The Raffle I Let the Con Man Run

He taught me the ear. A crooked wheel does not sound like an honest wheel.

The flapper clicks lower and drags on the last two pegs, and a man who works one long enough can hear a gaff across a noisy fairground.

“The mark always thinks he is watching the wheel,” Tully told me. “He is watching the wrong thing. Show a man where to look and you have already taken his money.”

I worked for Fenwick Brothers for three summers before the Army, and for four more after I came home from Korea, where I spent two years on the line with the Second Infantry Division.

I was very good, and for seven summers I took money from farmers and their wives and their kids at county fairs from Missouri to Oklahoma, and I thought it was a job, like any other job, and I slept fine.

There was a man in Sedalia in my last summer with the show, when I was twenty-six. I will call him a man because I never learned his name.

He was a short, tired fellow in a seed cap who had come to the fair with a pay envelope from a feed mill.

He lost forty dollars in an hour. Then another forty.

Tully nodded at me, which meant the wheel was ready, and at the side dice game I shaved a die for him and gave him what the house gave everyone.

He did not say a word when the last of it went. He folded the empty envelope into quarters, put it in his shirt pocket, and stood there looking at his pocket like it was a letter from home.

That was the end of my carnival career. I did not quit that night, and I did not quit that week.

But I stopped sleeping, and by the end of that season I could not hear the click of a wheel without seeing that envelope.

I left Fenwick Brothers that fall for good and took the job at the co-op. I met Jeanette two years later and joined the Post.

I never mentioned the carnival to anybody, because a man who is ashamed does not make conversation about it.

So when Lanny Spangler walked into our hall, I knew what I was looking at the way a retired cop knows a stolen car. I just did not want to be right.

The second Friday I stopped telling myself it was a thumb.

I did not plan it. I came early to set up the bingo cages for the Saturday game, and I ended up standing at the corner of the stage with a coffee, two feet from Lanny’s wire drum, while he cranked it for the second drawing.

There were four hundred and twenty tickets in that drum that night, and I could hear every one of them. Paper on paper, light as a handful of napkins, and then under it all, once per turn, a different sound.

It was a small, flat knock. A playing card in a pile of napkins.

One ticket in that drum was heavier than the rest, and when the drum turned, it landed like a hand on a table.

Lanny opened the little brass door and stirred. I watched his fingertips. They had a pale, dry shine on them, the way a baker’s do, and I smelled baby powder, faint, over the fish.