A Stone's Throw by James Ziskin (best story books to read .txt) 📗

“Keep Georgie Porgie out of my hair, will you?” I said, opening an escape hatch for Charlie that he didn’t really deserve.

“I’ll try. But you know Artie Short.”

George Walsh, Georgie Porgie to those in on the joke—which meant everyone at the paper except George—was the rotten-egg smell that hung in the air at the New Holland Republic. When not sharpening his pencils—the only skill remotely related to writing in his arsenal—George strutted around the place like the cock of the walk. Son-in-law of the publisher, Artie Short, he enjoyed, as such, the unearned and undeserved rank of golden boy, in spite of his struggles with spelling, typing, and making sense of the funny pages. His spectacular gaffes and embarrassing flubs were legendary at the paper, viz. his opinion piece on the Godless Cuban Revolution and “Fido Castrel.” As an homage to his witlessness, I’d thumbtacked that masterpiece of finger painting to the board at my desk right after it appeared, and it was still hanging there, yellowing like a stain, fully three and a half years later. His occasional sports stories, which read like last century’s mawkish leftovers warmed up with impenetrable analogies and incongruous, facile clichés, prompted either head-scratching or laughter, depending on the generosity of the reader.

I was excited about my first trip to the Saratoga racetrack. My only previous experience with a horse race had come years earlier, shortly after the war, when my father took me with him to Italy for an entire summer. I was ten. After two weeks of museums, libraries, and symposia, he promised me a treat. The Palio. A horse race, he said. Oh, God, I thought, longing for the seasickness of our ocean crossing instead. But the trip to Siena turned out to be one of the highlights of my summer. We enjoyed ringside seats from the windows of an apartment above the Piazza del Campo. A professor friend of my father’s had invited us to watch the pageantry. Ten horses and riders, who were called fantini, decked out in livery from the different contrade, or districts, of Siena, started the race. But only seven horses and six riders finished the three laps of the piazza that day, with the others either falling on the sharp turns of the dirt-covered oval or running out of the requisite energy and inclination to see the endeavor through to its conclusion. The winning horse, Piero—I wrote it in my diary—galloped to the finish ahead of Oca and claimed victory for the Giraffa contrada. A commotion broke out when some disappointed partisans roughed up their fantino for failing to uphold the honor of their colors. I loved the pomp and drama. Well, not the beating of the jockey—but my father shielded my eyes and guided me away from the window before I saw too much blood.

“Do you know anything about the Tempesta stud farm?” I asked Fadge over a cup of coffee at Fiorello’s, the ice-cream shop across from my apartment on Lincoln Avenue.

The big guy—six-two and tipping the scales at more than three hundred pounds—held the undisputed title of My Dearest Friend in the World. A boon companion for sharing late-night pizzas and off-color jokes, he was, I knew, also more than a little sweet on me. But at that moment, he was seated on a stool at the counter brooding over the Daily Racing Form in preparation for our day in Saratoga and indifferent to, if not unaware of, my presence.

Fadge was, in fact, an inveterate horseman. A gambler. Shameless “plunger,” in his words. He liked to bet, and the larger the wager the more interesting the outcome. His business took a backseat to the betting all year round, but especially when the Saratoga Thoroughbred season rolled around in August. If he couldn’t locate a relief soda jerk to man the shop during the meet, he would simply lock the front door, wedge his considerable self behind the wheel of his car, and hurtle off toward the track with little regard for posted speed limits or slow-moving vehicles in his path.

Absorbed in his study of the Racing Form, he hadn’t heard a word I’d said, so I repeated my question about the stud farm. Still nothing. To test his hearing, I slipped off the stool at the counter and approached the cash register behind the nearby candy case. I pushed down hard on the stiff No Sale button, and the cash drawer popped open, producing a bright ching as it did. Fadge remained oblivious. I could have emptied the till and tapped-danced my way out the door, and he wouldn’t have been any the wiser. I closed the drawer and rejoined him on a stool at the counter instead.

“Ron,” I said more insistently. Only his older customers ever called him by his given name. Eyes bulging from a thyroid condition, he regarded me as if I’d roused him from an erotic dream with a bucket of cold water. “What do you know about the Shaw Tempesta Farm out on Route Sixty-Seven?”

“What? Tempesta Farm? What did I miss?”

“There was a fire out there this morning before dawn,” I said. “An old foaling barn burned to the ground.”

He shrugged at me. “So? That’s nothing new. The place is abandoned.”

“Why did they close it down anyway? I know they moved the carpet mills south, but Saratoga is still there. Why shutter the farm?”

“The Shaws kind of lost interest in horse breeding after the fire that killed twelve horses.”

“How awful. What happened?”

“It was before the war. Thirty-seven or -eight, I think. A fire broke out in the stables, and twelve of the Shaws’ finest Thoroughbreds died.”

“How did I miss that in Sanford Shaw’s biography?”

“The Shaws didn’t talk about it. The biographer must have got the message.”

“That’s so sad.”

Fadge nodded. Although his interest in horseflesh was, in the main, a sporting one, he nevertheless had a soft spot for the beasts. At least