The Raffle I Let the Con Man Run

She paid herself last. Two hundred and eighty dollars, out of her own winnings, folded into the pocket of her church dress.

When she was done, a small stack of twenties lay on the cloth, sixty dollars and nothing else, the difference between the jar and the book.

Zadie picked it up. She looked across the table at Lanny Spangler, who had stood there through the whole thing without moving.

“Mr. Spangler,” she said. “That is for the gas. I would tell you not to come back, but there is a person somewhere who is waiting for you to get home, and I do not think that person deserves a man who runs out of road.”

He took the money. His hand shook.

“Her name is Roberta,” he said, and for the first time in three weeks his voice had no church in it at all. “She does not know my name anymore. She is in a home in Tulsa. It costs seven thousand four hundred a month.”

“That is a reason,” Zadie said. “It is not an excuse.”

“No, ma’am,” said Lanny Spangler. “It is not.”

He went out the front door at ten minutes to ten, in his camel overcoat, past two hundred people who stood aside and did not say a word. I followed him out.

He stopped beside the Buick in the cold. The trunk was open. I could see a single suitcase in it and a worn black Bible, and nothing else.

He saw me looking. “My daddy’s,” he said. “It is the only thing I own that I did not take.” He gave a short, dry laugh, and then he looked at me.

“That man in Sedalia. Did you ever pay him back?”

“I have been trying for thirty-six years,” I said.

He nodded slowly, as if that were the only honest answer a man could give. He got into the Buick, and he drove out of Hobbs with sixty dollars and a half tank of gas, and I never saw him again.

Elwood put the gate money into the roof fund, and the new shingles went on in the spring. Finis Wohlers tells me three other counties now have a file open on Mr. Parrish and Miss Spikes.

The Monday after the raffle I mailed a check for three hundred dollars to the food pantry in Sedalia, Missouri, with no note. It does not pay what I owe. It is only the start of the payment.

I still have the spiral notebook with its forty-one names. I keep it on the shelf above the bingo cages, between the daubers and the extra cards, and I look at it sometimes on Thursday nights while the hall fills up.

What I know now is this. A trick is only a trick for as long as one person in the room does not understand it. Quiet is what a con man needs.

The best way to protect your people is not to run the trickster out of town. It is to teach them the trick while he is still standing in the room, and a good neighbor is a person who is willing to be loud.

I did not make Lanny Spangler sorry, and I did not make him honest. I made two hundred and eleven people able to hear what he was doing, and that turned out to be all the justice our town needed.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.