“So what we say to your aunt?” Uncle Richard tested me.
“We saw Cousin Cousine.” Aunty Mabel had come home with one of her migraines and had gone to lie down after lunch. I’d scrawled the note we left on the kitchen table: Going tothe movies. Be back for dinner.
“Good. You tell me the story.”
I glanced behind me and in front of me and when I was surer than sure it was absolutely safe pulled out of the driveway. I was usually bad at recalling the plots of movies, but this one I remembered, because it was the one Carey and I had seen on our first date and we’d argued about it afterward. He’d thought it was immoral.
“They’re these two couples, the man in one couple is the cousin of the woman in the other couple. Anyway, the man cousin is a real jerk, always having affairs, and the wife is good, the actress’s name is Marie-Christine Something.”
“Make a left at this light. What does this Marie look like?”
“Oh, I don’t know, long blond hair, not pretty pretty but very attractive. And in the other couple, it’s the wife cousin who’s the jerk. She’s extremely beautiful, dark hair, neurotic as hell, always threatening to commit suicide. For attention. You know she’s never going to do it. You following this, Uncle Richard?”
“Ummhmm.”
“Her husband’s totally easygoing, totally sweet. A doll. So guess what happens.”
“Either the good and the good or the bad and the bad get together.”
“But the bad and the bad are related by blood.”
“When I was growing up cousin could marry cousin. You make a right at this intersection. Watch out for trucks. Right, Niece.”
“Sorry.” It seemed as if my uncle’s eyesight was improving geometrically the farther away we got from the house. We’d been following the Gulf shore a ways, and now we were heading toward downtown St. Pete. We passed a low-slung stucco hospital with a row of those tall gangly palms, the kind where the trunks were skinny at the bottom and widened toward the top. “Bends in hurricane,” Aunty Mabel had explained to me when I’d pointed this out.
“You ever miss New York?” I asked my uncle.
“Of course. Chinese food. You think you can get decent here? Seafood is okay, but has American taste.”
“How about your friends?”
“All retiring now, and they come down here, you know, or to Miami. Miami, Miami. Big deal. Sometimes your aunt and me, we think Hawaii.”
“Hawaii! That would be great.”
“Yeah. Honolulu. You come visit us there, eh?”
“Of course.”
Now we were in a particularly seedy section, auto repair shops and bars and very few people on the street. I found the automatic door lock button and pressed it. Per capita, there was much more crime here than in New York. I remembered what Lillith had told me about the town of Starke, near Gainesville. “You want to hold your breath when you pass that,” she’d warned.
“Why?”
‘“Cause that’s where all the worst serial murderers are penned up. And that’s where they keep Ole Sparky.”
“What?”
“The electric chair.”
“I thought they didn’t use that anymore.”
“They do in Florida.”
How did she even know things like that?
“So how much money you bring, Niece?” My uncle’s jovial tone brought me back into the present.
“Not much. I’m living on a shoestring, Uncle Richard. I haven’t worked since January.”
“Your luck will change. Don’t worry.” On the worry my uncle started to cough, until he was hacking away like he did mornings in the bathroom. He whipped out a handkerchief, hawked, and spat. It turned my stomach and I tried not to let him see.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine, fine. Okay, make a left here on Gandy Boulevard and go two blocks and you see a parking lot.”
You couldn’t miss it, it was so enormous, with DERBY LANE in ten-foot-tall letters over the main entrance. Fortunately the lot wasn’t very full, so I didn’t have to pull any fancy parking stunts. As we got out of the car I could hear a band playing and a loudspeaker announcing something over it. The other people going in looked fairly normal, plump blond tourists in shorts and T-shirts. My uncle was by far the most nattily dressed, in a yellow linen suit and white bucks.
As we walked toward the entrance he nudged me. “You like this tie?” he asked, holding it out for my inspection. It was unfashionably wide and had tiny brightly colored parrot heads on a black background.
“That’s Daddy’s.” Now I knew why it had bothered me. Ma and I had picked it out for his birthday and I remembered the last time I’d seen him wear it, at the eighth grade Christmas play where my sister had been the Madonna.
“I wear it for you, Niece. Plus, it happens to be my lucky tie.”
I wondered what Daddy would have thought about this, whether anything of his could ever bring luck to anyone. I wondered what he would have thought of Uncle Richard and me going to the greyhound track. I myself was afraid I’d hate the track, I didn’t know why I was there, except I was bored and humoring Uncle Richard. I was afraid the dogs would make me sad.
My uncle paid for the dollar apiece tokens to get us through the turnstiles, bought a program, and then led me through the infield over to a building he called the benching area, where the dogs were penned, ready to go, or cooling down. I wasn’t prepared for what it would sound like, that greyhounds were after all hounds, all that howling and yelping. They weren’t show dogs and didn’t have to be beautiful, although some of them were. Bred strictly for speed, their spare lines were not unlike horses’ and they weren’t just gray. White, some of them, one even pure black, blue-black, a whole range of tans, pintos, dappled. Uncle Richard was friends with a handler, who flipped back the ear of one of the dogs and showed me the tattoo. The hound stood lean and quiet beneath his hands. Her name was Shady Lady and she was scrawny, light gray with little black spots. Her face markings resembled a raccoon mask.
The dogs were barking, the announcer was barking, my uncle and I left the benching area and went back through the infield to the betting windows. As we walked he was scribbling notes in his program. Opposite the windows hung a row of television sets before which stood a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. I thought it must be closed circuit and then I saw that one screen was showing a horse race while the one beside it was displaying jai alai.
Uncle Richard placed several bets, talking and flinging down bills so fast that I had no idea what he was doing. “Tenth race, quiniela box,” I heard him say. Then he turned to me. “Okay. You pick a race, pick a number. We make it simple, your first time. You pick which one to win, place, or show. You know what that means?”
“Yes.”
I made my choice by name: Khartoum (named for a famous horse, I knew), Hotsplit, Greyghost the Fourth, and Shady Lady, a long shot in the seventh race, ridiculously long, twenty-five to one. Those were my kind of odds. I bet all my dogs to win and handed over thirty dollars in all. My uncle bought a plastic glass of beer and we went to lean against the fence. Across from us the odds flickered on the big board and a brass band played “The Girl from Ipanema.” In the center of the track was a carefully styled oasis, complete with pond and playing fountain. The whole scene wavered in the blazing, unforgiving savannah heat. I put my sunglasses on again.
Uncle Richard sipped his beer and pulled out his cigarettes and we smoked and waited.
I studied the program. “SHADY LADY, number 7 Green and White. Night Shade—Lady Godiva. Rl Erly-Crwdd 1st Tn. Weaknd in Stretch. Sought Rl 1st—Bmpd. Led Briefly—Weaknd.” My uncle was watching the odds flip with the calm concentration of someone who could do intricate calculations in his head. A snowy egret wafted onto the oasis and stood, as if posing in the brilliant green by the fountain, then took off as the band began playing a march. The dogs were being led out.