by Otto Penzler
And against all odds he had lost it.
A new voice cut through the fireworks of numbers, returning him to the here and now.
“I’m Doctor Patel. Your brother looks agitated.”
“Yes, he does.”
“I could give him something to help him relax.”
His endlessly churning brain immediately figured the odds against just slipping away, quietly and without fuss, a welcomed end to laying odds, and in that instant he tried to imagine the cooling of his brain, its inflamed circuitry finally soothed, the flood of numbers it sent like flaming stones through his mind now little more than a quiet mound of dying embers. If he could just get to that point of rest, that place where his mind could embrace the sleep for which he’d yearned since that day.
That day.
He saw it dawn over the city, a warm glow that slanted through his tenement window and curled around him and seemed almost to lift him from his bed and send him on his way, out into the street and down the avenue to where the sweet and lovely Margaret Shaunassey waited for him each morning, her books in her arms before he drew them from her and together they set off for school. He had during those brief preceding weeks been one of life’s winners, the boy who’d won the heart of the kind and beautiful Margaret Shaunassey, she of spring rain and sea-blue eyes. No more Eddie the prankster, with his gapped teeth. No more Eddie the loser, with his indifferent grades. Because of her, because of the love he’d won from her deserving heart, he’d become the waking Miracle of Holy Cross, looked at in wonder by the other boys, the guy who most among them had truly beaten the odds.
“Mr. Spellacy, you’re going to feel a slight pinch.”
He did, and with its bite he suddenly found himself lifted and carried away on a river of exquisite softness. The eternally cascading numbers slowed and after a time he became pure sensation, beyond the reach of clearly defined thoughts or expressions. Here, levitated, he had no need for devices of any kind, no need for pencils, or racing forms, or the little scraps of paper on which he figured the odds against this horse or that one winning this race or that one. The world of racetrack betting, of starting bells and photo finishes, now lay decidedly in the past, the odds against returning to it increasing with each passing second. He felt only the silent churn of his body drifting delicately forward, as if on a pillow of air, moving steadily and smoothly toward a final endless calm.
Only his thoughts were as weightless as he was. They came and went effortlessly, like small eddies within the gently flowing current. Translucent faces swam in and out as he lay silent and without fret, his bed now a raft gliding peacefully down a misty river. They stayed only a moment, these faces, then faded back into the mist. His mother, her hair pulled back, peering into a steaming kettle of corned beef and cabbage. His father’s face, smudged with grease from the mechanic’s shop. His older brother, Jack, all spit and polish in his army uniform.
The faces of horses surfaced, too, black or brown, with their huge sad eyes. They had given him more pleasure than any human being, and now, as he floated, they sometimes came rushing out of the engulfing cloud, strong and beautiful, their tails waving like banners in the bright summer air. Holiday Treat appeared, with Concert Master a link behind, noble in their ghostly strides, his only source of awe. They came prancing by the score, these horses upon which he had laid odds without dread. Something he’d never done with human games, baseball, football and the like, least of all on boxing. No, he had laid odds only on horses because though chance might rudely play upon them, it never fell with the dark intent of malicious force, and thus, despite its storied wins and losses, for him the track remained unbloodied ground.
Suddenly, he saw a head slam into a brick wall, a splatter of blood left behind, and closed his already closed eyes more tightly, working to seal off this vision, return it to the darkness.
It worked, and in the blackness, he felt the raft move on, bearing him gently away, down the placid, mist-covered stream. As he drifted, he saw a few friends from his boyhood, but none beyond those early years because his mind’s obsessive calculations had figured the odds against ever having friends his evil, odds-defying presence would not harm. He’d done the same with marriage and parenthood, and so no wife or child greeted him from the enfolding mist. The odds, as his eternally fevered brain had so starkly calculated, were against the safe passage of anyone who walked beside him or even passed his way.
A newspaper headline abruptly streamed through his mind, the words carried on a lighted circle, like the zipper on Times Square: LOCAL BOY DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT.
Freak accident.
It had begun the morning after he’d first heard the news that a local boy had tripped and fallen, slammed his head against a nearby wall, and by freak accident, died as a result. He’d stepped out of his third-floor apartment, on his way to school, when he’d glanced down the flight of stairs that led to the street. What were the chances, his mind had insistently demanded, of someone falling down them, because they were with him? He’d frozen in place, with his hand on the banister, briefly unable to move before he’d finally regained some control over his mind’s building oddity, then walked slowly, with a disturbing caution, down the uncarpeted steps.
She’d been waiting for him at the corner, just as she’d waited every morning for the last few weeks, her eyes upon him with unimaginably high regard, never noticing his hand-me-down clothes, the gap between his teeth, seeing what no other girl had ever seen, the nobility he craved, tender and eternal, his ragged knighthood. But now she seemed to stand amid a whirl of wildly hurtling traffic, a universe of randomly flying objects, the cement curb no more than a trapdoor over a terrible abyss, a door held in place only because he did not join her there, he, Eddie, against whom the odds were cruelly pitted, Eddie who brought misfortune, imperiling by his own ill luck everyone he loved.
And so he’d turned from her, and walked away, turned from her sea-blue eyes and spring-rain smile, and glimpsed, in his turning, a dimming of those eyes, a winter in the rain.
“I think my brother needs more.”
“It’s dangerous, Mr. Spellacy.”
“How long does he have anyway?”
“Not long.”
“Then it doesn’t matter. He just wants to rest.”
Another pinch and the voices ceased and night fell abruptly within his mind, sweeping everything from view. For a long time he lay, breathing softly in the mahogany blackness. Then from the depths of that impenetrable darkness, he sensed movement, but saw nothing, no relatives, no horses. Seconds passed. Or minutes. Or days. And far, far away, a tiny light emerged, pinpoint small at first, but growing like the dawn, until once again he was on his pillow of silence, drifting down a watery corridor of hazy light.
Still alive, he thought disconsolately, though this knowledge did not come to him as words spoken silently by his mind, but as a sensation mysteriously carried on the subtle beat of his pulse. It was like all his thinking now, composed not of coherent thoughts, but rather the product of unpredictable mental surges, the firings of his brain tapping out codes that seemed to be transmitted, soundlessly and without grammar and syntax, to his decoding heart.
Freak accident.
The repetition of the words struck so resoundingly in his mind that he suddenly felt another, somewhat larger disturbance in the flow. It was not so much a thought as an apprehension, the sense that somewhere far beneath the smoothly drifting raft a malicious creature lurked, huge in body, but largely still, sending ripples upward with its spiked tail.
Freak accident.
Night fell within him again, but not the blackness he sought, the dead calm of oblivion. Instead, it was the mottled darkness of his spare room. Within that room, he saw nothing but the gray-and-white flickering of the small television he kept on the tiny card table where he dined each night on food that required no cooking, since he’d figured the odds that a single match, used to light the single eye of a small gas range, might set his room on fire, t
hen the hotel, then the neighborhood, a whole city ignited because Eddie the Odds defied the odds, Eddie, whose cautiously discarded match,
dipped in water, cold to touch, might yet devour millions in whirling storms of flame.
A horn blared in his mind, and the flickering screen resolved into a view of the track, the horses prancing toward the starting gate, Light Bender in sixth place, hustled unwillingly into her stall, the odds against her ten-to-one.
Now a pistol shot rang out, and they were off, Light Bender in tenth place as he’d figured she would be, but moving in ways he’d failed to calculate, her head thrust forward like a battering ram, her stride lengthening, as it seemed, with each forward thrust, her black mane flying as she tore down the track, black hooves chewing up the turf.
From his gently flowing pallet of air, he watched as she rounded the track, eighth, seventh, sixth, now moving within striking distance of a fabled win. Then, suddenly, she began to fall apart, fall into pieces, like a shattered puzzle, her hooves no longer connected to her legs, her haunches no longer connected to her torso, her head thrust out farther than her long neck as if it were trying to outrun the rest of her.
He felt a violent agitation in his drift, and behind closed eyes looked to his right, if it were his right, and there was Light Bender running at full speed beside him, racing the fiercely boiling current, but running without legs, and now without a body, and finally without a head, so that nothing was left but her mane, long and black and shimmering… like Margaret Shaunassey’s hair.
Without warning she appeared before him as she had so many, many times, come like an incubus to pry open the still unmended rift within him, the cut that bled a crimson stream of numbers, and from which spilled, on each red molecule, the odds against his life.
She stood in front of Holy Cross School on West 43rd Street. He wasn’t sure he’d ever actually seen her on the steps of the school, though even if he had, she’d have been standing under the red-brick entrance marked GIRLS, not as she was now, poised between that entrance and the BOYS on the opposite side of the building. She stood silently, with her arms at her sides, dressed in her school uniform of white blouse, checkered skirt, white socks, black shoes. Margaret Shaunassey. How kind she would have been, a wordless impulse told him, to horses.
He felt the flow increase in velocity, make a hard leftward turn, then descend, so that he felt himself sliding down a long metal shoot. As he slid, he sensed the air grow warm around him. A cloud of steam drifted up and blurred his vision of Margaret but not his memory of her, which became all the more vivid as the steam thickened around him. It was as if his experience of her had become even more sharply defined, everything else a blur, the difference, as he conceived it, between a great horse recalled in the moment of its triumph and one recalled as merely another head nodding from the starting gate.
He closed his eyes more tightly and tried to remain in the soothing comfort of darkness, settle back into the flow, move toward death without further delay or interruption. But the lighted string of numbers began to move again, a snake uncoiling in his head, bringing back the odds he’d obsessively figured during all the passing years, the vast eliminations they had cruelly demanded, hopes and pleasures cut from him like strips of skin, all the sensual joys of life, taste and touch, the fierce reprieve of love, odds that had directed his life not according to rules of probability but to the probability of error within those rules, the terrible intrusion of odds-defying chance.
Freak accident.
The speed of the current increased again, and he felt himself racing headlong into an area of shade, the vault of heaven, or wherever he was, turning smoky. Through the smoke, he saw a figure close in upon him, slowly at first, then astonishingly fast, as if he’d traveled the distance between them at warp speed, so that he instantly stood before him, silent in the smoldering air, a kid from Holy Cross, short with pumpkin-colored hair, a rosy-cheeked boy half his size, but the same age.
Mickey Deaver.
Mickey the Clown.
He felt his closed eyes clench, but to no avail, because the vision was inside him, carried toward him on a river of rushing numbers. It faded in and out, hazy at first, but with growing clarity, until at last the mist lifted and Mickey stood in his school uniform, twelve years old, holding a blood-spattered towel against the side of his head. He stared straight ahead. His eyes didn’t blink. Not one red hair stirred. The only motion came from his lips, mouthing two unmistakable words:
Freak accident.
Now he was in the school yard, watching from a distance as Mickey sauntered over to Margaret. Within seconds she was laughing. Not very much at first, then harder and harder, as Mickey clowned and made jokes. Her laughter rang through the overhanging trees and spiraled around the monkey bars and curled through the storm fence against which he leaned, watching as Margaret reached into her small lunch box and handed Mickey the Clown one of her mother’s cookies.
A siren split the air, and on its desperate keening, he felt a hard jolt in the flow, like a train going off the track, so that he gripped for a hold, now clinging for dear life as he bumped and clattered, the flow rocketing forward at what seemed inhuman speed. The river vanished, and he was on land, his body flat on the hard surface of a metal gurney, wildly jostled as if he were being dragged across rutted ground.
“What’s the matter, Doctor?”
“Quick, get the defibrillator!”
The explosion came from the center of his chest, as if he’d lain face down on a land mine. It blasted shards of light in all directions, flashing images of past time through a roiling steam of memory. He saw Mickey emerge, whistling happily, from the rear door of his building, then felt the brutal shove of his hand against Mickey’s shoulder, and watched as Mickey tumbled to the side, knees buckling, so that his head struck hard against the side of the building, a geyser of blood spouting from his ear as he fell unconscious onto the cement stairs.
“Give me the paddles!”
A bell tolled, and in its dying echoes he saw Mickey gathered up, placed on a stretcher and wheeled into a waiting ambulance, a local boy, as the paper had described him, dead by freak accident.
“Clear!”
“Okay.”
“Hit it!”
He felt the jerk of the gurney like blows to his body, wrenchingly painful punches that sent him into aching spasms each time another jolt rocked the earthbound flow. With each blow a bell tolled and a year passed and logged within those passing years he saw the outcome of his act, Old Man Deaver dead of drink, Margaret confused and shaken, never knowing why he’d turned from her that morning, nor ever approached her again, never knowing that he was still Eddie, her white knight, bent on her protection, and so protecting her from himself, because by his own ill luck, a rift in the laws of chance, a little, half-hearted shove had made of him a murderer.
“Clear!”
“Hit it!”
He jerked in pain, and through the screen of his pain, yearned for the cushion of air, the invisible river, as his defiant brain worked feverishly to figure the odds that he might at least die beyond the reach of odds.
“No good.”
But figure as he did, calculate and recalculate, the odds remained the same as long ago, when he’d first begun to lay them, high against stopping yourself in time, getting another chance, high as the odds, he finally concluded, against a peaceful death.
“Too late.”
At least a billion to one, he figured on the dying breath of a final calculation.
But for the first time in a long time, he had figured them too low.
THE HUSTLE
Pat Jordan
The shooter rattled the dice in his fist and blew on them. The girl standing behind him massaged his shoulders and whispered in his ear.
The shooter said loudly, “Come on! Baby needs a new pair of shoes!” He flung the dice across the green felt table. The other gamblers around the craps table shouted out, too. The dice hit the far end of the
table, tumbled back toward the shooter, and came to rest. The other gamblers groaned.
“Craps,” the pit boss said. He raked in all the chips and said, “Next shooter.”
The young man and the girl moved away from the head of the table. An old man took his place. He was in his eighties, bald, with a friar’s tuft of white hair, a brush mustache and a much younger man’s pale blue-gray eyes. He wore a double-breasted navy blazer, a rep tie, gray slacks, and he fingered a felt fedora in one hand. The pit boss tossed him the dice and said, “You’re the shooter.”
Someone around the table called out, “Come on, old man. Show us what you got.”
The old man looked embarrassed. He leaned over the table and placed some chips on a number. Then he took the dice in his soft, pink, pudgy fingers, turned his head away from the table, and flung the dice backhanded toward the end of the table. When the dice came to rest the other gamblers cheered.
Someone called out, “Atta boy, old man!”
Someone else called out, “He ain’t an old man now. He’s a winner.”
Five hours later, the old man cashed in his chips. He fingered the bills in his hand. One hundred and seventy-five dollars. He put all the bills into his pants pocket, except one. He folded the bill into a tiny square and went over to the casino coatroom. He got his double-breasted camel hair topcoat from the girl behind the counter and slipped her the folded bill. She flashed him a quick, faint smile that vanished, without looking at the bill. She watched the old man struggle to put on his topcoat as he walked toward the door. She unfolded the bill in her hand, looked at it, a twenty, and then called out, “Thanks, pops! Thanks a lot!”
