The Lottery Ticket by Mark Seabrook
I was puffing a smuggled Marlboro Red, reclining in the car, seat way back,
windows down, radio on, Thursday alone, dreaming. The six o’clock fair wind hustled
the smuggled smoke out the passenger side window off to the where ever never never…
The hillside was burnt mid August bone dry; six thousand shades of yellow. The
crickets of August, somewhere and nearby; had their volume indicator up at ten. An
important letter in the glove box, dated 1979, read fifty million times, was read and re
stashed with other important papers, back in the glove box. The water at the north end of
the lake, on the West Bay Indian Reserve Number 22, was still, with reflections and loons
thinking.
“Magneto and Titanium Man” rose out of the dusty speakers under the dash,
stereo clearly, ushering in a dream from a beautiful childhood summer time; of an after
midnight drive from the Providence Bay Fair. We were all soaked, caught mid ride on
the Ferris Wheel, or in the dark woods behind the fair grounds.
We: Me, my older sister (who was at the wheel), and her boyfriend. I remember
the ride because “Magneto” was grooving through the speakers in the dash of dad’s old
1968 Plymouth wood panel station wagon “Rez Bomb”. “Magneto” was followed by
“This Flight Tonight” as read by Nazareth. The conversation up front didn’t include me
or my limited experiences so I sat silent, soaked, slanted in the darkness, thinking of her,
and tuned to the words of that song amid cackling static blasts every time lightning would
flash the island country side. The words to that song were boiling my imagination, and
the beat, well; I was fourteen at the time. And the fragrances inside the car: my sister’s
Chanel No. 5, my Coppertone sunscreen, and her wine red bandana, wonderfully and
beautifully soaked in her perfumes from overseas.
Her. The mystery girl at the fair grounds.
The fair grounds were packed and the rides were in full service neon light swirl.
Party coloured balloons of all shapes, sizes and colours, sailed up over the roar of
machinery and the music of the mid seventies.
I was dressed in my usual August wear, forty nine plus days at the beach: classic
native, full blood Ojibwe sienna skin tanned to the maximum, raven black hair straight
and long down over my shoulders, and, as she described it (written in that letter in the
glove box): large, innocent brown eyes, long eye lashes, elegant eye brows, choke cherry
coloured luscious lips, the body of “a bird in space”, smooth and hard, movement like a
wild in it’s own country.
(Oh my god I loved her words.)
I was alone and in decision over which ride to try first. I stood before the Salt and
Pepper Shaker. The year before I didn’t have the guts but this year I was different. This
year I had flames billowing inside, lava flowing through the night, flame throwers
blasting, grenades randomly going off, the roar of heavy automatic weapons near and far,
flares with parachutes sailing over the tree line, spent thirty and fifty calibre shell casing
lying everywhere. This year, as I watched the Salt and Pepper Shaker emitting screams
and loose change, I knew this was: THE. SUMMER. I had the tickets and turned without
looking to get in line and there she was. And a little to the left.
Crash. Boom. Bangle.
I knocked her candy apple right out of her beautiful hands and it fell to the filthy,
trample to death ball park grass. We both looked down at it (I noticed her feet and her
painted toenails) and I was afraid to look up.
The Lottery Ticket by Mark Seabrook
“Is it okay?” she asked.
That voice came from a place some Ojibways have never been.
Her hair was charcoal black and her bangs fell straight, just above her eyes. She
was wearing little white Daisy Dukes and a sleeveless white top and was tanned so well,
her colours seem to glow right through her sporty cool clothes. She was slim line with
jewellery: a silver ankle bracelet, a silver bangle, and the wine red bandana. She was
absolutely lovely. And foreign, from a place in southern Germany. It was the first time
I’d heard an exotic voice.
She took that ride with me. She took the next ten rides with me. She took me by
the hand and she walked with me, around the fair grounds and over the next several hours
we walked, down to the soft sands of the Providence Bay beach, through the old hockey
arena to look at the displays, back through the fair grounds, on the country road where
when we stopped and looked back, we could hear the carnival music and see the glow of
the lights above the trees. And back to the fair grounds where she told me she wanted to
walk the beach with me once again.
Her conversation was a place of exotica. She had been through Europe. Been
down to see the pyramids. Been up to Stonehenge during summer solstice. Rode the
train all the way across Russia to Valdivostok and sailed back to Germany!
The furthest I’d ever been was the Wiki Pow wow.
She’d already seen/heard Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony performed live and I had
no idea what she was talking about.
I had been at the beach for the past forty nine days. I’d been examining shells,
birds in flight, the movement of the waters in Lake Mindemoya, the full moon of July
from the cut hay fields on my dad’s farm, and somewhat, kind of, reading the early
poems of Robert Frost.
In all my limited days I’d never had anyone come up to me like that, hold my
hand, come around in front of me and stare at my mouth, my eyes, reach out and touch
my chin with their finger tips, when she smiled at me it was pure. She said to me: You
are beautiful. You are an ancient god. I have read about you and here you are, standing
before me. I love you.
Up to that point in time I was made to feel ugly and of course I believed it. The
racism, lateral violence, and coarse language directed towards us Indians was full time.
Shortly before midnight the thunder birds arrived, absolutely pounding, lightning
too, blasting, scaring the wits out of everyone, us included. The thunder was directly
above and within minutes the entire town of Providence Bay was soaked in a warm
August rain from Lake Huron.
The wine red bandana lads, that’s what she gave me, and in return, took away a
great huge slab of my heart at fourteen. She was my first kiss. First penpal. First whole
bunch of things. I still have all of her letters, her beautiful pictures and red bandana
tucked far away.
She was so beautiful.
That was so long ago.
I could smell smoke.
Toxic smoke! The carpet was on fire. Somehow the heater of the smuggled
Marlboro Red had come loose and was somewhere in the car, alive and well and doing
The Lottery Ticket by Mark Seabrook
big damage. Before I could find it the interior was filled with the smoke of fast food
trash. I had to bale out.
What a sight. Thick blue, black and gray smoke turned to flames pouring out the
open windows, quickly followed by a popping sound as the rear window either melted or
was blown out. Soon the tires caught fire and the aluminum rims began melting. Next
was the field grass. A huge pillar of toxic smoke reached up, signalling my whereabouts
in a land where all outdoor fires had been banned for the last four weeks! I looked
around nervously to see if anyone was watching and it was scary. I didn’t know what to
do. So, like a madman, I took off.
I ran up over the hill into the bush. That’s when I heard the first sirens. I kept
going, all night down the train tracks, hitch hiking the next day.
The following Saturday, with the day dreaming fiasco behind me, I checked into
the library for my weekly newspaper snoop. The Saturday Star ran a black and white
photograph of the skeletal remains of my car abandoned on a burned out, blackened
landscape. The rims were completely gone and the only thing remaining of the tires were
the steel belts, half buried with the brake rotors in ash. Charred rocker panels crumbled,
semi dripping into the scorched earth. The scene looked like something out of a war
movie. The headline read: MYSTERY CAR BURNS DOWN 1 800 ACRES OF
FOREST. 27 HOMES AND COTTAGES UP IN SMOKE.
Oh oh.
Ah well.
She was worth it. She was a movie. An epic. A blockbuster that wins a dozen
Academy Awards and goes on to earn upwards of a billion dollars, becomes world
famous, a cornerstone in modern culture, a huge life with tons of cash, stretch limos,
tinted windows, red carpets, press, the cover of Rolling Stone. Flash bulbs flashing by
the thousands. The wine red bandana: merchandising.
Meanwhile there is me; a nameless schmoe, lame, in the audience, seated alone in
the dark, hand in a bag of five dollar popcorn, wishing, pretending, re occurring
nightmares of a car torched to shreds on a charcoaled childhood landscape. The absolute
picture of the fumbled pass. Thirty some seconds total eye contact with another human
soul over the past seven years. The perfect candidate for an alien abduction; where the
dude who gets snatched never comes back. They just vanish off the face of the earth and
no one knows what became of them. All the folks can say is: Things just never seemed
to work out for him, no matter what he tried.
Weird. Kooky even. The same stuff legendary, potential billion dollar movies
are made of.
I looked over the headlines on the front page before checking my lotto numbers.
Mystery car remains a mystery; police remain baffled.
Hmmm…
Local detachment reports no new leads in mystery car burning which torched
eighteen hundred acres of old growth maple and oak wilderness and turned twenty seven
upscale homes into smouldering rubble. Police say due to the extent of fire damage,
vehicle identification numbers are impossible to read. The mystery bones reportedly
discovered yesterday about a thousand meters from the vehicle have been identified in a
missing person cold case dating back to 1973. Police ask any witnesses to call Crime
Stoppers.
The Lottery Ticket by Mark Seabrook
I chuckled as I turned to the lottery results. I’d been playing the same six
numbers religiously since I turned nineteen. The closest I ever came was four, back
when I was twenty one. I cashed in the four numbers and bagged eighty smackeroos
which I quickly drank up over at the Clipper Lounge at the Harbour Inn. (What a night
that was, complete with strippers, a bag full of shrooms, the room spinning round and
round, a knocked over table with a dancer on top of it, the cops, and one M.I.A. the
following morning… ) I located the numbers.
A crazy feeling came over the back of my neck. The area around my mouth and a
bit of my nose became numb. My heart started pounding like a pow wow drum midway
through a crow hop. My rib cage heaved like the bellows on an accordion being used for
a Saturday night polka. Nostrils flared up four times their normal size. And just when it
really did feel like the only prayers I’d ever had, had actually been answered, my whole
existence exploded into a trillion sparkly space bits like the Death Star in Star Wars.
My numbers had finally come up.
Six for six.
Worth a cool forty eight and half million dollars.
One winning ticket.
The winning ticket, my ticket, was in its usual place: in the glove box in the car.
© Mark Seabrook