The Raffle I Let the Con Man Run

“Mettie, I cannot arrest a thumb,” she said, and she looked unhappy saying it. “I will call the state. They will open a file. That is six weeks, maybe eight, and he will be in Missouri by Tuesday, running the same thing for the Elks.”

That evening I told Elwood Rasmusson at the Post. He is seventy-four, a retired lineman, with a gray crew cut and a face like a good fence post, and he took it harder than I thought a man could.

“I gave him the key to the building,” Elwood said. “I stood up in front of the membership and vouched for him. I want him out of here tonight. I want his Buick on the county road with its tires flat.”

“And then what?” I said.

I had been thinking about it for three nights. “Then he is a martyr, Elwood. Half this town still thinks he is a saint. They will say he was run off by a bitter old man and a jealous commander, and he will be in Nebraska by Monday telling the story of the angry Kansas veterans.”

“Meanwhile those forty-one households sit in their kitchens deciding they were fools. They were not fools. They were looked in the eye by an expert.”

Elwood sat down heavily. “So what do you want to do? Shake his hand?”

“I want to let him run one more,” I said.

I thought Elwood would throw me out of the building. He took off his cap and put it back on.

“One more, the biggest one yet,” I said. “The Saturday before Veterans Day. And before he draws a single ticket, I get the microphone. Ten minutes.”

“To do what?”

“To teach two hundred people his trick,” I said. “While he is standing right there.”

Elwood looked at me for a long time. “That’s the dumbest thing I have heard in this building,” he said. Then, after a while: “Ten minutes. And if it goes wrong, Mettie, it is on you.”

That night I told Jeanette about the carnival.

She was at the kitchen table doing the crossword, and I sat down across from her and said it all at once, the wheel and the brake and the pegs and the man in Sedalia with the empty envelope.

It took about twenty minutes. She did not look up from her puzzle until the end.

“Thirty-four years,” she said. “And you thought I would mind.”

“I thought you would think less of me.”

I told her. I said I was going to stand up and tell two hundred people that their friend was a thief.

“They will not believe you,” she said, not unkindly. “They will want to, and they will not. People do not believe what they are told about someone they like. They believe what they see.”

“I cannot show them a drum.”

“Can you not?” said my wife. She filled in a word and looked at me over her glasses. “You ran a game for seven summers, Mettie. Do not tell them. Show them.”

Then on Friday, the day before I was supposed to speak, I drove to the Starlite Motel and knocked on the door of Room Eleven.

Lanny Spangler opened it in an undershirt and gray slacks, with reading glasses pushed up on his head and a cup of tea in his hand.

A television was going behind him with the sound off. On the nightstand was a framed photograph of a woman with soft white hair.