If You Win Big, Don't Lose It

If  You Win Big, Don't Lose It

by

Austin Mitchell

        I was in Wally Duke’s bar when Jake Harriot came in. Now what the hell was happening, I thought. First Reece Duggan and now him, maybe the others would soon be in town. Jake spied me and came over.

          “What’s happening Russ, it’s a long time I haven’t seen you?”

          “I thought you didn’t remember what Norris looked like again,

Jake?”

          He laughed as he took a seat on a bar stool beside me.

          I was serious though, my cousin had been hurt by these guys before. I wasn’t going to stand around and see them rob her blind.

          I was drinking a beer and I bought him one.

          What had really happened was that one of my female cousins, Raquel Reed, had won the first prize in the Racing Pools. This was a huge chunk of money that if she was smart she would never be in need again.

            I knew a man who had won it some years ago. He now owned several buses, cars and at least two houses plus no doubt money in the bank.

            She and I were about the same age, thirty five years. Raquel had never finished school as she got pregnant in Grade Eleven and had to drop out of school. She had four children after that and never completed her education. All her children had different fathers. She was now operating a cook shop in the village. She was hardly making it, with five children to send to school with no support from their fathers.

          I operated a taxi and sometimes I dropped her home form the markets and she had to owe me the fare. So I knew that winning the pools was her saving grace. I was apprehensive that the presence of these men might turn her joy into a nightmare.

          “Jake, just what the hell are you doing in Norris, anyway?”

          He jerked around, surprised at my question.

          “What business of yours is that, Russ?”

          “I think you are after Raquel’s money.”

          “Go to hell, Russ,” he shouted and stormed out of the bar.

          Wally Duke had heard us and came over. He offered me a free beer, which I accepted.

          “I think, you told him right, Russ. He’s after Raquel’s money.”

          “She’d be a fool if she let them trick her out of it,” I remarked.

          He took a swig of his beer. I finished my bottle and started on the one he had given me.

          I had finished working for the evening. I was a route operator and sometimes came off the route early because all that was going on.

          “You know how women are, some of them can be easily tricked,” he remarked.

          “I’d be surprised if Raquel let something like that happen but we’ll see,” I told him.

          Both of her parents were dead and she was an only child. I expected that she would have fixed up the house where she lived. It had only two bedrooms. She had three girls and two boys. So I expected that she would probably add on another bedroom and fix up her kitchen and bathroom. Her children were getting bigger every day. I didn’t know the fathers of the last three children. After she had the two first children, a girl and a boy, her parents turned her out and she went to live in Kingston.

          Reece was the father of her first child and he was from Keswick, a nearby community. Her second child, a girl was for Jake.

          It seemed as if Reece went back to Kingston but Jake still hung around. It didn’t look as if Raquel had started spending the money. I heard that Reece had gotten some of the money. That was why he had returned to Kingston to spend it off.

          A man called Clifton Dennis spoke to me one day. I was having lunch when he came over.

          “Raquel just bought Dave’s bus. Jake’s going to drive it for her.”

          I was stunned, Dave’s bus gave the most trouble on the route. Jake was a good mechanic, he was also a good driver but why had he allowed Raquel to buy such a bus.

          “Why would Raquel do something like that? I don’t understand why Jake would let her buy a bus like that,” I remarked.

          “Maybe she got it cheap but it’s going to cost more just to keep it on the road,” Clifton said.

          The fact that she hadn’t consulted me or any of the other drivers must mean that she believed in Jake.

          A man called Dexter was the conductor. The bus seemed to be running good for the first two months or so. After that it was in the garage for at least two days per week. I heard that Raquel wasn’t making any money off it. In fact she was losing money. Then Raquel began conducting then bus herself. There was a strong rumor that she and Jake were together again.

          For some reason or other Raquel had never spoken to me since her winnings, nevertheless I wished her the best. Then the bus stopped running altogether. It was parked at her yard. She was now back to operating her cook shop. I stopped by one day and she said she wanted to talk to me. I told her that I would talk to her the next day.

          “That bus took away about a third of your money. So what are you going to?” I asked as we sat on her veranda that evening.

          “Russ, I don’t know. I’m afraid to do anything. I felt that Jake tricked me. Dexter told me that he is planning to buy a car.”

          “Jake is buying a car. I wish him luck.”

          “I suppose you heard the rumors about him and me. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jake has never given me money for Shelly-Ann yet, not even when he was driving the bus.”

          She continued.

          “I know what they are saying about Reece. The only money, I gave him was his bus fare back to Kingston.”

                                                            ***

          I saw Jake a few weeks later running a taxi. Raquel could not get her bus sold and she was getting more frustrated each day.

          Raquel started the improvements to her house. She told me that she was putting in an additional two rooms and a bathroom. She was now seeing a man called Raymond Jones. She told me that he used to live abroad but had relocated to Jamaica. Three months later, Jake stopped driving his taxi.

          I saw him one day and he behaved in a very belligerent manner towards me.

          “You tell Raquel that I want my money from her,” he told me.

          “Now, what the hell, Jake, if you and Raquel are having money problems, why come to me?”

          “Because it was you who told her to take the bus away from me, now it’s just parked, when she could be making money on it.”

          “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve kept out of Raquel’s business and I intend to keep on doing so.”

           I thought the bus had been parked because it needed parts.

           Raquel continued working on her house. One day when she was gone to Kingston to buy supplies for her shop somebody used a wrecker to remove her bus.

          “I’m dead sure it was Jake who stole my bus,” she told me.

          I told her why I thought it had been parked.

          “I thought I told you that it was draining me,” she told me.

          “Okay, so where do you think Jake could be with the bus?”

          “He’s running it somewhere in one of those parishes. The police are looking for it. I believe he’s running it at nights. It needs to be insured, passed and licensed. I fear that it might meet in an accident.”

          “Once you report it a stolen then they couldn’t hold you liable,” I assured her.

          “I’m going to do that, tomorrow.”

          She showed me a piece of paper.

          ‘Raquel, I want $ 50,000 or else……………….’

          “Jake?”

          “The handwriting doesn’t look familiar. Oh God, what am I going to do? I’m sorry I won that money, everybody believes I’m loaded with cash.”

          “Are you going to the police with this note?”

          “I can’t, I don’t even know what to do. I’m going to ask you to drop my children at school and pick them up in the evenings for me until I can make some other arrangements or until this thing blows over one way or another.”

          We agreed a price before I left her. For some months Raquel heard nothing about her bus or Jake for that matter.

          I knew that I had seen him driving a taxi, Downtown, Kingston one day. I told her where I had seen him. She went to the taxi stand but he never showed up there.

          Then Raquel was attacked at the house one night. Her boyfriend was shot in his left leg. She said that the men kept demanding money and threatening her and her children.

          About a month after I met two men who knew Jake.

          “If you want to find Jake, he operates out of Naggo Head to Spanish Town,” Neville Eason told me. The other man, Distant Brown confirmed what he told me.

          We went to Naggo Head and sure enough we found him.

          He denied everything; he knew nothing about the stealing of the bus and didn’t know its whereabouts. I didn’t believe him but the police said that unless there were eyewitnesses they couldn’t do anything.

          Nobody had come forward to say who had put the bus on the wrecker but it must have been Jake or somebody connected to him. It was only unfortunate that nobody was home that day.

          Two months later they caught the bus in St. Elizabeth. It was being driven by a man named Sully Wright. He claimed to have bought the bus from Jake. Jake denied it. Sully couldn’t produce any papers to show that he had bought the bus from Jake.

          The police told Raquel to sue Sully for the money he made off her bus. Meanwhile they will be charging him for theft along with other things. They are also investigating Jake to see if there is anything they can charge him with. I’m sure that he was the man behind those notes threatening Raquel.

          In the meantime, Raquel is busy building a two bedroom house with the balance of the money. She will rent it out to teachers who have to travel from Kingston to schools in the area.

          She has advertised the bus for sale but so far there are no takers. Meanwhile Jake is running around free but I’m sure that very soon something incriminating him will surface. The End.