That summer, 1987, it was just me and Donny at the track. The other guys from the post office were tied up with family vacations and new babies; even Sharkey was out, having promised his wife a season of off-track betting.
The lack of our usual crowd didn’t bother me. Donny and I went way back. We’d played baseball together in high school. We’d stood up in each other’s weddings. And now we worked out of the same office, him as a carrier and me as a clerk.
We knew others who spent those warm nights in the stands, but they were more like acquaintances, park fixtures. The bluehair who came for the early races and shook her cane at the horses, or Racetrack Rosie, in her lacy getups that stretched over broad shoulders and muscular thighs, and her movie star makeup, which couldn’t hide that manly jaw. And The Genius.
Donny idolized The Genius. No one had the touch like him. The guy made a living at the track, carried a rolled up newspaper under one arm and a racing program under the other, like weapons. His patchy silver hair was always shaved close and his polo shirts freshly pressed, his gut pushing at the fabric. He’d have been a hygiene poster boy if not for that hair growing out his ears, all white and wild, curling beneath his earlobe.
“You laugh,” Donny liked to say. “But that might be the source of his power.”
Some people always seemed to win. If there had to be eternal losers to balance them out, Donny was one of them. A bet from him would curse a six-to-five horse. I don’t know why he kept at it. He’d either overthink a bet or hand across a wad of cash on an impulse. But somehow, just when you thought the guy was nuts, or at least too broke to bet anymore, he’d hit some bizarre trifecta based on the Cubs box score, or his kid’s birthday. Never enough to break even, but enough to bring him back next weekend. It made you think about luck.
If Donny didn’t have money on a race, he’d go down to the rail and lean across. Then, as the horses flew by, he’d close his eyes. It was the only time I ever saw him at peace, like a dog with his head out the car window.
Maybe it wasn’t Churchill Downs, but the place had a certain glamour. By the end of the night losing tickets papered the clubhouse floor, gummed into place by drops of beer and French fry grease. There were secret spots, a boxing ring on the third floor, run by the Italians, or the burger counter behind the starting gate where “plain” meant onions only and raspberry was the only frozen yogurt flavor on tap.
And the crowd was like nowhere else. You might stand in line behind a Polish grandmother in orthopedics, or a call girl in sequins. Share the bathroom with a fat cat in linen or the black guy from Public Works. We were all there to put something on the line.
A few weeks into the summer, we heard about a horse, Rambling Willie, an inexpensive gelding from Ohio, with an obscure pedigree and bad knees to boot. His owners tithed twenty percent of Willie’s winnings to their church and rubbed his legs with olive oil and sheep’s bile. One day his lameness just disappeared. The announcers started calling him “The Horse God Loved.” When he came to Sportsman’s Donny bet him to win big and he did, broke the track record, 1:54 3/5, and after that Donny started showing up with a little gold crucifix around his neck. Janet, his wife, brought him to her church. He even quit swearing, which worried me. Donny was wound tight, real energetic, and a guy like that needs a steam valve.
It was a week after Donny won on Rambling Willie that we first heard about Eye of the Storm.
“Remember that name,” The Genius said, leaning into our row. “He’s running three Saturdays from now.”
“He a cinch or what?”
“This horse is more’n a chinch. He’s a monster, monster and a half. From nowhere, Florida. Solid 1:55 mile.”
I whispered to Donny, “How fast you run a mile?”
“In high school, four-fifty. Now…maybe five?” He grinned.
“Five minutes my ass.”
“I walk ten miles a day.”
“Yeah. Walk.” Sometimes I envied those guys their carrier jobs. While I sat behind a desk all day crunching numbers in an office with one scratched-up window, they were out in the world, getting suntans and chatting up housewives.
“One of these nights we should hide out til they close, take a lap. I got a stopwatch.”
“Look at the numbers,” The Genius said, brandishing a racing form. “Doesn’t take a mental giant.”
“We’ll see how the odds look,” Donny said, fingering his crucifix. “And what my old lady says about me being gone another Saturday night.”
As much as he joked about his “old lady,” I knew Donny liked being married, liked being a dad. Birthdates, anniversaries, he remembered all that stuff.
“Wait a second,” he said, clapping both thighs. “That’s the week Janet’s taking Molly to Janet’s parents’. They won’t get back til late that night.”
“Bingo.”
“I convinced her to fly instead of drive, got them tickets with the cash I won on Willie. Detroit’s too long a ride with a baby in the car.”
It was funny, if a little soft, that Donny referred to his four-year-old as a baby.
Janet had come to the track once last year, left the kid with a babysitter for the first time. Friendly girl, baby-faced with a South Side accent. She and Donny made a few two-dollar bets and lost. She was quiet at first, then started getting agitated; I heard her call a horse “shithead.” Then she bet a long shot named Lord I Apologize. He was neck and neck in the stretch and won by a nose. When they called it for him, she jumped so her feet hit her ass. All for sixteen bucks.
She put it back right away, then went home early. You could tell it pained her that Molly was with a babysitter. She kept running up to the payphones. And the track wasn’t really what she’d expected. Later she told Donny, “It’s not like in the movies, that’s for sure. Weird smell.”
*
Eye of the Storm wasn’t running until the seventh but when I got to Sportsman’s during the five-minutes-to-post call, the lines at the window already stretched past the bathroom. There was a charge in the air. The fluorescents seemed brighter; conversations hummed at a higher pitch. A sense of import swirled overhead. Something big was imminent; the feeling was as unmistakable as the smell of grilled onions. Everyone was talking about Eye of the Storm.
“Monster and a half, right?” I said, stepping up alongside The Genius.
He riffled his cash, placing all but one bill on the counter. He shoved the wad under the glass and said, “A monster’n three quarters.”
Donny met me during the fifth race; he looked spiffier than usual that night, button-down shirt and gel in his hair. Janet and Molly were due back at eleven P.M., and he was going to pick them up at Midway. He went in and boxed the three races after Storm’s with their flight number, 4-5-1.
I had a lot of money on Storm—more than my wife, Felicia, would have liked—but Donny wasn’t so sure. “It’s just too good a story,” he said. “You can’t trust it.” After rolling and unrolling his racing form into a damp cane he threw it down and bet the contents of his wallet on a long shot named Blueberry Morning.
Even Rosie, who rarely bet, had money on that race. “Stormy’s my baby tonight,” she sang. She’d gone all-out, too, with the outfit: a red leather dress with a slit up to here, black gloves, gold belt, and a hat like a peacock’s ass.
“And they’re off!”
Storm got stuck in the pocket early on. He wasn’t even placing until the far turn, when he made a pretty move to the outside and slipped into fourth. Only he didn’t stop at fourth. He passed the third and second place horses like they were standing still. We leaned over the rail, yelling along with the crowd. Storm took the lead in the stretch. By then I was screaming; we all were. My throat burned and my stomach strained and my hand cracked an invisible whip.
I looked at Donny. Blueberry Morning was ten lengths behind but he was no longer Donny’s horse.
“C’mon, Stormy! Go baby, go!” Donny screamed next to my ear, his vocal cords straining at his neck, his teeth gleaming under the lights. Everyone in the house was shouting Storm’s name and the horse knew it. As he thundered past us he turned his head just slightly, to take us all in with one white eye. And then, impossibly, he accelerated.
*
Eye of the Storm had busted the track record. Everyone in the stands became instant friends; the place stayed packed, though on a regular night the crowd thinned out after the seventh race.
In the eighth race the 5-horse, a hotshot two-year-old, lost his footing and scratched. Donny let his losing ticket flutter to the ground, then got up to grab a beer. I leaned over and picked up the ticket—4-5-1—and stuck it in my pocket.
Had you asked me then why I picked it up, I wouldn’t have been able to explain. The action was automatic, instinctive. Now I think I get it: I wanted to absorb some of Donny’s sentimentality, his naked love for his family. I wanted what he had: a woman who worried, a kid. And I had no idea how to get there. Not with Felicia.
When Donny hadn’t returned after the ninth, I went to look for him. It was too early for him to leave for the airport, and he had money on the next race.
He wasn’t in the clubhouse and he wasn’t at the windows, not in the can or buying food. I walked around the sports book where they usually showed baseball games and noticed the small crowd gathered in front of the TVs. There were no games on; instead, the monitors were tuned to the news. I stepped closer.
My hand went to my pocket and I pulled out Donny’s losing ticket.
Flight 451 had barely made it off the runway in Detroit before tipping sideways and blasting into a highway. “COMPLETE DEVASTATION,” read the headline. And under that, “No survivors expected.”
I called Donny’s house from a payphone. No answer. His car was missing from its usual spot near the parking lot exit. Of course: he was going to the crash site.
*
I stopped at home and told Felicia I was driving to Detroit. She didn’t complain, but she didn’t offer to go with me, either.
“You sure they were on it?” Felicia asked. She flipped among three news channels, each broadcasting the same pictures of the wreckage.
“Yeah. Donny talked to Janet’s mother right after she dropped them off. She walked them to the gate.”
“And that’s definitely the flight?”
I pulled the ticket from my pocket and dropped it on the coffee table. “Four-five-one.”
Felicia picked it up, glanced at the TV and bit her lip. For a second I thought she might cry. Finally she whispered, “Did your horse win? The big monster?”
It took me a couple seconds to remember. “Yeah, he did. Broke the track record.” For a second I felt the rush of it all again. Then I looked back at the screen.
I made the five-hour drive in three and a quarter. The Dan Ryan seemed to clear for me, the reflectors and the streetlamps and the billboards hardly registering. Every few minutes, I turned on the radio, then switched it off. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there, or if Donny would have time for me. I just knew I wanted, somehow, to involve myself. To be someone who had helped.
I found him at his mother-in-law’s place in Brush Park, where he and Janet had gotten married. It was two A.M. A handful of people milled around the living room. A wilted grocery store bouquet lay on the kitchen table, still in plastic. The place smelled like garlic. Donny sat in a chair jangling his keys, as if he were late for something. I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked up and said, “The wing flaps were not properly extended.”
*
When the sun rose I drove Donny to the crash site, where guys in uniform poked through the wreckage. The highway patrol had opened one lane and cars crawled past.
Pieces of blackened metal lay scattered across an area a quarter mile long. Everything was flat. Airplanes are so massive, but this one had collapsed into practically two dimensions. We pulled over and stood outside the caution tape and stared; despite the news and rescue crews around us, the air was silent, a vacuum.
Then a shout rose from the opposite edge of the site. A swarm of yellow uniforms filled the area. As we watched on tiptoe, a rescuer emerged carrying a small body. A child.
Donny’s voice shook. “Get in the car!”
I followed the ambulance, sliding into the emergency lane at Donny’s insistence when we hit traffic.
We swung into a handicap space outside the ER doors. Donny was out before I put it in park. I jogged in and caught a glimpse of the little girl on a stretcher. Her eyes were open and her mouth moved. She looked to be about four—Molly’s age.
But she wasn’t Molly. This girl was blonde, pudgy. Doctors had rushed in and we stood outside a ring of shouting people in pastel scrubs. A young nurse laid a hand on Donny’s chest. Donny backed away, didn’t blink. He just kept staring at that kid. I didn’t think I would, but I cried then, watching him.
They eventually discovered what was left of Janet’s body, but after a few days the crews stopped the recovery efforts.
*
I don’t know where resilience comes from. A young guy at work lost his first wife to a brain tumor a month after they got married. A month later he was back in the office. Got promoted, even, and a year after that he was married again with a kid on the way. Donny was different. He took six paid months off—hadn’t taken a sick day in seven years—and avoided the track. “It’s where I won the money for the plane tickets,” he told me. “And where I was when I heard. I’ll never go back.”
I spent a lot of time at his place during those weeks after the crash, looking for gaps left by Donny’s parents and in-laws and neighbors and trying to fill them. I sorted the mail and cancelled Janet’s subscriptions to People and My Savior. I defrosted the freezer and organized stacks of green bean casseroles and sat with Donny through re-runs of Leave it to Beaver. I drove to Osco for refills on sleeping pills. The pharmacist there knew Donny and his family; she always slipped a few extra in the bottle.
Things had gotten harder with Felicia since the crash. I don’t know if the hours at Donny’s created the tension or if the tension drove me out of the house, but I did use Donny’s place as something of a getaway. Though Felicia never said so outright, I could tell she resented how much time I spent over there. She’d make comments like, “Donny’s isn’t the only freezer that could use a defrost,” or, “If I knew you liked grocery shopping so much I would have let you do ours for the past three years.” Once she even asked who had to die in order for her to get so much attention. I did my best with Felicia, or so I told myself. But my heart wasn’t in it. Hers probably wasn’t either, but she had a stronger will than me. She wanted to work on things. She wanted me to want to work on things. She said I should be grateful we still had each other.
Funny how a few minutes can drag on forever and years can disappear without notice. Right before Donny went back to work our boss dangled a carrot in front of me and I agreed to transfer to the Elmhurst office, where I’d be a candidate for supervisor when the position opened up. It was only a thirty-minute drive from Berwyn but the distance seemed much further. Months went by where I didn’t see Donny. I can’t explain any better than to say that, at that point, my life felt like a sham, like ultimately, my choices didn’t matter much. I could stay with Felicia or leave her; I could stay in Elmhurst or try my luck in Boise, Tampa, upstate New York. Some planes crashed and some didn’t and there was no way to know when things would go wrong.
I moved into an apartment in Elmhurst. Dated a string of bar bimbos, or tried to, while the divorce went through. It was a lonely time. And I felt like I deserved to be alone, like maybe Felicia was right and I should have appreciated her more. Tried harder. Our troubles weren’t so big, not compared to Donny’s. But instead of bringing me closer to Felicia, this thought put distance between us. Between me and Donny, too. I didn’t feel quite worthy of him during those dark months.
Ten months after the divorce was final, I met Angela. We kept running into each other at the Italian beef place down the street from my new office. She taught at the preschool down the block. Once we’d established an inside joke about the place’s au jus, I asked her out to dinner.
It’s not the way you’d think, the parts that have to fit between two people. At twenty, I’d thought Felicia was perfect—she loved the White Sox and hated Rush. But that didn’t make it easier to get along. When Angela picked me up that first time in her Nova with old French fries on the seat, I felt a hot thing burst in my chest and I was warm the rest of the night. The woman could’ve been a Communist or a Cubs fan for all I cared. After I met her, things made sense. And she brought me back to Donny.
Once Angela heard the story, she called Donny up herself and arranged a bowling night. While I kept score, they chattered about astrology, debated potato chip brands, mocked my baseball addiction. I’d never dated a woman who got along so easily with my buddies. And Donny, he acted like he understood my absence, like his approval of Angela made it okay that we hadn’t been in touch all those months.
Angela had a friend, Marcy, who lived on Donny’s mail route. I’d met her once. Short blonde hair, cute smile, had a couple older kids from a previous marriage. “I know for a fact she thinks Donny’s good-looking,” Angela told me after we’d dropped Donny off that night. “But she thinks he’s taken. I’ll let her know the score.”
*
I didn’t hear anything more about it and frankly, didn’t think to ask; I was putting in extra hours at work, campaigning for that supervisor job so Angela and I could buy a house, maybe get married. She and I met up with Donny for ninety-eight-cent bowling night at Rolling Lanes every month or so. Things seemed to be going okay for Donny. He was doing therapy, he said. His in-laws had finally gone back to Michigan to resume their lives. It was weird, he told us; now that Janet and Molly were gone, he probably wouldn’t see much of those people. Eventually they’d be out of each other’s lives completely, as if he and Janet had never gotten married. As if Molly had never been born.
It was around this time that they announced Sportsman’s last night of horses. The land had been sold; some jackass wanted to turn the place into a motor speedway. They were gonna demo the whole park. I called Donny right away.
“I was just about to call you, man,” he said. “I heard about Sportman’s. It’s time I went back.” It had been more than a month since our last bowling night and there was something different about his voice, like he’d gotten his old sheen back.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Damn good, man. Damn good. I met someone. You’ll see at the track.”
Of course, when we showed up, there was Donny with Angela’s friend Marcy, his arm around her shoulders, fingers in her hair. They were laughing so hard they didn’t notice us until we sat down next to them.
I looked at Angela and she me gave that I-told-you-so half-smile. Donny introduced me to Marcy, who winked at me. I played dumb. When I asked how they’d gotten together, Donny said, “She was always working in her garden when I came by to deliver the mail, so we ended up chatting.”
Marcy jabbed him in the ribs and said to me, “Took forever. Every day, 11:45, I’m out there holding a pitcher of lemonade, in my shorts, bending over.”
We all cracked up, except Donny, who threw up his hands and said, “I’m an ass guy, what can I say?”
Later, when the girls were in the bathroom and I was buzzed, I said something to the effect of, “Life’s strange, isn’t it?” I was thinking about how we feel like we’re holding the wheel when really, the car’s driving itself.
Donny didn’t respond, just looked out into the track like he was watching a sunset. Finally he said, “It’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, coming back here. It’s actually sort of a comfort. Like visiting the house you grew up in—the bad memories combine with the good and it’s all sort of…holy.”
I nodded and kept my mouth shut.
“That race, Eye of the Storm,” he continued. “My God. Whatever happened to that horse?”
“Still holds the record.”
“What a beast. He had a whole nother gear. Ya know what?” He leaned forward. “As just, you know, a moment, independent of everything else, that race was one of the happiest times of my life.”
Even over the din of the stands, you could hear cicadas pulsing in the trees outside. “How’s that mile time?” I asked.
Donny rubbed his neck. “Five minutes? Maybe five-twenty.”
“You know the demo’s scheduled the day before my birthday?”
“No shit?”
“We never did take that lap.”
“Well—damn. I’m in if you are.”
*
It’s the eve of the demolition, almost a year since that last night of races. Donny’s not here yet, but I can’t wait. The fence leans slightly inward, as if it knows this place deserves a bow.
As I climb the chain link, my knee pops and my arm does that tweaky thing Angela calls “mail elbow.”
The HARD HAT AREA sign provides leverage for my last step, and I’m over. I laugh out loud. After all those years in the stands, this is like high-fiving the marble Jesus in church, or dancing on the floor of Chicago Stadium. The sound of hooves pounding down the stretch fills my head. A few betting slips cling to the rail and a couple seedlings have pushed up from the track. I start to walk.
I pause at the half-mile marker, the far turn where Eye of the Storm started his acceleration. The light poles are useless, dark giants, but the moon is out. This close to the city, there are no stars. Peeling tires squeal from Cicero Ave. and an overlooked sprinkler bursts to life, shooting jets of water onto a small patch of grass near the finish line.
Donny shows up just as I pass the three-quarters post into the stretch. I can almost hear Gil Levine calling the final stretch: Heeeere they come, headed for home!
Donny shoves a foot into the chain link. The fence sings. He vaults over, raises both arms overhead, twirls a stopwatch around his finger, and howls. The sound echoes in the stands. Tomorrow, the wrecking ball, but tonight the steel cuts a sharp silhouette so imposing it seems it’ll leave a mark.
I remembered back to when we were kids—there was an abandoned speedway outside of town and it was like they just shut off the lights and walked away. Vines wound through cars. Oil drum trashcans brimmed with faded pop cans. We’d climb the fence and drink Pabst in the stands. We’d tell stories.
Things don’t get left like that anymore, I know. Too risky. These days you have to think about liability. As if tragedy is avoidable, as if blame is always an assignable thing.
We’ll meet at the finish line. Clap each other on the back, laugh like kids, look out for patrol cars. Together we will make a full lap, the longest mile in harness race history, leaving behind the last prints this dirt will take. Afterwards we’ll climb that doomed grandstand and gaze out over our path, notice how it wanders and drifts, how it returns to the beginning.
“The Far Turn” originally appeared in The Chicago Tribune’s literary supplement Printers Row. It has been republished here with permission of the author.
Kelly Luce‘s story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, won the 2013 Foreword Review’s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her work has been honored by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Jentel Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Kerouac House, and Michener Center for Writers, and has appeared in the Salon, O Magazine, Crazyhorse, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, and other magazines. She’s the editorial assistant for the O. Henry Prize anthology and editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. She grew up in Illinois and currently lives in Austin, TX
