How are they running, the guy wants to know. He throws me a big wink under the combover, hitchhikes his thumb in the direction of my Racing Form, and the parade of wit continues. “Any hot tips?” Yeah, I’d say, if I was writing the advice column. Lose the Hawaiian shirt and the combover. It’s not that I mind guys checking me out. Turning forty didn’t bother me. I still look better in jeans and a tight top than a lot of these nineteen-year-olds. And in my day, you didn’t have all the machines to do it for you. Plus, it’s not like the pills make these guys genius lovers. They just bring them back to where they were, which let’s face it, am I right, was not too startling to begin with. Anyway, that’s the long answer to how are they running. The short answer is I heard a couple of days ago that the Monk had died.

Flat out, the Monk was the greatest handicapper that ever lived. And that includes your Memphis Englebergs, your Footsie Macgraws, all the little gremlins in checkered sport coats who licked the stubby ends of tooth-marked pencils and checked the clocker’s time against their own stopwatch. The Monk’s brain worked different from regular people’s. These days they’d call it a syndrome, give it a three-letter abbreviation and TV ads for a drug to cure it. But back then it was magic. He would look at the same Past Performance charts everyone else did, but where civilians saw rows of numbers, the Monk saw moving pictures. He wouldn’t just pick the winner; he’d tell you where every horse would be at every call of the race. It was like he was watching a replay before it happened. A preplay, if there could be such a thing.

I don’t know what “renovations” all the signs are raving about. The place still looks like the last place you’d go to change your life. Last time I was here was the last bet the Monk ever made. So why the sentimental journey? There’s a horse in the fourth race today name of Monkeyshines. He must’ve told me a thousand times that looking for omens was my big mistake. I can still hear his voice in my head, big and horseradishy, even when he talked soft to me, which he almost always did, swallowing the front part of my name so it sounded like he was calling me Ray or The Rain, like there was something between us that he was the only one who could see.

If you’re looking for the thing, he told me a million times, you’re not looking at the thing. And if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you can’t know what you’re seeing. Thing is, that last day here–? I knew exactly what I was looking at. And I knew what I was seeing. Whether I should have told him or not. That’s always the question. A blackjack dealer once told me there were two kinds of people in the world, and neither of them can leave well enough alone. I guess I’m one of them. But what are you gonna do? You take your two bucks to the betting window, and you hope for the best.

This I know. The Monk would not have bet on Monkeyshines. The Form tells you everything you need to know. He’s run twenty-six times and he’s still a maiden. You asked me what a maiden was before I started to wait tables at the Harpoon–? I would’ve said the same thing anybody else would. And we all would’ve been wrong. A maiden is any horse, male or female, until it wins its first race. Most of the great ones break their maidens as two-year-olds.  Future money-winners do it at three. What happens to five-year-old maidens–? Don’t think about it next time you open a can of cat food.

With all his gifts, the Monk would never bet a maiden race. You can’t tell what a horse has learned by losing until you see him win, is what he always said. Most of them keep finding new ways to break your heart.

Still. Here I am.

It’s not only because of his name. Morning line odds on him are seventeen-to-one. Monk’s birthday is the seventeenth. The seventeenth of April. April is the fourth month. He’s running in the fourth race. I won’t argue that maybe I’m looking too hard. But way worse than losing a few bucks is ignoring the signs shouting, Today is your day, and if it turns out that it was, and you missed it, those days haunt you forever.

I’d put my money that back in the day, the Monk was a maiden in the love department. Probably the whole motley crew of us were maidens, the knights of the round table of The Harpoon Bar (The HA POO BA if you read only the neon letters that still worked.)  Fly shit on the windows looking out over the pier at Sheepshead Bay. Beautiful in spring and summer with all the boats, even better in winter when the water was flat grey, the color of wet cement.

There were four regs: Rick, who still looked like his album cover with the Blue Jays. He wore the white tux with the purple trim and bolo tie on special occasions, until the time Morocco did the number on him in front of those girls, making believe Rick was the car hop guy and throwing him a quarter saying, It’s the red Monte Carlo.

Morocco’s real name was Rocco, but he didn’t want people to think he was Italian. Little Stevie was five foot-three and weighed maybe eleven pounds. He looked like a gecko and sounded like he’d snorted helium. When they were playing poker, he would jerk his neck like he had a tic so he could look at people’s cards. And whatever you would talk about, Little Stevie claimed he invented it. The chocolate egg cream. Automatic transmission.

The place was owned by the legendary Derf. He mostly let his wife run it, which was the best decision Derf ever made other than marrying Mrs. Derf. Derf was Fred spelled backwards, which made perfect Hapoobian sense, since his name wasn’t Fred. It was Albert. But Trebla sounded too much like an outer space movie, was his reason. And yeah, I could see that.

The Monk was the centerpiece of the circle. Scared the hell out of me first time I saw him. Weighed two-sixty. Face like a cantaloupe with a crewcut. He always ordered a ham and swiss on rye, mustard and mayo on the side, and a Schaefer on tap. Schaefer, because that was the beer that sponsored the Dodger games before they deserted Brooklyn and moved someplace west, and loyalty was something the Monk believed you gave, even if you didn’t get it back.

I nearly blew it my first week working there. A lot of guys tip you big when you know their usual. When they can just catch your eye and nod and you know what that means. So, to show him that I noticed, I brought him his beer and his sandwich just as he sat down.

“What the hell is this?” He said. “Who ordered this?”

I was about to explain, but luckily, I caught Derf’s wife shaking her head “no” to me, and I got the idea that Monk didn’t like to be predictable. He had to study the whole menu and come to the same conclusion that he came to every day but think it was the first time. I apologized to him and said I’d take it back.

“Yes,” he said. “That would definitely be the thing to do.”

Derf’s wife put her arm on my shoulder on my way to the bar. “Don’t try to figure them out, Honey. They’re all crazy and the Complaint Department’s closed.”

Besides waiting tables, I could dance a little. People thought I was smarter than I was because I had long legs. As if sex ever made anybody smarter. They used to kid around with me, but nothing serious. The thing with Rick in the back room was like two cars that tapped bumpers in the fog and no damage done. Incidental Contact would be the stewards’ ruling on the track if a couple of horses got jostled like that in close quarters, with the action not affecting the outcome of the race.

Not to say that the Monk was infallible with his picks. No way to predict if a horse steps in a hole, gets boxed in, jockey has a bad day, acts of God, that sort of thing.  But with it all, he could have done serious damage to the local bookies, which out of respect he didn’t want to do. So, every day, one of the Hapoobians rode out to Aqueduct or Belmont or down to Philly or even Pimlico to place their bets. I threw down a buck or two myself when Rick or Morocco went. Not with Little Stevie though, not after the time he ‘forgot’ to make my bet and returned the five spot I gave him along with a story of why he didn’t get the bet down instead of the hundred and change my winner paid, but what are you gonna do?

The Monk never went to the track.

Little Stevie was the first one to tell me about that peculiarity, so I shrugged it off. But later, Rocco told me the same thing, and Rick too, so I figured it was true. Monk’s curse was that on the way to the window he would start believing the opinions of everyone around him. People who were cobbling together two-dollar bets out of pocket change. –Six horse can’t lose. –Seven horse won the last race. So, it’s got to be the eight. It didn’t matter how stupid the comment was, the last thing he heard, that was the bet he’d make. He’d walk away looking at the ticket he’d just bought, reduced to hoping for something to happen that he already knew would not.

So, the Hapoobians took to making the trek, coming back richer, and of course wanting to do right by him.  Everyone remembers the Derby Day when the Monk picked a five-horse parlay, with 20-1 and 13-1 longshots at the center of it. It paid huge, and the boys chipped in a grand apiece for the long black ’94 Lincoln Continental. Monk’s face, when that boat on wheels pulled up in front of the Hapooba, was like a kid’s nose pressed against the Macy’s window the day before Christmas. But he couldn’t accept it. So quietly the car went back. Little Stevie volunteered to drive it and looked hurt at the chorus of, when hell freezes over. Things settled back to normal for awhile after that. But as the Chinese proverb says, no tree grows to the sky forever.

It was a woman who changed everything.

One day, she was just there. Eliza-bith was the way she pronounced it, like it was like two names, Eliza and Bith that she rammed together. Everyone repeated it back slightly wrong. How you always try to make something you never heard of sound close to a thing you know.

The Monk seemed to like her, so I wanted to like her too, even though she was the most enthusiastic person I ever met. She gushed over every stupid thing. That’s priceless, she would say and write it down in her little notebook. She was twenty-three, five years younger than me at the time, and looked maybe nine. She had really smooth skin, a thin face, and when she didn’t wear her glasses, she did a lean-in-and-squint thing that made you think of a slightly nearsighted trout. But she knew about all kinds of weird things—plumbing, electricity, and she’d been to the Pyramids, the Rock of Gibraltar, Patagonia, if that’s even a real place. She won me to her side the night of the eclipse when Little Stevie was showing everybody the difference between a star and a planet using saltshakers and plates to demonstrate, and she told him he had the whole thing backwards.

You’d think she’d know to take a back seat at the Round Table, but she was chirpy as a lark. Called everybody by their first names. Asked people questions, even repeated stuff the Monk had told her in private that made you look down at your fingernails so you wouldn’t have to see him being embarrassed. She was one of those people the blackjack dealer talked about, too. Can’t leave well enough alone.

The death of the Hapooba began the day she ordered a Ballantine. She always brought her own tea bags and asked for a poda low show, which somehow was supposed to mean a pot of hot water. But this one time she wanted a beer. And she liked the sound of Ballantine. It reminded her of some dancer, she said. In my line of work, you learn how to be a safety net without letting people know they’d slipped off the wire. I asked if she was sure she didn’t want a Schaefer, like everyone else drank. She was one of those people who insist that their worst mistake is exactly what they meant. She raised her pointy chin and said, “I’m a Ballantine girl.” The rest of the table went into shellshock. Even Rheingold or Pabst would’ve been acceptable. But Ballantine sponsored the Yankees, and to drink their beer was to support the enemy. Everyone waited for the Monk to school her, but his face looked like Siamese Twins named What Can I Say? and I Didn’t Hear Anything.

Elizabith followed me back to the slide where I was waiting for my six open RBs to come out of the kitchen. Her professor “finds no merit at all in her dissertation project,” she told me, as though we’d been talking about this for the last half-hour instead of never. “He is so stuck in nineteenth-century chivalry he thinks you can only do sociology in the jungles of New Guinea. He has no idea where the field is going in the next twenty years. Demographics. Exploration of our own subcultures. These are going to be the issues of the future, Lorraine, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think much about the future,” I said.

“Well, you ought to. It’s the direction we’re all headed.”

My sandwiches were ready and the only direction I was headed was table nine. But she wasn’t done. Her brilliant idea was to pull a switcheroo. To bring Monk a Ballantine and see if he recognized the difference. “Our thesis,” she said, like we were already collaborating, “will be to discover whether brand loyalty is based on anything intrinsic to the product or if it’s emotional. Do you think he’d notice the difference, Lorraine?”

My job is to bring the customers what they ask for, I told her.

“I’m a customer, too, Ray. So can you add a Ballantine for our table?”

She didn’t read the subtext, which was my telling her not to take advantage of a man’s good nature. I tried again. “You want me to bring six beers for five people?”

“He’s not in love with you, Ray.”

Maybe she did read subtext.

The boys had come back happy. The track was sloppy after a few days of rain, and the Monk had picked a couple of mudders that scored at long odds. Easy money makes people think they’re too smart to die. They were on their second and third rounds when she nodded at me, that meant now. When I brought the refills, Little Stevie had just invented the Middle Ages. Rick liked it when I leaned over his shoulder to pick up the empties and I didn’t mind giving him an occasional thrill. Elizabith was behind Monk with her elbow resting lightly on his neck as I dealt out the brews. I thumped them down hard on the wooden table. Morocco. Derf. Rick. Little Stevie. I could feel Elizabith watching me like a mosquito from behind a bedpost.

Fuck it, I thought, if all I am to him is some girl, let him drink Ballantine.

Only at that moment, the Monk smiled at me. And I felt like he was completely inside, the way cream dissolves through coffee and changes everything. I knew that he was seeing me the way he saw the races, that he understood Elizabith was a frontrunner. A popper and stopper. That she’d blow out of the gate in the early furlongs and try to steal the race, and that I would rate just off the pace, and when she faltered in the stretch, I would make my move and hit the wire with daylight to spare.

This all happened at the speed of light while I was setting the beers down. Only I “accidentally” set Monk’s Ballantine on top of a fork, so it toppled over with a big thwop and flooded the table. Everyone on the downstream side jumped back. I was there with my side towel, mopping up the mess and apologizing from the bottom of my sincere young heart.

“You must be hypnotized by the sight of good-looking men,” Derf’s wife said. She was cool for an owner. Never got raggy when someone broke a plate. She grabbed a side towel and made like to wipe down Morocco’s crotch. He turned twelve shades of red. Once order was restored, I apologized to Monk that I owed him one. I took out my pad and made a big show of getting it right.

“Was that a Ballantine you had?”

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “How long have you worked here? Did I ever in my life order a Ballantine? I drink Schaefer. That’s all I ever drink. Get your head screwed on right.”

“I stand corrected, sir. Schaefer it is, and Schaefer it will always be.”

I headed back to the bar, giving my hips an extra swivel for the boys. When you’re a winner you spread it around.

Talk of the engagement started not too long after that. It was supposed to be a secret that the Monk was shopping for finger candy. Rick’s cousin Eddie from Philly had a friend in Newark who knew a diamond guy in Brooklyn. He showed up one morning, and him and Monk and Derf’s wife spent an hour checking out his wares. Elizabith was a cool customer or maybe I misjudged her. She’d been nice to me after the Ballantine thing like nothing ever happened. She caught me at the end of my shift coming out of the Ladies’. “I guess you’ve heard,” she said.

“I hear a lot in a day’s work.”

“He’s going to ask me this weekend.”

I tried to slide past her. She touched my shoulder. “I want him to propose to me at the racetrack this Saturday. In the winner’s circle. Tell me that isn’t a brilliant idea!”

“There’s a reason he doesn’t go to the track, if you recall.”

A smile spread across her face like newspaper burning. “That’s what’ll make it so special. He’s got to confront his weakness, or it’ll rule him forever.”

“Are you going to tell him yes or no?”

She looked disappointed that I had to ask.

Yeah, I thought, that’s what I thought.

 

Word flew around the Hapooba that the Monk was going out to Belmont. Elizabith got him all duded up for the occasion. Trim and a barber’s shave, A&S’s for a tweed sport jacket and brown loafers.

“You look just like a college professor,” she said, with that way she had of being proud of the wrong things.

Comes Saturday, and the Monk plays it like it’s no big deal. He’d gone over the Racing Form the night before, and he had his plan. The fourth was his money race. He had a vision of a forty-to-one shot, Adios Amigo, that had shipped up from Argentina and loved the turf. “Gate-to-wire,” he said. “In the lead every step of the way.”

I hoped so, because I was putting the thirteen hundred bucks I’d saved on that horse. If you can’t win at love, money is a decent place bet.

Elizabith threw the day’s plans off-kilter by showing up late. No apologies. In her mind she’s the finger-snap that brings life into motion. Nobody grumbled out loud. It’s the Yoko rule. You don’t grouse the leader’s girlfriend. Except for Little Stevie of course. This time, good for him.

We split up into two cabs. Derf, Elizabith, and the Monk in one. Me, Rick, Morocco, and Little Stevie behind them. Stevie sat up close and pressed his skinny leg against me. It was a warm day. I was wearing my red blouse. My hair was up. A good crowd was there but not too mobbed. Maybe fifteen thou. Elizabith was wearing a wide hat and a green dress. She looked a little like Audrey Hepburn. Not as much as she’d like to. We sat out the second and third races and everyone was getting antsy. We went down to the paddock to watch the runners for the fourth get saddled up. I tried to see inside their eyes; some key to the heart. But the Monk was right. If you hope too hard, it clouds what you’re looking at, so you can’t know what you’re seeing.

Elizabith was right alongside the Monk with her stupid hat flapping in everyone’s face. “I have an announcement,” she said. “My dissertation is going to be published and you’re all in it.” Nobody knew what the hell she was talking about, but she planted a loud kiss in the middle of the Monk’s blushing forehead. “And now we’re all going to give our betting money to Monk, and he’s going to walk to the window and place our bets for us.”

That took everyone’s breath. Except Little Stevie, who blurted out, “The hell I will.” Mrs. Derf started to referee, but Elizabith was in no need of assistance. She stood right up to Little Stevie, and I had to laugh because they’re both the same size and she could probably cream him.

“After all he’s done for you.” A hot circle of sunlight glinted off her glasses into a bullet hole circle on the Monk’s forehead. “I think you owe him this much.”

“I’m feeling a little dizzy,” the Monk said. “I’ll sit here a while and let people do as they please.” But Elizabith wasn’t having it. “It would mean a lot to me if I could help you do this one thing that you’ve never been able to do.”

“You know I’d do anything for you.”

“You don’t understand,” she cooed. “This is for you.”

He couldn’t refuse her, and what could the rest of us do but hand over our bankrolls. He lumbered away from us like a car with used parts heading across country.

I trailed a few lengths behind him, keeping out of sight, hoping somehow to be a shield, to keep bad thoughts at bay. As he got closer to the window I could hear the chatter.

–The three horse is a lock.

–Are you shittin’ me?  He dies at the quarter pole. It’s the eight.

I put myself inside Monk’s brain and broadcast a steady pulse of Bet the five, baby. Bet the five. Do it for me. Five. Five. Five.

Just before he got to the window a voice behind him asked who he loved, and the Monk whispered, “the five,” like it was a prayer, so it would be the last thing he heard. But the guy said, “Horses from south of the equator get dizzy running in the north. No chance he can win. I got the nine.” The next moment it was Monk’s turn at the window.

He came back and handed us our tickets. We all looked at them like he’d just drowned our pets. Everything was on the nine horse, Hopeful Dancer. Elizabeth showed us the two-dollar ticket she had bought on her own. “Well, at least I bet the five,” she chirped. And when the little Argentinean colt ran away from the pack and won by eleven lengths just like the Monk said he would, she was the only one screaming her head off. She flounced through the crowd to the cashier’s booth and came back with a few of her college friends who were celebrating like lucky distant cousins at the reading of a will. One of them was older and dressed just like the Monk, only he looked a lot more like a real professor.

“What do you think of my little girl?” the Monk said as he came up alongside me. “She’s the only one of us who bet the five horse.”

“Yeah. Isn’t that something.”

“She has more faith in me than I have in myself.  He showed me the engagement ring and asked if I thought she’d like it.

“You really want to know what I think?”

“I’ve always valued your opinion, Ray.”

Elizabith was headed back toward us. I saw in his brown eyes I was the only one he trusted to save him. Another step and she’d be in earshot. He was telling me to put the final word in his ear.

And I did.

She never showed up at the Hapooba again. Nobody ever mentioned her name. The diamond guy refunded half the ring money back, but the Monk never handicapped another race. Totally lost the vision. Without the goose laying the golden eggs, the party was over. Morocco and Rick moved down to Lauderdale and opened a car wash. Little Stevie accused them of stealing his idea. The Hapooba became a bowling alley. Then a nightclub. Then a skating rink. Then condos. Through it all, the Derfs held onto the land, courtesy of Mrs. Derf.  Don’t try to guess what it’s worth today. Me, I dealt blackjack. First in Reno. Later, on the sacred Indian ground in Connecticut. Hit a few Daily Doubles in the romance department but never the long-term exacta combo.

Monkeyshines goes off the longest shot on the board, at fifty-six-to-one. He figured to finish tenth in a nine-horse race. To stop on the far turn for a bowl of oats. Or a dog runs onto the track and bites his leg. But less likely than all those occurrences, he wins. I’m not saying he wasn’t wheezing the last furlong and wavering like a scarecrow in the wind. But on this day, there are eight horses worse than him.

I’m not sneezing at the money. Fifty-six hundred’ll do me just fine. And maybe it’s a sign that the Monk understands I did the right thing back then, that he knows I was the one he should’ve bet on. Frankie the bartender pours me a Double Jack neat before he goes on break. The glass is to my lips when there’s a roar from the crowd. People rush to the TV screens. All the numbers are flashing. There’s been a Steward’s Inquiry. The jockey on the beaten favorite has lodged a complaint of interference against the winner. “Hold all tickets,” the announcer’s voice says.

The replay of the race is projected from a bunch of different angles, and yeah, maybe Monkeyshines brushes the other mount’s flanks in tight quarters. Maybe he blocks his path for a second, but it’s nothing. Incidental contact at most.

And then bing, just like that, they take Monkeyshines’ number down. He’s disqualified and places fourth. What am I supposed to do with this information? The Monk sends me a horse from the afterlife, it wins, and then this?

Combover fills the airspace behind my ear with a “HEY” of sour breath, snarls at me like I was a lesson he should’ve learned, then sprinkles the confetti of his two-dollar ticket into my drink. Frankie sees what happens and flares up to do damage. “Nah…” I wave the whole thing aside. “Incidental contact.” He comps me a fresh one, which is cool. A victory drink and a consolation drink go down pretty much the same. In the end the glass is empty and the only thing that matters is what happens next.

My way out takes me past the ring where the grooms are leading the field from the last race back to the paddock. I like the smell of horse. Always have. It’s the afterlife of honest work. Even after the race is over it’s just as hard to pick the winner from the also-rans. I’m walking alongside the sliding barricade, stride-for-stride with, yeah you guessed it. It’s Monkeyshines. I have the urge to pop him with a closed knuckle right upside his skull. But the way he’s holding his head, it takes me by surprise, does not look like a loser. He’s kinda proud. And for a second, I catch his eye and it’s like I’m looking inside him and he’s saying, I gave it my best shot, I hope you know that. And I think, yeah. Can you ask anything more from anyone. And instead of clonking him, I reach over and give him a good scratch behind the ear.

The mounted steward rides up fast at me. “NO TOUCH!”

“It’s okay,” I say. “We go way back.”

On the way out I see Combover scrounging the grass through discarded tickets hoping to find a winner. Probably as good a system as anything else. I slap my folded Racing Form into his gut and leave it. “Next race,” I tell him. “The Eight horse. An absolute lock!”

He beams his thanks. Then, “Hey. Can you spare a friend a buck-sixty?”

***

Hal Ackerman’s short fiction has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Fiction, The Idaho Review, New Millennium, The Pinch, Southeast Review and Gemini, among others. Ackerman has published two “soft boiled” murder mysteries featuring Harry Stein, a 60s counterculture PI.