"There ain't nothin' like a well-behaved dog," drawled the unkempt man, loud enough for the entire bus to hear, "and that ain't nothin' like a well-behaved dog." He cackled at the punch line until his laughter became a hacking cough that made the nearest lady recoil in disgust. His mutt was tugging aggressively at its lead and bothering anyone who dared to get on or off the bus. The driver was glaring angrily each time and, finally when he'd had enough and turned to order the man off the bus, he rose of his own accord and got off, tangling himself up in the lead and almost falling ass over tit in the process.
Just my luck. This was my stop.
"You see a dog can't be trained like a horse," the man was saying, seemingly to me, but I felt like he was half talking to himself in the way that down-and-outs do. "Sure, you can tell it to sit and you can tell it to roll over, but will that win you a war? Hell it won't." His accent was strong but, never having been there I could only place it as somewhere in the south of the States, Texas or Alabama maybe. As he spoke I wondered about his life story, what had drawn him to our little town, how he'd - I guessed - ended up on the street. As it was, I didn't have to wait long to work it out.
"No siree, no fighting dog's gonna win you land or power, and I tell you that for free." I'd not a clue what he was on about, but even if I'd wanted to ask I wouldn't have been able to get a word in, such was the speed he was rattling off his nonsensical thoughts. "Won't win you as much at the tracks, neither. You a betting boy? Sure you are, who isn't. I'd slap a dime bet on you being a horse man over greyhounds - if I had it to bet." He chuckled again, but softly this time, with only a small audience to impress. "Say, kid, can you get the odds on that gizmo o' yours?" I was fiddling with my phone, trying to pluck up the courage to simulate a call and thereby get out of the conversation. "Can you
check Kentucky Derby odds information on there?"
"Sure, I guess. What exactly do you want me to look up."
At this he suddenly got angry, or at least more animated, and I wondered if he was drunk. No, I wondered
how drunk. He had the glazed look of a man whose body only knew differing levels of inebriation.
"Information, kid!
Derby 2013 information. Odds, runners, form, jeez." He fiddled in his pocket and to my surprise drew out two crisp twenties. "There's a bookies around the corner, but they don't let me in. How's about we check the odds and you can have ten percent of me scoop for sticking it on?"
"Fifty."
"Twenty."
"Forty."
"Thirty."
"Deal."
I clicked a few buttons and the old man squinted his bloodshot eyes at the small text, calculating and muttering under his breath for what must have been five minutes. I begun to wonder if he knew what all the numbers and names even meant, but then he reeled off a list of horses and a load of other jargon so quickly that I had to ask him to write it down on the back of a receipt. At that he scoffed. "Ha! Write, there's a good joke, kid." He repeated the list more slowly and I noted it down, took the money from him and made my way to the shop.
As I approached the bookies I noticed beside it was a convenience store. I stopped and thought of the money scrunched in my hand. Forty quid could buy enough to feed a man for a month, if he bought wisely.
I left the five bags of groceries on the floor outside the store, confident that they'd not get nicked, and strolled off, happy in the knowledge that I'd probably kept the old yank alive for a smidgen longer. He'd probably hated me for it when he'd found the food in place of his betting slips ten minutes later, but then if he'd any sense he'd have checked the results and seen that not one of his horses had come in. It felt food being a guardian angel for a day.
