1
“What do I care what kind of horses they are? I’m not here to join some 4-H club.”
The old man was looking out over the rail at a bunch of horses pulling little carts around the track. He never turned around, but I could hear him good enough. “A smart kid like you, I figure you probably know the difference between stupidity and ignorance, right?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered him. Not challenging, asking. “Show him respect,” is what they’d told me. I always do the job the way the people paying me want it done. That’s my reputation, and I worked a long time to earn it. The better your reputation, the better you earn.
“You can do something about being ignorant,” the old man said. “Not everybody gets the chance to do that. But if you do, and you pass it up, then you’re stupid.”
“Okay,” I said to him, going along. “Could you tell me what’s so special about those horses over there?”
“Those are harness horses,” the old man said, talking like he was in church. “Harness horses, you understand? Not thoroughbreds, like they have over to Aqueduct or Belmont. Not thoroughbreds, standardbreds. What that means, they’re all bred to race a standard distance. One mile.”
“And the jockeys sit in those little carts—?”
“Not jockeys,” he said, waving his hand like he was brushing some dirt off his sleeve. “Drivers. That’s where this whole thing started from: horses doing work. Some guy’s driving down a country lane, hauling a load, okay? Another wagon rolls up next to him. One guy looks at the other, and, bang! you got yourselves a race.”
He talked the way a man does when he’s just told you something important, wants to make sure you get it. Me, I got it, all right. You can see the same thing at stoplights every night, only with cars. But I just nodded, so he’d keep talking.
“And they do it the same way today,” he said. “You see that big convertible over there on the back stretch? That’s the pace car. It starts moving, nice and slow. Then a gate comes out of each side, like a butterfly opening its wings. It keeps moving, so all the horses can get lined up behind that gate. When the car crosses the starting line, the gate folds back up. That’s the signal for the horses to go. The car keeps going until it gets away, then it pulls off to the side.
“A rolling start, see? Not like those thoroughbreds,” he said, almost sneering the word. “Those, they start them out of little cages, like they was fucking greyhounds, chasing a fake rabbit.”
“So the trotters, they’re like Old School, huh?”
The old man gave me a sharp look, trying to see if I was jerking his chain. After a minute, he gave up. I may not know anything about horses, but I learned how to keep my face flat a long time ago.
“Those horses out there; you wanted, you could trace every one of them all the way back to the original stud. Hambletonian was his name, and every trotter you see today carries his bloodline. He was racing way before the Civil War, that ‘Old School’ enough for you?”
“Damn!”
“And when they’re done racing, those trotters you see out there, what do you think happens to them?”
“They get killed?”
“Killed? You mean, like with those greyhounds? Nah. Some of them, the big winners, they use for breeding. The rest of them, well, they keep right on working. Those fancy carriages you see in Central Park? You know, the ones for tourists? Who you think pulls them? Those Amish people, down in Pennsylvania, where you think they get the horses, pull their buggies? They got some programs where they even get adopted. That’s probably the best deal of all.”
“The regular racehorses, they don’t—?”
“ ‘Regular’ racehorses?” he said, like he was mad about something. “You mean, like the ones you see on TV, get movies made about them?”
I just nodded; I didn’t say anything. That’s always the best move when it looks like someone’s going to lose it. I learned that one when I was just a little kid, even before I started getting locked up.
“You never been near a track in your life, but you heard of Secretariat, am I right?”
“Yeah. I mean, everybody’s—”
“Sure. But I say, Nevele Pride or Une de Mai, I might as well be talking about fucking Martians, huh?”
“I guess so. I mean—”
“Thoroughbreds, that’s all anyone knows. Let me tell you something, kid: Those nags, they’re nothing but toys for rich men. That’s why those spindly-legged things are always breaking down. They ain’t from rugged stock, working stock, the way trotters are.”
“But they’re faster, aren’t they? I mean—”
“A track star could outrun a prizefighter, too. But what happens when the runner gases out, got no breath left? Your trotters, they’re the true tough guys in the business. Go out forty, forty-five times a year and work for their money. Race in the rain, race in the snow. Race in a damn hurricane, you let them. They pull whatever you put behind them, too. You don’t have to be no midget to do it—some of those drivers are as big as you are. And you don’t have to be from Saudi-fucking-Arabia to own one, neither.”
“I don’t want to own one. I just want to win some money on them.”
“Uh-huh,” the old man said. Meaning, whatever was really going on, it wasn’t his business. “All right, here’s how it works. Winning money on the trotters is part handicapping, part investment, and part luck. If the race is clean—and, a lot of them, they’re not no more, not with exotics on every race—the edge goes to the man who really loves the horses. You got to have a feel for them. That takes—”
“What’s ‘exotics’?” I interrupted. I know it’s not polite, but he was losing me, and I wanted to slow him down so I didn’t miss anything.
“Combo betting. Like a trifecta, that’s one example. To hit one of those, you have to pick the horses who come in first, second, and third, in that order. Long odds, big payoffs.”
“What’s wrong with that?” It sounded okay to me. That’s the way life is—the bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff.
“What’s wrong with it is that big money always brings out the guys who like shortcuts. Those kind of people, the ones I’m talking about now—all they have to do is pay two, three drivers to pull their horses—hold them back, make sure they don’t finish in the money, okay? Then they bet the other horses in every possible combination. Long as they make sure the pulled horses are short-priced, they’re guaranteed a big score, every time.”
The old man lit a cigarette, hunching his shoulders and cupping his hands, even though there was no wind.
“They used to call a race like that the Big Triple. Usually had only one a night, on the last race; keep the crowd from leaving,” he said. “Now, they got one on damn near every race. Superfectas, you got to pick the first four horses in the exact order of finish. High-Fives … well, you get the idea.”
“Yeah,” I said. And I did. There was a casino at the track—not a real one, just slots, mostly—and it was packed to the gills with gamblers. Not horse-players, gamblers.
“Look at it like this,” the old man said. “The owner of the winning horse gets half the purse; the horse that comes second, his owner gets half of what’s left, and so on … all the way down to fifth. So if you own a horse, he can get you a check even if he never wins a race. They do it that way because it’s better for the game. It costs just as much to feed a horse that never wins a race as it does to feed a world champ, so the idea is to spread the purse money around, help the owners out, keep more of them in the game.
“Now the driver’s take is ten percent of whatever his horse earns in the race. Let’s say the purse is ten grand. That means five g’s for the winner’s owner, and five hundred for the driver, okay? So what you do, you tell the driver of the best horse, here’s a couple of grand for yourself, you do the right thing. No big deal. All you got to do is make sure your horse, it’s not gonna be his night, see?”
“If that’s the way it is, how come you bet on them?”
I thought that was a good shot I’d just landed, but the old man didn’t even blink. “You stay away from those kinds of races. That’s something you have to learn. Some guys, they strictly play the stakes races,” he said. “A stakes race means the owners have to buy their way into them, keep putting up more and more money as the season goes along. The stake, see? You ante up, that lets you sit in. But you have to keep calling to stay in the pot.
“Some of those races, the purse gets so big, you could never get to the driver. It’s not just that the driver’s in for a fat check if he gets his horse home—any driver gets seen tanking in a big race, he’s on the permanent shit list. You train one of the top horses, you know what he’s supposed to do out there, and you watch close. So even if the driver doesn’t get nailed by the track, the trainer, he’ll know.”
“A big race, like the Kentucky Derby?”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Like the Kentucky-fucking-Derby. Only for a trotter, that would be the Hambletonian. Named for the original, see?”
“I never—”
“I know.” He spit over the rail. “You never heard of it.” He took a breath, like he was taking control of himself. “Listen,” he said, “you think the trotters don’t run for big money, too? That Hambletonian I just told you about? Last year, the purse was two million, okay? That sound like chump change to you? They got all kinds of races for six figures, and a few go over that. There’s plenty of money in this game, you got the right horse.”
He sounded like a guy apologizing for something, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything at all.
“You couldn’t pay a driver enough to pull in one of those big races,” he said. “And finding three of them crazy enough to try, forget it.”
“So why wouldn’t they cheat in the other direction?” I asked him. “Isn’t there a way to make them go faster?”
“You mean like when they stick a garden hose down their throats and pump them full of baking soda? Sure. That’s what they call a ‘milkshake’—it stops their muscles from locking up so they still got plenty of zip down the stretch. But you mostly see that used on thoroughbreds, not trotters.”
“How come? They’re all horses, right?”
“No! That’s what I’ve been telling you. Okay, look, they call all standardbreds ‘trotters,’ but it’s not like they all trot. Some of them are pacers. Trotting and pacing, those are different gaits. But you got to hold that gait. If you start running, you’re out.”
He held up his hand to stop my next question, then he showed me what he was talking about, using the first two fingers of each hand: “Trotters move their outside front leg and inside rear leg at the same time; pacers move both outside legs, then both inside legs, like sidewinders, see?
“The big thing to remember is what I told you, they got to stay on whichever gait they pick. If they break stride, start galloping, the way the ponies do, you got to take them off to the side, settle them down, get them back to trotting or pacing before they can get back into it.
“That happens, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, their race is done right there. That’s why you never want to hit a trotter with a speedball. He’s likely to get all excited, start running. That’s when you can tear up your tickets.”
“But there’s other ways, right?”
“With all the drugs they let them take now, who knows?” the old man said. He tapped a fresh cigarette out of his pack, looked at it for a second. Then he said, “Listen, you don’t have to come around here with this fairy story, okay? I got asked to do a favor, and I’ll do it. You want to pick up enough so you sound like you know what you’re doing, let people think you’re a handicapper, I can teach you enough. But you want to really look the part, you got to put in more than a few days, understand?”
“Sure.”
“I can’t be here every night. It’s a long drive from where I live. But I can come maybe two, three times a week, until you’re ready, fair enough?”
“You’re the one doing the favor.”
“That’s right. Now, I got some books at home. About harness racing. When I come down Monday night, I’ll bring some for you to look at. You willing to do that?”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised. People don’t ask me to read books. “Thanks.”
“In the meantime, just hang out, watch the races. Only watch, for now. You start betting before you’re ready, you could get lucky, think you actually know what you’re doing. Worse, you could get hooked on the action. Then you’ll never learn nothing.”
“Okay,” I told him.
It was early the next morning by the time I got back to my room. Motels are better than hotels—you can park right outside your room, and the desk clerk doesn’t need to see you come and go.
I used one of the prepaid cells I always carry to make the kind of calls you make in my line of work. They never ask you for a credit card number, just an address.
The hooker they sent over was like they all are.
2
“Never fall in love,” the old man told me a week later. “That’s certain death for a handicapper. It’s okay to have a couple, few horses that are like your guys, sure. You follow them, root for them, all that. But when it comes to betting on them, you got to make sure they’re placed right, first.”
“How do you do that?”
“Class is one way; you can see if the horse is going up against tougher company than usual. Or if he’s in soft. But, mostly, you got to watch the conditions. See this race here,” he said, pointing to the form. “It’s a ten K condition layout, only for non-winners of eight thousand, last six outs, okay?”
“And even the winner, he only gets half the purse.”
“You listen good,” he said, like he hadn’t expected it. “That’s right. And remember, the horse comes in second, he takes half of what’s left. All the way down to fifth.”
“So, six races not to win eight thousand dollars, they couldn’t be winning too often.”
“Or,” the old man said, smiling a little, “they were kicking ass, but the purses were real, real small. Sometimes, an owner don’t expect much from his horse, so he keeps him at the small tracks.”
“Small tracks, small purses?”
“Yeah,” he said, handing me the program. “You got it down. So show me, which one of these is in cheap?”
“I think … this one,” I said, putting my finger on a horse who won five out of the eight races they showed on the form, but the purses were all under two thousand.
“Maybe. Maybe so. Next thing is to look up the track,” he said, taking the program from me and turning some pages. “That’s Bangor, way the hell up in Maine. Speed rating for that track is two oh four, according to this little program you bought. What’s it for here?”
I looked where he was pointing. “It says, ‘Yonkers, one fifty-nine.’ ”
“Good! Now this here one we’re looking at, he’s been going in two oh two and change when he wins up there. And that’s a real slow track. What’s that speed translate to down here?”
“One fifty-nine?” I guessed.
“Closer to the deuce, I think, but you’re in the right spot. So, could he win here, if he runs his number?”
I scanned the form, looking at each of the other horses. It was chilly out, with the wind blowing enough to move the flags. Maine, I’d never been up there, but I figured this kind of weather wouldn’t be any big deal to a horse that made his living in worse.
I went over the race real careful. Taking my time, the way the old man had told me to. The horse would be fifth from the inside when the race started. It wasn’t just the number on his blanket; the old man told me that every slot has to wear a color to match it, so you could tell them apart even on the back stretch. The horse had a black blanket.
“Early speed doesn’t mean as much as it used to here,” I remembered the old man saying. And, anyway, this horse never was first by the quarter mile even when he started from way inside, so I didn’t count that much.
“Yeah,” I finally said. “I think he could.”
“Me, too,” the old man said. “Even though those speed ratings are a pile of crap today, they give you some idea. Now I’ve been to that track in Maine, and, let me tell you, it’s one rotten joint.”
“The track itself?”
“Yeah. The track itself. See, the best tracks are firm, but they ain’t like concrete. A horse moving to a track like this, he’s going to feel like he’s floating.”
3
One of the things I had been reading about was the movable hub rail they have at Yonkers. The old man hated it. “Just another sign,” he’d said to me, when I asked him about it. “This whole track has gone lousy. One time, it was one of the top spots in the whole country … maybe the whole world. Had the best horses, biggest purses, huge crowds. Now look at it.
“First, they had to go and fuck with the starting line. Used to be, there was a long distance between the start line and that first turn, okay? Now, naturally, that means a real short home stretch, right? So, tell me, what kind of horse does that favor?”
“One with early speed?”
“You’ve been hitting those books,” he said. “I’ll have to bring some more down for you next time. More advanced stuff. Now listen: Before they had that movable rail on the inside, you could see the strategy and tactics play out right in front of you. Get to the front, dictate the fractions. That means, shoot that first quarter, then back off on the second. You want to keep the pace slow, because you know they’re all going to be coming at you down the stretch.
“Now, you go the whole way on the front end, there’s no cover, so it may be a tougher trip. But it’s a shorter distance home, too. If you’re still in front looking at the wire, you can’t block the others off—that’s a sure DQ—but you can ease your horse out a little to the right, give the other guys a few extra feet to cover, see?”
“Yeah,” I said. And I did.
“But you can’t do it that way no more,” the old man said, like they’d been out to cheat him, personal. “Now it’s all gimmicks. This track, they even run some of the races at a mile and a sixteen. What’s that supposed to be, a joke? These horses aren’t bred for that distance. You can’t handicap them, ’cause you got no background to look at. Might as well make them run uphill.”
“Not standard.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking at me close. “That’s right. They say this track’s coming back. Big purses again. That’s true enough. But that’s all down to the fucking ‘casino’ they got inside. That’s where the real money is.”
4
A month went by with him talking to me like that. “You been making paper bets for a while now,” he said one night. “You ready to pick one for real?”
“I think so.”
“You already got one, don’t you?”
“I … guess,” I said. Wondering how he knew.
“Show me.”
He studied the form I held out. Asked me a bunch of questions. Kept nodding. Finally he said, “Your guy’s no overnighter; he’s been on the grounds for five weeks now. Been going in the same class every week, just one step down from the top. Hasn’t won here yet, but he’s been holding his own. And there’s a driver change, too. You see that?”
“Yeah. John Campbell. He’s good?”
“Good? The man’s an artist. Some of these drivers, they’re nothing but thugs. Campbell, he knows you can’t whip a horse into winning, you have to guide him home, act like you expect him to get there first. With pacers, he’s pretty good,” the old man said, “but you put him behind a trotter, there’s no driver out here that can touch him.”
My horse was a chesty bay named Little Eric, a Noble Gesture trotter out of an Arsenal mare. He was sluggish out of the six-hole, but he fired up and went first-over just past the quarter, which had gone in a soft thirty-flat. Just as he caught up to the lead horse, Simple Justice, that one picked up speed, and kept Little Eric parked out. The half went in fifty-eight and four.
Little Eric finally got clear by going slingshot on the clubhouse turn, but he’d come a long way without cover and the heavy chalk, Bruno’s Boy, had popped down into the inside lane, as the movable hub rail lived up to its name.
Bruno’s Boy was really rolling, but my horse kept chugging on, dead game. Little Eric held off Bruno’s Boy by a neck. The tote board said he paid $18.20 to win. On the program, he’d been what the old man told me was a classic overlay. That meant he wasn’t the favorite, and he didn’t deserve to be, but he was a lot better than the 13-1 morning line made him out to be.
“Nice,” is all the old man said. I didn’t know if he said that because I’d picked the horse, or because I didn’t jump up and down and scream as they came down the stretch, the way some people do. “Lames,” the old man called them. “Like chumps who yell at the dice in a casino. The horses hear all that shouting about as much as the dice do. Makes as much difference to them, too.”
I made my way to the window, waited my turn on line, the program open in front of me, heavily marked up in red. Under the brim of my hat, my eyes swept the area. But I didn’t see what I was looking for.
6
“Thanks,” the old man said, when I handed over the beer I brought back for him.
He took a sip. Looked over at me. “You never get one for yourself,” he said.
I just shrugged.
“You don’t smoke, neither. Against your religion?”
“I don’t do that, either,” I said.
He closed his eyes like he was thinking something over, but he didn’t say anything for a while.
I went back to looking at the program.
The old man tapped me on the forearm. “See that?” he said, pointing at the giant tote board in the infield. “Forget that Morning Line crap—you can watch the real action right here. Remember, the track don’t set the odds, the bettors do. That’s all ‘pari-mutuel’ means: you’re betting against all the other players. The track takes its piece off the top. Same as the house does in a poker game. That’s the only sure way to make money, any kind of gambling. Live off the takeout.”
“What about when you bet with a bookie?”
“Don’t bet with bookies,” he said, like we were done talking.
I studied the tote board. Watched the numbers jump around.
“Any chump can be a gambler,” he said. “All it takes is money. Or credit, if you’re fucked up enough. You, you’re learning to be a handicapper.”
“Handicappers don’t bet with bookies? Where do they go, then, OTB?”
“OTB? That’s Sucker Paradise. You bet with those thieves, there’s another takeout, on top of the track’s. A horse that pays ten dollars at the track, he’d be a nine-eighty horse at OTB, see? You let politicians run anything, the first thing they do is drain it dry. OTB, that’s the only bookie operation in history to lose money. A pro wouldn’t go near that joint. Let’s say you hit a big enough number—like a Pick 4, which is a righteous play for a handicapper, ’cause you’re stringing winners, not betting on horses to come in third or crap like that. At OTB, IRS takes its cut right at the window. They rob you at both ends.”
I didn’t say anything. That’s the way things are, everywhere.
“Used to be, you got a wino to cash a big ticket for you,” he said. “Ten-percenters, we called them, ’cause that’s the piece they got out of it. All they had to do was show a Social Security card. It got reported to the IRS, sure, but they didn’t take out the money off the top. You walked off with ninety percent, all cash.”
I studied the tote board for a few minutes. “How come the show pool has so much money in it?” I asked him.
“There’s a bridge-jumper in the house,” he said.
“What’s that?”
The old man lit himself a smoke. “This is how it works. The more the bettors like any particular horse, the less it’s going to pay, understand? By law, the track has to pay at least $2.10 on each race, no matter what the odds. Now, you see the seven horse up there?”
“Yeah.”
“Look at those odds: one to nine. Only time you see something like that, the horse is a monster. The next race, you see it’s a Sire Stakes elimination, okay? There’s maybe fifty horses eligible for the final, so they break them into groups, then the winners get to race each other. See, on the program? There’s six of these races tonight. You with me so far?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s happening here is that the seven horse, Stephen’s Susie, she got put in with a bunch of stiffs. Those others don’t belong on the same track as her. Look at her lines: she’s already won a couple of hundred grand, see there? Next best filly to her has banked thirty-something and she had to run twice as many races to get even that much. Stephen’s Susie, she’s already gone in fifty-three. For a two-year-old trotting filly! Only one other horse in the field ever got below two flat, and that was at Woodbine, where they all fly. The next race, it’s going to be a slaughter.”
“So, if everybody bets on her, it’s not going to pay anything?”
“Not if you’re a ten dollar bettor, it won’t. But look at that board. Look at it close. When the odds get like that, you get the same $2.10 whether your horse comes in first, second, or third. So you play the monster to show, you’ve got the closest thing to a mortal lock you’ll ever see on a racetrack. Figure it that way, it’s a five percent return on your money in under two minutes. But that only works if you throw serious coin. You plunk down two, three hundred K, and, so long as the monster gets at least third, you get your stake back, plus ten, fifteen thousand profit.”
“But what if the horse, I don’t know, breaks stride, like you said? Even a great horse wouldn’t win, then.”
“That’s why they call them bridge-jumpers, kid.”
7
Back in my motel room, I studied the photographs they’d given me before I left.
“This is him,” the man who’d hired me said. “He knows he’s marked, but the fucking rat’s a degenerate gambler—he has to play. And he’s gotta watch the action, see it with his own eyes. He’s not crazy enough to walk into a real casino, so we figure it’s got to be the track. This one, it’s got those slots, too. Sooner or later, he’s going to show.
“So what you need is a reason to be there every night. And we’ve got that covered for you, too. You’re going to be a real hardcore gambler, the kind of guy who practically lives on the premises, never misses a day. After a while, you’re part of the scenery; nobody pays attention.”
I didn’t say anything. That’s what people like him expect.
“We might even get lucky with a heads-up,” he told me. “The only racehorses this little weasel knows anything about are the kind you rent by the hour. This Arnie guy, he’s all about flash. Never goes anywhere without full front. He picks the wrong whore to bring with him one night, we’ll get a call. That happens, you’ll get one, too. But don’t count on it, all right? Just study those photos; make sure you’ll know him if you see him.”
I knew what they’d expect me to do with the photos after I was done studying. The man gave me half the money in front, like always. Said it was mine to keep even if I didn’t do the job. I knew that meant they had other people working the same job, but I didn’t ask any questions. That’s not my place—I’m a contract man, not a family member.
So I put in a couple of months, seeing the old man two-three nights a week, just like he’d said. Some days, too—he told me the real pros never miss the baby races—two-year-olds racing for stakes their connections put up when they were born—or the Qualifiers—where horses coming in from another track have to prove they can go the course in under a certain time.
You can’t bet on any of those races, but it’s the best place to get advance info. “Like scouting a farm team, see who’s going to be a star in a couple of years,” the old man said.
He kept a notebook, and he made a separate section for each new horse he liked. Every time that horse would go after that, the old man would be there, making his notes.
He showed me how to make a notebook of my own, but he never showed me what was in his—that wasn’t part of the deal.
“Every handicapper’s got his own system,” he said. “And it all comes down to weight.”
“I thought weight didn’t matter with trotters. You said it’s only the thoroughbreds who have to—”
“Not the weight they pull,” he said. “The weight you put.”
“Huh?”
“Look, kid, you see this program?”
“Sure.”
“Got all kinds of information, if you take the time to learn how to read it. Most of the suckers who come here, they don’t even bother to do that, and that’s good, because they’re the ones we’re betting against, remember? But even if you learn to read the program perfect, even if you check the breeding books, read everything you can get your hands on, you’re still working with the same information anyone can get: Like how many times the horse has been out, how much money he’s won, his fastest time, what class he’s been in … right?”
“I … guess. Sure. But, all that information, how do you know what piece is more important than another?”
“That’s the trick!” the old man, said, like he was proud of me for figuring it out. “That’s the weight I was talking about. Some handicappers, they’re speed whores. Others, they go for horses that race better in the mud. Or take a drop in class.”
“What about the breeding? You said there were books on it, so that’s real important, right?”
“To some people, yeah. To them, bloodlines are everything. Me, I never went much by that. You got horses, you look up who their mother and father was, you’d think they’d be rockets. But they turn out to be duds, never even make it to a racetrack. Other ones, you never heard of any horse in their whole family tree, just a bunch of mutts. And they turn out to be world-beaters.”
“What do you look for, then?”
“Heart,” the old man said.
“Where’s that on the program?”
“It’s not supposed to be on the program.”
“So how—?”
“That’s mine,” the old man said. “I was asked to teach you the game, and I’m doing that. And one of the things you learn is, a real handicapper, he puts together a system that works, he don’t share it with anyone, ever. You ever watch those commercials on the TV in the middle of the night? The ones where this guy, he’s made a zillion dollars in real estate, now he’s going to show you how to do the same thing for a couple of hundred bucks?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You believe them?”
“Come on.”
“Let’s get something to eat,” the old man said.
8
“You don’t think you know enough yet?” the old man asked me.
I’d been going to the track with him for more than three months straight. I’d moved around a few times, just in case anyone was paying attention. It’s easy for me to move, only takes an hour or so. I don’t own a lot of stuff.
“No,” is all I said.
“You got all the lingo down, now. You know how to read the program, how to bet, that’s more than ninety percent of the lame stugotz that hang around any track.”
“But there’s more, right?”
“Sure. There’s always more. Me, I’m still learning, picking stuff up.”
“Okay, then.”
He gave me a look, but he didn’t say anything. That night, we sat in his favorite place in the grandstand. “You know why this is the perfect spot?” he told me the first time we sat there. “You can see the action in the turns, on the backstretch, and coming home, too. That’s ’cause this is a half-mile track, get it?”
“No. What difference could that make? I mean, they all run the same distance, right?”
“Half-mile track means two circuits to get the whole mile in, okay? Two circuits, four turns.”
“They’re not all like this one?”
“Hell, no. Most of them are mile tracks, now. Like the fucking Meadowlands. Used to be a lot of five-eighths courses, too—that’d be three turns, real long stretch. Like Sportsman’s Park just outside Chicago, that was a real beauty.”
“So, one mile, that’s only two turns?”
“Yeah,” he said, like he was sucking on a lemon. “Gives you faster times, sure, but you can’t actually see most of the race, unless you’re one of those guys don’t mind wearing fucking opera glasses.
“By me, binoculars narrow it down too much. You can only watch a few horses at the same time, depending on how tight the flow is. You miss a lot that way. Most people like the two-turn tracks, because the horses run closer to form there. That means the favorites win more often.
“I’m not talking about horse people; I mean the guys who bring their girlfriends to the track, watch them bet their birthday numbers, think it’s cute.”
I thought about the guy I was watching for. Then I said, “That’s good for guys like us, right?”
He gave me one of his looks, but he didn’t say anything.
10
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked him one day. We were at a diner, a short distance from the track, having breakfast, waiting for the gates to open so we could watch some new shippers qualify.
“All my life,” he said. “My old man used to take me, when I was just a kid. That’s why they ran the trotters at night, so working guys could go. But I didn’t do it like this, come anytime I want, I mean, until I retired.”
“You had a regular job?”
“What, you think everyone’s like you?” he said. “Con Edison, just like my old man. Thirty-five years I put in.”
“Didn’t seem long to me,” he said. “I figured, I had things to look forward to. My old man, he died on the job, when I was still in high school. I remember him always saying he was going to retire someday, spend all his time playing golf.
“My old man loved golf, but he only got to play once in a blue moon. He was going to move to Florida—they got a golf course down every block, there. But he never got to go. Me, I could have had what I wanted right here in Yonkers.”
“So what got messed up?”
“Everything got messed up. My wife, Pam, she had plans, too. Just like my old man. She never got to see any of them come true, either. Fucking cancer.”
He looked down at his hands. Big hands, I noticed. I always look at a man’s hands—the eyes show you the right-now—it’s always the hands that show you the history.
After about a minute, he said, “My kids, I got a boy and a girl. He’s a lawyer, she’s a schoolteacher. Only she don’t teach. Anyway, the boy, he lives in Los Angeles, and my daughter, she’s all the way down in South Jersey. After Pam passed, I started coming here all the time. But then it turned lousy, like I said.
“So now, I got me a place upstate. There’s a sweet little track twenty minutes from my house. It’s not major league, but it’s got some nice horses going. And not just the old campaigners that aren’t fast enough for the big purses anymore; the prospects, too. You can pick out the ones that are going places. It’s kind of fun, watch them after that. Not in person, I mean in the papers. See how they made out.”
“You miss your kids?”
“About as much as they miss me,” he said. “I always worked second shift. Put in a lot of overtime, too. Always adding to that goddamned pension, that was me.”
One day, the old man said he’d showed me what he knew—a piece of what he knew, he made sure to tell me. That’s how I knew it was time for him to split.
“You don’t have to do this … what you do, Henry.” That was the first time he ever said my name. “I know you must get paid good, but there’s not even a pension at the end, right?”
I nodded. The old man knew more than I thought he did. There’s only one way a guy who does my kind of work gets to retire.
12
After the old man went away, I did the same stuff he did. I was there every night. I kept my notebook, and I watched. They never called me off, and I got paid expenses every week, so I figured they hadn’t found that Arnie guy yet.
One Tuesday night, there wasn’t a single pacer I liked in the first race, but I was crazy about a trotter going in the second—a tough little gelding named Sheba’s Pride, eleven years old and he still knew the way home. That was something the old man taught me, how some of the older horses had the track figured out better than the drivers did.
Sheba’s Pride was in with 5K claimers, grinders who weren’t ever going to get claimed, just there to pick up a pick of the purse. My horse had a life mark of fifty-one and one, but he took that when he was a four-year-old. Three of the other horses had gone faster, and much more recently. But not one of them had taken their mark on a half-mile track, like my horse had.
It was a nasty day, cold with heavy clouds; the infield flags showed a hard wind, too. None of that was going to bother my horse. I had watched him qualify when he shipped in from Freehold—another four-turn track. His driver had him pocket-sitting all the way; he could have cruised home second, qualified easy. But he pulled outside, challenged, and put together a last quarter in twenty-eight and three, open lengths between him and the horse that had been on top.
“They have to want it,” the old man had told me. I knew that was what he meant by “heart,” even though he never said the word.
I had wheeled Sheba’s Pride, so I had the Double covered if he could pull off his half. I didn’t care who won the first, but I watched anyway. The seven horse tried to cut across, but he moved too sharp. The interference break took out the front-runners … lucky none of the horses went down.
Some rat with no business winning anything managed to stagger home ahead of what was left. Paid a ridiculous forty-seven bucks for the win.
When I checked the board, it was like the stakes just shot up. I knew if Sheba’s Pride came through for me, I was looking at a real bundle.
The marshal called the trotters, and they rolled in behind the moving gate. When the pace car pulled away, three of them fought for the lead, but Sheba’s Pride showed nothing going into the first turn. He was shuffled back, sixth on the rail, and he stayed there all the way through the first two quarters, even though the second went in a stone-slow thirty and four.
Just past the half, Sheba’s Pride pulled off the rail, but he wasn’t the only one with that idea. Usually, that’s good—you want to flush cover to run behind if you can. But he was parked deep, with two horses ahead of him on the outside instead of just one.
I glanced at the timer, the three-quarters had gone in 1:27.4, so I knew the lead horse wouldn’t be able to hold on, but he was trying like hell anyway.
The first horse coming up on the outside slingshotted the clubhouse turn and made his move. The horse behind him had his nose in the other driver’s helmet. Just as those two pulled past the leader, Sheba’s Pride swung out three-wide and made his own lane.
Down the stretch, it looked like the two horses who’d been running outside were really flying. Sheba’s Pride was just grinding away on the outside, closing on the leader, but not fast enough. But he kept grinding, right to the wire. The photo had his nose in front. The Double paid $709.50, and I had it five times.
I didn’t go cash my tickets right away. I wanted to watch the replay on the monitors. And make some marks in my notebook.
I wished the old man had been there, but I didn’t know why.
13
Late one afternoon, I got a call. They told me the job was over. They didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask. Instead of going to the track that night, I checked out of the motel and drove to a new one, all the way over by JFK.
The next morning, I packed my duffel bag: my clothes, my tools, and my notebook. I would have ditched everything except the notebook, but I didn’t know how this would come out. That’s why the virgin semi-auto I’d bought for the job I never did went into the slot built behind the glove box. Then I threw the duffel in the trunk of my car and started driving.
I’m going to try my luck at this sweet little track upstate I heard about. If I can be good at anything besides the one thing I already knew I was good at, maybe I could be good, period. A good man, I mean.
I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out, soon enough.
for Stephen Chambers