by Adam Berlin
I opened the glove. There was a reserve of loose candy bars, a small bag of Cheetos, a snack pack of Oreos. Nothing half eaten. Once Gary started, he finished.
“Take out that book.”
I took the book out from the bottom. The title was The Business of Blackjack. Cards were stuck into the pages at various spots for bookmarks and I opened to the place where the first card stuck out. Under the heading of “Chart 11: Advanced Count Strategy for Six Decks” was a colorful grid of boxes. Yellow H’s to Hit and red S’s to Stand, green D’s to Double Down and blue P’s to Split. In each box was a different minus or plus count. The page was smudged with food stains.
“Turn to page forty-eight,” Gary said.
I did. There was a card in the page. It was a statistical analysis of why it was always mandatory that aces and eights be split.
“Aces and eights,” Gary repeated like a mantra. “It’s all there. You study this book and you practice counting cards and you can make some serious money.”
“If it’s that easy, how come everyone doesn’t just memorize these charts?”
“I didn’t say it was easy. People are lazy.”
I stretched my shoulders and breathed. I’d heard that word too often growing up.
“Anyone who says I don’t work hard doesn’t know me,” Gary said. “I put in the time, serious time. I study baseball in baseball season, basketball in basketball season. I spend all Saturday getting ready for football Sundays. I crunch numbers like an accountant during tax season. I out bookie the fucking bookies.”
Gary’s hand was clenched on the steering wheel.
“Most people gamble for fun so they don’t understand the work. They’re mostly recreational gamblers in the casinos. Instead of traveling to Europe they go to Vegas, check out the sights and the entertainment and blow their money. How do you think they build all those new casinos?”
“Not in a day.”
“If I wanted to sightsee, I’d sightsee. I’m not interested in sightseeing. We’re going there to win.”
“How come you don’t live in Las Vegas then?”
“I never needed to make money at cards before.”
I knew Gary wasn’t telling me everything.
“I’ve made money at cards before,” Gary said. “But I’ve never had to make money at cards.”
In Gilmore’s class we had read King Lear. Gilmore spent a lot of time discussing the line Reason not the need, Lear’s response when his evil daughters decided to strip him of all his men. The gist of the moment was that the daughters had no business questioning the king’s desire to keep a few soldiers around even if he was old and even if he had abdicated the throne. He’d been the king and that gave him the right. I didn’t question Gary’s need. I didn’t ask him why he stepped on the gas a little harder and started to weave through the traffic.
I put my feet back inside my unlaced work boots and kicked my legs out as far as they would go. I moved my tongue around my mouth to get rid of the dryness. My armpits felt sweaty but I was cold. Traffic became congested. People were driving into the city to begin their workday. I remembered it was Friday. I had lost track of time.
“We’ll try to find some indigenous Indianapolis food,” Gary said. “See what they’ve got besides race cars.”
The Indianapolis skyline was nothing compared to New York’s. It could fit handily into a downtown section of Manhattan, a part that didn’t even make the postcards like the part where I had worked.
Gary took the second exit into Indianapolis. I asked him why and he said we were parallel to the tallest building and the tallest building was usually the center of town. He said look at New York. The World Trade Center didn’t count but the Empire State did, it was still the big building, topped by its famous spire which the original King Kong had climbed before saving the girl, smashing some fighter planes, beating his chest, saying in his ape way the equivalent of what Jimmy Cagney had screamed out. Top of the world.
“Top of the world,” I said.
Sometimes walking the streets I felt that way, even when my body was ground level, felt top of the world, full of New York City energy. I would feel my potential, not my father’s, mine, strong enough to do whatever I wanted. It was a strange high, a sober high, sometimes too full of my potential. I could take the world if provoked which is why I kept walking, looking straight ahead and not at the eyes of the passing people and eventually I would walk it off and if I hadn’t walked it off by the time I got to my apartment I would get down on the wood floor and do sets of push-ups until my arms were pumped full of blood but the blood itself was no longer rushing so hard. I could picture my grandfather flipping mattresses at such moments, picking up the pace to ease the rush, really throwing the heavy mattresses high into the air to keep away the anger from working too hard for too little money, day after day after day to pay rent to some landlord who if he didn’t check his greed would get thrown down the incinerator. My grandfather could do whatever he wanted. He was that strong.
Indianapolis and its relatively puny buildings that didn’t scrape the sky let alone the low-lying clouds was not a city that could inspire top-of-the-world highs but maybe it didn’t matter. The city streets were surprisingly empty and some of the buildings appeared abandoned. One store with a large window sold custom-made frames. The neighborhood must have been the equivalent of Soho. Gary pulled over to the curb. Two blond women looked over the Jaguar and the fat man inside.
“Excuse me,” he said. “We’re from New York. If you were going to eat in one restaurant in Indianapolis and it was your last meal, which one would it be?”
The two women just stood there. They weren’t sure if Gary was dying or if he just wanted some decent food.
“You drove here just to eat?” the prettier of the two said.
“Look at me. What’s your fast paced city famous for? New York has its cheesecake. Boston has its baked beans. What does Indianapolis have?”
“I don’t know. There’s a Steak and Shake down the road.”
“Great. They don’t have Steak and Shakes in New York. This is my cousin, Dess. He’s sick of eating meat.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
I wasn’t sure if they could see much of me behind Gary’s body.
“Can you tell we’re cousins?” Gary said.
The prettier woman bent to get a better look.
“Are you first cousins?” she said.
“We’re kissing cousins,” Gary said.
“Is the racetrack worth checking out?” I said.
“Yes it is. You should definitely visit our Speedway. It’s only a short drive from here.”
“Vanilla or chocolate?” Gary said. “Which is the more authentic Steak and Shake shake?’
“I like chocolate,” the woman said
“Chocolate it is. Thanks for your help.”
Gary drove off.
“I could really go for a glass of orange juice,” I said.
“No chance. We’re not in Florida. We’re going to the Steak and Shake and we’re ordering chocolate shakes. That one was kind of cute. I think she liked you.”
“She loved me.”
“Should I turn around?”
“Let’s check out the racetrack.”
“The Speedway,” Gary said.
Gary drove through the streets like he’d been raised in Indianapolis. He found a sign to the Speedway and then he found a Steak and Shake. Gary pulled into the entrance but the restaurant was dark inside.
“They probably don’t open until lunch,” I said.
“We blew it. Like the line in Easy Rider. Did you ever see it?”
“The motorcycle movie.”
“Right. Their pure on the road experience is corrupted by a drug deal and when their trip is almost over Peter Fonda says, We blew it.”
Gary pulled into a drive thru McDonald’s, the fast-food places always stacked one after the other, clusters of easy choices. He called off his list of menu items like there
were six hungry kids in the nonexistent backseat of his Jaguar.
I handed Gary one burger at a time while he drove. The Speedway looked closed. The parking lots were empty except for a trash truck that moved slowly along. It was probably too cold for racing season in this part of the country. The track itself looked like it stretched for miles. Gary drove through a half-open mesh gate with a NO TRESPASSING sign attached to it and parked in the shadow of the Speedway.
“It’s pretty impressive,” I said.
“I never bet on the Indianapolis 500. We have a few minutes if you want to sneak in.”
“We must be making good time.”
“We are. I just want to get there by Sunday.”
I took the disposable camera and we walked past more NO TRESPASSING signs and up some stairs to the bleachers. Wedged underneath one of the benches was an empty champagne bottle, the foil around the top ripped and jagged, the party long over. The track itself was wide and not as smooth looking as I expected it to be. A hundred feet down was a pole that must have been the pole of pole position, the place where the race started. Gary walked down the bleachers. For a fat man he moved surprisingly well and I watched him climb over the protective barrier and walk onto the Speedway. He would have taken the focus away from any race car next to him. I looked around but there was no one to see us. I heard the garbage truck’s engine in the distance.
I walked down, jumped the barrier, and stood near Gary who was making engine noises and buzzing around the track with his arms out as if he were an airplane. We were both giddy from being in a place that we were not supposed to be. I took a picture of Gary striking a runner’s pose, smiling up at me from a crouch with the pole behind him. He took a picture of me running, my head turned around, pretending to be chased by cars. I wanted the film to capture the illusion of speed as I ran from the camera.
“Look at this place,” I said.
“The culmination of a parking attendant’s dream.”
“I was just killing time there.”
“Not anymore.”
“And what’s your big dream?”
“I just need to make some money.”
I took a breath. It had been a long night. My dad told us the story of how when he was a kid and his parents argued, Grandpa would take my dad out of the house and buy him an ice cream. My grandfather just wanted to get away before he did something he might regret and an ice cream for my dad was his excuse to leave. My dad joked that he still couldn’t eat an ice cream cone without feeling tense.
Gary lifted his leg and let out a loud fart. Fucking around for me.
“Gentlemen, start your engines,” he said.
“I hope these pictures come out.”
“I’ll buy you a photo album for your birthday.”
“You don’t even know when my birthday is.”
Gary lifted his leg and farted again.
“False start,” he said.
“Get one more of me running away,” I said.
Gary looked into the lens, took a step to the right, looked into the lens again.
“Go.”
I started to run until I heard the click of the camera.
Gary climbed back over the barrier and walked up the bleachers. I bent down and touched the racetrack. With my garage uniform on I could have been mistaken for Speed Racer testing the conditions before the big race and when he raced there was always something more at stake than just getting to the finish line. Go Speed Racer. Go.
I climbed over the barrier and walked up the bleachers. Nobody was going to make me write about my day at the Speedway in a diary. Gary was already inside the Jaguar, the engine idling.
10
THE JAGUAR WAS PARKED on the side of the road sandwiched between two eighteen-wheelers. I opened the door and went outside to wake up in the cold air. I leaned against the car with my arms on the black roof and watched the traffic moving on the highway. The speed looked deadly. It was easy to imagine how quickly a body could be sent hurtling a hundred feet through the air before skidding on the pavement, blood and guts and shattered bone.
I stood there until the speed didn’t make me want to shudder. It was like looking at the approaching subway, head just over the imaginary line where the first car could clip me, holding it there until the conductor hit the horn and holding it some more. With practice it became easier. Before every match I jogged slowly around the wrestling circle outlined in black, then crawled around with my knees skimming the mat, my elbows taking most of the weight, an adult crawl where I forced myself to stay balanced at all times. I practiced falls, tucking my body under to break the force, pulling imaginary arms and legs toward me as I went down to create a small circle of my own, a circle around my opponent’s body and onto his back so the referee would raise his hand and yell Two points.
I walked along the breakdown lane to loosen my legs. We were in Illinois. On my right the tall grasses moved, indentations forming and reforming, spreading out and closing, choreographed by eddies and jets created by the passing cars on my left. I rubbed my hands together, blew air into them, looked at them. My hands were strong like my grandfather’s hands. In high school I had taken an old mattress into our basement and I would flip the mattress over and over until my hands ached. In college I had flipped my mattress every morning before I made the bed. Derek had made fun of me flipping mattresses, calling me the maid. He listed off chores for me to do. Did you do the hospital corners the way I like? Did you wash my linens with fabric softener? Did you squeeze my orange juice? Did you scrub the toilet? I took the pen he always kept in his pocket and broke it in two over his head, the ink running into his hair and his shirt. Derek said he assumed the maid would clean up the mess. He always knew how to get the last word. Sometimes Derek came to see me wrestle, sometimes without my dad. He’d sit in the high school bleachers and watch me on the mat and afterward he would shake my hand. He usually didn’t say anything but one time he asked me what I could do with wrestling and he looked like he really wanted to know the answer. I looked at my brother and told him. Whatever I want.
I woke Gary by opening his door. It was the gentlest way I could think of. I could feel his weight against the car door as I opened it. Gary caught himself from falling, opened his eyes, looked at me, worked himself out of the car, walked around the front, worked himself into the passenger seat, pulling his legs in one at a time. He adjusted the down jacket and the indentation where my head had been disappeared. Gary started breathing heavily, his mouth open, his head sunk into the fleshy folds of his neck. I looked at his fat face with cheeks that seemed puffed by a steady stream of helium and at his double chin now tripled in repose gently rising and falling into his fat neck. It was fascinating how fat he was. His small hands were folded in front of his crotch, body language that said protection. It was the only sign that he might have had a worry on his mind. I was already in the driver’s seat. I watched the cars speeding past in the side mirror and at the first opening I hit the gas. It was Interstate 70 straight on through.
I looked at the signs. Counted down the miles to St. Louis. Practiced the count in my head. Pushed traffic away from me the way Gary did, tailgating cars until they moved. Watched for cops waiting in the brush with their speed guns bouncing radar off moving metal. Listened to one radio station fade into the next. Counted the restaurants at each rest stop. McDonald’s. Roy Rogers. Wendy’s. Burger King. A real variety. The farther west we drove, the less Gary stood out. There were large bodies all around. Heavyweights. Super heavyweights. Super fatweights. Fat people in Manhattan were scarce. Sometimes on the news there would be an item about someone so fat that he had to be lifted out of his apartment by a crane. Invariably the owner of a neighborhood restaurant would be interviewed and he would list off obscene quantities of food, a warning to the viewer in his moralizing words. You stuff your face constantly you deserve to be humiliated, attached to a crane and lifted like the fat fuck you let yourself become. The stories were freak shows. I didn’t let it get
to me but I always noticed the eyes of the person being hoisted through the roof, saw the fear of falling, the embarrassment of being seen, the depression that must have led to that first extra piece of fried chicken, then the second, then the third, until gluttony became comfortable. I had starved myself to make weight before some matches. I had exerted total self-control. I had scorned anyone who had a round stomach, a flabby arm, a pectoral that was soft like a tit. I was driving with a fat man across country.
I mostly remembered Gary as fat and funny. He was strong too. I was fourteen, my first high school wrestling season over. I had won all but one match against a junior and in that match the junior had bled and I had not. It was almost summer, school was almost out and we were working in the yard. My mom was pulling up weeds. My brother was helping my dad turn over soil for some annuals. Marigolds, zinnias, pansies. I was cutting dead branches from the trees that lined the side of our house. We heard a loudspeaker up the street.
“The Rose residence is now going on sale. All offers will be considered.”
I recognized the slightly nasal voice and walked out from under the trees. Gary pulled into the driveway in a new car. He spoke into a handheld microphone.
“The Rose family will stop doing yard work immediately.”
Mr. Klokotka across the street opened his front door to see what was going on. Gary smiled at us over the microphone. He held it out to me and I spoke into it, my voice amplified.
“Now wrestling for the United States, Odessa Rose. Odessa Rose.”
I repeated it twice like we were in a big Olympic stadium, echo effect. Gary took the microphone.
“Now batting for the Yankees who will kick the Red Sox butts, the ex–Boston player traded away in the stupidest move of all baseball history, the Sultan of Swat, George Herman Ruth.”
He reached into his pockets, pulled out two baseballs, threw one to me and one to Derek.
“Catch. I caught these at the Yankees game,” he said.
He’d driven from the Bronx to Massachusetts. When Gary had been a kid he used to skip school and go to Yankee Stadium with a butterfly net, roam the bleachers, even then his fat frame able to block out all kids and most men. He’d caught over a hundred major league balls. My family went to a few Red Sox games every year, in the summer, after school was out, but we’d never caught a single ball. My dad and Derek kept an official scorecard and my mom read the paper. I watched how the hitters balanced themselves when they swung.