“That little bitch looks fast,” she says, nodding toward a lemon-colored dog standing close to the leg of its handler, a black kid in a burnt orange T shirt. “It’s not too heavy to run.”
He watches her watching the dog and doesn’t say anything until she looks over at him and then back at the lemon bitch.
“Is that better, you think?” he says. “Not heavy? Not heavy can mean not strong, right?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she says. “I go by looks, not theories.”
“You go by names,” he says. “Whatever sounds cute.”
“You bastard,” she says just as her nephew walks up. He’s her sister’s boy from Florida, just graduated and jobless. He’s in Memphis, wanting her to help him get on at Federal Express, where she’s an expediter on the line. His problems are that numbers make him dizzy and he’s so homesick for Jacksonville that he sobs himself to sleep every night on the sofa where he sleeps in their den. They’ve taken him to the Southland Grayhound Park across the river in Arkansas to watch the dogs, bet a few dollars, maybe even win a little. There’s always the chance. She’s just found out her husband’s been having a thing with a girl at work. The girl’s divorced, two kids, big bills, all of it.
“Go buy us all a beer, Ronnie,” he says to the nephew and gives him a ten. “Coors Light for you, honey?”
He looks over at his wife who’s still studying the number on the blanket on the lemon-colored dog.
“Whatever,” she says. “Yeah, Coors.”
“Light?”
“Yes,” she says. “Jesus. Coors Light.”
It’s time to put them in the starting boxes, so the black kid pulls the lemon dog away and joins the other handlers who are putting their dogs into the enclosed metal pens. A few try to stay out, like always, and the handlers have to push against them with their knees and feet until they’re all inside and the automatic doors close with a bang. All the dogs bark and yip and will until the doors jerk open to start the race.
When the loudspeaker comes on to announce the race, the fifth of the night, you can’t hear the noise of the dogs any more, and the mechanical rabbit comes flying around the rail, going like blazes, and when it’s just in front of the dog boxes, the announcer says “Here comes Rusty,” in a drawn-out, excited way, and the doors open together so that everybody at Southland Grayhound Park in West Memphis can scream with one voice.
By the time Ronnie gets back with the Coors Light, the race is over and the lemon dog has come in second.
“Did you bet her?” the husband asks.
“Yes,” she says. “What do you think? That’s why I’m here.”
“To show or to place?”
“Not to show and not to place,” she says. “To win.”
“You always try for too much,” he says and sips the Coors.
She doesn’t answer and walks off to look at the next group of dogs being brought up by their black handlers. She wants to pick out a light fast mover, one that won’t get left at the gate or jump over the fence before the race is through, or get shouldered out by something heavier.
“Find a good one,” he calls out. “Something cute.”
When the last race is run, they’ll get in the front seat of the car and Ronnie will get in the back, and they’ll join the hundreds of people looking for a lane back to the interstate out of Arkansas. A few will have fender-benders in the parking lot, but there probably won’t be a real wreck or breakdown until the Southland crowd hits the approaches to the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to Tennessee. Nothing major.
Later that night while Ronnie is trying not to think about Florida and getting on at Federal Express and finally be able to fall asleep, he’ll hear his aunt call her husband terrible names as they undress to lie down together again back across the river, there in the king-sized bed, home in Memphis.
Gerald Duff has published stories in the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Missouri Review, storySouth and elsewhere. His collection of short stories, Fire Ants, was named a finalist by the Texas Institute of Letters for the Jesse Jones Award for the best book of fiction in 2007.
