The Bookwoman's Last Fling

by John Dunning

  “I’m looking for Everett,” I said, but I had already singled him out. I knew he’d be the big lumbering guy with muscles up his ass. “That’s my money you got on the table, Everett. I do appreciate you boys hanging on to it for me, but now I came over to pick it up before something else happens to it.”

  Everett got up from his chair. “Now that is total bullshit, whoever the hell you are.”

  “My name’s Janeway, Everett. I work over in 26.”

  “He walks hots for Sandy Standish,” one of the others said.

  “I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck who he walks for, he can’t just come busting in here and jack us around.” He looked at me and said, “You must be fuckin’ crazy.”

  “Correction, Everett, I am in here, and right now I’m getting annoyed at what you three did to my pal. That was my money he had on him tonight.” I looked incredulously from one to another to another. “You guys really want to push this?”

  “What do you think, we’re gonna let you take our money on the word of some drunk?”

  “You still don’t get it, Everett. All that’s stopping me are two ladyfingers and a bucket of dog turds, which would be you.”

  He snorted, maybe a laugh, a bluff, or a plugged nose. But I could see that Parker and Sidney were already nervous. One said, “Let him have the fuckin’ money.” Everett said, “In a pig’s eye,” and for a moment nobody moved. I turned my face slightly toward Everett and watched his eyes. “Tell you what, Everett,” I said, “I’m gonna ask your two clowns which one wants to pick up my money and hand it here. Then we can let this all blow over and be friends again.” But Everett said, “Bullshit,” and I added, “Otherwise, we can let the fellas in the racing office figure it out.”

  “Goddammit, give him the money, Everett.”

  “Shut up, Sid, he can’t prove a goddam thing.”

  “Or,” I said, “you boys can fill out a change of address for him at the post office and have his mail sent to the city hospital.”

  “Big talk for a goddam fool,” Everett said.

  Suddenly he made a move toward the table and in that tiny flash of time when his eyes were on the money, I took a step his way and kicked him hard in the balls. He gave a cry of pure agony and slipped to the floor. Parker and Sidney had backtracked all the way to the wall and we watched together as Everett tried to roll over and get up. “I will kill your sorry ass,” he whispered, but the moment trickled away and Everett was still down and my sorry ass was still standing. “You,” I said to Sidney. “Pick up the money and hand it to me.” He stood frozen to the spot for about five seconds. “Now,” I said, and he leaped to the table and started scooping up the bills.

  “Some of that was ours,” Parker said.

  “How much?”

  Parker said, “The C-note” and Sidney said, “Fifty bucks.”

  I shook my head sadly. “You boys can’t get anything right. You were lousy thieves and you’re lousy fighters, and on top of that you’re lousy liars.” I wadded up thirty and threw it on the floor. Damned generous under the circumstances.

  At the door I said, “I’ll be back if you boys ever hassle my pal again.”

  19

  I was in no hurry to get back to Rick; I knew he’d figure things out and come to me if he ever sobered up, so I went to bed and slept all night. In the morning I walked my horses and at some point Sandy blended in beside me. He was in no better mood than the last time I’d seen him. He said, “I want this cleared up, Janeway, I don’t know what Sharon expects from me, but I need you out of here by early next week.” I said nothing; just kept turning left. Later I saw him take Ms. Patterson’s filly to the track and I heard him tell the jockey to gallop her six furlongs. Ms. P. arrived as Sandy had, out of nowhere. I heard her rich belly laugh and then I saw her, walking around the tow ring and following him up to the backstretch rail. They returned together and I held the filly while Bob gave her a hot soapy bath, rinsed her, and scraped her off. Sandy and Obie took Pompeii Ruler to the track and they huddled there in serious conversation. I started the filly around and Ms. P. sat on a folding chair to observe her baby’s cooling out. Twenty minutes later Bob took off the cooler, covered her with a light sheet, and said to me, “Give her another fifteen minutes.”

  Sandy and Obie were still up at the rail, talking. At some point Bob took the sheet off and I walked the filly in the warm sunlight. She was truly a beautiful animal, gleaming brightly in the new day. Most of the time even I could tell a really classy horse. So I thought, but what did I know? I thought of Seabiscuit, an ordinary-looking champion of the thirties, whose trainer finally figured him out and soundly defeated War Admiral in their celebrated match race. You never knew, with horses or women. Ms. P. got up off her chair and followed me on another few rounds like a doting mother. I put her baby in the stall, Bob picked out her feet, rubbed her down, and Ms. Patterson watched over the webbing. I had nothing to lose so I ventured a comment.

  “This is one special lady you’ve got here.”

  “She sure is. She’s a dreamboat.”

  “She’s got the look of eagles.” I had read that line somewhere long ago, it seemed like something to say, and my risk saying it now was small.

  “Yes, she does. What’s your name?”

  “Cliff.”

  “Well, Cliff, it’s good to meet somebody who knows a good one when he sees her.”

  “I’ve got a hunch about her,” I said to keep things going, hopefully my way. “I think she’ll be a great one.”

  “You’re a man after my own heart. Are you going with us to Santa Anita?”

  “Don’t know. Haven’t asked Sandy yet.”

  “If you want to go, go, Sandy won’t mind. I like it when people who handle my horses appreciate them. Then it’s not just a job and the horses know that and they do better.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I believe that as well.”

  “You rub them too or just walk?”

  “Just walk, but that’s fine. Gives me time to get to know them, they’re not just another leg to be wrapped. I talk to them in the tow ring.”

  She looked amused. “What do you say to them?”

  “How pretty they are, how they stand out. Stuff like that.”

  “Do they answer you?”

  “Oh sure, all the time.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “Sometimes with a friendly nuzzle.” I remembered the horse on Sharon’s farm and I stretched a point. “Once I had one who used to lay his head on my shoulder.”

  She watched as Bob put a shine on her filly. “I think with your attitude you could bring us luck. I’ll talk to Sandy.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Sometime soon. I imagine you could come with us if you wanted to.”

  “That’s very generous, Ms. Patterson…”

  “Call me Barbara.”

  Before I could call her anything, Sandy and Obie arrived from the track. Barbara said, “Cliff’s going south with us, Sandy; isn’t that great? He loves my baby and I’ve got a hunch about him; I think he’ll bring us luck.” Sandy turned to the wall and said nothing. He felt the filly’s legs and frosted me with a look as he crawled under the webbing and walked away with Barbara. They were barely out of earshot when Bob began razzing me.

  “Oh, I just LOOOVE talking to them. I whisper sweet nothings in their pointy little ears, I kiss them here and there, just every-little-old-where.”

  I laughed with him.

  He brushed off his horse’s legs. “You dog.”

  Noonday came and went.

  Sandy and Barbara seemed to have left the premises. I called Sharon from the pay phone in the kitchen and told her what was happening. On her end, the executor had finally approved the move to Santa Anita. “I think they’re leaving in a couple of days,” she said. “They want to get the horses accustomed to the track as soon as possible.”

  In the afternoon I pressed my hunt for people who remembered Candice. I walked through the barns and
asked my questions; I shot the breeze and congregated with old-timers wherever I found them. So far my hunt had been sporadic, but I’d had such good luck on the first day I thought there had to be others here who had memories of the woman in white. If so I didn’t find them. At four o’clock I arrived back in my tack room, tired from the long day. I kicked off my shoes and lay on my bunk, thinking I’d rest a few minutes. When I opened my eyes the clock said five-thirty and someone was tapping on my screened door.

  Rick.

  “It’s not locked, come on in.”

  He sat on the chair facing my bed, a ruddy-faced man, jowly and aging badly with dull washed-out eyes. This was my first good look at him in the daylight, and he looked like he’d lived a hundred hard years. A shiner was growing under one eye and both lips were split. His nose was fat and red. In a year he’d be lucky to be alive. His first words were raspy and predictable.

  “You got my money?”

  “It’s right there on the table.”

  He looked at it. “What’s the catch?”

  “Hey, I keep my word. Now take it and get out of here before I change my mind.”

  He picked it up with trembling fingers. But he didn’t move from the chair.

  “I hear you put Everett on the ground.”

  “So what? Everett struts around but he’s got a paper ass.” I closed my eyes. “I’ve seen a hundred guys like him. All of ’em put together don’t amount to a sudden fart in a hurricane.”

  A long minute passed. I knew he was still there because I could hear him breathing. And I knew sure as hell what would come next.

  He worked himself up to it. “What about my other hundred?”

  “Don’t press your luck, Rick. Take your money and scram.”

  “I could still tell you some things, Janeway.” His voice trembled now and I knew he had something, the same way I’d known it when I first met him; my gut told me so. I knew this but I wasn’t going to play his patsy again. “Well, this time I won’t lose any sleep thinking about it,” I said. “Go drink yourself silly.”

  “I’m through with all that. Gonna get my act together.”

  “Famous last words of every drunk everywhere. But why tell me? What do I care?”

  I heard him get up. I opened my eyes. He was standing at the doorway looking back at me. “You’re a hard son of a bitch, Janeway.”

  “Yep. Screw me once, I remember it forever. I don’t turn the other cheek, Rick.”

  “What if I told you…?”

  I sat up on the bed. “Tell me what?”

  “Everything you want to know.”

  “That would be great, but how do you know what I want and how could I believe you?”

  “I’m counting on you to know the truth when you hear it. Or I give you this money back and you owe me nothing.”

  20

  He came back into the room and sat on the chair. His eyes were steady now and his voice was clear. He didn’t mention the money again, just sat with his hat in his hands and looked at me across the small space between us. “You tell me,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Probably all the stuff you can’t tell me.”

  “Try me.”

  I tried him on an easy one. “How well did you actually know her?”

  “About as well as you can know anybody,” he said, and I felt my heart pick up. If only that were true, I thought.

  He twisted the hat in his lap. “You want to know what kind of woman she was?”

  “Sure. That’ll do for a start.”

  “She was the sweetest, loveliest, most wonderful girl…she didn’t have a mean bone in her body.” He coughed. “Jesus Christ, I loved her. Still do.”

  His eyes were focused on nothing now; he looked like he had gone far away to another place and another time. He stared at the wall and his voice became a soft monotone. “I can’t believe she’s been gone all these years.”

  I didn’t move. I barely breathed, just watched his face and his eyes. He said, “No matter what you think you know about love, Janeway, you can forget it. When I was very young I thought I knew what love was. I knew nothing. I had no idea. She was the love of my life. There’s never been an hour of any day when I haven’t thought of her. I would have died for her, but I couldn’t do that. Instead she was the one who died. She died and left us all.”

  He covered his face with his left hand. “I’ve never been the same; never cared much about anything since then. The night she died I got drunk for the first time, and my only really sober moments since then have been when I had to get up to work or when I was tapped and had no money to spend on liquor.”

  There had always been a sadness about her, he said. “I don’t think she ever drew a truly happy breath after her father died.”

  She was her daddy’s girl: first, last, always. When old Ritchey died she looked to another old man for what she had lost, but Geiger was a different kettle of fish. Her father had been her window to the world. He had taken her on the grand tour of Europe when she was thirteen; he wanted her to have everything, except, apparently, boyfriends. He sent her to private girls’ schools, threw lavish parties on her birthday, encouraged her to invite friends her own age…but then the party was over and she was his baby again. The friends winnowed down and disappeared. She was smothered all her life, first by the father who adored her, then by another old man who possessed her. Her father had tried to protect her and only made her insecure and dependent. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got if you don’t believe in yourself.

  “I was her childhood friend long before she ever thought of having a life on the racetrack.” He leaned back in his chair. “I can close my eyes and see her just as she was then.” He didn’t move then for a long time. His breathing became shallow and then seemed to stop. I leaned forward and put my hand on his arm. “Rick?”

  His eyes flicked open. “My name is Richard Lawrence.”

  Candice thought he had a storybook name. Like Lawrence of Arabia, she said, but what she always called him was Ricky. Just a jump away from Tricky Dicky, I thought.

  “I never told anybody about her, she was my secret, and she was the only one who ever called me that.”

  Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, she called him.

  “My father worked in Wall Street,” he said. “My mother was an elegant lady who belonged to clubs and society. Was…is…I have no idea now whether they are alive or dead. At twenty-two I was going to study medicine, and I had two older brothers and a younger sister. Later, when Candice died, I went straight to hell. And when everything in life goes bad, the racetrack is a perfect place to lose yourself.”

  He and Candice had a secret friendship in New York State, where they both grew up. Her father would go almost daily into the city on business, and Rick—Rikki-Tikki-Tavi—would meet Candice there in the woods. “Mr. Ritchey had an estate that sprawled across two hundred acres, about forty miles from the city. He had a driver and a butler and a stable. Not racehorses, not then: polo ponies, hunters, show horses. He was always interested in a fine horse, and if he saw one he liked, he bought it.

  “We lived down the road, about half a mile from their gate. One day I saw her picking flowers just inside the gate. She was watched by an old Negro woman who went with her everywhere.

  “I spoke to her through the gate. I loved her right away, from the first minute of that first day. You can see what a sloppy romantic I was. Still am. The difference then was, I went around with my head in the clouds. I idealized everything. I haven’t done that in a while.

  “We talked for five minutes before the old woman came over and chased me away. But after that I looked for her every day. I would walk the half-mile and then up the road to the gate. Sometimes the old woman was there, sometimes not. When I started school I kept hoping I’d see Candice again, and I did, and we talked, but then she was sent away to a girls’ academy about eighty miles away. That didn’t matter: When I was twelve I would get out on the road two or three times a month and thumb
my way there and back. It wasn’t until much later, when we were seventeen, that we were able to steal moments and then hours away from her father and take long walks in the woods.”

  He blinked and looked at me. “You probably don’t believe a word of this.”

  “I’m sorry, did I give you that impression?”

  “It’s not you, it’s me. My own words suddenly started sticking in my throat when I realized what a drippy old fart I’ve become.”

  “Hey, stuff happens over the years.”

  “Ain’t that the damn truth. Stuff happens and a lot of it happened to me. I thought if you knew where I came from it would be easier to swallow. But maybe belief just isn’t to be had.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Not at all.”

  “It’s still no excuse for beating a dead horse, so to speak. If I was doing that…”

  “…keep doing it,” I said.

  He laughed and I found, to my very great surprise, that I liked him.

  He took a deep breath.

  Said, “You’re easier to talk to than I thought you’d be.”

  “That’s because I’m interested now.”

  “Well, there isn’t much more. Then you can ask whatever you want and I’ll try to answer. But this is a long reach back through an alcoholic haze. At times I almost believe I can reach out and touch her…I can recall every moment like it was yesterday.”

  He said, “I’m going on the wagon. I’ve said it before, but this time I swear…I swear.”

  But that wasn’t what I wanted to hear, he said. About Candice…and what he knew…

  They never had what could be called a love affair; he was always terrified of touching her and spoiling what they did have. It was idyllic. They were best friends always, so she did have another friend her age. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

  “Mr. Ritchey believed that boys only wanted one thing from a girl. ‘If he finds out about you, he’ll send me away,’ she said.

  “But I would never touch her. Even if I could, I couldn’t.”

  There came a time when he knew he could. “But I didn’t.”