LOCKED into the darkness of an endless starting gate, the rider saw field lamps burning in a mist; bordering a straightaway rains had left so shining that every lamp looked tethered.
Yet he heard no horses restive in their gates nor starters’ warning cries. No gate had ever been this dark nor any crowd this still. The field lamps began casting moving shadows all down the straightaway. His horse came asweat as the flag went up, at the restless shadows the high lamps cast: he shared his horse’s fear. Scratch the whole field he tried to cry out as every gate clanged open but his own.
Lamed riders afoot, all in black silks, broke in a jostling pack, whip and spur to be first to the rail. All limped and several fell. Some fell and could not rise. His horse hooked itself across the still-locked steel, its forelegs racing air.
He stood in the irons to double the reins and felt his right rein ripping. He reached for the mane but there was no mane—rot in the reins he thought, falling from a great height slowly—rot in the reins all along.
And wakened feeling disappointed in everything.
Somebody’s big hand was lying lightly across his forehead. He pulled away from the hand.
Kate was standing above him. The tumult of her hair, uncombed and reddish-orange, looked to be aflame because of the yellow bug-repellent bulb burning behind her. She was offering him coffee in a tin cup.
Tin cups were for water not for coffee.
“For God’s sake,” he sat up to refuse the cup, “you have to shove a person across a room to wake him up?”
He looks so young yet so old, she thought, Floweree looks so grey in the dark before day.
“You were tossing, I thought you were fevery.” She placed the cup with care in reach of his hand.
“Fevery?” he mocked her, “What in God’s name is fevery?”
“I only have a country vocabulary,” she explained; and let it go at that. It was going to be another mean day for them both; that was plain. With nothing the way it had been before the Mexican had begun nipping him at the wire. He’ll be pecking at me now for my Ozark talk, she knew with resignation; or for being a head taller and half again his size. Or for looking years younger while being years older. Or for being bom in the mountains or raised on a river. Or for not minding when people call me Catfish. Or for wearing a GI cap. Or for wearing horse pins around the bam—What does he think I should use for bandaging?—Glue? Then he’ll get on me for owning a horse that does a mile and seventy without coming asweat by morning yet starts washing in the paddock that same night. A pure wonder he hasn’t yet faulted me for his falls at Waterford. Maybe he does in his jealous mind.
For all of his pecking (she’d taken note) took care to avoid its true salty cause; for it was her trailer, her table and her bed. Hollis Floweree was scarcely the man to take chances with a good thing. Unless he had money in his pocket.
“If you’re going to blow out Red,” she reminded him, “you better get moving.”
“Blow him out yourself,” he advised her.
Might not have things worked out better, had she not made it too easy for him at the beginning, Kate wondered now. All she’d done, of course, had been to take off his boots when he’d had too much whiskey in him; to let him sleep it off on her bed.
Yet they’d lifted a few together before, at other parks, when he’d been riding better; and nothing had even begun to happen between them before. That he’d still been using a cane and had had his saddle in hock when he’d come here from Waterford hadn’t had anything to do with her taking off his boots. She hoped for her own sake now as well as for his.
Or had the falls—three in two months—had something to do with it? Yet the Mexican had not yet taken either a drink or a fall. And his boots had come off just as easily.
How can he hold that against me, she asked herself. Don’t he know that was before?
There was the salty cause Floweree wouldn’t risk pecking.
Unrequited love wasn’t what was souring him so, she felt sure. It had to be because the rider who outraced him so often was the same who’d nipped him at the wire in bed. A touchy group, these riders; whose need of proving themselves could be felt in their mounting of women as well as of horses.
Excepting, of course, that Mexican thief. Whose mastery of all mounts came to him so naturally that he felt no need of proving himself to any. Horses sensed it as quickly as women.
“What time is it?” Floweree asked.
“Nigh to day.”
“Night to day—What kind of time is that, for God’s sake, night to day? Didn’t they even learn you to tell time in them hills?”
“Them weren’t hills,” Kate corrected him, “them were mountains. Though I do have to admit we lived pretty far back.”
Stripped to his waist, Floweree stood with his disproportionately big hands clasping his cup the way a child holds a gift he fears may be snatched away.
“So far back the owls screwed the chickens,” he decided; “that’s my opinion.”
“The farther back you live,” she returned the usual answer to the usual taunt, “the tougher you get. And we lived in the last house in town.”
She handed him his boots with one hand and the Racing Form with the other.
“You’re in the funny papers, rider.”
Under “Official Rulings,” he read, with lips moving:
OZARK DOWNS
“Jockey Hollis Floweree has been suspended for one day and fined fifty dollars for entering a frivolous claim against jockey Elisio Casaflores following the eighth race of Thursday night, July third.”
“That’s Ishop, not Casa,” Floweree felt, “I don’t blame the Mexican because his boss pushes the stewards around.”
“Well?” she wanted to know, “you got fifty dollars for the front office?”
“You take care of your end, I’ll take care of mine,” he told her.
Kate didn’t bother pointing out that she’d been keeping up both ends.
“Front office don’t get fifty by noon, you don’t ride Red tomorrow night,” she reminded him, “and I don’t want your Cajun buddy on him.”
“What’s the matter with my Cajun buddy?” Floweree asked innocently. “He’s got all the class there is to be had around this bullring.”
“That depends on what you mean by class,” Kate decided.
“When you get so good you can get on top of a $10,000 horse and lose to a $3,500 horse without the stewards seeing anything wrong, that’s class.”
“And when you’re paying a rider to ride for you, and he’s riding for people in New Orleans instead, where’s the class in that?”
Holding one soiled sock in one fist, Floweree kept peering into the depths of various boots; in hope of finding one equally soiled.
“That don’t make him a bad guy, does it?” he asked one of the boots. Then looked up at Kate: “That man can whup his own horse ’n flick the nose of the horse behind, all in one motion,” Floweree defended the Cajun, “as good as even Don Meade could. ’N that don’t make him a bad guy, neither.”
“Oh, toss those stinking things away,” Kate ordered him; and tossed him a ball of fresh white socks.
“Just because he done a little time—” Floweree began.
“I know, I know,” Kate interrupted him, “I know that don’t make him a bad guy. But he got a big mouth and he got bigmouth people behind him. In my book that makes him a bad guy.”
“A person don’t have to come from Louisiana to have a big mouth,” Floweree observed quietly.
“The Cajun ain’t riding Red,” Kate ended the argument.
“How about that apprentice kid—Duryea?” Floweree sounded her out.
“Duryea rides with his shoulders instead of his hands,” Kate pointed out, “he thinks he’s supposed to outstrong his mount. He rides every horse the same. Red takes a long rein. Duryea snugs up.”
“Can’t you get one of the Mexicans?” he asked her softly.
“No,” she took him up quickly, “all the good riders are contracted out around here.”
He finished pulling on his socks before he answered. She could tell he was hot.
“Believe me when I tell you,” he told her, standing up to his full height of five-foot-one, “I can get a contract with any stable in the country. Believe me when I tell you.”
“Sure I believe you when you tell me,” she agreed easily, “tell me a rooster can plow ’n I’ll hitch him up.”
She drew a rubber-banded roll from the pocket of her jeans and laid five ten-dollar bills beside his cup.
“I don’t want you borrowing off the Cajun, neither,” she explained.
“It’s your horse,” he disclaimed his involvement, “you take in the fine.”
“The horse belongs to me,” she agreed again, “but the phony claim is all yours.”
“Them people up there look at me like I smell of the shed,” he complained.
“You don’t always smell sweet around me neither,” she filled him in, “what do you care what you smell like to them?”
He eyed her steadily across the rim of the cup. “The reason that horse of yours don’t win”—he put his cup down carefully—“is he’s ashamed to have his picture took with you in them clothes.”
“Rider,” she responded quickly, “your job is to get me into the winner’s circle. How I’m dressed for the occasion is my own affair.”
“Alright,” he gave in, “I’ll take the fine in—only don’t get the idea you’re doin’ me a big favor. I got friends all over the country ready to back me.”
“Sure you have,” she yet agreed, “you got friends from coast to coast. Tell me a duck is carrying a gun ’n I’ll stay out of his range of fire.” She whipped her GI fatigue cap down over his ears, tugged it tight and hurried through the door. By the time he got it off she was down the shed-row.
Floweree spun the cap against the wall without so much as a glance at the money she’d left. He drew on his boots and stomped his feet to make them tighter. He put on his helmet and let the straps dangle. He flicked his little whip. Then he stomped in his boots once again. And once again flicked his little whip. He put on his riding-goggles. Then he picked up the money and left.
And kept trying to figure out, as he followed Kate’s steps between the shed-rows, why, when it had been the Cajun who’d done the provoking, that the Mexican had come at him.
“Hey! Casa!” the Cajun had started it—“You make fifty dolla! You have good time at your mama’s house now, Casa?”
Not until the Mexican had been sitting on the floor, cupping his nose with a touch of blood on the white of his silks, had Floweree realized it had been himself who’d knocked the boy down. “You don’t get the best of it all the time, Mex,” he’d heard himself saying.
The Mexican Thief got his nerve, I got to give him that, Floweree now had to admit to himself. For, in the next race, he’d driven his mount between Floweree’s and Houssayen’s and beaten both under the wire. His nose hadn’t started to bleed again until he’d climbed down out of the irons.
That still didn’t make The Cajun a bad guy.
* * *
A heat haze was already banking above the ridge. Between the sheds grooms were sponging down horses with names like Flying Indian, Billy V., Flash McBride and Popcorn Bummy.
Two grooms were hauling a horse up a ramp into a coast-to-coast horse van, while another shoved the brute from behind. Six horses, already installed, stretched their necks out of the windows like so many shop stewards, to see how the work was going. The driver leaned idly against the van, holding a bill of lading in his hand and spitting tobacco juice now and then to show he didn’t have to lift a finger.
The hay, heaped and baled between the bams, lent a yellowish scent to the air. Floor fans, whirring all night and into the breaking day, carried music cool or hot from rooms where hot-walkers drank or dozed.
Owners saved a pretty penny here by permitting hot-walkers to do the work of grooms: A green youth could pick up a lifetime craft here. He could learn how to tape a horse without having galloped one. The trick in bandaging was to keep the tape level, so that cotton tufts showed at either end of the bandage. And if the thermometer he shoved into the animal’s rectum read a degree and a half off, and the horse was backing off its feed, he knew that that horse should be scratched.
Yet, as like as not, the horse was led to post all the same. And the rider who refused a mount unfit to race might have a rough go getting another.
The riders, as well as the grooms, knew that things that mattered at other tracks didn’t matter all that much here. That’s what made it a bull-ring. It was all block-and-tackle around the soybean field; where a rider could make more money by running interference for the horse he’d put his backers on than by winning on his own mount.
The rail was too high and the purses too low. There weren’t half a dozen rectal thermometers in the whole stable area. Nobody had heard of a film patrol. Hustlers wearing shades walked in and out of the bams without having to identify themselves. That’s what made it a bullring, too.
But there were also, around the same bams, men whose respect for horses was merely part of their respect for men. This old-fashioned kind of Western man wouldn’t run a horse that wasn’t ready; any more than would the fight-manager who won’t throw a fighter into a ring at risk of a bad beating. There were owners of horses here who still considered the chief point of racing horses to be finding out whose animal could run the fastest.
This kind of owner insisted that his grooms, when taping a horse, keep the tape level all up and down the leg. And who, when the rectal thermometer was a degree and a half off, scratched the horse.
A stakes-winning rider earned only $50; and the rider behind him but $30. Third money earned $17 and fourth received $12. Out of which each rider paid a dollar to the Jockey’s Club and two dollars to his valet.
Floweree waggled his whip at a couple of exercise boys but didn’t stop to exchange stories. When the vasty light of morning struck, tilting the straightaway into day while leaving the backstretch in darkness, the odds for the coming night would start forming. Rumors of evening would shape the rest.
That, and turns so sharp that a rider on a $1,500 horse, who knew the turns, could outrun a $3,500 mount; there wasn’t enough of a stretch for the better horse to prove his class. His rider had either to take his mount around the leading horse or bull his way through at risk of being smashed against the rail. For the sake of a $50 purse, only apprentices and younger riders took such a risk.
It was also a track where exercise boys competed with professional riders to make two dollars in breakfast money at 6 A.M. And where you saw horses with such string tails you had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t a pony.
Spring harness-racing had left the track surface so hard that owners of thoroughbreds risked laming their horses here. The track’s hard spots had soft spots that threw a horse off stride. Owners didn’t risk running a horse worth more than a few thousand dollars at Ozark Downs.
One morning the apprentice Duryea had worked Red’s Big Red out for five furlongs in fifty-seven seconds. The track record was fifty-eight. That same night, while a groom was giving Duryea a foot up in the paddock, the horse had stretched about and chomped the groom’s elbow, sending Duryea skittering down its flank. By the time Duryea had gotten him into the gate the horse was awash with a sweat of anxiety. He’d broken badly and finished dead last.
Catfish had waited for her rider outside the jock’s room.
“What happened?” she’d wanted to know.
“Nothing happened,” the apprentice assured her, “the horse can’t run, that’s all.”
“He ran this morning.”
“If a horse can’t run between horses, he can’t run.”
“And a rider who can’t ride between horses can’t ride,” Kate had judged the apprentice immediately. And hadn’t put him on the horse since. Floweree was the only rider whom both Kate and Big Red trusted.
“Move over, you,” the groom now ordered the animal as Floweree stood by.
“Don’t call him you, Mike,” Floweree suggested. “This horse was brought up by a fool who hollered Hey you! at him so much he wouldn’t run. He’s tore chunks out of people for Hey-youing him.”
Floweree stroked the big brute’s neck and singsonged softly into his ear, “If you move over, baby, your little daddy’ll have more room.”
The horse shifted its rump to give people more room; then rolled his neck toward Floweree as if to ask, “Is there room enough back there now, little daddy?”
“He’s been kicking at his tail, too,” the groom reported sullenly.
“Then take the knot out of it,” Floweree advised him.
“If he talked like that to women,” Kate observed to nobody in particular, “he wouldn’t have to risk breaking his back riding around a soybean field.”
“No, I could get it broken for me at home,” Floweree informed the horse, “and never have to leave the house.”
Cantering onto the track, Floweree held Big Red back until Kate reached the scale at the finishing line; stopwatch in hand. He wheeled the animal into the gate with only his toes in the irons.
Then, leaning far forward, shouted into the horse’s ear—“Get all the money!”
Kate saw the perfect start, yet lost horse and rider in the shadows. But where the backstretch broke into day she saw a darkness driving across the sun, rider and horse a single creature, neck astretch and tail slowly blowing. At the turn for home its mane caught the sun and she glimpsed light beneath all four hooves at once: then it loomed like an oncoming express and she shielded her eyes against a showering dust.
And heard the dying thunder of its hooves.
When she looked up she saw Floweree easing the horse down the far side of the track. Why don’t you run like that at night you sonofabitch? Kate asked Red’s Big Red and God.
Floweree wheeled about and gave her a confirming nod as he passed her on the trot.
Had she seen the horse try to bolt? Floweree wondered. That flash of silvered light, across its hooves, was what had caused it. The clubhouse light, at the first turn—that was it. Now he knew what was frightening the horse at night.
He knew something nobody else knew. If Kate hadn’t caught it.
She came up with a scatter of dust across her forehead and the stop-watch still in her hand.
“How’d he make it?” Floweree tried her out.
“One forty-one flat.”
“It felt even faster,” he risked suggesting.
“The watch don’t lie.”
It don’t tell the truth all the time neither, the rider reflected.
When she led the horse off, to cool it, Floweree pushed his helmet back on his head and lifted his goggles to his forehead. The workout had presented him with a gift package that he didn’t want to unwrap quite yet.
The gift was information. And information used too soon could kick back in your teeth; used too late, it lost its value. Used at the right moment, it could bring him the stake he needed to get away from Kate.
He never could admit to himself that it wasn’t losing photofinishes to Casaflores that was rankling in him. Not even to himself could he admit that, sleeping with Kate, he was second again to the Mexican.
“He gets the best of it every time,” Floweree thought—thinking only of photofinishes.
He and Kate would be better friends, he assured himself benignly now, if he had his own digs.
Information, however, had to be worked before it could be used. He lowered his goggles against the sun and cracked his little whip just once. Then set off for the Riders’ Cafe.
He was going to need help.
The clipclop clattering of horses at a walk or a canter, cries of rider to rider and the swift swing of cars off the highway to the bams, carried a clamor of preparation across the hurrying air. In which the faintly bitter scent of leaves parching on the bluffs mixed with the odor of horses awash with sweat. The heat was already building.
In the Riders’ Cafe the horse-and-woodleaf scent was lost in the greasified pall of hamfat frying, bacon sizzling and beef stewing while toast was crisping in the ovens and eggs were burning in the pans.
Great floor fans blew the ovens’ heat across the Negro muckers and walkers lounging in the cafe’s back room. For the boys who earned a dollar for walking a horse half an hour, the big rainbow-colored juke played Caterina Valente singing—
* * *
Chinatown my Chinatown
Where the lights are low
Dreamy dreamy Chinatown
Hearts seem light and life seems bright
In dreamy Chinatown—
while they ate fried chicken and gnawed on the bones. They accommodated themselves to the heat and the noise more easily, it appeared, than did the white owners and riders who ate, with their wives and kids, in the front room.
There helmeted farmboys from Kentucky took off their helmets while jiving teen-age girls off Canadian farms. And high school dropouts from New York, New York, kept their helmets on, while jiving the same girls, so their straps could dangle. Why the girls had left their farms, only in order to muck out stables, nobody understood; least of all the girls.
But they preferred listening to Kentucky farm boys, and New York City dropouts, to listening to some ancient railroad pensioner recalling what it had been like as a brakeman on the Nickel Plate. There were too many drifters of no trade here, parolee-breakers, hiders-by-day and flyers-by-night; smalltime bookmakers gone on the arfy-darfy; too many I-Wonder-Who-Shot-Johns; who knew who’d shot John.
Off in a comer, the always-by-himself loner—ex-salesman, exinsurance agent, ex-teacher, ex-lawyer, ex-husband, ex-father, ex-barber, ex-clergyman, ex-whatever—was making his last stand for survival with the Racing Form.
The loner didn’t drink any more. He didn’t date women. He never went to a movie. He read nothing but yesterday’s charts and today’s overnight sheet. He spoke of nothing but last night’s results and today’s entries. He lived as close to the mutuel windows as he could find a bed.
The sure-losing-loner rose early to watch the horses work out. Then sat about the Riders’ Cafe figuring, figuring; until the toteboard lit up.
When all he had was daily-double money, he couldn’t risk it on food. Because that two dollars was going to pay him, come evening, $51.50. Thus enabling him to put twenty and twenty on something that was going to pay $11.20 and $6.80; giving him a bankroll of a hundred and eighty-four dollars. Enough to sit at a clubhouse table with fifty dollars going for him on the nose of an 11-1 shot. Which would bring him $596.80; thus permitting him to put a hundred across on a sure thing off at 9-2. Then he’d move into a hotel until the meet closed. Whereupon he’d fly to Hialeah and win the grandstand. Then he’d return triumphantly, in a new car, to his wife.
All this between the peeling of the paper off a chocolate bar and the final bite; that would have to last him until night. It never occurred to him that his wife wouldn’t have him back.
Yet the people who really made the show go had no such fantasies. Now and again they’d make a small bet—but not at the price of a night on the town or of going without supper.
They were the muckers and haulers and walkers and washers; who slept in shacks between the bams. Spongers and brushers and combers and cleaners: starters of the gate and jockey’s valets, saddlers and scrapers of hooves and manes; of hides and great white horse-teeth. They knew how to file a horse’s teeth so its lips wouldn’t tear when it was reined sharply. They were the ones who could calm a horse in the pad-dock; then whip him across the finishing line whether he wanted to run or not.
Riders, trainers, grooms and traders chunked the ice in their glasses; and talked of their horses more like farmers than bettors. The rider turned agent, the carnie turned hot-walker, the agent turned tout; and the exercise boy who’d gotten his start in life by contracting rickets at the age of three.
Beside the ex-pro football coach now running a stable for a Chicago outfit, still wearing a whistle around his neck, sat the ravaged owner of three horses (two of them sick and one of them crippled) in hope of getaway money back to New Iberia, Louisiana.
“Good morning, horsemen!” The PA system exclaimed above the metallic voices and the aluminum trays, “here’s how it looks: Thursday morning, July 10th: first race didn’t fill. Out. Sixth race goes as she stands. Seventh race goes. Third substitute race out. Scratch Terry’s June in the fifth. Scratch Flash McBride in the eighth. Attention! Mr. Jack Coleman the tattoo man is here! Please pay Mr. Coleman five dollars. All horses must be tattooed within the week. Thank you, Mr. Coleman.”
This was the place where the rider who weighed 104 found out what had happened to the rider who now weighed 133. This was where the rider, whose riding days had been shortened by whiskey, asked the young rider to lend him ten dollars until he got a mount. It was where the rider who had never taken a fall heard out the rider who’d taken one fall too many—and resolved to sleep alone, stay sober, save his money; never take a fall and avoid bad dreams.
This was the long morning before the night’s swift show and these were the ones who made the show go. The grooms who rubbed the soreness out of the horses’ legs with ice and Absorbine; scraped the hooves and taped the legs; or held the brute still by a nose-twitch to permit the vet to wrench out an abcessed tooth with a pliers.
These were the ones of whom it could be said: To him who hath shall be given; and him who hath not even that which he hath not shall be taken away. For it was the owner of seventy horses, such as Everett Ishop, who claimed the one sound horse left in the stable of an owner of only four: one crippled, one sick and one bowed. When photofinishes came up it was the bigger owner who got the break; his horses being essential to making up the programs.
“Attention, Stewards!” the PA system demanded, “nominations for the Western Missouri Juvenile Stakes, five thousand dollars added, two-year-olds Missouri bred, to be run Saturday, August 2nd, will close Monday, July 28th.”
Clarence Houssayen’s career had been unique. Not because he’d come up fast, from the bullrings to The Big A, and then had gone back down to the bullrings. But because he’d come up a second time.
Flimflam men and smalltown sports followed him. He was trusted by such birds of prey as those whose prey was other smalltown sports and other flimflam men. Past-posters, coneroos, double-crossers and informers believed in him. Because when he gave his word that a short-price horse would run out of the money, and he was on it, it ran out of the money.
He never talked face to face with this little group. There were only one or two, among them all, whose faces he’d ever seen. He made his deals by telephone from a house-trailer a few furlongs down the highway.
Somebody had put concrete blocks under a trailer, hooked it up to electric power sufficient to keep a dozen twenty-watt bug-bulbs flickering weakly around a hand-painted invitation over the trailer’s entrance:
EXOTIC TOPLESS DANCERS
Whether the other exotics had left, or had not yet arrived, nobody troubled to ask. There was only Wilma-Mae, a lank and freckled barmaid with teeth so bucked she could eat an apple through a snow fence. And a pair of breasts so lactated Houssayen would shake his head sadly, when Wilma-Mae served him a beer, and reproach her gently.
“Wilma-Mae, you ought to wear a bra just to protect yourself. Some guy loses control of hisself in here, it’ll be purely your fault.” Then he’d flick a few fingers of beer foam at those piteous dugs.
He used the bar, in the long afternoons, to take long-distance calls from New Orleans. When the phone rang a man’s voice identified itself:
‘‘ Atchafalaya here. ’’
“Off,” Houssayen would answer. Meaning all bets off; no fix. But if things looked right he’d answer “Suffolk. Five. Six.”
“Suffolk” meant put your money down. “Five” meant five hundred dollars to win on himself. “Six” meant the sixth race at Ozark Downs. Whether or not he won, his backers stayed behind him. They knew that, once Houssayen gave his word, he’d do all in his power to keep it. Houssayen was trusted by the sure-thing boys.
In order to remain free to choose his own mounts, he never signed a contract with any stable. He had to stay free to choose his own. There were mounts nobody could win on. And there were mounts that it would be particularly risky, for a man on track parole, to lose on.
Houssayen was not only trusted by the gamblers who backed him: he was respected.
The apprentice rider, Troy Duryea, sharing the common disdain of the native-born riders toward the Mexicans, brought a story on Hector Vaes to Houssayen. Houssayen got tight-up.
“Ah take mens as ah finds mens,” he advised the apprentice coldly, “Ah don’t traffic in second-hand info’mation on a man’s cha’acta.” And had kept a cold distance between himself and the apprentice ever since.
Now he sat, in the Rider’s Cafe, with his unclean underwear turned about so that its red label looked like a spot of congealed blood in the dark hollow of his throat. The tiny patch of dead-white skin, beneath his right eye, made him look even more leathery. It was a hoofmark from a bad fall he’d taken at Evangeline Park. Clarence Houssayen, under his faded helmet, looked like a cross between a bad-tempered rooster and a worn razor-strop.
When you were told he’d been up to the Big A twice, you could believe it. As you knew, just as certainly, that he wasn’t going up there again.
The second time he’d gone down he’d gone down all the way to the Louisiana State Pen for armed robbery. This had solved the problem of keeping his weight down for so long that weight was no longer a problem to him.
Making his way through the heat and the chatter, to where Vaes and Casaflores were chatting it up, side by side, with Houssayen on the other side of their table, Floweree thought: it looks like bygones are bygones.
Hector Vaes was a picture rider. He sat a saddle like a man bom to ride. Yet his ambition, aboard a horse, was limited to staying on top of it all around the course; then to get into his civvies and get to the Highway Bar before they ran out of whiskey.
Vaes had so many fourths that, when parading a mount assigned to the Number Four gate, some railbird was sure to shout across the rail, “You got your own number today, Hector!”
“Vaes knows all the moves,” bettors agreed, “but I’d never buy a ticket on the bum.”
For fifty dollars wasn’t too much to sacrifice, it was Vaes’ thinking, to avoid a broken back. And he conveyed his caution to the animal under him.
When pressed to the rail with room—-just room—to get through, Vaes would falter and get blocked off. When the apprentice, Duryea, had once charged him coming out of the gate, Vaes had pulled up so hard the horse had swerved, and it had taken him an eighth of a mile to catch the pack. That day he ran fifth.
He’d ridden at Santa Anita. But his conviction, that it was better to give ground than to run into a crush at the wire, made it increasingly difficult for his California agent to get mounts for him. He wouldn’t ride at Santa Anita again.
Yet once Vaes and Casaflores had dismounted, all the caution belonged to Casaflores. Vaes went for the girls. He went for the whiskey. He went for the dice. He went for the cards.
The women and the whiskey and the dice and the cards liked Hector Vaes, too. So did the bartenders and the sharpie crapshooters and the stud-poker mechanics and the blackjack cheaters. If nobody cheated him out of his money he’d find a hooker willing to hold it for him. There wasn’t a horse stabled at Ozark Downs for which Vaes cared anything.
Although he was six years younger than Vaes, Casaflores nonetheless cast himself in the role of an older brother. All Hector required, it seemed to Casaflores, was edification. He never ceased, therefore, to point out bad examples to his friend.
There was no lack of bad examples.
“Look now Floweree”—he indicated the rider sitting with Troy Duryea in the Highway Bar—“he do the whiskey, long time, he do the girl. Now he sleep with a lady because she feel sorry.”
“Then I got nothing to worry, Indian,” Vaes assured Casaflores cheerfully, “I go broke, lady take me in, too.”
Casaflores looked disappointed in his friend.
Vaes caught it. “I only want to be happy, Elisio,” he tried to explain.
“What has that got to do with it?” Casaflores asked.
Vaes called Casaflores “Indian” because Casa mounted a horse from its right side, Indian-fashion.
“He could mount from the left,” the apprentice Duryea confided Houssayen, “that still wouldn’t make him a white man. But imagine—a Mexican calling another Mexican an Indian!”
“That’s nothing,” Houssayen informed the younger man, smiling faintly, “I’ve heard a Cuban call a Mexican a Mexican!”
The Spanish riders fought like women. D’Arcia and Josohino had gotten into it because D’Arcia had hooked Josohino’s stirrup coming out of the gate. Josohino threw a rock through the window of D’Arcia’s car. The next day D’Arcia cut up Josohino’s clothes with a letter-opener.
Mounting from the wrong side was only the first thing Casaflores did wrong. Everything he did after that looked even worse. In the saddle he moved in every direction except off. When he should have been pressing himself flat against a horse’s neck, he sat up and began pumping, waving his whip across the horse’s mane and looking like he was about to leap off and drag the horse across the line by its tail.
“If my mount ain’t giving me everything he got,” he confided in Kate, “I scare that sonabitch till he give it.”
Casaflores cared everything for horses and nothing for cabereting. When he had to sit out a race he paced, half-dressed and helmeted, up and down the color-room floor, popping his whip against his boots: that same left-handed whip that flicked chalk-bettors with fear when he began popping it, coming down off the crown of the track on a horse so frightened it looked blind. He’d gotten so many wins by coming down off the crown that bettors had named it “Mexican Alley.”
Why the Mexican Thief would take a bad mount, rather than no mount at all, caused other riders to wonder. Yet up he’d go into the irons of some crow-hopping fourteen-year-old mare that hadn’t won in seven years, yammer into her ears and keep yammering around the turn for home although the whole field was already passing the toteboard.
“Money?” he answered when asked whether he liked it, “O yes—I like that.” Yet other riders suspected that he rode for the joy of winning as well as for the love of money. The truth was that, though he needed neither a woman nor whiskey in order to get him through the night, Casaflores had trouble getting through a day without driving a horse toward a finishing line.
And this flatnosed little man whose eyes were Asian and who wore his hair too long, could drive a horse five furlongs in one minute flat by the clock in his head.
A clock that had never failed him until he’d come to Kate’s trailer, on her invitation to share a Mexican dinner. “Made with my own hands,” she’d assured him.
The Mexican dinner had been bought frozen. He’d taken it outside and dumped it in the garbage can. But had come back inside himself.
In the twenty months since he’d seen his wife, it had been his single transgression.
When he put down forty cents for a beer, that was forty cents worth of bread he was snatching from the mouths of his four children. Yet he’d been known to spend as much as six dollars in a single evening simply to keep a protective eye on Hector Vaes at the Highway Bar. In return, Vaes read books, newspapers and magazines to Casaflores; in English as well as in Spanish.
Houssayen found it incomprehensible that a rider who’d brought in sixty-six winners, and the meet only half over, could be illiterate.
“Read what it tell here,” he was now demanding of Casaflores, handing him the sports section of the Post-Dispatch.
“How this man goin’ read your paper,” Vaes laughed lightly, “when he cannot read even his own?”
Immediately, Casaflores put a finger on the previous night’s results.
“It tell here Lee K. pay fourteen-forty with Casaflor’ up,” he reported thoughtfully, “Here it tell Mickey’s Miki pay twelve dolla straight, Casaflor’ up.” He handed the results to Vaes—“How many Houssayen win last night? Tell me where it say. That boy make money like crazy I hear.”
“Ah made more money in one month in the port of N’Awlins than you’ve made your whole life,” Houssayen let Casaflores know.
“I never make one damned dime in that port,” the Mexican conceded. Then, seeing Floweree, confided aloud to Vaes, “Watch out now—here that man pop people in the nose. He gonna pop you too!”
Floweree nodded to Houssayen and turned toward the back room; Houssayen followed.
“Big Red tied the track record out there this morning, Dad,” he told the Cajun the moment they were seated. Houssayen, in his mid-thirties, didn’t appreciate being called “Dad” by a rider himself old enough to be killing the grass.
“What has running in the morning got to do with running under lights?”
“That’s just what it got to do with, old buddy—the light at the clubhouse turn. That’s the shadow Red been jumpin’. Can I but get him to the rail before he hits the turn, the Mexican Thief will look like he’s standing still—and Red is going to be the price horse in the field. Old buddy.”
“Tell the Racing Commission. Maybe they’ll turn off the power when you get a mount that’s scared of electricity.”
Floweree placed his helmet carefully on the table before him.
“Catfish just clocked the horse in one-forty-one,” he explained, “but she didn’t allow for his shadow-jump: I figure him one-thirty-nine tomorrow night.”
“Why not just use a one-eyed blinker and a shadow-roll?” Houssayen suggested.
“The horse won’t run with equipment. Besides, I couldn’t put extra gear on him without that woman wising up. If she sniffs something up, the word’ll be out.”
For the first time Houssayen regarded him seriously. Then shook his head, No.
“Caint afford to get into no more of your jock-room brawls, Flower. I’m on track parole.”
An apparition, gaunt, lean and unshaven, held out a handful of programs to them.
Houssayen paid The Apparition a quarter, the standard price, for one of the programs. Yet the Apparition waited.
“It’s how much I pay for them myself,” he explained, looking sorrowfully down at the coin in his palm, “certain folks give me a nickel extry for bringing them in early.”
“Let’s go to my place,” Houssayen suggested, adding a dime to The Apparition’s palm.
Floweree rose to go. Yet now it was Houssayen who stood waiting.
“You want change?" The Apparition asked at last.
When he’d found a nickel, Houssayen accepted it and they left.
The morning workouts were done now. All that was running the track, as they walked past the soybean field behind the toteboard, were tiny tornadoes made of chaff, dust and rumor: that wheeled in pursuit where horse and rider had lately run. That scattered sparrows under the rail then began making up ground. That circled the winner’s circle triumphantly as if mocking that nightly ritual. And at last blew across last night’s crushed lily cups, dead tickets and such.
Into the vasty hollows beneath the stands.
A green haze of heat, so heavy it looked like a wall, kept building higher and higher above the bluffs. Then a flash of heat-lightning cracked it and the whole green wall came tumbling down.
Yet there was no thunder.
Down the shadowed shed-rows the horses hung their great sad heads. The water in the big orange buckets was already turning brackish. Above the piled hay-bales a small chaff blew.
Houssayen sniffed the air: “Somebody’s using cane,” he sensed, picking the scent of sugar out of the scent of hay.
Between the bales, in small stone rooms crowded with tack, exercise boy and mucker, rider and groom, all slept. Only the faint insistent tapping, of a hammer against a hoof, and a transistor murmuring near at hand, broke the stilly heat.
“Get out your mud-silks, old buddy,” Floweree warned Houssayen, “when them clouds bust, she’ll pour for days.”
“Pretty-day colors will do for tonight,” Houssayen judged.
His room was an army cot surrounded by coffee-stained plastic cups, empty Coke bottles, riding boots, socks drying on a line, a calendar whose pages fluttered when he switched on his small floor-fan; and flies that buzzed contentedly. Never having known any other home.
“Ah can git you a hundred across the board in N’Awlins,” Houssayen came directly to the point, “if your information works—But only Gawd can git you to the rail.”
“If you’re in the One Gate I won’t need God,” Floweree assured Houssayen.
“Ah won’t be posted on the rail. If the Mexican Thief don’t git it, Josohino or D’Arcia will—‘n that comes to the same thing.”
“Or Vaes,” Floweree suggested.
“Even worse,” Houssayen warned Floweree, “the sonofabitch caint ride a lick any more—but he’ll bump you over the rail to let his buddy git it.”
“Why, that’s where you come in, old buddy”—Floweree brightened—“it don’t matter whether it’s Casa or D’Arcia or Vaes or Josohino—you thwack the first cat out of that gate—thwack!—like that”—Floweree smacked his right fist into his left palm—“all I got to do is to get inside before we hit the clubhouse light. When I let him out—we’ll leave that field tied to the rail.”
“What the hell you think ah am, Flower?” Houssayen demanded, “the Confederate cavalry? How many them damn horses you think ah can cut out for God’s sake? Ah don’t even know what the Mexican Thief is riding.”
“Moon River.”
“Ain’t nobody can hook Moon River,” Houssayen now feigned inexhaustible patience—“ah know, buddy—ah’ve rode that horse. He runs from behind or he don’t run at all. Now how you goin’ to hook a horse that won’t try until he got the pack in front of him? Wait for him? You hook a horse between horses, when he try to git out front early. By the time the Mexican let Moon River make his run, whole field be strung out.”
But Floweree began scratching an overnight sheet with a pencil stub. Flies buzzed against the screen. The floor fan rattled as if ready to quit. The light was hot yet the shadows were chill. The scent of instant coffee dried in old cups mixed with the choking odor of manure. Floweree handed his sketch to Houssayen.
Houssayen saw starting gates numbered 4 and 6, with a diagonal line from 6 to the rail; and a crude representation of a clubhouse light purporting to be an eighth of a mile away.
‘‘That simplifies your work,” Floweree decided, “if Casa breaks slow all you have to do is drive at Vaes.”
“Have to?” Houssayen glanced up quickly from the sketch, “Have to? All ah have to do is drive at Vaes? If ah jist grabbed his tail ‘n waved to you to come on ahead would that be alright with you?’’
“All I meant was that if you drove at him, he’d give ground,” Floweree apologized, “you know all Vaes wants to do is stay on top of a horse until it slows down enough to let him get off.”
“That’s only how he’s riding this meet,” Houssayen recalled, “he didn’t use to ride like that. If Vaes wants to ride, he’ll leave you thinking you’re tied to the rail. What’s his mount?”
“Fleur Rouge.”
“What’s the class of the race?”
“Port-O-Pogo. ”
Houssayen shook his head.
“No. Fleur Rouge.”
Then he tore Floweree’s sketch in two and the halves raced, in the floor-fan’s windstream, head-and-head to the open door and out into the haze of day.
Houssayen went to the door, bolted it, and drew a riding crop and two batteries from a drawer. Sitting opposite Floweree, he unscrewed the top of the whip, exposing a hollowed center. He inserted the batteries. Then, turning the cap of the whip to Floweree, revealed a small coil. He drew a half a dozen small pins from his pocket, inserted them in the handle of the ship, screwed the top back on; then touched Floweree’s forearm lightly. Floweree drew back as if he’d touched an exposed light bulb.
“Ah paid six hundred bucks for this small goading device, Flower,” he assured Floweree, “if ah wasn’t on track parole ah’d use it m’self. Ah caint take the risk.”
The penalty for using a buzzer, as Floweree was well aware, was to be ruled off Canadian as well as American tracks for five years. And though other riders had used buzzers here, only one (a Chicago rider) had been caught and ruled off.
Floweree began laughing, he didn’t know why. Houssayen’s small pillified face looked out at him from under his helmet, like the face of a dog in a kennel’s dark. Then he began making the kind of dry clicking, deep in his throat; that passed, with Clarence Houssayen, for rollicking merriment.
“Now you’re putting me on, Dad,” Floweree decided—“every steward in the tower would spot a move like that.”
Houssayen rose and stood in the middle of the room, studying Floweree. “You don’t buzz him on the track, Flower,” he explained, “work it in the areaway under the stands. You wave it in front of the horse. Then you get a strong double-grip in the reins. Then you give him a touch—just a touch. You’ll have to hold him hard—because that sonofabitch is going to stand up on his hind legs and holler. Can you hold Big Red?”
“I can hold him,” Floweree felt certain.
“Then, after you’ve made the turn for home—ah said after—you let him see it again and he won’t run for that wire—he’ll fly under it.”
Houssayen waited for Floweree to ask him something. But Floweree merely studied the device.
“Well,” Houssayen asked the question himself—“how are you going to get rid of it?”
Floweree hadn’t thought of that.
“You toss it to Drumgo. Drumgo’ll know what to do with it. You know Drumgo?”
Drumgo was Houssayen’s Negro groom.
“I know Drumgo.”
“Then be sure nobody but Drumgo gets it. Damned sure.”
A flash of heat lightning turned the room pale green for a split second. In that green moment, two small gaunt men, one helmeted and one unhelmeted, leaned rigidly toward one another.
Floweree closed his eyes at that flash and kept them shut when the flash was done. In the darkness that followed he heard Houssayen’s voice.
“You’re a mean little bastard, aren’t you?”
The rider opened his eyes.
“I have my reasons,” he replied.
Red’s Big Red swung his great sad head across the stall’s webbing, forth and back, forth and back, lifting his left foreleg an inch then the right; in a slow immemorial dance. A small floor-fan, at the rear of the stall, whispered a changeless rhythm; that ruffled the feathers of the rust-colored rooster that was Big Red’s best friend.
Were it not for her horse’s attachment to this mangy old bird, Kate would have wrung its neck and fried it. The stupid rooster was forever underfoot. But when you’re the owner of a one-horse stable, your horse is an only child that always has its own way.
‘‘Hold still, you long-striding sonofabitch,” Kate scolded Red when he shied, pretending to be frightened by the brush against his flanks; yet he didn’t shy too much. Red’s Big Red was a nervous stud who wasn’t against cow-kicking her if he’d dared. But whenever that impulse entered his mind she’d show him the broad white flat of her palm; and he’d decide against cow-kicking. Because with a single smack of the flat of that palm against his belly she’d bring him whinnying to his knees.
This afternoon he was sassier than usual because he knew she never knocked the wind out of him on a day he was going to the paddock. Red always sensed when she was getting him ready to run.
Kate Mulconnery might have spent her days teaching disturbed children. Her own need was to minister to beings less endowed than herself in flesh, spirit and wit. But as her own education had never gone beyond the barnyard, she ministered instead to the spiritual and emotional needs of a great inbred four-legged neurotic; slightly retarded and perpetually disturbed.
Warming, cooling, calming, currying, combing, feeding, coaxing, cleaning, Mercurochroming, bandaging, iodining and soothing this creature lent Kate the feeling that she was of some small use in the world.
‘‘Hold still I said,” she commanded Big Red now, “if you want to be a horse act like a horse.”
Why all her horses had been losers and all her lovers had just missed being dwarfs, Kate needed no shrink to explain. When you’re a single woman cutting toward forty you don’t need to have a witch-doctor to advise you to take what’s at hand. Nor that, if you’re a woman weighing 189 pounds who likes men, your chances of getting cow-kicked by a jockey are greater than those of getting cow-kicked by a horse.
A hint of rain in the air, however distant, had always had a calming effect on Red’s Big Red. Now he permitted her to pick his hooves with no more than an occasional twitch of his hide. He was feeling well despite the heat. Kate could tell.
“Looking for rain, Red?’’ she asked him, tying small red and green ribbons into his mane. “You want mud again, Stud? Like the time we won in Ohio?”
Red’s Big Red nodded: nothing he’d like better than rain bringing mud enough to send him splashing past all those horses that had been running away from him on these nights of fast tracks and dry going. Red snorted.
She patted his neck. “Get all the money, Red,” she blessed him. Then kicked his rooster.
“Frivolous claim” kept going through her mind all the way back to her trailer with the U-Haul behind it. Her life, recollected, seemed a sequence of frivolous claims: all put in by riders whose saddles she’d gotten out of hock. Now she’d paid out her last fifty dollars to reinstate a man she wished to trust; yet could not because he didn’t trust himself. That’s about as frivolous as a woman can get, Kate Mulconnery reflected, and began humming to herself.
Your cheating heart
Will tell on you
Their bed was unmade; the floor unswept. Pots, pans and dishes stank in the sink and beer cans rusted below. Forms, overnight sheets and copies of Sports Illustrated littered the table and the single overstuffed chair. A week of Floweree’s dungarees, shirts and muddied boots cluttered the trailer.
Kate kicked a sweatshirt aside, unhooked a black satin gown that had the sheen of age upon it, and slipped her feet into a pair of red slippers. She slapped on a floppy, flowered hat and took a swig from a half-pint of Old Overholt. Then she sank into the overstuffed chair with the bottle in her lap.
And there Kate Mulconnery sat in her foolish hat; in the slow soft darkening of day. Watching where headlights, beyond the woods, showed the night’s first bettors making their ways.
Now in the early-bettor’s hour, when the toteboard’s two hundred shuttered eyes light neither WIN nor PLACE nor SHOW; nor whether a track is fast or slow. In the hay-smelling evening light, among the litter of her days, she took another swig.
Till lamps, and leaves and damps and glooms, of times and homes that once were hers, and now were gone, returned like the twilit glimmerings of the headlights approaching; then receding beyond the ominous wood.
One October had come down the Mississippi like a cloud returning home to rest. Waters had followed through the woods. When the waters had ebbed, every tree had stood stripped of its April finery; bare, dark, and separated on a sea of sour mud.
There, in the sinking mins of somebody’s kitchen, the handle of an iron frying pan had loomed like a lopsided gravemarker; above the grave of someone who’d lived a lopsided life. Yet the very thing, the girl had decided, to pry a rusted lock off some long-lost river-pilot’s sea-trunk stuffed with treasure.
Plodding barefoot through the stinking gullies, she’d searched, among drowned roosters and cats the blueflies were already at, for the magic sea-trunk of her child’s fancy. If the watches and bracelets and rings and brooches in it weren’t pure gold, silver would do. If there was no silver, she’d be grateful for copper. If the dresses weren’t silk she’d be content with cotton. If they didn’t fit she’d cut them down.
Rye was for remembrance. Kate took another swig.
Thirty years now since those waters had ebbed. And all there had been, in the sea-trunk of all her days, was a U-Haul on which payment was overdue. And a four-legged brute she’d have to enter in a claiming race if he didn’t get into the winner’s circle this same night.
She’d had other horses before Red’s Big Red. As she’d had other men before Hollis Floweree. Some of the horses had pulled a tendon; some had lost speed. Some had looked good when she bought them but had later gone bad; and all the men had turned mean. Horses or men, whether paid for or gotten in trade, had sooner or later been claimed. The difference was that losing a horse didn’t wound her pride.
She drifted off into the kind of woman’s dream where one sees herself acting out some fantasy; yet knows she is only dreaming.
Kate saw herself leading a horse to paddock whose name she could not recall. Yet she’d run him once—just once—at Waterford Park. A stallion.
A horseman, wearing a Westerner’s hat, was leaning against an old-fashioned railroad bell and smiling at her as she approached. Then she saw that the smile was mocking, and turning about, saw that all she was leading was a small, pinkish penis. It was alive and had a rope-twitch about its head. In a surge of shame she tried to rid herself of the end of the rope in her hand. It coiled itself about her wrist as if it were part of the creature she led, and she wakened.
The room had grown dark. She lit the lamp above her dresser.
She slipped a gown over her head, then let down her bright hair; itself as tawny as a mane. There was always a bit of chaff in it; she brushed it now till it shone in the light. Then she braided it, as she’d once seen Ann Harding do in some forgotten film, about her head.
“Not bad,” she decided, checking her reflection in the mirror, “I look strong enough to braid trees.”
She clasped a string of imitation pearls about her throat, clipped on a pair of imitation jade earrings and smiled for the track photographer.
Dressed for the winner’s circle if not for a ball, Catfish Kate went to lead her horse to paddock.
Now the horses had been tried too often against the same horses. Moon River had outlasted Flying Indian, Lord Wingding had easily outrun Moon River; Port-O-Pogo had overtaken Lord Wingding in a rush, Djeddah’s Folly had nipped Port-O-Pogo at the wire. Then Moon River had beaten Djeddah’s Folly and Flying Indian had outlasted Moon River.
The riders had been tried too often against the same riders. The Mexican Thief had ridden the daily-double twice around this bullring of the summer night. Then Houssayen had begun getting the jump on everybody especially Casaflores. So Vaes had held Houssayen’s saddlecloth, coming out of the gate, long enough to get Casaflores the rail and bring in a route horse at 35-1. So Houssayen had told Floweree That Mexican Thief Gets The Best Of It Every Time.
Then the apprentice Duryea, D’Arcia and Josohino had come down the stretch stride for stride until Casaflores came down off the crown again, picking up speed as he came and got under the wire before all three stride-for-striders.
The red INQUIRY sign went up. While the crowd grew still in order to hear whether the protest, entered by Duryea against Casaflores, would be sustained.
The toteboard kept flashing—1-7-7-1-1-7 off and on and off and on until the PA system cried out most pitifully: Owner of red Corvair Illinois license DJ 5485 Come To Your Car Motor Is Running Doors Are Locked. And an old sad scuffler, car-less all his days, thought with relief, “I’m glad that ain’t me.”
The Mexican Thief won the photo. “Nine claims of foul against him since the meet began,” Duryea complained, “and not one sustained.”
“Mexicans get the best of it every time,” Floweree agreed.
So Floweree broke the Mexican’s nose in the jock-room brawl, Vaes accused Houssayen of having pinned Casaflores’ arms, a jockey’s valet swore the Mexican had swung first, Josohino accused Vaes of having no guts because he’d stood by and watched his best friend slugged, The Clerk of Scales said “I didn’t see anything,” D’Arcia said, “Leave me out of this,” and The Popcorn Woman under the grandstand said, “I never seen such a bunch of popcorn-eating motherfuckers my whole born days.”
“It’s one time the Mexican Thief didn’t get the best of it,” Duryea congratulated Floweree.
“Keep your saddlecloth tucked in,” Floweree had cautioned the apprentice.
But Djeddah’s Folly is moving up in ciass, an old sad scuffler quickly explained, while Port-O-Pogo is moving down: First bet the breeding then bet the speed. Speed up when you’re winning, slow down when you’re losing. In a claiming race look for condition and forget class. Never bet on the rider—bet the horse. Your strongest bet isn’t on a horse but against it.
“I know, I know,” another scuffler cut in, “but if a route horse is wearing bar-plates in a short event when the track looks fast but is actually sloppy, do I still bet the breeding? When a horse is clearly the class of a race, what do I do if I know he’s just a good old sport? Do I still bet the breeding? Do I still bet the class?”
“When a track is sloppy watch out for any two-year-old filly wearing smooth-plates in case of a change of riders, in event the moon is full and the slop turns to mud—she might just roll in. But never let anyone put the touch on you standing next to the fifty-dollar window. Tell him you’ll meet him in the hotel lobby and he’ll settle for ten.”
“But what do I do if my horse lugs in? And what do I do if my horse lugs out?’’
“If your horse lugs in, you lug out. If he lugs out, you lug in. And never date a girl vocalist whose favorite song is Somewhere Over the Rainbow—there’ll always be a dude in the lobby wearing long sideburns and green eyeshades waiting to take over her check.”
“And what do I do if I don’t do what I ought to do? What do I do then?”
“Just watch out for those sheenies D’Arcia and Josohino. Watch out for that hillbilly Duryea. Watch out for that ex-con Houssayen. If he don’t ride as he’s told to ride those New Orleans dagoes’ll bury him in the Old French Cemetery. But mostly watch out for that Mexican Thief. He’ll bury you under the grandstand.”
Watch out don’t forget, pay no heed don’t look now, keep in mind, get on, lay off, here he comes, there he goes—O Boy am I glad he ain’t me.
Now the night’s earliest tipsheet-shouter began hawking Father Duffy’s Hotshots—“Nine straight winners today, folks—nine!”
How this clown got two dollars a sheet just by turning his collar around, when the red-sheet, green-sheet and yellow-sheet touts were getting only a dollar, could be explained only upon the premise that Catholic bettors paid the extra dollar because they assumed it was going to the church; or to assuage the pang of guilt some endured in attending a gambling occasion. More likely, they felt they’d have a better day with The Virgin going for them.
“Father Duffy”—a renegade Jew—suffered no pangs when his clients (or were they his parishioners?)—went home with nine straight losers. There would be no lack of believers whose faith in The Virgin would remain unshaken.
Nor was he troubled by the Protestant loser who snarled at the holy father every night when he came in; and snarled again when he left —“Why don’t you turn that collar around and go to work, you bum?”
The holy father only smiled benignly; as much as to say “I forgive you, my son.”
He knew the Protestant loser. The PL materialized on TV, just before the evening news, five nights a week, offering financial advice. For fifteen minutes he offered consistently conservative counsel on investment. Then the camera-eye blinked out and he drew his Racing Form from his desk and raced to the clubhouse at Ozark Downs.
Six races later he’d be standing before the shoeboard, his jacket wrinkled by sweat and tie askew; the very image of a man in desperate need of a 35-1 on-the-nose shot to get him even for the night.
“No matter how much a man makes in his own business,” Father Duffy explained, “so long as he’s playing the horses he’s working for me. The dollar-bettor will stay with you longer, and pay you off sooner, than the thousand-dollar bettor. The higher the fee you charge for information, the more horse-players will believe in it. And when you’re hustling tip-sheets it don’t matter whether you’re giving out winners or losers, so long as you holler loud. The louder you holler the more they’ll buy. Here, I’ll show you.”
“Nine straight losers yesterday, folks!” Father Duffy shouted, “nine straight losers again today! Get your losers here, folks!”
Three bettors hurried up; each with two dollars in hand.
Chicago money is coming in on Good Old Ed, the word got out, but it won’t go down till the flag is up. So the old sad scufflers scuffled about till the flag went up before they put their money down. But Good Old Ed never got a call, because the Chicago money had gone down on Helen’s Peach; which was why the rumor had gone out to bet Good Old Ed. And each old sad scuffler, rebuffed once again, went milling around with a dead ticket in his hand.
Watch out for Duryea, he’ll drive through any hole he can get a horse’s nose through—watch out for Houssayen, he picks his own mounts —watch out for D’Arcia and Josohino, they work together. Watch out for Floweree unless he’s lost his nerve. But mostly watch out for The Mexican Thief when his horse begins switching his tail. Are they going to take a urine test on the Mexican’s $82.80 win? Did you know that Mexicans ride with only one toe in the irons? Why don’t they take a test on the Mexican?
Every night, as the small amber lamps of the paddock came up, the same word went out: Watch out for Duryea, Watch out for Padagua, Watch out for McLennon, Watch out for Anson, Watch out for Di Stefani. But mostly watch out for the Mexican Thief.
But not even old sad scufflers said Watch out for Hector Vaes.
The beardmen moved big bets away from the track while screening their action with small throwaways on other horses. They padded the machines with other peoples’ money to bring the price up on off-track wagers. While security men moved among the bettors looking for faces of short-wave past-posters; whose photographs they kept, for matching purposes, in pockets made to hold dossiers.
Anytime a face appeared in the local press, captioned Known Hoodlum, that face was officially barred from the clubhouse, grandstand and stable area of Ozark Downs.
Any person who had served time, regardless of the offense, was categorically refused employment on the premises of Ozark Downs.
Any employee discovered making a wager, while in the employ of Ozark Downs, was dismissed.
Consequently the waitresses brought in a whole tribe of unemployable touts to run their bets for them as well as for their customers. The bartenders watered the whiskey to make up their losses at the daily-double windows. And the women who grilled hamburgers and hot dogs brought in their own rolls so they wouldn’t have to account for hot dogs and hamburgers sold on the company’s rolls.
Therefore the front office had to hire people-watchers who were paid better than the people they watched.
One people-watcher caught a waitress coming out of the gate carrying stolen cocktail glasses. All she had to do, to keep her job, was to go to bed with him. But, after she’d slept with him, he had her fired anyhow. The consequence of this was that two weekend bartenders, one of whom had once been married to the waitress, beat up the people-watcher.
It wasn’t until the people-watcher fingered them that it was discovered that both bartenders were Known Hoodlums and that the people-watcher himself had served time. Everyone involved, excepting the waitress, lost their jobs. She was able to keep hers by going to bed with the Chief of Security.
Didn’t you see my rider stand up in the irons to let that Mexican Thief pass him? Could anything like that happen at Ak-Sar-Ben? Do you know that Barnett has only one eye? What became of Don Meade have you heard? Do you know that a hog can out-run a horse—for the first hundred feet? Didn’t Red’s Big Red quit at Miles Park?
That wasn’t Red’s Big Red it was Good Old Ed and he didn’t quit he throwed a shoe—I’ll see you at the fifteen-dollar combination unless a Chinaman wearing a blue beret crosses my path—everything else is superstition.
Some depended upon a sudden gust from the northwest to propel their selection across the finishing line; while others banked upon the wind to stop the favorite at the head of the stretch. Others prayed, as the flag went up, that all the winds of the earth would stop blowing for one minute and fifty seconds.
Some hung around the sellers’ windows, cash in hand, before the windows opened, fearing to be shut out. Others never bet till the horses were in their gates and there could be no further fluctuation of the odds.
Some balanced barometric readings against post positions; others rested their hopes upon drought or depth of dust.
And though some figured results by the changeful skies and others by the shoeboard, nobody asked how much either shoes or skies would count if a groom pried a calk just loose enough for a horse to throw it. Or how much speed would count if a rider took his mount wide simply by slacking his left rein at the turn.
And if a rider were bought and the owner didn’t know and the trainer didn’t care and the paddock judge wasn’t quite sure, how could the bettor be sure that the rider might not lose his nerve a furlong from the finishing line and fling his electrified whip into the soybean field just when he needed it most?
As no offtrack bettor could be certain, when he went to collect on a long-priced horse, that he might not find his bookie gone.
Gone on the arfy-darfy saying: “I wish this wasn’t me.”
The biggest larks were the photograph finishes. For the darkroom at Ozark Downs was very dark indeed. Anything could be accomplished up there short of inciting a riot: the horse that had won by half a head could be made to appear to have lost by that margin, simply by giving the finishing line an imperceptible slant; or by retouching the nose of one horse to make it appear to be touching the wire. The track itself, of course, gained nothing by this. But to the member of the camera patrol who had a five-hundred-dollar bet going, it afforded innocent merriment.
Till the big field lights came on in a blue-green glare and everybody warned everybody to bear in mind that a short-legged horse could out-run a long-striding one in the stretch if the long-legged one’s hooves had been weighted.
And don’t you know, they warned one another, that a sponge up a nostril can hamper a favorite’s breathing?
Don’t you know that a battery can be fitted into a whip? That a fistful of bennies up a plater’s behind will make him pass up Damascus?
A skinny old man and a stout middle-aged one were in a hassle among the seats beside the paddock.
“These seats aren’t reserved,” Fats, who was sitting, reminded Old Skinny; who was standing.
“I left my program on that seat,” Old Skinny complained—“that reserved it.”
“There’s no program on this seat, old man,” Fats contended.
“Stand up ‘n let’s see,” Old Skinny challenged him.
“Give the old man his seat,” someone behind Fats intervened.
“Mind your own business,” Fats put the voice down without turning around.
“I want my program,” Old Skinny persisted.
“Don’t get arrogant, old man,” Fats warned him, “I’m a doctor!”
This threat, implying not only that an M.D. was beyond ethics when it came to usurping a seat, but that he might see to it that anyone denying him a seat of his choice might be denied medical attention for the rest of his life, troubled the bettors about the pair. If an M.D. was immune to racetrack ethics, didn’t that also allow dentists to evict other bettors from seats they’d come early to get? And interns? And nurses? And gynecologists? And psychiatrists? And once the psychiatrists were in, how were you going to keep out pharmacists and mailmen? The prospect of chaos was imminent.
Fortunately the crisis was resolved by the announcer’s cry, “They’re off!”
And so they were, going six and a half furlongs on the other side of the track. They disappeared behind the toteboard a moment, then emerged with Rain Swamp, off at 11-1, neck and neck with GoGoGo, off at 5-2; until Popcorn Bummy, off at even money, charged down off the crown at the track and under the wire by a length and a half.
When the big shout had died the players looked around. Sure enough, there was Old Skinny still waiting for his seat. And Fats still sitting on his program.
“Two-year-old Anthony is in the Security Office,” the PA system announced, “he is waiting for his mother.”
Some bet the stable and some bet the rider; some bet the trainer and some bet the program selection. Some stayed at home if the day was clear and sulked, having put all their hopes upon a steady all-day drizzle turning the track from dust to slop; from slop to mud and from mud to a sinkhole and rising tides.
Watch out for a horse coming out of the paddock taped to its rump —they warned one another—it might be taped that high to keep the odds up against it. Look out for a horse on the outside post if he’s wearing one-eyed blinkers. Look out for a horse on the inside post if he’s wearing a shadow-roll. Look out for a rider who’s been flown in to ride just one race. Look out when there’s a last minute change of rider. But ignore the mud-bettor who keeps samples of mud, in Mason jars, from Santa Anita, the Big A and Hialeah: he may sell you one of his jars.
Then here comes the clown with yet one more system: all you have to do is add the selections at the foot of your program. “What does it say here?” “Nine, five, and six.” “Okay, how much is that?” “Twenty.” “Okay, now look at the second race—add them up.” “Eight, two and one makes eleven.” “Alright, how much is eleven deducted from twenty?” “Nine.” “Okay—number nine is the winner of the third race. It never fails.” And he walks off, program in hand; looking as though he were actually in his right mind.
While small whirlwinds made of soybean chaff, pursued one another tirelessly, out of the chute and into the backstretch, around and around, hugging the rail then going wide; sometimes lugging in then lugging out, in a race that had no starting gate nor even a finishing line; that yet made perpetual mimicry of riders forever driving.
Upon horses forever dumbly driven.
Bearing hopes of bettors who first lost their cars and later their crafts; later their homes and at last their wives. Yet went on discerning quinellas, exactas and daily-doubles by a fickle shoeboard, a changeful earth; and certain treacherous stars.
Don’t bet a race with a horse in it whose odds are even money or less, they warned one another. Don’t bet to place or show: one way to lose a bet is enough. Don’t bet jump races or races for two-year-old maidens. Don’t tout anyone else onto a horse. Don’t listen to anyone touting you. Bet when the odds are 4-1 or better—and if two horses in the same race look good, bet both to win. Don’t fight your losers. Remember there’s always another race.
But not one said Look out for Vaes.
No other woman would have risked making a public fool of herself, by dressing up for the winner’s circle, while leading a 23-1 shot to the paddock, except Catfish Kate. Yet, after the grooms in broken straw hats and manured boots, here she comes in her black satin party gown, her flowered and floppy hat with the pink ribbon about its crown, stepping lightly in red-tasseled slippers. Leading a big tawny ridgeling with red and green ribbons braided into his mane.
Helmeted riders were crowding the paddock bench. Casaflores, Houssayen, D’Arcia, Duryea and Vaes; but she didn’t see Floweree. It went across her mind that he’d taken off with the fifty instead of paying the fine. Was he stupid enough to pull something like that? She wondered. “Almost,” she decided.
Then she saw him leaning against the paddock in his silks. Just as Red’s Big Red decided to go back to the barn.
“Hold him, Catfish!” Vaes called out.
“He’s worried about his rooster is all,” she called back, laughing; and got Red moving back toward the paddock.
“He’ll be alright in the gate,” the Paddock Judge assured her, “we had a mare once who got so hooked on her goat that we couldn’t get her saddled less’n the goat came along and stood by.”
“The only kind of goat I’d keep would be a nanny,” Kate went along, “I wouldn’t have a billy. You know why their whiskers are stained yellow?”
The Paddock Judge expressed no interest; but Kate told him anyhow. “Because they piss their whiskers. Deliberately. To keep people away. You get a horse who doesn’t like people either ’n he’ll really appreciate sharing his stall with a stinking yellow-beard billy.”
The Paddock Judge cupped his palms and gave that big barnyard shout—“Last bus for the Sunday School picnic! Everybody up!” to summon the riders.
The little men in their bright silks sauntered to their saddlings. And every time a horse kicked the boards of its stall, an old sad scuffler peered through the webbing and thought, “I’m glad that ain’t me in there!”
Kate gave Floweree a leg up and Red’s Big Red wanted to leave right then. But Kate held him long enough to give Floweree final instructions.
“Take him back off the lead and lay about third or fourth going down the back side. Let him move on the elbow. If you can’t get through on the rail at the head of the stretch, circle the others—he’ll have plenty left.”
“I’ll try not to fall off,” Floweree replied; and flicked his little whip. Yet held Red’s Big Red tight until Moon River, Casaflores up, then Port-O-Pogo, D’Arcia up, passed his stall.
Then he swung Big Red in front of Lady Night, Houssayen in the irons. Kate kept her hand on Red’s bridle until Floweree swung the horse into the narrow brick-walled areaway between paddock and track. He glanced back to make sure that Drumgo, Houssayen’s groom, was giving Big Red plenty of kicking room. He pulled Red in a half-turn away from the wall, showed the horse the whip, took a double-grip on the reins, flicked on the current and touched Red under his tail.
Floweree felt the shock of terror flash through the horse and hauled hard on its head, talking low and reassuringly into the animal’s ear—“I see you, little bay horse, I see you.”
Big Red quieted and Floweree swung him out onto the track. It had taken him less than ten seconds to throw fear into Red; then to quiet him. yet the horse had come asweat.
Floweree cantered past the toteboard lights, keeping Red’s head averted. The on-and-off flashes of the board increased Red’s nervousness. By the time Floweree had gotten past the lights, the horse’s neck was shining with sweat.
Floweree leaned forward toward the horse’s ear, kneading the great neck with his free hand and asking softly, “You think it’ll rain, old buddy? How would you like mud, old buddy?” Then patted the horse reassuringly. Mud would never come in time now.
A wind came drifting down from the heights and moved across the soybean field behind the toteboard. The whole field stirred.
And old sad scufflers, lifting their eyes, saw a full moon barely risen, looking down in mild surprise; on grandstand and clubhouse alike.
A moon that appeared to know, somehow before the toteboard itself knew, all possible daily-double payoffs.
Yet could not remember the last time it had rained.
Port-O-Pogo delayed the start of the third race by backing out of his gate every time D’Arcia had him halfway in. Two starters, in yellow raincoats against the imminent threat of rain, hauled at the horse, rump and mane, until they got its big rump locked in at last.
Sensing the tension building in Big Red since he’d gotten the electric touch, Floweree murmured, this time softly, into the horse’s ear until the flag went up. Then he split the ear with a sudden shout—“Get all the money!” The affrighted horse leaped out a full jump ahead of the field, with Casaflores, D’Arcia and Houssayen on his tail neck and neck. Floweree cut to the rail.
Houssayen cut into Lady Night, veering her into Moon River’s flank and Moon River went off stride. Floweree got the rail and Houssayen got it right behind him half a length ahead of D’Arcia. Houssayen kept the half length to the first turn then took his horse wide in order to draw D’Arcia wide—the whole field might follow wide.
It didn’t work. D’Arcia let Houssayen go wide. Then got to the rail behind Floweree and began making up ground.
“Spinning out of the turn,” the caller made it, “on the rail Red’s Big Red by a half, Port-O-Pogo by two on the rail Djeddah’s Folly, Flying Indian in the middle of the track by three Fleur Rouge by one Flash McBride Lady Night by four trailing the field Moon River.”
Fearing to spend Red’s strength too soon, Floweree wasn’t letting him have full rein. The horse was running well. Houssayen, now far back, saw Big Red’s tail begin to blow and knew he’d done his own job well: all Flower would have to do now would be to hold the horse to the rail until he made the turn for home; then let him out.
He’ll make it by three, Houssayen judged the pace—nothing but Port-O-Pogo could catch him now. He saw Big Red beginning to draw away and instructed Floweree in his mind: “Not too soon, Flower; not too soon.”
“Red’s Big Red showing the way by two—two and a half—” the caller made it, “Port-O-Pogo on the rail in the middle of the track Djeddah’s Folly and Flying Indian head and head by two and a half on the outside Fleur Rouge by four Flash McBride by three Lady Night”—then he got a laugh by adding, “the distant trailer Moon River with his tongue hanging out.”
Now he ought to make it by four, Houssayen judged the final turn —then caught a flash of orange emerging from Port-O-Pogo’s outside flank against D’Arcia’s green—“Look behind you, Flower!”
He warned the rider in his mind. And as if Floweree had heard him he glanced back and saw Vaes coming.
Floweree stood in the irons, doubling the reins in his left hand and flashed the whip before Red’s eyes—the horse took off as though freshly shocked. The big lights flashed like an explosion above the line, Big Red swerved and Vaes drove Fleur Rouge straight up onto Red’s heels.
Fleur Rouge propped. Propelling a blue-orange streak over her head head-on against the rail. And raced on riderless.
Vaes lay face down with one boot hooked by the rail and his fingers spreading to get hold of earth. Then heard horses coming and put both hands to his ears.
Duryea stood in the irons to clear the fallen rider and the horse appeared to clear; its hind legs kicking dust against Vaes’ goggles.
“Loose horse on the track,” the caller appealed to the crowd, “please try to make as little noise as possible, ladies and gentlemen, so as not to frighten the animal”—as the great shout slowly died.
And a stillness came down upon grandstand and clubhouse like a great dark hand. Then a wind went about tossing drifts of rain into faces of all who were listening there; who didn’t know what they were listening for; losers and winners alike. Yet all moved back, murmuring, to the sheltering stands.
“Ambulance to the finishing line,” the caller added like a sorrowing afterthought.
Two groundkeepers raced to Vaes. One jumped the fence. But the other, a stout Negro wearing a red cap, tried to go under the rail and knocked the cap off. He bent to pick up the cap, appeared to falter; then picked up something else that he put in his raincoat pocket. He stood watching his colleague prying at Vaes’ left boot to get it loose from the rail. He’d forgotten his cap.
“Take the boot off, dummy!” some railbird shouted.
“Don’t move him!” a woman’s voice cried warning. And her voice, so querulous and thin, brought troubled laughter; almost like derision, from the crowd.
The Inquiry lights began burning an angry red while the yellow figures blinked beneath:
3-5-5-3-3-5-5-3
The ambulance, blocked by horses being led to paddock for the fourth race, got onto the track at last. By the time the stretcher-bearers bore Vaes into the ambulance, the pony riders had reined Fleur Rouge.
“One thousand pairs of panty hose to the first thousand ladies through the gate next Thursday,” the PA system reminded all bettors, “make your wagers early.”
“A rider fell,” a customer informed The Popcorn Woman, “his haid hit the rail.”
“If his head hit the rail he’ll lie still quite a spell,” The Popcorn Woman decided with finality.
“The boys were riding rough right out of the gate,” he added—“put some more butter on this stuff.”
“I don’t care whether that bunch kills theirselfs off one by one or in a group,” The Popcorn Woman assured him; adding a shot of oleo.
“He kept trying to raise his haid,” the customer recalled.
“I can always tell a killer,” The Popcorn Woman filled the customer in, “because he don’t have a sense of humor. And, if he does, he laughs all the time.”
The vasty hollows beneath the stands began ringing again with the cries of tipsheet-shouters. Paddock lamps burned in the heavy air like stars trying to bum themselves out.
“It must be an arfy-moon,” the Popcorn Woman thought to herself, “the outpatients are out in force.”
The ambulance siren had long faded before the toteboard lights at last stopped blinking. And the red OFFICIAL came on at last.
|
Win |
Place |
Show |
||
|
1. |
1 |
$6.60 |
$4.00 |
$2.80 |
|
2. |
4 |
$8.80 |
$4.80 |
|
|
3. |
3 |
$8.80 |
Floweree dressed slowly. While D’Arcia was being photographed with Port-O-Pogo, he’d seen the Chief Starter handing a whip-handle to one of the stewards. “I didn’t even feel it leave my hand,” he remembered. “It must have bust against the rail.”
They’d let Kate pick up the purse for show money, anyhow. But there was no need, now, of hurrying about anything.
Framed photographs of forgotten riders, that lined the color-room walls, looked down at him. And though he’d always felt that he knew them all, they looked like total strangers now.
Walking, bareheaded, back to the bam area in the warm drizzling rain, the small lamps of the shed-rows shone like harbor lights in a fog. In the off-and-on drizzle he took shelter under a shed. Knowing that Kate would pass, cooling Big Red.
He heard the horse’s hooves before he could make the animal out. They were almost up to him before he could make out Kate, in her flowered hat now sodden. He knew her slippers must be muddied. The horse was shining with rain or sweat. He stood under a lamp so she couldn’t miss him; then he had nothing to say.
“Pay your own fine this time, rider,” she let him know as she passed. And led the horse around the shed-row’s comer.
“Kate!” he called after her. She stopped and turned about, waiting for him to speak.
“I’m glad Red didn’t get hurt!” was all he could think to say. He felt her studying him in the dark.
“You’d fuck up a one-car funeral, mister,” she told him at last. Then turned and led Red’s Big Red away.
She’d be walking the horse for twenty minutes more, at least. That would give him time to get his clothes out of the trailer and be gone before she returned. If he didn’t get his things on the sneak, he’d have to face her in the morning. Best to sneak it, he felt.
The naked light above the trailer was burning and she’d left the door unlocked. But when he entered all he saw, that was really his own, was a pair of rider’s boots so down-at-heel they weren’t worth toting around the country any longer.
He shut the door and turned back toward the stands. Headlights were swinging out of the parking lot. Bettors were already leaving.
He stood at the rail while the riders paraded the horses, for the final event, past the toteboard. Their silks were already darkened by the rain; as if the color of every stable was black against darkening grey against black. The course had changed from dust to slop; from fast to slow; slop was turning to mud.
It was a mile and sixteenth event. And when they came into the turn for home the lead horse was already splattering mud against the goggles of the rider behind him.
Had Big Red entered in the ninth, instead of the third event, he considered ruefully, he would have had no need of all that block-and-tackle work. There would have had to be no inquiry. Like everything else, mud came too late.
Then a visual image of himself came to him: He was standing, in his civvies, before a small table on which lay the broken half of an electrified whip. Faceless men stood around him. He forced the image out of his mind: that was one scene he’d never make. And turned from the rail as the riders, their pretty-day silks muddied, began returning to the jockey’s room. He waited, in the shelter of the paddock, until they began coming out in their civvies, heading for the bars. He let them all pass, in the dark where he stood, until Troy Duryea came out; and called to him.
The boy peered into the dark to see who’d called to him.
“Hi, Dad,” he recognized Floweree, “What’s your story?”
“What’s the word on Vaes?”
“Bad, Dad. Bad. Broke his back.”
Duryea turned away—then swung suddenly about—My horse cleared him,” he absolved himself. A light high in the stands went out as he turned away. Others followed, as the apprentice moved toward the gate; one by one.
When the crowd is gone and lights go down—how strange a change! How ghostly a toteboard, where payoffs flashed past like boxcar numbers, when the board is shuttered, dark and still.
When no lights were left except those of the bam area, burning like lights in a shifting mist, Floweree stood at the rail and looked at the shuttered toteboard. The moon was a wan dying light. Behind it he heard the soybean field whisper faintly; as the rain began slanting across it. A line of horses, each one black and bearing a rider in black silks, began parading before the darkened board.
He counted eight horses, one by one. He looked for their numbers; but they wore none. He heard no sound of hooves; though he listened.
The lead rider broke into a canter straight into the soybean field. Behind him the others spurred their mounts to a canter and followed. Then the dim shrouding light went out. Darkness surged back across the moon.
The lights of the bam area, he saw, were the lights of a far-off country.
One he would never see again.