“If you would just explain yourself, that would be most satisfying,” Santa said.
“I can explain it,” I said. “He heard us talking in the bar and decided it would be fun to play a little prank.”
The kid nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. I can hear most everything under that floor, you know. And the walls are thin too.”
Santa continued to look befuddled. “But you knew so much about the boy and the vase and—”
“Because he stole the vase himself,” I said. “Would have worked better if you’d used the dead boy’s name.”
“I know! Trouble was, never knew that kid’s name. Never met him. When he was alive I mean. I saw the stiff when I nicked the jar.”
“You stole from the dead?” Santa said.
“Naw, I stole from his family. Plus I felt bad about it, okay? But then I heard you guys. You think you’re Santa Claus, and this guy thinks he’s on his thousandth birthday, and both’a you were looking for someone to make happy so I figured, I know someone who could use some’a that. Right?”
I had no reason to think there was anything remotely altruistic about his intentions, but my friend was swallowing it whole.
“Why didn’t you just tell us the truth?” I asked.
“How many reasons you want, champ? You’d be askin’ about my parents in a hot minute, and next thing I’m getting walked down to Our Lady of the Wooden Rulers so you can feel better about yourselves. Everybody who sees a kid on the street looks for the easiest story they can find to get out of worryin’ about him, and I gave you one.”
“And so instead of the truth you told the story that would best convince us to return the ill-gotten family heirloom,” Santa said.
“Yeah. That sounds right, sure. You guys seemed wacky enough to fall for it, so yeah.”
“I’d stick with the ghost story if I were you, Santa” I said. “When you retell this one.”
“Oh no, you’re wrong, my friend. This is a much better story. A little thief, haunted by the memory of his crime, concocts a brilliant solution!” He shoved a forkful of food into his mouth. “Nearly perfect. All it’s missing is the right ending.”
“Geez,” the kid said, looking at me. “He always like this?”
“More or less.”
“Head injury or something?”
“It’s in his nature.” To Santa I asked, “What kind of ending did you have in mind?”
“Orphan stories can only have one kind, Stanley. The boy must be reunited with his family or adopted into a loving household.”
“No thanks, buddy,” Davey said.
“But you are an orphan.”
“No, I’m a freakin’ Martian. The sisters said they found me on the steps of the place, that’s all I know. If you’re lookin’ for me to shed a tear about how nobody loved me and I’m all alone and all that, you better just keep lookin’. I got past it a long time ago.”
This was a rather worldly statement from a boy his age, but living on your own does have a maturing effect on a person.
“Surely there’s more we can do!” Santa said. “We can’t just let you walk off on your own, you’re a child!”
“I’m doin’ all right, mister. This food’s great though. Real nice of you. But look, I got a steady job. That basement under O’Shea’s place, I’m the only one short enough to stand upright down there, so that’s some real security, until, you know, until I get bigger. And I got places I can sleep in the winter. I got friends.”
“Does that include the guy shaking you down earlier?” I asked.
“Oh, him?” His eyes darted to the window, and the street beyond, as if he was actively searching for the person in question. “You boys don’t want to get involved in that.”
“If he means you harm, we certainly do!” Santa said.
“Nah, nah, I got that under control.” He didn’t say it like someone who was at all confident that this was the truth.
“Look kid, you may as well tell Santa here everything or he’ll have to come up with his own happy ending.”
“I’m certain the nuns at your orphanage are worried terribly about you, Davey,” Santa said.
“Right, fine. But it’s not a story for little kids, right? It’s a gambling thing.”
“You owe him money?” I asked.
“Kinda. The guy he works for thinks I owe him money. We don’t agree about that. What do you fellas know about horse racing?”
Santa and I looked at one another. “I think the question, young man, is what could you possibly know about it?” Santa asked.
“More than you’d think from lookin’ at me,” Davey said. It was a sentence that defined him more accurately than anything I’d heard up to that point. He had just the right combination of knowledge and intelligence to be dangerous, and his age made it easy to forget that fact.
“So here’s the deal,” he continued. “Down at the track the jockeys all know each other, right? They ride for the horse owners and only make coin when they win, so they got lotsa incentive to win, but they’re also real friendly with each other most’a the time. And they look out for each other, right? So now and again, like if one of those boys are about to get canned or they’re hard up for a purse, they’ll get together and throw a race. Not all the time, just here and there, mostly on weekdays when the action ain’t that much in the first place.”
“They’ll decide who is going to win ahead of time?” Santa asked, for clarification.
“Exactly. Or place or show. Anything with a purse, just for a pal. So it helps to be in the room with the jockeys when they all decide to throw one. That’s where I come in.”
“You’re secretly a jockey?” I asked.
“Naw, I hate horses. I could be though, maybe. No, I’m in the room only they don’t know it.”
“Hiding.”
“Yeah. Thing about being this size, there’s lotsa places I can fit. So my friend in the alley, he works for a guy who likes to place big bets on those horse races, but he likes to make those bets when it ain’t really gambling, right? He likes it when he already knows how it’s gonna play out, I’m saying. So for a little of his action I been spying on the jocks and tipping him off whenever there was a sure thing. And it was workin’ beautiful for a long time. That was until a few weeks back, when one of my sure things broke his leg on the back stretch. Now the guy is sayin’ I owe him the money he lost on the horse.”
“Why that’s ridiculous!” Santa said.
“Sure it is. But he won’t leave me alone about it until I cough up money it’s pretty obvious I don’t have. I even offered to earn it back with more sure things, but he doesn’t want to hear it. Which is a shame, because I’ve got a good one in a few days and he’s gone deaf. That’s what we were really arguing about. Me and the guy in the alley, I mean. He came to tell me it was a no-go. It’s a pickle, right? I got this one-in-a-million set-up, just perfect, and I don’t have the money to take advantage. And if I did, they don’t let kids bet on the horses anyways. If I did, though, I’d have the money for Vito and then some.”
“His name is Vito?” I asked.
“Yeah. Heard of him?”
It was a pretty common name in certain parts of the city, so it was hard to say. However, were I to make a list of people not to enter into a business agreement with, people named Vito would be near the top.
“Does he have a last name?”
“Probably. I don’t know it though. Everyone just calls him Vito. Why, you thinkin’ of paying him a visit? I wouldn’t. Me, he threatens. You, he’d prob’ly just kill. Or have one of his guys do it. He’s that kind’a person.”
“What’s this sure thing?” Santa asked.
“Why? It doesn’t matter.”
“Indulge me. I’ve never heard of a sure thing before in gambling.”
“That’s because it doesn’t exist,” I said.
“Hey, now that’s unfair. Sure, I’m in a bind because of a horse with a broken leg, but how often does that happen? I can name
every single one of my other sure picks for you if you want, you go back and look ‘em up in the papers. You’ll see.”
He turned back to Santa. “So there’s a jockey by the name of Beautiful Pete. Used to be a big deal for a while on the circuit, but he had this problem. Women liked him too much, see, and that got him into jams, and some’a them jams were big enough that Pete needed help getting out of ‘em. But Pete won regular, and that made all the difference because even if he was stuck under contract with the same guy that whole time, and the guy had to keep greasin’ wheels to get him out of trouble, he made more money than he cost. Pete also never made it as big as he could’a, because nobody wanted to take on such a wild card, even if he was one hell of a jock.”
“There’s a point in this where you explain what it has to do with your sure thing, isn’t there?” I asked. I was already signaling the diner’s one employee that I was in need of more coffee. In another hour I was going to be sober enough to start drinking again.
“Beautiful Pete is the sure thing, mister. See, all that was a long time ago, now he’s a lot older and he’s not winning so many races, but his boss won’t let him off the hook, right? Pete wants to retire, but because of all the trouble he got into over the years he’s got a bunch of back-pay owed to him that he can’t get out of the guy. Like, the boss, he’s taking revenge on Pete for being such a pain the ass. So I heard, at least.”
“You’ve heard a lot.”
“The jockeys like me. Most times I don’t even gotta hide any more, they just forget I’m in the room. Anyway, so Pete’s on his last tour one way or another. The last race he’s gonna be in is this Thursday at the Aqueduct. Then the whole team heads South for the Mexico circuit and he ain’t planning on being a part of that. But first, he needs to win one race. That was the deal he made with the boss, right? He wins the race, straight-up, he gets his back-pay, everybody’s happy. But—and this is the best part—to stick it to him one last time, his boss is making him ride the worst nag in the stable. I mean, this horse hasn’t won a race one time. The jocks nicknamed her ‘glue factory’, that’s how bad she is. But since it’s Pete’s last trip around the track, everyone’s gonna lie down for him regardless. He could run that race on foot and cross the tape first, you understand? But riding glue factory, that’s even better.”
“I’m not sure I do understand,” Santa said.
“The nag’s never won,” I said. “So the odds will be long.”
“Exactly. So this is my dilemma. I got a horse that’s gonna pay back on eighty to one, and no money to put on it, and a debt to clear that I don’t even really owe to the one guy I used to trust to make these kinds’a bets for me.”
“That is quite a dilemma,” I said. “What’s the actual name of this sure thing of yours? I assume the horse doesn’t race under the name glue factory.”
Davey laughed. “Yeah, right, like I’m givin’ that up. Listen fellas, I gotta take off. I got until Thursday to find someone to make that bet, and time’s wastin’. Thanks for the food though.” He got up. “Also, sorry about the thing with the vase.”
“Do you have a place to stay?” Santa asked. “Because if you want…”
“No, no, this is what I was saying. Everyone meets a kid like me, they wanna save me, but I don’t need saving, even from Santa Claus and whoever his friend thinks he is. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”
“But still…” Santa was looking at me, expecting some sort of volunteerism on my part, but I wasn’t sure how much of what the kid had said was worth believing. Even the part about living alone on the streets. I was pretty positive none of it was fully true, but I was much more cynical than my friend and, really, more cynical than most other representatives of the human race, so it was difficult to tell if I was reacting appropriately.
I did know, on some basic tribal level, that having discovered a ten-year old living on the street—assuming, again, this was true—I held some sort of responsibility for his wellbeing, just by virtue of being an adult. But I’d known a whole lot of street urchins in my life and he seemed considerably better adjusted than most of them. My impression was, he would be no better with my assistance than without it, and likely had a long and admirable life of crime to look forward to whether or not I interfered.
Santa was coming from a different place, though. He wanted a way to keep Davey around that didn’t involve coercion, and could only think of one.
“If someone were to place that bet for you,” Santa said, “How much would it have to be? Just hypothetically?”
“Hypothetically?” Davey said, smiling. He returned to the table. “Hypothetically, how much money are you looking to make?”
* * *
“It’s a scam,” I said for perhaps the fiftieth or sixtieth time. It was my new mantra, replacing there’s no such thing as ghosts, and I expected to be just as right about this one.
Four days had passed since Santa had struck the deal with little Davey, which was as follows: on Thursday afternoon, they would meet at the track and enter together, at which time Davey would give Santa the name of the horse and he would place the bet for both of them.
Only after the horse won would Davey give Santa his share, which was said to be in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars. I considered it highly unlikely he actually had that much money, but since he wouldn’t get his cut of the winnings without first proving he had the cash, the angle escaped me. For his part, Santa was putting five thousand dollars on the horse. He could spare it, and was likely planning to split the winnings equally regardless of how much of the bet was his and how much was Davey’s. Santa was that kind of guy.
The name of the horse remained unknown up until a half hour before the race, Davey claimed, in order to protect his investment. This was a little silly, because if Santa was in any way dishonest he could just keep all the winnings, regardless of when the name was revealed. But that was how they’d worked it out.
I was cut entirely out of the proceedings, which was fine. Gambling is one of the oldest and worst inventions in history, and I grew tired of it a few thousand years ago. That was why, the day before the race, I was still telling Santa he was being scammed.
“Stanley, you have no faith in human beings, even young human beings. I think we have firmly established that by now.”
We were at a bar again, but not O’Shea’s. Since discovering the subject of our conversations could well be listening in, we’d taken to frequenting the next-nearest Irish pub down the street.
“I’ve earned this distrust honestly, over many centuries.”
“So you have. But you’ve lost the capacity to be pleasantly surprised by humanity as well. You’ve lost hope.”
“I thought you were going to find it for me.”
“I was, but you may be a lost cause. Besides, we’ve been over this. Davey has nothing possible to gain.”
This was the biggest problem with the scam argument. Santa was taking his own money and walking it up to the window himself and placing the bet. If he lost, he lost, but the kid wasn’t going to gain anything from that loss, not unless he also owned the track.
“Maybe it’s another prank,” I said. “Like with the vase. He wasn’t getting anything out of that either.”
“Of course he was! He cleared his own conscience.”
“Because he didn’t have the money to buy it back himself? I’m not sure he has a conscience.”
Santa growled into his beer. “Any other man, Stanley, I’d tell them an appropriate story and they would feel better about themselves.”
“You’re the one who thought I needed cheering. I never asked for that.”
“Of course you do! It’s Christmas! Everyone should be happy at Christmas!”
Christmas is a pretty new holiday, really, at least as far as how it’s celebrated now. It was on the calendar for a long time, but only recently became the kind of big deal that involved otherwise-total strangers demanding cheer. That said, there were always events like it: har
vest festivals, royal birthdays, religious anniversaries, and so on. One or two made me legitimately happy when I participated. For instance, anything involving sex as an act of celebration I am entirely in favor of. But that’s not the sort of thing one expects out of Christmas. This is a holiday for family and friends and happy memories of childhood, and I don’t have any of those things. I can’t celebrate it the way other people do, in other words.
Interestingly, neither could Santa, which made his general sense of optimism and default state of happiness perplexing enough to continue to be around. As much as he was trying to figure out how to get some Christmas spirit into me, I was figuring out where he even found the energy to have it himself. Granted, questioning why Santa Claus was happy in December was a strange place to find myself, but this Santa was real, he was actually an imp, and he was stuck with the same bunch of humans as I was for the other eleven months. On Christmas Day this Santa wasn’t going to be resting from delivering toys to all the little girls and boys. He was going to be sitting at home alone, watching a parade on television and drinking, just like I was. And then it wouldn’t matter how many kids he made smile.
I appreciate that this is a terribly depressing way to look at life, but it’s where I was at the time.
I didn’t say any of those things to Santa, both because I wasn’t drunk enough and because I was pretty sure I already had said some version of it to him in the past week. He was not compelled by my thesis.
“By your reasoning, if I want to be happy I have to make someone else happy, right?” I asked.
“Yes, after a fashion.” Unspoken was the hint of a very long discussion on the topic of selfishness and the act of bringing joy to other people for the sake of their joy rather than for oneself. It was a profoundly annoying conversation we’d already had few days earlier and I never wanted to have again.
“Then I’ll make you happy for Christmas,” I said.
“I’m already going to be happy. Make Davey happy instead.”
Yuletide Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 4) Page 5