“Depends on what needs transporting,” Dontay said. After seeing how things had worked out with Uncle Marcus, he wanted to see what she would offer to pay before he named a price.
“We have three large coolers.” She opened the back of the Escalade, showed them off. They looked brand new, the price tags still on their sides.
“That’s a big job,” Dontay said. “They’ll be piled so high in my cart, I’ll have to go real slow so they don’t tumble.”
“Twenty dollars?”
Twice the going rate. But before he could nod, the woman quickly added.
“Each, I mean. Per cooler.”
“Sure.” He loaded them up, one on top of the other. “But you know I can only take you up to the gate. You got to get them to your seats by yourselves. How you going to do that?”
“We’ll figure it out,” she said. The man had yet to say a word.
The three coolers fit into the shopping cart, just, and rose so high that Dontay could not keep a quick pace. What did it matter? Sixty dollars, the equivalent of six trips. They must be rich people, the kind who brought champagne and-well, Dontay wasn’t clear on what else rich people ate. Steak, but you wouldn’t bring steak to the Preakness. Steak sandwiches, maybe.
“You do this every year?” the woman asked.
Usually, people walked ahead or behind, a little embarrassed by the transaction. But this woman kept abreast of him, her yellow high heels striking the ground with a loud clackety-clack, almost as loud as the wheels on the shopping cart.
“Yes ma’am.”
“You ever think about going to the race?”
“No’m. I make too much money working it.” He wished he could take that back. It wasn’t good manners, much less good business to draw attention to how much a person was paying you. No one wanted to feel like a mark, Uncle Marcus always said.
“Want me to place a bet for you?” she asked. She was white-white, her skin so fair it had a blue tint to it, with red hair like a blaze beneath her black straw hat.
“Naw, that’s okay. I wouldn’t know what horse to bet for.”
“The favorite in the Derby often comes through in the Preakness. That’s a safe bet.”
Dontay liked talking to the woman, liked the way she treated him, but he couldn’t think of anything to say back. He tried nodding, as if he were very smart in the ways of the world, and all he did was hit a pothole, almost upset the whole load.
“But you probably don’t like safe bets.” The woman laughed. “Me either.”
The man, who was walking behind them, still hadn’t said anything.
“I’m going to bet a long shot, a horse coming out of the twelfth gate. Know how I picked it?” She didn’t wait for Dontay to reply. “Horse bit his rider during a workout this week. Now that’s my kind of horse.”
He finally had something to contribute. “What’s its name?”
“Diablo del Valle. Devil of the Valley. It’s a local horse, too. That’s also in its favor. A local horse with a great name who bit his jockey. How can I lose?”
“I don’t know,” Dontay said. “But based on what I see, a lot of people do.”
She loved that, laughing long and hard. Dontay hadn’t been trying to be funny, but now he wished he might do it again.
“I’ll probably be one of them,” the woman said. “But you know, I don’t gamble to win. The track is interactive entertainment, theater in which I hold a financial stake in the outcome. If I ever found myself too invested, I’d have to stop. Don’t you think? It’s awful to care too much about something. Anything.”
Dontay wasn’t sure he followed that, but he nodded as if he did. He was wondering if the woman was cold, her shoulders and back as bare as they were. With her yellow dress with the black dots, yellow heels, and big black hat, she looked like something.
“You’re a black-eyed Susan,” he said.
She nodded, clearly pleased. “That I am. But they’re fake, you know.”
“Ma’am?”
“The black-eyed Susans. They’re not in season until late August, so they buy these yellow daisies from South America and color the centers with a Magic Marker. Can you imagine?”
“How much that pay?” It hadn’t occurred to Dontay that there was a single opportunity in Preakness that his family had missed. Coloring in flowers sounded easy, like something the twins could do.
“Oh, I don’t know. Not enough. Nothing is ever enough, is it? Doesn’t everyone want more?”
The question seemed like a test. Did she think him ungrateful or greedy?
“I’m fine, ma’am.”
“Well, you’re a rare one.”
They had reached the entrance to the grandstand, but to Dontay’s amazement, the woman didn’t stop there. “We’re in the infield,” she said. The infield? She was paying almost as much to bring her stuff as she was paying for the tickets. The infield was mud and trash. The woman would get messed up in the infield, where no one would care that she had taken the time to look like a flower. Dontay looked for the man, but he had disappeared.
“You’ll just have to let this young man help me,” the woman told the ticket taker, but not in a bossy way. She had the ability to say things directly without sounding mean, as if it was just logical to do what she said.
“Not unless he’s going to pay admission, too. And he can’t bring that shopping cart in.”
She peeled more money from her wallet.
“And ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“We need to inspect them, make sure there’s no glass, nothing else that’s forbidden.” The Preakness ticket had a whole long list of things you couldn’t bring in and Dontay stuck close to his clients, in case they needed to send things back with him.
“Why, they’re just sandwiches.” The woman opened the top cooler, pulled out a paper-wrapped sub. “Muffulettas. Muffies, we call them. We make them every year with that special tapenade from the Central Grocery down in New Orleans, so they’re practically authentic.”
She unwrapped one. It was an okay sandwich, although a little strong smelling for Dontay. He didn’t much care for cheese.
The man quickly looked inside each cooler, saw the array of wrapped subs, and waved her through.
It took Dontay and the woman three trips to carry in all the coolers. It seemed like a math problem to him-how could they protect the unattended coolers at either end?-but the woman found a man at either end to keep watch. She had that way about her. They stacked each one just inside the entrance. The people around looked nasty to Dontay, and he worried about leaving the woman there, in her pretty dress.
“Diablo del Valle,” she said, handing him four twenties. “You heard it here first.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “But that’s extra-”
“I’ll lose more than that today. At least you’ll still have the money when all is said and done.”
She took off her hat, fanned herself with it, and Dontay realized with a start that one of the shadows on her face was still there-a purplish bruise at the temple.
He pushed the empty cart back quickly, flying along, wondering if he might catch one more trip, then wondering how it mattered. Eighty dollars! Still not enough for an iPod, not even when it was added to all he had already earned today. He wondered briefly if he had the discipline to save it all, but he knew he didn’t. The woman was right. Nothing was ever enough.
Back at the house, the Escalade was gone. “Man came back and said he forgot something,” Uncle Marcus said. Dontay worried that something was wrong between the man and the woman, that he had abandoned her to the infield. He thought of her again in her yellow dress and high heels, her big black hat-and that bruise, near her eye. He hoped the man was nice to her.
THE DAY-AFTER CLEANUP STARTED at 9 A.M. sharp. Just the sight of the garbage took Dontay’s breath away, not to mention the smell. There was a reason this job paid, of course. But it seemed impossible that this patch of
