galore, but no horses. He hates horses. Gentlemen, can you think of a more downright wholesome place for a growing boy than a farm like that?” Pop began to get tears in his eyes, just thinking how wholesome it was going to be.
Well, the way it turned out there was a lot more palaver but they finally agreed with Pop about the farm and said I could go. But they warned him if he ever got in any more trouble around New York they’d take me away for keeps. I thought this was kind of funny, because we’d never been in New York, but I didn’t say anything.
We went back and got the car and trailer and started out, but we got mixed up in traffic and so turned around we didn’t know where we was. Aqueduct is a lot bigger than Hialeah or Pimlico and it’s got so many streets you could drive around in it until you starved to death and never find your way out. Pretty soon we was stalled in a traffic jam on a street that had a lot of big hotels with carpets and colored canvas tents running out the front doors and across the sidewalk, and Pop yelled at a man standing under one of these tents. The man was dressed up in a fancy uniform with a lot of red and gold on it.
“What street is this?” Pop asks.
“Park Avenue,” the man says, kind of snooty.
“Well,” Pop asks him, “how do you get over to Jersey?”
The man just stared at him and said, “Who’d want to?” and then went on looking at his fingernails.
“That’s the trouble with this goddam place,” Pop says to me. “What do you want to go anywhere for? You’re already here.”
Just then another man in a uniform with a monkey’s hat on his head come out of the door leading a dog on a leather strap. It was the longest dog I ever saw in my life, with real short legs, and his belly dragged when he come down the steps. The man with the red and gold uniform puffed up and got red in the face, but he took the leather strap anyway, and started down the street with the dog. But just then the dog give a big leap and jerked the strap out of his hand and ran out in the street in the middle of all the cars.
The uniformed man followed him, squeezing his way through the cars and getting redder in the face all the time. “Here, nice doggie,” he says. “Here, Sig Freed. Nice Sig Freed. I’ll kick your teeth in, you dumb sausage bastard.”
But Sig Freed turned and ran down the middle of the street towards us and the next thing I knew he was under our car. The traffic was beginning to move a little now and the people behind us was blowing their horns and calling Pop a knucklehead, and I was afraid Pop would start up with him under there, so I jumped out and crawled in after him. He grinned at me, and yawned, and licked me on the face. I gathered him up and got back in the car with him sitting on my lap, still laughing that cute dog laugh of his.
The uniform man come running up, dodging the cars, and his face was as red as his coat. “Gimme that damn mutt,” he says, looking hard at Pop.
“Beat it, you poodle-dog walker,” Pop says, “before I spit in your eye.”
“Give him here! I’ll call a cop.”
The traffic was clear up ahead now. Pop held up a finger and says, “That for you, Mac,” and we started off with a whoosh and just made the next traffic light before it turned red. We turned a corner pretty soon and the man never did catch up with us.
Sig Freed was tickled pink. He licked me on the ear and barked a couple of times, and then stuck his head out of the window to grin at all the people along the sidewalk. “Can I keep him, Pop?” I says. “Can I?”
“How you going to feed him?” Pop says. “A dog like that, from Park Avenue, he don’t like nothing but mink and caviar.”
“I’ll bet he’ll eat regular bones just like any dog.”
“I don’t know,” Pop says, “but how you going to keep him when we get to Hollywood Park?”
“Hollywood Park?” I says. “Ain’t we going to Uncle Sagamore’s?”