Eddie Kay turned up the edge of his hole card. Beautiful, he said to himself. Ace of diamonds. He already had an ace showing. There were no pairs and no higher card out on the table.
“Twenty,” Eddie Kay said.
The guy next to him, a luncheonette owner, put out forty.
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Luncheonette, Eddie Kay said to himself. Ha! Go for your coffee urns. Eddie Kay covered and raised it another twenty. Silently, the luncheonette owner pushed out another forty. Eddie Kay’s insides squealed. Here you go for your stockpots, you moron. Eddie Kay covered and raised the guy still another twenty.
“I’ll see you,” the luncheonette owner said.
Oh, an imbecile! The best the guy could have — the best — was a pair of tens. Eddie Kay turned over the hole card. “Aces!”
Eddie Kay leaned back in the chair, raised his arms, looked up at the ceiling, and began to stretch. After sixteen hours at the table, he finally was wearing these bums down. Class, Eddie Kay told himself. Class is the father of luck.
“You better look at your pair of aces again,” the luncheonette owner said. “One of them is a four.”
Eddie Kay grabbed the hole card and held it at arm’s length. He cannot read anything that is less than a full yard from his face. And here it was, blurry and wavering: a four of diamonds.
When he woke up in the morning, Eddie Kay leaned out the window and put a match to the ransom note he had written, sending the message up to the heavens in a thin stream of smoke.
The ransom note said, “Dear Lord, I have Saint Francis of Assisi locked in a dark closet. Let me win my bet on the fourth race today at Aqueduct Race Track, Rockaway Blvd., Ozone Park, Earth.”
The religious statue had belonged to Eddie Kay’s mother. He usually kept it on the top of his dresser. Now and then Eddie would ask the statue for a favor, hit a number, catch a winner, draw a few good cards; and if the statue failed to deliver, Eddie would threaten it: “You ought to get a good choking.” This time, when Eddie Kay came home from the card game, he went into a full kidnapping. He put Saint Francis of Assisi into the closet and locked the door. There Saint Francis would stay, a hostage in darkness, until the powers above paid the ransom, a winner.
“You can come out when I got money,” Eddie Kay said.
Eddie Kay lives alone and he likes it because he does not have to deal with other people who are always so nice. But, for the big holidays, he likes people over. Family, old friends. He had invited eight so far, and at the moment he did not have enough cash to entertain a party of two. So he sat at the kitchen table and stared down at the past-performance charts, which were spread out on the floor so he could see them.
The numbers in the form told him that a horse he liked in the fourth race had won his last outing against stronger opposition than he seemed to be in with today. Eddie Kay gathered his papers, went downstairs to his car, a great car, a car that survived the Kasserine Pass, and drove to the track.
The horse in the fourth race ran as if he were in leg irons. Seeing Eddie Kay suffer, a young horseplayer, a college student with thick glasses, said to Eddie, “How could you take that horse? It’s his first time out in a year.”
“He ran last week,” Eddie Kay said.
“Last week last year, you mean,” the kid said. “Look.” He held the form chart up to Eddie Kay’s face. Eddie saw only gray fog, but he would not admit this to the kid.
When he got home, the first thing he did was free Saint Francis of Assisi. “This isn’t your fault,” Eddie Kay told Saint Francis. Then Eddie Kay sat in the gloom of his empty apartment. “I got eight people coming for Thanksgiving Day and I can’t take care of myself,” he mumbled. He looked into the kitchen. “You better have some Swiss cheese left for me tonight,” he yelled at the kitchen.
The next day, Eddie Kay left his work at the Four Ones Car Service, Fresh Pond Road, Ridgewood, and went to Delancey Street in Manhattan, where there is a shop with a big outdoor sign saying that glasses are ten dollars. For ten dollars the man who owns the store holds a black cloth over your face and asks you how the new glasses are. For fifty-nine dollars Eddie Kay received a pair of gold-rimmed glasses that are so big and heavy they threaten to cave in the bridge of his nose.
“New world!” Eddie Kay said, holding the charts against his nose. The figures for a horse called Ruby River soared right off the page. “Hot horse,” Eddie Kay announced to himself. “A holiday special.”
On Tuesday, in the seventh race, Eddie Kay bet everything but his new glasses on Ruby River, ten to one. “Eight for dinner Thursday seems small,” Eddie Kay said as he walked out to watch his sure winner. “Maybe I better ask Jimmy Flynn and his wife and kids. We’ll have a real old-fashioned day.”
Outside, a raw breeze had the small crowd standing with hands deep in pockets. On the track, taking their horses to the post, the South American jockeys were singing to the flat sky. The sounds of their voices mixed with the squeal of the sea gulls swooping over them. On horse No. 3, Ruby River, jockey Jacinto Vasquez bounced lightly as his horse galloped slowly toward the starting gate.
“Do you know the first thing you do to make stuffing for a turkey?” Eddie Kay said to people around him.
“What?”
“Get a turkey.”
He became silent as the horses got into the gate. The sound of metal slamming carried through the cold air, and the horses lunged out. Ruby River took the lead, as Eddie Kay’s figures said he would. In the backstretch, a horse called In Mischief took the lead. “He’ll fade,” Eddie Kay proclaimed. They raced around the turn and came to the quarter pole, where Ruby River appeared to get shot. In Mischief ran on. Olive-drab blood circulated through Eddie Kay’s face.
Yesterday afternoon, a woman on Eddie Kay’s block looked at him holding his burning piece of paper out the window.
“Where are you goin’ tomorrow?” she said.
“Nowhere.”
“What are you goin’ to have?”
“Nothing.”
Eddie Kay followed the wisps of smoke, his latest kidnapping note, as it carried its message to the sky. The note said that if Eddie Kay didn’t get a winner by Friday nobody would ever see Saint Francis alive again.
