
All Bets Off
By Richard Skaare
When I died a week ago Monday from life’s complications, I hadn’t quite finished telling you the story about this woman, an older woman – I’m not sure how old — sitting in an unfamiliar chair late one afternoon wondering why she was wearing a nightgown.
Certainly it was her nightgown, her disagreeable odor, the same kind of gown and odor wafting from the parade of bent women clutching walkers, shuffling determinedly, habitually, back and forth in the hall.
She was confused, which embarrassed her. Maybe someone would notice and say she’s crazy. Maybe Helen, the other person in the room, would ask if she’s alright. No matter, Helen said she would be going home soon. But she had been saying that for a long time.
The part-time nurse’s assistant, “Flower” – that’s what it said on her badge – sauntered into her room, chattering loudly about nothing but the weather and her cousin getting married for the third time, and complaining about that always smiling black man who delivered the shrunk-wrapped bundles of laundered clothes to patients’ rooms every Tuesday … no, not Tuesday, Thursday.
Patients? “That’s right,” she told herself, “I’m in a hospital. No, rehab. No, nursing home. No, no, they said not to call it that.”
Panicked, she anxiously scanned for a pen to record whatever scraps of certainty she could recollect – today’s date, the President’s name, how old she was — the questions she was asked when she arrived here — wherever here was. She found paper, pondered a few seconds, smiled about something that came into her mind, wrote down a name and a number, chuckled to herself, folded the paper, and slid it under the tissue in the cuff of her sleeve.
I’m telling you this story because I knew this woman somehow. My mother knew this woman, too, or said she did. My mother didn’t tell me too many details about her and likely made up some half-facts.
I remember now: the woman’s name is Erma. That’s right, I think, Erma. She had almost lost her mind one other time when Ed – Mr. Ed, she called him – her husband of 23 years decided to move out with no reason and no destination, and from what she could gather, no other woman.
It was her fault he was leaving, she knew. Everything was her fault. He told her that, shouted that repeatedly whenever there was a problem looking for blame. Never did he hit her, though. He simply was all tangled up inside.
He had left sometime during a drizzling night in the red Taurus, the only car they almost owned, leaving behind three blank-eyed kids and overdue rent for the apartment in the duplex owned by his cousin.
A week later, bewildered and nearly broke, Erma set out to apply for a job as a horse trainer at the race track. Strange idea, folks thought. What did she know about horses? But the decision made sense to her, at least she thought it did that morning. She had always loved horses, loved books about horses, slept with men who owned horses. But she had never ridden a horse outside a corral. Wasn’t that something?
There she was, standing outside the stables in her makeshift business suit of two shades of blue — a business suit, mind you! – suddenly uncertain why she had shown up at this place. Had Ed worked here, she wondered? Something was familiar to her.
Most of the stable hands ignored her. One seemed to be a gentleman, however, offering to walk her back to her car, but not without intentions. She pushed away his groping, drove home, ate half a baloney sandwich, bit her fingernails, tried to cry, and eased into a hot bath until the children returned from school to remind her of her name.
I said I knew her. But that’s not completely truthful. I really knew her brother, Tom. He was wild, almost dragging me one time into prison with him because we were in this convenience store buying beer when he pulled out a gun I didn’t know he had. He demanded cash from the attendant, but when he found out that there was less than $30 in the register, he said, “Forget it,” put the gun in the back of his pants like the slick guys do on TV, and said, “Let’s go.”
I wasn’t all that surprised by what he did. Under the toughness was a soft heart, which he let show at times, such as when he lit up a smoke while we were fishing and started talking about some noble purpose he was called to. We howled when I said I had once bet on a race horse named Noble Purpose. The horse finished last. That’s when he told me about his sister and horses.
He and Erma had grown up in a vanilla suburb of Baltimore. Their father was a fireman, their mother a gossiper. There was nothing much unusual or exciting about their early years, except maybe Erma’s lucky streak. Seems that she won just about every contest she entered.
Most of the prizes were small: a Bobbsey Twins book, harmonica, cheap doll from China. But then the prizes got bigger and better. In high school, she won a bike, then a week at a summer camp. Even when her skills couldn’t compete, she’d figure out how many kids would likely enter which contests and, if there weren’t many, she’d research and write up an essay or whittle what she thought looked like a bird for a Future Carvers competition. An essay she wrote pulled in $500; a carving $100 and a fancy knife that she later sold.
After high school was when Erma started playing the horses. She spent hours reading about racing, and landed a job at the track’s concession stand simply to pick up tips on what made one horse faster than another. She once dated a jockey under false pretenses, he thinking she wanted him, which she did, but not for love or even sex but for inside information.
Erma got real good at betting. Her uncle laid down the money since she was underage. At first she would shriek whenever her horse won or placed. But she stopped that craziness when a couple of loitering young toughs freed her of her winnings late one night. Bastards! She wished she had that carving knife back.
Before long, she had built a reputation as a tipper. A few Twenties slipped into her palm would get you an almost sure winner in the fifth. If the bet paid off handsomely, she’d go looking for the self-congratulating winner and squeeze him for a 20 percent cut, which she sometimes got reluctantly after threatening to cause a scene.
At 19 came the first pregnancy, and then the second, and her routine trips to the track became infrequent and eventually stopped. But her smarts on racing didn’t stop. Her husband knew a good gig when he saw one. He supplied Erma with race sheets and betting books, paid for a seminar on horse psychology, and even brought guys from the track home for dinner to fill her in on hearsay. Ed became the bettor, based on the tips Erma gave him. Her predictions became his winnings until Erma’s instincts dried up for a long spell, as did his income. That’s when he left in the Taurus.
And that’s why I keep telling you this story. Erma had some juicy inside information a couple of weeks ago on the final race at … you know, that track that begins with “P.” Her brother Tom told me to get the tip from her at that nursing home place where she was living, which I did by slipping into her room when only she was there and asking her for it.
She said real sexy-like that I could get it myself if I really wanted to, just like old times. She started unbuttoning her gown. I sweated, rocked, said “C’mon, Erma, time’s short,” and finally coaxed her to hand over the slip of paper with the horse’s name and race number.
I held the paper tightly in one hand, my cane in the other, and headed toward the elevator, then down and out the front door to the sidewalk. I looked for Tom, yelled for Tom, then heard someone shouting my name. “Ed, Ed, come back,” called out the husky nurse’s aide, Max, who was running out of the home.
“Ed, don’t leave me” came another voice from behind Max. Erma’s. “Don’t leave me again, Ed. We need each other, have to have each other to remember where we’ve been.”
I spotted the red Taurus, my red Taurus, across the street struggling to pull out of a tight parking space, tapping the cars in front and behind. “You’re going to scratch the hell out of my car,” I cried. “Stop, Tom, stop!” I moved into the street, my eyes focused only on the red Taurus, and, wham!, that bus slammed me down into road-kill.
Back inside the home, none of the patients believed the part of my story about the bus, but I could tell they liked thinking about the red Taurus. I’m not sure I believed any of what I said after a while. It didn’t matter to Erma whether or not I was telling the truth. All she wanted to do was to remember my name, and to hum that dang Mr. Ed song from the TV series. That’s okay, she loves horses … she loves me, she says … well, whenever she remembers.