Tip
on a
Dead Crab

by William Murray

"Handicappers are just like horses; they need to be turned out somewhere two or three times a year."

By the time Jay and Fido had reached Mombasa, a center of native culture Jay had described as a sinkhole on the east coast of Kenya, they had both had it with wild animals and Africa generally. "If I want to see game, I can go to the zoo," Jay explained. "Africa is no girls, no TV, no action, nothing. The only thing that saved me from going nuts was this tip we got...."

...Jay and Fido were just lying around at about seven o'clock Saturday night, sipping vodka-and-tonics and trying to figure out how to kill the rest of the evening, when some noise outside lured them to the terrace of their second-floor windows. Their room, like those of the rest of their party, overlooked an inner courtyard, where about half a dozen black men were engaged in setting up a racecourse of sorts....

"They'd roped off a circle about four feet in diameter...with a kind of cage in the middle in which they had all these little crabs with colored numbers painted on their backs. One guy made the odds on this blackboard, another one took the bets from the public watching at the terrace railings, two or three others ran the races off....

"They'd lift up the cage and the crabs would scuttle away to get the hell out of there," Jay resumed. "The winner was the first one to get to the outer rim of the circle. I mean, it was crazy, all these little crabs scurrying around all over the place with people shouting at them, but it was the only action in town."

Jay and Fido, deprived of workouts and past-performance charts, wagered cautiously until the fifth and last race on the card, which included a so-called exotic bet paying off at five to one. "You had to figure out which crab would be the last one out," Jay explained.

As they were standing there on their balcony and studying the dozen or so entries in the starting cage, their waiter, a cheerful ancient with a smile like a sunrise, came up beside them. "I think, sir," he whispered, "that the number four is very sick." They studied the number four carefully for a couple of minutes through their racetrack binoculars....

Excerpt from Tip on a Dead Crab, by William Murray; The Viking Press, 1984