Lucifer's Lottery by Edward Lee Read Free Book Online

crotch.
    Gerold frowned.
    Her desperate whisper told him, “Let’s go over to them trees. Twenty-five bucks. I’ve done guys in chairs before; some of ’em get off.”
    “I don’t get off!” he spat.
    “Hmm? You sure?” She kept rubbing, her grin knife-sharp. “You feel
that
, don’t you?”
    “No,” he grumbled. He was enraged and humiliated. “I’m paraplegic. You know what that means? It means
dead from the waist down
.”
    “Come on, just let me play with it anyway. Twenty bucks. You’ll like it.”
    “Get away from me!” he bellowed.
    “Well fuck you, then!” she yelled back. “Fuckin’ cripple.”
    “Yeah,” he said, grimacing. He got out his wallet. There was his bus pass and a fifty-dollar bill. “Do you have a knife or a gun?”
    “What?”
    “I’ll give you fifty bucks, my bus pass, and my bank card—”
    “For what?”
    “I want you to kill me.”
    The junkie face seemed to pucker like a pale slug sprinkled with salt. She left the shelter and jogged away.
    Anyway,
that’s
what had brought Gerold down here in the first place.
That’s
why he’d been in the library: to use their computer, go online, and read about castor bean poison, which he’d found quite easily. Just as easily, however, he’d found that the extraction process was way too complicated, save for anyone but a chemist; and then when he’d looked up some other poisons, he’d caught the librarian eyeing his screen with a troubled frown on her face. He’d felt idiotic so he’d left in a rush.
    SWOOOSH!
    The next bus drove right by, its driver pretending not to see Gerold waiting in the shelter.
    No. Today just wasn’t Gerold’s day.
(IV)
    When Hudson finally fell asleep, he dreamed almost in flashback: the recent past. A year ago when he’d graduatedfrom Catholic U., he’d taken a summer job for a Monsignor Halford, the chancellor of the Richmond Diocesan Pastoral Center. Hudson needed a letter of reference to get into a quality seminary, so here he was.
    Halford had to have been ninety but seemed sharper and more energetic than most clerics half his age. He did not beat around the bush with regard to spiritual counsel. He said right off the bat, “The only reason you’re working here is for a reference, but I won’t give you any manner of reference or referral unless you do this: take a year or two off, go into the work force—not volunteer work or hospices—you’ll do plenty of that during your internship.” The pious old man chuckled. “Work a real job, live like real people, the
other
people. You have to
be
one of them before you can be one of us. Work in a restaurant, a store, do construction work or something like that. Earn money, pay bills, know what it’s like to live like
they
do. Go to bars, get drunk, smoke cigarettes, and, above all . . . familiarize yourself with the company of women, like St. Augustine. There’s nothing worse than a young seminarist going straight from college to seminary and taking all his idealism with him. Those are the ones who fold halfway through their pastorship.”
    Hudson sat agog.
St. Augustine was a whoremonger before he found faith
. . . “You don’t mean . . .”
    “I mean as I’ve said,” the elder replied in a voice of granite. “Am I
ordering
you to engage in sexual congress outside of wedlock? No. But hear this, Hudson. A venal sin now is much more forgivable than a grievous sin later, later as in
after
your ordination.”
    Hudson couldn’t believe such an implication.
    “Are you receiving my meaning, son?”
    “I’m . . . not sure, Monsignor.”
    “In the real world you’ll be subject to the same temptations that Christ faced. We in the vocation
all
need to know that.”
    “But I’m perfectly happy with a vow of celibacy.”
    The monsignor smiled, and it was a
sardonic
smile. “Go out into the world first, and that includes the world of
women
. If you don’t, you’ll probably quit in ten or twenty years. It doesn’t do God any good to