Cross Country Murder Song (24 page)

Song 12: Lucky

He was staring out of the car window, his reflection hanging like a ghost on the landscape as farmland dotted with outbuildings and barns went by. A field opened out before him and cows glanced up slowly, indifferent to the road cutting through. Stupid cows, he mumbled to himself. His father was talking to him again, he was recounting a story about winning, about riding trains and card schools and being richer in the next station than you were in the one before. The miles, as he told it, yielded up dollar after dollar from beneath their clanking wheels as the locomotive pulled and shunted their snaking cars from town to town.

They'd be laughing, his father said, negotiating a busy junction, his head bobbing back and forth with the constant beat of the story, and I was a kid, you know, I was about your age, maybe a little older. His father looked at him as if to gauge the years between them, and those guys, they'd be laughing, he repeated, but you know, soon enough someone would be bitching about something.

A flush, said a voice proudly and he saw his teenage father seated at a table, the youngest face among the four men. The man opposite his father made a fan of his cards like a Geisha girl turned suddenly shy and looking for something to hide behind. The man fanned himself mockingly.

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 was, 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.