The Ultimate Good Luck by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

like being in the afterimage of a catastrophe, though he thought he’d gotten used to catastrophes all right without falling apart.
    In Morgan he traded the Firebird and four thousand dollars for a Porsche, decided to hang in for the money, and moved out to company bunks in an Alamo Plaza painted company blue out Route 90. On his seven-off he liked driving up to Kenner to the dog track and playing cards in the bars in Evangeline Parish and working the women. He didn’t have any plans. All the colleges he’d ever been in didn’t teach him what he’d learned in two years out of the world, that once strangers you couldn’t see started shooting guns at you and trying to set you on fire way up in the sky, plans didn’t take you too far. And the only thing smart you could do was try to stay efficient and keep your private shit together. He’d picked up the tattoo in Hawaii. Good conduct was what kept you in the picture, kept ground underneath you instead of on top, and that was the only basic concept you could count on.
    When he saw Rae she was standing in the bettors’ pavilion under the grandstand, watching the TV monitor that had a dog race in progress. She was tall and elegant with long red hair, wore tight black jeans that cost some money, and a green halter that showed her breasts. She was holding a copy of Fourier’s
New Industrial World
under her elbow and a wad of yellow win tickets in her hand, and she looked wrongly placed, which he guessed was the point.
    He checked the old men in plaid suits and white socks who were watching the monitor, and the women wheelchair bettors cruising down the concourse in motorized chairs. He wanted to guess which one was paying her bills. His second dog hit, but when he came back holding his $4.80, Rae was still watching the monitor showing the pale pink racetrack with his winning number flashing at the bottom. The guys in plaid suits had all scattered toward the payoffs and the wheelchair women had gone to the refreshments. But she hadn’t moved. And he suddenly likedthe air. It had the stacked, cooled feeling of below zero ground, the nonplace where anything thinkable was possible if you didn’t expect a long engagement. It was what the world left available.
    He took one more look around. “You waiting for Johnny Carson?” he said.
    Rae looked at him and at the four dollars in his hand as though he wasn’t seriously there. She had on dark rouge and her eyes were flecked green. She was exotic looking, like she’d just come from someplace illegal, and she was speeding. That seemed like the right combination.
    “What d’you think they do with the ones that don’t win?” she said, and looked back at the suspended screen as though she’d asked the question to no one in particular, not even herself.
    “Shoot ’em,” he said quickly, and took another survey of the pavilion, to see if somebody was coming after her.
    “I’ve got a candidate, then,” she said flatly, “but he already left, I guess.”
    “You just read this crap between races?” he said. He didn’t know who Fourier was, but he was betting he was somebody who started a revolution in Jamaica.
    Rae smiled appealingly and snapped her head to sweep her long hair off her shoulders. “He doesn’t know enough,” she said, and sighed. “The guy who knows everything is the guy who runs the rabbit. He’s in control of fate. You don’t know him, do you?”
    He figured enough time had gone by now. “I dont want to pry, but you haven’t been to Mississippi, have you?” he said.
    She didn’t look at him. “Yeah, it’s a shit hole,” she said.
    One of the wheelchair women was straining toward the TV monitors with a stack of green show tickets under her watchband, and her jaw swinging, unable to be still. It wanted to smile when there wasn’t anything to smile about. He was nervous the woman had Rae in hock for her clothes.
    “Well, since you liked it so much, how about let’s go again?” he said in a