Sweet Nothing

by RICHARD LANGE

  I’M DUE AT Lupe’s at noon, which gives me enough time to pick up my Xterra from Kong’s, where it’s been sitting since I got popped, then drive back to Larry’s and sneak a quick shower while Shauna’s at the store. The hundred dollars stashed in the toe of one of my good shoes isn’t much, but admission is free at Santa Anita today, and they’ve got dollar sodas and hot dogs, so I should be fine.

  Lupe lives in North Hollywood with her sister. The two of them and their kids share a condo. Lupe’s sister lived there with her husband, but then he ran off, and when Lupe got rid of her old man, the girls decided to throw in together.

  I park in the loading zone in front of the building and give Lupe a call. She’ll be down in a minute. While I’m waiting, I walk to the main entrance and look in through the lobby to the swimming pool in the courtyard. The water is perfectly still, and an old man is reading a newspaper at a table with an umbrella sprouting out of it. It’s nice, nicer than anyplace I’ve ever lived.

  Lupe and her son walk out of the elevator, and she looks as good as I remember, in tight jeans and a white tank top. The kid is wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt and Spider-Man sunglasses. I try to get the front door of the building for them, jerk it twice before I realize it’s locked. Lupe pushes it open from inside.

  “They’re serious around here, huh?” I say.

  “That’s right, you lowdown, dirty varmint,” the kid growls.

  “Jesse!” Lupe snaps, then says to me, “He gets all this weird stuff from cartoons. Half the time I don’t even know what he’s talking about.”

  “You like horses?” I ask him.

  “Are we gonna ride some?”

  “We’re gonna watch them race.”

  “Dag-nab it.”

  I keep my Xterra immaculate; wash it every week, polish it once a month. It’s the only decent habit I picked up from my dad. He couldn’t stand it when people paid good money for a vehicle then let it go to pot. “It shows they don’t appreciate what they have,” he’d say. “That it came to them too easy.”

  Lupe straps Jesse into the backseat.

  “Is there TV in here?” he asks.

  “No TV,” I say.

  “My uncle has TV.”

  I ignore him. You have to do that to kids sometimes, otherwise they think every silly thing that comes out of their mouths deserves a response. He’s all wrapped up in a toy he brought with him anyway, some kind of ninja doll.

  Lupe starts right in with a story about a girl she works with who misread the numbers on a lottery ticket and thought she’d won. She got on the phone and screamed to her husband and her mom and danced around the office and promised everyone a cruise.

  “I felt so bad for her,” Lupe says, laughing and shaking her head. “She called in sick for two days afterward.”

  I laugh and change lanes to get around a slow-moving semi with its hazards blinking.

  “Hey, check it out,” Lupe says as we pass the truck.

  The semi is hauling four huge palm trees, their roots encased in heavy wooden boxes, fronds tied to their trunks to keep them from blowing around. They look like prisoners on their way to execution. Lupe takes a photo with her phone. She’s excited about being out, about the day ahead of us, and maybe even about me. I like that, that she can’t hide it.

  BY THE TIME we park, it’s five minutes to post for the first race. A couple of decent horses are running, and I’d like to get a bet in if I can, but Jesse doesn’t know how to hurry yet. He stops to pick up a penny from the pavement, stops again to watch a ladybug crawl. I give up when Lupe kneels to tie his shoe right before we walk through the turnstile, grit my teeth as the announcer calls, “And away they go.”

  “Would you have won?” Lupe asks when she sees me looking at a tote board a few minutes later.

  “Couple a’ bucks,” I say. “Not enough to cry over.”

  We pass through the echoey cavern beneath the grandstand, which is full of horseplayers staring up at TV monitors or hunched over copies of the Form. The same anxiety that tightened my throat as soon as I drove into the place has these men squinting and licking their lips and slapping rolled-up programs against their palms. This hasn’t been fun for any of them for a long time.

  Lines have already formed at the betting windows for the next race, and a crowd has gathered beneath one of the TVs to watch a simulcast from San Francisco. “Come on, you motherfucker,” a guy in a Raiders jacket shouts at the screen as we walk by. I glance at Lupe and see that she’s about to say Hey, there are kids here or something, so I rush her outside.

  We emerge into the sunlight beside the track, near the finish line. I lead Lupe and Jesse up into the stands and snag three seats. It’s ten minutes to post.

  “You guys want hot dogs?” I say. “Cokes?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Jesse chants, bouncing up and down.

  Lupe jerks his arm and hisses at him to stop. “One plain and one with ketchup,” she says to me.

  “Ketchup, ketchup, ketchup,” Jesse whispers as I walk away.

  I HEAD STRAIGHT for a window to put ten on Wilder Thing, the favorite, to win. Then, before I can stop myself, I also put ten on the second favorite. The race goes off while I’m waiting in line at the snack bar, and I watch it on a monitor. My horses come in second and fifth. So I lose, but at least I know how my luck is running. It’ll be dollar exactas for the rest of the day, a ten-cent superfecta if the field is big enough.

  Paul pops up behind me while I’m ordering the food.

  “Get me a dog too,” he says, shoving a moist dollar bill into my hand.

  “What the fuck?” I say.

  “Come on.”

  Paul is the type of person I need to avoid. He has no goals, no impulse control, no life. Last time I was with him at a card club, we wound up running from some drunk Iranians after one of them accused Paul of trying to lift his wallet. Paul swore up and down they were nuts but then got the crap beat out of him two weeks later for doing the same thing to someone else.

  I hand him his hot dog and get no thank-you, nothing, just “You seen Whammy?”

  Another lunatic, another crackhead. “Nope,” I say. “I got to go.”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “I’m on a date.”

  “One of them pay-by-the-hour deals?”

  The guy hasn’t showered in days. His teeth are yellow, and he looks like he dressed out of a dumpster. He follows me to the condiment counter and moves in close as I’m pumping mustard.

  “You know somebody looking for something like this?” he says and lifts his T-shirt to flash the butt of a gun sticking out of his jeans. “I’ll let it go cheap.”

  “Who are you?” I say. “I don’t even know you.”

  I push past him, almost spilling the Cokes in my haste. See, I’m learning. That dude is surely going to die young, and I don’t want to go down with him.

  “SOON AS A bitch opens her mouth,” a buddy once said, “I stop listening.”

  Four or five of us were drinking in a dive where failure hung thick as cigarette smoke in the air. Something contrary welled up in me—a sudden, intense disgust at the hatefulness we used for cover—and I pointed out to my friend that I’d seen him talking to women plenty of times.

  “Talking, maybe,” he said, “but never listening.”

  I like listening to Lupe. We sit in the stands and eat our hot dogs, and she tells me about her ex, Jesse’s father. I asked for details about him because her and I are going to yank out our pasts like weeds and throw them away. The story is a sad one, but she makes it funny by spelling out the words she doesn’t want Jesse to hear and calling her ex Dick instead of his real name, so the kid won’t know who we’re discussing.

  They’d been together since high school, and she married him when she got p-r-e-g-n-a-n-t even though she knew he was an a-s-s-hole. Which was stupid, it’s clear to her now, because of course the guy cracked under the pressure; of course he couldn’t hold up his end of anything. He quit every job he
managed to get, f-u-c-k-e-d around on her constantly, and beat on her when he was d-r-u-n-k. She finally had enough of it and got her brothers to come over and throw him out, and every day since then has been a good one.

  “I’d like to meet him,” I say. “In a dark alley. With a baseball bat.”

  “He’s not worth the trouble,” she says.

  “He was the wrong man for you,” I say. “It’s good you found out early.”

  “Wrong man, right man,” she says. “You’re all the same.”

  “No, we’re not,” I reply. “We come in all kinds of crazy.”

  This gets a laugh out of her, and we sip our Cokes and watch the horses for the next race parade down the track. A big roan bucks, almost tossing his jockey, and the crowd applauds. I’m transfixed by a man standing half in the shadow of the grandstand and half in the sun, split right down the middle, dark and light. One step in either direction will change everything. Move, I think.

  “I like number two,” Lupe says, wiping ketchup off Jesse’s chin with a napkin. “He’s pretty.”

  Toe the Line is the horse’s name, three to one.

  “You know how to pick ’em,” I tell her. “He’s one of the favorites.”

  She reaches into her purse and pulls out two dollars. “I want to bet on him.”

  I wave the money away. “My treat.”

  “Nope,” she says, thrusting the bills at me. “That’s bad luck.”

  Her smile could stop a war. I take the two bucks and turn to leave. The man I was watching before is gone. If he went light, I’d planned to go with the four horse; dark, the nine. Now I’ll have to bet both.

  WHEN I GET back from the window with our tickets and a box of popcorn for Jesse, Paul is sitting in the row behind us, leaning forward to talk to Lupe. Something takes hold of my guts and squeezes.

  “Here he is,” Paul says as I approach. “The man himself.”

  “Watch your purse around this one,” I say to Lupe.

  She laughs. Paul looks hurt, then angry.

  “She was asking how we met,” he says.

  Danny Boy brought us together. Gave us the keys to the back door of his brother’s house and told us to trash the place, paid us each a hundred bucks. Those were not good times.

  “Who can remember?” I say. A warning.

  Paul picks up on it. “I can’t,” he says. “I sure can’t.”

  I give Lupe her ticket, and the kid tries to grab it out of her hand. She tells him to sit still. We make small talk as the horses walk to the starting gate. All I can think of is the pistol in Paul’s waistband. It’s like there’s a snake coiled under Lupe’s seat where she can’t see it, and I’m ignoring it so as not to alarm her, all the while terrified that the damn thing is going to strike. Paul’s talking about Hawaii, telling Lupe how great it is there: Oh, the sand. Oh, the water. Oh, the food. He’s never been to Hawaii; he’s never even been to San Diego.

  A stiff breeze sweeps up a bunch of losing tickets and whips them around the legs of the Mexicans lining the fence next to the track. The gates swing open, and the horses are off. I’m not normally a stander or a shouter, but Lupe, you know, and the kid, that’s part of the fun for them. So as the pack comes into the stretch, I’m on my feet with everybody else, even though my picks are already out of the money.

  “I won!” Lupe yells as the horses cross the finish line.

  “We won!” Jesse yells.

  Lupe hugs him, hugs me, hugs Paul. When things settle down, Paul starts pumping her for info: where she lives, where she works, what she drives. I interrupt with “So, who do you like in the next race?”

  “Paul said Kentucky Straight looks good,” Lupe replies.

  I glance at my program. Thirty-five to one. That’s Paul right there: If he can’t win, he doesn’t want anyone else to. Fucker lives his whole life that way.

  “It’s a long shot,” I say.

  “What’s that mean?” Lupe asks.

  “It means you bet a little to win a lot,” Paul says.

  “Good, ’cause a little is all I got.”

  I’m not going to argue. We’re supposed to be enjoying ourselves. And what’s two bucks? Paul, though, has got to go.

  “Come on,” I say to him. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “Just bring it to me,” he says.

  “Nah, come with me. I want to talk to you about something.”

  He gets up reluctantly, knowing he won’t be back, kisses Lupe’s hand and bumps fists with Jesse.

  As soon as we’re out of their sight, I give him a shove. He stumbles and almost goes down. The maniac has a gun, and I push him. I’m a genius; I truly am.

  “I don’t appreciate your jokes,” I say.

  “So what?” he says. “She’s not that cute. In fact, her ass is gigantic.”

  I lurch toward him, and he backs off.

  “Get going,” I say, keeping an eye on his hands.

  “You know what?” he says. “I’m done with you.” Then he turns and, thank God, walks away.

  I DECIDE TO visit Willy and Leon in the clubhouse, see what horses they like. You’re supposed to have a stamp to get in from the grandstand, showing you paid extra. I don’t, but the woman guarding the entrance is too busy texting to look up when I wave my hand under the black light and hurry past her.

  Willy and Leon are legends, twin brothers who worked as pari-mutuel clerks, taking bets here and at Hollywood Park for thirty years before retiring. They still show up every day, out of habit, know all the jockeys, all the owners, all the trainers, and they’re usually good for a tip.

  I find them in their usual spot, a booth in a quiet corner of the clubhouse snack bar beneath a bank of monitors showing races from all over the country. Five or six other regulars sit with them, and the table is covered with dope sheets, marked-up Forms, and Styrofoam coffee cups. The men all wear clothes from twenty, thirty, even forty years ago. They never venture outside to watch a race live, and they communicate with one another mostly in grunts and whispers. Their days are spent scribbling arcane symbols on their programs or staring up at the screens overhead, tongues clenched between their teeth.

  At my hello, Willy taps Leon, who takes off his reading glasses and glances around, confused, before spotting me. The brothers are both five feet tall and just about as wide, with big round heads and bulging eyes, and they both comb their graying hair to the same side. The only way anyone can tell them apart is that the lobe of Willy’s left ear is missing, sliced off in a gang fight when he was a kid.

  “Hey, buddy boy,” Willy says. “Keeping out of trouble?”

  “You know me,” I reply.

  “That’s why he’s asking,” Leon says, and he and Willy jiggle with silent laughter. Rumor has it that they’ve won and lost millions over the years, that they once shared a woman who broke both their hearts, and that they still sleep in their childhood bedroom at their mother’s house.

  “I need a winner,” I say.

  “And you came to them?” one of the other men at the table says with a snort. “They’re in so deep, Obama’s gonna bail them out.”

  Everybody gets a kick out of this, one guy laughing so hard he goes into a coughing fit.

  “Seriously,” Willy says. “It’s nothing but nags today.”

  “Yeah, keep your money,” Leon adds.

  “Come on,” I say. “You guys have something.”

  They lock eyes for a few seconds, then Willy runs a fat finger down the chicken scratches he’s made on a memo pad.

  “The five horse in the sixth might come alive,” he finally says.

  “Might,” Leon emphasizes.

  Willy announces that he needs to use the can. He’s sitting in the center of the booth, which means the guys to one side or the other will have to slide out and stand up, but neither group wants to move. I leave them bickering about it and go to a window, where I cash in Lupe’s ticket for eight dollars and put two back on Kentucky Straight.

  For my bet, I figure it�
��s been three races now since a favorite has come in, so it’s got to happen this time. I mean to lay ten on the horse, but out of habit say twenty and decide not to correct it. I don’t want to get in the way of anything.

  “COME ON, BABY, come on!” Lupe shouts, but it’s no use. Kentucky Straight runs last, and the favorite ends up third. So we’re both losers.

  “Made for each other,” I say to Lupe.

  “I’m no loser,” she replies.

  “It was a joke,” I say.

  We sit poring over the prospects for the next race when we should be getting to know each other better. This was a horrible place to take her on a first date. I see that now. I’m under too much stress here. Now that I’m down, all I can think about is ways to get back up. And Lupe, look at her, jiggling her leg, twisting her hair, squinting at her program like someone taking a test. The zoo would have been better, something fun for the kid. He’s bored to death here, nothing to do but play with his doll, make it jump in the air and kick his mother’s arm.

  “What’s your guy’s name?” I ask him.

  “Black Dragon.”

  “So he’s like a ninja?”

  “Bingo, brainiac.”

  Shadows are creeping up the foothills just beyond the track, and it’ll get chilly as soon as the sun sinks a bit lower. We should leave now, while I still have enough cash to buy us a couple of Big Macs. I’m trying to figure out how to suggest this to Lupe without sounding as lousy as I feel when she jabs her program with a bright pink fingernail and says, “I want this one: Divalicious.”

  Fifty to one. The girl is throwing away her pennies, but, hey, I don’t have any room to talk. She roots around in her purse, hands me two dollars, and says, “What happened with you and your wife?”

  It’s only fair. She told me about her marriage. But which story does she want to hear? How Christine and I met at a casino where she was a waitress and I was on a winning streak? That’s a good one. Christine thought it was always going to be like that, the high life, and that’s why she said yes when I asked her to marry me two weeks later. She’d never been with a gambler before, though, never ridden that roller coaster.