“Grandmom can buy a fistful of lottery numbers on her way to the corner store when she picks up the bread and milk.
“No, compared to horse and dog racing, the lotteries are much more pervasive. To lose money at a track, you’ve got to go out of your way to do it.
“Also, when you look at the casinos, that form of gambling is much more harmful. Casinos even extend credit to their patrons; racetracks don’t.”
Turning to the action in front of her, Melissa couldn’t resist making a comment that was disparaging of canine IQ.
“After a while, you’d think the dogs would learn,” she noted, “that the mechanical rabbit they’re chasing is not what they think it is.”
“Typical comment about the intelligence of dogs, coming from a cat person,” Joe laughed. “Don’t worry, if you lose a few more bets, you’ll stop believing that the dogs are the dumbest ones here.”
The long journey back to Islamorada provided another spectacular view, despite the absence of sunlight. On the superstructures of each of the many highway bridges were small red and green lights that lifted skyward, competing with the stars.
“It’s just like the holiday season in Philadelphia,” Melissa beamed. “I love to watch those tiny blinking lights on the trees that line the sidewalks.
“Here in the Keys, it’s even neater. Looking at the tops of the bridges is like seeing giant Christmas trees from the north that have been replanted in the middle of the tropics.”
Joe dominated the conversation during the traffic-free drive. And from the content of his comments, Melissa was acutely aware that he seemed genuinely interested in her future plans. She was unquestionably thrilled that someone she actually cared for was in the process of pursuing her.
“We’ll have to go to the races again when I come up to visit you,” Joe insisted. “And you’ll have to show me some of the restaurants you like in Philly.”
Inwardly, Melissa was ecstatic at Joe’s roundabout yet possessive remarks. There seemed to be no reason at all now to think that he considered her as merely a means to a one-night stand.
“Uncle Steve’s going to like you, just wait. He’ll fall in love with you as soon as he sees you.”
The horror stories about broken romances that she had heard from her female acquaintances on so many different occasions didn’t seem pertinent at all as far as she and Joe were concerned.
Melissa was crossing her fingers now, hoping she needn’t heed the tales of Natalie, Ruth, and Jennifer regarding those nameless, heartless men who had disappeared from their lives after a night or two of recreational sex.
“We’ll have to come back to Key West again,” Joe told her. “Once or twice a year, at least.”
Melissa smiled, and despite her best efforts, drifted off to sleep safely snuggled against Joe’s shoulder.
Chapter 7
Mary Ann and Paul quickly developed a favorite pastime—attending the races at the nearby track where Paul’s horses were stabled.
On an average of about two evenings every week, from about 7 to 11 p.m., they would sit in the same area of the grandstand, in the same seats. Now and then they’d walk to the betting windows to place a wager, but most of the time they’d just sit and talk to each other, talk to fans sitting nearby, and experience the joy of seeing horses run. Paul noted, and Mary Ann agreed, that a summer’s night at the races had all the “getting acquainted” advantages of the bar scene, but without the booze and without the noise. There was a certain harmony among all the factors that led to this allure.
“I’ve found out a lot about you just from sitting here and talking,” Mary Ann told Paul one evening. “You said you were astounded by the number of guys you see at the track who have tattoos on their arms. But before I met you, I thought all men had tattoos. I was surprised when you swore to me that you never had even one.”
“I swear, never.”
“And what about laundromats? Remember that old woman, the one who wore four sweaters and was carrying those big shopping bags? She sat down in front of me, and all she talked about were horses and laundromats. I think it’s amazing that you’ve never been to a laundromat. I’ve gotten to know some of my best friends at laundromats. They’re great places for women to chitchat. I’ve even met men at laundromats.”
“And I’ve learned a lot about you, too, M.A.,” Paul countered, “especially from the people-watching we do when we’re here. Remember on that rainy, cool night when I pointed out the kid who was wearing the wild, five-color, psychedelic jacket? I asked you if you’d ever have the guts to wear a coat that looked like a slapdash abstract painting.”
“I remember,” Mary Ann admitted. “You wanted to know if I’d wear something like that to make a statement, but I said there would be nothing symbolic about it, that whether I’d wear the jacket or not would depend on whether it felt warm.”
Occasionally, one or two of the girls would tag along when Mary Ann and Paul went racing. To the children, though, racetrack attendance was only secondary entertainment. The real fun was the visit, before the races, to the stabling area. This activity was much more to the girls’ liking. For while they’d walk from barn to barn, they would feed carrots to the horses and offer table scraps to the many cats who roamed the grounds.
Mary Ann said she should have known that the lure of the friendly felines would gradually overpower the girls. Melissa and Annie were the co-conspirators who kidnapped a chubby little calico from Barn R on a warm, muggy night in August.
“If I’d have been aware that they were kidnapping four cats in one, I’d never have let it happen,” Mary Ann reflected.
“But I’m sure it turned out all right,” Paul laughed. “There’s no way the girls could have known that Puff was pregnant when they ran off with her. It was a good experience for them, watching Puff give birth.”
The racetrack wagering that Paul and Mary Ann engaged in always seemed to follow the same pattern. Paul would make $20 bets three or four times a night, and Mary Ann would risk $2 or $4 on most of the races. Paul would give her $30 at the beginning of each evening, and Mary Ann would either lose it all or turn that $30 stake into $100 or so.
Paul learned even more about Mary Ann’s character when she hit for $60 on the first race one night in early September and offered Paul half of the money right away. A week later, a $4 bet she made returned a whopping $150.
“Wow, it takes me a week to make this much at my job,” she screamed, waving the winning ticket in front of Paul’s nose. “Now I can rescue some of my layaways.
“Oh, I forgot,” she continued, looking straight at Paul. “You might not know about stuff people can buy on layaway.”
“If you ever hit a really big bet, M.A., several thousand, for example,” Paul asked her, “what would you do with it?”
“I’d buy the girls the best art supplies I could find and sign them up for the special classes at Allentown Art Museum,” Mary Ann answered, without blinking. “Then I’d put some money down on a new car. All of my life I’ve never owned a new car. And then, if there was any money left over, maybe I’d treat myself to a washer and dryer. But if I did that, then I wouldn’t be able to drive my new car over to the laundromat.
On his next bet, Paul won $500 on Greystoke, a long shot he would have overlooked if Mary Ann had not pointed it out. After picking up his winnings, Paul turned to Mary Ann, handing her the money, and said, “I want you to have this money, Mary Ann, and buy the girls those art supplies and art lessons. I’d like to think I was the first patron of a budding, American, female Picasso.”
On the following morning, a certain inevitability occurred, as it does with all vacations—the going home.
Melissa’s plane was due to depart Miami later that evening. In the interim, she and Joe would share one last day with each other in the Florida sun.
The plan for the morning of departure was to leave Islamorada right after breakfast, motor to Miami, and spend the last few fleeting hours in Florida’s largest city.
“You’ll like Miami,” Joe touted. “It has its own special kind of charm. For lack of a better description, it’s sort of like an air-conditioned Atlantic City. Big hotels, big money, and a sprinkling of ethnic neighborhoods.”
“I’m really going to miss Islamorada,” Melissa told him, almost with a tear in her eye. “The whipping of the wind through the palm fronds and the quiet comfort that comes over me every time I walk on the beach will be difficult to forget. I’ll also miss waking up every morning and seeing the egrets, the pelicans, and the roseate spoonbills fishing for their breakfasts in the shallow waters.
“Ever since yesterday I’ve been psyching myself up to leave. And perhaps I really am getting a little homesick for Philadelphia. The suitcase full of dirty laundry tells me it’s time to go home.
“But there is one thing I can’t do when I’m in my house,” Melissa noted, pointing to Joe and smiling a bit wistfully.
“While I’m lying in bed at home, trying to fall asleep, I can’t listen to the ocean.”
“Someday soon, my lady,” Joe commiserated, with his arm around her shoulder, “there’ll be another time, another dance.”
Joe led the two-car convoy, driving his personal automobile, not the police cruiser. And Melissa kept her rental a constant six lengths behind him as they traveled along two-lane Route 1.
The traffic was minimal until they reached Key Largo, where the road split briefly into a four-lane configuration.
Once they passed over the drawbridge at Grouper Creek, there was still about a half-hour stretch to go of narrow, deserted macadam—with highly visible water on both sides. Melissa hoped that the sea level was already at its highest tide, because, during several brief moments, the glistening waters to the right and to the left seemed to be higher than her shoulders.
At one point during the drive, Melissa noticed the remnants of an old Burma Shave advertising sign perched in the hard coral just off the highway.
“All of Islamorada was like one big step back in time,” she told herself. “The charm of the entire Florida Keys is in being able to get a taste of rural America as it was in the 1950s, or maybe even the 1940s, without having to travel somewhere far inland in the Midwest, hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean.”
Joe had planned a brief respite on the way to the Miami airport—a visit to the sprawling grounds of the Everglades National Park.
For about twenty minutes of travel time to the west of Route 1, through vast fields of sprouting tomato plants, they zoomed their way toward a meeting, face-to-face, with Florida’s famed alligators.
“This is definitely farm country,” Melissa told herself, surveying the acres of tomatoes and what she perceived to be an occasional field of green peppers.
She was charmed at the sight of the single-engine crop dusters that flew but a few feet over the roadway, spreading white, artificial clouds that covered the vegetables.
When she and Joe arrived at the visitors’ center, they saw that there were only a handful of other tourists in the park.
“This is a good luck stop for us,” Melissa told Joe. “I just saw a cat walking behind those bushes. Cats are always good luck.”
Melissa was especially glad to be able to step out of her air-conditioned car and into the warming sun again—with Joe at her side. She wished, however, that she could be wearing a comfortable pair of shorts and a tank top instead of the prim brown skirt and high-collared, matching blouse that she called her “take an airplane outfit.”
The park itself provided two main paths. The first was much like a boardwalk, the kind that made Atlantic City famous. This version stretched for about a half-mile, in a huge circle, through and just barely over the lush green swampland.
Melissa was bending over the railing when she took her first look at a live alligator. It was swimming, ever so stealthily, through what appeared to be shallow water.
At one point, a group of three other alligators, much smaller, congregated directly under the boardwalk. They were vocal, too, making the guttural sounds that dogs emit when they expect to be fed.
“I think they’re barking,” Melissa told Joe.
“They are.”
“If I close my eyes,” she joked, squinting, “it sounds like the Key West greyhound track.”
“You’d better walk quickly, my dear,” Joe counseled, “it must be feeding time.”
The second of the parkland walkways coursed through an overgrown tropical jungle. Soon after entering this pristine setting, Melissa and Joe beheld a sunken grove filled with wide-bodied divi-divi trees that lay sprawled before them, leafless and sporting outgrowths of gnarled wood that gave the appearance of a school of giant octopi brandishing their menacing tentacles.
Multicolored flowers were plentiful on both sides of the path, as were towering patches of bamboo.
“It looks like an immense floral arrangement, designed in heaven,” Melissa offered, “absolutely breathtaking.
“The way the long-stemmed flowers are bunched together, hanging over both sides of the path, makes it look spooky. I expect to see the eyes of a lion cub peering out at me.”
A brief, five-minute walk took them to the far reaches of the path. And except for the chirping of an occasional bird and the whispering of the warm air as it whistled through the scrub pines, they were alone.
Melissa and Joe, arm-in-arm now, were soaking up the solitude of the forest and luxuriating in the warm feelings generated by two people who truly care for each other.
“If I could go back in time and be twenty years old again,” Melissa revealed, “I’d attack you immediately, and we’d be lying in the grass under the shade of that tree.”
Without saying a word in response, Joe brought her closer to him and hugged her gently. Quite naturally, they stopped to kiss.
Rubbing noses together, like two enraptured high schoolers on a first date, they pecked at each other’s lips a number of times and then hugged, again, while swaying, ever so slightly, to the rhythm of the tropical breezes.
But before their minds, or their desires, could leap to any more erotic activity, they heard the sounds of oncoming footsteps. Muffled voices indicated the approach of children.
Within seconds, Melissa and Joe were smiling and saying hello to their fellow tourists, a family of four.
“Nice day, isn’t it?” the father of the group offered, as he held onto the tiny hand of his blonde and toddling daughter. “Makes you kind of wish you could live forever.”
“No, not quite,” Melissa thought, as she clutched Joe’s hand even tighter. “LOVE forever would be more like it.”
In less than an hour after leaving the Everglades, they had arrived at the airport in Miami. The first step was to turn in the rental car. Also, Melissa made it a point to check her luggage—far in advance of the flight’s departure time.
Soon afterward, she and Joe were headed off for a bit of last-minute sightseeing.
They visited for a while at the famed flamingo exhibit in the nearby town of Hialeah. Although the Hialeah racetrack itself was closed and would not begin its yearly thoroughbred meeting until February, the exotic bird exhibit on the grounds was open all year round.
Hundreds of beautiful pink birds make their home alongside the racetrack’s two man-made lakes.
Occasionally, a group of flamingos will soar skyward, flying off for a few seconds in a wave of color before landing effortlessly on their long, spindly legs.
“They look like one big pink cloud, don’t they, flitting across the sky?” Melissa commented, “as graceful in the air as they are on the ground.”
“The fact that they’re pink sets them apart, I guess,” Joe noted. “It makes them unusual. No one would care if they were gray, or if they were blackbirds, or pigeons.”
“Sort of like blue food, is that what you’re saying?” Melissa countered. “That’s why I always love to eat blueberries. They look so neat. And, really, there isn’t any other food that’s blue.”
“No other food, you say?
“Hmmmm, now you’ve got me thinking,” Joe admitted, deliberating. “Before the end of the day, I guess I’m going to have to come up with the name of another kind of blue food.
“Just you wait, lady. Just you wait.”
The final stop on their itinerary was at yet another of southern Florida’s many wagering emporiums—the Miami jai alai fronton, where they relaxed over lunch.
“Horses, dogs, jai alai, they’re all separation centers,” Joe wisecracked, in reference, sarcastically, to the separation of money from wallets.
The game of jai alai, extremely popular in the Miami area, is of Basque origin, Joe told her.
Distantly similar to racquetball, it is played either as a series of singles matches, man against man, or in pairs, with two teammates doing battle against two other teammates.
Instead of a racquet, though, each player uses a wicker “cesta,” a basketlike mitt strapped to the wrist. The ball, called a “pelota,” is caught in the cesta and hurled toward a wall at speeds that can reach in excess of one hundred miles per hour.
Just as in tennis, the ball must be returned by an opponent before it bounces twice. Two bounces or a failure to catch results in a lost point.
“The word ‘fronton’ refers to the building in which jai alai is played,” Joe explained. “Aside from animal racing of one kind or another, this is the only other sport in America that you can bet on—legally, that is.”
Melissa enjoyed watching the games, seeing the short-sleeved, helmeted players jumping, running wildly, and literally climbing walls to return a steady series of difficult shots. The balls most often dropped were low, spinning volleys that hit the cestas and popped out.
Melissa also noticed that the “standing room only” section, with its fifty-cent admission charge, was jam-packed with fans. “Most all are men,” she noted, while surveying this Miami crowd. “Cigars, gray beards, and rumpled baseball caps. From the looks of this group, yuppies aren’t the targeted audience for jai alai.”
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