The Odds Maker

 Uncle Russell was late for dinner, again, and I’d heard enough about his drunk driving to know that we should worry. When he was drunk, he frightened me.

            We breathed a sigh of relief when we saw his car in the driveway. He smelled of whiskey when he walked through the door, and he carried his transistor radio and The Daily Racing Form.

            He saluted us and said, “Hell, sorry I’m late, but I had some business. Go ahead and eat while I wash up.”

The adults exchanged indecipherable looks around the table, which I thought could have been about the whiskey, the bookmaking paraphernalia, or the swearing.

Russell returned to the kitchen with his face shining and damp, his icy blue eyes glittering as he espied the food. He had changed into a fresh pair of starched jeans and a clean white tee-shirt, with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve. The usual cloud of English Leather cologne followed him.

            As he turned his food black with pepper, I listened to him tell Dad about talking to a car salesman about buying a new Volkswagen. His Beetle was nearly a year old, and it was time to trade. He said that he and Bob Showalter had come within twenty dollars of agreeing on a price, and when Showalter would not come down, he walked out of the dealership.

Grandma went to answer the phone. Russell looked around to make sure that she was out of hearing distance.

            “Have you heard the one about the hooker and the vacuum cleaner?”

            Mother and her sisters yelled at him to shut up. He shook his head and said, “You girls have been Baptists for too long. You’ve forgotten how to have fun”.  

            Grandma came back to the table and said it was Jamie Kearney from church on the phone, calling to ask about Russell. She said, “You ought to consider taking Jamie out on a date sometime.

“Damn it, Mom, I told you that I’m never going to date that old crow. So, stop nagging me about it.”

            Russell walked outside after dinner to listen to the horse races from Churchill Downs, and I followed along. He held the radio in one hand and scribbled on the Daily Racing Form with the other. Between races, he struck a match on the bottom of his boot and lit a cigarette as he sipped from a bottle of Early Times Bourbon, which he retrieved from under the driver’s seat of his car. Then, he peeled a crisp twenty dollar bill from the wad of money in his pocket and handed it to me.

            “Don’t tell nobody where you got that, you hear? Your mother’s ready to skin me alive as it damn well is,” he said.
            “I won’t tell,” I said. “You had everyone worried earlier when you were so late. They thought you’d been drinking and had a wreck.”

            “I’ll tell you one damn thing about them women in there: they all fret about me too much. I’ll bet you even odds that one of them dies from a heart attack worrying about me before I kill myself driving to the track in this car.”