Another Miracle for Kenny

By Bruce Strand

Matthew 15:  The disciples said to him (Jesus), “Where are we to get enough bread in the desert to feed so great a crowd?” Jesus asked them, “How many loaves have you?” They said, “Seven, and a few small fish.” Then ordering the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish; and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all of them ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. Those who had eaten were four thousand men, besides women and children. After sending away the crowds, he got into the boat and went to the region of Magadan.

The band was playing loud. Kenny figured the intent was to mix with the noise of the slot machines and thereby create a kind of white noise which might be perceived as quiet, with the help of enough booze. Instead of sound waves annihilating each other, tonight it seemed they were enhancing each other. A veteran of casinos, Kenny had his ears full of rubber so he barely heard it, just felt the vibrations in the stick on the machine, into which he pumped the coins one at a time, then watched the dials spin. 

The purple-haired lady next to him had set up a shrine with a cross and a baby Jesus on it. She closed her eyes every time she pulled the lever and set the wheels in motion. There aren’t too many atheists in here, he thought, looking around and pulling the lever with forced conviction. This time. Will do it. Now. Bing bing! Crash. That not-winning sound.  

Yeah. Down to his last seven quarters. These tips weren’t going to last forever. Though he did manage to earn quite a pocketful today. Shining shoes. Hardly anyone wore leather shoes anymore. Younger folks went around with sneakers undone, sneeringly open with laces hanging all over the place. No gentlemen anymore. Offices were going informal. Salesmen and bankers were his mainstay, but they too were going more and more for the casual fabric slip-on. 

The occasional lady with heels propped her pretty feet on his box. A quick shine today, she’d say. He’d oblige, displaying his finesse; and besides they always tipped the best. Now here he was with barely a handful of change dumping it into the mouth of The Goblin hoping for another miracle.

# 

A boy, barely a young man, wandered in from a prairie town and became a local celebrity for a brief time: Farm Kid Wins Fortune At Vegas Slots; Kenny’s Coin Trick Pays Big. Just over a hundred grand on a low odds machine. Well that was the opening up of the firmament, the dispersal of the dark clouds, and for a while he had stood on that famous stairway to heaven. 

But he had pissed it away. All of it. Not just on high living but in trying to repeat his original success. He tried to remember: Had he rubbed that special coin in a certain way before inserting it? Was there a tune he had been humming, perhaps? He still had the ballcap he had worn that day, which he had always considered lucky. When the gods smile on you, you get frazzled in the head. Good luck is a powerful seductress. 

When you finally get to ride that dragon you experience an elation that you’ve tamed it, confident that the dragon is yours and will take you anywhere. So, you’ve got money now to play the wheel and the tables. Play with the tuxedo crowd.  And that’s how it starts. Money for gas and a nice car to put it in. You’ve mounted the dragon but it’s not quite enough.

Enough! That good sense word. It did not stop him at the time and the cash flowed out of that hole in his pocket. He had meant to send some to his older sister Liz to help with her first baby, but he kept delaying until it was too late. Besides, she was married to a dentist.

#

But, I’ve had enough now, thought Kenny. That was ten years ago. I was young and hungry. Maybe a little greedy. Another chance was all he wanted. He understood that the odds were not in his favour. That’s the thing about luck, he thought, it doesn’t have to obey the odds. Does it? You can’t predict it like an ocean storm. Maybe a shrine wasn’t such a loony idea. A small miracle— it could happen again. Couldn’t it? Another multiplication miracle? To experience the magic of that one lucky coin going in and thousands pouring out. He got a momentary surge of adrenaline thinking about that day. 

He felt in his pocket for the envelope, the letter he had received that morning. His Uncle AJ was inviting him to work on his cruise liner, a modest-sized ship that he had acquired some years before when he and his wife Slim had sold off their farm and headed for the coast. It was a cruise ship that marketed to wealthy retiring farmers or of course anyone willing to spend some cash. He smiled thinking of his uncle’s standing joke: Farmers never really retire. They think about it and even if they sell their land they can’t leave, and even if they leave they’re always planning to get back into it; it gives them a reason to talk about the weather. Serious business, the weather. 

Stupid joke, really, because Kenny knew that leaving the farm had been a serendipitous choice for his uncle AJ, his dad’s brother, and had led to a heaven-sent bonanza. Uncle AJ had sold the farm and he and his thin, diminutive, almost-disappearing wife, Slim, nearly drowned in the cash. Five thousand acres on the edge of the capital city were worth a surprising amount of money. But Uncle took his good fortune in stride. “Boy did I get lucky,” he said. He shucked the coveralls for an upscale pair of jeans and shiny brown oxford shoes, which he kept shiny, and never thought of the farm again. His shrinking wife got a bright red pair of stilettos and a fancy ring. 

When he had come to visit not long after the farm sale, he told Kenny’s dad that it was the best thing he’d ever done. “Sure, it’s good farmland, but folks have to live somewhere, don’t they? Sell out your farm, Alvin, and let’s go into partnership. I’m keen on cruises, you know, and I love the smell of sea air. The squawking of seagulls makes my day.”

Mind you, on the farm they had seagulls too, prairie seagulls that ate mice and bugs and other birds. They always seemed out of place and Kenny never liked them.

Uncle AJ had surprised them all that evening in the prairie town’s local tavern with his proposal. “I want you to come on a Caribbean cruise with me and Slim. No cost to you and Cupcake or the kids.” Cupcake was Kenny’s mother and considered quite a dish in her youth. “Plenty sweet with icing in the right places,” his father used to joke. Do men have a hard-wired oral fixation, Kenny wondered? He thought of the colourful beauties he had encountered in this city of Fortune’s prisoners over these few years.

“Anyway, Alvin, Cupcake needs a holiday even if you don’t, a break from the farm routine. And you don’t have to even think of the cost, maybe tip the waiters, that’s all. How is this going to happen?” Uncle AJ continued. “Well, I finally bought that boat I’ve always talked about. Goddammit, Alvin, I bought the cruiser. It’s not a big one, but still—a cruise ship. Think of the fun we can have. Farming has finally paid off.” Uncle AJ’s enthusiasm was infectious. “Once you see the ship I know you’ll be as excited as I am, Alvin.” 

Alvin went on the cruise, and Cupcake went on the cruise, and Kenny’s older sister Liz and Kenny went on the cruise. The Caribbean was gorgeous. They stopped at many islands, sampling the beaches. Cruising to the next one, the adults and the kids would sip their fancy concoctions mixed and shaken by a voluble barman and gorge on spiny lobsters. 

AJ propositioned Kenny’s father again: “Sell your land and come in with me, a partnership, whatever percentage your heart tells you is reasonable. Ten percent or forty-nine percent. Not fifty.” Uncle AJ spread his arms as if to encompass the cruise ship. “You’re hitting sixty now, Alvin, it’s time to retire.” 

Kenny could tell that his dad was tempted. Not to make a windfall in shipping rich tourists around the world, but to see new places. He too loved the Caribbean, but he never made it back there. When he turned down the partnership offer at the end of that cruise, Cupcake left him. Kenny was thirteen and sad to see her go. 

Cupcake was a gifted pianist and Uncle AJ got her a job on the ship. Kenny had always wondered about her and Uncle AJ, but he put it down to his uncle’s natural charm and exuberance. Kenny and Liz went back to the farm where they lived with their father until that too came to an end.

Alvin could not or would not touch the 49% offer to invest. His older brother had lorded it over him in subtle ways over the years and one percentage point was their separation point. Cupcake wrote letters and called regularly when she got a cellphone. “We get satellite anywhere in the world,” she exulted. Kenny was envious, but stuck it out with his father, not really knowing what else to do. Then Alvin had his first bout of cancer. “Too many farm chemicals,” Alvin said. 

When it came back a year later, Alvin succumbed, despite the surgery and radiation and all the nasty things they do to a person. Kenny left home when Cupcake sold the farm. He felt good about his farming skills, driving machinery, fixing machinery, painting buildings, building buildings, and dreaming dreams about next year. This was the farmer’s lot, usually, as this year was always a mess and next year would certainly be luckier, if you kept faith. 

However, Kenny did not build anything. Nor did he look for work driving machinery. But he did know how to dream and he felt lucky. At eighteen years old, he could not say yes fast enough when his friend and fellow graduate, Freddy, suggested they take a gap year and head south to the city of dazzle and magic.  

Sister Liz was happy to see the farm go. She had never been much a part of it anyway, as Alvin was a boy’s father and less inclined to understand where a girl might fit into the operation. But the land sold for a good price; Kenny and Liz split the small amount that Cupcake gave each of them. “You’ll get it all in good time,” Cupcake said. 

Cupcake stayed on the cruise ship playing waltzes and two-steps and schottisches for the dancing crowd, an entertainment draw that pleased Uncle AJ. During the day she worked in the administration of the ship, as she had taken up Uncle AJ on the 49% offer, sinking in the balance of the farm sale fortune.

# 

Liz had married Larry, the dentist, who made her his assistant. She learned how to pick plaque off yellow teeth and wore a mask most of the day. “The droolers are the worst,” she told Kenny, “because they almost always have terrible breath.” So Liz got pregnant and figured staying home was the best option for a soon-to-be mom. They moved to Saskatchewan where they got lost for fifteen years and it wasn’t until their divorce that Kenny talked to her again. “At least I got my teeth all done,” she said first thing. Two boys in tow she moved into the capital city and phoned Kenny every Friday night to talk about their parents. To survive she once again had to start scraping plaque.

By that time Kenny was fully employed as a Vegas casino shoe shiner. He had learned the trade at the age of thirteen when he had gone on that family cruise on Uncle AJ’s first ship, never realizing it would come in handy later. “We need a shoe shiner,” Uncle AJ had said. “Would you like to give it a try, Kenny?” So Kenny practised on his uncle’s brown oxfords, and on the cruise he made a good haul in tips with his winsome smile and curly brown hair. He even got his first kiss from a girl that wasn’t his mother.

So five years later, he had gone to the city of lights emboldened by youthful enthusiasm and dreams of more kisses and coins. After a month, Freddy had gotten bored and returned broke to the family farm. Kenny however, with stars in his eyes, persisted. He had shoeshine skills which kept him alive. Within three months he had struck his bonanza, but within a year his windfall was gone. Vanished into the fickleness of flashing lights and plastic promises and one machine after another that refused to perform the miracle again. Now here he was, still Kenny the determined Vegas shoeshine boy, already past thirty, trying to get his fortune back and vowing never to piss it away again. 

#

He pulled out the letter from his uncle. Uncle AJ and his mother, the beautiful Cupcake, had just married. It was no big surprise, as AJ had clearly been smitten with her ever since his brother Alvin had brought her home to show off to Kenny’s grandparents. They were planning to take their honeymoon on Uncle AJ’s second cruiser, renamed Cupcake, which he had purchased when he got the insurance money from Slim’s accidental death.

Auntie Slim had disappeared overboard, taken by a wave in a Caribbean storm. Liz figured the accident looked somewhat iffy but no culpability was assigned to anyone except the storm. Her diamond ring was worth a fortune, quipped Uncle AJ. But he was not the kind of guy to dwell on losses and soon brought his sanguine attitude back to the business at hand. “When we get back from our honeymoon, Kenny, I want you to come work for me,” Uncle had insisted. “You can’t shine shoes all your life.”

Off to Rio de Janeiro on the fully-booked cruise ship named after his new beautiful wife, he left behind the memory of Slim while embracing his windfall and Kenny’s mother. Cupcake slipped contentedly into her new role and enjoyed gazing at the glimmering jewel on her finger as she continued to entertain the passengers with her vast repertoire of piano tunes. 

They never reached Rio. The Cupcake disappeared off the radar after leaving Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana. A few items were recovered by fishermen in the area but no bodies. “The water’s shallow but the ship must have slid into an ocean trench,” postulated local oceanographers.

#

Kenny called Liz. “We’ve got to meet,” he said, and a few days later they were seated at the Moosetown Café in Regina, the capital city, to discuss their future. The boys, in their mid-teens, were asked to join them. Kenny and Liz had just found out that they had inherited everything: the cruise liners or rather the surviving cruise liner, the hotel in Rio de Janeiro, and the modest villa in Costa Rica. “What now?” they asked each other across the round bar table with its bright orange cloth while waiting for the lobster special. “Do we sell it all?”

“The boys just graduated,” she said. “They’ll need cash for university. And now I can quit scraping teeth.” Kenny, who had no wife and no children, expressed sincere avuncular sentiments. The prospect of all that money, much more than his first lucky pot, was a bit overwhelming for him. He was grieving that his mother was gone, but shining shoes had lost its lustre and he was personally getting tired of overly-lipsticked Vegas girl kisses. He swore to embrace this unexpected turn of fate and be grateful for his good fortune, Cupcake’s legacy.   

“Just so you fellas never have to shine shoes for a living, we’re going to set up a fund for you to continue your education,” Kenny began brightly.  

The boys had other ideas.  Don the eldest at sixteen years asserted, “I’m going to learn massage and work on cruise ships, Uncle Kenny. Could you get me a job?” 

“They do sink you know,” Kenny responded. By this time Kenny was over thirty years old and not inclined to argue with teenagers. “OK, if that’s what you want, Don.” Liz sighed and nodded. 

Jerry the younger lad, still only fifteen, pondered over his lobster which he deftly cracked open with the tool provided. “After fifteen years on the prairies I want out. I’m going to see every country in the world. That’s my goal.” He paused to eye his mother. “Dad says I can when I graduate high school.” 

“If you graduate high school,” emphasized his mother. “Right now you’re barely passing grade nine.” 

Kenny had gone through vicissitudes enough to know that directions change. Eventually, after a couple more glasses of wine, Liz and Kenny decided to take the boys on a cruise so they could experience what had become a somewhat embedded family culture: “The Business,” Liz called it. “Maybe it’s our destiny to sail the grand oceans of the world.”

“Open and flat like the prairies,” added Kenny. “Not always flat,” reminded Liz, pointing to the large picture of the ill-fated Cupcake decorating the wall of The Moosetown Café, an earlier gift from Uncle AJ to remind his hometown friends and neighbours of his success.

#

Three months later they were on board Uncle AJ’s first cruise ship, which Kenny had renamed Lucky Lady, after his favourite Sinatra song. They were warmly greeted by the crew and treated as proper ship owners ought to be, and it wasn’t long until the boys were enjoying the run of the ship with access everywhere as VIPs. Exquisite food was available any time of day, there was evening dancing with girls aplenty for the young fellas to chase, and both the boys got a chance to steer the ship. Though Don had completed a brief massage therapy course before embarking, he was too enthralled by the pleasures and distractions of this first-time rich lifestyle to bother setting up his massage table on board. “Later, later,” he stalled. No one expected him to do that anyway.

They cruised on toward Rio de Janeiro heading to the Hotel Sol, the three star tourist accommodation which was Uncle AJ’s prize possession in that resplendent and exotic city, according to stories from Uncle AJ. Everyone was excited as none of them had been to Rio before. Jerry exclaimed that he was already on his third new country. “Only two hundred plus left to go.” Only fifteen years old, mused Kenny. A long ways left to go.

Caribbean King Crab was served that night and the tools were out and making plenty of racket. Kenny reminisced about the big band sound at the casino in Vegas where he had made and lost his fortune. Shining shoes and plugging coins into the greedy slots, before and after his lucky strike. Who was the greedy one? But this band was playing slow jazz and he promised himself a dance with the lady in white satin sitting melancholy at the bar.

He slit open the large crab then tore it apart to dig out the edible bits. Not much, really, in a crab, he thought, despite its size. His fork caught on something. It was shiny and he extracted it with the crab fork. It was a ring with a big shiny diamond on it, still encircling what appeared to be part of a swollen and purple finger that had worn it for only a few months. “Holy pirate booty!” he exclaimed. “Look at this!” And he poised the purple finger over the candle where the ring could freely sparkle.

“That’s Mom’s ring,” said Liz. “Must be her finger too, I suppose.” 

“Couldn’t possibly be,” said both boys, astounded. “Oh I know that ring,” said Liz. “There are a few years of intrigue, or should I say romance, behind that bijou.” Kenny looked at her and nodded to acknowledge what they both had refrained from talking about these past years, their mother’s side gig with their uncle. 

He had to use a knife to remove the ring and did not know what to do with the finger, so he dropped it into his unfinished salad. He brought the ring up close to his glasses. Inscribed on the inside: Cupcake. No doubt there. 

“What are the odds of that, eh?” said Liz after dessert had been served and they were spooning the delicate whipped something of many colours. Except for Jerry the world traveller who had ordered sardines à la Portuguese, although the fish evidently came from Brazil. They were large sardines grilled whole with eyes that looked at you. He was eating slowly, not used to biting through fish guts.

“Oh mama!” Jerry spat something across the table. “I think I cracked a tooth,” he spouted and winced. A chunk of tooth landed on his plate and a small object bounced onto the table. It sparkled. It gleamed in the candlelight. Liz picked it up. “Well, well, well. I know that ring too. That belongs to Auntie Slim who long ago went swimming with the sharks. Or I guess the sardines. This is something beyond belief.” She held the ring up and checked the inside inscription: Slim. No doubt there.

“Well, that is incredible,” Kenny exclaimed. “We’d all better buy lottery tickets right now.” Smiles all around. More wine. They were all giddy. “I guess we’ll have to fight over them.”

“Uhuh,” said Jerry. “I cracked a tooth on that ring from my sardine. It’s mine. It’s my world travelling fund.” 

“Hey, who paid for the sardines?” quipped Liz, half seriously. Hmm. A momentary silence. 

“OK, Uncle Kenny, what about Granny Cupcake’s ring?” It was indeed a conundrum. 

“Let’s think on it overnight,” Kenny proposed. “Good fortune follows those who keep their heads. Maybe at breakfast we’ll find pearls? This has got to be the luckiest day of my life.”

But it was not to be. Kenny died with slot machine noises and big band music filling his dreams. The boys and Liz went to the far beyond or the deep below in peaceful slumbers—seafood and wine will do that to a person—not at all bothered by the gongs and whistles that happened too late, as the cruise ship slipped into a whirling oceanic black hole. 

“This isn’t even the Bermuda Triangle,” thought the Captain somewhat indignantly as the Lucky Lady dropped out of sight of the satellites and stars twinkling and taunting like distant elusive jewels.