Cross Country Murder Song

by Cross Country Murder Song (retail) (epub)

  My, he said, I have the vapours. His father pulled the cards from the man’s hands and returned them to the pack.

  Keep it down, he hissed, but he was smiling as he said it.

  Heavens, Lyle, said the man to his father, we’re only playing for matches, and then all four men boomed with laughter. The guard entered the carriage and asked for tickets in a voice that sounded like he might be about to break into song. The men quietened down, suddenly they were all business, their heads low as they found fascination with the table top.

  What are you now? Seventeen? asked his father. It was nearly midday and the sunshine flooding the car was making him squint. They were headed for the races. Grass and livestock had given way to a small town that had risen up in the shadow of the track. The town was one listless street punctuated by bars and a grocery store. Men looked up at them with as much interest as the cows had. Quiet streets forked off to dead ends and the only movement was the shuffling gait of the men blown gently towards the bell ringing out starts at the edge of town. His father’s obligation to his only son was to take him out there twice a week and sit with him in the stands, a paper bowl of nachos on the seat between them as the horses made endless circuits that seemed, to the boy at least, to have neither beginning nor end.

  Pick a number, his father would say to him, holding the tip sheet out. He’d stare at the paper as the horses thundered past, their hooves making dust of the dry oval of earth and clay. He heard the thin crowd cheering as they hit the home straight and then he watched as the men around him, their necks still straining to see the result, bunched up the racing slips in their hands and tossed them onto the ground. Then one exhilarated face would come floating through the crowd, smiling stupidly, clutching a stub in their hand and heading to pick up their winnings. It was always a man, though. He never saw women at the track, unless they were behind the barred windows where you placed your bets.

  He’ll have blown it all by the end of the afternoon, his father said as the man walked dreamily past.

  How do you know? he asked his father.

  Track always wins, said his father. And he wanted to ask him why they kept coming out here if that was the case, but his father was moving off towards the rail, licking his pencil and making notes in the margins of his newspaper.

  Then one day he picked three straight winners from his father’s sheet. Strangers were beginning to stare by the third race as his father started punching the air and picking him up to hug him.

  Yes, his father said over and over, emphasising the ‘s’ like a cartoon snake. He’d never seen his father so happy and now he too strained to see the horses as their riders pushed them, rounding the final curve of the track and heading towards the main stand. He got the result of the fourth race wrong and his father told him it was just the way it went sometimes and then quickly asked him who he liked in the final meet of the day. When his horse came in first again, his father scooped him up and held him until he struggled self-consciously to break free.

  His father dropped him off at home. He’d lived with his mother ever since his father had sold their car to pay off debts.

  You’re a mess. You’re a fucking cliché, Lyle, he had heard his mother shouting at his father through the bedroom floor. The argument moved to the hallway and then his father slammed out of the door as he’d done so many times before, but this time he didn’t come back. He stood in the garden briefly and shouted how it was his damn car and his damn house anyway and then he stormed off, he didn’t know to where.

  How was your father? she asked him now tiredly.

  Good, he said. We won. And his mother narrowed her eyes at him.

  We won, she said. Did he split the winnings? she asked and then she went into the kitchen where she banged her pots and pans loudly, asking him if he was hungry.

  I’m okay, he replied, suddenly wondering why he hadn’t seen any of the money.

  An old girlfriend who had read up on numerology in one of her magazines told him with some authority that seventeen was the number that represented immortality, and that’s just how he felt at seventeen: immortal. He started spending more time with his father, more than he ever had growing up, at the track, sitting in the stands in the blue plastic seats that pinched your sides if you stayed in them too long. He began to study things like form, cross-referencing jockeys and horses and trying to make a science out of luck and chance. His father was impressed. His idea of stacking the odds in their favour was to bring his lucky pencil with him, or if a jockey’s silks were his favourite colour: red. Sometimes it was just down to whether he’d remembered to put his left shoe on first in the morning, somehow that was enough to make him feel charmed.

  We’re beating them at their own game, he’d say, and look around at the other weathered men populating the stands, not like these schmucks. He thought his father might believe it too. Every victory was greeted with a cheer, his father waving his racing programme lustily towards the track, every defeat with a stoic phrase: we’ll get them next time, or an excuse: they cut him up at the corner, anyone could see that. Then he’d get exasperated and look wildly around him to see who might agree, but no one met his eyes here, the track was rarely a place where people went to mingle.

  His father played at a handful of card schools mainly through necessity. He’d win at one and then return to another to clear his debts there so he could start playing again. They always invited him back. Gamblers always loved someone who lost more than themselves.

  I don’t welch, he said to his son. His voice chimed with misplaced pride. Remember that.

  Even if it means selling your car? he replied, but his father pretended not to hear him. They were on their way to a card game at a friend of his father’s garage.

  Why the garage? he asked.

  His wife doesn’t like the smell of the smoke. She doesn’t like having the guys in the house, imagine that. He could imagine that, but he kept it to himself. When they got there the first thing he noticed was that all the men sitting around the table looked like his father; worn somehow, past their best.

  This is Jack, his dad said, and he waited for one of the men to pull a card from the pack and hold it up and shout, like the card! It didn’t take long. Then he watched his father whittle away the small mound of money in front of him as he blundered through one game of poker after another. He had no game face; amazement, happiness and disappointment appeared as clearly as if he were holding up signs declaring his state of mind. The men around him read him as naturally as they did the sports pages and soon they were broke and back in their car, its engine coughing through the back streets of their town.

  I didn’t play too well back there, said his father as if his son might not have noticed. It comes and goes, you know. He nodded and agreed that it did.

  Dad, he said, could you teach me to play, poker, I mean? His dad grinned happily, of course he could, of course he could.

  He had learnt to box when he was younger, his father had been home more then and he’d been the one to take him to the gym and introduce him around. He started training three times a week and picked up the rudimentary skills quickly. He knew how to guard against punches, he knew how to build a combination of blows, how to duck and weave, but he never ever got used to being hit. He could draw a diagram in his head (he once made a physical chart on a notepad in his room, creating nonsensical equations; x battled y on the page while he looked for the ultimate solution to solving boxing’s mysteries, and dissect where and how the punch had landed, but he couldn’t take the hit itself. He’d suddenly be backing off, reeling from the blow, feeling dazed, his mouth full of spit, all his composure lost, his coach shouting at him from ringside. You’re running away, he’d spit, running away. He knew he was too. He could talk a good fight, but talk about it was all he could do.

  Poker was different. Everyone tried to act remote and cool, but he could see their openings as clearly as he could an uppercut coming. Everyone had a tic, it just depended on how amplified it wa
s, how hard it was to spot. His father’s friends were easy, they’d drop their hand down (like some boxers did before they threw a punch, he realised) when they got a card they needed, or blink suddenly, or sit back and try to look assured or nonchalant. He cleaned them out quickly and then had to hear about it from his father when they weren’t invited back to the games any more.

  Those guys are my friends, his father said.

  When they were taking your money, they were, he replied.

  Do you know any other games in town? he asked. Ones that you’re not attached to?

  Maybe, said his father, one or two, but I haven’t been back for a while. He sounded sad as he said it.

  Card games, he realised, were just like regular sports; you had to work your way up through the leagues, get your name out there, which he started to do as the months passed. He was becoming a name in the Phoenix suburbs and in some of the satellite towns in his State. He thought about playing in sponsored tournaments, maybe travelling to Reno or even up to Vegas, but his father dissuaded him. You’ll have to declare your winnings, he said, and the idea of sharing his spoils was too much to bear. His father accompanied him to games, but rarely played any more. He stood off to one side and nursed a beer and watched the game progress as his son’s coffers filled up. Some players resented him being there, and accused him of signalling his son or counting the cards. Some would make him leave and go and sit out in his car to wait, but in truth, he would often simply be wondering if he’d given the gambling gene to his son and if so, then how come it had flourished and blossomed in Jack and withered and died within himself?

  Someone tried to rob his mother’s house one night. He was sleeping deeply as they went through the lounge, grabbing at anything that came to hand. He was dreaming about Billy Joel when it happened. It was Piano Man-era Billy Joel, his hair was high and curly on his head and he wore a blue blazer with the sleeves rolled up and sunglasses that were too big for his face. Joel was showing him how to bluff and when to fold.

  I used to play piano in gambling joints. I know, said Joel, shuffling a deck of cards flamboyantly. You’ve got a good poker face though, he said. Those dead eyes, not like your old man, his face gives everything away.

  He was woken by his mother screaming his name and he leapt from his bed and ran to the top of the stairs and when she started shouting about there being a break-in he briefly imagined Billy Joel making off with their TV set. Very little was missing though as his mother, ever the light sleeper, had disturbed them and they’d fled. His father, however, took it as a sign.

  It’s a warning, he said, paranoia clouding his thoughts. You’re winning too much.

  How would you know? said his mother. It’s not like anyone ever had to warn you off.

  He believed in the science of the game and in the body language of the players who played it, not in luck, the elusive, irresistible magic that some people approached it with, seeking out a higher power to help them out. They thought that winning hung above the table like so much cigar smoke. He’d sneer, but even he started looking for talismans once he started losing. He’d lost before, but this streak was as consistent as the winning one had been. One day, like finding the first grey hair, he realised that things had changed; he stopped seeing the inevitable weakness in the way people played. There was no unknowing semaphore being signalled to him and then he was back to feeling like he’d felt years ago when that first punch had landed. He’d suddenly lose his nerve, just looking for a way out. He couldn’t bluff any more, and whether it was paranoia or not, he sensed the other players picking up on his fear. He started to make more and more mistakes. He’d fold too early or he’d hold on until it was too late. He found a quarter and it became his lucky quarter; he’d keep it in his front pocket when he played and he’d pat it for assurance when the game was getting away from him. He started his own rituals before he left his mother’s house; the lamp in his room was to remain on while he was out playing; if his father was coming to get him, as he inevitably did, then he had to knock three times and three times only and he had to be the one to open the door to him. His mother, who had been exhausted by her husband’s slide into ritualistic madness, was happily ignorant of her son’s new-found habits so had opened the door to her estranged husband when he’d come to pick Jack up one night. He came running from the bathroom when he realised what had happened and started to scream at her.

  You’ve ruined it, he shouted. I can’t win now, and he ran into his room, slamming his door so hard that it shook the frame of their house. She looked at her estranged husband in the cooling silence and recognised what the father had passed down to the son and she quietly closed the door in his face.

  The father watched the son from a distance, knowing the terrible feeling of being found out, of sliding ever backwards no matter how hard you dug your fingers in or worked your legs. He tried to talk to his son one night when he was driving him home, but he looked appalled and untrusting; restless in his seat and over two hundred dollars down. Whereas once he’d enter rooms and other players would look unsettled, they now pushed a seat back and made room for him, toasted his arrival. He was slowly becoming the punchline to their jokes.

  I’m not like you, he said to his dad, I’m just playing the odds. You can’t be a winner every time. His father took his son calling him a loser quietly.

  And then one night on the drive back home from another game without resolution or profit he suddenly shouted out and threw a protective arm in front of his father’s chest.

  Hey, he said, you just ran a stop sign.

  The road was quiet. One car came slowly around the corner and drifted past with its window half-open. The car’s driver had the radio on.

  What are you talking about? asked his father. What stop sign?

  The one you just ran, said Jack, exasperated. His father checked behind him and slowly reversed back on the road they’d just driven down. He pulled over and flipped his hazard lights on and looked around.

  What stop sign, Jack? he asked. Jack got out of the car and looked around. It was dark now and the car’s headlights only emphasised the bewilderment on his face. He walked to the kerb and looked up and down as if angling his head might cause the sign to reveal itself. He walked back to the car avoiding his father’s concerned stare.

  I’m okay, he said, but he was scared and that night he slept with the bed-clothes pulled up to his chin like he did when he was very young and was afraid of things not seen, but heard, he imagined, somewhere beyond the window.

  When he was a young man, before his son had been born and before the fighting and the divorce, Jack’s father had lived for a while in a small apartment block in West Hollywood. Chronic gambling losses hadn’t yet shaken his self-belief and shown him the fallibility that underpinned his existence. He was still to learn that the infrastructure of his life was rotten, that it was only a matter of time before the beams holding everything in place crumbled to dust. Ashes to ashes, he’d later think as the debts mounted up and the cards stacked themselves against him. That was later though, he was still carefree and drunk and celebrating the turn of those self-same cards when he was pulled over for drunk driving on the Strip.

  I’m a winner, he told the policeman as he was ordered out of the car and stood there smiling stupidly. Cars honked their horns at him as they went by, their headlights washing over him, bleaching his features as he swayed delicately. The officer stood in silhouette, taking down his details in a small notepad. He was given a mandatory fine and ordered to attend driving school. The judge didn’t even look up as he told him this. Lyle stood there a moment wanting to state his side of things, how he’d only been celebrating his win, when the court clerk took him firmly by the elbow and guided him towards the door. As he turned to go the judge looked up at him. He was hawk-nosed and looked peevish, though his eyes suggested that they might once have looked kindly on things.

  The driving school was in a low squat building that acted as a community college in the dayti
me, and became a warren of night classes and group meetings in the evening. He passed a half dozen open doors with notes taped or pinned to them, offering everything from AA counselling to wine appreciation, which made him smile. He looked at the people inside the rooms and they looked at him, he wondered what purpose or circumstances had drawn or propelled them there. He found his room at the end of the corridor, it was a prefabricated extension tagged on to the original building by the parking lot that was currently covered in regimented rows of red traffic cones. Out there someone was revving their engine furiously before skidding backwards and crushing some cones and scattering others. The cones regained their shape as soon as the wheels had passed over them as if they were designed with accidents in mind, which, he supposed, they must have been. The car idled to a stop and crept forward again and then a man with a clipboard ran forward and hit the car’s roof and hood angrily with the board.

  Those kids are just learning, they’ll get it, said the man who had just walked into the room behind him. He was the only person in the room wearing a tie and a smile so he assumed he must be in charge.

  I’m Mr Lee, he said, turning to write the words traffic and school on the board behind him. Someone in the class – they were seated at desks so it really felt like they were freshmen starting a new year – said Hello Mr Lee and everyone turned to look at them.

  Now, said Mr Lee, handing out folders, we’re all here for a reason, so let’s get you all a credit and then back out on the road.

  Lyle looked around the room and decided that he didn’t want half of these people back on the road. Some of them looked shifty and dangerous, others looked like the only reason they’d want to get their car back was because it was where they lived. Somebody was sleeping at the back of the class, head hanging dangerously back, an arm dangling by their side. Whoever he was he was in a chef’s smock that looked oily and damp, his hair hung back in black strands, a hairnet lay on the floor beneath his seat. Lyle decided he’d find out where he worked so he’d never mistakenly go in there to eat.