End of the Tiger (8 page)

Quent’s smile was not a good thing to see. “You tell me, maybe. Erica’s going back east next week. She doesn’t seem to like it out here.”

“You kids have a little scrap?” Mack asked.

“I wish we had, Mack. I wish like hell that we had. Then I could figure it out. She just … cooled off toward me. Ever since that picnic it hasn’t been the same. As if she took a good second look at me and decided I wasn’t the guy after all. What the hell is wrong with me, Mack? What is it?” There was a certain taut desperation in his tone.

“Don’t think that way, kid. That’s no way to think.”

“What other way is there? Tell me that.”

Mack knew there were no words. Nothing, after all, to say. “Quent, it’s one of those things. Roll with the punch, kid. Couple of months and you won’t remember what she looked like.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It’s a big wide wonderful world, kid. And a good cigar is a smoke.”

“You’re a good guy, Mack, and I know what you’re trying to do and all that, but it isn’t doing any good and it isn’t going to do any good, so let’s just drop it, shall we? Let’s just drop the whole thing. I don’t want to do any talking about it.”

“Sure, kid. Sure.”

Mack tried to talk shop, but it was flat. The air was stale. The drink didn’t taste right. Quent was trying to respond, but his eyes were dead. Mack kept wishing there was some way to explain. They finished the drinks. Mack paid, and they went out onto the dark street.

“Want a ride, kid?” Mack asked.

“Thanks. I think I’ll walk it.”

Mack’s car was in the opposite direction. He stood and lit a cigarette and watched Quent until he had turned the corner and the sidewalk was empty. He wondered why thinking of Erica should make him feel older, feel a little worn around the edges. Hell, a blind man could have sensed it. That was the trouble with Erica. The kid was well out of that deal. He’d get over it. It was something you had to keep telling yourself. The night wind cut through his topcoat, and he shivered. Marie expected him. As he walked slowly toward his car he decided that this was a night for going home. A little warm milk. Call Marie in the morning from the office. This was a night for going home and going to bed and hoping sleep would come quick before your mind started roaming around that squirrel cage.

It was a chilly evening at the Orange Lane Dog Track, and the crowd was thin. The cool wind tore away the brass notes of the band so that the music came across the infield in fragments. There were another four minutes before the windows would close for the seventh race. I was at one of the five-dollar win-place-show windows. Joe Stack, the manager, had moved me up from the two-dollar show window, where I had started. Lately he had been hinting about moving me back to the money room. We got along well. He had decided I was steady.

It makes a good deal for anybody in school, as I am. I’m in my senior year. The track pays you fifteen a night to work behind the windows. If he put me in the money room, I’d start drawing down twenty.

He moved up beside me and looked at the ticket numbers and said, “Slow night.” He saw the book I had open on the shelf under the window. “What’s that?”

“Math quiz tomorrow.”

He shrugged and yawned. Then he moved a little closer and lowered his voice. He pitched it so low that Dave Truelow on my left and Stan Garner on my right couldn’t hear him. Particularly Garner. “Johnny, you see anything like I asked you?”

“Not a thing, Joe.”

“Keep looking,” he said, and moved casually away. The minutes were running out, and we began to get some business. The dogs had been shut in the starting boxes. I had no business when the buzzer sounded, so I shut the window. I heard the zing of metal on metal as the bunny came around the track, and heard the roar as the race started. I yawned. I tried to look at the book again, but I kept thinking about Stan Garner. It wasn’t up to me to tell Joe Stack that Garner was roughing the customers. He didn’t do it often. Just when it seemed safe.

There are a lot of ways to do it. Stan Garner knew most of them. Drunks are the easiest. A drunk puts down a five and wants a two-dollar ticket. Stan counts
off the change as three, four, five. But he counts the ticket as three so that the drunk moves off with two dollars in change and his two-dollar ticket. On a windy night like this one, if a drunk bought with a ten, Stan would fast count him out about six dollars and hold it down and say, “Watch the wind, sir.” The drunk would shove it in his pocket and wobble off toward the track.

Sometimes Stan would wink at me. He said to me once, “Get what you can, Johnny. The customers will rough you if they get a chance. You have to use the angles to stay even.”

Joe Stack was putting me on the spot trying to get me to inform on Garner. I felt no moral responsibility toward Stan Garner. He is a stocky, smiling little guy, crooked all the way through. He’ll never go into crime in a big way. But he’ll never be honest when he can be crooked. I didn’t worry about Stan.

I did my worrying about Dave Truelow, who has the window on my left. Dave and I were friends in the beginning. We applied for the jobs and got them on the same day. We’re both seniors at the University. We stopped being friends a month ago when I took it on myself to tell him that he was making a bad mistake playing out of the box.

Here is the way it works. When you report in, you are given a money box. If you’re just selling, there may be only fifty or seventy-five dollars in it. As you sell your tickets you put the money in the box. Every once in a while someone from the money room will stop around and take out a few hundred and give you a receipt to put in the box. After the last race you have to be able to total out. The money you started with, plus total ticket sales off the machine, less cash and receipts on hand. The management has no objection to our buying a ticket for ourselves now and then. Those tickets are supposed to be purchased with money out of your pants, not out of the box. Sometimes when an owner steps up and makes a good bet just before race time, the information will go all the way down the line, and nearly everybody will buy themselves a ticket.

There’s no harm in that if the gambling bug doesn’t bite you. But when it bites you and you start playing
out of the box, hoping to make out before checkup, then you can be in trouble.

I shouldn’t have tried to give Dave a lecture. He knew that I knew he was playing out of the box. But even before that, our personal relationship had become tense because of a girl named Joanne Jamison.

Her father is an owner and trainer. During the season they travel from track to track. She and her father and mother travel and live in a big house trailer. An employee named Arn drives the pickup truck that pulls the big dog trailer. They have a nice string. Dave and I both fell for Joanne at the same time. She is button-sized, with blonde hair like silk, and big dark eyes and lashes and brows. She always seems to be half laughing at you. She likes nice things and nice places to go. She is content with a hamburger and a drive-in if that’s all you can swing. But she is more contented—and shows it—when you can have drinks at the Tampa Terrace and dinner at Ybor City. She is fun to be with. She sparkles.

As I said, it is a good job to have when you are in school. I had my courses arranged so I could work the matinees on Wednesday and Saturday. That way I could make a hundred and five dollars a week during the season and still keep up reasonably well in the classes. At least I wasn’t falling too far behind.

But it is not such a good job when you start competing for Joanne. The money seemed to melt away too easily. And money is the pulse of the track. Gambling is the only reason for the existence of the track. Money beats in the air like a drum you can’t quite hear. If that drum beat gets in your blood, then it can be a very bad job indeed. If you check out short, the management can be very very difficult. Perhaps the atmosphere is emotionally unhealthy. Without trying to sound too moral, I can say that it is only unhealthy if you have the streak of weakness that permits you to cheat. I had honesty hammered into me right from year one. I wasn’t capable of forcing myself to play out of the box, and I guess that was what Joe Stack had sensed and what made him anxious to help me along.

I knew Joe Stack was being devious. I knew he had guessed that my friend, Dave Truelow, had been playing
out of the box and had been lucky at it. So he told me to watch Garner. I don’t know what he was trying to prove, or what he thought I would do. Dave had gotten the inside track with Joanne. His grades were in pretty bad shape. He was beginning to act jumpy. I knew all I had to do was tell Joe Stack that Dave was playing out of the box regularly. Joe would fire him. He wouldn’t be able to wine and dine Joanne, and she would have to be content with my more meager date money. But I couldn’t do that.

After the races were over, I saw that Dave checked out with no difficulty. From the way he glanced at me I guessed he had had a pretty good evening. Joe, as usual, gave me a ride back to the campus after the armored car had been dispatched. As we drove out by the empty parking lot Dave passed us in the small used convertible he had bought. The top was down, and I saw Joanne beside him, some sort of white net affair over her pale hair. It hurt to see her going out with him. But there wasn’t much I could do about it.

“I wonder if Dave gets any sleep at all,” Joe said.

“He gets some.”

“How is he doing at the school?”

“I don’t really know.”

“You aren’t as friendly with him as you used to be. Break up over the girl?”

“I guess so.”

“Nice-looking girl, Johnny. Nice expensive little item.”

I was glad he didn’t continue it. I was glad he dropped it right there. After I was back in my room, it took time to get my mind riveted to the math book. Joanne kept getting in the way. I could see her walk, and see the way her mouth curved when she smiled.

We had a huge crowd on Friday night. It was the kind of evening the Chamber of Commerce claims Florida has all the time. Colored spots played on the infield fountains. The dogs ran hard in the white glare of the floodlights. The windows were busy. It was a bustling, good-humored crowd, with heavier money than usual.

When we had a breathing spell after the fourth race, and I had over four thousand worth of receipts in my
box, Stan Garner winked over at me and said, “Davey is ailing.”

I glanced at Dave. He was looking straight ahead. His color was bad, and his face looked sweaty. I looked back at Stan Garner and raised one eyebrow in question.

“He went heavy on Dancing Ann. Maybe four hundred worth.”

Dancing Ann had been hit and rolled on the first turn. I whistled softly. I hadn’t been keeping track of anything outside my own window. Garner is the type who can work hard and keep his attention on ten different things at once.

I looked at Dave again and I knew that this was the night when he was going to come to the end of the string. He had a bad case of the fever, and up until now it had paid off. But it had changed, and I sensed that he was going to ride it all the way down. It wouldn’t be a pretty thing to watch. I couldn’t be happy watching it, even though it meant that Joanne would be my girl when it was all over.

We were running ten races. He made no bet on the fifth, at least no bet that I could see. I saw him bet the sixth. By then the word had gotten around. A lot of us saw him bet the sixth, holding the keys down for a frightening length of time, the bell bonging as each ticket was printed. He checked the sheaf of tickets and put them in his pocket and made a pencil notation on a piece of paper under the counter. His hand shook as he made the notation.

“About two hundred,” Garner whispered. “On Skipjack I think.”

The word was passed along. All the men behind the windows sweated out the sixth race. It was vicarious disaster. It was like watching a man cut his own throat slowly. Skipjack came in fourth. We watched Dave Truelow. He looked five pounds lighter than when he had reported.

He made another sizeable bet on the eighth. Garner was the one who spoke to Dave, called across to him. “Getting in a little heavy, Davey?”

Dave turned slowly. His voice and eyes were expressionless. “A little.”

“How much, kid?”

“Eleven hundred.”

That word was passed along, too, and I found that I, like all the others, was pulling for Dave to come out of it. But I knew he wouldn’t. And I think he knew he wouldn’t. Luck goes sour and it won’t come back.

I don’t know how Joe Stack heard about it. He had his own sources. I didn’t see him coming, but suddenly he was behind Dave. He stood there. He didn’t say anything. I saw Dave look back at him and then hunch more closely over his work. Joe stood there throughout the betting on the ninth race, and then went back to the money room.

When the results were posted on the ninth, Dave turned toward Stan Garner and me. He had a crazy look on his face. “That’s what I needed to get even. Boxer Boy. That’s what I was going to play. Eight to one it paid and I didn’t get dime one down.”

“He’ll have himself a good time figuring this last one,” Garner whispered to me. “Two favorites and six tanglefeet. He can’t get enough down on either favorite to make it all back.”

“What will they do with him?”

“This isn’t any twenty- or thirty-buck shortage, Johnny. They’ll hold him for the cops.”

Dave waited until moments before the board closed. Once again he held down the keys. Garner stood on tiptoes and looked across. He checked the numbers against the starting position and said, in a tone of awe, “Kathy’s Prince! Good God!” Then he shrugged. “He’s down eleven hundred. Another hundred won’t make it hurt any worse.”

I tried not to look at Dave as the race was being run. We could not see the finish line from the windows. We could all hear the sound of it, the rising roar as the dogs came around the final turn and into the stretch. Dave stood utterly motionless. The crowd sound died away abruptly as it always does, and people began to move toward the exits and the big parking lot.

The P.A. system announced a photo finish between dogs one and seven. Seven was Kathy’s Prince. I looked at Dave. He wavered a little and held onto the edge of
the counter for support. I began automatically to prepare my checkout. The bank had finished its final number of the evening.