For a quarter of a century now, Armond McGuire had been the "man of all work" about Saint Jude's. Often, when his chores were done, he would often come down to the old altar to sit and watch and imagine and think. He liked the title, "man of all work." It stuck him as noble and more honest than "custodian," though he knew that he was that too. Sometimes he would walk across one of the three stone arch bridges that crossed the stream, kneel at the communion railing and remember when he had been an altar boy and had followed the priests back and forth holding the patten beneath the parishioner's chins as the priests dispensed communion. Sometimes, on frosty crisp winter days, he and the other altar boys would have a contest, shuffling their rubber-soled shoes along the carpet to see who could create the biggest static spark between the gold-plated dish and the communion recipient's throat. He missed the Latin mass. It had conveyed a sense of mysticism to the ritual that was wholly consistent with a God no one could comprehend. He remembered the first words: Introibo ad altare Dei. At times he said his few prayers at the rail. But most of the time he sat on one of the pews mentally removing the intervening floor that separated the old, lower church from the new one above, restoring the structure to its original state. If only the diocese had the money for such a project. He would love to do the work. The thought made him smile.

Now was the rare occasion for a frown. The new altar of Saint Jude's was connected to the old by a trap door, a three-foot square platform and a set of plank stairs that led rather gradually from the former to the latter. In the sole supporting cross beam beneath the platform an as-yet small colony of termites had established themselves and were enduring the hardships of feasting on that hardest of all diets for termites: cherry wood. Deemed impossible by the carpenters of their day, these insects defied that natural law and had set about their destructive chores with purpose, much to Armond’s chagrin. Presently, he was wondering where he could find suitable replacement lumber as he squished one of the invading with his huge thumb.

He tested the beam, pushing upward and shaking it side to side. It was still sound but not sound enough. No, it would take a penetrating insecticide and epoxy resin to restore this. There was almost no hope of finding aged, hard-as-stone, cherry wood to replace it. Armond looked at his watch, shook his head and walked up the plank staircase looking down into the raging Cowhorn Creek as he crossed it. There would be no flood this year he knew. In fact, there had been no floods since the new floor of the church had been placed.

In that same year the railroad tracks had been raised, much of the Cowhorn had been covered, set underground in wooden conduits forever, it was thought. That meant that nearly all of the Spring runoff never reached the stream which now entered and exited the old church through a pair of six foot square storm drains, passing through the cut-stone channel that separated the altar and communion railing from the pews. At worst, during Spring thaws like this one, the stream shot through the church, crested to its maximum five and a half feet or so, and departed on its five-block-long subterranean trip to the Mohawk River without so much as threatening to dampen a single floor stone or pew.

Armond listened to the quieted rustling of the water as he ascended the plank stairs and crossed the small platform. He paused to admire again the handiwork of those long dead Irish stone masons. Then he climbed the last four stairs and shut the heavy hardwood trap door at the left extreme of the new altar, and all was silent in the twentieth-century church. With ease that would have annoyed an onlooker, Armond lifted the two-hundred-pound stone pedestal and placed it gently on the door. The carved stone statue of Saint Jude was just three-fourths the weight of its stand and Armond positioned it atop its pedestal gently and reverently. Satisfied, he walked out the front door of St. Jude's and locked it behind him.

It was three o'clock and if he caught the right buses he'd be back on time to open the door for Saturday mass at five. Father Lomax expected him to do this. He walked East on Liberty Street and then turned south, past City Hall, on Barrett Street in a nearly straight line to the bus stop. Because it was Saturday, because he was a man of indefatigable habit, Armond required a stop at Parker's Newsroom.

As he had for thirty odd years, Leland Parker, along with his two lifelong cronies, Salvatore "Solly" D'Amico and Billy "Bones" Richards, were manning the store, sitting at a worn card table reading their racing forms. Shelves padded with papers from all over the country and the world blared their often tasteless and titillating headlines. Endless magazines ranging in content from the exquisite to the pornographic lined the shelves and every tobacco product known to humanity awaited the customer there.

Traditionally, Solly stood when Armond walked through the door. At six feet four inches, Solly was as tall as Armond and as strong he believed, though he'd always avoided really finding out. Solly, however, carried with him an extra two hundred pounds of tonnage that gave him the shape of a large, very short-necked bowling pin. Well advanced alopecia topped off Solly's countenance which he combated by letting the growth to the left become excessively long; long enough to be thrown over the top and made to mingle with life on the other side of town. The resultant effect was that the top of his head looked rather like a honeydew melon being carried in the armpit of a huge, hairy orangutan. Solly's wardrobe, while of tasteful pinstripes and a crisply starched white shirt, still suggested labels that read, "Omar of Iraq," or just as likely, "Goodyear."

Bones, on the other hand, was a five-foot-eight inch monument to anorexia. He resembled nothing less than a living skeleton with a misaligned grin and a graying DA haircut from the fifties kept in place with a couple of scoops of petroleum jelly. Bones' eyes were the exact color of meconium. He wore jeans with exaggerated folded cuffs, engineer boots, a tee shirt beneath a motorcycle jacket, and a toothpick.

Leland and his clothes were middle aged. He was average in height, average in weight, average in appearance and his unthreatening, baggy earth-tone wardrobe gave him a look not unlike something in a plain-brown-wrapper.

Armond's entry marked yet another performance of a one-act play that ran twice weekly and wherein the players varied their dialogue only slightly and their motions hardly at all. He pulled out his wallet, extracted a small slip and stood in front of the April lottery board carefully comparing the numbers in his hand to those on the board from Wednesday's drawing. He didn't have to check his slip, of course. He knew the numbers well, having played them for twice a week for twenty-five years now but still he checked them, perhaps because the script required him to do so. Then he crumpled the little scrap of paper, threw it in the wastebasket and drew out a dollar bill.

"Did you check the second set?" Leland asked as Armond walked over to the counter.

"That's not the one I'm going to win with Lee." Armond smiled holding out the bill. "Hi Solly, Bonesy. How's the world treating you guys?"

"About the same," Solly replied moving close to Armond and patting him on the shoulder with the slab of meat he called a hand. Moving close was a choreographed move that allowed Bones, hidden by Solly's bulk, to retrieve the discarded slip from the waste basket and check the second set of numbers while Leland further distracted his customer in the usual manner, taking the dollar with a flourish and preparing to punch in Armond's numbers.

"Remember," Armond said as he watched Leland key in the numbers, "you gotta put them in like I give 'em to you, Lee. It's...."

"I know the numbers, kid. They ain't changed ever, and someday you'll get it through that thick head of yours that it don't matter what order you put them into the machine."

"Yeah, it does," Armond insisted. "If you just shove them in they're just a bunch of numbers instead of being birthdays. You gotta put them in like birthdays and like I give 'em to you so they're the right birthdays. Now do it right for me, okay, Lee?" Armond petitioned with that same smile.

"Sure, kid, sure. Like the sign on the wall says, 'The customer is always right.' We got seven, twenty-one, forty-five," he recited as he pressed the keys. "And we got a one, a fifteen and a forty-six and we let the machine pick the second set of numbers." He pressed the entry key, and the machine whirred and ticked as it punched out the small slip of paper.

"You still porkin' them two widows?" Solly asked.

"Hey. Come on now," Armond replied. "You're talkin' my best friends' wives here," he protested, still smiling.

"Here's your winning ticket." Leland smiled, holding out the slip. "Do you see yet that the numbers ain't in the order you make me enter them in?"

"The machine ain't allowed to put them out in that order." Armond grinned. "But it knows, Lee. It knows. And, if you want, you’re in for heavy points for stakin' me when I come home back then."

"Yeah? Heavy points of nuthin' is still nuthin'. I do hope you hit it, kid. We're talking forty million bucks on this drawing." Then Leland Parker seemed to sort of fall out of the playwright's role as he asked with sincerity, "How are Nancy and Marsha doing anyway, Armond?"

"They're doing fine, Lee; just fine," Armond replied, smiling of course. "The kids are all grown now. Still live at home but they got good jobs so things are pretty good for them. I'm going to Nancy's for dinner tonight."

"It's Saturday, Armond. Where else you gonna go. See you Wednesday."

Armond took no offense at this. Leland was correct. Armond's day-to-day life was laid out before him like panels in a cartoon strip. There would always be the same panels on the same days in the same places on the same pages, but the worlds within each panel was full of variation which made his life stable and predictable and at the same time, rich and full.

Armond paused before turning away and looked at the small photograph on the shelf against the wall, pleased to see there was yet again a fresh flower in a thin glass vase beside it. "She's really beautiful, Lee," was all he had to say to get Leland going.

"Beautiful? Margaret? Yeah, maybe, but fathers don't see their kids like that, y'know? I look and I see..... Aw, who gives a rat's tukus what I see."

"You should call her, Lee," Armond persisted. "If I had a daughter, I'd call her, no matter what she done."

"Yeah? Well you ain't me, kid. Now get outa here."

The trio watched as Armond walked out the door with a, "See ya, guys," pocketing his cloth wallet and pulling the rubber band off his graying blond ponytail.

"What a bust out," Bones said, showing the others Armond's discarded betting slip. The numbers of the second set were also losers. "When I stand near enough to him I swear I can hear the ocean," Bones joked and they laughed.

Solly particularly liked this joke because he got it.

"He's a good guy," Lee reminded them. "I hope he does hit it. Maybe I could hit him up for a loan. Man, do I need the money."

"Someone leaning on ya, Lee?" Bones asked.

"Not yet," he answered. "I lost a couple grand in Thursday's poker game."

"Uh oh," Solly intoned solemnly. "You went to Legs' game. He don't take to holdin' chits for very long."

"Now ain't you the goddamn genius," Leland observed, and Solly looked properly scolded.

Bones walked behind the counter, located the cardboard box and set it on the display case. Inside the box were dozens of locks of all variety and shape and atop these sat collections of ever-so-carefully hand ground stainless steel tools. It was Bones' latest entertainment offering that they learn the noble art of lock picking, at which he had a modest talent. Solly had found from the outset that his huge hands were not properly disposed to this genteel pastime but still took vicarious pleasure from Leland's rather impressive acquisition of the skills involved.

"This," Bones announced proudly, drawing a package from his pocket, "is a Talvis seventeen: the finest padlock now made."

Solly smiled broadly, and Leland looked at the little box Bones held with honest anticipation as he gathered his jimmies.

Half an hour before midnight, Armond pulled Nancy closer and kissed her, enjoying the sensation of her naked body against his. Only once, many years ago, had she wondered openly if he also made love to Marsha. His reply had been, "What would you want me to say if she asked the same question about you?" When Nancy said nothing, Armond had kissed her forehead saying, "Consider it said."

It was Saturday night on a pleasant evening in the spring of 1998, and Armond McGuire was exactly where he should be.

In the back room of Parker's News, three men watched, but only one appreciated, a singular, most impressive piece of genuine magic take place on the television screen. In a routine, twice weekly episode, an event that rivaled transubstantiation itself in their minds happened before their eyes, only this time it was immeasurably better. A scrap of paper that had been in their possession hours earlier went in value from the one-and-a-quarter cents it cost the state of New York to print it to a mind numbing forty million dollars.

Solly and Bones began reviewing their private piles of lottery tickets, leaving only Leland got the punch line.

"Holy Jesus!" he said. He followed this up with an even louder recitation, then looked at his two companions and shook his head. "You jerks!" he hollered, and they looked at him like two aging puppies that had somehow incurred their master's wrath. "He was right! It was just like he said!" Leland grabbed his video cassette player's remote, pressed the "Rewind" button, and seconds later pressed "Play."

This time Solly and Bones paid close attention. On the screen, the attractive announcer began in mid sentence, "..for tonight's winning lottery numbers." Five Plexiglas tubes spilled their contents of numbered ping-pong balls into a circular bin that was set on edge, and jets of air blew the balls about chaotically. At the base of the drum, a small gate opened allowing just one of the balls to escape down another tube and then roll left, to the end of a small rack. "Our first number is seven." There was a pause as another ball escaped. "The next is twenty-one. The next is forty-five." By this point Solly and Bones eyes were wide open and thoughts of their own lottery slips a thing of the past. "The next number is one. The next number is fifteen, and tonight's final forty million dollar lottery number is.. forty-six!" Leland pressed the stop button and the trio stared at the screen in disbelief.

Solly was the first to react. "Way to go, Armond!" he boomed and swung a hand at Bones' back.

Many years of experience had taught Bones one of life's fundamental survival lessons: an enthusiastic Solly was a dangerous Solly. He flinched just enough to save himself the inconvenience of losing a body part, and let the shoulder of his black leather jacket absorb the blow, forgetting that his shoulder was still inside it. Bones expelled air involuntarily, dislodging his toothpick and sending it across the room where it glued itself to the television screen.

"Sorry, Bones," Solly said when he realized what he'd done and tried to rub Bones' shoulder. Bones would have none of it. Solly then turned to Leland and asked, "What's the payoff on that?"

"Two million, one hundred nine thousand, one hundred sixty eight bucks a year," Bones replied, adding, "or so."