Lucky Aces draft

A/N: Piece handed to my fiction class a month or two ago. Haven't edited it yet, (edited since some of my friends took a look at it though) since I'm working on expanding it for the second round. Got a lot of good crits on this, and now that I haven't looked at it for a month, I can see how annoyingly superfluous and pretentious parts of it are. But I still like it. If my second piece goes over well, I'll be doing that style for all the back stories for Somnambulist. Planning on busting out work on that this summer. Plan to get the first draft done at least, since i have the entire story worked out. Blah, blah, blah. Zombies, what what?

Lucky Aces


With no effort at all he had managed to strike it big. His friends slapped him on the back and called him lucky.
He hadn’t felt lucky. When he walked into the gambling station, he felt numb. Placing the money down in rhythmic repetitive motions, he whispered to himself the amount he was betting, slightly shaken at his uncharacteristic banality.
$2 straight trifecta. Numbers 2, 8, and 3. The heavyset man behind the counter never glanced up as he took his money.
When he stepped out of the gambling station he lit up a cigarette. The day was windier than he would have liked, and windier than usual for summer. He flicked his cigarette and the ashes disappeared almost instantly into the air, swept up and swallowed by Mother Nature.
His ebony hair fell into his eyes. He reminded himself that he needed to get it cut. He knew that he would remind himself again and again before he finally got around to doing it. It wasn’t important.
Unabashedly, he watched as the racing track’s many visitors shuffled past him. He liked to watch them. He liked their obliviousness and ignorance. He felt pretentious leaning up against the building’s cold gravel wall, with his black hair and leather jacket, eyes covered with dark sunglasses and a cancer-stick in hand. This was not his intent.
Twenty-two and at a loss for where he wanted to take his life, he knew that today was the last day he would speak to his father. Facing disownment, he began envisioning the conversation that was coming. The only saving grace was that he had the luxury of explaining everything to his father, instead of the older man hearing it from a third party, like his now ex-boss.
That would be worse. So much worse.
He ridiculed the thought of it being a conversation. It was going to be more of his father berating him with his stern militaristic tone. He hated that tone. Something along the lines of how he was not the son his father wanted would follow his confession, how he embarrassed his family, how a good military education would have beaten the coward out of him.
No, his father didn’t have what most people thought of as conversations. One day the old man was probably going to keel over from a heart attack, chronic anger the only enemy he didn’t see coming out of the bushes. Edgar just wished that the hour glass had run out already for him so he didn’t have to face him. He could deal with never having to speak to him again, but his dear old ma - that was another matter entirely. He was never close to his siblings – older brother went off to Iraq, tattooed dog tag on his torso, gun in one hand, bloodlust in the other. His sister was a widowed military wife - she hasn’t spoken to anyone in the family in two years. Last he heard, she was doing programming work, single mother of a three year old girl.
He knew how much a life could change. At the kickoff of a race, everyone started out on the same playing field. In mere seconds, their name would be celebrated or forgotten.
Edgar Valdez was twenty-two and had quit his job, but he was not without regrets.
The wind tugged the cigarette out of Edgar’s hand, as if finding the act of smoking it offensive. He cursed and watched what little of it was left land in the small pond on the other side of the gate fencing the race track in and the rest of the world out.
His father was going to kill him once he told him. Working in the Air Intelligence Agency wasn’t something you just quit. Besides that fact, Edgar had gone back on their agreement. It was one of the few jobs he could have to get out of going into the military. That was the deal. His father had pulled strings. He had to serve his country.
The race he had bet on was going to start soon. He pushed his sunglasses back up his nose. When he made his way to the fence he politely wove through the people to find a place that suited him. It was the downfall of being shorter than the average man. When he could see fine, he pulled out of his pocket the scrap of paper with his carelessly picked numbers printed on them.
The race had started.
He wondered what he was going to do with the rest of his life as he clutched that white ink-smeared paper.
In mere seconds, three horses coming in in three different places in an exact order made him over seven grand richer.
Edgar Valdez hadn’t felt lucky.