Heart's Desire (6 page)

Chapter Ten

WHEN I AWAKE DARLENE IS POKING ME IN THE STOMACH WITH a baton and the red and white plastic streamers flying off the ends scrape across my face. She hits a portable CD player and a loud march fills the room. I’m treated to her entire twirling routine, which concludes with a toss that puts a dent in the ceiling and almost takes out the overhead fixture.

I clap my hands in appreciation. Louise is now cleaning out her drawers, acting as if both Darlene and I have ceased to inhabit the land of the living.

Darlene grabs my hand and lisps, “Hallie, come thee the doll houthe that me and Franthie built.” I assume she means Dad built it and they play with it.

Some dark grammar force buried deep within my DNA leaps to the surface and corrects her. “It’s Francie and I.”

Louise gives me a disgusted look as if I have indeed turned into
one of them.
I shrug and go back downstairs, convinced that I’ve officially passed the torch to the new black sheep of the family, or at least to the sheep with the most black clothes and makeup.

Back on the first floor I observe that Mom has re-covered the couches in something that’s not so much fabric as the indestructible material you find on seats in commuter trains. And the new floor covering has the distinct coarseness of indoor/outdoor carpeting, or better yet, Astroturf.

Mom is busy preparing dinner and appears relieved that I was upstairs so long. “How did everything go?” she asks, wiping her wet hands on her apron. Mom possesses the eternal hopefulness of a full-time wife and mother and perennially pregnant woman.

“Not that great. Let me think about it.” Frankly, I’m stymied. Perhaps Officer Rich has a line on some sort of scared-straight program through the county jail system. At the end of the day he’s a good guy and doesn’t always assume the worst about teenagers, like so many grown-ups around here do. When I ran away he even offered to let me sleep in the jailhouse so I wouldn’t freeze to death.

I hold baby Lillian while Mom sets the table and experience this weird moment where I feel as if I’m looking into my own eyes. Mom’s maternal radar system picks up on this and she says, “She looks exactly like you did at that age. Look at that mop of strawberry-blond hair!”

“You mean apricot,” I say. “Just think of the third-degree sunburns and lime green freckles she has to look forward to.”

“Oh, Hallie! Why do you always act as if your coloring is some sort of handicap, when it’s so much more
interesting
than blond hair with blue eyes or dark hair with dark eyes.”

“Interesting, huh,” I say doubtfully. “Maybe Lillian and I can start a support group for the differently hued.”

Five-year-old Francie has come up from the basement and clings to my jeans, beaming up a big gap-toothed grin and trying to show me everything she’s ever drawn.

To Francie I’m more like a fun aunt who occasionally comes to visit and performs card tricks. She doesn’t remember back to when I lived at home—all the fighting and the doors slamming. And even
I
have to admit that I didn’t exactly find the little kids very amusing back then. However, now that I’m a visitor who can escape at any time, and no longer an inmate, I think they’re pretty cute.

“Isn’t she a little young to be losing her teeth?” I ask Mom, though I’m no expert on child development.

Mom shakes her head. “She knocked the front two out while trying to ride Darlene’s bike last week. The dentist said the only thing to do is wait for her adult teeth to come in and that we’re lucky it wasn’t those.”

Dad walks in, still as square and sturdy-looking as ever, just like whatever house or car he inhabits. But it also appears as if he could use some sleep. I’d say about a year’s worth. First he kisses Mom on the lips. Then there’s that awkward moment where neither of us are sure if we should hug and kiss. Dad isn’t emotionally withdrawn. In fact, he’s very affectionate until you’re ten—lots of piggyback rides, kisses, and tickling. However, after his daughters are in training bras Dad doesn’t want to be perceived as being involved in anything unChristian. So now it’s a quick self-conscious hug and a drive-by kiss. With the boys he transitions to handshakes when they start school so it doesn’t appear as if his sons have been raised to be soft or unmanly.

“You look terrific!” Dad announces with a proud smile. This translates to: You’re wearing little or no makeup and you’re not drunk or pregnant. Also, Dad prefers long hair on girls. Only I don’t keep mine long to make him happy but rather so that I can braid my unwieldy mane or pull it back into a ponytail. Ever since reading
The Elephant Man
in ninth grade I’ve been convinced that an escaped zoo lion frightened my mother while she was pregnant with me.

“Congratulations on the new baby,” I say.

“Well, why wouldn’t I want lots more children just like my Eric and Hallie?”

What a difference going to college instead of a casino makes. I’d transitioned from reprobate relation to the family hall of fame, right up there with my knightly older brother, Eric, Sir Football Head, who can do no wrong.

“We’re driving down to Indiana next weekend to watch Eric play in the end-of-year game that raises money for local charities. Why don’t you come along? He’d love to see you.”

No way! A half-hour visit with the family is one thing. A ten-hour car trip is another altogether. If there were a scholarship offered for playing license-plate bingo, believe me, I would have applied for it. And having people at rest areas stare at your ten-member family exiting a station wagon like circus clowns pouring out of a Volkswagen gets old pretty fast.

“As much as I’d love to, I’m pretty sure that I have to work.” Dad never minds if you skip something for a job, unless of course what you’re ditching is church or schoolwork. “In fact, that reminds me, I’d better get going. The Stockton’s yard is a total mess. And they gave me a nice raise.”

Dad beams. His favorite words are:
scholarship, raise, perfect attendance,
and
it’s not broken.

I say good-bye to everyone, promising the little kids that I’ll come back to visit soon and play Old Maid with them.

Out in the front yard Teddy and Davy are tossing a Nerf football, though Davy is too small to catch it and has to chase the ball down after every throw. “It’s never too early to think about sports scholarships. If not football there’s always swimming. Or cross-country,” I encourage them. Teddy is still skinny as a fishing pole. He throws the ball at my head but I catch it and then run over and tickle him until he collapses onto the ground. Davy piles in, shrieking with delight.

It’d be fun to hang out with them, but I know Bernard will be biting his cuticles off if I’m not home in plenty of time for tonight’s mission. Backing out of the driveway I notice that Teddy is wearing one of Eric’s old football jerseys and recall how I always made fun of my older brother’s devotion to being a jock. And now the joke is certainly on me. Not only does Eric get free tuition and board, but his football scholarship even gives him an allowance for books.

Mom and Dad give me $2,000 a semester, and that’s a lot for them. But tuition is $24,000 a year, not including books and art supplies. It’s another $5,000 for housing. Second semester I’d moved to an off-campus share because it was half the cost of dorm living. It also put the “off” in “off-campus.” With so little parking near the main buildings it’s basically a one-mile hike to class or the art rooms. And without the meal plan, we tended to subsist on pizza, Ramen noodles, care packages from Suzy’s mom, who owns a restaurant, and Bernard’s weekend brunches.

Obviously I can’t ask my folks for more money. They have another six kids to educate—whoops, make that seven soon—and tuition is only going up, up, and up. In fact, if you can’t be really rich, then you’re better off being
really
poor. Because if you’re in the middle, like my family, then you get screwed—no breaks and hardly any financial aid. The aid office conveniently counts our home as a “liquid asset,” fully expecting Mom and Dad to sell our house that’s worth about seventy thousand dollars, turn that over to the college in order to cover partial tuition for one child, and then move to a public park with their six younger kids. What they give instead are big fat student loans that cause you to graduate a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Meantime, entry-level jobs for graphic designers are hard to find, especially without a résumé full of internships. But if you’re working during vacation, then you don’t exactly have time for internships.

Now I understand why Dad gets so cranky when the bills pour in—car payments, mortgage payments, insurance premiums. And that doesn’t start to take into account food, clothing, sippy cups, and school supplies.

Maybe it’s time to reconsider my bookie pal Cappy’s proposal regarding the rebate shop, even if I just set it up and then when school starts again in the fall he finds someone else to take over. Living clean hasn’t done a thing for my solvency. What was going through my head when I passed on his offer to make a hundred grand a year, honestly? Or dishonestly, such as the case may be. And whatever was I thinking when I kept avoiding losing my virginity throughout the school year? Did my parents’ and Sunday school teachers’ hammering away about sin during my formative years suddenly take hold? Because if so, there’s still time to consider Pastor Costello’s invitation to be a counselor at Bible camp this summer. Sure, the pay isn’t so good, but there’s lots of Bible bingo for those bitten by the gambling bug, and plenty of nice Christian boys who won’t lay a hand on a girl, even if it’s just to slap a mosquito.

It’s official. I’m losing my mind. It’s definitely time to talk to Cappy.

Chapter Eleven

DRIVING DOWN MAIN STREET YOU DON’T CROSS A RAILROAD track to reach the run-down section of town, but go over a bridge built above a trickle of a creek. A few blocks along on the left is where Cappy maintains his “downtown office.” It’s actually a small room at the back of Bob’s Billiard Parlor. Cappy’s “suburban satellite” is next to the starting gate at the racetrack a few miles out of town, which is where I’d first met him.

Learning poker from the janitor in elementary school had quickly led to studying the odds for other games, like blackjack, and then when I saw a horse race on TV and the winner was a long shot paying fifty bucks on a two-dollar bet, I started riding my bike to the track at age twelve. Of course, it was illegal for me to place a bet, and so I had to find a guy who didn’t look like he’d mind helping a kid get ahead in the world, and that patron of the underaged happened to be Cappy, a regular fixture during the racing season. By the time I was fifteen and could see over the counter, the people working at the betting windows no longer bothered turning me away, and Cappy decided that I’d learned enough about the business to act as his assistant in exchange for some tips on how to play the odds rather than the horses.

It’s not hard for me to find a parking spot in front of Bob’s Billiards during the daytime. This particular dilapidated block is primarily home to a long wooden storefront that used to sell farm implements in the first half of the 1900s. The old building is falling apart but somehow the owner rents space to a start-up software company and a guy with a recording studio. Bob’s is across the street, next to Nolan’s Irish Pub, which isn’t the kind of place young people gather to socialize on weekends so much as where a married woman might search for her husband if she hasn’t seen him for a few days. When my mom refers to the “iffy” part of town, this is exactly where she’s talking about.

From the street, Bob’s Billiards looks as if it went out of business about ten years ago, when Old Bob died, and shortly afterward Middle Bob became Robert and moved to Los Angeles to design costumes for TV shows. Only, Young Bob, who is just a few years older than I am, keeps the place going without new investment, aside from refelting the pool tables and changing the lightbulbs. Though changing the lightbulbs is rather important, being that Bob’s is open to the public but closed to the sunlight. Otherwise the players don’t seem to care how chipped the paint is or how many tiles the ceiling is missing, and so Bob the Younger is able to scratch out a living by renting tables to individuals, pool leagues, and tournament organizers.

And then there’s the trickle of rent from Cappy, whose office is in the rear, one door past the men’s restroom. Though there’s nothing inside there that the police would be interested in—just a bunch of yellowed sports pages and stacks of old horse-racing news. According to Cappy his bookmaking business isn’t illegal so much as extralegal, in that the cops would have to work
extra
hard making any sort of charges stick to him. Then there’s the fact that another guy would pop up in his place overnight, and not a local who everyone knows and trusts, at least as far as it goes.

Cappy offers the popular service of allowing people to bet on horse races and sporting events by making a phone call. He accepts customers who may not have credit elsewhere and offers complete confidentiality to those citizens who may desire to keep their wagering quiet (or as Cappy prefers to say, “be able to surprise their families when they win”). He can also steer a person to a clean poker game in most any city in the US or Canada. And I have reason to believe there are a few other dilemmas that Cappy can solve for a client willing to pay his service fee, though I’d rather not know about them. In fact, Cappy doesn’t even like to be referred to as a bookie. He describes himself as a “problem solver,” which in his eyes is more akin to being a management consultant or a social worker. And from the way Cappy set his son up with a car dealership and put his daughter through medical school, it would appear that he’s solved a lot of problems in his day.

Knocking gently on the closed door I call out, “Cappy, are you in there?”

“Come in,” says a youthful voice from inside.

Using my shoulder I force open the warped wooden door, which always sticks when the humidity is bad. Cappy’s place is cramped, poorly lit, and reeks from a toxic mixture of day-old cigar smoke and month-old tacos. The décor consists of dark green walls plastered with newspaper clippings featuring some of the greatest upsets in betting history, particularly those that had also served to help the proprietor separate a large number of wagerers from their wallets.

I’m surprised to see his grandson Auggie sitting at the rusty metal desk. I’m surprised for two reasons. This first is that Cappy has always vowed that
no one
in his family will ever go into The Business, which I of course take to mean the problem-solving business. And the second is that the last time I saw Auggie was about three years ago, when he was visiting from Dayton and tagging along behind Cappy at the racetrack like a worshipful puppy dog. Only back then he was sporting a Catholic schoolboy uniform with an ugly blue plaid tie, silver braces with green and black rubber bands on his teeth, and wire-frame glasses, all topped off with a crew cut. And although Auggie was a grade ahead of me in school at the time, he looked about twelve instead of fifteen.

When Auggie stands to greet me it becomes apparent that he hasn’t grown much taller, since we’re about the same height now, but otherwise he’s filled out in all the right places. And the crew cut has turned into gorgeous dark brown shoulder-length hair that hangs loose about his face. Auggie’s soft brown eyes are set deep in strong arches and he looks up at me quizzically from underneath thick lashes, as if trying to determine how we might be acquainted with each other. Around his neck is a leather-and-bead necklace that I like, but most guys around here would be afraid to wear something so blatantly unisex. In his Creed T-shirt from the
My Own Prison
concert tour, tan cargo pants, and black leather sandals, I find the overall effect to be that Auggie is not only cute but also cool.

“Hi,” I say. “I’m Hallie Palmer. We met once at the racetrack a few years ago.”

“Oh my gosh!” Auggie reaches across a metal filing cabinet to shake my hand. “You’re the famous Calculator Kid—my grandpa talks about you all the time and how you can do probabilities in your head on the spot!”

Wow. A person forgets how nice a little flattery feels after living as a constantly broke B-student for a year. “It’s not that I really do them all in my head,” I modestly explain. “In most games there are a certain number of combinations that regularly come up and after a while you simply start to remember them all.”

He flashes me a metal-free smile and I decide that Cappy indeed got his money’s worth on the braces. “I wish that I could do all that stuff in my head. I can’t even do it with the help of an adding machine.” He nods unhappily toward
The Daily Racing Form
spread out on the desktop, which is all marked up with a pencil and the red rubber flecks of countless erasures. “I’m supposed to figure out the payoffs on a hundred-dollar bet for all of these horses.”

Moving closer to the track newspaper, not unlike a moth being drawn toward an old flame, I look to see if there’s anything tricky about the project. Maybe Cappy has asked him to do hypothetical odds based on practice runs. But no, it appears to be a straightforward case of dividing the numerator by the denominator and then multiplying by a hundred. Picking up the pencil I quickly perform one calculation for him.

“Way cool, thanks,” Auggie says and studies my notation. “The ones with plain numbers, like odds of two-to-one made sense, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with six-fifths and the one and one-eighths. Sounds like an amount of scotch or something, huh?” He laughs good-heartedly at his own misunderstanding.

Meantime, I’m thinking that a person unable to do basic math cannot possibly be any grandson of Cappy’s. He must be adopted. This is further evidenced by the stack of books on the desk that are
definitely
not Cappy’s—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, and Carson McCullers. But no, there’s too big a family resemblance, especially around the forehead, and I notice that he’s also left-handed like Cappy.

“You like to read?” I ask.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “And write, too. There’s not a lot to do until the local track opens next week so I’ve been catching up on my American authors.”

“What do you write?”

“Short stories, mostly about death. And I’m outlining this novel about a young guy who goes to work for a relative, like an uncle or something, who’s involved in gambling. I guess it sounds autobiographical but it really wouldn’t be.”

“No, of course not,” I say.

Auggie points down to a horse on the list named Prairie Gary and says with all the innocence of a happy novice set to lose his entire purse, “Look, Hallie, if that horse had won with those odds of twenty-to-one, you would have made two thousand dollars on a hundred-dollar bet!”

“Huh?” I don’t know what it is but I keep losing my train of thought. The necklace crosses his Adam’s apple and a large red bead bounces up and down when he talks. Perhaps I’m being hypnotized.

“If Prairie Gary won, he’d have paid out two grand!” exclaims Auggie.

I quickly scan the page to see what kind of race it was and the other horses running. “But there really wasn’t any way he could win, because Prairie Gary is a turf horse and it was a dirt track. Ever hear the expression
horses for courses
? Well, that’s where it comes from.”

“Wow.” He looks at me with the kind of admiration that parents and teachers and pastors, especially pastors, rarely employ when they discover that you have more than a passing familiarity with gambling. “You really do know your stuff!”

Yeah, but is this what I want—to sit in some airless cave in the back of a grungy pool hall, multiplying and dividing all day long, waiting for the results to come in and figuring payouts? Then there are the occasional out-of-towners asking where they can find poker games and call girls, and not always in that order.

“So I guess you came here to see Cappy,” says Auggie.

“If he’s around,” I reply. “But it’s nothing urgent.” Cappy had apparently just hired Auggie and so it’s doubtful that he needs
two
assistants.

“He took a ride up to Great Lakes Downs in Michigan to talk with some of the trainers and jockeys. You know Cappy, he doesn’t trust anyone until he looks them in the eye, including the horses.” Auggie gives me a knowing wink and from the way he grins it’s obvious that he idolizes his streetwise and well-connected grandfather. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Oh no, I—I just stopped by to say hello.” I start to back out of the room, because it’s getting awfully hot in here, or else I’m having my own personal summer. The place never felt quite this cramped or crowded before. “Did Cappy change the office around?”

Auggie nods toward the gray metal filing cabinets precariously stacked on top of each other against the far wall. “I cleaned out the storeroom last month so Grandpa can sell seats to a Friday night poker game.”

“Cappy’s running a game right
here
? On Friday nights?”

“Yeah, that’s one of the reasons he hired me to help out. A bunch of rich guys want to play this new kind of poker from Tennessee or somewhere.”

“Texas Hold ’Em?” I don’t bother trying to hide my excitement. It’s a game where knowing the odds and how to play them can make or break a person.

“Yeah, that’s it,” says Auggie. “I even bought some really cool black-and-white-checked cards. But Grandpa said we couldn’t use them.” His frown indicates bruised feelings as he points to a deck that looks like a stack of miniature M. C. Escher paintings.

“You really want to use red diamondbacks in a clean game or everyone will think it’s a marked deck,” I say.

“That’s
exactly
what Grandpa said!” Auggie appears briefly mystified.

“Did Cappy say anything else about the game?” I ask.

Auggie thinks for a moment, apparently sorting through all the new terminology he’s been hearing. “Oh yeah, that it’s nickel-and-dime poker.”

“Wow!” I say. “He must be attracting some out-of-towners.”

“Who doesn’t have fifteen cents to bet?” asks Auggie.

“
Nickel
means five hundred and
dime
means a thousand,” I explain in a nice way.

“Oh right—
high-rollers.
” Auggie demonstrates that he is indeed working on his lingo. “Anyway, if you want to place a bet or something, Cappy’s going to phone in soon and—”

“Thanks, but actually no.” I unconsciously wince at the idea of going to a bookmaker to place a bet. I mean, hitting the racetrack or playing in a friendly game of poker is one thing, but being one of those people constantly on their cell phones laying action and then more often than not trying to hide losses from their families isn’t exactly the life I’ve envisioned for myself. Because if you’re on the betting end, and not the booking end, eventually the percentages are going to get the best of you. Or as Cappy likes to say in private, “You may as well waste your time voting.”