FICTION
Joyce Carol Oates
SURF CITY
His number finally came up , his good luck number, pub–
lished in the
Suif City Gazette
and announced over the radio, he'd won
$1 , 150 in the state lottery in which a retired grocer from Camden
won $1 ,726 ,092 and somebody else , a woman schoolteacher from
upstate , won $628 ,530 . About time , he thought. Maybe even a few
years behind schedule .
His name was Harvey Kubeck, he was thirty-one years old , had
a two-year-old son and another baby on the way. Both pregnancies
hadn't been planned but weren't exactly accidents either. Except for
the weeks when he was laid off from work he made good money at
Republic Steel: when they laid him off he got part-time work driving
a truck for a local construction outfit , part-time work as a security
guard (not licensed to carry a gun) at the shopping mall, short-term
jobs with a tree service his wife's uncle owned, whatever came along.
He'd never gone downtown to collect unemployment, no one in his
family did. For a long time it had seemed to him that luck was run–
ning against him. It wasn't just the things you could put your finger
on, talk about , it was how you felt about yourself, the air you had to
breathe . In fact it seemed to him that his bad luck was like dirty
water, stinking sewage water splashing around his head, his face, it
sickened him to think he'd get it in his mouth and swallow it. Months
and months of things going against you until finally it's years , you're
thirty, then you're thirty-one , not a kid any longer.
He'd gone to parochial school so he knew the Church's teaching
on luck, it was supposed to be nothing but pagan superstition, it was
supposed to be ignorant; good Catholics didn't put their faith in any–
thing but God. But Harvey knew when his luck was bad and he was
being cheated, it was just instinct to know. In any case he didn't be–
lieve in the Church any longer, hadn't been able to swallow that shit
Editor's Note: Copyright
C
1985 The Ontario Review, Inc.
