Orwell's Luck (4 page)

"I can sleep late any day of the week now," he explained. "It doesn't have to be Sunday."

"But what about the people who have to go to school?" I asked. "When do they get a day off?"

"I can't help that," he said.

My father, my mother, my sister, my grandmother, and I all sat together. With the girls' purses and everybody's coats, we took up an entire pew. We stood up to sing songs. We sat down to listen to words. We also sat down to listen to the choir sing and to pass the offering plate, which went all the way down our row with only my grandmother kicking in.

The minister talked for a long time about achieving your goals in life, a subject he said was timely because this was Super Bowl Sunday, something I had not realized, since I am one of the few kids at school who does not keep up with football. I prefer shooting baskets and thinking about things.

After church I hung out with Orwell and listened to the sound of ice being blown against the windows. It's the unique sound of crystals breaking by the thousands, the sound of frozen pieces of clouds shattering into even smaller pieces, falling into gutters, onto driveways, and into yards where the raggedy starlings are the only creatures brave enough or dumb enough or desperate enough to be out searching for food.

I was getting plenty discouraged about Orwell ever walking again. I said to him, "Listen! Hear that? That's the sound of fat chances breaking into slim chances."

But for some reason, I found myself saying a prayer for him.

That night, my father and I watched the game together. We sat in front of the big screen TV eating our dinner from plastic trays that we balanced on our laps. When we asked her very politely, my mother brought us refills.

It was about halfway into the second quarter—when Denver threw a pass over the heads of the Atlanta guys all the way to the other end of the field—when I first started putting two and two together.
BRONCOS TRAMPLE FALCONS
. Denver Broncos. Atlanta Falcons.

My horoscope!

Then, when I heard the guys on TV talk about how the Denver quarterback already had one Super Bowl ring and it looked like he was going to get another, all the pieces just fell into place.

BRONCOS TRAMPLE FALCONS
. Then a number. Then
GRAB SECOND RING
. But what was the number?

"I'll be right back," I told my father.

"Get me one, too," he said.

I hurried to Orwell's hideout. Yesterday's newspaper was folded neatly beneath him.

"Excuse me, Orwell," I said. "This will just take a minute."

It wasn't the most pleasant reading I've ever done, since Orwell had been using the newspaper for more than a day, but you can forgive your friends a lot, especially when it's not their fault. Anyway, I found what I was looking for. A four-digit number: 3419.

"No way!" I said out loud. "Nobody gets that many points in a football game!"

Have you ever noticed how things that are obvious often do not start out that way? It's because you were expecting them to be something else. So you work really hard trying to figure out a problem, and just when you begin to look at it a little differently, all of a sudden your brain goes Bing! and the answer is staring you right in the face, as plain as a little brown rabbit.

The number was not 3419. It was 34 to 19.
BRONCOS TRAMPLE FALCONS
34 19
GRAB SECOND RING.
The Denver Broncos beat the Atlanta Falcons 34 to 19 for Denver's second straight Super Bowl victory! That's what my horoscope was trying to say!

My hands were shaking when I sat down again beside my father.

"I think I know how this game is going to end," I said. "I think Denver's going to win."

"So it would appear," my father agreed. "So it would appear."

On Groundhog Day the weather turned bitterly cold and stayed that way for a week. Even the most determined groundhog dared not venture out for long.

Slowly, the unusually severe freeze crept deeper and deeper into the ground. The backyard goldfish pond, a little four-by-six-foot oval dug two feet deep and lined with black plastic, froze into a solid block of ice. Eleven black and orange goldfish, ranging from a few inches in length to two monsters each more than a foot long, were displayed beneath the surface in suspended animation, locked solidly in the ice in mid-swim, their fins extended, their mouths open in astonished mid-gulp. Further down I could see the lifeless bodies of two unlucky leopard frogs. I suspected there might be more of them dug into the mud.

I pounded on the glassy surface with a shovel. It bounced back into the air like a basketball. There was no hope for these water dwellers. Their luck had definitely run out.

Why does it happen like this? I wondered. Why must creatures, through no fault of their own, be run over or frozen solid? I couldn't figure it out. Some detective!

The Super Bowl score turned out just exactly as my horoscope had predicted. At first, I kept the information under my hat, as I had been advised. At one point, I made a stab at mentioning it to my father, but since my mother had disposed of the stinky newspaper that contained the proof, he wasn't buying it.

"Of course the final score was in the paper," he said. "The Super Bowl is one of the biggest shows on TV. The newspaper has to report the results."

"But this was before the game!" I insisted.

"That's impossible," he replied.

"Well, it's interesting you should say that," I responded, "because look at what my horoscope—our horoscope—says for today!"

I thrust the comics page of the newspaper into his hands. I had just finished deciphering Scorpio's message. It said

THINGS ONLY SEEM IMPOSSIBLE BEFORE THEY HAPPEN
.

My father took a moment to decode the seven special numbers, then announced, "There's a reason they put this stuff in with the funnies, you know."

What I didn't tell my father was that this latest horoscope was an installment in yet another series, this time apparently having to do with life's tougher questions. Over the past week, I had received

THE MEANING OF LIFE IS TO SEE

LEARN BY DOING THERE'S NO OTHER WAY

UNDERSTAND YOURSELF AND
YOU WILL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING

WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO DO TODAY MATTERS
and
BE WHO YOU REALLY ARE ALL DAY.

This last astrological suggestion had been very helpful at school. In fact, in science class, when I held up my hand to answer a question, I blabbed on about what was happening to the wild animals that live around here, even though it had little to do with the original question. Afterward, this one boy came up to me in the hall and said, "I liked what you said to the teacher. I don't know if he got it, but I did."

He had brown hair that looked like his mother had mussed it with her hands as he left for school. The rest of the school day was great.

Naturally, I told Orwell all about it. He was very attentive. Most people would look at Orwell and think he was just sitting there bored. But I knew him pretty well by now. Orwell was always thinking. He looks like he's not moving, but inside his little brain, where he doesn't need to use his feet, ideas are hopping around like popcorn in a pan.

My father's job during this troublesome time in our lives consisted primarily of buying lottery tickets. Sometimes I would accompany him on the two-minute road trip to the Saturn-Mart at the corner of our winding street and the busy four-lane boulevard that leads commuters to and from the highway.

There are a dozen different kinds of lottery tickets for sale at the Saturn-Mart, each promising a chance on a fortune for as little as a dollar. My father never spends more than two dollars at a time.

"You only need one set of numbers to win," he said.

"Then why buy two?" I asked.

"Just in case," he replied.

A two-dollar ticket gets you two rows of six numbers each. One of the numbers is more valuable than the other five. If you get all the numbers right, you win millions. If you get five of them, but miss the most valuable one, you still win thousands.

Once in a while, there's a picture in the newspaper of some guy winning a bundle. He's always somebody you never heard of.

Meanwhile, my horoscopes had switched into a more personal mode. One sunny morning, I was greeted with this insight:

YOUR SISTER WANTS YOU FOR A FRIEND.

The next day, Scorpio was advised

YOUR MOTHER NEEDS HELP AROUND THE HOUSE.

Each time, I did as I was told. My sister and my mother were so grateful for my small acts of kindness that I figured it wouldn't hurt to be nicer to them all the time.

On the day I accompanied my father to the Saturn-Mart, my horoscope gave me an especially handy tip:

STUDY SCHOOL BOOKS TONIGHT
POP QUIZ TOMORROW.

As my father was paying for his two-dollar ticket to easy street, I had a low-level brainstorm.

"How much does a newspaper cost?" I asked.

"Fifty cents," the clerk said.

"I'll take one," I told him.

"Why waste your money?" my father asked as he wasted two perfectly good dollars. "That's exactly like the one we have at home."

"Maybe," I replied mysteriously. "And maybe not."

Tap-tap-tap-ta-tap!

The cat was waiting outside Orwell's door when I arrived and announced myself with our secret knock.

"Scram!" I told him, giving the sly feline a gentle shove with my sock-covered toes. "
Sortez!
"

"Take a look at this, Orwell," I blurted out the moment I entered his peaceful hideout. "Same newspaper. Same day. Same astrological sign. Different horoscope. What do you make of it?"

The newspaper I'd plucked from the curb in front of my house carried the half-light, half-dark moon-that-can't-make-up-its-mind sign and warned me of an impending challenge at school:

STUDY SCHOOL BOOKS TONIGHT
POP QUIZ TOMORROW.

But under the identical neutral moon in the newspaper I'd picked up at the Saturn-Mart, Scorpio's daily prediction was

STAY ON TOP OF WHAT IS HAPPENING.

"I suppose they could both mean the same thing," I admitted. "But the one in the home-delivered newspaper is much more specific. I mean, under the circumstances, you'd have to be a complete idiot not to do exactly what it says."

Dutifully, I opened my math book and turned to the appropriate chapter. Orwell stared pleasantly at me, twitching his nose.

"Not that I really believe it," I added. "But, you know, just in case."

Orwell craned his neck and yawned. His tiny pink tongue extended slightly as he stretched his upper body. He seemed bored.

"I wonder how they do it," I said.

Orwell stretched his forelegs until his paws touched the curled-up edge of the newspaper that lined his bathtub bed. He casually raised his right paw above the paper's brittle edge. With those cushioned, circular pads that protect his furry feet from cold and shock, he softly sounded out a signal.

Tap-tap-tap-ta-tap,
went Orwell's little rabbit foot.

Tap-tap-tap-ta-tap!

It was one of those late winter days where you'd swear it was spring. The sun was shining and a warm breeze had brought with it the aroma of a distant rain that never arrived.

It was a great day to be alive and kicking. It was a great day to be outside.

Strapped securely into my sister's pink umbrella-style doll stroller, Orwell watched the world go by as if he didn't have a single care in it. Trotting along beside us, sniffing excitedly, first at Orwell, then the trees, then the edges of the sidewalk, was the elderly family dog, hardly believing his good fortune at being freed from the dull routine of the house.

Our little parade must have made an amusing sight, but I didn't care what passing strangers might think. I was following the instructions of my horoscope for this fine day in February and I felt like a million dollars.

The morning after Orwell surprised me with his mastery of our secret knock, the message that appeared in my horoscope was

IT'S NOT WITH THE TONGUE WE SPEAK.

You did not have to be a great detective to see that my messages were somehow being customized for my eyes alone. So when the next day's home-thrown horoscope suggested beneath a familiar smile face moon

WHY NOT TAKE YOU-KNOW-WHO FOR A WALK,

I responded by saying, "Why not indeed!"

What a sight we were! We ambled, we trotted, we strolled. The three of us paraded merrily through the neighborhood, walking all the way to the baseball fields behind the junior college before we even thought of turning around.

We saw birds and squirrels and a big, brown woodchuck waddling near his burrow in a field. A flock of geese heading north crossed over our heads making sounds like the squeeze bulb horn on my sister's bicycle. Gray and white clouds boiled up from the flat prairie like great mountains in the sky. When we finally got home, the poor old dog collapsed on his bed behind the sofa and snored for hours.

I returned Orwell to his hideout, but I did not return the doll stroller to my sister.

"You're really something, Orwell," I said to him admiringly.

Like Punxsutawney Phil, Groundhog Day's famous weather-predicting rodent, it seemed that Orwell also had a gift, a knack for brightening up the day.

The next afternoon, when I got home from school, my mother was fussing at my father.

"We are not going to wait until we get calls from the neighbors. We are going to deal with it now," she was saying to him. "It stinks."

By "we" she meant him and me, and it soon became clear that by "it" she meant the backyard pond. And you may think that you know what "stink" means, but unless you have had your hands in a dank blackwater coffin like my father and I encountered that balmy afternoon, you do not have any idea what stink really means.