Gargantuan (2 page)

“No you don’t.”

“I don’t trust him, lady,” Ramirez says, sitting down heavily.

“How can you not trust him? You don’t know him.”

Ramirez shrugs. “I just don’t want to see you in any more trouble with men,” he says, making it sound like trouble with men is my life’s pursuit.

“Can we talk about something else?” I ask.

“Go ahead.”

“When’s Elsie coming back?”

“Soon I guess. Not sure. Aunt’s still sick.”

“Oh.”

“There’s something about those eyes of his. They’re a funny color, Ruby.”

“What? Whose eyes?”

“The jockey.”

“His eyes are blue,” I protest.

“They’re a funny bright blue. I don’t like it. I knew a dog with eyes like that once.”

“You’re comparing the object of my affections to a
dog?”

“No, just his eyes.”

This is disturbing. Ramirez has never poked his nose so firmly into my affairs. Elsie, yes. But not Ramirez. He stands up and goes to the stove to see about the tea.

“Drink your tea,” he says a moment later, setting a cup in front of me.

He sits back down and frowns again, causing his dark eyes to disappear under folds of forehead. “I’m sorry to be in a mood, Ruby,” he sighs. “It’s the snow. It’s getting to me.”

“Apparently.”

“Don’t be mad,” he urges, uncharacteristically patting my hand and squeezing it.

“Okay,” I shrug.

I sip my tea and, as soon as it’s slightly cool, drink it all down and bid my neighbor good night.

“You’re sure you’re not upset with me, lady?” Ramirez asks, escorting me back to my own front door.

“No,” I sigh. “I understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Understand everything,” I say, not wanting to explain myself.

“That makes one of us,” my neighbor says.

I go back into my apartment. Stinky is still on the couch and Lulu is now keeping him company—though she’s sitting about a foot away from him, pretending she doesn’t like him enough to get closer.

I walk back into the bedroom where I find Attila still sleeping but turned onto his side. He’s bunched up, like he’s riding a racehorse in his sleep. I get in bed next to him, prop up on my elbow and stare at him. His blond crew cut is growing out and some of his hair is mashed to the side of his head. His entire body is, even in repose, rippled with muscle. It occurs to me that racehorses and jockeys are similar in their impossibly lean but muscular physiques. Horses don’t have to vomit up their dinner to keep to a certain weight though.

I rest my head on the pillow and look up at the ceiling which, for some reason, I recently painted leafy green.

“What are you doing?” Attila suddenly asks. I turn my head and find that his eyes are open.

“Nothing.”

“I woke up and you weren’t here,” he says, reaching for me.

“Just went across the hall to say hello to my neighbor,” I say entwining my legs with his.

“That Ramirez fellow?”

“Yeah.”

“That guy hates me.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I just know. You spend enough time around horses, you develop a sixth sense. Mostly about horses, but about people too.”

“I think he’s just protective of me.”

“So you admit it? He thinks I’m bad for you? He’s got it in for me?”

“No, nothing like that,” I protest, running my hand down Attila’s forearm, kneading the muscles there.

“What, he liked your last boyfriend better?” Attila presses on.

“Not that either. He’s a Vietnam vet, he’s suspicious by nature.”

“Uh-huh,” Attila grunts, not buying it. “The man can’t stand me,” he declares.

To take his mind off this alleged hatred, I run my hands over Attila’s compact chest and then down into his boxer shorts. He growls, wrestles me down, and pins me underneath him.

“Nobody hates you,” I say softly into Attila’s ear.

“That’s not entirely true,” he says, putting his mouth to mine.

I didn’t believe him. But I should have.

I
woke up feeling like someone had ripped out my insides and replaced them with fire. I took a deep breath and turned onto my side but the view wasn’t one to cool me down. Ruby was sprawled across two-thirds of the bed. Her black hair was coiled in snakes against the white sheets. Her red nightgown was unceremoniously hiked up over one hip, exposing her hind end. I reached over and lightly rubbed her thigh, my hands rough against her soft, pale skin. She let out a small sigh and tucked one hand under her cheek but she didn’t wake up.

I got out of bed and started stretching. I felt the fire spreading from my internal organs to my limbs. When I fail to follow my customary physical regime of running several miles, doing hundreds of sit-ups and push-ups and riding at least a dozen horses a day, I pay a price. Where some athletes’ bodies become stiff and half crippled, mine turns to fire. Not that I’m a traditional athlete. I got into all this a little late in life. I’m thirty-four and still an apprentice jockey. A
bug boy
they’d have called me in the golden days of racing. But the golden days of racing are gone and so are mine. Or so I thought. Until I met Ruby.

She was hanging over the rail looking down into the saddling paddock at Aqueduct Racetrack. She was standing next to a wild-eyed blonde and both women were staring at my mount, Ballistic, a less than stellar grandson of Native Dancer. A few months earlier, Ballistic had gone off as the favorite in an allowance race at Saratoga
and hadn’t finished in the money—he’d dropped down in class in each successive race and was now running for a tag at Aqueduct. The horse had bad luck just like me.

I don’t usually look at the racing fans. At Aqueduct, in the middle of winter, most of them are either grouchy old white men clutching coffee-stained tip sheets or angry Jamaican guys prone to calling both jockeys and horses
blood clots
.

On that cold afternoon, something made me crane my neck and look up into the spectator area. And I saw her. She wore a red fake fur coat and, from that distance, her lips seemed as red as the coat even though it didn’t look like she was wearing lipstick. Her long black hair was falling loose and wild and her eyes were searching for something. I found it difficult to stop looking at her. Although I’d already been given a leg up onto Ballistic, and had picked up the reins to make contact with his mouth, I wasn’t really paying attention to the horse. The girl’s eyes met mine and she smiled a little but it was hard to tell if she was smiling at Ballistic or me. Probably the latter since, for the first time in nine months, good ol’ Ballistic won a race. I didn’t have much to do with it. I just stayed out of the old guy’s way and let him do his thing. Which, on this particular day, he did by an uncharacteristically large margin, crossing the finish line a half-dozen lengths ahead of the second-place horse.

Henry Meyer—Ballistic’s trainer—was even more surprised by the win than I was. He looked stunned as he ran a hand through his thinning hair then took hold of Ballistic’s bridle, steering the chestnut into position in the winner’s circle. Ballistic stood proudly as the track photographer took the win photo. I hopped down off the horse’s back, patted him on the neck, then took my saddle and went to weigh in. When I stepped off the scale, Henry came over and clapped me on the back. For better and mostly for worse, Henry had always had faith in me. Now, it had paid off.

“Glad to win one for you, Henry,” I said, looking into his tired brown eyes. He offered a rare smile and, for the first time, I saw something other than weariness radiating from him.

When Henry had turned away, I looked up to the spectator area, hoping to find the girl in the red coat. She was hard to miss. I stared up at her for several seconds but she wasn’t looking in my direction.

Ballistic was my last ride of the day so I went into the jockeys’ room to change back to street clothes. A few of the guys congratulated me and slapped me on the back. I nodded and grinned but my mind was elsewhere. When I emerged from the jocks room, I found myself walking into the grandstands. I almost never do this. But I felt compelled to find the girl. Jockeys are a superstitious lot and I felt certain she’d somehow made the race come out as it had. She’d held good wishes in her heart for me and Ballistic and these wishes had influenced fate.

As I wove through small packs of spectators, I pulled a cap from my jacket pocket and put it on so that none of the horseplayers would recognize my noticeable blond hair and hurl insults at me. I was pretty sure they’d all bet against Ballistic and me and would no doubt heap unpleasantries upon me at the top of their lungs. A few old guys looked at me sideways, registering something, but I moved swiftly, darting around people until I finally spotted the girl. She was standing near the saddling paddock’s indoor viewing area. She was still with the wild-eyed blonde; the two of them hunched over a computerized printout of the
Daily Racing Form
. They were oblivious to the fact that several men were eyeing them, which is a raging testament to their extreme attractiveness. Those guys normally wouldn’t look up from their heavily annotated tip sheets if a tidal wave suddenly reared up from the not so distant sea and engulfed all of Aqueduct.

I stood about a foot away from the two women. My red-coat girl was frowning in concentration, chewing on the eraser of a little blue Aqueduct pencil. Eventually she felt my eyes on her. She glanced up briefly then did a double take and looked up again. This time she smiled. I felt that smile reach deep inside me.

“You’re… you’re… that jockey,” she said.

“Attila Johnson,” I said, extending a hand to shake.

“Nice job on Ballistic,” she said. Her hands were even smaller than mine but she had a grip of iron. I noticed that her eyes were gray.

“No, actually, Ballistic did a nice job on me. I just tried to keep out of his way,” I told her.

She grinned at this, as if I’d uttered a magical phrase.

“You ride?” I asked, because in that grin I thought I saw a girl who knew horses.

“Not really. Not like you mean. I walked hots once for a month at Belmont,” she said, shrugging, “but I don’t ride well. I’ll get on a quiet horse given the chance but I couldn’t do
that
,” she said, motioning out at the track with one of her small hands. Her fingernails were unpainted though I’d have bet a hundred bucks right then that she had her toenails polished a strong red.

And I’d have won my bet. It was the first thing I checked two nights later when she took me home to her apartment in Coney Island. I hadn’t even had to do much that day at Aqueduct. We’d talked a little more, she’d told me her name—Ruby—which I’ve rolled around like a good taste on the back of my tongue ever since. Eventually, she’d written her number down on a blank corner of her
Racing Form
printout and, three hours later, I’d called her. She immediately asked if she could come watch me exercise horses the next morning. I don’t win many races but that’s just dumb luck, I ride well. I told her it was fine. I’d leave her name at security.

The next morning at seven
A.M
., I was trotting one of John Troxler’s three-year-old fillies along the rail when I noticed a girl standing there yawning. Ruby. She wasn’t wearing the red coat this time but she still stood out. She was a little too well dressed to be a backside worker but too wild looking to be an owner. I smiled to myself, kept my filly going along the rail, then turned her around and, at the five-eighths pole, had her going full steam. The filly posted her best workout time to date, five furlongs in fifty-eight seconds and change. After handing the filly off to her groom, I walked to the rail and Ruby and I grinned at each other like idiots. Later,
after I’d ridden six more horses, I took Ruby to the backside cafeteria and bought her dark, rich cups of coffee until she stopped yawning.

By the time she took me home to her place that night, I was elated. Expanded. Afire. There was lust, but something else too. We still hadn’t kissed. Maybe we both knew things would quickly get out of control.

We walked into her place having just eaten lousy Italian food in Sheepshead Bay. A cat the size of a pony immediately launched itself at Ruby’s legs, nearly tripping her. Evidently this was some sort of ritual Ruby was used to because she adroitly dodged the animal. I followed her into a small kitchen where I watched her take a packet of raw meat out of the fridge and mix strange-looking powdered crap into it, then set this down for the large cat and its friend, a tiny calico. As Ruby and I stood, transfixed by the sight of the cats devouring their meat, Ruby shed her coat, letting it drop to the floor. She was wearing a low-cut dark blue sweater and a pair of simple black pants that I’d been imagining ripping off her body throughout dinner. She stood one inch shorter than me, five foot four.

I studied her face, the small, well-made nose, and the lovely mouth that liked to laugh. She stared right back at me, her eyes mapping me, committing me to memory. After a few moments, I got down on all fours and unzipped her little black boots, making her lift one foot at a time as I removed the boots and the socks underneath. She didn’t question this. I grinned when I saw her violent red toenails. She grinned right back, as if this were all perfectly understandable behavior. I stood up and leaned my whole body into hers, mouth against mouth, hip bones jutting into hip bones. She draped her arms at the small of my back, right above my ass. I shoved her toward the kitchen counter, startling the little cat who stopped eating and skittered out of the kitchen—though the pony-sized cat didn’t move a whisker. I picked Ruby up and carried her out of the kitchen. She squirmed in my arms, adjusting her weight, like she didn’t think I’d be strong enough to carry her.