He never looked into the drum. He looked at the crowd and told his story about the young Marine, and his hand went in and moved around and came out with the heavy ticket, as if the ticket had come to his fingers on its own.
That was all of it. There was no magic in the thing at all.
It was a thicker ticket and a dry hand, and the whole show was built to keep two hundred good people looking at his face.
The winner that Friday was a woman named Basil Spikes, from Great Bend, in a purple windbreaker. She waved from the back, took her envelope at the door, and was gone before the Auxiliary could find a camera.
The next morning I drove past the Starlite Motel on the highway, and there was a silver Ram pickup parked beside the Buick, with Oklahoma plates. Dub Parrish, who drove in from Hutchinson, had not slept in Hutchinson.
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Lanny took another four thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars out of Hobbs that second weekend. Add the first weekend and it comes to nine thousand and sixty.
On Sunday after church I bought a spiral notebook at the drugstore. I stood in the parking lot of First Lutheran and the Methodist church and the Dollar General, and I asked people one question: how much did you put into that raffle?
A few were angry, and not at him. “Mettie, you sore because you did not think of it first?” That was Hiram Pfannenstiel, a man I had pulled out of a ditch with a tow chain in 2011.
Others just told me, and went red doing it. A farmer who put in four hundred dollars because his wife had been sick.
A pair of brothers who split a hundred. A widow of a Navy man who had kept her ticket stubs in her Bible.
By Wednesday I had forty-one households, each with a name and a number. I added them on the back of a seed catalog.
It came to eight thousand nine hundred and forty dollars, less than he had taken, because some people were too ashamed to give me a figure.
Near the bottom of the notebook was a name I had been dreading. Zadie Gerdes, two hundred and eighty dollars.
Zadie is eighty-eight years old and she has sat at the third table from the stage at every bingo night since before I was the caller. She plays three cards at once and never misses a number.
Her husband, Albert, was in the Post for sixty years. He fought at the Chosin Reservoir, lost two toes to the cold, and spent the rest of his life saying he had been lucky.
She told me about it in the kitchen of her little white house, with her hands folded on the table. She had paid for the tickets out of a Folgers can where Albert had kept quarters for the Fourth of July parade.
“I thought it would be nice to win something,” she said. “Albert never did, and he always said he would not know what to do with it.”
On Thursday I went to see Deputy Finis Wohlers at the sheriff’s substation. She is a plain, direct woman in her forties, and she listened to every word with a cup of coffee going cold at her elbow.
Then she told me what I already knew. His registration was real. The county clerk had stamped it.
He had not made a false statement to anyone that she could prove, and a heavy ticket in a drum was a thumb and a feeling.