answer.” Jerry fanned away Arlene’s cigarette smoke. It burned his eyes.

“
I’ll second that.” Arlene puffed again. A thin tube of ash bent from the tip of her cigarette, like a charred tree limb. She was spending a little too much time at the tanning salon, and her skin glowed with a queer orange hue.

“
Don’t get me wrong. I still believe in money.” Tom sat by the window, noshing on a chocolate éclair. Since the loan to repurchase his father’s bakery fell through, he adopted a cavalier attitude about wealth.

“
What is it that you believe?” Dick flipped through his notebook.

“
I still believe it can make good.”

“
That’s great. You must keep the faith.”

“
I want more money. I hope to have it one day.”

“
And you will. Be positive.”

“
But I don’t know if I need millions. I’ve done that.”

Jerry considered the lottery tickets in his wallet. He still purchased them, just like the old days. He bought a strip of five from Mojique at the Seven-Eleven, plus an extra large cup of black coffee. The ritual made him feel like a regular guy, but he’d never confess it to this crowd.

Tom swallowed a huge mouthful of pastry. You almost saw it slide down his gullet. “I tried to guess where I went wrong, so I traced things backwards.”

“
Excellent,” Dick said. “Go with that thought.”

“
I was happy before I won the money, but if I had the choice again, would I give it away from the start?”

Jerry chewed on that question. He’d given half of everything to Mel Cogdon. Unfortunately, it was the half that he wanted to keep. Chelsea never phoned. She never sent e-mail. It’d been a month, and not even a postcard from Mexico dropped out of his mailbox. He anticipated one of those tacky honeymoon pictures with her and Mel donning oversized sombreros—the lovebirds in goofy bliss. He’d prepared himself not to react, but he never thought that no contact might bother him more.

Arlene tapped her ash into a plastic cup. “You should make a checklist: good points on the right, bad points on the left. See how it adds up.”

Tom wiped his mouth with a napkin. “On one hand, I liked being able to have choices, but on the other, there’s that constant worry about what to do.”

“
Correct,” Dick said. “Freedom has its price.”

“
I’ve decided that I would give the money away, donate it to charity.”

“
Stop it!” Jerry thumped his heel on the linoleum floor.

The room turned abruptly toward Jerry.

“
That’s ridiculous,” he said. “You wouldn’t give the money away.”

Tom looked hurt. This happened once per session, but usually Dick told him off. “Yes. I, I …”

“
You’re broke because nobody stopped you from making bad choices.” Jerry had had enough of this. He suddenly understood the term ‘oral masturbation.’ If Tom wanted to dream aloud, he should take up a writing career.

“
But ...”

“
But nothing. You got rich, then spent it all. It’s that simple.”

“
I guess I invested cash in the wrong areas.”

“
You thought the money was the answer to your problems. You thought you could buy the answers.”

“
I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“
That’s my point. No one told us what to do. No one warned us what might happen.”

The room fell silent. Every man and woman in the circle acknowledged Jerry’s words with a long glance or a nod of the head. He felt like a teacher who just scolded the class. It was a red-hot poker of truth in the eye, the poignancy searing, concrete enough to touch, and who’d dare refute it. Everyone already knew the truth. In fact, they lived it. They came to the Winners Circle for affirmation of the facts.

Jerry noticed Dick squinting in his direction. Jerry recognized that look too. Dick’s big brain was turning. Dick had a new idea.

A week later, Dick planted himself in the middle of Jerry’s Victorian couch. He and Tom were making a habit of showing up unannounced at the farmhouse, but this time, Dick was on an urgent mission. He bent Jerry’s ear for twenty minutes. He plotted to save the world, at least their part of it. He was going to shield the big dollar lottery winners from harm and especially themselves.

“
Something tells me you have a name for this plan,” Jerry said.

“
It’s called the Winners Alliance.” Dick donned a content expression, as if he’d just laid out the inner workings of the first atomic bomb and given it a name. “I took the idea from you. We’re going to warn them. We’re going to warn them all.”

“
We can’t warn them.”

“
We can, and we will.”

Jerry was speechless. It was impossible to warn anyone about the future, much less predict its color and shape in advance. He’d tried it once and ended up with something that resembled nothing he’d imagined. “What about the Winners Circle?”

“
The Circle’s still going on. We’ll always need that to mop up broken lives. This is a splinter group to counteract problems before they start.”

“
Who’s in it?”

“
Just us—you, I, and Tom. Tucker will perform the undercover work.” Dick leaned closer, as if someone bugged their conversation from outside the room. “I want no one else to know. It’s a secret alliance, a sub-entity within the Winners Circle.”

“
This all seems a little too covert for me. Explain it again.”

“
We monitor millionaires for signs of personal and financial destruction, then intervene at the right moment.”

Jerry worried whenever Dick got to thinking like this: the plans, the secrets. “How will you know when the right moment arrives?”

“
Tucker’s putting a file together on everyone.”

“
Everyone?” Jerry scanned Dick’s dark priest-like getup. Dick was a zealot for sure, noble but naïve, not to mention a little scary, the essence of a true missionary. One hundred years earlier, he’d be roaming the jungles, converting natives to Christians, and as always with a zealot, it was mostly about the converter as opposed to the converts.

“
Everyone in the last ten years will have a file,” Dick said. “We’ll review them regularly for changes. They’ll be a file on each of us as well. It’s the only fair way.”

“
I suppose.” Jerry heard Tom rummaging in the kitchen. The teakettle boiled and a package of potato chips or pretzels ripped open. “What does Tom think?”

“
He’s in.”

“
Just like that?”

“
Yes.”

“
He’s not nervous?” Jerry knew what a worrywart Tom was.

“
The Alliance will pay him a stipend for odd jobs and driving.”

“
Oh, that’s why he’s in.”

Dick ignored the remark. “What do you say? Are you joining us?”

“
You really need me for this?”

“
There’s a presence about you.”

“
I’m not roughing anyone up.”

“
You’re solid, Jerry.” Dick slapped him in the arm, as if the threesome were embarking on a rugby scrum instead of something weird and outrageous.

“
No funny stuff?”

“
Nothing unnecessary.”

Jerry looked at Dick’s outstretched hand. He was bored silly, rattling around the farm from sunup to sunset. What was the harm? A phone call here; a letter there. Besides, he needed the companionship. “Alright, I’ll see how it goes.”

“
Great.” Dick pulled a file from his loaded briefcase and dropped it on the coffee table. “You’re our first case.”

“
You’re joking.”

“
Do I joke?”

Jerry just stared.
No, you have no sense of humor whatsoever.

“
Gina Spagnoli,” Dick said. “How much money have you spent on her?”

“
I don’t know. Twenty, thirty grand. I have to check with Tisch.”

“
Do you even know if it’s your child yet?”

“
No, not yet. I mean, I assume it is.”

“
You assume?”