by Otto Penzler
Jones told her that he had just had a talk with Mr. Grandors. She was not even to try to win the Bluegrass. It was Spats’s year to win. Fortune’s Child was to serve as a sacrifice; Michelle was to use his speed out of the gate to set so torrid a pace in the first part of the race that the favorite’s most serious rival, Windsong, trying to keep up, would fade in the stretch, leaving Spats, a classic closer, to win.
Michelle had been so surprised that she blurted out, “That’s not right, Mr. Jones.”
His mouth twitched under a peppery mustache that hid a scar from a horse’s kick long ago. “Yes, it is. Both these horses belong to Mr. Grandors. His money is on Spats. It’s his prerogative.”
“I don’t know what prerogative means.”
He nodded. “That’s why you’re going to college. So you will know.” He told her that she had a job, not a destiny.
Michelle understood about sacrificial pacesetters. Mr. Jones had taught her about the kinds of maneuvering that went on in racing. But she’d never thought he’d allow anything that wasn’t “right,” any more than she could imagine him drunk or having a temper fit. And if Raindancer had a chance to win, wasn’t it a cheat to take that chance away from him? Weren’t the trainer’s stories all moral tales about what happened to cheaters? All right, what Jones was telling her to do was not as bad as bribing a jockey to pull a favorite back, or fraying a cinch, or hiding a dangerous heart stimulant in a carrot. It was not as bad as the way trainers had given Viagra to their horses, even though some of the horses had died from overdoses. “Cheating only cheats the cheater,” Jones had often told the girl. “In the short run, you can fix a race, but in the end the best horse is the one with the best record. In the long run, go with the real odds.”
In the end, shouldn’t Raindancer win if he could? And if he did win…
• • •
Loopy Rojas took the money box from her and stuffed the cash into her knapsack. She said nothing as he put the box back in place and locked Mr. Jones’s office behind them.
“You can win,” he told her at the entrance to the stables. “I don’t know much. But I know you. I know Raindancer. I know Spats. I know it’s gonna rain. One-forty-six-something, you gonna do it.” He pulled her head toward him and kissed her curls, then pushed her away.
Loopy Rojas had his own rules. They were unlike the code by which Michelle had once thought Mr. Jones lived. Loopy appeared to see nothing wrong with fighting or lying, drinking or even stealing. Loopy’s rules were practical: Like, “Maybe coke keeps you skinny and maybe it makes you brave. But it makes you crazy, like the loco that stabbed your daddy.”
Another rule, the one Loopy now told her to pass along to her mother with the stolen money, was that, starting at 12:30 tomorrow, at Keeneland racetrack, Bits Harlin should place bets at as many different windows as possible, always betting different small amounts, saving her biggest bets to the last possible minute.
Michelle made one more effort to talk Loopy into putting the money back in Jones’s desk drawer. “My mom’s not going to believe you saved up ten thousand dollars. What if she decides to call the police and get you arrested?”
“Then you phone me quick and I’ll be on the road out of this crazy country before the police get the key in their big car. And lose that race? Same thing. Luis Rojas is dust on the road. But you gonna win. Your padre in heaven gonna be proud.”
“My dad went to heaven? I doubt it.”
“Doubt’s a terrible thing, chica. I see you tomorrow.” And he was gone in that fast slanting way of his.
Hours later, when Michelle walked into the Finish line, she still hadn’t decided what she was going to say to her mother.
Then, suddenly all that cash burned hot as coals in her backpack. She saw Mr. Jones seated at the smoky bar, talking to Bits Harlin. Mr. Jones, who couldn’t bear the smell of cigarettes, sat with his white-shirted elbow leaning on the bar, right next to her mother’s ashtray.
Michelle could feel her heart thud as strongly as she felt Raindancer’s heart during a race. Did Mr. Jones know that Loopy and she had robbed him that evening? She forced herself to go up to the bar and say hello.
But the trainer treated her the same as always; he just told her to go get some sleep, that she had a big race ahead of her.
He shook hands with Bits. “That’s a pretty nice house,” he said, and walked out of the Finish Line.
“What’s a pretty nice house?” Michelle asked, watching the bar door as he left and the owner’s son, Eric Grandors, entered with two young men who looked like fellow college students.
Her mother was showing her a circled photo in the real estate section of the paper. A little Dutch Colonial in a subdivision, a garage and lawn and hedged with new azaleas. “Dream on, right?… Michelle?”
“Sure, Mama, right. Dream on…” Michelle rubbed her mother’s hand. There were cheap rings on each finger. “… Mama. Loopy wants you to do him a favor.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“He’ll pay you.”
“Sure he will.”
“Just listen.”
Bits listened to her daughter’s story. Then she looked at the money in the knapsack. Then she took the knapsack to the back corner of the bar and counted the cash. She didn’t believe the ten thousand dollars belonged to Loopy Rojas. But she didn’t suspect the truth either. Instead she assumed Loopy had given Michelle money pooled by a collection of Latino workers at the Farms who needed someone to place their bets for them. And finally, she agreed to do so; there was nothing illegal in it, was there? If Michelle and Raindancer lost, they lost. If they won, Bits would get a twenty-five-thousand dollar cut out of the winnings.
“But maybe I won’t win,” the girl added, so nervous about her lies that she felt sweat running down her T-shirt under the red Campbell Farms jacket. “Mr. Grandors doesn’t want me to win and Mr. Jones doesn’t think I can.”
Bits lit a cigarette. “Yeah, Raylan told me tonight how you were a real long shot.” She blew a ragged smoke ring at the dirty ceiling. “So, baby, you going to lose? Or you going to show them? Excuse me.” Her mother went over to wait on Eric Grandors, who waved at Michelle from the end of the bar.
• • •
Loopy was right that it would rain that afternoon at Keeneland. It was a soft steady rain, and at post time for the Bluegrass Stakes, the track was muddy.
The big crowd cheered as the last horse, Number 14, Fortune’s Child, danced into the starting gate.
Bits Harlin held her binoculars tight to her eyes, never taking them from the red number fourteen and the red-and-white clocks of her daughter’s satin shirt.
Michelle and Raindancer broke fast and headed inside, catching Windsong by the far turn. To the astonishment of the announcer, Raindancer ran the first quarter mile in twenty-one and three-fifths seconds.
At the half-mile, Raindancer was still right beside Wind-song, challenging him to keep up. Windsong couldn’t do it.
In the stretch, in the soft rain, in the crowded splatter of mud, Raindancer took the lead.
Michelle felt the gray pulling away from the pack, carrying her with him until there was no mud around them, no noise, only the misty finish line ahead. But then she heard something. And she looked back.
What she saw was Spats coming closer. He wouldn’t go away.
Spats brushed past Raindancer, so close that Michelle could feel the leather boot of the champion’s jockey. Spats was taking the lead from them. They were only a dozen lengths from the wire. Spats’s lead was widening. For one terrible second, doubt rushed through Michelle. They were going to lose. Mud from Spats’s hooves splattered on her goggles so she couldn’t see; Raindancer faltered as her stick fell from her hand and, losing control, she grabbed at the gray’s mane.
She said to him, “Raindancer.”
It felt like a moment last summer when Eric Grandors had taken Loopy and her for a motorboat ride on a lake. At a thrust of the throttles, the boat’s large engines had li
fted them with sudden speed almost out of the water. She felt the horse gather himself beneath her like that, as if he could leave earth behind. She said again, “Raindancer.”
The gray caught up with Spats, they raced side by side for an instant, than Spats faded, faded to nothing. There was no one in the world but Raindancer and Michelle at the finish line and the far distant cry of her mother’s voice.
Fortune’s Child paid fifty-to-one. The odds had dropped at the last minute when, just before the race, at six-oh-five p.m., Bits Harlin placed the last of her bets to win on Number 14.
Bits collected, before taxes, $540,000. Loopy Rojas darted in and out of the crowd near her as she moved from window to window collecting the money in cash, filling out W2-G forms for the biggest bets. As she left each window, Bits put the money in Michelle’s knapsack. Loopy pushed in beside her, leading her to the crowded bar area, taking the money, cramming it in an old duffel bag. But turning around after collecting on her last winning ticket, Bits Harlin couldn’t find the groom. She stood there waiting for him, holding seventy-two thousand dollars, the payout on a two-thousand-dollar bet at fifty-to-one, minus the twenty-eight percent deducted then and there for federal taxes.
In the winner’s circle, Michelle, muddy-faced, smiled for the cameras. A reporter asked her, “How do you feel?” She shook her head, not wanting to talk. “No,” the reporter insisted. “How do you feel, winning this race?”
“… My horse won the race.”
Raindancer pushed his nose at Mr. Jones, as if to say, “I knew I could, too.”
Mr. Grandors was red-faced, glaring up at Michelle on the horse, except as the cameras clicked, when he hugged his young handsome wife and tried to look happy. Grinning, his son, Eric, reached out to clasp his hand around the ankle of Michelle’s boot. “One-forty-six-point-seventy! Unbelievable!”
Jones bent over, felt the gray stallion’s fetlock. “You got a bruise here,” he told the horse. But he said nothing to Michelle.
That night, when she looked for Loopy at Campbell Farms, the groom was nowhere to be found; the shelf empty where his hotplate and TV had once sat. When she called his cell phone, no one answered.
At midnight Michelle took $10,800 of the money her mother had collected to Mr. Jones’s office, thinking that she would just leave the cash without explanation on his desk. But she found the trainer standing quietly in the dusky room, waiting for her.
He told her what the official bonus would have been for her as winner. For him as trainer. For Loopy as groom. Loopy wouldn’t be getting his bonus though. Loopy was doubtless on his way home to Costa Rica. “Right before the race,” he added, “I fired him.”
“Because of this?” She handed the trainer the bound stack of hundred-dollar bills.
“Because of this.” Mr. Jones showed her a small vial of a drug called Dormosedan that he’d taken from Loopy. It was a powerful tranquilizer, and two cc’s of it would drop a horse to the ground. Much less of a dose could slow down a favorite, a closer like the big roan champion Spats, just long enough for a long shot like Fortune’s Child to win. Losers in a horse race weren’t urine tested. If Loopy drugged Spats, who would ever know?
Michelle felt sick to her heart.
The trainer and the jockey sat there in silence a long while. Finally she couldn’t bear it anymore. “What are you going to do?” She pointed at the bound stacks of bills on his desk.
Jones scratched at his grizzled mustache. “Teach you a lesson,” he said in his quiet voice and then turned away from her.
Michelle left the office. In Raindancer’s stall, she sat on the straw in the dark, quiet, listening to the steady breathing of the gray horse. So they hadn’t won. Spats was drugged. Rain-dancer and she hadn’t done the splendid thing after all. True, maybe her mother could now make a down payment on a house that couldn’t be moved, but that happiness wouldn’t happen because Michelle had won it for her. No, Loopy had hedged his bets, had cheated and slowed down Spats with a drug. And Mr. Jones had caught him cheating. It was true: Cheating only cheated the cheaters. Loopy had cheated them all.
“I’m sorry,” she told the gray horse.
Raindancer whinnied at the noise of someone walking toward them. She heard a knock at the stall door. Then a light came on in the corridor and Mr. Jones stood there. “Michelle, come on back to my office.” He walked away.
In his office, Jones held out to her a small folded bundle of money. “Five hundred dollars,” he said. “That’s what I won. Because ten dollars was all I could bet. On Raindancer. Somebody had robbed me.”
She said, “I’m sorry.” Then, “You bet on Raindancer? You put in your bet before you found Loopy with that tranquilizer?”
He shook his head. “No. I put in my bet afterwards.”
The trainer took the vial of tranquilizer from his pocket and handed it to her. The seal on the bottle wasn’t broken. Jones said, “Loopy would have used this. But he didn’t. I stopped him.”
She stared at the tall thin black man. “Spats wasn’t drugged?”
“No, he was not.”
“And you bet on Raindancer?”
“Well,” he said, “you made me a believer. But running that track in one-forty-six?” He whistled softly. “Young lady, that took my breath away.”
“So winning was all right?”
He shook his head. “Winning wasn’t your job. Your job was to take out Windsong.”
“But I did that, too.”
“Yes, you did.” Jones held up a framed photograph, the same newspaper clipping Eric Grandors had given her. The trainer stood on a chair and placed the picture on a hook already set in his wall, below but not far from his photo of Secretariat. “Eric gave me this picture.” Stepping down carefully, he nodded at her with a regard she’d never before seen in his lined, freckled face.
She smiled back at him. “So Raindancer’s not only a morning glory?”
Mr. Jones just held open his office door for her to walk through it. He said, “I’ll see you tomorrow at five. Go get some sleep.” As they moved into the corridor, Eric Grandors stepped toward them.
“Michelle, you want a ride home?”
“Sure.” She shrugged at the young man.
“Tomorrow at five,” Jones called after her.
She waved her arm without looking back.
The trainer leaned into Raindancer’s stall. “There she goes, Champ.”
THE LONG SHOT
Michele Martinez
Lisa Rivera had about twenty minutes left on her shift when the guy walked in and took a seat in a corner booth. She could tell from the way he moved that he was in a hurry, and from his expensive haircut and pinstriped suit that he had money in his pocket, so she brought him ice water and a menu ASAP. She could always spot a high roller, and win or lose they were generous tippers. Especially if she gave them reason to be.
“Specials are on the board. Something to drink?” She smiled just enough to show off her full lips. Lisa had been playing the same game in one form or another since she was twelve years old, and she had the moves down.
“Coffee. Black.” He glanced at the menu but didn’t bother to open it. “What can you do fast?”
“How long you got?”
He looked at his watch, and so did she. It was a gold Rolex with a diamond bezel, flashy for a man, expensive. “Twenty minutes, max.”
“Yeah? Me too. Before my shift ends, I mean.” Lisa’s tone was casual, not at all suggestive, but her comment was meant to test the waters. The guy didn’t bite. He just looked back at her, waiting for an answer. “It’s not real crowded right now, so say five minutes for a sandwich. If you want a burger, maybe a little longer,” she said.
“Make it a cheeseburger. Deluxe.”
“That’ll take around ten.”
“No problem. I’m a fast eater.” The guy smiled as if this were funny, so Lisa smiled back. He had white teeth and eyes so dark brown that they were almost black. He was good looking in an average sort
of way, late forties she guessed, with curly hair, graying and cut short. lisa held his gaze for an extra beat.
“American, swiss or cheddar?” She glanced down at his hands as she spoke. A wedding ring. That was always good, for her purposes. And manicured nails. This guy must have mad cash.
“American.”
She brought the slip back to the kitchen and leaned across the open stainless steel counter. “Hey, Earl, do me a favor. Move this to the front of the line. Customer’s in a hurry.”
“You see a crowd out there? Lunch is through, ain’t no line.”
“So move it faster, then. I wanna make him happy.” And she pulled her lip gloss out of her apron pocket and slicked the wand over her lips, using the metal napkin holder on the counter for a mirror.
Earl leaned out as far as his big stomach would allow, craning his neck. “Over there in the suit?”
“That’s him.”
“You got yourself a live one, girl.”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
“Be good, now.”
“You be good. Cook the food and mind your own business,” she said, and blew him an exaggerated kiss.
Earl chuckled as he turned away, making his belly jiggle, lisa watched him pick a wan-looking patty off a pile by its square of bloodied paper and slap it down onto the grill. It sizzled, sending up a lick of flame.
She walked back over to the guy, balancing a mug of black coffee and squeeze botdes of ketchup and mustard on a wet plastic tray. He’d been in the middle of a conversation, but he hung up as she approached and slipped his cell phone back into his jacket pocket. Lisa placed the items down before him one by one, leaning over just far enough to give him a flash of cleavage if he cared to look, but not so much that she was shoving her tits in his face. With this one, her instincts said to go slow.
