Yuletide Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 4) (7 page)

“There’s a point in this where you explain what it has to do with your sure thing, isn’t there?” I asked.  I was already signaling the diner’s one employee that I was in need of more coffee.  In another hour I was going to be sober enough to start drinking again.

“Beautiful Pete
is
the sure thing, mister.  See, all that was a long time ago, now he’s a lot older and he’s not winning so many races, but his boss won’t let him off the hook, right?  Pete wants to retire, but because of all the trouble he got into over the years he’s got a bunch of back-pay owed to him that he can’t get out of the guy.  Like, the boss, he’s taking revenge on Pete for being such a pain the ass.  So I heard, at least.”

“You’ve heard a lot.”

“The jockeys like me.  Most times I don’t even gotta hide any more, they just forget I’m in the room.  Anyway, so Pete’s on his last tour one way or another.  The last race he’s gonna be in is this Thursday at the Aqueduct.  Then the whole team heads South for the Mexico circuit and he ain’t planning on being a part of that.  But first, he needs to win
one
race.  That was the deal he made with the boss, right?  He wins the race, straight-up, he gets his back-pay, everybody’s happy.  But—and this is the best part—to stick it to him one last time, his boss is making him ride the worst nag in the stable.  I mean, this horse hasn’t won a race one time.  The jocks nicknamed her ‘glue factory’, that’s how bad she is. But since it’s Pete’s last trip around the track, everyone’s gonna lie down for him regardless.  He could run that race on foot and cross the tape first, you understand?  But riding glue factory, that’s even better.”

“I’m not sure I
do
understand,” Santa said.

“The nag’s never won,” I said.  “So the odds will be long.”

“
Exactly
.  So this is my dilemma.  I got a horse that’s gonna pay back on eighty to one, and no money to put on it, and a debt to clear that I don’t even really owe to the one guy I used to trust to make these kinds’a bets for me.”

“That is quite a dilemma,” I said.  “What’s the actual name of this sure thing of yours?  I assume the horse doesn’t race under the name
glue factory
.”

Davey laughed.  “Yeah, right, like I’m givin’ that up.  Listen fellas, I gotta take off.  I got until Thursday to find someone to make that bet, and time’s wastin’.  Thanks for the food though.”  He got up.  “Also, sorry about the thing with the vase.”

“Do you have a place to stay?” Santa asked.  “Because if you want…”

“No, no, this is what I was saying.  Everyone meets a kid like me, they wanna save me, but I don’t need saving, even from Santa Claus and whoever his friend thinks he is.  Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

“But still…” Santa was looking at me, expecting some sort of volunteerism on my part, but I wasn’t sure how much of what the kid had said was worth believing.  Even the part about living alone on the streets.  I was pretty positive none of it was fully true, but I was much more cynical than my friend and, really, more cynical than most other representatives of the human race, so it was difficult to tell if I was reacting appropriately.

I did know, on some basic tribal level, that having discovered a ten-year old living on the street—assuming, again, this was true—I held some sort of responsibility for his wellbeing, just by virtue of being an adult.  But I’d known a whole lot of street urchins in my life and he seemed considerably better adjusted than most of them.  My impression was, he would be no better with my assistance than without it, and likely had a long and admirable life of crime to look forward to whether or not I interfered.

Santa was coming from a different place, though.  He wanted a way to keep Davey around that didn’t involve coercion, and could only think of one.

“If someone were to place that bet for you,” Santa said, “How much would it have to be?  Just hypothetically?”

“Hypothetically?” Davey said, smiling.  He returned to the table.  “Hypothetically, how much money are you looking to make?”

*   *   *

“It’s a scam,” I said for perhaps the fiftieth or sixtieth time.  It was my new mantra, replacing
there’s no such thing as ghosts
, and I expected to be just as right about this one. 

Four days had passed since Santa had struck the deal with little Davey, which was as follows: on Thursday afternoon, they would meet at the track and enter together, at which time Davey would give Santa the name of the horse and he would place the bet for both of them.

Only after the horse won would Davey give Santa his share, which was said to be in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars.  I considered it highly unlikely he actually had that much money, but since he wouldn’t get his cut of the winnings without first proving he had the cash, the angle escaped me.  For his part, Santa was putting five thousand dollars on the horse.  He could spare it, and was likely planning to split the winnings equally regardless of how much of the bet was his and how much was Davey’s.  Santa was that kind of guy.

The name of the horse remained unknown up until a half hour before the race, Davey claimed, in order to protect his investment.  This was a little silly, because if Santa was in any way dishonest he could just keep all the winnings, regardless of when the name was revealed.  But that was how they’d worked it out.

I was cut entirely out of the proceedings, which was fine.  Gambling is one of the oldest and worst inventions in history, and I grew tired of it a few thousand years ago.  That was why, the day before the race, I was still telling Santa he was being scammed.

“Stanley, you have no faith in human beings, even young human beings.  I think we have firmly established that by now.”

We were at a bar again, but not O’Shea’s.  Since discovering the subject of our conversations could well be listening in, we’d taken to frequenting the next-nearest Irish pub down the street.

“I’ve earned this distrust honestly, over many centuries.”

“So you have.  But you’ve lost the capacity to be pleasantly surprised by humanity as well.  You’ve lost hope.”

“I thought you were going to find it for me.”

“I was, but you may be a lost cause.  Besides, we’ve been over this.  Davey has nothing possible to gain.”

This was the biggest problem with the scam argument.  Santa was taking his own money and walking it up to the window himself and placing the bet.  If he lost, he lost, but the kid wasn’t going to gain anything from that loss, not unless he also owned the track.

“Maybe it’s another prank,” I said.  “Like with the vase.  He wasn’t getting anything out of that either.”

“Of course he was!  He cleared his own conscience.”

“Because he didn’t have the money to buy it back himself?  I’m not sure he has a conscience.”

Santa growled into his beer.  “Any other man, Stanley, I’d tell them an appropriate story and they would feel better about themselves.”

“You’re the one who thought I needed cheering.  I never asked for that.”

“Of course you do!  It’s Christmas!  Everyone should be happy at Christmas!”

Christmas is a pretty new holiday, really, at least as far as how it’s celebrated now.  It was on the calendar for a long time, but only recently became the kind of big deal that involved otherwise-total strangers demanding cheer.  That said, there were always events like it: harvest festivals, royal birthdays, religious anniversaries, and so on.  One or two made me legitimately happy when I participated.  For instance, anything involving sex as an act of celebration I am entirely in favor of.  But that’s not the sort of thing one expects out of Christmas.  This is a holiday for family and friends and happy memories of childhood, and I don’t have any of those things.  I can’t celebrate it the way other people do, in other words.

Interestingly, neither could Santa, which made his general sense of optimism and default state of happiness perplexing enough to continue to be around.  As much as he was trying to figure out how to get some Christmas spirit into me, I was figuring out where he even found the energy to have it himself.  Granted, questioning why Santa Claus was happy in December was a strange place to find myself, but this Santa was real, he was actually an imp, and he was stuck with the same bunch of humans as I was for the other eleven months.  On Christmas Day this Santa wasn’t going to be resting from delivering toys to all the little girls and boys.  He was going to be sitting at home alone, watching a parade on television and drinking, just like I was.  And then it wouldn’t matter how many kids he made smile.

I appreciate that this is a terribly depressing way to look at life, but it’s where I was at the time.

I didn’t say any of those things to Santa, both because I wasn’t drunk enough and because I was pretty sure I already had said some version of it to him in the past week.  He was not compelled by my thesis.

“By your reasoning, if I want to be happy I have to make someone else happy, right?” I asked.

“Yes, after a fashion.”  Unspoken was the hint of a very long discussion on the topic of selfishness and the act of bringing joy to other people for the sake of their joy rather than for oneself.  It was a profoundly annoying conversation we’d already had few days earlier and I never wanted to have again.

“Then I’ll make
you
happy for Christmas,” I said.

“I’m already going to be happy.  Make Davey happy instead.”

“He seems pretty happy.  But you aren’t going to be happy if I’m not happy, so I’ll be happy and that will make you happy and we’ll both be happy.  How’s that?”

He growled again.  “It’s hard to believe you’ve lived this long.”

*   *   *

The first time I watched horse racing I couldn’t understand why everyone was going in the same direction and the riders weren’t armed.  This initial confusion has colored my understanding of the sport ever since, to the extent that I still don’t really get the appeal.  Gambling, certainly, is a major factor, and as I’ve said I’m not overly fond of gambling, or at least not the kind that relies on almost pure chance.  (I do sometimes like poker.)  Beyond that, watching large animals run around an oval a couple of times just doesn’t strike me as overly productive unless one is trying to discern the best quality breeding stock, which I’m told is not the point.

Still, there I was, at the track a couple of days before Christmas, waiting for Santa to make a bet on a horse to make a little boy’s dreams come true.  It was one of the stranger holiday scenarios I’ve ever been involved in—excluding certain Sumerian fertility events I won’t go into here—but it wasn’t all that terrible, because there was beer at the track.

Santa met up with Davey at the entrance.  I wasn’t privy to their conversation, as I’d been told already that my negativity might somehow influence the proceedings in some way, which I’m told more often than you might imagine.  The name of the horse was exchanged, though, and a few minutes later Santa was placing a bet on
Bacchus Doubtful
to win.  It was an incredibly appropriate horse name under the circumstances.

Santa was in an annoyingly good mood.

“It’s been
years
since I was at the track, Stanley!  Can’t you feel the excitement?”

“I’m trying to.”

“If this doesn’t get your pulse racing, nothing will!”

In my experience a racing pulse meant a predator was nearby, so I couldn’t really understand why that was considered a valid form of entertainment, but in fairness I was in a crappy mood. 

I was more interested in scanning the crowd than checking out the racing, anyway.  Searching crowds is an old habit of mine, and probably fundamentally a survival mechanism I’d internalized and stopped thinking about.  I think I do it because it’s always helpful to know if there are any non-humans hanging around worth keeping tabs on.  I find it’s hard to relax in a large group until I’ve done this two or three times.

It wasn’t a large crowd though, so it took only a few seconds.  I didn’t see any demons or goblins or anyone else easily identifiable from a distance, but I did come across an unexpected and familiar human.

“Hey, when’s our race?” I asked.

“Not for another forty minutes.  Should we get more beer?”

“You go ahead.  I just saw an old friend, I want to say hello.”

He treated me to a raised eyebrow, because generally speaking all my old friends are dead, and he knew that.  “Well don’t be too long or you’ll miss it,” he said.

The person I saw wasn’t actually a friend, and likely had no idea who I was.  I only had a dim notion of his identity, but I was pretty sure we shared a common associate.  It was the guy who’d threatened Davey in the alley.  It had been dark in that alley, but I was sure I was right about this.  There was a certain sloped-shoulder quality about the way he stood that was hard to mistake.

I’d seen him pacing in the back of another section.  My intent was to talk to him and maybe assess how much of the kid’s story was fact-based, but before I got to where I’d spotted him he had slipped under the grandstand.  Suddenly I was tailing a stranger with likely mob ties.  This is almost never a good idea.

I located him again a couple of minutes later, beneath the stands and in the middle of a conversation with Davey.  I didn’t know whether or not to be surprised by this.