Sporting Blood

In a smoky back-room universe where playing-cards clatter like rattlesnake tails, Dave Garrison—silver-tongued, green-eyed, forever smelling of rye and horse liniment—stakes his reputation on the trembling legs of a thoroughbred called Shooting Star. He has already pocketed Billy Ballard’s life-savings, then coaxed Bessie Riddle into a moonlit tangle of crinolines and guilty sighs; two dynasties thus bruised, two dynasties now sharpening knives. Enter Mary Ballard—striding through cigar haze in a blood-red velvet coat, hair pinned so tight it seems to hoist the room’s chandelier—offering the gambler a wager that smells of lilacs and gunpowder: her body against his ten thousand if the favorite falls. Overnight, the mare is swapped for a lumbering doppelgänger, May Belle, whose gallop resembles a drunkards’ waltz across a floating pier. On race-day, dust clouds become veils of fate; railbirds howl; bookmakers swallow pocket watches. When the false Shooting Star wheezes across the finish line last, Dave’s smirk implodes, Mary’s smile detonates, and the sound of coins spilling onto straw is indistinguishable from the hiss of a soul escaping through clenched teeth. Replete with matrimonial ambition, James and Mary ride off, leaving the gambler amid the grandstand’s detritus—torn tickets, trampled roses, the echo of a pistol that was never fired yet somehow still wounds.