Mata Morose won wire-to-wire by five.
“How did you know that?” Shelly demanded, staring at me angrily.
“Hunch,” I answered.
Shelly believed in the Form as if it were some kind of laboratory-certified navigational instrument and had to run his finger down the columns again to see where he’d miscalculated. The problem with the Form player is he’s going to catch very few longshots. After he weighs the numbers, enters his pace model, considers the Plum and the Beyer, jockey changes, bleeder medication, weight, age, morning workouts, and the rest of it, he’s going to come up pretty much with the same horse that everyone else using a Racing Form has. The guy who sets the morning line is a Form player too. Only granny here with her bridge club betting her grandson’s age and the guy who’s spent the last decade and a half in a mental institution and developed through blindness, head trauma, dreams, drugs, and deprivation a heightened perception of reality is going to nail the Chilean shipper from Bay Meadows.
“Yeah?” said Shelly, shoving out his chin. “All right, who you like in the second then?”
“Don’t know yet.” I had circled Red Freak Wanna Ride, but the game had changed. “I gotta look.”
Shelly had an excellent memory and knew his bloodlines, the successful dams and sires all the way back to the triple-crown-winner Whirlaway. His conservative style of play had not wavered in twenty years so that year in and year out he was close to a break-even player, grinding along from favorite to favorite. He muttered, frowned, and dragged around squinting at the Racing Form trying to figure how he could fit the newly acquired information into the next race. Was the rail dead? Was it going to be a longshot day? Were Bay Meadows shippers suddenly viable? Should he just go flush all his money down the toilet now?
In the next race, for fillies and mares five years old or under who had not won two races in their career, Shelly glowered at me doubtfully, wondering if I’d pull another rabbit out of my hat. I was going back and forth between Red Freak Wanna Ride, the eight horse, and Silly Pilgrim, the six, until all of a sudden I heard the one, River Shannon, say, “When I get back I’ll have carrots and apples,” which is what my father always gave his winners (the losers got Purina and hay). And though it wasn’t my father’s horse, I said, “I think it’s River Shannon.”
Shelly smacked his program indignantly and said, “How? Thing hasn’t won in two years.”
“Just a feeling,” I said coyly. “Call it carrots and apples.”
The elderly woman in front of us, who’d also gotten Mata Morose in the previous race on a number coinciding with her grandson’s age, beamed at us. “I’ve got River Shannon, too.”
Shelly, thinking he’d nail the first fifty-to-one shot of his life with the help of a recovering schizophrenic and a doddering grandmother, reluctantly joined our cause and volunteered to roll it into some pick threes.
River Shannon couldn’t get out of the gate, and though she made a valiant dash on the grandstand turn she lugged out wide in the stretch and finished eighth in a field of nine. Shelly smoldered.
I said, “Hey look, it’s been a while since I’ve done this.”
“Carrots and apples,” he grumbled.
I decided that unless something really beamed out at me I’d better lower my antennae and stick to the Form, and if we lost then at least Shelly would be satisfied that I had violated no sacred conventions and we would remain friends.
“You gonna go see your Dad?” he asked.
“Probably not. What’ll he say? Deadbeat crackpot with a dead guy’s driver’s license betting longshots. He hates people like that. It’s better he doesn’t know I’m here.”
Shelly prized that kind of self-effacing talk and not only for-gave me but was once again on my side. “We’ll hit the pick six,” he declared. “That’ll show him.”
Down on the tarmac below, a group of drunken rural stereotypes, three men and two ladies, sitting on a blanket, had begun to argue. The men wore tight pants that showed long stretches of white sockless ankle. The ladies had piled-high hair, and one wore a low-cut white blouse splashed with red hearts. A ruckus started up and a chair was broken. One of the men lurched up and a beer bottle flew. The crowd receded, giving them room. Punches ensued. The men scrabbled across the pavement through the trash grunting and trying to tear off each other’s shirts, their white ankles flashing, while the women rooted them on. Many spectators laughed and applauded as if bumpkin scuffles were a regular feature between the second and third race. Security arrived and the three men and one lady were taken away. One of the fellows was badly cut, his face glazed in blood. The woman with the unbuttoned heart blouse, the only one remaining after the melee, stared at Shelly, her glossy open mouth like a tunnel in an amusement park ride.
“Gosh,” Shelly said. “I wonder if we should take her home.”
It began to rain then, just a sifting at first and then the wind started to blow the pop cups in a waxy clatter and the seagulls began to bounce on the
