Murder at the Racetrack (22 page)

It was getting dark so he flipped on the headlights. The bright lights illuminated up ahead in the darkness the falling snow,
the passing trees, the abandoned cars, and, in his mind’s eye, the faces from his past.

He saw an old Sicilian with elaborately curled and waxed mustaches. Mustache Pete, he called him. Pete sat on a milk crate,
reading //
Progresso
and smoking a crooked Toscano cigar in front of the heavy, bolted door of the Venice Athletic Club. He watched out for the
polizia while behind that door, the old man, younger then, forty, dealt hands of poker, from the bottom of the deck. His pink,
soft fingers flicked cards around the table faster than a blink.

He saw the face of the French-Canadian logger he had just past-posted in a horse race in a small town outside of Montreal.
The logger’s face was purple with rage, his features contorted, his breath smelling of whiskey only inches from the old man’s
face. The old man was in his thirties then. He thought he was invincible. He looked into the Frenchman’s eyes and smiled,
even as the Frenchman pressed the cold blade of his hunting knife against the old man’s throat. “Go ahead,” the old man said.
“Let’s see if you got the moxie.”

The old man would never forget that look of open-mouthed disbelief on the Frenchman’s face when he realized that even with
a hunting knife against his throat, the old man would not pay up.

He saw the faces of the mean, rednecked farmers in a small town pool hall in upstate New York when they finally realized they
were being hustled by the old man, in his twenties then. One of the farmers moved toward the front door and another moved
to the backdoor. The old man laid his cue stick on the table in the middle of a game, and excused himself. He went to the
men’s room, hoisted himself up on the sink, pried open a painted-shut window high above his head, climbed out, and walked
quickly to his car. That was one of the first lessons the old man learned about hustling in a strange pool hall. Always check
the bathroom window before you begin to play.

He saw the faces of the bearded lady and her husband, the Geek, at the county fair, where he’d begun his life on the road
at the age of fifteen. The old man was fresh out of the orphanage where he’d spent most of his early life. He got a job as
a roustabout at the fair and then moved up to the shill in the pea-under-the-pod scam. The bearded lady felt sorry for him.
She invited him to dinner one night. She roasted a chicken. Hours earlier, her husband, salivating insanely in a cage, had
entertained the rubes by biting off the head of that chicken. The old man remembered how he struggled to keep a straight face
after dinner when the Geek tossed a head fake toward his wife, washing dishes, and said, “Don’t get any ideas about my old
lady, kid.”

He heard a harsh voice and opened his eyes to see the white, moonlike face of a nun, dressed in her black habit, looming over
him in the darkness of the dormitory room where he slept, a child of six, with fifteen other boys in the orphanage. The nun
leaned over, her face close to his and smelling of an astringent cleaner. She whispered harshly again, “Come on, Pasquale,
time to get up, lazy bones. Get dressed.”

He rubbed sleep from his eyes and got out of bed. He did as he was told and dressed.

“Hurry, now,” she said. “We don’t have much time.”

“Where are we going, Sister?”

“To visit your mother.”

“But I don’t have a mother.”

“Don’t be silly, boy. Everyone has a mother.”

He followed her outside into the early morning darkness of a muggy, August day. The big yellow school bus was already parked
in front of the Gothic stone orphanage, its motor running, its tailpipe spewing smoke. Sister opened the door, hiked up her
skirt, revealing her black stockings and the stale smell of her sex, and climbed up and settled into the driver’s seat. He
climbed up after her and sat behind her as she ground the gearshift into first and the bus lumbered down the long driveway,
turned right onto the street, and began moving slowly through the Italian ghetto, past old, three-story houses with three
floors of porches, and little gardens in back of tomato plants growing out of Medaglia D’Oro coffee cans. The bus stopped
at a red traffic light across from Nanny Goat Park. Old men, smoking crooked Toscano cigars, sat on benches and watched their
goats graze on the grass as the sun came up.

When they reached the hospital, the nun held his hand tightly, and hurried down the hallway past doctors and nurses in white,
half dragging him behind her, her habit billowing up into his face. When she came to a door, she stopped. She opened the door
and pushed him through it. He stopped and turned back to her. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”

“But what do I do, Sister?” he said, tears welling up in his eyes.

“Go talk to your mother. She doesn’t have much time left. Go on, now.”

He turned and saw a shape lying on a cot, a white sheet pulled up to its neck. The shape had thick, wild, black hair spread
out on a pillow. He moved closer to see its face. It was a beautiful face, with dark eyebrows, a straight nose, and full lips,
except that the face was gaunt, her skin the color of a storm cloud. Her eyes fluttered open. They were as blue as a summer’s
sky. Her face turned toward him. She studied him with her blue eyes for a long moment and then her lips turned up into a faint
smile.

“Pasquale,
meo fillio
” she said, and then gasped for breath. When her gasping subsided, she reached out her hand and touched his cheek with her
cold fingers. She smiled and said,
“Te amo.”
Then her eyes opened wide in terror and her hand gripped his shoulder so tightly it hurt. He wanted to pull away, but he
couldn’t. She said loudly, as if pleading, “Pasquale,
me dispiacel! Me dispiace!
” Then she began gasping for breath again, and her hand fell off his shoulder, dangling beside the cot, and her head fell
back onto the pillow.

He heard the nun’s harsh voice from the doorway. “That’s enough, Pasquale, don’t tire the poor girl. Come.”

Riding back to the orphanage in the bus, he sat behind the nun and said, “Who was that, Sister?”

“Your mother. Who else?”

He was quiet for a while as the bus moved past Nanny Goat Park in the morning light, now. He saw the young mothers in their
summer dresses, sitting on the benches in the park, talking to one another while they held their babies tight to their breasts
so they could drink their milk.

Finally, he said, “But I thought I didn’t have a mother, Sister.”

“Don’t be foolish. I told you everyone has a mother.”

“Then if she’s my mother, why didn’t she want me?”

The nun glared at him through the little mirror that hung over the windshield. “Don’t you ever say that, understand?
Understand?
Of course she wanted you, but what could she do, a girl, a child, really, fifteen, with no husband. She had no choice but
to give you to us so we could take care of you.”

He was quiet again as the bus turned the corner toward the orphanage. Then he said, “What’s my mother’s name, Sister?”

“Rose.”

He said his mother’s name out loud. “Rose.” He smiled to himself. “What did my mother say to me?”

“She said, she hoped you would forgive her. Then she said, she loved you very much because you were her son.”

He sat back in his seat as the bus moved up the long drive toward the orphanage. He remained in the orphanage for nine more
years and every night of those years he dreamed for the first time since he could remember. It was always the same dream.
He dreamed about his mother, her wild, black hair and her blue eyes. Her name was Rose, he knew that now, and she had loved
him, and that was all he would ever know.

•    •    •

The old man pulled the Volkswagen into a snowdrift in front of his apartment building. He heard the wheels crunch over the
snow and then felt them sink deep into the snow. Tomorrow morning he’d have to dig out the car. The snow was still falling
in darkness. It was ten. The light was on in their third-floor apartment window. He saw his wife’s face pressed to the window.
He beeped the horn once. She waved and moved away from the window.

He stamped the snow off his shoes in the hallway. His feet were cold and wet. He held on to the stair rail as he climbed the
three flights of stairs. He had to stop at each flight to catch his breath. He was breathing heavily when he reached the third
floor. The gambling and the drive had exhausted him. He had never felt so numbingly tired before in his life.

His wife opened the door. “I was worried about you, honey,” she said.

He kissed her on the cheek. “It was nothing,” he said. “I took my time.” He took out the bills from his pocket. “I made almost
two bills.”

She smiled. “Good,” she said. “I kept dinner warm.” She hobbled off in her aluminum walker toward their tiny kitchenette.

He brushed off the snow from his fedora and hung it and his overcoat on the coatrack behind the door. He sat down at the dining
room table in their threadbare apartment that smelled of things old and worn. Plastic sheeting covered the Mediterranean sofa
and easy chair they’d had for years. There were two large sepia-tinted photographs on the dining room wall. The old man in
his twenties, balding even then, but handsome. His wife at sixteen, with luxuriant, wavy black hair and dark eyes. A pretty
girl then. Now she was just an old woman in a worn housedress, hunched over, with swollen ankles, mottled skin, and a thin
puff of white hair. The old man bent over and took off his wet shoes and socks. He looked at his slim, white feet.

His wife returned and put a plate of food down in front of him. Pastina with butter and salt. A child’s supper. “Vino?” she
said. He nodded. She returned with a grape jelly glass filled with wine she had poured from a gallon jug with no label. She
sat down with her husband and watched him eat slowly.

He chewed a few mouthfuls of soft pastina and then had to rest his jaws. “I don’t know how much longer I can make that drive,”
he said.

“I know,” his wife said, and looked down at the table. She had watery, red-rimmed eyes and a big nose. She looked up at him,
and said, “But what would we do without the extra money?”

“There’s always pool. I’ve been thinking. An old man like me. I could hustle up a nine-ball game downtown.”

“Do you still have the stroke?”

“You never lose the stroke. It’s the eyes that go.”

“There’s still my nephew,” she said. “We have that money coming in every week.”

“A C-note a week isn’t enough,” he said.

“You could ask him for a raise. You’ve been driving him to work and home for five years now.”

The old man nodded. “I could,” he said. “It’s about time.” He put a mouthful of pastina in his mouth and chewed slowly.

•    •    •

His wife’s younger sister had married a prosperous lawyer. They had only one child, a son, who was born retarded. When the
doctor told her her son was born retarded, the sister went into a state of shock. She lost all her hair. After that, she wore
an assortment of henna-colored wigs that always made her look much younger than her older sister with her graying, and then
white, hair. The younger sister refused to institutionalize her son since he was not severely retarded. She was determined
to teach him to function. She trained him like a dog. She was oblivious to his cries and whimpers and even to the pleas of
her older sister. She beat him with a belt over the slightest sign of weakness—spilled milk, soiled underpants— until he got
his first job at twenty. He became a messenger in the Municipal Courthouse, a job he has held for thirty-five years. His father
died when he was forty-five, and his mother got cancer when he was fifty. It took her a year to die. Her older sister visited
her every day in the hospital. And every day, the younger sister pleaded with her older sister to watch over her son when
she was gone. Then she died. She left her son enough money to remain in their big, old colonial house and to pay for a full-time
nurse-housekeeper. The only thing her son needed was someone to drive him to work every morning and drive him home every night.

The old man didn’t mind doing that. He looked forward to it even. The only family he had in the world was his wife, who could
never have children, and now his retarded nephew. He didn’t seem retarded, only odd, childish, talkative in that shrill way
of women, which was understandable since he spent all his life close to his mother. He was short, blocky, prone to moods of
extreme animation and sullen withdrawal. Sometimes in the morning, he would not stop chattering about a Yankee game he had
watched the night before. He kept score of those games on an official scorekeeper’s pad. He told his uncle about every pitch,
every out. Sometimes, though, nothing his uncle said to him could take him out of his sullen silences. He would spend their
morning drive picking at the sleeve of his sweater like a petulant child. The old man tried to understand what put him in
such a silent, brooding mood. He studied him for a sign, the oriental cast to his features, the age lines around his slanting
eyes, his thick lips, his slack, hairless skin, and then he realized with a shock that his nephew was not a child, but a fifty-year-old
man. On such days, the old man felt he more than earned his $100 a week.

•    •    •

The old man awoke the next morning in the twin bed beside his wife. It was still dark outside. He let his wife sleep. He got
out of bed, put on his pot of espresso, and started to get dressed. He picked his clothes with great care. A Gant shirt with
a frayed button-down collar. A stained rep tie. No. He put the tie back. He buttoned the shirt at his throat without the tie.
He put on a gray cardigan sweater that was unraveling. Gray flannel slacks that had a sheen at the knees. Scuffed wingtip
cordovans. All his other shoes were brilliantly polished. He looked at himself in the mirror, and smiled. A defeated old man.

He sat down with his cup of espresso. He rubbed a lemon peel around the lip of the cup and took a sip. He forced himself to
remember. The secret was in never losing control. Knowing that one thing the mark didn’t know. It was always ego with the
mark, not the money. It was all about saving face. The curse of Italians. Saving face. The old man was lucky to be raised
in an orphanage by Irish nuns instead of the Italian home of the parents he never knew. It gave him the edge in his profession.
He never lost control. He never lost sight of his only goal in the hustle. He always let the mark have his ego while he, the
old man, walked out with the money. How you kept score. The cash in the pocket any way you could get it, and then, as you
walked out the door the mark would shout after you, “You’re one lucky sunuvabitch! But I’ll get you tomorrow.” Which was the
point. If you left him with his ego he’d stay on the string for a lot of tomorrows. Some marks were like his own private bank.
He stopped in whenever he wanted to make a withdrawal.