"And you left with your head filled with flames
And you watched as your brains
Fell out through your teeth, push the pieces in place
Make your smile sweet to see, don't you take this away
I'm still wanting my face on your cheek
And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
And when we break, we'll wait for our miracle
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life"
"Two Headed Boy Pt 2" Neutral Milk Hotel
The sky blue and cloudless, a crowd of thirty thousand hushed and restless with anticipation, waiting to release their unbridled screams of greed, pure and simple, and down below, on the green grass, horses circling nervously behind a starting gate, their riders wearing silks representing seemingly every color in the spectrum.
In the clubhouse, Section H, Row K, seats 13 and 14, sits a middle-aged man, worn down by the cares of the work-a-day world, by his problems and by the wrongs he can't stop himself from noticing, by the losses and slights both big and small that have accumulated in his heart over almost exactly four and a half decades of life; a middle-aged man sits, desperately looking for a few moments of peace, of escape, of solace. The man knows the world around him has come unglued and he knows all too well that what he does in this moment does nothing to address what has gone wrong. He sees zealots filled with rage and unfathomable cruelty rule the country he was born in and grew up to love, he sees them hold it by the neck, threatening to choke off its air if they can't get their way; he sees the suffering of the defenseless march on unabated, he sees the suffering willfully ignored as though the suffering have brought it upon themselves.
Next to him sits his twelve year old son, a twelve year old already the size of an adult, five nine and built like a future offensive lineman, overly broad shoulders and beefy, right down to his fingers. The people packed into the seats around them amplify the midsummer day's heat, and the cooling mercy of a northwest breeze fails to reach their brows, blocked off by the old grandstand that has stood in this same spot since 1863. The man reaches into the back right pocket of his brown and red check plaid shorts for a white handkerchief and wipes the sweat off his forehead. He passes it wordlessly to his son, who wipes his own face dry.
Who'd you bet, dad, the son asks.
The man has placed a small wager on the upcoming race on behalf of his son, a one-six exacta box, meaning the one and the six had to run first and second. The man doesn't want to tell the son who he has bet on for some reason, perhaps because he doubts the wisdom having his son witness this spectacle, the wisdom of letting his twelve year old son participate in the filthy, holy spectacle about to unfold on the grass below them.
He remembers the first time he brought his son to this place, in July of 1999, when the son was seven months old, on Open House Sunday, the Sunday before the meet opens for business. Even at seven months old, he could see the son enchanted by the spectacle of a bunch of horses running around a track, his then-bald head bobbing up and down in excitement as he watched jumpers running over the hurdles. His mother, still young but a mere eight years and a couple of months from the end of her life, turned to the man afterwards, laughed, and said to him, well, I guess he's got the gene from your side of the family.
He remembers all the days they have spent here, he remembers the boy, as an eight year old, chasing down the riders for autographs, he remembers when the boy turned to him on a Sunday afternoon and said, I wanna be a jockey when I grow up, Dad, and the man remembers not having the heart to tell his son that this dream would never come true, what with a mother standing at five nine and a father at six four. He remembers the Saturday a few years back when they stood outside the jockey's quarters and the son struck up a conversation with an aging French rider named Jean-Luc Samyn. Samyn had a mount on the nine horse in the upcoming race and he told the son he thought he had a good chance, and the man had placed a bet on his horse, the nine horse, off at good odds, and they went up to the clubhouse to watch the race and the nine lost in a photo-finish and the son turned to the man and started crying and said, Dad, that man said he would win!
C'mon, Dad, who'd you bet? I saw you bet, who'd you bet?
The man, for reasons he will never understand, came to learn how to read a racing paper, a form, he came to learn to read it, read between its lines of numbers and truncated comments, people who seemed to know what they talked of told him the secrets and he got good at it over the years, hell, he figured it out well enough to once win fifteen thousand dollars on a ninety-six dollar bet a couple of years back, money that came in handy when he found himself widowed and quitting a job not much longer afterwards.
The man had bought his son hot dogs and beef tacos and popcorn and sodas and paid for his son's small bets all afternoon without wagering himself, but now, before the eighth race, he thought he had seen something in the form, he thought he had spotted a weakness in the crowd, he thought he had seen something few others had, and he had gone to the windows and bet twenty dollars to win on the nine, on the board at nineteen to one, and a one dollar triple keying the nine over four other horses, meaning the nine had to win and any of the four other horses had to run in some combination of second and third.
He didn't know why he didn't want to tell his son who he had bet. Maybe he felt ashamed for betting at all. Maybe he felt that rather than spend the afternoon at the Saratoga races, he should have brought his son down to Washington, DC, to stand shouting in protest outside the offices of their supposed elected representatives. But the man had lost his faith in his own voice; he felt hopeless, powerless, and his own powerlessness had driven him very nearly crazy in the weeks leading up to this day at this races. He knew any shouting they might do would be akin to pissing into the icy waters of the North Atlantic to warm it up. He didn't want to tell his son who he had bet, but even more fiercely, he didn't want to tell his son the truth: he didn't want to tell him that, if it ever did matter, it no longer mattered what ordinary folks like themselves thought and felt about things. The man knew he didn't matter, and he knew his son didn't matter. He knew the people running things would gladly throw away the check his son got from the government every month, the pitifully small consolation prize he got for living through his mother dying when he was eight years old; the tea-hadist zealots would throw it away out of nothing more than spite, and the putative defenders of the common man would throw it away in a doomed attempt at chasing votes they'd never get from a mythical center.
The man gazed down at the grass, the horses walking into the starting gate, as resigned to their fates as he was to his. He dabbed the sweat off his forehead again. The crowd murmured at the nine horse demurred at the gate. She reared, struck her hind legs up in the air at perceived threats behind her. The jockey, another Frenchman, Julien Leparoux, dismounted. She pranced nervously around, ready to kick anyone with the nerve to get behind her.
The man put his arm around his son.
I bet the nine, he said.
I'm gonna lose, he said. They never run good when they act up, so I figured I'd tell you now. I'm gonna lose.
They got the horse in the gate, the jockey got on top, the gates opened, they ran around, the crowd quieter than you think thirty thousand people could be. The nine dropped back to the rear of the field, just one horse beat. The man kept his arm around his son, he'd given up on his own bet, he just wanted his son to win now.
As they rounded the last turn and headed for the finish line, the nine horse still sat in the back, next to last. The front-runners had set a slow pace, making it unlikely that a horse from the back would come from behind to win.
An eight of a mile from the finish, and the son's bet had a chance, and then the man spotted something moving quickly: the nine horse.
He held his breath.
No way, he thought.
No way.
The crowd began to yell, the crescendo of cries swept over him. He felt new sweat on his forehead but he didn't bother wiping it off. The nine horse exploded, as if set free from a trap. She began passing horses, one by one.
A hundred yards from the wire, the man lost his composure. He forgot about everything, the dismal state of things, the hopelessness, he forgot about a country lost at sea, he forgot about not having enough money, he forgot about watching his first wife's head filled with flames, he forgot about watching her brains fall not through her teeth but through small suction tubes, he forgot that he's doomed, that we're all doomed, and he jumped to his feet and slapped his right hand into his left so hard that both hands tingles, he jumped to his feet and screamed, something he could believe in, if just for a few second, he jumped to his feet and screamed, at the top of his lungs, nine horse, nine horse, nine horse, nine horse, baby, nine horse.
The nine horse won. He picked up $392 on the win bet and half of $726 on the triple.
The son turned to him afterward it ended and said, god, Dad, you embarrassed me yelling like that.
Sorry, the man said. Sorry. I got a little carried away there for some reason.
&&&&
The man didn't bet the rest of the day, but he put a few more small bets in for his son. They all lost.
On their way out, the son put his arm around the man's shoulder.
I know I didn't win today, Dad, but I had fun. Thanks for taking me.
Ah, nobody I'd rather come here than you, the man said.
Really?
Really.
Nothing had changed; but for awhile, than man had forgotten about it all. Nothing had changed over the course of that afternoon, but he'd spent it with his son, and he'd had the nine horse, baby.
For tonight, that's enough.