Mata Morose won wire-to-wire by five.
“How did you know that?” Shelly demanded, staring at me angrily.
“Hunch,” I answered.
Shelly believed in the Form as if it were some kind of laboratory-certified navigational instrument and had to run his finger down the columns again to see where he’d miscalculated. The problem with the Form player is he’s going to catch very few longshots. After he weighs the numbers, enters his pace model, considers the Plum and the Beyer, jockey changes, bleeder medication, weight, age, morning workouts, and the rest of it, he’s going to come up pretty much with the same horse that everyone else using a Racing Form has. The guy who sets the morning line is a Form player too. Only granny here with her bridge club betting her grandson’s age and the guy who’s spent the last decade and a half in a mental institution and developed through blindness, head trauma, dreams, drugs, and deprivation a heightened perception of reality is going to nail the Chilean shipper from Bay Meadows.
“Yeah?” said Shelly, shoving out his chin. “All right, who you like in the second then?”
“Don’t know yet.” I had circled Red Freak Wanna Ride, but the game had changed. “I gotta look.”
Shelly had an excellent memory and knew his bloodlines, the successful dams and sires all the way back to the triple-crown-winner Whirlaway. His conservative style of play had not wavered in twenty years so that year in and year out he was close to a break-even player, grinding along from favorite to favorite. He muttered, frowned, and dragged around squinting at the Racing Form trying to figure how he could fit the newly acquired information into the next race. Was the rail dead? Was it going to be a longshot day? Were Bay Meadows shippers suddenly viable? Should he just go flush all his money down the toilet now?
In the next race, for fillies and mares five years old or under who had not won two races in their career, Shelly glowered at me doubtfully, wondering if I’d pull another rabbit out of my hat. I was going back and forth between Red Freak Wanna Ride, the eight horse, and Silly Pilgrim, the six, until all of a sudden I heard the one, River Shannon, say, “When I get back I’ll have carrots and apples,” which is what my father always gave his winners (the losers got Purina and hay). And though it wasn’t my father’s horse, I said, “I think it’s River Shannon.”
Shelly smacked his program indignantly and said, “How? Thing hasn’t won in two years.”
“Just a feeling,” I said coyly. “Call it carrots and apples.”
The elderly woman in front of us, who’d also gotten Mata Morose in the previous race on a number coinciding with her grandson’s age, beamed at us. “I’ve got River Shannon, too.”
Shelly, thinking he’d nail the first fifty-to-one shot of his life with the help of a recovering schizophrenic and a doddering grandmother, reluctantly joined our cause and volunteered to roll it into some pick threes.
River Shannon couldn’t get out of the gate, and though she made a valiant dash on the grandstand turn she lugged out wide in the stretch and finished eighth in a field of nine. Shelly smoldered.
I said, “Hey look, it’s been a while since I’ve done this.”
“Carrots and apples,” he grumbled.
I decided that unless something really beamed out at me I’d better lower my antennae and stick to the Form, and if we lost then at least Shelly would be satisfied that I had violated no sacred conventions and we would remain friends.
“You gonna go see your Dad?” he asked.
“Probably not. What’ll he say? Deadbeat crackpot with a dead guy’s driver’s license betting longshots. He hates people like that. It’s better he doesn’t know I’m here.”
Shelly prized that kind of self-effacing talk and not only for-gave me but was once again on my side. “We’ll hit the pick six,” he declared. “That’ll show him.”
Down on the tarmac below, a group of drunken rural stereotypes, three men and two ladies, sitting on a blanket, had begun to argue. The men wore tight pants that showed long stretches of white sockless ankle. The ladies had piled-high hair, and one wore a low-cut white blouse splashed with red hearts. A ruckus started up and a chair was broken. One of the men lurched up and a beer bottle flew. The crowd receded, giving them room. Punches ensued. The men scrabbled across the pavement through the trash grunting and trying to tear off each other’s shirts, their white ankles flashing, while the women rooted them on. Many spectators laughed and applauded as if bumpkin scuffles were a regular feature between the second and third race. Security arrived and the three men and one lady were taken away. One of the fellows was badly cut, his face glazed in blood. The woman with the unbuttoned heart blouse, the only one remaining after the melee, stared at Shelly, her glossy open mouth like a tunnel in an amusement park ride.
“Gosh,” Shelly said. “I wonder if we should take her home.”
It began to rain then, just a sifting at first and then the wind started to blow the pop cups in a waxy clatter and the seagulls began to bounce on the currents and that harbor smell lifted from the ground and the raindrops began to swell and splat. The crowd standing out in the open made a few collar adjustments. A few tugged at cap bills. When the rain came in earnest everyone scattered for cover.
Shelly and I stood at the edge of the overhang, studying the oddsboard, waiting for the post parade, watching the track surface go from fast to slow to muddy. A sloppy track is like a fast track because the dirt is near liquid and hooves can find purchase on the hard surface underneath, but a muddy track is like running in mashed potatoes. Mud and slop are two different, nearly opposite, factorial worlds. We waited for the announcement to see whether our decision should be based upon slop or mud. Two minutes before the second race the track was deemed “sloppy.” Shelly and I looked at each other and nodded.
For weeks you lose. You get close, you catch bad breaks, you fall a nose short in a photo, your horse breaks down, the inquiry sign goes up and they take your number off the board. The gods chuckle and it sounds like the wind and the madness and futility of your life. You couldn’t pick a horse if it crawled up your nose. Seagulls shit on your head. You want to tear your program to bits. You want to throw your money in the air. You want to go home and get drunk. You want to crawl back into your hospital bed or shoot yourself in the brain.
But then, without warning, you start hitting winners, and it doesn’t matter if you can hear the horses talk or see two minutes and eighteen seconds ahead of everyone else, or if you pick numbers randomly or eavesdrop on granny or continue to refine faithfully your antiquated system. You are going to win.
Shelly and I knew how to play the primodrome on a gumbo track in the rain. We looked for horses with a little step, those who were not afraid of slipping in the slop. The outside posts were virtually dead. The speed was holding. Shelly knew the complete history of nearly every animal competing. In one glance, as if we were playing a mezzodrome, we could eliminate half the field or more. The harder it rained, the shorter the fields got.
Rain prickled along the asphalt; the sky was low and rumbling gray. Sleek, thundering mud-coated beasts rose out of the mist, and each time, though you could barely read the numbers on the twisted and splattered saddlecloths as they streaked past, it was the right number. It was magic time. Shelly and I shouted and danced and slapped the high flesh, sharing the sweet endocrine blossom of victory.
We hit our first pick three and split the cash, eighty-six each. The cameramen up in the press box taping for the TV recap tonight had already cut to us twice. Shelly became so transported, so ecstatic, he drifted away, standing in the deluge, shouting like Brando in Streetcar, boots steaming, face raised to the sky, completely ignoring the wet hillbilly in the red-heart blouse who adored him. Come on, Laffit, bring it on, Laffit Baby, atta baby.
My father’s horse, a bay gelding named Chiquilla Vanilla, got the four hole in the sixth race at six to one. Everything on grass had been moved to dirt. Normally a turf horse, Chiquilla Vanilla was the longest shot on the board,
even if there were only four horses in the field. I knew what a nightmare this was for my father, who loved and took care of his animals better than the people in his life. He had enough money that he could’ve scratched all his entries and not risked injury to them, but even he wouldn’t admit that he was a gambler too. Chiquilla Vanilla won going away. Shelly and I slammed the high fives and toddled off to buy another round.
At the beer booth Shelly made a joke to the girl who drew our two jumbo Michelobs. He flashed his mangled smile and said to me as he handed me my cup, “I oughta ask her out. She’s a margarita girl at Del Mar.”
And he would’ve asked her out, too, he really would’ve, right there on the spot, lived happily ever after with a margarita girl — maybe she could’ve gotten me a date too and we could have had a double margarita marriage — but the seventh race was coming. There were only three races left and when would the magic come again? We needed to bear down. Shelly threw his Form open across a concession table and commenced to decipher the next race, nearly panting as he worked the numbers, the pages so wet they should’ve torn from the point of his pen, but he was in a trance state, invincible, still speaking in the angry immigrant voice. “I’m like Marilyn Monroe, baby,” he crowed. “Get on me while I’m hot.”
It was still raining hard at the end of the ninth race. The park was almost empty. Soaked to the skin, we scurried across the empty parking lot toward my truck. “Goddamnit,” he said. “I toldya we shoulda bet the pick six. We woulda won!”
I was about to remind him that the pick six had been canceled when a woman called to us.
We turned. It was the mountain girl in the heart blouse. “Can y’all give me a ride home?” she called.
“Where you live?” I yelled back.
“Downey,” she said, moving toward us, her breasts lifting and falling splendidly against all those wet and shiny hearts. “It’s just down the road apiece.”
Despite being slack-jawed and wearing a baffled expression, she was a luscious looking creature, especially now with her hair flattened by the rain and her makeup washed away. She wore a jeweled anklet and her white knee-length skirt was so wet you could see straight through it. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. “Come along then,” I shouted.
“Mah name’s Marvelle,” she said, out of breath. And when she flashed those legs and white breasts climbing into the truck I thought about chucking it all.
“This is Shelly here,” I said, “and I’m Eddie.”
Shelly still standing there dripping contentedly in the rain suddenly looked four feet tall. We got ourselves arranged in the cab. The truck had a floor shift and my arm hovered above the lovely warmth of Marvelle’s knees. I turned on the heater, the radio, and the wipers. It began to rain harder, the drops clanging like ball bearings on the metal roof. The seat was vinyl and the water from our wet clothes pooled under us as the windows began to fog. Above Marvelle’s brown bread scent was a hint of Violet Simplicity, a perfume one of my stepmothers had worn.
“So, what happened to all your friends?” I asked her.
“They got arrest-it.” She said it like a question, slinging her jaw to the left. “And Booey, he didn’t do nuthin.”
Shelly grinned like an eight-year-old at a peep show. “Seemed like Booey was gettin’ in his licks,” he said. It was funny how easily he had slipped into her accent.
I put it in gear and headed for the gate, passing some poor old tout in a clear green rain parka holding up a fan of tomorrow’s winning tip sheets.
“So, how’d you all do?” she asked. “Every time I looked over you was jumpin’ and whoopin’ up a storm.”
“We did all right,” I said.
“You got a system?”
“I’m telepathic.”
“No,” she said. “Can you read mah mind?”
“I might,” I said.
A bead of water dripped from the tip of her nose. “What am I thinkin’?”
“You wouldn’t want me to say it aloud.”
“Why, that is a fact.”
“He’s a mental patient,” said Shelly.
“Oh, well, then,” said Marvelle with a flop of the wrist.
“His father is Calvin Plum,” Shelly added.
“Should I know him?”
“It isn’t important,” I said.
“Can you do astrology?”
“Only when the moon is in the seventh house,” I said.
“And Jupiter aligns with Mars,” said a grinning Shelly, who had positioned himself for the best view down her blouse. Marvelle didn’t seem to mind.
“Y’all are from Mars,” she said good naturedly.
A wet woman smells like a wet cat, or maybe it was Shelly, but there was that Violet Simplicity mingled in with other robust and more titillating carnal and fresh-baked lipstick scents and I got to thinking about how things take form, and I wondered what flesh really was and how it got that way and what kept it together and how it stayed so sweet and firm and why it had to decay and then re-form somehow all ripe again like a peach on the bones of its next temporary owner.
Marvelle liked to talk, and though I wasn’t getting it all, Shelly was hanging on her every word.
“I don’t know how I’m gonna raise bail,” she was saying. “That’s the third time this month. Booey and Fred just don’t git along.” She turned her head to each of us, giving an imploring look with those gorgeous big eyes that brought to mind a starving child. “Sometimes I think about goin’ out on mah own.”
“How long you been in California?” I asked.
She fingered her chin. “About a year. Booey, he just got offa parole.”
“Parole for what?” I said.
She turned her head haughtily. “You have to read mah mind.”
“Aggravated assault.”
“Anybody could’ve guessed that.”
Shelly leered. I changed lanes and passed an old woman creeping along in her winged black Cadillac through the downpour at forty-five miles an hour, her sloshing tires half submerged. It was raining so hard I couldn’t see more than a hundred yards in front of me. The wipers slung the rain side to side as an Elton John song came on the radio, “Where to Now, St. Peter?” Marvelle sang some of the words, hitting the high notes just right on “blue canoe” and “half enchanted,” then found a comb and began to drag the water out of her hair.
It was twenty miles or so down the freeway to Downey. Marvelle lived on Cole Street in a rococo mansion with twenty-foot gilded pillars and a Louis XIV deck sitting atop a three-car garage. “Jesus,” Shelly whispered, thinking as I had that we’d be dropping Marvelle off at a trailer park. Shelly got out and held the truck door open for her. “Thank you kindly,” she said with a bow so low it would take Shelly half an hour to get that expression off his face.
We watched her stroll up the long driveway in the rain, the sodden, transparent skirt clinging to her hips. At the door, in the shelter of her portico, she gazed back at us, finger crooked on bottom lip. Shelly stared without breathing as if he were a toddler watching his mom boarding a rocket ship to another star. Finally, I waved, shoved the truck into first, and puttered away.
13.Sex and Murder Self-Help Book
IT WAS ALMOST NINE BY THE TIME WE GOT BACK TO SAN DIEGO. Driving half-drunk in the rain on the interstate with over a thousand dollars of winnings in my pocket and Marvelle’s scent like mental illness still hanging in the cab had pitched me into a swivet that would last me the week, I reckoned, unless a cop pulled me over or I got in a wreck. But I had to be positive and honest with myself and all that stuff that Doc Jangler had said. Seeing meat shop pictures of police lineups and half-naked chases across motel parking lots, I was glad I’d been able to resist Marvelle.
“We shoulda took her somewhere,” Shelly said for the third time.
“And done what with her?”
“I don’t know. Talked with her. Got some beer. Got a motel or something. Damn. How many opportunities do you get like that? She was beautiful.�
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“Well, I like to think about consequences now and again.”
“Consequences!” he roared. “Since when?”
“Since Booey just got out on parole.”
“Hell.” Shelly groaned and shook his head heavily. “Booey’da never found us.”
“Well, she’s gone now, sport. You had your chance. You coulda said something.”
“I figured you’d know what to do. You’re the expert on women.”
“Expert screw-up. I’ll tell you what. I have known many a Marvelle and every one was a train wreck.”
“I shoulda stayed in Downey,” he whined.
“I’ll take you back if you want,” I said.
He shook his head. “No. It’s too late. God, I wonder what she’s doing now. In her bathrobe probably.”
Shelly was crestfallen. Much of this I suspected was frustration that his fantasies were never realized. “We’ll go back up there next week and check on her if you want,” I consoled. “Booey’ll probably be back in the pen by then.”
This seemed to lift his mood. “You wanna beer?” he said.
“Parky’s still around?” I said, thinking he meant the old folks bar down the street where we had logged many an hour.
“I got some beers at my house,” he said, looking over at me with a face unnervingly transparent and fragile. “You wanna come over?”
“To your house?” I repeated.
“Hate to see the day end,” he said. “You’ve never been inside before, have you?”
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