Something for Nothing by David Anthony Page A

tall and lanky horses, ratherthan those that got by on raw power. A horse like Secretariat had both height and power, and certainly that was ideal. But that sort of horse was out of Martin’s league (out of Val’s, too). And so Val tended toward horses with the long stride, which could gobble up yards and yards of track with each gallop. They were better at longer distances—a mile and up, basically. None of this six furlongs stuff. Cloudy River and Uncle Jack had been in this general mold, and both had been pretty solid horses, each of them winning a handful of races in the couple of years that Martin had owned them. Martin wasn’t sure, but he thought he might’ve actually turned a profit with them. At the least he’d come close to breaking even—boarding and training included. Most people couldn’t say that about their racehorses.
    As for Temperature’s Rising, he was like an exaggeration of the type. He was 16.2 hands tall and noticeably lean—skinny, almost. Only just over a thousand pounds. And as Val had explained to him, he had nicely formed withers. They were a little high, but not too high—not a problem for a saddle, but it seemed as if the vertebrae of his withers were quite long front to back, which meant (again according to Val) that he could really rotate his shoulders backward and increase his stride length.
    Once or twice Martin had heard people make a passing joke about how thin Temperature’s Rising was. But they stopped talking when they saw him run. He wasn’t going to be a Grade 1, nationally recognized horse. He was definitely kicking some serious ass at the local tracks, though. And to Martin, it was as if he’d managed a date with the prom queen. If his horse actually won at the fairgrounds, it was going to be as if he’d managed to go all the way.
    As he drove, Martin felt his spirits begin to lift a little bit. He was starting to imagine himself as a boxer, one who’d been cruising through the early rounds, jabbing and pretty much scoring at will. Those were rounds one through six, say (the early years with Anderson Aircrafts). But he’d walked into a left hook in about the seventh (with the oil embargo). He’d been knocked on his ass, in fact, and he’d been in troublefor the next two rounds after that (no business, mounting debt). But now it was the tenth round, and it seemed as if he might be getting his legs back, and his jab was starting to work again. Yes, he was cheating, if you wanted to look at it that way (because drug smuggling was the very definition of cheating—he knew that). It was like his trainer had given him a piece of metal to put into his right glove. But cheating was better than getting the shit kicked out of you, wasn’t it?
    He laughed—laughed out loud right there in the car. He glanced around, but there weren’t any other drivers next to him. He was relieved. Not that it would have mattered, really, but still, he didn’t want to seem like a nut—some wacko driving along and talking and laughing to himself. Though he could just have been listening to the radio and heard something funny. Like the
Comedy Hour
on KSFO. Peter listened to that at night sometimes; he’d take notes and then do the whole routine for Martin in the morning. Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Hudson and Landry, the Smothers Brothers. Most of it was pretty funny, though of course it was a little weird coming from a nine-year-old.
    In truth, Martin liked the harsher humor better, Don Rickles especially. He loved it when Rickles picked out people in the audience and abused them. He and Linda had gone to see him in Reno a year or so ago. The guy was a genius. Imagine making money off of ridiculing people like that. Martin remembered one line in particular. Rickles had picked out a guy and started in on him: “Who picks out your clothes? Stevie Wonder?” It was a line he’d heard before, either on one of