Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

Lupe and her son walk out of the elevator, and she looks as good as I remember, in tight jeans and a white tank top. The kid is wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt and Spider-Man sunglasses. I try to get the front door of the building for them, jerk it twice before I realize it’s locked. Lupe pushes it open from inside.

“They’re serious around here, huh?” I say.

“That’s right, you lowdown, dirty varmint,” the kid growls.

“Jesse!” Lupe snaps, then says to me, “He gets all this weird stuff from cartoons. Half the time I don’t even know what he’s talking about.”

“You like horses?” I ask him.

“Are we gonna ride some?”

“We’re gonna watch them race.”

“Dag-nab it.”

I keep my Xterra immaculate; wash it every week, polish it once a month. It’s the only decent habit I picked up from my dad. He couldn’t stand it when people paid good money for a vehicle then let it go to pot. “It shows they don’t appreciate what they have,” he’d say. “That it came to them too easy.”

Lupe straps Jesse into the backseat.

“Is there TV in here?” he asks.

“No TV,” I say.

“My uncle has TV.”

I ignore him. You have to do that to kids sometimes, otherwise they think every silly thing that comes out of their mouths deserves a response. He’s all wrapped up in a toy he brought with him anyway, some kind of ninja doll.

Lupe starts right in with a story about a girl she works with who misread the numbers on a lottery ticket and thought she’d won. She got on the phone and screamed to her husband and her mom and danced around the office and promised everyone a cruise.

“I felt so bad for her,” Lupe says, laughing and shaking her head. “She called in sick for two days afterward.”

I laugh and change lanes to get around a slow-moving semi with its hazards blinking.

“Hey, check it out,” Lupe says as we pass the truck.

The semi is hauling four huge palm trees, their roots encased in heavy wooden boxes, fronds tied to their trunks to keep them from blowing around. They look like prisoners on their way to execution. Lupe takes a photo with her phone. She’s excited about being out, about the day ahead of us, and maybe even about me. I like that, that she can’t hide it.

BY THE TIME we park, it’s five minutes to post for the first race. A couple of decent horses are running, and I’d like to get a bet in if I can, but Jesse doesn’t know how to hurry yet. He stops to pick up a penny from the pavement, stops again to watch a ladybug crawl. I give up when Lupe kneels to tie his shoe right before we walk through the turnstile, grit my teeth as the announcer calls, “And away they go.”

“Would you have won?” Lupe asks when she sees me looking at a tote board a few minutes later.

“Couple a’ bucks,” I say. “Not enough to cry over.”

We pass through the echoey cavern beneath the grandstand, which is full of horseplayers staring up at TV monitors or hunched over copies of the Form . The same anxiety that tightened my throat as soon as I drove into the place has these men squinting and licking their lips and slapping rolled-up programs against their palms. This hasn’t been fun for any of them for a long time.

Lines have already formed at the betting windows for the next race, and a crowd has gathered beneath one of the TVs to watch a simulcast from San Francisco. “Come on, you motherfucker,” a guy in a Raiders jacket shouts at the screen as we walk by. I glance at Lupe and see that she’s about to say Hey, there are kids here or something, so I rush her outside.

We emerge into the sunlight beside the track, near the finish line. I lead Lupe and Jesse up into the stands and snag three seats. It’s ten minutes to post.

“You guys want hot dogs?” I say. “Cokes?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah!” Jesse chants, bouncing up and down.

Lupe jerks his arm and hisses at him to stop. “One plain and one with ketchup,” she says to me.

“Ketchup, ketchup, ketchup,” Jesse whispers as I walk away.

I HEAD STRAIGHT for a window to put ten on Wilder Thing, the favorite, to win. Then, before I can stop myself, I also put ten on the second favorite. The race goes off while I’m waiting in line at the snack bar, and I watch it on a monitor. My horses come in second and fifth. So I lose, but at least I know how my luck is running. It’ll be dollar exactas for the rest of the day, a ten-cent superfecta if the field is big enough.

Paul pops up behind me while I’m ordering the food.

“Get me a dog too,” he says, shoving a moist dollar bill into my hand.

“What the fuck?” I say.

“Come on.”

Paul is the type of person I need to avoid. He has no goals, no impulse control, no life. Last time I was with him at a card club, we wound up running from some drunk Iranians after one of them accused Paul of trying to lift his wallet. Paul swore up and down they were nuts but then got the crap beat out of him two weeks later for doing the same thing to someone else.

I hand him his hot dog and get no thank-you, nothing, just “You seen Whammy?”

Another lunatic, another crackhead. “Nope,” I say. “I got to go.”

“What’s your hurry?”

“I’m on a date.”

“One of them pay-by-the-hour deals?”

The guy hasn’t showered in days. His teeth are yellow, and he looks like he dressed out of a dumpster. He follows me to the condiment counter and moves in close as I’m pumping mustard.

“You know somebody looking for something like this?” he says and lifts his T-shirt to flash the butt of a gun sticking out of his jeans. “I’ll let it go cheap.”

“Who are you?” I say. “I don’t even know you.”

I push past him, almost spilling the Cokes in my haste. See, I’m learning. That dude is surely going to die young, and I don’t want to go down with him.

“SOON AS A bitch opens her mouth,” a buddy once said, “I stop listening.”

Four or five of us were drinking in a dive where failure hung thick as cigarette smoke in the air. Something contrary welled up in me — a sudden, intense disgust at the hatefulness we used for cover — and I pointed out to my friend that I’d seen him talking to women plenty of times.

“Talking, maybe,” he said, “but never listening.”

I like listening to Lupe. We sit in the stands and eat our hot dogs, and she tells me about her ex, Jesse’s father. I asked for details about him because her and I are going to yank out our pasts like weeds and throw them away. The story is a sad one, but she makes it funny by spelling out the words she doesn’t want Jesse to hear and calling her ex Dick instead of his real name, so the kid won’t know who we’re discussing.

They’d been together since high school, and she married him when she got p-r-e-g-n-a-n-t even though she knew he was an a-s-s-hole. Which was stupid, it’s clear to her now, because of course the guy cracked under the pressure; of course he couldn’t hold up his end of anything. He quit every job he managed to get, f-u-c-k-e-d around on her constantly, and beat on her when he was d-r-u-n-k. She finally had enough of it and got her brothers to come over and throw him out, and every day since then has been a good one.

“I’d like to meet him,” I say. “In a dark alley. With a baseball bat.”

“He’s not worth the trouble,” she says.

“He was the wrong man for you,” I say. “It’s good you found out early.”

“Wrong man, right man,” she says. “You’re all the same.”

“No, we’re not,” I reply. “We come in all kinds of crazy.”

This gets a laugh out of her, and we sip our Cokes and watch the horses for the next race parade down the track. A big roan bucks, almost tossing his jockey, and the crowd applauds. I’m transfixed by a man standing half in the shadow of the grandstand and half in the sun, split right down the middle, dark and light. One step in either direction will change everything. Move, I think.