by Brad Smith
“In a way, I am,” Sonny said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m gonna build a racetrack,” Sonny said, and then he smiled. “Among other things.”
Billy had the pop halfway to his mouth. He stopped, put the can on the table. “Bullshit,” he said.
Sonny just showed his Sonny grin and recrossed his snakeskin boots on the tabletop. Raul watched him.
“You can’t just build a racetrack,” Billy said.
“Why not?” Sonny asked. “They think they got a fucking monopoly. Says who? I’m gonna build a world-class track, Billy, and that’s not all. I’m gonna build a golf course on the back of the concession that’ll put Glen Abbey to shame. They’ll play the Open there. And then I’ll build a couple hundred homes in the middle of it all, price ’em from a million up. That concession is a beautiful piece of land; it’s got forest, streams, hills. I’m gonna build a fucking showplace.”
“You’re buying farmland,” Billy said. “You’re gonna have zoning problems.”
“There’s no such thing as zoning problems,” Sonny said. “Come on, Billy, you’re not that naive. I got two farms to go. Some stubborn old squarehead who I’m about to close on, and this senile old fart who’s got a foxy blond daughter who’s too smart for her own good. But I have it on good authority that they’re hurting financially. I’m looking forward to making her squirm.”
“You looking for investors?” Raul asked.
Sonny had a long look at Raul, then deliberately got up and went to the bar for a refill. When he returned he picked up a deck of cards and began to shuffle absently.
“I don’t know that I need outside investment,” he said. “Stanton Stables is a pretty solvent enterprise. But I may have something open, for the right partner. I like these futures, Billy. The Ontario Jockey Club doesn’t offer them.”
“Officially, neither do I,” Billy said.
“But we could, under the right umbrella.”
Big Billy Coon shrugged. Sonny looked at him in annoyance—goddamn Indian, you never knew what he was thinking. When he looked at Raul, he got the same stare. Indians—east or west—were all the same, it seemed.
“Where you from?” Sonny asked.
“Sri Lanka.”
Sonny didn’t have a clue where Sri Lanka was, but he assumed it was over there somewhere.
“They got racehorses over there?” he asked.
“They sure do.”
“That where you got your money?”
“No,” Raul said.
10
The lawyers arrived at ten o’clock, as scheduled. Jackson, unloading feed at the barn, saw them pull up together, mount the steps in their eight-hundred-dollar suits, briefcases tucked under their arms, an air of gravity and purpose and importance hanging over them.
The first lawyer rang the bell and waited. After a moment the second lawyer knocked on the door, and they waited again. Jackson left the feed truck and, cutting a wide circle so as to remain out of sight, walked around and entered the house through the back door.
He went up the back staircase. Sonny was still in bed, as Jackson had known he would be. The blinds were shut tight, and the room was as dark as night.
“Sonny! For Christ’s sake, the lawyers are here.”
Jackson walked over and opened the louvered blinds, zebra-striping the bedsheets with the morning sun. Sonny kicked his legs under the sheet and raised his head. He squinted red-eyed at Jackson, as if he didn’t recognize him. The smell of alcohol and sweat hung in the room. When Sonny swung his legs out, Jackson could see the thick raised scars from the operations on his right knee. Sonny reached for his cane and then turned to look at the clock on the nightstand.
“Shit,” he said. “I’ll be down in a minute. Tell Marla to make some coffee.”
“She’s off today.”
“Shit,” Sonny said again. “Okay, I’ll be right down. Tell ’em a story, Jackson. Tell ’em I was up all night with a sick mare.”
“Sure,” Jackson said, and he left.
He let the lawyers in and led them into the dining room. They placed their briefcases on the heavy oak table and then sat and opened them and began to spread papers about the tabletop.
“He’ll be down in a minute,” Jackson said.
“Is there a problem?” the first lawyer asked.
“He’s been out all night drinking,” Jackson told them, and he went to make coffee.
Sonny arrived at the same time as the coffee. He was leaning heavily on his cane as he came down the stairs, and Jackson suspected that his knee was giving him at least as much pain as his hangover. He was wearing jeans and a golf shirt with a Hilton Head logo above the pocket. His eyes were red and puffy, his hair tousled.
“I’m sorry, but I was up half the night,” Sonny said when he walked in.
“Jackson told us,” the second lawyer said.
Sonny, approaching from behind the two attorneys, gave Jackson a conspiratorial wink, then he took a seat at the head of the table.
“Well, I got grain to unload,” Jackson said. “Unless you want me here.”
“No, no,” Sonny said. “You tend to the feed; I’ll be along to help when we finish here.”
Jackson nodded as he left. He’d known Sonny for more than twenty years and had never in that time seen him lift anything heavier than a bottle of Glenlivet.
* * *
Sonny poured himself a cup of coffee and took a large drink, burning his mouth. He’d swallowed a couple of Demerol before coming downstairs, and he was waiting for the drug to kick in. Maybe the caffeine would jump-start it.
“So what’s up, guys?” he asked while he waited.
“You’ve got a cash problem, Sonny,” the first lawyer said.
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s not a joke. Everything’s been frozen.”
“How the fuck can that happen? I have power of attorney,” Sonny said.
“That might not be true,” the second lawyer said cautiously. “Some new paperwork has shown up, with another law firm. It looks as if Gena might have power of attorney.”
Sonny felt his stomach turn over, and he thought he might throw up his drugs. “You better not be telling me that. That fucking skank has a prenup; there’s no way she can pull this off. We settled all that before he married her.”
“First of all, Sonny, a prenuptial agreement is a pretty iffy proposition under the best of circumstances,” the first lawyer said. “Secondly, these other papers have been filed in the Bahamas. For the here and now, it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot whether or not they’re valid. You might prove that they’re not, but you could be in court for years doing it. And the money would be frozen the whole time.” He hesitated. “The best thing that could happen right now would be if your father came around.”
Sonny poured cream in his coffee to cool it and had another drink. The Demerol was hitting him already, thanks to an empty stomach. But it was hard on the heels of his anger, that familiar uncontrollable feeling that he was being used.
“Then we gotta get him home,” Sonny said. “Who knows what they’re doing to him down there. She’s probably got some fucking voodoo man sticking pins in him.”
“Why don’t you fly his doctor down, see if he can be moved?” the second lawyer said. “You’re right; things would be a lot easier to monitor if he was home.”
“Have I got enough money for a plane ticket?” Sonny asked sarcastically.
“You’re not broke, Sonny,” the first lawyer said. “You just have to stop spending money like you’ve been. Buying all these farms. You’re seriously overdrawn at the bank. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem. But until this is straightened out, it is. You have no access to the old man’s money, Sonny. Do you understand that?”
Sonny fell into a sulk. The lawyers exchanged glances, then each looked at his watch at precisely the same moment. Sonny saw, and it infuriated him further.
“Just sit there,” he said. “You’re still getting p
aid, aren’t you?”
“We’re still getting paid,” the first lawyer agreed.
“Then sit there,” Sonny said. “Wait a minute—what about the money we got coming in?”
“What money would that be?” the second lawyer asked. It was his turn for sarcasm.
“Thoroughbred money,” Sonny said. “Purses, stud fees, whatever.”
The lawyers looked at each other for a moment. The hesitation was all that Sonny required. He’d always been adroit at twisting rules. Indeed, before he lost most of the use of his right leg, he’d been famous on the golf course as a cheat of astonishing imagination.
“Think about it,” he said. “We’ve got a huge overhead in this horse operation. Anything coming in should go back into the business. How else we gonna pay the bills?”
“You might be able to make that argument,” the first lawyer said.
In his head, Sonny had already made it. He could foresee a dozen ways to potentially turn this to his favor. There was enough diversity and ambiguity in the thoroughbred end of things—the feeding, the training, transport, vet bills—that he could get pretty creative with the bookkeeping.
“Let me put it another way,” Sonny said. “You tell my wicked stepmother that either that’s the way it works, or I sell every nag we got. Have her explain that to the old man when he wakes up.”
When the lawyers had packed up the papers—which might as well have been props for all the attention they’d received—Sonny walked them to the front door. On the porch the two had attempted to initiate small talk about racehorses and the weather, and Sonny had closed the door on them in midsentence. He went into the kitchen and mixed a Bloody Mary and drank it looking out the rear window, watching the broodmares in the back paddock. When the drink was done he mixed another, and then he went out to the barn. It was a cold morning, and halfway across the yard he wished he’d grabbed a jacket.
He found Jackson in the tack room, drinking coffee and reading the morning paper. The tack room served as an office of sorts for Jackson. There was a desk and a couple of chairs, a filing cabinet in the corner. There was a small electric heater on top of the cabinet, and the room was cosy. On the walls, above the saddles and halters and blankets, were pictures of various Stanton horses over the years. There was a large picture of Jackson and Earl Stanton, posing with Supernova minutes after the colt had won the Queen’s Plate ten years back. Sonny could be seen just over the horse’s haunches. In the old man’s shadow, even then.
Jackson looked at him impatiently over the sports section of the Post. Sonny picked a copy of Thoroughbred Magazine off a chair and tossed it onto the desk, then sat down. He took a large drink of the Bloody Mary. Everything was flowing together now—the Demerol, the caffeine, and the vodka—and his mind was functioning again, click-clacking along like a train on a track.
“Gena’s trying to take charge,” he told Jackson.
“I figured that when I saw the look on that lawyer’s face,” Jackson said. “Man looks like he hasn’t taken a shit in a week.”
“Tell me something, Jack. We gonna win the Classic?”
“I believe we are.” Jackson indicated the various periodicals on the desk. “Just about every handicapper in North America thinks so, too. Why?”
“We’re off the mother tit, at least for the time being. But any money we make through the stable is ours to run the operation.”
Jackson nodded slightly.
“What’s our take if we win it?” Sonny asked.
“The purse is five million,” Jackson said, wondering why Sonny, given his gambling jones, had never mastered common mathematics. “Winner gets 52 percent of that. Place or show is nothing to sneeze at, either.”
“Place or show, my ass. What else is there out there? I’m gonna need some working capital, Jackson. I got outside investments. Anything at Woodbine?”
When Jackson never inquired about the other investments, Sonny had to assume that he knew about him buying up the property in Holden County. But of course Jackson would know. In spite of his laid-back pose, it was pretty obvious that Jackson never missed a trick. It was his nature, and it was also why Sonny didn’t trust him as far as he could toss him.
“We’ve got a couple two-year-olds running, but that’s about it,” Jackson said. “The old man never planned anything else this year.”
“What about Fort Erie?”
Jackson took a moment to thumb through a magazine on the desk, checking out the racing schedules. Sonny finished his drink and leaned back, his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling. The panic he’d felt earlier had passed.
“There’s a two-year-old stakes race next weekend,” Jackson said, his tone reluctant. “A hundred-thousand-dollar claimer.”
“We could run that big chestnut colt,” Sonny said at once. “He’d win it easily.”
“He’d be dropping down. We’d lose him on the claim.”
“Even better. If we lose him, we get the purse and the claim price. Double bubble. That’s the risk you take when you run in a claimer.”
“It’s a stupid risk. Running a quarter-million-dollar colt in a hundred-thousand-dollar race.”
“We got plenty of horses, Jack.”
“It’s not just that. Though I do hate the thought of losing that colt—I got a feeling he’s gonna be a hell of a three-year-old. But it’s not just that.”
“What is it?”
“The old man never liked to drop horses down just to win a race. He figured it wasn’t fair to the smaller owners.”
“Gee willickers, Jack—I never thought of that. Fuck the small owners.”
Jackson tossed the schedule onto the desk and got to his feet. He took his jacket down from a hook on the wall and put it on. He looked at Sonny.
“I guess that’s your philosophy in life,” he said as he walked around behind Sonny, opened the door. “I’m just saying the old man wouldn’t like it. That’s not the way he operates.”
“Have you seen the old man today, Jack?” Sonny said, asking over his shoulder, still sitting in the chair. “Have you?”
Jackson made no reply.
“I didn’t think so. Ship that colt down to the Fort. Let’s make some money.”
* * *
Etta’s shift ended at seven in the morning, but her replacement had called and said she’d be fifteen minutes late. Either her estimate or her watch was wrong; she showed at the hospital at seven-thirty.
“I’m sorry,” her replacement said when she finally arrived. She was young and vivacious, always talking about her lively social life. She was apparently a karaoke singer of some renown in the bars of Kitchener and Guelph, and it was this distinction that led her to regard herself as a celebrity of sorts.
“It’s all right,” Etta said.
“Oh well, it’s not like you had anything important going on,” her replacement said.
“Just my life,” Etta said, and she left.
She stopped for coffee for herself and donuts for Homer on the way out of town. It began to rain as she drove. She turned the wipers on and was reminded at once that the wiper blade was missing on the driver’s side of the Taurus. It had been gone for weeks; each time it rained, she cursed herself for not having it replaced. Of course when it wasn’t raining, she never thought about it.
After a few miles, she had to pull over to wipe the windshield with a cloth from beneath the seat. Not that it would help much; the rain fell steadily. As she finished wiping the glass Ray Dokes came upon her from the opposite direction. He pulled over to the shoulder of the road and powered the window down. He was wearing his work clothes; his Tigers’ cap, pulled low over his eyes, was splattered with raindrops.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Well, I’m not standing out in the rain,” he said. “You got trouble?”
“I’ve got no wiper on this side. I keep forgetting to fix it.”
Ray shut the Caddy off and got out, walked around and opened the trunk. The
re was a toolbox inside; he retrieved a slot screwdriver and walked over to the Taurus.
“You’re soaked; get in the car,” he said.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, but she got back in.
Ray crossed over to the passenger side of the Taurus and with the screwdriver began to remove the wiper there. Etta watched from inside. He had his collar up, and rain dripped from the brim of his ball cap. He needed a shave, she saw, and he looked wonderful.
As she watched him in the rain she was reminded of the night they got caught in a downpour on the pier at Port Maitland. They’d just finished dinner—along with a couple of bottles of red wine—and had gone for a walk along the pier afterward. In the lee of the lighthouse they had begun to kiss, and in her memory it seemed as if in an instant they went from kissing to making love on a bed of their discarded clothes. When the skies opened they were both drenched at once, but they carried on gamely, laughing crazily, breathlessly, before pulling on their wet clothes and dashing for the car.
“Shit,” she said now, sitting in the car. She’d exorcized those memories a long time ago. It was the rain, she decided. The goddamn rain.
Ray brought the good blade around and slid it onto the arm on the driver’s side. Etta rolled her window down.
“Why didn’t I think of that?” she asked.
“You want me to answer that?”
“No,” she decided. “What are you doing out here?”
“Heading home. We got rained out at work.”
“Oh.” She hesitated. “Well, I’m just getting off work myself.”
“I figured that when I saw the nurse’s getup. I’m getting wet. I’ll see ya, Etta.”
“Hey,” she said as Ray walked away. “Thanks.”
He raised his hand and kept walking back to his car. She waved as he drove away, but he wasn’t looking. She sat there along the side of the road for a time, watching the rain as it fell.
* * *
When Etta got home Mabel was watching Regis on TV, and Homer was nowhere to be seen. Mabel Anton was a heavyset woman in her fifties, and she wore her usual uniform, matching sweatpants and sweatshirt, pink running shoes. On occasion she would wear a like-colored baseball cap with a white pompom on top.
