Something for Nothing (32 page)

“So what should I be looking for?” Miriam asked.

Martin had placed his bets, bought some beers, and now he was sitting next to her in one of the green fold-down stadium seats. His first thought had been to avoid her, sit a few seats away, and generally play it cool. Direct his comments to Hal, maybe. But she'd called him over, patted the seat next to her, and asked him for help with her
Racing Form
. So now she was holding it out in front of her, and she was leaning in toward him a little bit. The tip of her knee touched his leg. He gave a quick glance sideways, and saw that she was squinting, studying the columns of numbers and the description of the races.

Huh, he thought. She really did seem interested in the betting thing. And was the physical contact intentional? Probably not . . . or probably not in the way he hoped. It was always intentional when he did it, anyway. Maybe she was just the sort of person who didn't think much about a little bit of physical contact. He tried to remember whether or not he'd ever noticed that she was the type who put a quick, light hand
on your shoulder when talking to you, or anything like that. Like at the cocktail party. He didn't think so.

He resisted the urge to look at her again, to see her mouth and eyes and even her nose so close up. Maybe get a glimpse at the texture of her hair as some stray strands fell down across her face. Or see the moisture on her lips. As it was, he could smell the beer on her breath. It was a little stale, but he loved it—it made him feel as if the moment was more intimate, somehow. He couldn't believe they were sitting so close together like this, hunched over a
Racing Form,
with him actually doling out advice. It was like a miraculous, divine form of intervention.

He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Well, the first thing you want to do, especially if you're just coming to a race and you don't know the horses, is see what the odds are, and then maybe see what the oddsmaker's picks are at the bottom of the page. Sometimes they're way off the mark, but they're usually in the ballpark.”

Miriam nodded. “Okay,” she said, glancing at him.

“So, for example,” he went on, “in the Eighth Race, which is in about ten minutes, Lucky Charm is listed as having five-to-one odds. That's not bad—it might be a good bet. And let's see, Back Alley is listed as three-to-one, and, Cosmic Reality is five-to-two. So Back Alley is the favorite. And then if you look down here at the bottom of the page,” he said, pointing, “you can see that there are three horses listed as ‘Expert's Picks.' For this race, they've picked Back Alley, Cosmic Reality, and Go-Getter. So Lucky Charm isn't one of their top three, even though he's got better odds than Go-Getter, who is listed as nine-to-one. But that might be good,” he said, “because you can make more money betting on nine-to-one odds than on five-to-one odds.”

He looked up and made eye contact with her, but he looked back down at the sheet almost right away. It wasn't as if he had never looked her in the eye before, but this was different, somehow. For one thing, her eyes really were an intense blue.

The key issue here, though, was that she was so close up. She was
more real, somehow, than she'd been before. Yes, that was it. True, he'd lain on her bedroom floor and listened to her while she was alone in her bathroom—one could argue that that was pretty real. But in some ways she hadn't been real at all that day. For one thing, she hadn't known he was there.

Miriam gave him a playful jab in the side with her elbow. “Listen,” she said. “I get it about the odds, but I want to know about all the rest of this stuff here. You know, the expert stuff. There's an awful lot of information here. How will it help me decide which horse to pick?”

He looked up at her, not hiding his mild surprise. She was a lot more interested than most women he knew (Linda didn't give two shits about horseracing). Plus, he realized, his leg was still touching hers. Or he thought it was. His whole body was numb. He looked down. Yes, there it was, his knee, up against her knee. They looked happy, he thought. Our knees are happy together, and we could be happy together, too.

“You're right,” he said. “There's a lot of stuff here.” He took another deep breath. It was hot, and he felt a little light-headed. He took a big swig of beer, and she drank, too.

“Let me just show you a couple of things,” he said to her. He pointed at the far left column, and looked at her to see if she was listening, which she was. She looked up at him, nodded, then looked down at the sheet again.

“First,” he said, “I want to know how a horse has done over the course of the past few races. So for example, I can look here and see that this horse last raced in April. That's this column here. Then I see how he finished. That's in this column here. Okay, it's a three. That means he finished third. And the little half number next to that three tells you how far back he was. This says ‘one,' so he was only back by one length. That's not so bad, actually. And in fact, if you look way over here to the right, you can get a couple of words describing how he finished. This says ‘wide, hung'—meaning that he swung around too wide at the turn, but he hung in there until the end. He didn't give up.”

He looked at her and watched as she pushed the hair back out of her
face. Her neck was a little bit sweaty, and he saw that some small bits of her dark hair were sticking there. He wanted to reach out and stroke her hair there, move it away from her neck.

“Go on,” she said. “I'm listening. I'm following you.”

He nodded and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Well, let's see. There's one other thing that's good to know.”

He paused for a second, thinking about how much to say. He wanted to impress her, show her how much he knew, but he didn't want to overdo it, either. He took a quick glance over at Hal, and saw that he was talking to Ludwig and Jenny—boring the shit out of them, most likely. But that was their problem, not his.

“Okay,” he said, pointing to another part of the sheet. “If you look at this column, you can see how long his previous races have been. This might be useful. If he's done well in short races, but not in longer ones, you need to know that, right? Maybe he's a sprinter, so you might hesitate before betting on him for a longer race. My horse, for example, Temperature's Rising, isn't a great sprinter. I don't put him in shorter races, and if I did, he probably wouldn't do well.”

At the mention of Temperature's Rising, Miriam looked at Martin and smiled. She crossed her arms across her chest and gave him a sort of sidelong glance—it was a little playful, Martin thought.

“Did you come up with that name, or did someone else?”

Martin laughed, and realized as he did that he was blushing. He didn't know why, though. Why would a question like that make him blush? He let go of the sheet, finally, dropped it on her lap, and sat up a little straighter in his seat.

“No,” he said, “I didn't name him. I got him when he was almost two years old, and he'd already been named.” He wanted to say something more, be witty, but he was a little tongue-tied.

“Well, it's a great name,” she said. “And he's a really good horse, right? I mean, that's why he's in the championship race. What are his odds for today? Should I be betting on him?” She was still smiling. Despite himself, he started to calm down.

Martin shrugged, trying to adopt the same posture of indifference he'd had with Ted Reasoner a little while ago. “He's listed in the book at five-to-two,” he said. “We'll see what happens as it gets closer to race time. The odds on the board out there are keyed to bets placed. So if a lot of people bet against him, the odds go up.”

“But that would be good, right?” she said.

“That's right,” Martin said, more comfortable now. “It would actually be really good . . . because he's going to win.”

He hadn't planned to say that, had just blurted it out. But when he saw her momentary surprise—she started back just a bit, opening her eyes a little wide and grinning—he felt as if he'd said the right thing.

He took a quick glance around at the others in their group. Ludwig was hurrying off toward the betting windows—maybe to escape from Hal. Jenny and Hal were sitting together now, talking, but Martin saw Hal give a quick glance over toward him and Miriam. Or he thought he did, anyway. It was a look that said he was bored talking to Jenny. No surprise there—she was probably yakking at him about some film she'd seen recently, or maybe about her intention to apply to graduate school at Stanford (good luck). But it was also, Martin felt, a wary sort of look, one that suggested he wanted to keep an eye on things.

Huh, Martin thought. You can't be jealous unless you think you've got a reason to be jealous.

A few seconds later Ludwig grabbed Martin and pulled him out of his seat to talk with him about something, and then before he knew it an hour had gone by. By then they'd all had too much to drink, especially in the heat of the late afternoon. They'd finished off the gin Ludwig had brought in his cooler, but they were still drinking draft beers. And it wasn't just Ludwig and Jenny. They were all starting to slur a little, talk too loud, Hal and Miriam included. Some of the people in the seats around them were giving them the look, but he didn't care. They were all moving around, talking, laughing, running up to place a couple of bets, running back to the seats. No one seemed to win
anything. Miriam teased him when she placed a bet and lost—punched him in the arm, even.

Some time went by, and he looked over and saw Miriam and Hal sitting together, laughing, his arm draped around her shoulders, across the back of the seat she was in. They were sharing some sort of joke. Or that's what it looked like. For a panicked second Martin thought they might have been talking about him.

“Is this guy a knucklehead, or what?” she'd ask. “I can't believe we live near him. He really does think he's something special. You should've heard him with that stupid
Racing Form.
He was acting like it was rocket science, for Christ's sake.”

“You don't know the half of it,” Hal would say in response. “The guy's a total loser—really just a big sham. He's fucking broke, you know. I heard it from a friend of mine at Wells Fargo. He came begging for a loan, and they told him to take a hike. All of this with the horses is just made-up money—credit. He's a walking house of cards.”

Martin took a deep breath and counseled himself to calm down. Who knew what they were talking about? Maybe something to do with one of their kids. It was impossible to say (though he was tempted to march over there and find out. What the fuck are you two talking about? he'd ask. This is my day, you know).

One thing was certain, though, and that was that they were actually pretty close. They were friends, even. He thought for a moment about Linda. Sure, they were married, and yes, they loved each other. But were they close? Good friends? On some days his answer to that question would be an automatic yes. But on other days, and especially in the past year or two, he wasn't so sure. In fact, he wasn't sure that he was friends—close friends, that is—with anyone anymore. He suddenly wished she were here to watch the race with him, and share this moment. Jesus, he thought. It wasn't too late for them, was it? He wasn't sure.

Finally, Martin heard the announcement for the eleventh race—the one he'd been waiting for. “The horses are on the track.”

He watched through his binoculars as the horses walked out onto the raked dirt of the track for the post parade. The horses were actually right down in front of them, pretty easy to see, but he liked to use the binoculars anyway. He could tell they were excited; their heads bobbed up and down, straining at their bits. The jockeys were perched on top of them, guiding them, but mainly just working to keep them calm. Martin saw Temperature's Rising right away: his number and eyeshades were sky blue, and Sanchez was wearing a checkered shirt in matching blue. That was one of Val's touches. He hated it, he said, when the jockey and the horse didn't match (which was ironic, in that Val's own clothes routinely clashed).

Martin felt a hand on his shoulder—a woman's hand—and he thought for an ecstatic second that it was Miriam's. But when he brought his binoculars down from his eyes, he saw that Miriam was standing in the row in front of him and that it was Jenny who was standing next to him. A second ago he had seen her over with Ludwig, two rows down. But now she was next to him, her hand on his shoulder.

“Which one is Temperature's Rising?” she asked.

“Right there,” Martin said. “In the light blue. The sky blue. Number six.” She was leaning against him a little bit, her left breast pressing into his side, and he resisted the urge to take a half step away from her.

In front of him, Miriam was shading her eyes with her right hand and looking out at the horses. “Oh, wow,” she said, with a quick half glance back at Martin. “Look at that. He's really something. He's taller than the other horses, isn't he?”

Martin felt a quick jolt of pleasure run through him. As far as he was concerned, the horse had just paid for himself.

He thought about moving away from Jenny entirely, getting her hand off his shoulder and making it clear he didn't like it when she touched him. But instead he slipped the leather strap of his binoculars from around his neck and handed them to her.

“You can see better with these,” he said. “I need them for the race, but go ahead and check him out.”

“Okay, wow, great,” she said. “Thanks.”

He put his right arm around her shoulders, and guided the binoculars with his left hand.

“See that horse in the red right there?” he asked her, pointing out toward the track with his left hand. “Number eight? That's the horse we've gotta worry about. Champagne Taste. He's a lot like Temperature's Rising: a late breaker. He'll be hanging back until the last turn. It's gonna be the two of them coming down the stretch.”