One-Eyed Jacks

by Brad Smith

  Callahan had his dumb smile fixed in place. “You got everything figured out,” he said in admiration.

  “You bet,” Tony Broad said. “That’s why I’m the boss.”

  The landlady caught Tommy walking out of the bathroom, wearing only his pants — no shoes, no socks, no shirt. She was a thick, muscular woman who looked to Tommy like she should be unloading trucks somewhere. Her grey hair was pulled back in a pony-tail and she had forearms like Popeye.

  “See here!” she shouted when he tried to retreat. “What are you doing here?”

  Tommy had no choice but to say that he was visiting Lee Charles. “But she’s my sister,” he explained quickly.

  “That so?” the thick woman said. “Where’s your shirt?”

  Tommy thought for a moment then finally held his hands up in surrender, like the villain in a western movie.

  “We got rules here,” the woman said. “No cooking, no alcohol, no men. That means you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I don’t want to see you here again.”

  “You won’t.” Tommy turned to walk away.

  “And Mr. Cochrane?”

  Tommy spun round at the sound of his name. The landlady stepped closer.

  “The next time you fight a chump like Rinaldi,” she admonished, “put him away early, for crying out loud. None of this fancy-dan stuff. Slug the son of a bitch and get it over with. I lost a dollar on that fight to the grocer.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

  When Tommy got back to the room, Lee was lying on the bed, wearing his shirt and laughing like she would die. Tommy stood inside the door and shook his head.

  “You coulda come and rescued me.”

  Lee tried to catch her breath. “No chance,” she said. “The woman scares the hell out of me.”

  “I screwed it up now. I won’t be able to come back here.”

  “I was getting kinda sick of you anyway,” Lee told him.

  “That a fact?”

  “Yeah, that’s a fact. All you want to do is screw. Is that any way to treat your sister?”

  “I was under the impression you enjoyed it.”

  “Hey, I’m a better actress than I thought.” Then she grabbed him by the belt and pulled him onto the bed.

  Later they were hungry and they left the rooming house and went down to the market, where they bought cheese and crackers and smoked sausage at a Greek place. The owner knew Lee by now and called her by name.

  “I see you’ve found yourself a young man already,” he smiled.

  “This guy?” Lee said. “He’s my brother, that’s all.”

  There was a small park off Spadina, and they sat on the grass and ate the lunch. There were maybe a dozen kids playing softball in the park. Before the game began, a fight nearly broke out over who was going to be Mickey Mantle.

  “You figure on staying at the Parrot?” Tommy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lee said. “The job was supposed to be for a month, but we’re packing ’em in. I got a feeling Mel’s going to offer me a contract.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “I guess.”

  A kid at the plate hit a long foul ball that landed in the grass near them. Tommy got up and tossed it back into the game, fired a perfect strike to the third baseman.

  “You didn’t tell me you were a ballplayer, mick,” Lee said.

  “Hey, we had a good ball team in Marlow,” Tommy said. “Went to the provincial finals when I was fifteen, lost in extra innings. I still got my old jacket somewhere.”

  Lee took a bite of the cheddar cheese. “Why did you never take me to Marlow?”

  Tommy looked at the kids playing ball. “You know, I used to wonder that myself. I guess I never wanted to look like some hick, figured you wouldn’t like me if you saw where I come from.”

  “And now you want to go back there.”

  “I sure as hell do. I hate to think about losing that place, Lee.” He fell quiet for a full minute, watched the kids playing ball. “It just seemed like it would always be there.”

  “Can you make a living from it?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah, you can make a living. I mean, you won’t get rich, but you can get along all right. It’s nice to get your hands dirty, believe it or not. Been a while since I did any work that actually felt like work.”

  He took his jack-knife and sliced the sausage.

  “Mind you, it’s nothing fancy,” he said. “But it’s a place where you could... put your feet up.”

  “It sounds nice.”

  “You’re right,” he said to her then. “I should’ve taken you to Marlow.”

  “Well, we’re not dead yet.”

  Tommy turned to look at her. “Could you ever live on a farm?”

  “I never have.”

  “You ever think about it?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Lately.”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “Sure.”

  NINETEEN

  When Herm was in the chips, he liked to have breakfast every morning at Lem’s Diner. Poached eggs and ham, pancakes, brown bread toast, coffee, juice and marmalade. Eggs beside the toast, not on top, thank you ma’am. Who the hell wants soggy toast?

  It was Saturday — the Saturday — and he settled into a booth and ordered his usual, then opened up the daily racing form, which he’d picked up sixty seconds earlier from the kid at Sully’s. Herm turned at once to the seventh race and looked for the horse Bobby Pin. And there he was — out of the six hole — not a great post, but it could have been worse. Besides, at a mile and a sixteenth the post wasn’t all that important. The dope on Bobby Pin — and who knew if it was true — was that he’d been running in the Finger Lakes and he had a place and a show in ten outings. A brown gelding, sixteen hands. High horse.

  Oh, Bobby Pin.

  Sometimes there were things to be learned from a racing form and sometimes there was nothing. The problem was, you never knew which was true until the race was run. Hindsight was a wonderful thing but, to a betting man, about as useless as tits on a boar.

  After breakfast he went back to Sully’s and shot some eight-ball with Stan Jones the elder until noon. Stan wasn’t too flush, as usual, and they played for ten cents a game. Herm was off his stick and he lost a dime after five games. He gave Stan the elder a dollar bill and told him to invest in a meal, although Herm knew it would never happen, unless barley and hops could pass for lunch.

  At noon Herm walked over to the Jasper Hotel. Tommy Cochrane and T-Bone Pike were sitting on the steps out front when he arrived.

  “Hello, T-Bone,” Herm said. “How are you?”

  “Just fine, Mr. Bell,” T-Bone said. “Look like a fine day for the horse races.”

  “Are you coming with us?” Herm asked. “Or are you sparring?”

  “No, no,” T-Bone said. “Got the day off. Got a snooker game down the way with a man from down Arkansas, he a hillbilly guitar picker whose daddy knew a man who might have known my daddy.”

  Herm looked at the coloured man’s face, cut and bruised like damaged fruit, and thought that T-Bone Pike deserved a day off.

  While they were talking Herm noticed a stocky man in a black flat-top approaching through the alley. As Herm watched, the flattop walked directly up to Tommy and extended his hand.

  “I heard I could find you here.”

  “How you doing, Chuck?”

  “I’m all right,” Chuck Monday said. He held a bill in his hand. “It ain’t much, I know, but here’s ten on what I owe you. I’ll try to give you ten every two weeks from here on, ’til I pay it off.”

  Tommy looked at the sawbuck, and at the earnest face behind it, for maybe a three count. To refuse the money would be an insult to Chuck Monday.

  “Thanks, Chuck,” Tommy said. “I appreciate it.”

  Chuck nodded quickly. “Well, you take care. See you in a couple weeks.”

  Tommy watched until Chuck had rounded the corner and passed
out of sight. “Well, let’s go,” he said then.

  Herm and Tommy walked to the streetcar stop on Gerrard. Tommy had his wallet in his front pocket and he checked its safety as he walked. He was carrying four hundred and eighty dollars (four-ninety now), what he’d earned from the Bamboo and made at the card game, along with a hundred from T-Bone Pike. Now all he needed was a horse that would run.

  “Looks like T-Bone’s having a rough go down at the gym,” Herm said as they stood and waited for the car.

  “Nick Wilson,” Tommy said. “That kid’s got a lot to learn about respect. Something happened down there yesterday that Bones won’t talk about, that’s where he got the cut.”

  “It’s a hell of a way to earn a living.”

  “Don’t worry, Wilson is getting his, too. Bones may be forty years old, but he’s as strong as his word and he’s smart. He knows more inside a ring than Wilson could learn in a hundred years.”

  On the streetcar Herm showed Tommy the form. Herm had already made his picks for the first six races, the seventh he’d left blank.

  “Early line shows fifteen to one, but that’ll drop when they start to bet him. You won’t be the only one.”

  “What about you?”

  “I didn’t figure to bet him to win, it’d just knock your odds down,” Herm said. “Unless you want me to as a show of faith.”

  “I figure you’ve shown faith.”

  Herm nodded. “I’ll bet him a few bucks to place, that’ll do. This horse is going to run in the money.”

  It had been a lot of years since Tommy had visited Greenwood. The place hadn’t changed though, the same mix of high rollers and society’s dregs, bee-hived blondes and bag ladies, men smoking Havanas and bums picking discarded tote tickets off the floor.

  And a well-dressed kid with a nose for gambling and a finished-up fighter looking for acreage.

  It was a long afternoon for Tommy, waiting for the seventh to arrive. He didn’t bet the first six, didn’t want to hurt his bankroll, didn’t want to jaundice his luck.

  Herm bet all the way through and he had the winner in the second and the show horse — a long shot — in the third. By the end of the sixth he was up over eighty dollars. He and Tommy walked down to the rail to watch the horses as they came out for the seventh. Bobby Pin was wearing black and blue — colour of a shiner, Tommy thought, good sign or bad? — and he was a tall horse, with a good head and full jowls, like a stallion, although he wasn’t.

  “What do you think?” Tommy asked Herm Bell.

  Herm just shrugged. “He’s a horse, that’s all I know,” he said. “Now, if my old man was here, be a different story. He could tell you things about a horse that the horse himself didn’t know. How its tendons looked, how it was blowing, what it had for breakfast, how much it shit this morning. He knew more about horses than he did about everything on earth put together. More than he knew about people, that’s for sure, that’s why my mother left. She used to tell my aunt she was gonna start wearing a saddle and bridle, that way my old man might notice her.”

  Tommy watched the chestnut fighting the bit, prancing sideways, eyes wide and strung out. Typical thoroughbred, wrapped a little tight. Hey, hey, Bobby Pin, Tommy thought. You gonna run for me today, gonna help me catch some luck? I’ve got ninety acres of better than average farmland riding on you, not to mention a white stucco house and a solid barn of pine and oak, put up by the strong Irish hands of James Cochrane.

  And more than that, Bobby Pin, you ringer, you thief of dreams, you side-stepping, bit-fighting chestnut son of a bitch. A lot more than that.

  The odds on the board went from fifteen to eighteen to twenty to one. It was an eleven-horse field and the favourite was Baxter’s Beauty, showing three to two at the present. Herm turned to Tommy.

  “I’m going to go bet,” he said.

  Tommy stayed by the rail until two minutes to post and then he went and put four hundred and fifty dollars on the nose of the chestnut gelding Bobby Pin.

  When he rejoined Herm at the rail all bets were down and the odds on the six horse had dropped to eleven to one.

  “The late money knocked him down,” Herm said. “But eleven is good, you can’t squawk about eleven.”

  Bobby Pin came out of the gate in the middle of the field and he stayed right there until the three-quarter mark. Baxter’s Beauty settled along the rail in second and he appeared to be coasting. The leader was a bay mare named Tammy Too and she was setting a mean pace she wasn’t likely to hold.

  At the rail neither Tommy nor Herm said anything, but kept their eyes on the black-blue colours in the midst of the pack. Herm was praying for Tommy Cochrane’s horse harder than he’d ever prayed for one of his own. For Herm, winning was just money — money to spend on good food and better liquor, nice clothes and nicer women. But this was different, this was something Herm had never dealt with before. This time it was somebody’s dream out there. The possibility made him happy, but it scared him a little, too.

  At the three-quarter post Bobby Pin found a hole and broke through on the outside. As he began to move, Tammy Too shot her wad and fell away to give Baxter’s Beauty the lead. Bobby Pin came on to challenge at once and coming out of the clubhouse turn he was neck and neck with Baxter’s Beauty. The chestnut had the momentum though and the favourite began to fail. Down the stretch it was Bobby Pin by one and a half, then two lengths.

  At the rail Tommy had crumpled the racing form into a ball without knowing it and he hadn’t drawn a breath since the clubhouse turn. He kept his eyes on the number six of the saddle cloth, afraid that the horse in the lead wasn’t his. Herm Bell had his head back and he was laughing out loud.

  And then a rank bay filly name of Fiery Kate came out of the pack like the devil himself was chasing her. She was tight to the rail, and flying. The jock on Bobby Pin kept his horse wide, hunched over the gelding’s neck, working the whip stride for stride. At the wire it looked as if Bobby Pin had held on.

  When they went to the photo, it was Fiery Kate by a nose.

  They took a cab back downtown, Herm’s insistence. Tommy hadn’t said much since the race. Herm sat and looked out the window at the traffic on Queen.

  “I feel like a son of a bitch,” he said.

  “No,” Tommy told him.

  “Should’ve kept my goddamn mouth shut right from the start. It was a dumb idea.”

  “It was about three inches away from being a great idea,” Tommy said. “Things don’t always turn out. Were you mad at me for the Rinaldi fight?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Well, it’s close enough,” Tommy said. And he laughed. “Jesus, didn’t we have a hell of a two minutes though? You gave me a good horse, kid, he ran a game race.”

  But Herm couldn’t be happy with it. He kept turning it over in his mind.

  “A place bet wouldn’t have helped,” he said out loud. “Only paid five bucks to place, they had him bet from here to Tuesday for second.”

  “I had to go for the win,” Tommy said. “I knew that.”

  “Goddamn black-hearted, plowhorse son of a bitch,” Herm said. “You want to go for a drink? I’m buying and for as long as you’re drinking.”

  Tommy was looking out the window. He didn’t know how he felt. “Okay, let’s go for a drink,” he said. “But we have to go to the Parrot, I told Lee and Bones I’d meet ’em there after the race.”

  Herm told the driver. “What’re you going to do now, Tommy?”

  “Well, I got ten days. Could be I’m screwed, blued and tattooed. You know any jobs that pay five hundred dollars a day?”

  “What about Mac Brady?”

  “Mac Brady and that prick he calls a heavyweight can both take a long walk off a short pier,” Tommy replied.

  Herm went back to looking out the window. He wouldn’t ask about things that were none of his concern. Tommy turned to look at the honest face beneath the pompadour and decided that Herm Bell was a good kid. He was a good kid and today
he’d nearly turned Tommy a hell of a favour. He’d tried, anyway.

  “I’ve been advised by the medical profession not to fight again,” Tommy said to the kid. “I’ve got what the doctors call an aneurysm. There’s a good chance that if I go back in the ring, I won’t get out alive.”

  Herm looked over. “Holy shit. Does Mac Brady know this?”

  “Nobody knows it. Just me and Bones. And now you. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep it quiet, though.”

  “You got my word.”

  “Good enough.”

  Tommy let it go at that and turned to look out the window again. It was hot July on Queen Street, and the women were dressed in shorts and halters, wearing sandals on their feet as they went about their errands. There were a million people in the city who never heard of a horse named Bobby Pin and wouldn’t care if they did.

  “Ten days,” Tommy said out loud.

  Lee was standing at the end of the bar when they got to the Blue Parrot, having a beer with Doc Thorne. Lee wasn’t wearing shorts or sandals, she was wearing a loose cotton shirt and khaki pants, and she was the best thing Tommy Cochrane had ever laid eyes on. When she saw him she watched his eyes and then she knew. She didn’t ask any questions.

  Tony Broad and his sidekick Callahan were standing down the bar a ways, drinking and joking with an off-duty waitress. They were polluted for five in the afternoon, and they were pissed off because Lee Charles had minutes earlier turned down their offer of a drink.

  Herm ordered beers all around and laid a twenty on the bar. Tommy introduced him to Lee and the horn player. Doc Thorne laid some skin on Herm.

  “You boys been down to the ponies, Lee tells me,” Doc said. “How you make out?”

  “Well,” Tommy said. “We got beat by a filly named Fiery Kate. I should know better than to bet against an Irish handle like that, Doc.”

  “Win some, lose some,” Doc said.

  “That’s a fact.”