By Brian K. Stumbaugh

"What would you do if you hit the lottery?"

Marcus had said it as he was coming out of the Bonfare store, scratching one of those instant lottery tickets. We all piled back into the van thinking, Marcus grabbing shotgun next to Slim, Jimmy and I in the back. Slim was finishing off a beer, and Jimmy was lighting a cigarette next to me. Marcus was busy scratching another ticket with his black thumbnail when Slim started the van up. We limped down Liberty Avenue in Slim's beat up, yellow van- we called it "the school bus"- and stopped at the town park. The swimming pool was Heeney's main summer attraction, and the young girls ran and lounged and squealed while we stopped and ate our lunch. I opened my bag and began to eat my roast beef sandwich, like I had every day since coming to work on the railroad in May. "Damn, man. Look at her." It was Marcus. He was notorious for being the Heeney ladies' man. All ages, all the time. Even as far back as high school, when I was in high school; he was notorious even then. "Davey-boy, who is that?"

"You mean you don't know?" said Jimmy, bits of mayonnaise clinging to his too long mustache. "I thought you knew all the young things in Heeney, babe. She's got to be fifteen, sixteen; perfect for you." He laughed, and his ripe, red face turned white with the exertion of the chuckle.

"Screw you, man. Davey, who is she?"

My stomach always flipped when Marcus looked at me like that. I could almost see the teenaged girls in his bed, so cool because he had taken them. I strained to see the white bikinied girl, but she was too far from the van. I shrugged and took a bite of my sandwich. "I don't know."

"C'mon man. College ain't screwed up your eyes, has it? You gotta know who she is."

I looked at Marcus, who was squinting in the direction of the pool. "I don't know. I can't see her."

"Damn!" Marcus said, throwing his sandwich wrapper out of the van. Slim laughed and popped another beer. Jimmy pulled a drag from his cigarette and smiled. The mayo still clung to his mustache.

I had always loved this time in Heeney. The summers were hot, and the girls always wore those shorts that crept up a bit too high on their thighs. My buddies and I would cruise Heeney and Colmart, and even Mear's Lake. If we had the extra flow, we'd cruise across the bridge and hit Raven's Falls, just to check out the action. But that was before college, and working during the summer.

"I can't believe you couldn't see her, man. She was fine."

"Christ, Marco, she was sixteen, tops." It was Slim, fixing those glazed, red eyes on Marcus in between sips. "You can do better."

Marcus eyed him, looked deep into his face the way Marcus did when he was searching you out, and shrugged. I saw Marcus do that to a girl in town, and she melted, right there. Granted, she was in my sister's sophomore class. He turned his eyes to me and said, "But hey, enough about the chickees. No one said what they would do if they hit the lottery. C'mon man, who's got an answer? Davey-boy? Jimmy?"

The little man next to me smiled and blew a stream of smoke into the younger man's browned face. Marcus coughed and reared back. "Screw you man. You're an asshole."

"I know what I'd do," said Slim, burping and cracking a beer. We all turned to him, Marcus quickly jerking his head back and forth from the van to the pool area, Jimmy lighting a new cigarette.

"Yeah, what'd you do, Slim?" said Jimmy, smiling.

"C'mon man." said Marcus.

Slim sipped his beer and then set it on the dashboard, propping it between the window and the vinyl surface of the dash. He had a long face with a droopy rust colored mustache, and he always smelled like a beer. I hated working near him in the morning because the smell of the booze leaking through his pores when he sweated made my stomach turn. He burped again and smiled. "If I won the lottery I would buy Sandy's fuckin' Bar and Grill and name it that!" he said, easing back against the steering wheel. We all laughed. Slim was a fixture at Sandy's, sitting at the end of the bar every night, drinking beer until he was nearly blind, staggering home; it was a routine. Jimmy was Slim's best friend, and told me often about Slim's turbulent marriage. Jimmy liked to talk when nobody else was around, when just him and I would stack used up ties in the back of the Heeney yard. Davis, our foreman, would only come around once every couple of hours, so we had lots of time to talk.

Slim's marriage, he would say, was a throwing marriage. Dishes, cups, knives, they threw it all, and Slim had a few nice scars to prove it. Sheila, her name was. A real tough chic, according to Jimmy, but she loved him once. He was a good man, then, Jimmy would say. He was a full diesel mechanic in the shop, making forty grand plus; he got bored, though, and drank himself out. When he was fired for being drunk on the job, and after Sheila left him, Jimmy got him the job on the line. "You don't need to buy that hole, Slim. You pour enough money in there to own the joint already!"

"The truth, Jimmy. Yes indeed, that is the truth." Slim was finishing his beer and burping. Marcus laughed and turned back to the pool.

"Well, I'll tell you what I'd do," he said, pointing to the girl in the white bikini, "I'd take that little sweet thing, and all of her friends, and make sure they kept me satisfied."

"Love slaves." Jimmy piped up. "He wants a freakin' harem, that's what he wants!" We all laughed, and Marcus started turning red. I'm not sure whether he knew what a harem was. Slim choked a bit on his beer from all the laughing.

"Screw you all, man. What a bunch of homos." Marcus referred to anyone who didn't have his prodigious sex drive as a homo. He turned back to the pool, and we all laughed a little harder. I laughed the hardest, I think, because he was so serious, and I had seen his type at school. It seemed funny to me that guys were the same across all levels of education, that genetics, like the monotonous pounding of railroad spikes, was consistent. "If mine was so funny, college-boy, why don't you tell us your wish." Marcus had turned back around, and was livid. Little veins had flared in his forehead, tiny wrinkles coming from around his squinted eyes.

"I don't know," I started, even though I had posed the same question to myself numerous times, "I suppose it would be something to do with getting out."

"What are you talking about, Freeman? That's all you could come up with, man? Man, at least Slim got something out of his dream."

"Shut up, Marcus." said Jimmy, lighting the last cigarette from his pack. "What do you mean, man, about getting out?"

"I don't know exactly," I followed, "but I know that I need to get away from here. I need to leave Heeney. I've been here all my life. I love it, but there just isn't anything here for me."

Slim burped and chuckled. "Where would you go, man, Raven's Falls?" They all laughed, so I put on my best fake smile and waited for the laughter to die down.

"You know, maybe that ain't a bad idea, Davey-boy. Head on down to Myrtle Beach. I heard that the beaver down south is pretty tender. I just might go with you." Marcus had that gleam in his eye again.

"Yeah, you might even get lucky and score with an eighteen year old!" said Jimmy, exhaling. Slim chuckled.

"Alright, asshole," said Marcus, pointing a dirty fingernail at Jimmy, "what'd you do with your million bucks?"

Jimmy fell silent, and took a drag off of his dwindling smoke. I found this interesting because, sitting beside me in the back of the old yellow van, I realized that he had never talked much about himself. He had always talked about Slim, or Marcus, or had mocked Davis, but had never talked about himself. Splashes of water and shrieking girls could be heard from the pool, and Marcus turned away. Slim burped and the air in the van got heavy with smoke. I stared at Jimmy's face to get any idea of his emotion, but he just looked out the window. There was a long silence.

"It probably is going to sound funny," he started, turning back to the three of us. Marcus turned around. "But I guess I always wanted to paint signs, man. You know, like the real fancy one on Jerome's Restaurant, or the one on the Diner in Mear's Lake. They always seem to mean something, you know? They always announce something important. I'd go back to school, man, finish up. I did this painting of a bird, you know, in art class, in a lake of fire. He was just flying straight up, man, like a rocket. Thought I'd use it as my logo, you know? 'Signs by James Fennick. That's what I'd do if I hit the lottery." There was a long silence again, and Marcus broke into a grin.

"You would paint signs? You're a freakin' moron." Jimmy lunged at Marcus, his little body scissoring through the break in the front seats. Slim and I jumped to pull them apart, but, since Slim had finished his normal liquid lunch, the burden of separating the men fell on me. When Jimmy was calm, after many heavy breaths, he sat back in the seat and glared at Marcus.

"Screw you, man."

"Hey, I'm sorry, man." Marcus apologized. "I didn't know it meant that much to you. If you want to paint your signs, then do it." A silence fell over the van, and Slim looked at his watch.

"We should be getting back," he started, "Old Davis'll have a freakin' cow if we're late." And he started the van. Marcus blew a kiss to the girl in the white bikini. As we drove back to the yard, in the middle of the noontime heat, I realized that maybe, just maybe, we would make it back before Davis blew a fuse. The van limped onto VanPellis Road and headed for the yard. The heat from the blacktop shimmered in the afternoon sun, causing ripples in the air, and the yard, while looming closer and closer, still seemed very distant.