The Pirate's Daughter (5 page)

Cricket paid for the cab, and they walked up through the gates and along the cement path littered with ticket stubs and cigarette butts. Carbon arc lamps buzzed overhead. The smell of cigarettes and sand and night and the faint uretic reek of dog piss hung in the air. It was the lull between races. The grooms—underdeveloped youths wearing shorts pulled up to their belly buttons, knee socks, and cleated patent leather shoes—led eight mixed greyhounds around the sandy oval to the starting gate. A couple of dozen gamblers lounged against the railing of the promenade, watching this dismal parade. Wilson saw sullen, bony-elbowed old men in short-sleeve
shirts and porkpie hats, trailer park women with frosted hair, tough teens armed with sharp sideburns, leather jackets slung over their shoulder. Two dirty children chased garbage across the tarry apron. A Chinaman chewed on a piece of fat, staring into the darkness beyond the sweep of highway.

The few remaining mimosa trees decorating the infield melted in the light wind like cotton candy under a heat lamp. One frail pink blossom alighted in Cricket's coppery hair.

“Ever been here before?” Cricket said.

“No,” Wilson said. “I've only seen it from the highway.”

“What do you think?”

“Seedy, depressing,” Wilson said, looking around. “This must be where the other half goes on Saturday night.”

“Stop being so sensitive to your environment,” Cricket said. “Or I should say, stop being a snob.”

“O.K.,” Wilson said, “but what are we doing here?”

Cricket put her hand on Wilson's arm. “I'm going to pay you back for those bottles of wine,” she said, and led him toward the glass-fronted grandstand.

A rust-flecked chrome strip ran the length of the inside bar empty except for two whiskey-smelling old men smoking cigars. The dogs were at the starting gate. A closed-circuit TV broadcast the race live for those gamblers who could not get off their stools. Wilson found a table as Cricket angled up to the bar. She came back with a program and two pints of Colonial lager in plastic cups.

“When at the dog track, drink what the dogs drink,” she said, and put the cheap beer down on the table.

Wilson took a sip of the stuff and grimaced. It reminded him of high school—drunken rides in jacked-up cars, empty cans rolling around in the backseat.

Cricket pushed the program at him. “The guy behind the bar says we've got two races left and seven minutes to place a bet for the next one,” she said. “You pick the dogs, I'll lay the money down. You keep the winnings. Hopefully we'll walk out of here with
enough to cover the wine and a little change to spare. Come on, it'll be fun.”

Wilson stared down at the brightly colored boxes on the program. His head still felt a bit thick from the martinis at the Orion, and he had a hard time concentrating on the names of the dogs: Darcy's Lord, Southwind, Bartholomew Roberts, Honeysuckle Rose, Stinky, Mnemosyne, Battle, Crazy Eight.

“Dog racing,” he said. “My father is spinning in his grave.”

“Don't think about him,” Cricket said. “Do your stuff,” and she smiled, and her smile was as dangerous and irresistible as anything Wilson had ever seen.

“This is such a random thing,” Wilson said, looking back at the program. “With the horses, the most important factor is the jockey. Here it's just the dogs and the track, and from what I hear about the dogs, they're capricious, unpredictable.”

“See, you are a gambler,” Cricket said.

“Not me,” Wilson said, but he ran down the odds and felt something turn inside him, and he picked Darcy's Lord and Mnemosyne for the quinella. Cricket placed the bet just under the wire, and they took the program and the pints of Colonial out to the promenade to watch the dogs come around the track. A damp wind now blew from the direction of the sea. The dogs went into the slots and began barking and yapping and jumping at the gate.

“Here comes Swifty,” the announcer called, and a groom loaded the stuffed rabbit on the pulley and a shot went off and the gates sprang up and the dogs went clawing over one another, once around in a blur of haunch and paw and numbers and flying sand.

Wilson's dogs came in second and first. Cricket had placed a two-dollar bet. She came back from the cashier's window smiling and handed Wilson sixty dollars in ten-dollar bills.

“There's one bottle,” she said.

“Beginner's luck,” Wilson said, trying to sound nonchalant, but he couldn't keep the grin from his face.

The last race on the ticket was the Mimosa Maidens' Cup—once
around with a field of eight virgin bitches. Wilson felt a strange, queasy twisting in his stomach that was familiar yet not familiar. His palms began to sweat; he felt the desire to win like a metallic taste in his mouth. Then he was disgusted with himself, and he tossed the program into the nearest wire trash basket. “Let's get out of here,” he said. “I'm not in the mood for this.”

Cricket stepped around and put a hand against his chest. Her eyes were brilliant green stones in the greenish illumination of the carbon arcs.

“One last race,” she said quietly, and there was a serious edge to her voice. “Please, for me.”

Flags snapped noisily in the wind. Wilson saw the goose bumps raise themselves across Cricket's bare arms.

He hit the trifecta in disorder, with Mysore, Emma, and Little Flower. The payoff was fifty-to-one on a three-dollar bet.

With the extra money, Cricket rented a limousine for the ride back to town, a 1941 Lincoln Continental, long as a houseboat, with big flared fenders, lots of chrome, and an open section for the driver. The track kept this relic around for high rollers, but no one ever used it, and the interior smelled like dust and mildew. The driver was half shaved; he wore no tie or jacket, just a white shirt rolled up to the elbows and a baseball cap with the Mimosa Park logo on the crown. He seemed slightly irritated at having to drive them back to the city and handed over the complimentary bottle of domestic champagne with a grunt.

As the big machine lumbered out to the highway, canned forties-era swing music came over the speakers from up front. The instruments threw a faint green glow through the privacy window, touching the contours of Cricket's body with the delicacy of a shy lover until she settled back into the padded dimness of the Lincoln. Wilson gulped down three glasses of the champagne before they passed Exit 17 to Palmyra and East Morea. The stuff had a rank, fishy bouquet, but he drank a fourth glass and was suddenly very drunk.

“I told you, it's in your blood.” Cricket's voice came disembodied from across the long seat.

“The alcohol?” Wilson slurred.

“The gambling,” Cricket said. “Hell, I was raised around enough of them to know. And I can tell you that the knack, luck—whatever you want to call it—is passed down through the generations. Think of the odds against what you just did! You hit the quinella and the Maiden's Cup right in a row! Amazing! You're probably a better gambler than your father was.”

“Get this straight, I'm a failed archaeologist,” Wilson said, and his lips had trouble forming the words. “Dem bones just got the better of me.”

“What?” Cricket said.

“Sorry,” Wilson said, “not used to all this drinking. Generally I lead a very quiet life.”

“Not for much longer,” Cricket said, and when she smiled, all Wilson saw was her teeth like the Cheshire cat smiling from the shadows.

Landscape passed, dark and featureless. Soon the city lit the horizon with an orange haze. Then there were green signs with white lettering, and the Lacey Memorial Bridge and then the Overlook, and somehow Wilson found himself stumbling alone down the empty streets of the Rubicon District, and the next thing he knew it was morning and he woke up with a nasty hangover, fully clothed on the couch in his apartment.

He couldn't remember exactly how he had gotten there, but could remember why he didn't drink much anymore: He was too old for the hangovers, and after five or six drinks he suffered from blackouts. He lay around all day recuperating, swallowing aspirins and Coke, and trying to piece together the final events of the previous evening. Had Cricket said anything, given him a good night kiss, her phone number? There were no scraps of paper, no matchbook covers scrawled with seven digits in his pockets. Had they made
plans to go out some other time? He couldn't remember, and at the thought that he might never see her again part of him felt relieved.

But the vague suspicion that he had forgotten something important nagged for the next few days, until Andrea got back from Denver.

A week went by. At the end of it, Wilson dragged himself home on the Rubicon bus and got into bed in his pajamas, just after eight o'clock. Then the stars rose and shone so brilliantly out his bedroom window he couldn't sleep, a problem shared with a million other residents of the city that night. The stars seemed to hover just twenty feet above his roof, and there was no moon, and the sky was beautiful with just the stars like porch lights in the blackness.

Wilson had read an article explaining this phenomenon in that morning's edition of the
Times-Chronicle
, but he had not been prepared for something so utterly marvelous. It was caused by a rare atmospheric distortion known as Klett's Mirage, first recorded at the North Pole by the Dutch explorer W. G. Klett on the disastrous polar expedition of 1911. This time Klett's Mirage would be observable up and down the coast, though not below Taneville or above St. Charles, which is to say from forty-two degrees north or south of the meridian, where a distinct line divided the sky between dim and bright, between those inhabitants who dwelt in darkness and those, for the time being, blessed or cursed with an abundance of starlight. According to the article, the science of it was nothing special—gases in the atmosphere and certain types of industrial pollutants acted to magnify starlight in a mundane chemical reaction—
but just now the huge stars out Wilson's bedroom window sent chills up his spine.

Wilson got out of bed, leaned against the air-conditioning unit, and stared up at the sky. He had been restless since his excursion to the dog track; for days the dread had been gnawing with unusual force at the inside of his stomach, mixed with a longing he did not care to examine. Cricket hadn't called; perhaps he had done something to offend her. He couldn't remember. Earlier in the week, he thought about dropping by the magic store; then he thought about not dropping by. Andrea was a fine woman, they were just going through a rocky period, no reason to throw it all away on someone he hardly knew. Of course, once he started thinking about Cricket, sleep was impossible.

The vast night full of stars beckoned.

The Rubicon bus across the bridge stopped running after rush hour, so Wilson walked down to Ferry Point and caught the ten o'clock express through the tunnel.

At half past, the sidewalks of the city were still crowded with star-struck pedestrians. The bars along the esplanade were packed. The tunnel bus, full of Salvadoran hotel workers just getting off work, lurched up through the fish markets and the wharves and reached its terminus in the old Alcazar District—once a Portuguese neighborhood, now called Buptown—home to thousands of recent refugees from the war-torn West African nation of Bupanda.

Wilson decided to walk over to the Bend, get a drink at Tony's, then catch the 1:30 bus back through the tunnel. Tonight Buptown was teeming. Bupandan men squatted on small squares of carpet at low tables on the terraces of their open-fronted cafés, little more
than holes in the wall. They ate kif with their fingers, scooping the spicy stuff off polished brass trays with the spongy rice bread called panu; they drank tejiyaa or coffee out of oiled leather cups. The sound of their African dialect, their rages and enthusiasms filled the night. At the corner of Reeve and Middleton, a Bupandan tinka band played homemade flutes and five-gallon plastic paint drums and old men danced on the sidewalk under the stars. The Bupandans lived in Buptown much as they did in their distant West African homeland. Their lives were lived in public, in the streets, even the most intimate acts. As Wilson walked down Windermere to Fifth, hands in his pockets, he stepped around families of fifteen sprawled across blankets spread before the stoops of the tenements. They scratched and yawned and quarreled; they dressed and undressed. Young couples made love oblivious in tattered sleeping bags as naked children jumped rope not ten feet away.

Suddenly, Wilson didn't want to be alone. He stopped at the first pay phone on Fifth and called Andrea and got her machine. Was she out or asleep? He called home for his messages on the off chance she had left one, and the machine kicked in after the first ring. There was one message, but not from Andrea.

“Wilson, sorry I'm late. Just got back into town. We had a date, remember?” It was Cricket. The skin on the back of Wilson's neck prickled. “Wake up! We're supposed to go to the fights tonight. They don't start for a while yet. And there's something else I want to talk to you about. Come on, pick up the phone. Wilson?” There was a sigh, and the machine gave three beeps and disconnected. She didn't leave a number.

Wilson replaced the receiver carefully, his hand shaking a little. Just hearing Cricket's voice affected his nerves. The fights? He racked his brain for some memory of their arrangements and came up with nothing. Was Cricket talking about boxing, a restaurant, a club? He tried Information for her name—there were twenty S. Pages, and no Cricket—then he tried Sportsline and found there was no boxing anywhere in town tonight; then he tried Information
again and came up with a gym in Reevetown called the Fight Place. That couldn't be it. He felt abandoned. Desire and guilt washed over him in alternating waves like the fever and chills of the flu.

Directly across from the pay phone, a tiny, brightly lit terrace restaurant called the Kifto advertised a full seven-course Bupandan meal for $11.75. On a whim, he crossed the street and sat down at one of the low tables on a square of stained tartan plaid carpet. The patronage here tonight consisted of one large party of young Bupandan men, their skin the rich black of coffee beans shining with sweat in the swaying light of paper lanterns. They were just being served heaping platters of kif and panu by three thin Bupandan women wearing the traditional scarf and headdress of their country. A good two dozen blue glass bottles of tejiyaa stood empty at the center of their table. Wilson sat for a while feeling sorry for himself, watching them talk and laugh and eat. At last, a yellow-eyed old man wearing a Guinea T and a moth-eaten pair of tuxedo pants came over to his table.