“This is where the record hits the crack,” I let her know what was coming—
Don’t breathe it to nobody
’Cause you know I’m on the lam
The lam-the lam-the lam-the lam—
“I think that fool has hit a crack himself,” I told Zaza.
“I know,” she agreed, “he’s my old man.”
I poured her another but not any for myself. I kept myself from asking her “What for?” But I wasn’t about to take back calling that fool a fool.
“He only plays the fool around the piano,” she took me up, “that don’t mean he’s a real fool.”
“He’s chained,” I explained, “somebody has him chained. That makes him a real fool.”
“We’re all chained to something,” she told me, studying her glass, “he’s chained to the piano and I’m chained to him. What are you chained to?”
“The piano isn’t all he’s chained to,” I had to point out. I had the feeling that something was starting here that I could do without. I decided to put it in the open and then clear out. “Are you on, too?”
She didn’t even get mad.
“No,” she told me, “as a matter of fact I’m not even chained to this—” she nodded toward the bottle.
“Then you’re both real fools,” I made up my mind. And put on my cap.
She looked me up and down from my scuffed shoes to my jacket out under the arms. She even looked at my little wool seaman’s cap.
“It’s plain to be seen you’re not a man who makes mistakes himself.” She’d figured that out by herself.
Enright tried to pour me another but I kept my hand across the glass.
“I’ve got something for you, Rider,” he told me at last.
“Tell me about it tomorrow,” I told him. And left feeling sure I’d never be back.
I bought a chickenwire cubbyhole at the Hotel McCoy for fifty cents that night. But thinking about the way that old hooker had looked me up and down kept me tossing.
I felt a change in luck coming at the combination window, the next day, just before the fourth race was off. The dude in front of me said “two dollars on number eight three times.” The seller punched him a combination and the beef began. The dude didn’t want Place or Show. He just wanted Win. The seller pointed to the sign: Combination. The dude walked off not knowing what he was holding. I kept him in view.
Number Eight ran second. The dude howled with disappointment, threw his tickets down and went to complain to a bartender. I could have run after him and told him the seller had done him a good turn: that he had Place money as well as Show. By the time I’d picked up his tickets he was gone.
I picked up twenty-one bucks and sat down next to a big old darky gal and asked her how she was doing.
“I dreamed number five last night,” she told me, “today I bet four races ’n no number five win yet. Now I know, fifth race got to be number five.”
I took her program out of her hand—“That’s the very reason number five can’t win,” I told her like I knew something she didn’t know. “There’s your winner—I got to do it with your pencil”—and circled Mom’s Request. What did I have to lose?
Mom’s Request broke in front, drew away and was home free: eighteen dollars straight.
I didn’t ask the old girl for anything. And all she said was “Mind my seat.” Like she was sure I would.
When she came back she handed me a five-dollar ticket, on number five, Ilo-Ilo, to win. I was sorry she hadn’t just handed me the fiver. I never would have bet it on Ilo-Ilo. I excused myself and moved down to the far end of the bleachers, at the turn for home. We’d done all we could for one another.
Ilo-Ilo, Skoronski up, broke behind the pack, made up ground at the far turn and began moving up. Skoronski let him out right in front of me. I picked up $32.80. I spent a buck for a Form and huddled with it next to the paddock.
The next couple races were maiden races; which I never bet. But the seventh had what I was looking for. Popcorn Bummy, a mile and a sixteenth, Troy Duryea up. That was the one horse Duryea knew how to handle. I went down to the saddling to get a peek at both Popcorn and Duryea.
Popcorn looked fit and Duryea looked taller, somehow, than he used to be. Maybe because he wasn’t an apprentice anymore. The horse was on the board at 11-1 and it didn’t drop. I waited until Duryea had him in the gate. Then I put twenty on the nose.
Duryea didn’t try to take him out front, as he used to do at Ozark. He laid back fourth and laid back so long I thought he might be waiting too long. Then he began inching up, had him neck and neck at the turn, and let him out at the eight-pole. Under by two full lengths. A beautiful ride. Troy Duryea had become a real race-rider. I wasn’t about to wait around the jock’s room to shake his hand. I picked up $268.00 and headed for the gate. I’d be sleeping in a bed without chickenwire overhead this night.
I was back in business.
“You’re looking sharp, Floweree,” Enright spoke up the minute he spotted me.
“Why not?”
In sports slacks, a zippy sports jacket, new half-boots and a shave and a haircut, why not admit I was sharp?
Green Babushka was in some sort of hassle with a pimpy-looking character who came on like he thought he looked like Steve Lawrence but he looked more like Spike Jones to me. I heard her call him Daddy but I didn’t ask her to introduce me. Then I leaned on the backbar, two stools away from Zaza, just to let her get a full view of the new me. She didn’t register amazement and delight. In fact she didn’t even look as though it made any difference to her how I was dressed.
Whatever Enright had for me, he’d have to come to me. I made no move, except to lean on the bar behind my shades, until he came up. He didn’t bring the house-bottle. He knew now I wasn’t going to drink his whiskey without knowing what he wanted from me.
“You’re looking better than when you hit here, Floweree,” he told me. I just looked at him from behind the shades.
“Can we talk?” he wanted to know. I nodded. He could start talking whenever he wanted. I was ready to listen. He motioned me to the corner of the bar and talked with his head turned away from the barflies. But I think Zaza was listening.
“You know that thing Skoronski been riding?” he wanted to know.
“Skoronski been riding lots of things. He brought in a 11-1 shot today.”
“Flamisan.”
“It don’t matter who’s riding that, ” I knew, “the horse is part eagle. There’s nothing stabled out there can run with him. They’ll put 136 pounds on him the next time out and that still won’t get anybody in his right mind to bet against him. He’ll be off at 3-5 is my guess.”
“I got a party will put up five bills to have Flamisan run no worse than second.”
“Second to what? ”
“Second to anything. That’s his business. Look—’’Enright looked ready to scold me for not taking him seriously—“he’s been in here every night for a week. I been holding him for you.”
“Does he know me?” I asked Enright.
“He don’t know you from Ezra Taft Benson.”
“Who’s Ezra Taft Benson?”
“No matter. What I’m driving at is he don’t know you, he don’t know Skoronski either. Does anyone around the paddock know you?”
“I rode with some of those people.”
“Good. Then they won’t bother you.”
“I don’t get your drift, Enright,” I told him; although I was beginning to get it.
Enright drew back as if to study me from a distance. I let him study away. Zaza was studying both of us.
“You’re Skoronski,” Enright finally let me have it.
“Okay,” I went along, “I’m Skoronski. And you’re Ezra Taft Benson. What do we do now—play unnatural games?”
Enright shrugged. He’d said all he had to say. It was my move.
The impersonation bit has been worked around stables since people began to bet on horses. But there’s alway
s somebody who hasn’t heard of it. Usually from Omaha.
“I’ll think it over and let you know,” I told Enright. Then I slid off the stool and went to see what the piano-fool was up to.
He was still doing Johnny Cash.
When Enright took me to him I was wearing my pretty-day silks, shades, and a whip tied to my hand. We met him behind Skoronski’s barn.
He was a big-hand, big-belly, big-laugh old boy full of the jollies, on the surface. Underneath he never stopped counting the house. The ten-gallon hat, the shirt covered with rose-petals and the badge I’M FROM OMAHA was all part of his act. He was probably from The Bronx. He was Omaha all the same. He was all Omaha.
He was so hungry to make a killing that I had to be Skoronski. I gave him the Skoronski shake—as cold a piece of skin as he’d ever felt.
“Yew knaow what kin run fastern’s a horse?” was his idea of opening a conversation about fixing a horse-race.
“What runs faster than a horse, Amos?” Enright humored him.
“A pig!” Amos let us know.
“A pig?” Enright asked, feigning astonishment.
“Shor! For the first thutty feet! Yak!Yak!”
Enright pretended to laugh. I didn’t even try. I tipped Enright the wink to let me handle Amos. I don’t think he went far.
“Was there something you wanted to see me about?” I asked Amos, flicking my little whip.
Amos dropped the jolly-boy routine and got into it.
“I think something is going to outrun that thing you’re riding,” he told me.
“Then you better bet against me,” I suggested.
“It’s what I want to do. But a man wants to be shor.”
“Nothing’s sure in a horse race, mister.”
“Step over here, son,” he asked me. We went over to a shadow of the stable.
“I can’t hang around here long, mister,” I told him, “I’m supposed to be up in the color-room right now. My mount is even money and dropping.”
“If your mount should lose stride—” he faltered.
“He won’t, mister,” I told him.
“You’re on his back,” he reminded me—and he had it ready. Five C-notes. I didn’t touch it.
“It’s worth eight.”
“What it’s worth ’n what I got are two different things, son.” Now he was begging. But I knew there was more where that came from. I turned to go.
“Six is high as I can go,” he called me back.
“Six-fifty.”
He counted out six-fifty but he must have palmed the fifty. Because when I found Enright six bills was all I had. I felt better that Amos had held back on me. I showed Enright the six and handed him three.
“You were great in there,” Enright told me.
“You think the guy will lay for Skoronski?” I wondered; though I didn’t really care.
“He won’t lay for Skoronski. He’ll lay for me,” Enright told me. “Give him a couple of days to get back to Omaha before you come in again. He might put it together if he sees you again.” But I could see Enright liked the idea of the mark making a beef on his own territory.
I wondered how much the mark had bet against Flamisan.
Flamisan, the Form described the race, in hand while placed on the inside, was forced to come out and circle the field on completing the first mile, continuing gamely to take a commanding lead through the upper stretch. Won driving.
It looked like a rainy day in Omaha.
When toteboard lights go blind with dusk
And other losers have gone home
Above the grandstand’s damps and glooms
A moon of the backstretch on the wane
Sees a rider whose silks are long outworn.
Whose hands once guided whose wrists once eased
Whose fingers could gentle or warn or praise
Whose hands that commanded have nothing to do
But riffle dead tickets like bad guesses through.
A moon with a ruled-off rider’s eyes
Lights his way to those rain-caves and night-blue dives
Nine steps under the traffic’s cries
Where raggified ruins and draggified queers
Emerge from The-Street-Where-Nobody-Cares:
Begoggled young bandrats with boozified squares
Do-Wrongies, Do-Righties with coppers turned kuke
Mascaraed martyrs with maybellined spooks
To a furlong of stiffs in a swizzlestick cave
Where triumphs don’t matter just losses remain
Left at the starting gate all’s one and the same
For it isn’t cats who kill and drag out Who are ever in charge on the
Kiss-And-Claw Route.
Virgin or viper, thistle or flower
Who come at the close to the same night-blue hour
Where fists count the most but money counts more.
Can’t you tell by the breathing breathing
And the smiles that drain through gin
Can’t you tell by the smell Of this swizzlestick hell
The name of the place you’re in?
Whose gains are on paper whose losses are cash
To fevered informers or pandering cats
Where whiskey is free to all who’ve just died
(Others pay double though barely alive)
Teatalking strippers with compulsive old lechers
(The stick and the raging arrive in all weathers)
Keybroad and callbroad, cruiser or tout
Careless or wary, shut in or shut out
Straightbroad, boothbroad, headbroad and plain whore:
Each waits where she’s caught on the Kiss-And-Claw tour.
Where fists count the most but money counts more.
Yet not one knows the name of this understair dive
Where none are seen leaving yet new ones arrive
Where each stirs his bourbon yet none chunk the ice
Each pays his money yet none ask the price
Some made of water and some held by wire
Some with their green years yet afire
Each dressed for a ball though draped for the grave
None speak the name of this night-blue cave.
Through sunlight bright as seconal
Through twilights swept by snow—
Can’t you see by the gloom
Of a blue paper moon
These are Christ’s poor damned cats
Who’ll never see home?
On a stretch stretching back into dreams now done
The old jock hears the hooves of races long run
Here among cats of various stripe
Some on the heavy and some on the hype
He beats the bar with a swizzlestick click—
“Bartender! Booze! And fetch it damned quick!”
Then takes it straight till he’s stoned to the bricks.
When you come to the end it’s the end that’s all
Where fists count the most but money counts all—
Don’t you know that the cats who kill and drag out
Are never in charge of the Kiss-And-Claw Route?
WATCH OUT FOR DADDY
1. That day so still so burning
By the brought-down look of that gas-plate trap you’d scarcely have guessed it was the best deal we’d had yet. Everybody in L.A. was driving convertibles and us two fools thinking if a place had a rag carpet it had true class. This place had a carpet and cups, too. I was glad not to have to drink out of that shaving mug any more.
I got a job car-hopping but Daddy is too hard of hearing to do much along those lines himself. His right ear is as good as anyone’s, but the left is the one the guard at Industrial bust. What Daddy is best at is just hanging around the house in his tattery shorts with a stick of tea in his teeth.
Now and then he’d make a deal with a Mexican for half a can of backyard tea, double-wrap it and sell it to some other hill-billy as the pure Panama. That way we’d catch up on the ren
t and have enough left for a bottle of gin.
Other times people paid Daddy off in a pair of two-tone shoes the wrong size or a wristwatch with a home-made hairspring for me. “Daddy,” I told him at last, “this stuff is nowhere. Why take just anything?”
“For that grade of pot you’re lucky to get just anything.”
“But all you get is junk. Sheer junk.”
“I’ll take that too if I can get my hooks into it,” he told me.
I was still that simple I didn’t know what he meant.
I found out in due course. In that same room right under the roof where you had to battle for every breath.
On that day so still so burning.
I woke up with a lawnmower that had one blade missing ticketing around the room, cutting comers and coming back. It took me a full minute to realize the racket was all inside my head. I was face-down on the sofa with a hangover like a cliff.
I could feel my arm just hanging. And the watch with the homemade hairspring, that hadn’t run for days, hanging onto my wrist. Everything in that room was just hanging on. Everything in the world needed fixing.
“If I’m going to wake up feeling like this,” I told him, “I might as well drink whiskey.”
“You start on that again, Little Baby, you’ll be drunk again before night.”
“What makes me sick will cure me,” I told him. It was what he’d so often told me.
“There’s better cures than whiskey, Beth-Mary,” he pulled a switch on me.
“If submitting to that spike in your pocket is what you’re driving at, forget it,” I told him, “I’d sooner do without care.”
“I’m not asking you to undergo anything at my hands I’m not willing to undergo at yours.”
“I don’t want you to undergo a thing at my hands,” I told him, “I don’t want to punch holes in your hide—why punch holes in mine?”
He come to sit beside me on the horsehair sofa and took my hand in his own.
“Baby,” he told me, “Little Baby. Once we agreed that I was to take care of you in the big things and you were to take care of me in the little ones.”
“But why begin with the big ones, Little Daddy?” I asked. For at sight of that needle my strength simply drained.
“What kind of man do you think I am? You think I want to see my little wife go to work sick? Don’t she deserve my care?”
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