Then the car behind me blasted that the light was green again and I had to put my cup of wine down not fully tasted.
I hit three winners that afternoon. The two of us crowded the railing and yelled our heads off to push the nags home and when the last one slowed up in the stretch my heart slowed up with it because I had a parlay riding on his nose that was up in four figures. Fifty yards from the finish the jock laid on the whip and he crossed the line leading by a nostril.
Ellen shook my arm. 'You can open your eyes now. He won.'
I checked the board to make sure and there it was in big square print. I looked at the tickets that had gotten rolled up in the palm of my hand. 'I'll never do that again! How the hell do the guys who bet all their lives stand this stuff! You know what I just won?'
'About four thousand dollars, didn't you?'
'Yeah, and before this I worked for a living.' I smoothed out the pasteboards with my thumb and forefinger. 'You ought to be a millionaire, kitten.'
'I'm afraid not.
'Why? You cleaned up today, didn't you?'
'Oh, I did very well.'
'So?'
'I don't like the color of the money.'
'It's green, isn't it? You got a better color than that?'
'I have a cleaner kind of green,' she said. Her body seemed to stiffen with a tension of some sort, drawing her hands into tight little fists. 'You know why I like to see the Scobie horses win. It's the only way and the best way I can get back at my father. Just because of me he tries to run them under other colors, but I always learn about it before the races. He pays me a living whether he wants to or not and it hurts him right where he should be hurt. However, it's still money that came from him, even if it was indirectly given, and I don't want any part of it.'
'Well, if you're going to throw it away, I'll take it.'
'It doesn't get thrown away. You'll see where it goes.'
We walked back to the ticket window and picked up a neat little pile of brand-new bills. They felt crisp as new lettuce and smelled even better. I folded mine into my wallet and stowed it away with a fond pat on the leather and started thinking of a lot of things that needed buying bad. Ellen threw hers in the wallet as if it happened every day. Thinking about it like that put a nasty buzz in my head.
'Why can't somebody follow you play for play? If anybody used your system and put a really big bundle down the odds would go skittering all over the place.'
She gave me a faint smile and took my hand going up the ramp to the gate. 'It doesn't work that way, Mike. All Scobie horses don't win by a long sight. It just happens that I know the ones that will win. It isn't that I'm a clever handicapper either.
Dad has a trainer working for him who taught me all I know about horses. Whenever a winner is coming up I'm notified about it and place my bets.'
'That's all there is to it?'
'That's all. Once the papers did a piece about it and according to them I did all the picking and choosing. I let them get the idea just to infuriate the old boy! It worked out fine.'
'You're a screwball,' I said. She looked hurt. 'But you're nice,' I added. She squeezed my arm and rubbed her face against my shoulder.
On the way back to the city the four G's in my pocket started burning through and it was all I could do to keep it there and let it burn. I wanted to stop off at the fanciest place we could find and celebrate with a drink, but Ellen shook her head and made me drive over to the East Side, pointing out the directions every few minutes.
Everything was going fine until we got stuck behind a truck and I had a chance to see where we were. Then everything wasn't so fine at all. There was a run-down bar with the glass cracked across the center facing the sidewalk. The door opened and a guy walked out, and before it shut again the familiarity of it came back with a rush and I could smell the rain and the beer-soaked sawdust and almost see a soggy little guy kissing his kid good- by.
My throat went dry all of a sudden and I breathed a curse before I wrenched the wheel and sent the heap screaming around the truck to get the hell out of the neighborhood.
We went straight ahead for six blocks, then Ellen said, 'Turn right at the next street and stop near the corner.'
I did as I was told and parked between a beer truck and a dilapidated sedan. She opened the door and stepped out, looking back at me expectantly. 'Coming, Mike?'
I said okay and got out myself.
Then she walked me into a settlement house that was a resurrected barn or something. The whole business took about five minutes. I got introduced to a pair of nice old ladies, a clergyman and a cop who was having a cup of tea with the old ladies. Everybody was all smiles and joy and when Ellen gave one of the women a juicy wad of bills I thought they were going to cry.
Ellen, it seemed, practically supported the establishment.
I had a chance to look through the door at a mob of raggedy kids playing in the gym and I got rid of a quarter of the bundle of my wallet. I avoided a lot of thanks and got back to the car as fast as I could and looked at Ellen like I hadn't seen her before.
'Boy, am I a big-hearted slob,' I said.
She laughed once and leaned over and kissed me. This time I had a long sip of the wine before she took my cup away. 'It was worth it at that,' I mused.
