Chris Adrian - The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

The horses thundered around the track every day, a different group. Sired by names you’d recognize. The track stayed hard for the rest of the summer and there were winners — Jack Rabbit Fast, Sun Comet, The Last Laugh. Some of the names didn’t translate into English.

One morning, my brother and I had to take pistols out to the building where the stable hands slept and escort someone to the gate. We came back by the track and Mr. Osaka stood at the rail, watching the horses take their morning exercise. He mumbled and my brother spoke.

“Do you know the secret of a fast horse?” my brother translated.

“No,” I said.

Mr. Osaka mumbled at length and my brother fed me bits and pieces.

“When horses run fast, all four feet leave the ground. They fly. They like to fly. It’s their fantasy. But they have to push themselves back down to the ground, so their hooves can touch the track again. So when you look at a horse, or watch him in a race, see the look on his face and the jockey’s. If they like to fly, that is no good. They must like to push themselves back to ground, to run.”

“Do you bet?” I asked.

Mr. Osaka mumbled. My brother spoke.

“I swore a vow in the beginning never to bet on horses and I have kept that vow. Once, a horse had to be shot in front of me and my father told me, You can see someone’s life in the pattern of their death-blood. The horse’s blood stopped at my feet and it was a sign to me that I should not bet on horses.”

I nodded. Mr. Osaka moved his lips and my brother continued.

“If you were shot right now, and we saw your death blood, where would it go?”

I looked at the ground, which sloped slightly onto the track, and Mr. Osaka followed my gaze.

My brother finished. “Stay close to horses then, maybe that is your life.”

We watched Mr. Osaka walk back to the white clubhouse and he disappeared inside.

They slammed out of the starting gates all summer and soon my brother and I had to make a bank trip to Reno. We didn’t go to a bank. It was just a house on the outskirts of the city; it looked like a regular white-and-blue ranch-style. We put the money in the suitcase on the kitchen table and left, as we’d been told to do by Mr. Osaka. I think I saw the blue sedan following us that day, but I’m not sure. We went to the house later in the week, twice, and the second time, I’m sure I saw it. My brother saw it, too.

We had dropped the money off an hour before and were a mile away from the racetrack when the blue sedan pulled in front of us and cut us off. I knew as soon as they got out of the car they were cops. Two cops, undercover. My brother opened the passenger side door and ran up over the bank, as they pulled their guns. I slammed them both out of the way with my car and took off. There were shots behind me, and as I looked in the rearview mirror, my brother was getting into the blue sedan, following me.

You’ve never seen so many people in such a hurry from anything. Mexican stable boys running into the desert, limos pulling around with half-dressed women, and the whales, sunglasses falling off, waving for them to hurry. Planes taking off. My brother watched the gate. Running an illegal racetrack, illegal gambling operation, weapons, now shot cops. We needed to leave.

A fire started near the horse barn. I was still looking for Mr. Osaka, but he was nowhere. There was a bulldozer next to the airfield, left from the contractors. I started it, bulldozed the fence down, got off the rig and opened the stall doors as the flames licked the wood. The horses took off across the field, into the heat. I watched them, shining, maybe three hundred million dollars of property on hooves, running like they wanted to. The owners wouldn’t be happy, but I had done it. My brother and I climbed into a new truck and cut the corner of Idaho, before slipping into Montana and up into Canada. We took our pay with us, nothing more — maybe we hoped that honorable thing would calm Mr. Osaka. The yakuza were like an ocean, deep and violent, and I knew and my brother knew we would live small lives from now on. If we wanted to live life at all.

It was Saratoga that finally called us back. We were there in August on a Sunday, walked down Main Street, bought a racing paper and then made our way over to the track. Years had passed, we had different names and we’d just done a big deal in Manhattan. One stop at the track before returning to north of the border. We settled in, examined the sheet with golf pencils and went to the window.

In the third race, we were by the clubhouse rail. There was a tremendous field coming around, the crowd was cheering. It was close. The brown blur of the pack slammed past us to the finish.

A young Asian boy stood in front of us. He’d come out of the crowd; I hadn’t seen him till now. He mumbled to my brother and I almost felt bullets piercing my back. Nothing happened. My brother spoke.

“Mr. Osaka says we did the right thing and that we should look for a particular horse in the next race.”

The boy bowed and walked into the clubhouse crowd. Sweat ran down my ribs. My brother held up the racing sheet and I looked at it.

It was the maiden race for Komodo Dragon, blinders on, Lasix, and we checked the tote board. Leading off at 85–1. None of the other names could be it. We went to the window and put it all, over seven thousand dollars — that was the lucky limit we’d agreed to bet — on Komodo Dragon. On the nose.

They brought the horses into the starting gate and bang, ring, they’re off. Komodo Dragon is at the back of the pack and as they come around the first turn, it can’t be. Komodo Dragon is dead last and drifting to the outside. Then it starts. Komodo Dragon passes one, passes two, passes Two-Time Loser, passes Long Johnny. Now it’s Komodo Dragon on the outside and the horse starts to fly, to push itself back to the ground, to fly, to push, passing as though the other horses are standing still. You can feel it in the ground and now they’re headed for the final turn, it’s Komodo Dragon and Rummy, the favorite, Komodo Dragon, Rummy, and the final stretch, Komodo Dragon is flying and pushing and the whip gets him back down on the ground, Komodo Dragon is ahead and further, by a length, Komodo Dragon.

We’re walking up to the window with the ticket and we’re not saying anything. But it’s there in my head and as soon as we’re in the car, safe, moving, back in our own race, we’ll talk about it. Beautiful houses in Vancouver and the chance to start over again, a little safer. To run under another name, in a different city, with better chances, another day.

Chris Adrianis a pediatrician and divinity student in Boston. McSweeney’s published his second novel, The Children’s Hospital, last year, and Farrar Straus & Giroux will bring out a collection of stories called Why Antichrist? in May of 2008.

• I wrote this story back in 1996, not very long after my brother died, and at the same time that I was working on a rather goofy master’s thesis about conjoined twins. As part of the research for the thesis I read interviews with some survivors of separation surgeries in which one twin had died. It was not surprising to read that the survivors all missed their siblings, even though they had been separated as toddlers or infants and did not remember them very clearly. And one person in particular described his life as being shaped more than anything by the subsequent absence of his twin.

At about the same time I had a terrible nightmare in which I was Karen Black being chased around by that little fetish doll from Trilogy of Terror (except it had straggly blond hair instead of scraggly black hair, and was wearing a fancy dress). And somehow the bad dream and the sad testimony became the inspiration for an odd story.