Soul Proprietor

Things hadn’t been going right for Jim for quite some time. Business arrangements that seemed like they were done-deals inexplicably fell apart. Friends took umbrage at some random comment and turned to ice. His wife and his children hated him and treated him like he had a contagious disease. James Caterwaller felt like he was living under some kind of thunder cloud ... like the character, Joe Bfstplk, in the old L’il Abner comic strip. He couldn’t remember the last time he had won at poker or at the casino. Every time he had a decent-looking car, it would be totaled. His twenty-one-year streak of bad luck was beginning to grind Jim down. When he was much younger he had always been lucky. Women would swoon into his arms at the dumbest comment. He was regularly winning raffles and games of chance ... a Camaro, a trip to the Bahamas, a Harley Davidson, a bag of gold coins, four cash prizes ranging from $100 to $1000, six turkeys (five Toms and a capon), and a set of dishes. He was often accused by his fraternity brothers of having a horseshoe up his ass. His moniker among the Greek brothers was Lucky Jim.

Why this miasma hung around him now was the subject of many a sleepless night for Jim. Had he broken three mirrors? Not that he could recall. Well, maybe one ... a long time ago. Was he being punished for all the hearts and hymens he had broken? Probably not ... for most of these women also had designs of their own. Had he offended some lesser god to the degree that he was being hounded into his crypt? He couldn’t remember anything specific ... perhaps it was his youthful digging in an old Indian burial mound? Nah, that was well before he had had his run of good fortune. This bad luck thing was a splinter in Jim’s psyche.

As a result of these misfortunes, Jim, not normally an irrational fellow, had acquired over the years a staggering number of obsessive superstitions. He would never have the salt passed to him without it being set down on the table. He would never enter and exit a house without sitting down. He never walked under ladders. He would never let a cat walk across his path without spitting three times. He would waste hours watching digital clocks till they clicked up combinations of his lucky numbers (3, 7 and 9). He would be sure that ever wad of paper that missed the waste basket was a curse on his day. He never opened an umbrella in the house or put a hat on a bed. He never spoke ill of the dead. He knew that those years whose digits added up to a number ending in six were doomed.

Then one day a revelation occurred to Jim. An old drinking buddy from his fraternity was listed in the alumni magazine as having died in a skiing accident in Colorado. This name, Morton Melvane, started the wheels spinning in Jim’s brain. What was it about Morton Melvane that was special ... other than he was a nice guy and could play the piano like Andre Previn? Aha! Jim had bought Morton’s soul (for five dollars) one drunken night at the frat house many years ago. This remembrance now triggered a flood of other such recollections. Jim now remembered that he had purchased many different souls in his salad days. He was wont to do this as a devilish prank during drunken parties. He would announce to a group of revelers that he was buying souls for whatever people wanted. Then, if he had the requested funds in pocket, he would draw up a contract on a scrap piece of paper:

 “I, ____________________ , sell my eternal soul to James Caterwaller for the sum of $________ .
Signed _________________________”.

Jim would then get the person to sign this document and give them their requested pelf. This amounted to anywhere from a penny (for those wishing to prove their atheism) to fifty dollars (for the less sure, but more hard up). One late night at a poker game, he even bought a fraternity brother’s soul for twenty dollars, in lieu of his marker.

Could this amassing of people’s souls be what was causing Jim’s ill-starred streak? Particularly, if these people were dying? First, Jim had to reconstruct all the names on all those contracts. In fact, where in the world were all those contracts? Jim had saved them in an old cigar box which, as he recalled, had gotten pretty stuffed. It was held shut by the original brad when the box was full of stogies. Jim went through the entire house and couldn’t turn it up. He seemed to remember he had kept it in the old antique desk, but it was no longer there. His wife said she hadn’t thrown it out ... so where was it? Then, as life happens, a family emergency arose (Jim’s daughter was cut when she ran into a plate glass door) and his quest for the cigar box was postponed until Jim once again noted the passing of another one of his contract signers. It seemed, over the next nineteen years, that the weight of the souls he had purchased in his youth were beginning to bend his back to age and infirmity.

If you purchased someone’s soul, were you then responsible for it after the contractee had died? This was a frightening thought for Jim. Where these people roaming the world looking for their souls just as Jim had repeatedly rummaged through his house scouring for their mortal contracts? Were these dispossessed dopplegangers playing tricks on Jim’s private life and fortunes until he somehow released them from their own eternal damnation? Jim would periodically come back to these same thoughts, late at night, when his life was going particularly bad or when another of those accursed names appeared in the alumni magazine. This old parlor game that Jim had used to enhance his mien and mesmerize women was turning into his own personal Hell. He had to find these soul contracts and somehow release himself from their onus!

But the time finally came, when they were packing up to move out of their lovely old Victorian house and into a modest retirement facility, that Jim’s wife let out a whoop! She had found the old cigar box at the bottom of a trunk containing their children’s saved toys and books. With trembling fingers, Jim went through the now-yellowed slips of paper. There was Morton’s soul! There was Jerry, the poker player’s soul! Hadn’t he died in Viet Nam? There was Lucy Starkey’s soul! Wasn’t she Ron Bosset’s girlfriend back in college? I wonder if they ever got married? I wonder if she is still alive? All together there were thirty-five souls which had been purchased for a total of $634.67. Jim went to his computer and figured that, had this amount been invested with some conservative mutual fund forty years ago, it would have grown to about $150,000 today ... enough to have paid off the mortgage on their old house ... and thus not requiring their current move. But it was too late now. The contract had been signed and they had to be out of their only real home by Thursday.

With a sigh ... and then a longer sigh, Jim took the cigar box full of spirit covenants to the hearth in which was burning their very last fire ... a flame which had defined their hospitality over the last seventeen years ... and threw the slips of paper, box and all, into the conflagration. They burned with uncommon haste and heat. And Jim thought he could hear Handel’s Hallelujah chorus echoing faintly in the crackling of the flames. All was reduced to ashes in very short order and Jim felt as though a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. His step was lighter. His wife and children were warmer. And on the very next Friday, Jim hit the state lottery ... for $150,000.

© Copyright, George W. Potts