Someone behind her shouts an epithet.
Even here, the inevitable violence.
Ella, a few gulps into her beer, goes back and makes herself a Bloody Mary. The ingredients pour themselves out of their bottles. The stirrer shimmies its way out of its plastic box container and dances inside the glass. A brief promenade out to the track and she sees more of the bedraggled track-dwellers. A few of them congregate around a bench and chat, catch up, wonder out loud about the tactile realities of their world. The game, the kids, the front lawn. Many of them don’t pay attention to the races, the track often unoccupied for long stretches of time. There are some kids in leather jackets and fitted caps playing reckless games of tag, hopping over the metal benches and their dividers. Other white kids either pick at their fathers’ collars when they’re being carried or crush empty beer cans beneath their feet.
How much of that little girl’s lunch money for the year had been put on a horse that will run in a few hours?
If you had an addiction, Ella says to the Kev in her thoughts, you wouldn’t let your kids get in the way.
Back on the terrace, Ella steals a program and, perched over a small table in the front courtyard, scans for the next race.
The program lists, for her race, seventeen horses, and Ella smirks when she sees their names. Morning Glory, Valley of Lillies, O’Doul’s Revenge, Corp d’Esprit, and on it goes, random phrases purloined from a number of languages, meaning nothing except what significance the phrase held for the horse’s wrinkled white owner. Ella had seen some of the horses out front on the track while another made a lazy trot around, its jockey swaying in the saddle. Testing the hooves maybe or engaged in some other esoteric ritual Ella can’t begin to understand.
These outings fill her with a gleeful cruelty. She’d walked around these white people invisible, on the racetrack, in the trailer park villages, outside the pubs, and seen nothing but squalor and waste. In some places, hypodermic needles litter the floor and babies, when they cry, reveal teeth rotted by the Mountain Dew that’s cheaper than the milk their mothers want to buy. She wants to show this to Kev. See how little they are, brother. Knowing that jail tries to tell someone that all their betters are on the outside. They’re not better than you out here, Kev. None of them are.
In the larger building, Ella lowers her shield to bet on an Irish horse to place and a French horse to win. If Kev were here, she’d tell him, “Logic says, you can win big but you can only lose small.” And Kev would take maybe two and a half seconds before pointing out the holes in her proof, the missteps. But you don’t go to a racetrack to win money, these white people have taught her. You go to lose money. And what did it matter? she would ask him. She’d get their money to magically reappear, stolen from someone else’s pocket, or maybe pulled from thin air with her Thing.
The French horse has the longest odds. But Ella doesn’t care, not yet. Her gray horse—already “hers”—puts in a stronger-than-expected showing, but finishes middle of the pack, not even enough to show, though she had bet on it to win. Ella approaches the betting machines and gives them more money, punches keys and presses buttons according to the day’s philosophy, which has been, and remains, that if you bet long you can only lose what you put in, and if you bet long, you could win so much more than that.
Ella found the first race more amusing than thrilling, but it has gotten her going, and she watches the next Derby race and the next Belmont race, both close, on screen. She’d chosen her Derby horse quickly. In a race with seventeen horses, there was no hope. The next Belmont race promises more. Ella vacillates between Number 1 and Number 3. Number 1 has 10–1 odds, and Number 3 starts out 6–1.
Trackside, she fishes a coin out of her pocket. For an instant, the sun peeks through the cloud cover to glint on the thing. Her smile has wickedness in it. She flips the coin, and it stays in the air longer than coins normally do. It lands in her palm, and she slaps it onto the back of her free hand. Number 1 it is.
She flips it again, not playing with it this time. Horse Number 1 again.
She returns to the machine and bets on Horse Number 3.
The race begins. All around her, faces spasm in ecstasy and panic. Fists pump, betting slips crinkle, backs seize, shoulders tense. Feet tap. Stomp. Knees jitter. When the race finishes, an obnoxious bow-tied frat boy runs to a white girl in a hoodie and shouts, “We just won one million dollars!” on a 5–2 horse.
“Fuck that guy,” Ella mutters.
Then she hears a ghost of Kev whisper in her ear, “To win a million on a 5–2 horse, you have to already bet more than you should have. They didn’t make that much,” he says, smirking like he’s seen this many times before.
How often now had she come to watch white misery and provincial white joy? She has the ease of someone who has walked through sewer water before, knows to take off her shoes and socks and roll up her pant legs, knows the routine of watching for detritus, for broken glass. How much time has she spent watching these people? With them but not of them? She feels suddenly assured. This is what I did when I vanished, she hopes she can eventually tell Kev. Show him.
Around her, people split $10 and $5 bets on a few horses, one to win and maybe a few others to show or place. The seasoned ones mark up their programs and have pockets stuffed with tickets that will later litter the floor in pieces.
The next Belmont race starts off and Number 3, around the halfway mark, slips back. Number 1 breaks ahead, snaps the tape by a sizable length, and Ella watches it gallop away with the $260 she would’ve won if she’d listened to that damn coin.
The sky has started to darken.
Back at her kitchen table with its view of the surveillance tower at the top of the hill and the mini-tank at the corner of 145th and St. Nicholas and the mechanized orbs doing their controlled flight over Sugar Hill, night has fallen.
Ella has seen nothing but hospital rooms. At Mama’s bedside, her hand on Mama’s while Mama sleeps, swimming deeper and deeper into Mama’s mind, then letting the current pull her wherever it wishes, she sees nothing but hospital rooms.
A sound. A beep. When Ella looks up, Mama’s on a table in a small, dark room with a monitor hooked to her, her swollen belly wet with gel, her face turned to the monitor where she watches the heartbeat beep and beep. Ella follows her gaze, watches the green lines trace mountain peaks and valleys, then slowly turn to chicken scratching. In the ultrasound, the grainy image of a fetus moves, then stops. A nurse leaves the room, but there’s someone else there, dressed in a multicolored gown with beads around her neck and wrists. She holds a bag, and the odor of lavender wafts luxuriously from it. The two of them, Mama and the black lady, stare at each other, and Ella watches the black lady smile reassurance into a Mama who looks younger than Ella ever remembers her being.
“I’m anxious,” Mama says. “But I’m ready.”
“You’re ready,” the lady says back. She reaches into her sack and pulls out papers covered in crayon scribblings. Affirmations like “I can do this” and “I am loved” and “I am strong.”
The doctor returns and says to the room, “We don’t want to wait. We’re going to get her out now.” And Ella follows the nurse and her mother and this other woman up several flights of stairs to the labor and delivery unit, and the woman changes into purple scrubs, her sack now filled with snacks she got from the vending machine on the ground floor.
Ella stands by the wall as the doctor, brisk and white, enters with a clipboard in his hands. “Have you had any children before?” the doctor asks without looking up.