He used to know certain horses like that-personally-before he got ruled off. Getting ruled off the backside for alleged conflicts of interest and unsavory associations after Mickey went to jail for the dirty bookstore was humiliating and at first inconvenient, but he began to realize in due course that it was all to the good if what you were trying to do was see the whole world of half-mile racetracks and the people and animals that lived on them as one world, and not just a big, all-over-the-place, unseemly business. Of course horse racing was a business too, whatever else it might be, and in some ways he actually found it easier to keep his hand on the long strings if he didn't have to look up close at the valiant and tragic animals and the greedy conniving assholes, himself included, who took advantage of the horses' noble natures. To be ruled off gave him-yes-distance.
Distance helped him to see straight back to his father playing the horses with shrewd joy to the day he died. Long after the old man could limp to the track anymore he had his Telegraph folded on the little table next to the dusty water glass that held his false teeth. That was the one picture Two-Tie could still call up of Dorothy's little girls. Dorothy painted pictures, her husband was in the theater and of course the children were being raised as heathens, but they'd been warned to be respectful in a kosher house. The oldest, Margaret, was learning to read, she leaned over her great-grandfather's paper next to the teeth, looked at all those funny columns with the bold print and the symbols and the numbers and said, Is it Hebrew? and everybody had a big laugh.
His father had earned the reputation of a pretty good handicapper over the years. Anyway he got his diamond stickpin out of the crown of the sport of kings, or at worst he broke even, and it made him a dapper little man who thought good of himself and was a gentleman to his wife and a benefactor to the unfortunate.
He almost passed for a man of the world, Alvin. When it all came out about Lillian-that Preakness Saturday in 1937, when she was riding the streetcar out to Pimlico with her boy, looking pretty in her new hat, the white straw Suzy hat with the green spotted veil, and the roving photographer from the Sunpapers took her picture and she blurted that lie, that she was Mrs. Lillian Samuels, wife of Rudy Samuels of 211 Patterson Park Avenue, although she was still Miss Lillian Murphy and they had been living for four years on Queensberry Avenue in Pimlico, two blocks down from the fence where the first turn rounds into the backstretch; and his mother saw the picture in the Sunday paper and the truth came out-he had a feeling that Alvin would have been philosophical about the Catholic girlfriend and maybe even gone along with a wedding. After all, Lillian was a track clocker's daughter and the real god of the Samuels boys was the racetrack god. His mother threatened to kill herself and wept into her lokshen, but never missed a single meal.
He should have married Lillian. He knew that now. It wasn't Alvin, it wasn't Mama, he couldn't even blame Lillian for forcing his hand with the big hopeful lie-for some reason the doll really loved him-but at the time he was a puffed up young macher with a fat roll and had that sportsman's attitude you shouldn't let a girl get the upper hand. And besides he never could stomach that woodenhead kossack her son. So Lillian went to Chicago where she died, and he moved back home. The truth was he had never really moved out of the rowhouse on Patterson Park, since that's where the all-night card game was, with Alvin presiding, and he had slept there two, three nights a week, if you call that sleeping.
Some would argue, surely, that the influence of Alvin Samuels was not so healthy on his boys-look at Mickey-the bookstore after all was a family concern, and Two-Tie had barely missed going to jail himself. But for better or worse, when it come time to situate his finance business, the racetrack was what he knew, or thought he knew. And years later, once he really knew a little about that type of men and animals, getting ruled off only helped him to see the big picture.
The way he looked at it now, there was something unseemly about a grown man running around from track to track to hustle a buck. In your maturity, if you'd made yourself sufficiently useful to people, if you'd earned a place in their society, let them hoof it to you. Everybody needed money sometimes. Everybody, down to the lowliest hotwalker or toothless groom living in a tack room on a two-dollar dose of King Kong liquor per day, saw his little piece of the picture. Deals didn't have to be stuck together with spit and chewing gum if a man had credit. That's what goddamn telephones were for.
Besides, he had to think of Elizabeth. The year he got ruled off she turned eleven. He had just noticed the old joy had went out of it for her when they drove to new places and walked around. She got a worried look in her eye, and he saw that the round lens of her eyes was a little milky where it used to be clear as jelly. She hunched her shoulders and stuck close to his knee and never even tried to sniff around the barn poles and mouseholes and manure piles at a new track.
So it all came together. He could have fought it. Repeated appeals, screaming lawyers, incessant string pulling and greasing of doors had paid off in similar cases for far more repulsive characters than himself. But he decided not to. Unseemly. He liked that word. Enough was enough. He settled down in Carbonport, right here, on the Ohio side, where he could walk up on the little rise behind the elementary school on Second Street and look down the bluff and across the water at the specks creeping around the brown oval inside the green oval, at least he thought he saw such specks, if the fog was off the river and the morning was clear.
THE FRIZZLY-HEAD GIRL, the young fool's woman, was barking up his heels again with Pelter. She would walk a horse fast, that girl. She liked to hurry a horse, and him too. Sometime she got so fresh she tipped clean out from under the shedrow, carried Pelter in the dirt road and passed Medicine Ed and the horse he was walking on the right hand side. Not if the young fool was watching she wouldn't-he'd fuss with her if she tried that. Must be worried he stick out enough round here already, and for good reason. Anyhow he want everything done the old way, according to etiquette. The cleanest hay, timothy and alfalfa. Best quality pine tar foot dressing-Zeno used to mix up his own, out of used motor oil and turpentine. Best grain. Hundred percent Castile shampoo. And the most experienced old-time groom fool enough to take his job.
Naturally, Pelter go along with the girl just fine-Pelter was a game animal, he was always that, bit of a clown, even before he was born he had jumped round the usual etiquette of the business, for he was a unusual creature on the racetrack even if you been around as long as Medicine Ed, namely, a field-bred horse. Or that was the story. Some stud horse, maybe not the one officially certified on the papers, who knew, had sneaked round or over a fence somewhere and went with his mother. Some name like Home Cookin, she wasn't much of a mare and nobody wasn't expecting much out of her, and she got this witch-eyed long-backed colt who turn into a legend. Pelter. And which, if he could talk, and Medicine Ed wouldn't put it past him, why, what couldn't the two of them say about the type of folks they had fell in with now?