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By Root 268 0

pocket and put it on so that none of the horseplayers would recognize my noticeable blond hair and hurl insults at me. I was pretty sure they’d all bet against Ballistic and me and would no doubt heap unpleasantries upon me at the top of their lungs. A few old guys looked at me sideways, registering something, but I moved swiftly, darting around people until I finally spotted the girl. She was standing near the saddling paddock’s indoor viewing area. She was still with the wild-eyed blonde; the two of them hunched over a computerized printout of the Daily Racing Form. They were oblivious to the fact that several men were eyeing them, which is a raging testament to their extreme attractiveness. Those guys normally wouldn’t look up from their heavily annotated tip sheets if a tidal wave suddenly reared up from the not so distant sea and engulfed all of Aqueduct.

I stood about a foot away from the two women. My red-coat girl was frowning in concentration, chewing on the eraser of a little blue Aqueduct pencil. Eventually she felt my eyes on her. She glanced up briefly then did a double take and looked up again. This time she smiled. I felt that smile reach deep inside me.

“You’re… you’re… that jockey,” she said.

“Attila Johnson,” I said, extending a hand to shake.

“Nice job on Ballistic,” she said. Her hands were even smaller than mine but she had a grip of iron. I noticed that her eyes were gray.

“No, actually, Ballistic did a nice job on me. I just tried to keep out of his way,” I told her.

She grinned at this, as if I’d uttered a magical phrase.

“You ride?” I asked, because in that grin I thought I saw a girl who knew horses.

“Not really. Not like you mean. I walked hots once for a month at Belmont,” she said, shrugging, “but I don’t ride well. I’ll get on a quiet horse given the chance but I couldn’t do that,” she said, motioning out at the track with one of her small hands. Her fingernails were unpainted though I’d have bet a hundred bucks right then that she had her toenails polished a strong red.

And I’d have won my bet. It was the first thing I checked two nights later when she took me home to her apartment in Coney Island. I hadn’t even had to do much that day at Aqueduct. We’d talked a little more, she’d told me her name—Ruby—which I’ve rolled around like a good taste on the back of my tongue ever since. Eventually, she’d written her number down on a blank corner of her Racing Form printout and, three hours later, I’d called her. She immediately asked if she could come watch me exercise horses the next morning. I don’t win many races but that’s just dumb luck, I ride well. I told her it was fine. I’d leave her name at security.

The next morning at seven A.M., I was trotting one of John Troxler’s three-year-old fillies along the rail when I noticed a girl standing there yawning. Ruby. She wasn’t wearing the red coat this time but she still stood out. She was a little too well dressed to be a backside worker but too wild looking to be an owner. I smiled to myself, kept my filly going along the rail, then turned her around and, at the five-eighths pole, had her going full steam. The filly posted her best workout time to date, five furlongs in fifty-eight seconds and change. After handing the filly off to her groom, I walked to the rail and Ruby and I grinned at each other like idiots. Later, after I’d ridden six more horses, I took Ruby to the backside cafeteria and bought her dark, rich cups of coffee until she stopped yawning.

By the time she took me home to her place that night, I was elated. Expanded. Afire. There was lust, but something else too. We still hadn’t kissed. Maybe we both knew things would quickly get out of control.

We walked into her place having just eaten lousy Italian food in Sheepshead Bay. A cat the size of a pony immediately launched itself at Ruby’s legs, nearly tripping her. Evidently this was some sort of ritual Ruby was used to because she adroitly dodged the animal. I followed her into a small kitchen where I watched her take a packet of raw meat out of the fridge and mix strange-looking