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much else. You need the race program for real information, and the price keeps going up. The last four times I lost, I was betting on memory … on horses I remembered from better days.
    I guess their better days were over, too.
    I went down to OTB in the morning, holding my last ticket.
    Fancy Candy paid $33.70 to win. My ticket was worth eight hundred and change.

    That was seven months ago. At one point, I was up sixteen grand. Now I’m back where I belong.

    This time it’s forty bucks. I put it all down. Every last cent.
    I can’t die with money in my pocket, but I don’t mind going out on an empty stomach.
    for Frank Caruso

BLOODLINES
    1
    “What do I care what kind of horses they are? I’m not here to join some 4-H club.”
    The old man was looking out over the rail at a bunch of horses pulling little carts around the track. He never turned around, but I could hear him good enough. “A smart kid like you, I figure you probably know the difference between stupidity and ignorance, right?”
    “I’m not sure,” I answered him. Not challenging, asking. “Show him respect,” is what they’d told me. I always do the job the way the people paying me want it done. That’s my reputation, and I worked a long time to earn it. The better your reputation, the better you earn.
    “You can do something about being ignorant,” the old man said. “Not everybody gets the chance to do that. But if you do, and you pass it up,
then
you’re stupid.”
    “Okay,” I said to him, going along. “Could you tell me what’s so special about those horses over there?”
    “Those are harness horses,” the old man said, talking like he was in church. “Harness horses, you understand? Not thoroughbreds, like they have over to Aqueduct or Belmont. Not thoroughbreds,
standardbreds
. What that means, they’re all bred to race a standard distance. One mile.”
    “And the jockeys sit in those little carts—?”
    “Not jockeys,” he said, waving his hand like he was brushing some dirt off his sleeve. “Drivers. That’s where this whole thing started from: horses doing
work
. Some guy’s driving down a country lane, hauling a load, okay? Another wagon rolls up next tohim. One guy looks at the other, and,
bang!
you got yourselves a race.”
    He talked the way a man does when he’s just told you something important, wants to make sure you get it. Me, I got it, all right. You can see the same thing at stoplights every night, only with cars. But I just nodded, so he’d keep talking.
    “And they do it the same way today,” he said. “You see that big convertible over there on the back stretch? That’s the pace car. It starts moving, nice and slow. Then a gate comes out of each side, like a butterfly opening its wings. It keeps moving, so all the horses can get lined up behind that gate. When the car crosses the starting line, the gate folds back up. That’s the signal for the horses to go. The car keeps going until it gets away, then it pulls off to the side.
    “A rolling start, see? Not like those
thoroughbreds
,” he said, almost sneering the word. “Those, they start them out of little cages, like they was fucking greyhounds, chasing a fake rabbit.”
    “So the trotters, they’re like Old School, huh?”
    The old man gave me a sharp look, trying to see if I was jerking his chain. After a minute, he gave up. I may not know anything about horses, but I learned how to keep my face flat a long time ago.
    “Those horses out there; you wanted, you could trace every one of them all the way back to the original stud. Hambletonian was his name, and every trotter you see today carries his bloodline. He was racing way before the Civil War, that ‘Old School’ enough for you?”
    “Damn!”
    “And when they’re done racing, those trotters you see out there, what do you think happens to them?”
    “They get killed?”
    “Killed? You mean, like with those greyhounds? Nah. Some of them, the big winners, they use for