I stretched my forearms onto the cool concrete guard, desperate to radiate the heat from my body even if its coarse surface abraded my skin. My brothers next to me had opted to fan themselves with their programs, but I had heard in elementary school fanning oneself was a counter-productive effort and, believing myself erudite in the sciences, I stubbornly refused too. Earlier my family and I had been watching the races inside the hippodrome proper, a transparent wall providing us a vantage of the entire track in a temperate climate, but unbeknownst to us the air conditioner had gone on the fritz and with each successive race we were slowly being baked alive. When it became apparent that we were no different than a frog in a boiling pot, our family relocated to the open-air veranda, nearly tearing off our shirts as the congealed sweat from our backs hardened into a formidable glue. 

Our mother doled out sips of her neglected pop to us on demand as we waited for our father to return. He had skeltered off to place a bet, enthusiastically so upon learning a horse in the roster was named Buck Naked. Thankfully, he returned bearing a trencher of cold drinks which we greedily sucked down as we waited for the next outing. 

In the centre of the track lay a mammoth sized billboard that listed every contestant and their odds of winning, with Buck Naked’s projections dropping starkly. “27 to 1,” my father noted auspiciously. When the race began it would reach its nadir at 54-1. The larger the number the greater the pay out, but my brothers and I had the wherewithal to know that it was the consensus among our gambler cohorts that it was presumed to be a slacking equine. So, when the race began, my brothers and I only tepidly paid attention. Our horse not only succeeded in departing from the gate, which given the odds was not an outlandish possibility, but managed to pull ahead through much of the pack snagging third or fourth in line. Didn’t matter much, only position that did was first place, but as Buck Naked galloped around the second bend my father’s favourite received a boon; a sudden gust of speed. 

“Lorne House riding Buck Naked pulls ahead!” the speakers blared and suddenly the race my brothers and I long assumed was a forgone loss had arrested our attention. My father had rolled his program into a baton and began slapping it against the empty chair to his left as he cried out, “Come on Buck Naked! Come on!” Beneath her breath my mother muttered, “We may very well break even!” as she clapped her hands together. As boys, we aped our father, rolling our pamphlets into make-shift cudgels and then lashing them against our palms and knees or for my youngest brother, thrashing it against the concrete where he shredded the pamphlet into a pulpy chaff. For a moment it was as if my entire family had fused into a single organism as we cheered for a horse named, of all things, Buck Naked. 

“We’re going out for dinner tonight!” my father boomed as his champion was declared the victor, my brothers and I whooping and dancing in the walkway. Until that moment my family had lost every wager we had placed and thereafter would continue to do so, but as the day wrapped up and we streamed into the parking lot we departed transcendent, as if all of us had been the ones grappling Buck Wild’s reins, piloting the unlikely pony to victory. On a two-dollar bet, the payout was one-hundred-and-ten dollars.