The Raffle I Let the Con Man Run

“I took that man’s money,” I said. “I was twenty-six years old and I was good at it. I know what a crooked game feels like from the inside, because I ran one. That is why I can tell you what I heard in this hall a week ago Friday.”

A woman near the front put her hand over her mouth. Elwood, standing at the side of the stage, took his cap off.

Lanny Spangler did not move at all. He stood at the table with the jar at his elbow and his hands folded, listening to me like a man at a sermon he had heard before and expected to enjoy.

Behind the last row, near the coat rack, I saw a big man in a canvas coat and a woman in a purple windbreaker. Dub Parrish and Basil Spikes had come back to town for the biggest night of the year, and they were leaning against the wall like neighbors.

Deputy Wohlers stood by the door in her uniform with a paper plate of fish.

She had told me on the phone that she was off duty and hungry and nothing more. She looked like she meant to eat slowly.

I had the Post’s bingo cage on a cart beside me. I took the little brass door off the front and dropped in two hundred slips of paper I had cut from the Auxiliary’s recipe cards that afternoon, and one slip I had cut from an index card.

“Everybody has watched a man draw a ticket,” I said. “Nobody has ever listened to one. I would like you to listen.”

I brought the microphone right up to the cage and turned the crank. In the sudden hush it sounded like a bucket of dry leaves, soft and whispering.

And then once per turn, clear as a knock on a door, came a flat little tap.

“Hear it?” I said. “That is one heavier ticket in a drum of lighter ones. It rides up when the drum turns. You cannot see it. You can only hear it, or feel it, if your fingers know what they are looking for.”

I took the baby powder out of my vest pocket, dusted my fingertips, and reached in with my eyes closed. I came out with the index card.

I put it back and did it again. I did it a third time, and the third time I said the number printed on it before I looked.

“I want a volunteer,” I said. “Somebody honest. Somebody who has never run a game in her life.”

Bernadine Hatch stood up. She is seventy-nine, a retired fourth grade teacher, and she has never in her life been seen to take a shortcut.

She walked to the cage in her good shoes and stirred for a whole minute. She came out with a recipe card for rhubarb custard.

“Now put the powder on your fingers,” I said.

She did, with the face of a woman who thinks the whole thing is silly.

She reached in again, and on the second try, she pulled out the index card. The hall gasped, and Bernadine looked at her own hand as if it had spoken.

“That is all there is to it,” I said. “It is not magic. It is a thicker ticket and a dry hand. The whole performance is a man telling you a story about a young Marine so you keep your eyes on his face.”

That was when Hiram Pfannenstiel stood up in the middle of the room with his seed cap in his fist. He is a big man, and he was angry. I had known he would be.