Chapter 5: A Bet on the Past
The common room couch was a tomb of lumpy cushions and crushed dreams. Bernard sank into its familiar depression, the fabric scratchy against his neck. His body hummed with a new, specific ache—a deep burn across his shoulders, a tightness in his forearms from the unfamiliar work of hauling and scraping at the warehouse. It felt like a trophy.
On the flickering TV, Bruce Willis muttered about Christmas. Two guys from the football team—Paul and someone whose name Bernard had never learned—were shouting over the movie, arguing about the National League.
“The Braves are a done deal, man. That pitching staff—”
“Are you kidding me? It’s a fluke! The Pirates are gonna steamroll ’em. Justice is hitting .220 since the All-Star break!”
Bernard closed his eyes. The numbers swam up from the dark, not as spreadsheets, but as sensations: the collective groan of a sports bar in October 1991, the stunned silence on a dormitory floor, the way his original timeline’s father had thrown his hat at the television. He saw the box scores in his mind’s eye, clear as yesterday’s news. Because for him, it was.
It wasn’t a feeling. It wasn’t a hunch. It was memory, pure and simple.
The reckless energy from the Denny’s, from holding Elena’s hand and speaking his fractured truth, crystallized into a cold, hard point. What was the point of knowing the future if you didn’t use it to buy a better one?
He waited until the argument lulled. “You’re both wrong,” he said, his voice cutting through the static.
Paul turned, his beefy face creased with annoyance. “What’s that, Thorne? You gonna lecture us on earned run averages?”
“No.” Bernard sat up. The aches protested. “The Braves aren’t a done deal. The Pirates aren’t winning the pennant. It’s going to be the Twins. And they’re going to win the Series.”
A beat of silence. Then both guys snorted. “The Twins? They were worst in the league last year! They’re a joke,” Paul spat.
“They won’t be.” Bernard stood. He didn’t have the energy to convince them. They weren’t the point. “Just remember I said it.”
He left them spluttering, the thump of Die Hard’s gunfire following him down the hall. His own room smelled of Les’s cheap cologne and microwave popcorn. Les was sprawled on his bed, a battered copy of Watchmen propped on his chest. He didn’t look up.
“You know a bookie?”
Les’s finger paused on the page. He slowly lowered the comic. His eyes, sharp and brown, took Bernard in. “Run that by me again?”
“A bookie. Someone who takes sports bets.” Bernard leaned against his desk, trying to project a calm he didn’t feel. His heart was hammering against his ribs, a frantic bird in a cage of young bone.
Les swung his legs off the bed and sat up. The mattress springs screamed. “Okay. Context. Why is Bernard ‘Human Calculator’ Thorne, who flinches when someone swears too loud, asking me for a bookie? You get a personality transplant at that Denny’s last night?” A sly grin crept onto his face. “Or did your art girl drain your common sense along with your virtue?”
“This isn’t about her.” It was, and it wasn’t. It was about the space she made him believe he could occupy. “It’s about money. I need money.”
“Join the club. Sell plasma. It’s fifty bucks a pop and they give you orange juice.”
“I need more than fifty bucks.” Bernard pushed off the desk. “I know who’s winning the World Series.”
Les stared. He blinked once, slowly. Then he burst out laughing, a sharp, braying sound that filled the small room. “Oh, man! Okay. Sure. You and every drunk in every bar in America. You have a crystal ball? A talking dog?”
“I have a memory,” Bernard said, his voice dropping low. He held Les’s gaze, letting the odd weight of his words hang there. “I’m dead certain. I want to put every cent I can scrape together on the Minnesota Twins to win it all. Right now, their odds will be insane. The payoff would be… life-changing.”
Les’s laughter died. He studied Bernard’s face, looking for the joke, the punchline. He saw none. He whistled, long and low. “Shit. You’re serious.”
“Dead serious.”
“That’s not small-time, Bernie. That’s not betting on a Saturday game. That’s a futures bet. That’s the kind of thing that gets you noticed if you win. Or if you lose and can’t pay.”
“I won’t lose.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I do.” The absolute certainty in his own voice was frightening, even to him. It was the tone of a seventy-year-old man who had seen the game played out. It didn’t belong in this teenager’s mouth.
Les rubbed a hand over his jaw. The comic book was forgotten on the bed. “My cousin’s roommate. He runs numbers for a crew out of Trenton. He’s a weasel, but he’s connected. You’d be betting with real money. And I mean, real money people. Not frat boys.”
Bernard nodded. His mouth was dry. This was the threshold. In his first life, the very idea would have spiked his blood pressure. Now, it just felt like the next logical step on a path he’d already chosen. “Can you set it up?”
“Maybe.” Les stood up, pacing the thin strip of floor between the beds. “But you gotta understand. You give them cash. They give you a slip. If you lose, you owe them the full amount. They don’t do payment plans. They do broken kneecaps. This isn’t a game.”
“I know what it is.” Bernard thought of the hollow feeling of his retirement party, the gold watch that meant nothing. That was a different kind of violence, slow and polite. This, at least, was honest.
“Do you? Because you’re acting like you’re invincible. You’ve been different since… I don’t know when. Since you woke up a few weeks ago. It’s like you don’t care what happens.”
“I care,” Bernard said, and he meant it. He cared about the ache in his shoulders from honest work. He cared about the way Elena’s hair smelled like turpentine and rain. He cared so much it felt like his old, cauterized heart was sprouting bloody, raw new nerves. “That’s why I’m doing this. I need a stake. For a life that isn’t borrowed.”
Les watched him for another long moment. The irreverent mask was gone, replaced by a calculating, concerned intensity. This was the guy Bernard had always been afraid of—the one who saw too much. “How much are you thinking?”
“Everything from the warehouse job. My savings from home. Maybe three hundred bucks.”
“To win a World Series futures bet?” Les did the mental math, his lips moving slightly. “That could come back… huge. Stupid huge. If you’re right.”
“I am.”
Les let out a long breath, committing. “Okay. Alright. I’ll call my cousin. We’d have to drive out to a bar in Edison. Meet the guy. Cash only. You don’t talk, you don’t try to be smart. You give the money, you get the slip, you leave.”
“When?”
“Saturday night. He’s there every Saturday.” Les’s grin returned, but it was thinner, edged with danger. “You sure your art girl is gonna be okay with you running with bookies?”
The question was a probe. Bernard thought of Elena’s scared, honest face in the diner, her confession hovering over the sticky table. She was falling, she said. He was already over the cliff. This was just the wind rushing past.
“She doesn’t need to know the details,” Bernard said. “Not yet.”
Les nodded, as if that was the answer he expected. He picked up his comic book but didn’t open it. “Saturday, then. We’ll take my car. And Bernie?” He locked eyes with him again. “If you’re wrong, we’re both screwed. My name’s on the introduction. They don’t just come for you.”
The weight of it settled between them, a third presence in the mildew-scented room. It wasn’t just a bet. It was a pact. The kind of entangled risk Bernard had spent a lifetime avoiding.
Bernard looked at his roommate, this loud, troubled boy he was now bound to in a way he never had been before. The old fear was there, a cold whisper. He acknowledged it, then let it go.
“I’m not wrong,” he said, and for the first time, he smiled. It felt strange on his face. “Trust me.”
The silence after his words wasn’t empty; it was thick with the unsaid consequences hanging between them. Les finally broke it with a snort, tossing his comic onto the bed. “Trust is expensive, man. And you’re asking me to spend a lot of it.”
He stood up and grabbed his leather jacket from the back of his desk chair. “Let’s go get a burrito. I think better on a full stomach, and you look like you’re about to vibrate out of your skin.”
The taqueria was loud and steamy, the air rich with cumin and searing meat.They took a cracked laminate booth in the back. Les devoured his carne asada like it had personally offended him. Bernard pushed his rice around with a plastic fork, his appetite gone, replaced by a sharp, metallic focus.
“Saturday,” Les said, wiping his mouth with a flimsy napkin.“We drive out to The Stumble Inn. You bring three hundred in cash, exactly.You don’t flash it.You give it to a guy named Vic. He’ll be at the end of the bar, wearing a Flyers cap. He’ll hand you a slip. You check the team and the odds, you don’t say thank you, and we walk out. You talk to anyone else, you look at anyone else, we leave you there.”
“Understood.” The procedure felt both archaic and terrifyingly modern.
“You get one shot to back out.When we park the car. After that, we’re going in.” Les leaned forward, his forearms on the sticky table. “This isn’t a movie, Bernie.Vic isn’t some cartoon gangster.He’s a bored accountant for violent men. He will ruin you for the fun of it if you give him a reason.”
Bernard met his gaze.“I won’t.”
Saturday night arrived smelling of cheap gasoline and damp leaves. Les’s ancient Honda Civic coughed its way onto the highway, the radio silenced by tension. The warehouse ache in Bernard’s muscles had settled into a dull reminder of his new physical reality, a grounding counterpoint to the financial vertigo of the cash in his front pocket.
It was everything he had: two hundred and eighty-seven dollars from the warehouse, carefully folded around thirteen wrinkled dollars from his old life.He felt the rectangular bulk of it against his thigh with every slight movement.
“Last chance,” Les muttered as he swung the car into the potholed lot of The Stumble Inn. The building was a low, dark rectangle lit by a flickering neon cocktail glass. “We can just go in, have a beer, and leave. Tell Vic I was joking.”
“I’m not joking.” Bernard opened the car door. The bar’s bassline thumped weakly through the walls.Inside, the air was a fog of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. The lighting was dim enough to hide stains but bright enough to see threats. Les moved with an unfamiliar, deliberate ease, cutting through the crowd toward the long bar.Bernard followed, his senses heightened. He saw the Flyers cap first, a dark blue smudge under the glare of a TV playing hockey. Vic was younger than he’d imagined, with a narrow, pale face and fingers that drummed a silent pattern on the bartop.He wasn’t bored; he was waiting.
Les slid onto the stool next to him, Bernard standing slightly behind.No introductions were made. Les gave a almost imperceptible nod.
Vic’s eyes, flat and glassy like a doll’s, shifted to Bernard. “You the college kid with the fever dream?”
“I want to place a futures bet.” Bernard’s voice didn’t waver. He willed the seventy years of vanished authority into it.“American League.World Series winner.”
A slow blink. “Odds on the favorites are shit. You want the Twins?” A faint, mocking smile touched Vic’s lips. “I got a great number on the Twins.”
“I do.” Bernard’s hand went to his pocket.He didn’t pull the money out yet.
“Current odds to win the Series are forty-to-one.” Vic recited it like a waiter listing a soup. “That’s the number.For every dollar, you get forty back. Minus my vig.”
“Understood.”
Vic’s doll eyes stared.“How much?”
Bernard withdrew the folded cash. He didn’t fan it out, just placed the compact bundle on the bar under his palm. “Three hundred.”
For the first time, Vic showed a real reaction.His eyebrows lifted a millimeter. It wasn’t a life-changing sum for his business, but for a college kid, it was a declaration. Stupidity or conviction. He slowly pulled a blank slip from his breast pocket and a cheap ballpoint pen.His handwriting was surprisingly elegant.WS Winner: MIN Twins.40-1. $300.He didn’t write Bernard’s name.The slip itself was the contract. He slid it across the wood.Bernard picked it up. He studied the numbers, the letters, committing them to a deeper memory than the one that knew the final score. This was the artifact, the physical proof of his leap. He folded it once, carefully, and put it in his inner jacket pocket, a more sacred place than the one that had held the money.
He nodded once, at no one in particular, and turned.Les was already off the stool, melting back toward the door. They walked out into the cool night, the bar’s noise dying behind them, replaced by the sound of their own footsteps on the gravel.
Neither spoke until they were in the car, doors closed, sealing them in a bubble of stale fast-food air. Les started the engine but didn’t put it in gear.He let out a long, shaky breath he’d been holding. “Holy shit, Bernie.”
Bernard touched his chest, feeling the crisp edge of the paper through the denim jacket. A laugh escaped him, sharp and humorless.It was done.The money was gone. In its place was a slip of potential, a brittle seed that either grew a fortune or marked him for a different kind of harvest.
“Now,” Les said, finally shifting the car into reverse, his knuckles white on the wheel. “We wait.” The headlights cut through the darkness, pointing them back toward a campus, a dorm room, a life that now felt like it was balanced on a single, penciled line.
The silence in the car thickened with each mile closer to campus. Les finally cracked it, slapping the steering wheel with one hand.“Forty-to-one. You’re either a genius or the dumbest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
“Both can be true.” Bernard stared out the window at the passing streetlights, each one a streaking comet in the dark. The slip of paper in his jacket pocket felt like it was radiating heat, or maybe cold; he couldn’t tell.
Fall semester unspooled in a blur of paint fumes and aching muscles. Bernard’s days began before dawn in the warehouse, a vast, echoing space that smelled of damp concrete and the sharp tang of fresh drywall. Elena’s uncle, a silent bear of a man named Karl, communicated in grunts and demonstrations.
He showed Bernard how to load a pallet without blowing out his back, how to cut a straight line with a box cutter, how to read a shipping manifest.The work was brutally simple and profoundly satisfying. Sweat dried into salt lines on his t-shirt. His hands developed a permanent ground-in grime around the cuticles that no amount of scrubbing could fully erase.He loved it.Evenings were for Elena. They’d share a quick, tired dinner in the cafeteria or on a bench outside the art building, her fingers often stained with ink or charcoal.She didn’t ask about the bet.He didn’t volunteer it. It sat between them, an unspoken weight he justified as necessary. He was building a foundation, he told himself.A real one.
“You’re different here,” she said one night, tracing a paint-splatter on his work shirt. They were in her cramped dorm room, the air thick with the scent of linseed oil and her. “Softer in the eyes, but harder in the hands.”
“The hands are from trying to keep up with Karl. The eyes are from looking at you.”
She rolled hers, but smiled.“Smooth. For a man who smells like a hardware store.”
Les oscillated between fascinated concern and superstitious dread. As the baseball playoffs began, the Twins, against all expert prediction, kept winning. Every victory tightened a silent screw in their dorm room.
“They just took the ALCS, Bernie,” Les said one evening, dropping his sports section on Bernard’s desk.The headline was a shock of black ink. “This is getting real. And terrifying.”
Bernard looked up from his philosophy textbook, a subject he now found laughably abstract. “I told you.”
“You didn’t tell me my heart would try to crawl out of my throat every time I check the scores. Vic’s guys have to be noticing this.”
A cold filament of fear, the old Bernard’s lifelong companion, threaded through his gut. He acknowledged it, then boxed it away.“Let them notice. It doesn’t change the outcome.”
The World Series arrived, a seven-day fever dream that gripped the campus. Bernard watched the games in the boisterous common room, a strange island of calm in the sea of shouting jocks.Paul and his friend had stopped mocking him; they now watched him with wary, confused curiosity.
He saw the games not as fresh drama, but as a cherished recording. He remembered the key moments: the miraculous Game Six save, the electric tension. Yet experiencing it live, with his own money—his entire current existence—riding on each pitch, was a new form of agony.Game Seven. The common room was a sweatbox of bodies and shouted commentary. Les stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, uncharacteristically quiet. In the tenth inning, with the score tied, a fly ball soared toward the Metrodome’s gloomy ceiling.Bernard didn’t need to watch. He knew the arc, the catch, the eruption.But he watched anyway. He watched the outfielder settle under it, glove raised, the final out of the 1991 World Series.The room erupted. Beer cans shotgunned, foam spraying across the ceiling.Cushions flew. The roar was deafening, physical.Les grabbed Bernard’s arm, his fingers digging in. His face was pale.“They did it.”
Bernard didn’t hear him. The noise of the room faded into a distant tunnel. The slip in his pocket was no longer just paper; it was a live wire.It was a door. He saw the numbers in his mind, clean and absolute: three hundred dollars times forty.Twelve thousand dollars.In 1991.It was an unimaginable fortune. It was freedom.He turned and walked out of the cheering chaos, into the quiet hallway. Les followed, his breath coming fast.“Bernie.You’re a rich man. A rich man who owes Vic’s crew twelve grand.”
Bernard stopped, leaning against the cool cinderblock wall. The reality of it, the mechanics and the danger, crashed into the fantasy. The payout wasn’t automatic.He had to collect.From Vic.From the men behind him. The old fear uncoiled fully, venomous and familiar. But beneath it, thrumming harder, was a current of something else, something he hadn’t felt in either lifetime: pure, undiluted agency.“I know,” Bernard said, pushing off the wall.His voice was steady. “Now we have to go get it.”
Les’s laughter was brittle, edged with panic. “Get it? We can’t just waltz in there. That’s not how this works. They call you.”
“When?” Bernard’s mind was already clicking forward, past the celebration, into the logistics. The old accountant in him was awake, calculating risk and timelines. “A week? Two? They’ll want to hold onto that cash as long as they can.”
“I don’t know the protocol for collecting a small fortune, Bernie!” Les ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “My expertise was in twenty-dollar parlays. This is a different planet.”
The hallway seemed to tilt. The distant roar from the common room felt like it was coming from another world, a world that didn’t understand the cold calculus now governing his. The slip in his pocket was a magnet, pulling him toward a confrontation he couldn’t yet map.
“Then we find out,” Bernard said, pushing off the wall. His legs felt steady. “You call your cousin. Feel it out. We don’t ask for the money. We ask about the process.”
“He’s gonna know we’re sweating it.”
“Let him.” Bernard started walking toward their room. The noise faded behind them with each step. “We are sweating it. That’s normal. Acting like it’s no big deal would be suspicious.”
Three days passed in a strange, suspended silence. Bernard went to the warehouse, moving sheets of drywall with Karl, the physical labor a welcome anchor. He met Elena for coffee, kissed her with a intensity that made her pull back and search his face. “You’re somewhere else,” she said, her thumb tracing his lower lip.
“Just tired,” he lied, the taste of it sour. “Big project.”
Les made the call from a payphone outside the student union, his back turned to the foot traffic. He came back to the room smelling of cigarette smoke and anxiety. “Saturday,” he said, dropping onto his bed. “Same place. Vic said to come after midnight, when the bar’s clearing out. He said ‘congratulations.’ He didn’t sound happy about it.”
Saturday night arrived, heavy and cold. Bernard dressed in dark, nondescript clothes. He hadn’t told Elena where he was going, just that he was helping Les with something. The lie felt like grit in his shoe.
The drive to Edison was a silent movie. Les chain-smoked, cracking the window to let the freezing air whip through the car. Bernard watched the streetlights smear past, his hand resting over the inner pocket of his jacket. The slip was there. It felt like it was burning a hole through the fabric, through his skin, right into the memory of his old, cautious heart.
The Stumble Inn was quieter this time, just the die-hards and the desperate clinging to the bar. Vic was in the same seat, the Flyers cap a dark blue island in the gloom. He was nursing a club soda, watching a hockey game with flat eyes. He didn’t look at them as they approached.
Les slid onto the stool. Bernard remained standing, a half-step back.
Vic took a slow sip. The ice cubes clinked like tiny bells. “The scholars,” he said, his voice devoid of warmth. “Come to collect your winnings.”
“That’s the idea,” Les said, trying for casual and landing on strained.
Vic’s head swiveled. His gaze landed on Bernard, appraising, dissecting. “Forty-to-one. On the Twins. That’s a story you’ll tell your grandkids. If you live that long.” He let the threat hang, a greasy smoke in the air. “You got the slip?”
Bernard produced it, unfolded it carefully, and laid it on the bar. The penciled numbers looked absurdly fragile under the dim lights.
Vic glanced at it, then nodded to a large man who had been pretending to read a racing form in a corner booth. The man stood up, a mountain in a cheap suit, and walked toward a back hallway. He carried a plain, brown paper grocery bag. He placed it on the bar beside Vic.
“Twelve thousand,” Vic said, not touching the bag. “Count it.”
Bernard’s fingers trembled slightly as he pulled the bag toward him. It was heavier than he expected. He didn’t dump it out. He reached in and pulled out a brick of hundred-dollar bills, bound with a simple paper band. He counted it swiftly, the old accountant’s skills taking over. Twenty bills. Two thousand. He set it aside, reached for another brick. The process was methodical, silent except for the whisper of paper. Les watched the room, his jaw tight. Vic watched Bernard’s hands.
It was all there. Twelve neat bricks. A lifetime of cautious saving, earned back in one reckless, impossible gamble.
Bernard put the last brick down. He looked at Vic and gave a single nod.
“Good,” Vic said. He picked up Bernard’s betting slip, held it between two fingers, and produced a cheap plastic lighter from his pocket. He flicked it once, twice, got a flame, and touched it to the corner of the paper. They all watched it curl and blacken, dissolving into fragile ash that drifted onto the sticky bartop. The contract was gone.
“Transaction’s complete,” Vic said, blowing away the last tendril of smoke. “You’re a lucky kid. Luck like that draws attention. You should be careful where you flash that.” His eyes drifted to the bag. “And I’d be real careful who you tell.”
“We’re not telling anyone,” Les said, his voice too loud.
Vic’s smile was a thin, horizontal cut. “Smart. Now take your grocery shopping and get out of my bar.”
Bernard carefully placed the bricks back into the bag, folding the top over twice. He tucked it under his arm, the weight solid and terrifying. He turned without another word, Les falling in beside him. He could feel Vic’s doll-eyes on his back all the way to the door.
The cold air outside was a baptism. They hurried to the car, the bag feeling impossibly conspicuous. Les fumbled with the keys, dropping them on the asphalt with a sharp clatter. Bernard scooped them up, his own hands steady now, and unlocked the passenger door. He slid in, placing the bag on the floor between his feet.
Les got in, started the car, and they pulled out of the lot. They drove for five full minutes in absolute silence, just the wheeze of the heater and the hum of the tires.
“Holy fucking shit,” Les finally breathed, the word exploding in the small space. “It’s real. It’s in the car.”
Bernard looked down at the plain brown bag. It held more money than he’d made in a year as a junior accountant. It was a down payment on a different life, a life not dictated by financial aid forms and quiet desperation. He thought of the warehouse, of Karl’s grunted approval, of Elena’s paint-stained fingers. This money could build a buffer, could create choices.
But Vic’s final words echoed in the quiet car. Luck like that draws attention. The weight under his feet felt less like freedom and more like a landmine they now had to carry home.