‘Don’t worry,’ they said. ‘You will in time. You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be all right.’
He didn’t believe them, and they pumped a sedative into his arm to quiet him. He couldn’t feel the prick of the needle. He heard himself screaming because he could feel no pain.
When he woke up again he knew for certain that he’d broken his neck.
After four days Arthur Morrison came to see him, bringing six new-laid eggs and a bottle of fresh orange juice. He stood looking down at the immobile body with the plaster cast round its shoulders and head.
‘Well, Chick,’ he said awkwardly, ‘it’s not as bad as it could have been, eh?’
Chick said rudely, ‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘They say your spinal cord isn’t severed, it’s just crushed. They say in a year or so you’ll get a lot of movement back. And they say you’ll begin to feel things any day now.’
‘They say,’ said Chick sneeringly. ‘I don’t believe them.’
‘You’ll have to, in time,’ said Morrison impatiently.
Chick didn’t answer, and Arthur Morrison cast uncomfortably around in his mind for something to say to pass away the minutes until he could decently leave. He couldn’t visit the boy and just stand there in silence. He had to say something. So he began to talk about what was uppermost in his mind.
‘We had the result of the dope test this morning. Did you know we had the chestnut tested? Well, you know we had to have it put down, anyway. The results came this morning. They were positive...Positive. The chestnut was full of some sort of narcotic drug, some long name. The owner is kicking up hell about it and so is the insurance company. They’re trying to say it’s my fault. My security arrangements aren’t tight enough. It’s ridiculous. And all this on top of losing the horse itself, losing that really great horse. I questioned everyone in the stable this morning as soon as I knew about the dope, but of course no one knew anything. God, if I knew who did it I’d strangle him myself.’ His voice shook with the fury which had been consuming him all day.
It occurred to him at this point that Chick being Chick, he would be exclusively concerned with his own state and wouldn’t care a damn for anyone else’s troubles. Arthur Morrison sighed deeply. Chick did have his own troubles now, right enough. He couldn’t be expected to care all that much about the chestnut. And he was looking very weak, very pale.
The doctor who checked on Chick’s condition ten times a day came quietly into the small room and shook hands with Morrison.
‘He’s doing well,’ he said. ‘Getting on splendidly.’
‘Nuts,’ Chick said.
The doctor twisted his lips. He didn’t say he had found Chick the worst-tempered patient in the hospital. He said, ‘Of course, it’s hard on him. But it could have been worse. It’ll take time, he’ll need to learn everything again, you see. It’ll take time.’
‘Like a bloody baby,’ Chick said violently.
Arthur Morrison thought, a baby again. Well, perhaps second time around they could make a better job of him.
‘He’s lucky he’s got good parents to look after him once he goes home,’ the doctor said.
Chick thought of his mother, forever chopping up carrots to put in the stew. He’d have to eat them. His throat closed convulsively. He knew he couldn’t.
And then there was the money, rolled up in the shoe-cleaning tin on the shelf in his bedroom. He would be able to see the tin all the time when he was lying in his own bed. He would never be able to forget. Never. And there was always the danger his Ma would look inside it. He couldn’t face going home. He couldn’t face it. And he knew he would have to. He had no choice. He wished he were dead.
Arthur Morrison sighed heavily and shouldered his new burden with his accustomed strength of mind. ‘Yes, he can come home to his mother and me as soon as he’s well enough. He’ll always have us to rely on.’
Chick Morrison winced with despair and shut his eyes. His father tried to stifle a surge of irritation, and the doctor thought the boy an ungrateful little beast.
The Gift
The Gift is the story published in Sports Illustrated’s Kentucky Derby issue of 1973. The magazine re-named the story ‘The Day of Wine and Roses’, referring both to the blanket of real flowers thrown over the withers of the Derby-winning horse, and to the fictional alcohol flowing on the pages.
The Gift given to Fred Collyer, though, was worth far more than roses.
When the breakfast-time flight from LaGuardia was still twenty minutes short of Louisville, Fred Collyer took out a block of printed forms and began to write his expenses.
Cab fare to airport, $40.
No matter that a neighbour, working out on Long Island, had given him a free ride door to door: a little imagination in the expenses department earned him half as much again (untaxed) as the Manhattan Star paid him for the facts he came up with every week in his Monday racing column.
Refreshments on journey, he wrote, 525.
Entertaining for the purposes of obtaining information, $30.50.
To justify that little lot he ordered a second double bourbon from the air hostess and lifted it in a silent good-luck gesture to a man sleeping across the aisle, the owner of a third-rate filly that had bucked her shins two weeks ago.
Another Kentucky Derby. His mind flickered like a scratched print of an old movie over the days ahead. The same old slog out to the barns in the mornings, the same endless raking over of past form, searching for a hint of the future. The same inconclusive work-outs on the track, the same slanderous rumours, same gossip, same stupid jokes, same stupid trainers, shooting their goddam stupid mouths off.
The bright-burning enthusiasm which had carved out his syndicated by-line was long gone. The lift of the spirit to the big occasion, the flair for sensing a story where no one else did, the sharp instinct which sorted truth from camouflage, all these he had had. All had left him. In their place lay plains of boredom and perpetual cynical tiredness. Instead of exclusives, he nowadays gave his paper rehashes of other turf writers’ ideas, and a couple of times recently he had failed to do even that.
He was forty-six.
He drank.
Back in his functional New York office, the Sports Editor of the Manhattan Star pursed his lips over Fred Collyer’s last week’s account of the Everglades race at Hialeah and wondered if he had been wise to send him down this week as usual to the Derby.
That guy, he thought regretfully, was all washed up. Too bad. Too bad he couldn’t stay off the liquor. No one could drink and write, not at one and the same time. Write first, drink after; sure. Drink to excess, to stupor, maybe. But after.
He thought that before long he would have to let Fred go, that probably he should have started looking around for a replacement that day months back when Fred first turned up in the office too fuddled to hit the right keys on his computer. But that bum had had everything, he thought. A true journalist’s nose for a story, and a gift for putting it across so vividly that the words jumped right off the page and kicked you in the brain.
Nowadays all that was left was a reputation and an echo: the technique still marched shakily on, but the personality behind it was drowning.
The Sports Editor shook his head over the Hialeah clipping and laid it aside. Twice in the past six weeks Fred had been incapable of writing a story at all. Each time when he had not phoned through they had fudged up a column in the office and stuck the Collyer name on it, but two missed deadlines were one more than forgivable. Three, and it would be all over. The management were grumbling louder than ever over the inflated expense accounts, and if they found out that in return they had twice received only sodden silence, no amount of for-old-times-sake would save him.