george gale’s name

by Thomas M. McDade

Tall and slim George Gale retired at sixty-four after driving a forklift at the Roosevelt Cable Company for twenty-nine years. He has a full head of hair and a stubby mustache. He’d never taken a sick day. Some years he used half of his two-week vacation to work for a painter named Lassiter. George has a pretty good nest egg. Built, he’s whispered, from an enterprise on the partly sunny side of shady.

He fishes year-round, ice in Maine and deep-sea on a charter out of Newport. Lassiter used to stop at the Stampede Lounge after work. George enjoyed a Ballantine Ale or two and shot a couple of games of pool. Lassiter played 801 (part of his SSN) if it was Tuesday, daily numbers runner Mauricio’s weekly stop. The owner’s wife, Trish, called the runner Tuesday’s child: “Fair of Grace.” He’d throw her a kiss. Trish knew Mauricio was good for business. She hoped and prayed the vice squad would never pull a raid while he was there.

Was that weekday the second or the third? Either way it figured in George’s life because Hurricane Carol chose it to strike New England. A girl in his first-grade class named Jane wrangled a way to taunt him. “You ain’t a hurricane, Miss Gale.” The wind reference was bad enough. The female part was a kick in the nuts.

When George wasn’t off fishing on a Tuesday, he’d stop at the Stampede despite blowhards Carol and Jane. Lassiter’s 801 would pop to mind, but he always backed off thinking it might be unethical. George had but one racetrack experience under his belt, a bus trip to Rockingham Park, an Elk’s Club outing. He’d bet the number one post every race and never cashed a ticket. He decided to try his luck again with the numbers guy who’d take horse bets too while at his station, where a piece of the bar lifted to get in or out unless you wanted to duck under. George tried some reverse tinkering by chasing good fortune via his name. The filly was Windmill Magic. The payoff was fifty-bucks even. After that he checked entries in the Boston Record for horse handles that involved air currents. Luckily, he knew that Zephyr and Favonius were eligible from solving crossword puzzles or he would have missed a couple of beautiful pari-mutuels. He never looked at the sports page entries other than Tuesday. He’d heard a guy, praising Alcoholics Anonymous, misquote one of the sayings, “Keep it simple stupid,” before slugging down three shots of rum. George wasn’t stupid or a simpleton, but he kept it.

The success with his method had Mauricio scratching his curly head. He asked George what code to link with his bets. “I’ve been using “G” but if you want to change it to “Genius,” okay.” He didn’t waste a smile.

“Just my initials,” George suggested.

“They are?”

“’G.G.’ My last name is Gale.”

“Hey, that’s old slang for horses, ‘Gee-Gees’.”

“Maybe I’ll win two grand someday,” joked George.

“Have mercy! Anyone ever called you Windy, playing with your last name?” he asked. A snarl tried to whip across George’s face, but he fought it. “Not yet.”

“It wouldn’t fit you, being such a quiet chap.”

“George liked being a chap. He’d been an MP in Germany and was proud that he’d never clubbed the head of an unruly drunk. He regularly frequented a whorehouse and favored a British woman named Fern who once said to him, “You’re no common bloke. You are a King, George. He often dreamed about her and swore if he ever met a woman who looked like her, he’d marry in a Berlin minute. George was wed for fourteen months. Angie left him for a Greyhound bus driver, divorced through the mail, seventy-five bucks. The last he’d heard she was in Washington State. They owned an apple farm, two children.

George kept a small spiral pad in a pocket of the field jacket he loved. A tailor sewed two pen places. One was for a Scripto Mechanical Pencil. The second was for a slim pack of replenishment lead. George wrote down names of people and places he wanted to remember. There were movie and TV stars along with everyday folks. He knew it was a silly practice. If he ended up with the dementia his mother suffered for three years before she died the data would be hieroglyphics. He slated both the woman and her pre-school child who were at the Stampede on Tuesdays for pad inclusion. She gave the kid sips of her beer to wash down his potato chips. She smoked one Salem cigarette. When she finished, the boy played with the filter tip, stuck it in a nostril then ear before trying to flick it into a pool table pocket. George watched them in the bar mirror.

There were two booths: one was occupied by back editions of the Daily Racing Form. Well, one horse “historian” could scrunch in. The odd couple sat in the other nest. She spent a quarter for pool, per visit. Was she training the boy to be a pool hustler? George overheard Bobby, the afternoon bartender, name them Connie and Chad and add that she’d been granted visitation rights just once a week. That was the craziest arrangement George had ever heard. Mom and the kid hung around for a couple of hours. After pool, Chad sometimes occupied himself pushing buttons on the jukebox that hadn’t sung in years. He tapped her nose as if she were a song, and one spring day she sang “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and pretty damned good. Chad blew across her beer bottle top for his part. Her shoulder length hair was blonde. George recorded their names carefully in print and cursive.

Mauricio was the reason she picked the Stampede. She bet numbers for that day and through to the next visit. “Horoscope hints litter my path today. Save me Scorpio,” She’d cry walking over to him. George heard talk of a gambler who used Bible chapter and verse digits to summon luck.

Jack Malloy, who was collecting Workingman’s Comp, hollered “Lost and found department,” after he’d sunk a double bank side shot to win five bucks. What he’d discovered was a book Chad left behind that seemed to George too advanced for his age, Tom Sawyer. Roger Chapel the cabbie thumbed through it and told of many words and sentences underlined. He took charge of Tom and when he returned it, he told Connie that a Brown University professor who was in a rush left Shakespeare folios in his taxi’s backseat. “I got a twenty-dollar tip.”

“A shake of the hand is all I’m offering,” said Connie. Chad called him “a scholar and a gentleman” and had him autograph Twain’s book. Roger rated her paw squeeze as lethal.

George remembered a book report in Junior High. He’d read every word, didn’t fake off the dust jacket or the comic book. He’d found himself recalling Tom’s fence scam when laying on white paint that Lassiter had watered down until it was close to water. George caught an eight-pound catfish one winter in Maine, probably a shadow of the Mississippi kind. He’d visited Twain’s house in Hartford on an overnight class trip.

The boy owned a pocket computer. He came up with numbers he said were the amounts he hoped she’d win, once 238,855. She knew from a radio talk show that was the count of miles to the sun. He knew it too, got up and kissed her on the cheek. She’d cast an occasional eye on the TV close to the ceiling just past where George sat.

Chad would join her tackling quiz show questions. They were loud and didn’t miss many. She locked the two lunar trios into her betting string. She’d scored with the first one twice, but the second never came close. Chad could name all the planets and Latin names of bugs. Out of the blue, he’d recite the alphabet backwards. He was sickly thin. He kept his Celtics jacket zipped up even when temp was pushing ninety and the A/C was out of order. Connie shed her gray blouse until Bobby dragged a large floor fan out of the backroom that used to be a lounge where George danced with Angie to the music of the Ronnie Hall Quartet. Connie’s bra was skimpy. George concluded her breasts were as ideal as Lady Fern’s. A palm tree tattoo graced her shoulder. George watched the fan breeze play with her hair until she took some kind of clip from her purse to tie it up. George almost inched around to enjoy the beautiful view but stuck with the mirror. She slipped into her blouse but didn’t button up. Rick Walsh, the resident daredevil, (widely known for devouring a large jar of pickled onions on a bet) walked over to the oscillating fan and halted the blades with his hand without losing a drop of blood. Chad hid his eyes. George had seen Rick’s act before, but not at a fully occupied bar and all were yakking like they were collectively nicknamed Windy, refugees from Chicago. Chad’s nose was pug and freckled. His hair was on the way to match British Invasion Rockers. Connie sometimes took out a comb and parted it down the middle. He cooperated.

The day before she disappeared, she unfolded a sheet of paper and spent close to a half hour drawing with a thick carpenter pencil. The kid tapped on George’s back and presented him with a drawing of himself staring from the mirror. She’d tightened up his face and neck, darkened his hair and thickened his mustache. The other side of the sheet was a Belen’s Market sale flyer. The folds made him look like a finished child’s square piece puzzle. George said thanks and the boy saluted. George gingerly pocketed Connie’s art. Yes, it was art and her last Stampede Lounge act. Mother and child disappeared. No one knew where she went or, for that matter, where she came from. It was known she arrived and departed in a taxi. She didn’t have to call, the pickup was prearranged. Roger’s taxi connections were of no help. Wild speculations followed. She was a stripper, porn actress, spy, assassin, drug addict or pusher. She’d kidnapped the kid for God’s sake. George took comfort in having a link to her in his pocket. He had his own ideas and they were as nuts as the rest, a TV or movie honcho working on a new series or flick. Placing a bet on Savage Wind he quizzed Mauricio about Connie. “Gone with the Wind, GG,” he said.

“How much does she owe you?”

“Fifty.”

George took the five tens from the Windmill Magic win from an inside zippered pocket and handed them over. “You’re a good man, George Gale. You saved both her and me some trouble.” George walked back to his seat, feeling very old and again pictured himself in a nursing home, the drawing in hand and his image of her in his head in and out of cigarette smoke as if from a genie’s lamp, or fumes from dying embers in a haunted house, wind softly playing the chimney top, proving a picture is worth a thousand words.

Cabbie Roger Chapel was frequently unnerved by the ticking of his meter, as if it was a countdown to news his autograph had topped many signature dotted lines on bad checks or Mark Twain forbid, or a life insurance policy.

Photo of Thomas M. McDade

BIO: Thomas M. McDade is a 79 year old resident of Fredericksburg, VA, formerly CT and RI. He is a graduate of Fairfield University. McDade is twice a U.S. Navy Veteran serving ashore at the Fleet Anti-Air Warfare Training Center, Dam Neck Virginia Beach, VA and aboard the USS Mullinnix (DD-944) and USS Miller (DE / FF-1091). His fiction has most recently appeared in The Paradox Literary Magazine.