Missed last week?
Last known situation—
The horses are on the way to the track. And everything is on-the-line…
Ringo Starred (Chapter 5 - part 1)
by Angelique Fawns
Roxie made her way down the to rail to watch the race. Buzz was already at the finish line, as close to the wire as the white rail that separated the crowd from the dirt allowed.
A lot had changed in the five hundred years since the first Kentucky Derby ran at Churchill Downs, but somehow the track itself had not. Most of the rest of the planet had evolved , though almost all of it for the worse but this place had kept its charm.
Every stratosphere of wealth showed up here. The owners and their families lounged in the High Roller Club in real silk suits, Bentleys and Porsches lined up along the valet curb out front. The welfare recipients spent their relief checks in the grandstands, the only place you could buy a beer and a hot dog for two American dollars while gambling the rest of your rent. And in the middle were the regulars like Roxie and her Dad. Housewives, working folks, and pure racing fans.
Roxie loved it here.
Maybe luck was the great equalizer. Sometimes the fixes were in, but she’d never really believed it — that was just Buzz hoping, the way he hoped about everything. What she believed in was the odds on the board, the roar from the stands, the gleaming grace of the horses parading past. There was nothing in the galaxy that made her blood pump like a track. Not even, she had to admit, the morning she’d just had.
They came in through the back gate, past the souvenir stand selling miniature plastic horseshoes and the snack window selling pretzels older than she was. The smell hit her — fryer grease, cheap beer, mowed bluegrass, horse sweat, cigarette smoke layered into the rafters from a century of races. Home.
Buzz was already limping faster.
“Come on, Dad. Let me go place a bet.” Roxie scanned the tote board and her eyes locked on a name three lines down. “I’ve got a feeling. There’s a horse called Ringo Starred going off at fifty to one. Put five bucks on him for me.”
“You know you can’t legally gamble, Roxie. State of Kentucky. Gotta be twenty.”
“Just make it for me.”
“Babe.” He shook his head. “I let you get away with a lot. Lots of trouble. Lots of things I shouldn’t. But gambling is an evil bed mistress, and she’s got a hold on me I can’t shake. I don’t want her to grab you too.”
Roxie threw her head back. “I could walk up to any man here and get him to place the bet for me.”
“And then what? I gotta beat him up?”
“I don’t know who the enforcer in this family is anymore, old man, but it ain’t you.”
Buzz cracked a grin. “I’m hoping to retire on this next bet.”
He pulled out the fold of dirty American dollars — the eighteen hundred from the Nova Outrider, plus whatever he’d had in the front-hall drawer — and walked up to the kiosk before she could grab his arm. She watched him slide every single bill across the counter.
“All of it. On Hay Jude. Race nine. To win.”
“Dad.”
“Don’t, Rox.”
“Dad.”
“It’s coming in, baby. I can feel it in my teeth.”
She stared at the board. Hay Jude. Fifty to one. Same odds as Ringo Starred. Two long shots in a fourteen-horse stakes field, and Buzz had just dropped two thousand-plus dollars on the wrong one.
“At fifty to one I’ve got a better chance of my mother walking up and giving me a long, big hug than that race coming in for you.”
The joy slid off her father’s face for a moment, and his jaw did the thing.
“Come on, Buzz. If you won’t let me gamble, at least tell me who she was.”
“Your mom was no good, honey. She was around just long enough to leave me you, and then she was gone.”
His eyes shifted.
That little flicker to the left she’d been clocking since she was six years old. Buzz Vega had a hell of a tell at the poker table — and he had one right now, in the middle of Churchill Downs, telling her every word out of his mouth about her mother was a lie.
Tune in next Wednesday and join Roxie as she pushes Buzz about her mother. Plus, that horse race is about to go off…
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