The Raffle I Let the Con Man Run

Ten percent of the gate would go to Honor Flight, the prizes would be bought with the rest, and Lanny would keep a small fee for what he called “administration and travel.”

I found out later that the small fee was sixty percent. I found out a lot of things later.

The first Friday, the hall filled up the way it only does for a funeral or a free meal. Two hundred and four paid at the door, and Lanny stood at the end of the serving line in a white apron over his good shirt and shook every hand.

By eight o’clock the tickets were leaving his hands faster than the Auxiliary could slice pie. That Friday he sold four thousand one hundred and eighty dollars of paper in a hall that had never raised a thousand on a raffle.

The prizes sat beside the stage. A gun safe. A pellet smoker. And a cash jackpot of twenty-five hundred dollars in an envelope with a bow on it.

Lanny cranked a wire drum himself, a rented one, the kind with a little brass door. He talked the whole time.

He told a story about a young Marine he had met in Wichita and I could see grown men look at their shoes.

Then he reached into the drum, rattled it around, and pulled out a ticket, and he read the number into the microphone as if it hurt him to do it.

The jackpot went to a big man in a canvas coat who stood up in the back of the hall and waved. His name was Dub Parrish, he said he drove in from Hutchinson, and he had bought exactly four tickets at the door.

The room applauded. I applauded. I was standing at the side of the stage in my bingo caller’s vest and I clapped like everybody else.

But I will tell you what I did in the second after that, because it is the second I think about most. I looked at Lanny’s right hand.

He was not looking at the winner. He was looking at the drum, and his thumb was moving against his first two fingers, slow, the way a man rubs a coin he has already decided to keep.

It was nothing. It was a thumb. I told myself that all the way home.

Dub Parrish never stayed for the photograph. Lanny said the poor fellow had a long drive and a sick mother, and the Auxiliary ladies sighed, and the envelope went out the back door before anybody thought to ask what he drove.

Here is something I have never told anyone in Hobbs, not Elwood, not the pastor, and not, until the week I am about to tell you about, my wife.

When I was seventeen years old I ran a game for a traveling carnival called Fenwick Brothers Amusements, out of Sedalia, Missouri.

I was a farm kid with a bad report card and a father who had run out of patience, and a man named Tully Hosch hired me at a county fair in Boone County because I was quick with my hands and I did not ask questions.

Tully ran the Big Six. If you have never seen one, it is a vertical wheel about four feet across, painted in six colors, with leather flappers clicking on brass pegs, and a counter lined with players who think they are one spin away.

Tully taught me the brake, a strip of felt-covered metal under the rim, worked with a knee, so the wheel stops where the operator wants. He taught me the pegs, filed a hair too soft on the number the house does not want paid.