The Tuesday Night Bingo Ban That Backfired
“The notice doesn’t say building,” said Rudy Pfeiffer from the tailgate, very gently, like a man explaining to a heifer where the gate is.
I understood then that Darla was about to lose. She had gotten ready to fight a rule. She had no idea how to fight forty-one old people in lawn chairs who had loved each other a long time and had simply come outside to keep warm.
I should have let her stand there. But I looked at her face in the work lights, with the paint on her cheek and the clipboard shaking a little against her smock, and I did not see the woman who had handed me the laminated notice. I saw the woman who had put down her clicker on the first night while forty-one people applauded her into her chair.
“Darla,” I said. “You’ve got a streak of blue on your face.”
She put a hand to her cheek. It came away blue. She looked at it, and then, to everyone’s surprise, hers most of all, a short, wet, half-strangled laugh came out of her.
“It’s cobalt,” she said. “It’s for the sky.”
“It’s a good color. Come over here, hon, you’re cold.”
I will say this for Darla Whitlock. It took her a full ten seconds. But she walked across the gravel in her smock and her clogs, in front of all those people, and when she reached the picnic table, Bev pushed a cup of coffee at her without a word and Rudy slid six inches down the bench.
It was the way they had done it for me, six years before.
I took a pack of cards and put a small star in the middle of each one, and handed her the pack. “There’s no tampering,” I said. “I’ve only done the free spaces.”
“I don’t know how to play,” said Darla.
“I know you don’t.” I put my pen in her hand. “That’s what the star is for.”
The six painters came over one at a time as the first game began and stood at the edges with their brushes. Orville cranked the cage, and the wooden balls rumbled, and the whole pavilion went quiet. He took one out and held it up to the light.
“B-seven,” said Orville. He cleared his throat. “That’s for Maxine.”
“Hear, hear,” said Rudy.
By the sixth number, all six painters had cards, which I handed out myself, with stars.
Darla sat on the end of the bench with a pen too large for her hand. She daubed a number where I pointed. She daubed another. I could see her lips moving as she followed along, a woman who had never lost a game of anything and was about to learn how.
Twenty-two numbers in, Orville called, “O-seventy-one.”
And Darla Whitlock, hall programming coordinator, who had been playing bingo for fourteen minutes, looked at her card, and looked at it again, and then looked down the table at me.
I leaned over and counted her squares with my finger. B-seven. I-twenty. The free space. G-fifty-one. O-seventy-one. I counted again, to be sure. I am a bookkeeper. I counted a third time.
“Honey,” I said, “you have a bingo.”
“I what?”
“You have to say it out loud.”
The whole pavilion had turned to look at her. She looked at the painters, and Alma, and Orville with his hand on the cage, and then, I think for the first time in the ten weeks she had lived in Harlan Springs, she looked at the faces of the people she had been trying so hard to arrange.