Whenever Chub visited the place, he raised a long-necked Budweiser in salute to the martyrs honored on Bode’s wall. Through television he’d acquired a vague awareness of Koresh and Weaver, but he knew little about Kahl except that he’d been a Dakota farmer and tax protester, and that the feds had shot the shit out of him.
“Goddamn storm troopers,” Chub snarled now, parroting a term he’d picked up at a small but lively militia meeting on Big Pine Key. He carried his beer to a futon sofa, where he plopped down splay-legged and relaxed. Quickly his thoughts drifted from the fallen patriots to his own sunny fortunes.
Bode Gazzer hunched at the dinette, a newspaper spread under his nose. He’d been in a spiteful mood since learning from a state lottery pamphlet that he and Chub wouldn’t be receiving the $14 million all at once—it was to be dispensed in equal payments over twenty years.
Worse: The payments would be taxed!
Chub, who wasn’t bad with numbers, attempted to cheer Bode Gazzer with the fact that $700,000 a year, even before taxes, was still a very large piece of change.
“Not large enough to outfit a patriot force,” Bode snapped.
Chub said, “Rules is rules. The hell can you do?” He got up to turn on the TV. Nothing happened. “This busted or what?”
Bode smoothed the wrinkles from the newspaper and said: “Christ, don’t you get it? This is everything we’ve been talkin’ about, everything worth fightin’ for—life, liberty, pursuit and happiness all rolled up in one.”
Chub thwacked the broken television with the flat of his hand. He wasn’t in the mood for one of Bode’s speeches yet it now seemed inescapable.
Bode Gazzer continued: “Finally we hit it big and what happens? The state of motherfucking Florida is gonna pay us in drips and draps. Then, whatever we get is snatched by the Infernal Revenue!”
Listening to his friend, Chub’s high feelings about their good luck began to ebb. He’d always viewed the lottery as a potential way to get tons of free money without doing jackshit. But the way Bode explained it, the Lotto was just another sinister example of government intrusion, tax abuse and liberal deceit.
“You think it’s a accident we gotta share this money with somebody else?”
With the mouth of the beer bottle, Chub massaged the furry nape of his neck. He wondered what his friend was getting at.
Bode rapped his knuckles on the dinette. “Here’s my prediction: The shitweasel holding the other Lotto ticket, he’s either a Negro, Jew or Cuban type.”
“Go on!”
“That’s how they do it, Chub. To fuck over decent Americans such as you and me. You think they’re gonna let two white boys take the whole jackpot? Not these days, no way!” Bode’s nose angled back toward the newspaper. “Where’s Grange? Over near Tampa?”
Chub was stunned at his friend’s theory. He didn’t understand how the lottery could be rigged. If it was, how had he and Bode managed to win even half?
During the brief span of their friendship, Bodean Gazzer had invoked conspiracies to explain numerous puzzling occurrences—for instance, how come there was usually a big airplane crash at Christmastime.
Bode knew the answer, and naturally it involved the U.S. government. The Federal Aviation Administration was in perpetual danger of having its budget slashed, the crucial vote customarily coming in December before Congress adjourned for the holidays. Consequently (Bode revealed to Chub) the FAA always sabotaged an airliner around Christmas, knowing politicians wouldn’t have the nerve to cut the funding for air safety while the world watched mangled bodies being pulled out of a charred fuselage.
“Think about it,” Bode Gazzer had said—and Chub did. A government plot seemed more plausible than grim coincidence, all those plane crashes.
Corrupting the state Lotto, however, was something else. Chub didn’t think even the liberals could pull it off.
“It don’t add up,” he said sullenly. Plenty of regular white folks had won, too; he’d seen their faces on TV. Speaking of which, he wished the goddamn thing wasn’t busted so he could watch football and not have to think about what Bode Gazzer was saying.