Bucky

Bucky

It was Friday afternoon and the standup bar was busy.  Buckminster Trudgeon asked Warren for two dollars that he might place a bet in the second race.

Warren eyed Buckminster suspiciously.  “Why would you bet on a five-furlong race for two year olds, Buckminster?  I thought you were smarter than that. That is not like you.   Do you have some information you might like to share?” 

Buckminster rarely missed a day at the track.   He bet on the flats and only the flats.  Buckminster was convinced harness racing was fixed and invited arguments on the subject, concluding all verbal exchanges with ‘how many friggin’ times do I have to tell ya?’    Simulcasts confused him and were an occasion to curse the treachery of track officials and the ugliness of progress in general. 

Buckminster Trudgeon stood nearly six feet one and weighed a potato sack or two over two hundred pounds.  He was in his mid-fifties but, to Warren, he still looked like the young man he knew from the neighborhood,  a young man who hadn’t taken care of himself.  People tended to age with a certain predictability.  They took on age lines, lost their hair, grew shaggy eyebrows, saw their skin turn yellow and wattles form under the chin.  Warren supposed that was the way things were meant to be.   Buckminster’s face, however, looked like it had simply lost all muscle support,  his battle with life leaving him no strength with which to hold up his face.  There were no lines, as you might expect, only a sagging breast with eyes.    In Warren’s eyes,  Buckminster’s  entire body seemed to be in a race to see what could hit the floor first.    Apart from the drooping face, his hair was falling away from the top of his head and hung in long black tendrils, unserviced by a barber for far too long.   His chest had fallen onto his stomach and his stomach had settled into his lower abdomen.  His pants hung precariously to his wasted buttocks, defying gravity and forcing people to look away when he bent over.   Even his shoes, worn down at the heels, seem well on their way to becoming moccasins.   Gravity and too many years of booze were gradually returning Buckminster to the earth.

Buckminster’s lifelong love affair, his only love affair, was with alcohol.  When he reached the age of forty-five, doctors gave him some serious imperatives or face an early grave. ‘Your liver looks like an elephant turd.’  commented one.   Buckminster quit drinking but the damage, as they say, had been done.   Never again would he even look sober, his mournful face drooping like an oversized wattle, the eyes struggling to peek out from under heavy, inflamed lids.  He bore the perpetual look of someone whose dog had just been shot.

In his youth, Buckminster had walked the walk of the hockey hero, a respected young man about town, a person who was going places. He was good, he was cocky, and he was told he had what it took to make it to the NHL.  But it never happened.  Usually, he was too drunk to focus much on any kind of a future.  He was unable even to find the initiative to move out of his family home.    Buckminster still lived with his mother and worked hard to keep her from knowing just how much lapse there was in his Catholicism.    He had held jobs at various times but he preferred a position to a job, and found there was not, for him, enough money or satisfaction to be gained from working for someone else.   Nor did he have the skills or resources to become an entrepreneur.  Instead he drifted with alcohol.   And embraced conspiracy theories.

His brain cells permanently sodden, Buckminster, over the years, developed an extensive list of forces out to do him harm.   He was never too specific about why these forces were set upon eliminating him, but he was quite adamant that the facts were indisputable.  Normally, Warren would avoid any conversation with Buckminster, but the sheer diversity of the evil forces besetting the man continued to pique his interest.

The villains changed regularly, often making repeat appearances on Buckminster’s list of pursuers.  The list was a long one, including many obvious enemies of a free and doggedly independent man;  the RCMP, the CIA, the Church, the chartered banks, major oil companies, the Rosicrucians, grain conglomerates, diamond monopolies, and assorted South American drug cartels.  More curious menace came from the SPCA, the Salvation Army, the NFL, and Friends of Charlie Chaplin.

Buckminster stared at Warren, apparently weighing the question, did he have some information to spare.   Buckminster had been sponging for as long as Warren could remember.  The touch was always for two dollars.  It took place at least three times over the course of afternoon and evening.  And it always came with a promise to pay it back as soon as ‘things’ got better.   Who can refuse such a modest request?  was Buckminster’ version of a sales patter.  Several other track regulars were objects in his daily quest for borrowed funds.  Apparently, they, like Warren, treated the loan as a sort of social cost, the price of keeping one of their own, a neighborhood kid whom luck never seemed to favor, from  . . . . well, from something  . .  maybe an early grave?  . . . .  jail ? . . . . religion?    What it did do was allow Buckminster to hold his head up in a way, of not having to scour the infield for inadvertently-tossed winning tickets.

‘You want me to tip you?’   Buckminster glowered, as if the thought of having to share his pick of two-year-old maidens was akin to voluntarily filing an income tax return.

Warren smiled.  ‘Hey, Buckminster, for two bucks and maybe you know something, I figure you could share.’

‘The hell with you, then,’ said Buckminster. ‘I will get the two dollars from somebody else. And kindly refer to me as ‘Bucky, asshole.’   He turned to walk away.   Warren marveled at his efficiency.  ‘Relax, Bucky.’  Warren poked the retreating back and held out the two dollars.  

‘I’ll pay you back as soon as . . . .’  Buckminster shook his head, apparently unable to recall just when he might be able to repay the loan.   He walked away, his semi-Medusa head swaying from left to right, like a man approaching a gauntlet.

Buckminster hadn’t walked far when he suddenly lurched to his left, his heavy frame staggering from the effort, his arms flailing about to find something to keep him from falling.   He collided with a pillar and hung his head to catch his breath, his feet splayed out behind him, like a man about to puke.   Warren searched the crowd to see what might have caused Buckminster’s wild behavior.

The standup bar was a cavernous building set to one side of the grandstand and behind the paddock.  The walls were dripping with television sets, the bettor never having to look very far to find the latest odds.   One end of the bar was lined with Seller and Cashier wickets, the other end with the bar and a food outlet.  The floor contained only high tables, no chairs, a place where a man could stand to study the racing form and sip on a beer.   Prices in the standup bar were reasonable, not like the highway robbery clubs in the grandstand, and the place retained all the flavor of the rail without exposure to the elements.  

It was a place favored by the track regulars – the out-of-work trainers, compulsive gamblers, small-time wiseguys with open-neck shirts, gold chains and bracelets, their noses sniffing the air for situations and people  to exploit, packing plant workers with a ‘system’, middle-aged office workers in rumpled suits, and small-town girls wearing hockey jackets and tight jeans, imagining this was the ‘big-city glamour’ they’d heard so much about.  Among the men was an abundance of florid complexions and weary, I’ve-seen-it-all, eyes, eyes red-rimmed from staring at tote boards and horseflesh.  

The standup bar had its own smell, a blend of beer fumes, cigarette smoke, and fried onions – and its own sound, the high ceiling swallowing conversations and creating a hollow, railway station drone.  On slow nights, the aura was sepulchral, as if everyone was talking in a whisper.  On busy nights, the effect was of great distance, of listening to a conversation through a straw.

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Warren saw a hand reaching out from beneath a counter in front of Buckminster.   The index finger was pointed at Buckminster.   A voice was hissing loudly.  ‘Pow! Pow!  Pow!’ , finger jerking upwards with each ‘pow’.   Warren guessed the finger would belong to Lenny Klem, another product of the old neighborhood, a man whose journey into middle age was even more failure-laden than Buckminster’s.   The Klem family originally consisted of father and mother Klem, one of whom was generally ‘out of the house’ for an extended period, both of them attaching only nominal importance to marriage vows and maintaining a persistent need to form temporary liaisons, usually with partners even more unreliable than they.   Somehow they had managed to stay together long enough to bring four boys into the world;  Leonard, Homer, Lincoln, and Lazarus, the absence of alliteration with Homer being attributed to an especially spirited argument in the hospital, the result of which left Mrs. Klem in a state of recuperation for an extra week.   The boys, each separated by two years, grew up haphazardly, blissfully unaware of their strained circumstances, and fiercely independent.   They would eat anything, do anything, go anywhere, rarely questioning any action that could promise a meal, a bed, a roof, or a drink.  Amazingly, they stuck together, enduring brief intervals when Social Services saw a need to deliver them from their parents’ neglect and dealt them out to foster homes.

Not surprisingly, the boys all entered adulthood poorly equipped for its demands on personal responsibility.  If there was an urban school designed to graduate nothing but wastrels, drinkers, carousers, fighters, and petty thieves, the Klem boys would be their summa cum laude graduates.  Homer went from the tenth grade straight to jail where he remained until he was 25.  The others managed to avoid the law, even as they , habitually and without second thoughts, broke it.  A life skill the three brothers did possess was an ability to avoid institutions – any institution, be it a jail, hospital, school, corporation, and, especially, government.  The Klem boys would take care of themselves.

Warren thought it a minor miracle that Lenny, now 50 something, was still alive.  Booze, too, had pretty much scrambled his ability to think, but somehow he had survived.   He still had the small, wiry frame that took him to the Golden Gloves bantamweight championship back in the fifties,  the only difference being an unusual number of scars.  He bore more than a passing resemblance to Jack Nicholson and used this resemblance often to effect an embarrassing imitation of Jack.  They both had the same sharp eyes and killer leer and, as good as Nicholson was on screen at conveying menace,  Lenny’s leer was something that could produce real shivers.

Like Buckminster, booze became an early focal point in Lenny’s life.    Its effects tended to transport Lenny to some very special places, a world of child’s play, of imagination, of cowboys and Indians.  Sometimes he was Jack Nicholson.  Other times, he was the city’s most successful pimp.  And, often, he was dying.  ‘Doc says I got three months if I don’t quit drinking.  Whatta they know?  I just tell ‘em I quit.  They don’t need to know.

Lenny had obviously allowed beer drinking to take precedence over cleaning up at the track, of keeping a cool betting head.  This was something he did often and now was apparently embroiled in a gunfight with Buckminster, index fingers at ten paces.   Whatever world Lenny had created on this day, it was not a good idea.  As soon as he emerged from beneath the table, perhaps to compare bullet holes with Buckminster, Buckminster lunged forward, with an agility that belied his girth and uncertain health , and grabbed Lenny by the throat.

‘You little squirt,’ he growled, ‘That’s the last time you make fun of me, you hear?   My life is no joke!’  Lenny’s legs began to buckle.  Warren approached.

‘Buckminster!  Leave go of poor old Lenny.   You are going to kill him if you aren’t careful.  He is from the neighborhood, remember.’    Warren suspect the neighborhood was the last institution in which Buckminster had any faith.  He’d long ago given up on the Church and he despised all levels of government, all of whom had, at one time or another, formed a conspiracy to rob him of his life. 

Buckminster relaxed his death grip, his shoulders sagging, but he would not release the now-seriously-pink Lenny.   Warren leaned closer and whispered,  ‘Two minutes to post, Buckminster.’   Buckminster’s head spun around to see who had so generously shared this vital information and promptly dropped Lenny to the floor

‘You’re lucky, you little asshole,’ snarled Buckminster. ‘I will have to wring your sorry neck another time.   I gotta get this bet down.’   He disappeared into the crowd.

Lenny remained on his hands and knees, coughing and spitting, his throaty hack drawing disapproving looks from bystanders.   Warren knew Lenny would survive when he detected the retching man’s eyes scouring the floor for betting slips and salvageable cigarette butts.

‘Did you guys see that?’  wheezed Lenny as he reached out and grabbed a beer from a nearby table.  Warren was impressed.  Lenny could return from the dead with the best of them.

‘Lenny, you cannot go around provoking Bucky with those shooting matches’   Warren knew Lenny hated to be told what to do. 

‘Says you.   We been havin’ that gunfight for years and he never got mad.  He thinks he is a better shot, is what he told me.   So what does he do tonight?   He turns maniac and tries to snuff me out.   He is a menace.  Meaner than when he was a kid.  He should be put away.’  Lenny drained the beer in one amazing draught and peered about for another.  ‘ I tell you, people are crazy.  Crazy.  You can’t trust nobody.  Mother Klem taught me that.’ He paused to belch.  ‘I’ll get that big ape for that.   Nobody screws with Lenny Klem.’  You know I’ll get him, doncha.’

‘Lenny,’ Warren replied, ‘I know no such thing.  Bucky is under a lot of pressure.  People are out to get him.’

‘Sure as hell people are out to get him.  And those people are me.’   Lenny slipped a cigarette out from a pack laying on the table and waved it about to get someone to light it for him.  The cigarette lit, he scuttled off, muttering about revenge and free beer.

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The fifth race was a mile and an eighth, for four-year-olds and up, non-winners in the past year, $5,500 claiming price.  There were no Secretariats in this race.  Warren was not surprised to see Buckminster lumbering towards him, his head still shaking from side to side, his eyes ever alert to spot the assassin du jour.

‘Hey, buddy, lend me two bucks, will ya?’

‘What happened to the two-year-olds in the second race?  Did you lose?’

‘I told you I was getting something to eat.  Why would I bet on two-year-olds?  Smart people do not bet on two-year-old horses.’   Buckminster leaned forward.   ‘This race is different.  Felix Quarry is running a horse.  Blue Spinner.  Number five.   Scales is riding him.  Felix says he has bet two large.  On the nose.  On the nose yet.  No hedge.  I figger that’s worth something.’

Warren stared at Buckminster.   Terry Scales was the leading jockey that summer, so Warren was interested.  ‘Where would Felix come up with two large?’

‘What the hell do you care?  Just believe the tip.  That is my point.  Who cares if it is two large or five bucks?  Felix don’t go around tippin’ people every day.  That I know.  You got the two bucks?’

Warren looked up at the tote board.  ‘It’s early but it doesn’t look like a whole lot of people like your horse.  Twenty-five to one.  So what makes Felix any different from all the other trainers?  They all think their horse is a mortal, uh equine, lock.’

‘For two bucks we gotta debate trainers and horses?   I’ll find someone else.  I can’t waste no more time.’

‘Okay, okay, here’s the two bucks.   If I bet this horse and he runs to form – which is no form at all – I’m gonna cut you off.   It’s bad enough you have to mooch but you know I am a sucker for a tip.’

‘You do what you have to do.  Me, if I can parlay this race, I’m gonna get the hell out of this town.  Before the bastards get me.’   Buckminster pocketed the money and slipped away into the crowd.

Warren watched him go and decided to follow.   How much money could Buckminster raise before post-time?

Buckminster wandered the rail area and the main floor beneath the grandstand.   He put the touch on two neighborhood men.  Successfully.  A third told him to get lost.  Buckminster did not linger to argue the point.

The sellers’ wickets in the grandstand were in the rear, far from the rail.   Buckminster stood in line, his shoulders hunched while he stared at the racing form.  It was a body language warning for people not to bother him, a behavior, Warren had noticed, common to serious horseplayers.   Once a horse had been selected, it was then a struggle to keep the information from falling into the hands of the less-worthy, those who did not do their homework, or immune to the blinding insights of the dedicated horseplayer.   Not to mention people who would ruin the odds.  Special knowledge, gleaned from diligent research and savvy contacts, was the secret to racetrack success and was not to be shared.

The horses were now in the paddock and Buckminster, after carefully placing the betting slip in his shirt pocket, worked his way to have a look at Number Five, Blue Spinner.

Ignoring several security people, he climbed the fence at a point where the paddock met the track.   The horses began to leave the paddock to enter the track.  A few outriders glared at Buckminster, his large bulk a potential source of agitation to their temperamental charges.   Buckminster raised himself higher to get a clear look at Blue Spinner.  At the same time, Warren could see someone running across the infield toward the paddock.  It was Lenny and he was running hard, ducking around people, his rodent-like eyes fixed on Buckminster’s back.

‘Bang, bang, Bucky balls,’  squealed Lenny as he leapt onto the fence and pushed Buckminster onto the track.   Lenny jumped back into the infield and disappeared into the crowd, his cackling dying away in all the commotion.

On the track, a dangerous scene was developing.   Buckminster’s ample form rolled a couple of times and came to rest directly in the path of the four horses remaining in the paddock.  The horse closest to him was Blue Spinner.  Blue Spinner, perhaps reacting predictably to someone who had placed financial faith in him, rose up and threw his jockey, the startled Terry Scales.   At the same time, he tore the halter from the outrider’s hands .  The outrider was having enough trouble trying to stay her horse.  Contagion spread to the other three horses and soon the paddock was a rodeo of bucking horses, jockeys and outriders hanging on and swearing loudly.

Buckminster looked up from the red-brown earth and his eyes went wide with fear.  He rolled onto his side, pushed himself to his feet, and began to stumble down the track.  Running in the loose-packed earth was difficult and Buckminster advanced like a toddler running for a new toy.  ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ shouted several onlookers.

The first four horses were now well up the track, their riders looking back to see what was happening.   As Buckminster staggered onto the track,  an opening was created from the paddock to the track.   Led by Blue Spinner, the horses rushed from the paddock, riders hanging on as best they could, thrown riders scurrying to safety, and Buckminster directly in their path.

When Buckminster looked back to see his pursuers, he reacted by falling on his face.  Blue Spinner, firmly if uncharacteristically in the lead, galloped over Buckminster’ prostrate body.  Warren thought he could hear bones breaking.   Blue Spinner, and his impromptu racing competition, continued up the track, the wrong way, eventually to be brought up by the starter’s gate.   In the other direction, the first four horses continued their long walk to the starter’s gate, leaving Buckminster’ dirt-spattered body twitching in the brown earth.

Warren jumped over the rail and ran to Buckminster’ side.  Handlers and security people soon made it a crowd.  Warren knelt to see that Buckminster was still breathing, a strange rasping sound, a dangerous gurgle.

‘Buckminster!  You’re going to be okay!’

Buckminster’ eyes rolled back to see who was addressing him.  He muttered into the dirt.  ‘No, I ain’t.  I’m hurt real bad.   Didja see who it was?  Was it a heavy set guy in a cheap suit? And it’s Bucky, not Buckminster.’

‘Don’t talk, Bucky.  The ambulance is here.  You’re going to be okay.’

‘No, no, don’t let them put me into that ambulance.  I’ll never come out alive.  Just take me home.  Mom’ll be worried.  I don’t want she should worry.’

‘You need medical attention, Bucky.’

Buckminster coughed, a death rattle if Warren had ever heard one.  ‘Just take me home.  When Blue Spinner pays off, cash this ticket that’s in my shirt pocket and give it to my Mom.   Promise?’   

Warren looked up the track to see Blue Spinner fighting with his handlers,  Back in the paddock, Terry Scales was running around hitting people with his crop,    ‘You got it, Bucky.’   Warren reached into Buckminster’ shirt pocket, pleased to notice at the same time that Buckminster seemed to be breathing more regularly and might, in fact, be okay.

The ambulance attendants began to push Warren away from Buckminster.   Buckminster’ arm reached out, taking hold of Warren’s shirt.  ‘I told you they were out to get me, didn’t I?’

“Well,’ said Warren, unable to resist debunking Buckminster paranoia, ‘What you told me was that someone was following you.   Actually, it was some- thing, something with four legs and a saddle.  You weren’t worrying about a horse, were you?’

Buckminster’ eyes rolled back in his head.  ‘Don’t quibble.  I musta dropped my guard.  Not like me.  Who knew they could recruit horses?’  He closed his eyes, as if silently berating himself for being so unvigilant.

The attendants lifted Buckminster onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.  A track official began to jabber on about how it wasn’t their fault and how the race was ruined and it was all Buckminster’ fault.  Warren hoped Buckminster didn’t hear the part about ruining the race.  Despite the pain, Buckminster was no doubt still thinking about the 25 to 1 odds. 

Warren looked forward to hearing a new conspiracy theory.

Robert Alan Davidson

June 2007