A few days later, Carl had moved the remainder of his personal belongings into Christine’s apartment. He had clothes, a box of boots, a box of other riding gear—chaps, spurs, and four helmets. He was a small man who never needed much to keep him going. Carl’s mother had never married and when she gave birth he was three months early, weighed four and a half pounds. His mother left him with her parents and moved out west, to Nevada, he was told later. She told her parents she would send for baby Carl when she got settled. This was what they told him. Carl was six years old, the smallest boy in his class, when the family received news that his mother had died in Reno. She checked into an expensive hotel there, the Paramount, ordered room service for three straight days, then was found hanging in the shower. The police suspected foul play. When his mother’s father received the news, he sat in an armchair and held onto the arms of it. He seemed to stay in this exact position for a long time. She killed herself, Loretta, he said to his wife. That she was at a good hotel tells me all I need to know.
The funeral service took place at the public cemetery in Burgundy. A bright fall afternoon where the leaves on the trees were the colors of pumpkins and peaches. After this, when Carl lay in bed at night, his grandmother stood in the doorway of his room. She held her hands together and said the Lord’s Prayer. She didn’t ask him to say it with her and this eventually bothered him more than anything. When Carl turned sixteen and he told his grandparents of his racetrack plans, his grandfather’s eyes appeared to moisten, but then they turned dry again. His grandparents each passed away when Carl was in his twenties and riding in Southern Illinois. He attended his grandfather’s funeral but missed his grandmother’s because he had three rides that afternoon at Balmoral Park.
The boxes he unpacked at Christine’s held something he’d won in a poker game: a set of blinkers supposedly once worn by Run Dusty Run. The hood and the plastic half-cups around the eye holes were bright yellow. The card game had taken place in a tack room, and another rider, Martin Arnold, wanted to use the set of blinkers as currency. Carl okayed the play. He thought Run Dusty Run had raced in the mid-seventies, had chased Seattle Slew throughout the Triple Crown one year. Carl won the hand, won the blinkers. When Carl looked up photos of Run Dusty Run on the Internet, the horse never wore blinkers. Arnold was always in trouble and he left town a couple of days after the game. Carl supposed that when he saw Arnold again that they’d straighten things out. Maybe a year after the card game, Arnold was riding at Fort Erie in Canada and one night he just disappeared. Body never found. There were stories, rumors that he was into a loan shark or about to spill on how the mob was fixing races up there. Arnold wasn’t a bad guy, and he had probably misjudged the wrong person. Carl liked the blinkers. They gave him the feeling that even when things were going badly in his life, on the whole he’d still gotten off pretty easy.
Carl brought a milk crate of records, CDs, and DVDs, and a two-month-old flat-screen TV he thought might replace the set Christine had. There was a disagreement about the set. Christine said it was way too large and she didn’t watch that much television anyway. Carl’s TV was expensive and he didn’t want to just throw it out. The next morning, Carl put the flat-screen in the back of his wheezy Ford Focus and drove it over to Summit Park. He carried the TV into the jocks’ room, told a valet named Drew McCauley he needed to sell it and that he would split the proceeds. Drew was in his fifties and shaped like a bowling ball. He looked at the set as if Carl had placed an original Matisse in front of him. Drew said, “We can get something good for this.” Carl clapped him on the shoulder.
Carl had been on the road since age sixteen and he had learned something about moving: if you owned too many things, you would never understand when it was time to go. By Thursday, two days before the start of the Summit meet, Carl had completely moved in with Christine. He made out a check for $675—his half of three months’ rent—and left it for her next to his printer on the kitchen table. He walked into the bedroom and was surprised to see Bo stretched out on the middle of the bed. The cat’s tail smacked at the bedspread. Carl wondered if Bo was now ready to be friends. He sat on the edge of the bed and reached over to scratch Bo’s head. Bo allowed Carl to do this. The cat’s eyes seemed like a vortex, a passage to something else. Then Bo sat upright and Carl drew back his hand. “Ow,” the cat said. Carl reached over to pet the cat’s head again. Bo poked at Carl’s hand with his right front paw but kept his claws withdrawn. Carl felt glad, and he thought about texting Christine.
Carl finally stopped petting Bo’s head. He sat with his hands on his knees. “Thank you,” he said.
On the opening day of the meeting, it began to rain before sunrise. While Christine slept, Carl pulled on his slickers in the bathroom. He drove to a florist after morning workouts and bought a bunch of daisies. When he opened the door to the apartment, she was seated at the kitchen table. Christine stayed quiet as he walked over and held the flowers out to her. She said, “Look how dry you are. How many umbrellas do you own?”
“Coffee?” he said. “I have slickers. Two sets.”
“I’ll make you a cup.”
“Here, take these.”
She reached her hands forward. From the cupboard, Christine brought out a vase of sky-blue glass that looked like a large test tube and a slight-looking wooden rack to set it in. The vase was on the table, the flowers were in the vase. Carl began to talk about the horses he was scheduled to ride today. Christine produced a small notepad, perhaps from the pocket of her robe, and held it on her lap. Carl talked and she wrote. When he paused, she looked up. She held the pen away from the pad and her expression was like, This okay? Carl said, “In the fourth race today, I’m on a horse named White Star Line…” His eyes went to the windows. Mist had formed around the edges of the frames and beyond the glass the falling rain had a silvery quality. “What are you wearing today?” he said.
“What?” she said. She touched at the belt of her robe. “Underwear? Look, Carl…”
“What are you wearing to the track today?” Christine folded both of her hands over the notebook. She had a look of patience about her. “What’s the problem?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“You don’t like to ride in the slop?” she said. One of her hands moved across the opened page of the notebook. “I don’t blame you at all.”
“I’ve ridden in the mud from here to Edmonton,” he said.
“What then?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Okay.”
“It’s just that when I pictured some of this, I saw it a certain way. I saw you in a sundress and a spring hat walking for a betting window. You wore sunglasses, high heels. You stepped up to the window, named the bets you wanted to make and then when the teller told you how much, you took out hundred-dollar bills and handed them over. You weren’t carrying any goddamn notebook.” Carl decided not to say anything else. Since the first moment he had approached her with the idea of living together, Carl had not taken a tone with Christine. She had been mysterious and testy at times, but this was predictable because she was young and getting used to their situation. Those moments meant nothing to him. On race days, however, things needed to be different. When it was time to ride in races, Carl wanted to have a certain attitude about everything. He needed to think a certain way and he even wanted to sound a certain way.
Christine said, “Carl, this is Cleveland.”
“Living in Cleveland means you have to write everything down?”
She watched him for a time. Then she said, “Sundress?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Christine pointed the tip of her pen to the notebook page. “Fourth race, White Star Line. Go.”
Carl said, “He’s a real tall horse.” He watched the rain falling. “I rode him a couple of times last November. He tries hard in his races, but he’s just a grinder. Has absolutely no speed at all. When the track is real fast, the others get away from him in a hurry. I worked him the other morning and he felt pretty solid. Right now, they’re keeping the track deep because it’s early in the meet. Helps the horses get fit faster. Doesn’t beat ’em up like a fast track might. With this rain, it’ll be a swamp…he ought to handle it better than the others.”
By the fourth race that afternoon, the rain had stopped. The sky above looked like burned-up charcoal. Since leaving the apartment, Carl had tried not to think about Christine. He sat atop White Star Line and the horse stood quietly in the starting gate. Carl had six sets of goggles strapped across his eyes, one atop the other. White Star Line was never in a hurry early in a race; they’d be covered in mud ten seconds in. He’d peel away one set, then a furlong later, have to peel away another. To start, these goggles would fog his view but that was all right. He and this horse knew their way around.
Once the gates opened, the horses broke in a line and those inside of White Star Line went for the lead. Grainy layers of mud slapped against Carl’s face. His top set of goggles was almost instantly useless, but he didn’t pull them down. Carl tasted mud, swallowed it. White Star line aimed for the outer rail in an attempt to escape the mud shower, and Carl let the horse drift to the outside of the others, then yanked down his top set of goggles. White Star Line could feel some escape there and it eased the horse’s jerky stride. Carl tapped its neck with the whip and they began to race straight up the backstretch. With a half mile to run, White Star Line had almost lost touch with the field, but as the runners made for the far turn, one horse, then another, began to drift back. White Star Line’s stride felt like little more than a breast-stroke, but when they inched past a third horse Carl’s insides lightened. He kept his mount in the middle of the track for the run down the homestretch and he stayed busy. White Star Line had been running on the left lead, with the left hoof hitting the ground just beyond the right, but Carl tossed the reins at the horse, gave the subtlest tug on the right rein and White Star Line switched to the right lead, found a burst of energy there. Carl worked methodically, and he knew he was going to win the race. He tried not think about Christine. Yet, he thought about the shape of her face. He hollered at his horse, “Yahhhh!” They made the lead fifty yards from the wire and held on to win by a half-length. Carl galloped out White Star Line, then eased him into a jog. His horse was ready for these commands. Finally, White Star Line returned to a walk.
An icy wind sailed down the backstretch. He turned his horse and they cantered back around the clubhouse turn. The glassed-in grandstand seemed to be glowing like a pumpkin now. He could not picture Christine at all then—all he envisioned were mostly empty rows, the few gamblers there having already turned to the next race. She could check the results on her break, on the boss’s computer. The results would pop up and there would be White Star Line, Arvo, C. and that feeling would hit her. It was just another cheap, forgettable race at a racetrack one rung from the end of the world, but she had this one. By God she had this one. Carl moved his tongue over his teeth, spat out a spoonful of mud. A mud-painted jockey named Alice Saylor trotted her little gray mount back to be unsaddled and Carl said in her direction, “Lucky to win anything today!”
“This is somebody’s nightmare!” Saylor said, sounding a lot farther away than she was.
Carl bobbed in the saddle, in rhythm to his horse’s stride. There was an opening in the outside railing and he guided White Star Line in that direction. Two guards stood out on the track holding the portable section, their slickers dripping with greasy-looking mud. In the direction of the stewards’ booth at the top of the grandstand, Carl gave a flick of the whip, a silent signal he’d had a clear trip. Adjacent to the saddling ring, the winner’s circle was a half moon of scrubby Astroturf, ringed by shrubbery that was three feet high and still, brown-black with winter. Carl smiled in the direction of the photographer as he sat on White Star Line, and the camera’s flash brought a sudden saffron glow to things. Just as quickly it was gone again.
That night in the apartment, Carl slept on and off. He thought of the sounds of hoofbeats as they raced through the mud; how close to perfect his life could be. He awakened when Christine arrived home from work. She closed the front door and it sounded as if she were walking in a quiet-as-possible way across the living room. Then there came the pop of a wine cork. He couldn’t keep himself from getting out of the bed and he walked out to the edge of the living room. Christine sat in one of the plastic chairs at the kitchen table and the overheard light was on there. Carl could not tell if she had heard his footsteps. He said, “Bo came out to see me a couple of days ago. He laid on the bed and let me pet him.” She had heard, he supposed, because it took her a moment to turn her head.
“I had a talk with him,” she said.
“Did you get it good?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I sure did. Want to hear about it? How much I bet, what I wore when I did it?”
“You wore a sundress,” he said. He tapped at the side of his head. “And I’m going back to bed.”
“Come over here,” she said. He eyed the loveseat, decided to move in that direction. She stood, walked over. She held her wine glass and stood in front of him. “What do you think ought to happen now?”
“Do I seem sexier?”
Christine leaned forward, held out her glass and he accepted it. He took a sip and she pulled her long-sleeve polo over her head. She wore a shiny, royal-blue brassiere. She decided to sit down on the edge of a cushion by him. She put out her hand and he passed the glass to her. She said, “I’m not good at this.”
“Yes, you are,” he said. “You’re wonderful.”
She watched him, then she said, “I’m ready.”
A few hours later, Carl was up again. He walked out to the living room and listened for the sound of rain outside, but there was nothing like that going on. As he had the day before and the day before that, Carl had laid out his work clothes on the loveseat. They were folded in a short stack there. He carried them into the bathroom and dressed quietly. He pulled on his down vest and left the apartment.