MANA: Pickles

Shown: Eddie Ne and "Subversive"

The Mana Farms story line frequently contains mature language, topics, and situations. The characters within are fictional beings with weaknesses and faults, and I cannot promise you that you will like them for what they believe, say and do.


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What Ellie Campbell did not have that Eddie had in spades, besides raw sex drive, was his outstanding ability to visualize things in his mind with near-photographic precision. Snapshots of people, of horses, of racetracks with their unique angles and surfaces and stretches, race replays from months ago, were all filed away in his mind in their logical categories. He could also do something he knew women always boasted was their own privilege, and that was multitask. It was a unique, if perhaps feminine, strength he kept classified, but was thrilled nonetheless to possess. Thus, as he sat there reviewing race records in his mind for the foes he was about to face in the Fountain of Youth, he also sat there enjoying the Saint’s stirring charge past Laurence LeClerc in the final strides of the Hutcheson.

“HA!” Ellie Campbell shouted beside him, giving him a forceful punch in the shoulder, “Did you see that?”

“I saw her call Soul Patch a loser,” Eddie chirped, “...three times I think. Fuck, I love that girl.”

Ellie sighed, “I meant the win.”

“Yep. Didn’t see that coming,” he remarked with an edge of playful sarcasm.

Ellie crossed her arms and leaned into him. “Well I’m particularly happy. And do you know why?”

Eddie sighed and ignored her, pretending to read the race form in his hands.

“Because I had a tick-et,” she said, “and I just made some mon-ey,” she finished her reply by dancing a hair-tossing, boob-bouncing harpy circle around Eddie in a calculated loop just out of his reach.

He was aware of the many reasons the girl was now unleashing the ribbons of glee she’d held onto since Wednesday morning, glee that had been battered and bruised in the days since. She had seen it in that last flash under the wire and he had seen it too. Something had passed between the Saint and the Soul Patch in that stretch. And as exciting a prospect as that was, he had to make this adorably sexy but maddening romp of Ellie’s stop or he was not going to be able to be the man of authority the Outlaw expected him to be in ten minutes.

He put on his most dull expression and pinned her with it. “She was odds-on favorite, you made what? Four dollars off of your fifty bucks?”

“As a matter of fact,” she countered over her shoulder, baiting him with the ticket in her hands, “I had Laurence and Santa boxed together and he was not the favorite. I made eighteen dollars. Ha, ha, ha.”

Eddie’s sharp black eyes and quick hands plucked the ticket from her, deigning to validate her little triumph so she would stop her infuriating little girly prance. All she needed was a unicorn and some glitter and he’d officially stroke out from the girl power. He quickly reviewed the bet and couldn’t believe what he saw scrawled over it. He shook his head at her and wagged a finger. “Ellie.”

“What?” She growled, already pouting at him.

“You drew a fucking heart around their numbers.”

She gave him the ”So?!” scowl with her bright blue eyes that was a particular reflex of eighteen year old girls.

“It’s in pink sharpie marker,” he continued.

She rolled her eyes and looked away, hands on her hips.

“And you even have sparkle lines coming off it.”

She snatched her ticket from him and put it back in her locker with a slam. “I was going to buy you dinner with my spectacular winnings from my flawless handicapping, but since you just have to be an ass...I’m going to go buy me and Chloe and the Imp a churro after the last race. And you can have a pickle.”

“I love pickles,” Eddie replied.

"Oh no, wise guy, and I'm not even talking about good pickles from the fridge, but one of those pickles that have been sitting in a jar, on the counter, in the deli, in the clubhouse for two years.”

The two of them turned as the field from the Hutcheson Stakes returned, sweaty and grit-covered. Eddie noted the usual business posture of returning jockeys as they filed in one at a time, deflated but ever hopeful. Only one had struck a very different pose as he came through the door and tossed his whip into the corner. Eddie watched him pace beside his bench for a few strides, muttering to himself, before whipping his locker open, and pulling his silks over his head.

Ellie leaned over and whispered concerned, “He looks....angry.”

“Not anger. Disenchantment, Ellie, that’s all that is,” Eddie mumbled in reply.

“Disenchantment is good, you think?”

“Disenchantment is fucking excellent,” Eddie concluded. He knew that sensation all too well...like a vegetarian horrified to discover that steak smelled good. Like learning that Maggie could not relate to him the way he wanted her to. That he could never be what she wanted. And worse to accept, that she was not what he needed. Disenchantment was a shameful, arousing, seemingly unaccountable sensation. But Eddie smiled to himself; disenchantment was the thing you realized later as the worst and the best thing that ever happened to you.

The worst and the best thing about Subversive, Eddie realized a minute later as Cornelius gave him a leg up onto the enormous frothing buckskin monster, was that the horse didn’t believe in complicating the uncomplicated. Subversive was unequivocally all that was bad about masculinity and all that was good about it too. He was strong, but he was fierce. He had goals, but he didn’t give a fuck about yours. The Outlaw made the rules as he went along, and the rules were almost always the same, let me by or I will eat you.

Approaching the gate, Eddie gathered up his reins, passed his whip from under his arm to his right hand, and felt a familiar cadence build up in his own chest again: California, California, California. He turned and looked up to the stands as though feeling Santa’s warm eyes on him. The jocks of California had always said she had Saints-Eyes; a gaze that knew where and when to be turned. She was watching him, rooting for him, and was leaving him...in the morning. He returned his focus to the track spread in front of him, lowered his goggles, fingered his chinstrap, entwined his fingers around the Outlaw’s mane and wondered if Ellie and the Saint, sitting there in the Jocks’ Room, had fifty dollars on Number Four.


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