I’ve been working on a short story this week called The Heebie Jeebie Girl. It’s partially based one of my cousins, who for a time when she was very young, correctly gave the daily lottery number to my aunt and grandmother. I learned years later that our great uncle called her The Heebie Jeebie Girl. A lot of my stories (and I would venture that of many writers) are based on events from my life or those of someone I know. The discovery process of the writing comes in augmenting history–saying, “Okay, A and B is what actually happened. But what if C and D happened next? Or D happened before B?” Real life is just the place where the writer jumps off.
This story–the story my cousin might tell you–has an O. Henryesque ending, but I don’t think that ending will translate into a short story. It’s a funny ending in some ways, but it doesn’t have enough weight. I’m at the point where the characters and the story are starting to break away from the actual events (at least the events as I know them). The stories we tell about our lives and the stories our relatives and friends tell about the same events frequently diverge. We are all storytellers.
Just for kicks, here’s the first 500 words or so of The Heebie Jeebie Girl. Bear in mind that this is a first draft. I may post subsequent drafts in the future just because it might be fun to track the evolution of a story:
I never saw any of the money my sister or my niece won playing the daily number. I could have cashed in too, but I didn’t. It didn’t seem right, even though Hope gave the first number to me.
She was only about six then, and she was sitting out in the garage with me one Saturday while I worked on Ralph Krasniak’s ’74 Charger, which he needed to get to work at the Sheet and Tube on Monday. My sister, Dolores, doesn’t like me to work on Sundays because it’s the Lord’s Day, so I had to get it all rebuilt in one day. Ralph’s one of the few guys in the neighborhood who hasn’t been laid off by the mill yet, so he can at least pay you when he says he’s going to. He needed a car, and I needed the money.
Little Hope sat out in the garage with me and watched as I rebuilt the carburetor. Those old Chargers are so finicky that they can’t run right unless it’s 72 degrees, dry, and sunny. It was a humid summer that had turned into a wet fall. Ralph was stalling out left and right, and I was tired of having him stop by every other day asking me to tinker with the choke setting or the float level. I kept doing it for free since he drives three other guys in the neighborhood to work too, and they’ll all lose their jobs if the car doesn’t run. But I finally reached my breaking point and rebuilt the darn thing.
Hope is smart as a whip and kept asking me questions about the engine and could name half the parts by the end of the afternoon. At one point, she was holding the hi and lo screws, one in each hand, and moving them up and down like they were soldiers in a parade. Then she suddenly looked up at me and said, “Want to hear a secret?”
“Sure,” I said. I kept one eye on her and one eye on the bowl in my hand.
“The daily number is going to be 126,” she said. She has wispy blond hair that’s always hanging in front of her eyes, but as she said this, she actually tucked her hair behind her ears so she could look at me a little better. “You should go to Morten’s and play it. It’s going to win.”
“Since when does a little girl know about playing the lottery?”
“Grandma plays it.”
“My sister wastes her money. She’d be better off putting it in the bank instead of hiding what little money she has in a cigar box.”
“Why does she hide her money in a cigar box?”
“Because she doesn’t trust the bank.”
“Why not?”
“Because fifty years ago all the rich guys running the country overspent and the stock market crashed, then everybody pulled all their money from the banks and all the banks crashed and people lost lots of money.”
“That was the Depression, right?”
“Right.”
“Grandma talks about it all the time. She said everybody was poor then.”
“They were,” I said as I grabbed the venturi.
“Well if you play 126, you’ll win and then you’ll have money,” she said and sounded so confident and grown up that the part almost slipped out of my hand.