Murder at the Racetrack (20 page)

You can feel safe with me, Margaret.

That was when she’d reached into her lunch box and offered him one of her mother’s homemade cookies.

I do feel safe with you, Eddie. I really do.

What else is there but this? he wondered now, the thought cutting through the flaming trails of exploding odds, What else
is there for a boy but this offer of protection? If he had ever known nobility, it was then. If he had ever known courage
or self-sacrifice, these had come to him through her, fallen cool and sweet upon his shoulders like spring rain. All he had
ever wanted was joined with her, his hope for marriage, family, an ordinary life.

And against all odds he had lost it.

A new voice cut through the fireworks of numbers, returning him to the here and now.

“I’m Doctor Patel. Your brother looks agitated.”

“Yes, he does.”

“I could give him something to help him relax.”

His endlessly churning brain immediately figured the odds against just slipping away, quietly and without fuss, a welcomed
end to laying odds, and in that instant he tried to imagine the cooling of his brain, its inflamed circuitry finally soothed,
the flood of numbers it sent like flaming stones through his mind now little more than a quiet mound of dying embers. If he
could just get to that point of rest, that place where his mind could embrace the sleep for which he’d yearned since that
day.

That day.

He saw it dawn over the city, a warm glow that slanted through his tenement window and curled around him and seemed almost
to lift him from his bed and send him on his way, out into the street and down the avenue to where the sweet and lovely Margaret
Shaunassey waited for him each morning, her books in her arms before he drew them from her and together they set off for school.
He had during those brief preceding weeks been one of life’s winners, the boy who’d won the heart of the kind and beautiful
Margaret Shaunassey, she of spring rain and sea-blue eyes. No more Eddie the prankster, with his gapped teeth. No more Eddie
the loser, with his indifferent grades. Because of her, because of the love he’d won from her deserving heart, he’d become
the waking Miracle of Holy Cross, looked at in wonder by the other boys, the guy who most among them had truly beaten the
odds.

“Mr. Spellacy, you’re going to feel a slight pinch.”

He did, and with its bite he suddenly found himself lifted and carried away on a river of exquisite softness. The eternally
cascading numbers slowed and after a time he became pure sensation, beyond the reach of clearly defined thoughts or expressions.
Here, levitated, he had no need for devices of any kind, no need for pencils, or racing forms, or the little scraps of paper
on which he figured the odds against this horse or that one winning this race or that one. The world of racetrack betting,
of starting bells and photo finishes, now lay decidedly in the past, the odds against returning to it increasing with each
passing second. He felt only the silent churn of his body drifting delicately forward, as if on a pillow of air, moving steadily
and smoothly toward a final endless calm.

Only his thoughts were as weightless as he was. They came and went effortlessly, like small eddies within the gently flowing
current. Translucent faces swam in and out as he lay silent and without fret, his bed now a raft gliding peacefully down a
misty river. They stayed only a moment, these faces, then faded back into the mist. His mother, her hair pulled back, peering
into a steaming kettle of corned beef and cabbage. His father’s face, smudged with grease from the mechanic’s shop. His older
brother, Jack, all spit and polish in his army uniform.

The faces of horses surfaced, too, black or brown, with their huge sad eyes. They had given him more pleasure than any human
being, and now, as he floated, they sometimes came rushing out of the engulfing cloud, strong and beautiful, their tails waving
like banners in the bright summer air. Holiday Treat appeared, with Concert Master a link behind, noble in their ghostly strides,
his only source of awe. They came prancing by the score, these horses upon which he had laid odds without dread. Something
he’d never done with human games, baseball, football and the like, least of all on boxing. No, he had laid odds only on horses
because though chance might rudely play upon them, it never fell with the dark intent of malicious force, and thus, despite
its storied wins and losses, for him the track remained unbloodied ground.

Suddenly, he saw a head slam into a brick wall, a splatter of blood left behind, and closed his already closed eyes more tightly,
working to seal off this vision, return it to the darkness.

It worked, and in the blackness, he felt the raft move on, bearing him gently away, down the placid, mist-covered stream.
As he drifted, he saw a few friends from his boyhood, but none beyond those early years because his mind’s obsessive calculations
had figured the odds against ever having friends his evil, odds-defying presence would not harm. He’d done the same with marriage
and parenthood, and so no wife or child greeted him from the enfolding mist. The odds, as his eternally fevered brain had
so starkly calculated, were against the safe passage of anyone who walked beside him or even passed his way.

A newspaper headline abruptly streamed through his mind, the words carried on a lighted circle, like the zipper on Times Square:
LOCAL BOY DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT.

Freak accident.

It had begun the morning after he’d first heard the news that a local boy had tripped and fallen, slammed his head against
a nearby wall, and by freak accident, died as a result. He’d stepped out of his third-floor apartment, on his way to school,
when he’d glanced down the flight of stairs that led to the street. What were the chances, his mind had insistently demanded,
of someone falling down them,
because they were with him?
He’d frozen in place, with his hand on the banister, briefly unable to move before he’d finally regained some control over
his mind’s building oddity, then walked slowly, with a disturbing caution, down the uncarpeted steps.

She’d been waiting for him at the corner, just as she’d waited every morning for the last few weeks, her eyes upon him with
unimaginably high regard, never noticing his hand-me-down clothes, the gap between his teeth, seeing what no other girl had
ever seen, the nobility he craved, tender and eternal, his ragged knighthood. But now she seemed to stand amid a whirl of
wildly hurtling traffic, a universe of randomly flying objects, the cement curb no more than a trapdoor over a terrible abyss,
a door held in place only because he did not join her there, he, Eddie, against whom the odds were cruelly pitted, Eddie who
brought misfortune, imperiling by his own ill luck everyone he loved.

And so he’d turned from her, and walked away, turned from her sea-blue eyes and spring-rain smile, and glimpsed, in his turning,
a dimming of those eyes, a winter in the rain.

“I think my brother needs more.”

“It’s dangerous, Mr. Spellacy.”

“How long does he have anyway?”

“Not long.”

“Then it doesn’t matter. He just wants to rest.”

Another pinch and the voices ceased and night fell abruptly within his mind, sweeping everything from view. For a long time
he lay, breathing softly in the mahogany blackness. Then from the depths of that impenetrable darkness, he sensed movement,
but saw nothing, no relatives, no horses. Seconds passed. Or minutes. Or days. And far, far away, a tiny light emerged, pinpoint
small at first, but growing like the dawn, until once again he was on his pillow of silence, drifting down a watery corridor
of hazy light.

Still alive, he thought disconsolately, though this knowledge did not come to him as words spoken silently by his mind, but
as a sensation mysteriously carried on the subtle beat of his pulse. It was like all his thinking now, composed not of coherent
thoughts, but rather the product of unpredictable mental surges, the firings of his brain tapping out codes that seemed to
be transmitted, soundlessly and without grammar and syntax, to his decoding heart.

Freak accident.

The repetition of the words struck so resoundingly in his mind that he suddenly felt another, somewhat larger disturbance
in the flow. It was not so much a thought as an apprehension, the sense that somewhere far beneath the smoothly drifting raft
a malicious creature lurked, huge in body, but largely still, sending ripples upward with its spiked tail.

Freak accident.

Night fell within him again, but not the blackness he sought, the dead calm of oblivion. Instead, it was the mottled darkness
of his spare room. Within that room, he saw nothing but the gray-and-white flickering of the small television he kept on the
tiny card table where he dined each night on food that required no cooking, since he’d figured the odds that a single match,
used to light the single eye of a small gas range, might set his room on fire, then the hotel, then the neighborhood, a whole
city ignited because Eddie the Odds defied the odds, Eddie, whose cautiously discarded match,

dipped in water, cold to touch, might yet devour millions in whirling storms of flame.

A horn blared in his mind, and the flickering screen resolved into a view of the track, the horses prancing toward the starting
gate, Light Bender in sixth place, hustled unwillingly into her stall, the odds against her ten-to-one.

Now a pistol shot rang out, and they were off, Light Bender in tenth place as he’d figured she would be, but moving in ways
he’d failed to calculate, her head thrust forward like a battering ram, her stride lengthening, as it seemed, with each forward
thrust, her black mane flying as she tore down the track, black hooves chewing up the turf.

From his gently flowing pallet of air, he watched as she rounded the track, eighth, seventh, sixth, now moving within striking
distance of a fabled win. Then, suddenly, she began to fall apart, fall into pieces, like a shattered puzzle, her hooves no
longer connected to her legs, her haunches no longer connected to her torso, her head thrust out farther than her long neck
as if it were trying to outrun the rest of her.

He felt a violent agitation in his drift, and behind closed eyes looked to his right, if it were his right, and there was
Light Bender running at full speed beside him, racing the fiercely boiling current, but running without legs, and now without
a body, and finally without a head, so that nothing was left but her mane, long and black and shimmering… like Margaret Shaunassey’s
hair.

Without warning she appeared before him as she had so many, many times, come like an incubus to pry open the still unmended
rift within him, the cut that bled a crimson stream of numbers, and from which spilled, on each red molecule, the odds against
his life.

She stood in front of Holy Cross School on West 43rd Street. He wasn’t sure he’d ever actually seen her on the steps of the
school, though even if he had, she’d have been standing under the red-brick entrance marked GIRLS, not as she was now, poised
between that entrance and the
BOYS
on the opposite side of the building. She stood silently, with her arms at her sides, dressed in her school uniform of white
blouse, checkered skirt, white socks, black shoes. Margaret Shaunassey. How kind she would have been, a wordless impulse told
him, to horses.

He felt the flow increase in velocity, make a hard leftward turn, then descend, so that he felt himself sliding down a long
metal shoot. As he slid, he sensed the air grow warm around him. A cloud of steam drifted up and blurred his vision of Margaret
but not his memory of her, which became all the more vivid as the steam thickened around him. It was as if his experience
of her had become even more sharply defined, everything else a blur, the difference, as he conceived it, between a great horse
recalled in the moment of its triumph and one recalled as merely another head nodding from the starting gate.

He closed his eyes more tightly and tried to remain in the soothing comfort of darkness, settle back into the flow, move toward
death without further delay or interruption. But the lighted string of numbers began to move again, a snake uncoiling in his
head, bringing back the odds he’d obsessively figured during all the passing years, the vast eliminations they had cruelly
demanded, hopes and pleasures cut from him like strips of skin, all the sensual joys of life, taste and touch, the fierce
reprieve of love, odds that had directed his life not according to rules of probability but to the probability of error within
those rules, the terrible intrusion of odds-defying chance.

Freak accident.

The speed of the current increased again, and he felt himself racing headlong into an area of shade, the vault of heaven,
or wherever he was, turning smoky. Through the smoke, he saw a figure close in upon him, slowly at first, then astonishingly
fast, as if he’d traveled the distance between them at warp speed, so that he instantly stood before him, silent in the smoldering
air, a kid from Holy Cross, short with pumpkin-colored hair, a rosy-cheeked boy half his size, but the same age.

Mickey Deaver.

Mickey the Clown.

He felt his closed eyes clench, but to no avail, because the vision was inside him, carried toward him on a river of rushing
numbers. It faded in and out, hazy at first, but with growing clarity, until at last the mist lifted and Mickey stood in his
school uniform, twelve years old, holding a blood-spattered towel against the side of his head. He stared straight ahead.
His eyes didn’t blink. Not one red hair stirred. The only motion came from his lips, mouthing two unmistakable words:

Freak accident.

Now he was in the school yard, watching from a distance as Mickey sauntered over to Margaret. Within seconds she was laughing.
Not very much at first, then harder and harder, as Mickey clowned and made jokes. Her laughter rang through the overhanging
trees and spiraled around the monkey bars and curled through the storm fence against which he leaned, watching as Margaret
reached into her small lunch box and handed Mickey the Clown one of her mother’s cookies.