BECAUSE IT AIN'T SAFE for the horse with that pazzo back on the backside, D'Ambrisi said. Joe Dale don't want the kid should get suspended again. Or worse.
Biggy? What is he, home from college? Earlie Beaufait said, and everyone laughed.
Heh-heh. Finally got his walking papers from Pruntytown, more like it. Once they lose their hair, state gotta send em home no matter what they done.
They were at Two-Tie's all-night card game. The second floor, over the Ritzy Lunch in Carbonport, was roasting, the Frigidaire solid with Carling Black Label, two bits a bottle. Orange soda was free. A small electric fan hung upside down from the ruins of a dining room chandelier over Two-Tie's green felt card table. Dangling askew between three naked light bulbs, it made just enough wind to keep the mutt pack from stinking each other out of the room, without blowing the cards off the table. Over and over it wagged its head no, but weakly, very weakly. No one ever listened.
What he done to get sent up there, again? Kidstuff inquired.
Nobody could recall the details, except that a car with a trunk full of heaters of various shapes and sizes, all loaded and ready for action, had been impounded on racetrack grounds.
This was after the thing with the dentist, D'Ambrisi explained.
O yeah the dentist. Fletcher. Fletcha the butcha from Chesta. He and Biggy got along good. (Everybody knew that story.)
He was after the horse, or what?
After the horse, with 500 rounds of ammo.
Maybe he still ain't just the right groom for that particular racehorse, huh?
Guess not, everyone laughed.
Joe Dale tries to keep the kid down the farm most of the time, D'Ambrisi said. But that's where he use to keep the horse too. The horse don't do good in a stall.
The thing with the dentist was in a stall, said Kidstuff. Horse put a dent in Biggy's head with an egg bar shoe, which I know because I put it on myself. But, I kid you not, a lot of people said Biggy was smarter afterwards, like it might of let a little light in the bubblegum he got for brains or something. He ain't grateful, though.
He still got the exact curve of that bar on his forehead, D'Ambrisi added. Which is why, like I started to say before, Deucey is tied up tonight. Joe Dale got the idea the old jasper could solve his problem. He's making her take the horse on the cuff whether she wants him or not.
I hear she says no.
They are talking business as we speak.
Why Joe Dale don't just send that overpriced quitter to the block? Jojo Wood asked. He'd still fetch three, four big ones easy. They might not even heard he's bonkers, that horse, Lil Spinny or whatever the fuck he's called.
Little Spinoza, Two-Tie said. A Speculation grandson, out of a Rembrandt mare. Joe Dale Bigg paid twenty grand for the yearling at Keeneland. This was in 1965.
He was gonna be Joe Dale's Derby horse ya see, Earlie said. He was going to Saratoga at least, with that kind of class. This wop from East Liverpool, he was going to be a debutante. Come to find out he just got himself another space cadet like Biggy. If the horse had broke his leg first time out, he'd of put him down and forgot in a week, but the stiff refused in the gate three times. An embarrassment is what it is. Joe Dale can't give it up. He wants something back for the horse.
He would like to pass the animal to Deucey on the cuff? Nuttinginfront?
That's the deal.
And she says no? Come on, Elizabeth. Two-Tie shook his head and went to answer the back door, rolling a case of empties in front of him. His old dog was just getting to her feet when he came back.
It was Deucey, clattering out of the back stair in army surplus combat boots, which she wore without socks. I hope you gents ain't waiting for me. I mean to sit the first few out. This ain't my lucky night.
Joe Dale get your name on them foaling papers yet?
Hell no.
May I ask, said Two-Tie, what's so geferlich about his offer? Nobody ever touched that classy horse so far but thugs. Who knows what he's got?
He's got a ankle, what I heard, Earlie said. But that ain't the half. He got all the Speculation loony-tunes and none of the talent.
If I remember correctly, Little Spinoza win for sixty-five hundred going away, the one time he don't quit. True, that was some time ago.
Before the dentist?
Before the dentist.
I guess everybody knows that story, Deucey said. Well did I ever tell you fellas I was across the way in Barn Z when it happened? Me and Medicine Ed saw the whole thing. For yalls information, I don't think that beauty-full boy is one bit crazy. Spinoza I mean. He might be the sweetest little horse I ever met.
You try bringing him to the starting gate, we'll see how sweet, Earlie said.
I know I look stupid, gentlemen, but I ain't racing Joe Dale Biggs' ruint stakes horse, which he hates, at Joe Dale Biggs's racetrack, where he is king, under my good name. Many troublous things could happen to the horse, as we was just discussing, and I would still be three grand in the hole for him, to say nothing of the feed bill. I don't care if he never runs his race. A great big baby is what that horse is. And that's what I'm doing for Joe Dale Bigg, and that's all I'm doing-babysitting him.
So there, Kidstuff said. Here, here. And I give up liquor starting now, except for this one last Carling's I'm finishing off, just so as not to waste it.
You can drink yourself to hell, Deucey said, and I know you will. I ain't taking this horse.
On the racetrack may be found any number of doggy types, Two-Tie observed to himself as he surveyed his rooms over the Ritzy Lunch in the graying dark to see what his all-night card game had dragged in. It was the low nature of their appetites that tangled them up in one species together, various breeds of dog as they were. Only Kidstuff had gone home, wherever home was. D'Ambrisi, whose bubblegum-stuffed cheek lay on his last hand of cards, looked like a chickenshit dachshund, the kind that pees itself, and your shoes, whenever you give it a pat on the head. The little tout D'Ambrisi worked for Joe Dale in some obscure capacity, assistant trainer he'd like you to think, more like licker of shit and gofer. Deucey Gifford was an old broad-browed retriever dog, faithful to the death, who had some dignity with her size. The doggish part was how she never let go. Once she thought something belonged to her, or didn't, her jaw clamped down and her gaze flattened out and she could get stupid, very stupid. Jojo Wood, leaning back on the sofa with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, was the commonest dog around the racetrack, a square-headed beagle mutt who padded around the backside, nose low to the ground, hoping for that pizza crust or dropped hamburger, without a clue or a plan. Jojo was a jockey, a little worse than run of the mill. He got his mounts largely because certain horsemen was dumb enough to think that Jojo was too dumb to cheat them. The other jock on the sofa, Earlie Beaufait, a little Frenchman from around Evangeline Downs with a big Choctaw beak on him, was smarter than Jojo, but twitchy as a chihuahua even in repose. It is a known fact that dogs sleep two-thirds of the time. These four, like sixty-seven percent of the other dogs on the planet, were asleep.
Of course the whole notion was an insult to dogs, which included some of the noblest individuals that Two-Tie had ever known in his life, like his Elizabeth. But as with humans it was a question of how the dog had been raised and what had been asked of it whilst it was still young. Early on, you had to show a intelligent dog what to do. A dog like that thought good of herself and pretty soon she ran the whole show, better than what you could. On the other hand, if nutting was asked of it, a dog would expect its dog food night and morning every day of its life and spend the rest of its time looking for that bonus hamburger that fell on the floor, never noticing how good it was taken care of already, for the nutting it contributed to society. The dog got led around like a ponyride by that nose for a free hamburger, and the rest of its brain went dead.
His Elizabeth, however, was a herd dog, hustled by some ancient sense of responsibility not to let her sheep-whoever she decided her sheep were-out of her sight. As for Two-Tie she wouldn't even let him take a dump in privacy but curled up with a groan on the little wrinkled rug between the tub and the sink for the duration. He had had to curtail some of his out-of-town operations in recent years. Elizabeth no longer cared to travel. She didn't appreciate having her routine interrupted. It had cost him some bucks. But it was the least he owed her for thirteen years of devoted companionship. Around the racetrack (especially if you weren't welcome on the actual grounds no more) you had better know the value of a foul weather friend.
Two-Tie leaned over Elizabeth towards the mirror, to pull a comb across his hair and realign his redundant haberdashery, the black bow tie under the striped bow tie that he wore every day of his life. He pinched the alligator clips and patted down the loops of the rather greasy black bowknot. Lillian, he nodded at the glass, and his sagging bloodhound of a face nodded back. He didn't kid himself that Lillian, aleha ha-sholom-she'd been pushing up the daisies in some RC cemetery in Chicago for thirty years-could hear him, or would listen if she could. It was his way of trying to pay off little by little an unpayable debt. Lillian, I treated you wrong, he thought, or said-it was a kind of morning benediction with him, and sometimes he listened to himself, sometimes he didn't. Hey, I don't forget. I treated you shabby, very shabby, and the worst is, there ain't a thing I can do about it-nutting. Except, hey, your boy Donald called me up from Nebraska yesterday. He wants I should do a favor for him and I'm going to do it, Lillian, not for him-he's the same no count, worthless punk he always was, I can tell already from the phone-but for you. Look out, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth pushed herself off the floor, her old toes scrabbling tiredly on the linoleum for purchase, to follow him out to the back porch where he was drifting, telephone in hand.
Good morning, dear. Get me Mr. Smithers, please. Two-Tie looked out over the trash barrels down in the courtyard, the pile of rotting windows and ragged patches of tar paper, broken chairs and stacks of empties from the Ritzy Lunch and the blowing laundry on the next porch, and he felt calm and in tune, this end of his life being tied securely to the other by a porch much like his mother's back on Patterson Park Avenue in East Baltimore, although hers had had a fine vegetable garden down at the foot of it, every inch of the backyard dunged from ayrabbers' horses and planted, with the leaves from the last row of radishes poking through the alley fence.
Vernon. Look. These things happen. Just because I am interested in a horse in a particular race don't mean nobody else is trying to win. In the fourth race last night as you know I am very interested in the one horse. Correct, Buckle My Shoe. Before this race goes off I hear nutting about some possible unknown factors that could figure. Am I right or do I forget something? All right then, nutting.
As I say, I am aware such things happen. Some jeff ships in from god knows where. We don't know him. He's not from here. He ain't even looked around to see how things work here. He's got his mind on his own business and he tries to win first time out and gets lucky. Somehow I don't hear nutting about the mug, who appeared inconsequential. These things happen, Vernon. We make allowances for that.
What I fail to understand in this particular case is two horses beating the crap out of mine, and I hear nutting in front, not word one, zooker. Alls I can say, it's a good thing Buckle My Shoe goes off at such a sorry price so I'm not in heavy. But as you know, Vernon, I like to keep myself covered, and I know nutting about the four horse, on paper he looks like shit. Well, it's Zeno's horse, alev ha-sholom, poor slob, so I have to know he could be gambling. But this other guy with the two horse what got claimed, I never even hear of him before and nobody gives me a call, nutting.
Suitcase mumbled something about the third place purse he had in fact taken home, and Two-Tie winced.
We are talking about a very small piece of change here, Vernon, and besides, as you know, he delicately cleared his throat, I am not the owner of this horse. These are complex operations. A little money may be going more ways than a dago waiter in such a operation and this purse don't even qualify as money in my book. It's basically nutting.
Suitcase goes bop de bop, this and that, he's sorry, he'd never thought, it was late, the girl forgot to call, and finally, okay, I owe you one.
Thank you. It's interesting you should put it that way-it so happens I want you to do something for me, Vernon, not right away, let's say in the spring, maybe twelve, thirteen weeks into the meeting-and not because you owe me-I overlook such considerations from friends, even if you do owe me-but because in my opinion the deal is good for the People, and for Horse Racing.
Two-Tie paused to let this piety sink in. Men like Ogden and Rohring did things for Horse Racing. Now Two-Tie and Suitcase could do something for Horse Racing, and it wouldn't cost them a dime of their own money, and they could make a bundle on the same deal.
Take something out of that Tri-State Glass and Marble Industries kitty, I know you got some left, Two-Tie suggested. Or I could put the squeeze on the bargeman for you. He owes me deep.
So? Suitcase said.
So I want you should write me a race, well, not me personally, fellow from Nebraska, kid I used to know back when-actually I used to know his mother. Beautiful, skinny broad, but nervous. Yellow hair in a nice soft puff, like a Easter chick. She was very good to me. Alas, I fear I did not return the favor like I should have. Died young. Cancer.
Anyway the kid ends up out at Aksarben with a stakes horse that once was big, the biggest, a legend. He's tryna make a little comeback Nebraska, you say?
Correct.
Not Lord of Misrule?
Lord of Misrule, Two-Tie admitted, in not quite the sanguine tone he was attempting.
Lord of Misrule-Jesus Christ, what about that fall last year? Ain't he dead?
I hear he's doing good. He ain't back racing yet. They're sharpening him up-slow Slow-I guess. I don't know, Two-Tie. Jesus, he must be eating bute for breakfast lunch and dinner-no wonder he's in Nebraska. You sure that horse can walk?
Maybe he can't walk, Vernon, but he can run. That's what the kid tells me. And he can still beat the class at the Mound. Anyway the horse should be a draw in a nice little special allowance race some Sunday-call it the Glass Block or the Crystal Classic or something. Everybody wants to know the ending with a horse like that. It's a whatever-happened-to-so-and-so kind of story. Tie it up beautiful for the fans. Even if it's his last race they can always say I saw it. It's history.
I wouldn't put no horse of mine out on the racetrack next to that wreck.
Say, five grand added. Nice little pots for the finishers down to six, to make sure the race fills up.
I don't know. I have to think about that.
You think about it. Plenty of time. Meanwhile, on another, unrelated matter, Vernon. My elderly cousin in the city tells me a distant relation of mine, a young lady, may be headed this way. She is the daughter of a person once dear to me, my niece Dorothy, a brilliant, beautiful girl, a college graduate, who died in a trainwreck on the Pennsylvania Railroad in, lemme see, 1955. The niece left two small children and this is one. She is no racetracker, this young woman, but she got herself hooked up with a racetracker. I like to know if she gets here-Koderer-Margaret Koderer is the name. Should be around 25 years old. I wish to keep an eye on her for the mother's sake.
Suitcase said just a minute, he might have wrote down a groom's license for a girl with that name last night. Yeah, as a matter of fact she come in with the guy who run the two horse.
Is that so? Ain't that a coincidence. What's his name?
Hansel.
Irish, Two-Tie sniffed. I would like to know everything about that fellow, where he come from, what he's got for horses, whether he's a gentleman, educated, what. Where he banks, so to speak. And Vernon, you didn't hang up my great-niece for stalls, did you?
There was a one-day temporary shortage, Suitcase said. There won't be no problem today.
I should hope not.
I'll look into it.
And by the way, Vernon. This young lady doesn't know me from a hole in the ground. The families wasn't close in recent years. Don't mention my name. It's not that kind of thing.
I'll get back to you, Suitcase says.
Two-Tie picked up Elizabeth's leash, which nowadays he mainly carried, waiting for her to catch up with him at the curbs and street corners. And she followed along after him, toenails tapping as if she was blind as well as old, out the door and down the stairs.
They had a route through the streets of Carbonport that took nearly an hour, although the town was made up of only five streets, two avenues that turned into county roads and ran up in the hills, and one riverfront park, really a rundown parking lot, by the ferry landing. He had long since observed that Elizabeth had superfluous IQ for her line of work, and inside all that free space in her brain she was completing a philosophy of the world wove together out of all the smells she had ever smelled. Maybe her memory was not the longest. Every day she had to go over every line of it again from top to bottom, just like the day before. She was history-minded: she wanted a piece of every dog who had come before her to every landmark, the whole roll call, every tuft of grass at the foot of the loading platform by the old natrium plant, every pile of boards or lost truck part in the fringe of weeds along the shore at the four-car ferry, every corner stump or clump of pee-bleached iris on the shaggy line where front yards ended in pavement. The one-time ice house. The Wheeling amp; Lake Erie water tower. Every boundary stone still standing, however crookedly, in front of the town cemetery. Where putting her own bit into this olfactory model of the world was concerned, Elizabeth was not demure but lifted her leg like any male dog, a little decrepitly now that she was old. Come outa there, Elizabeth. He didn't want her pissing on the gravestones.
He used to know certain horses like that-personally-before he got ruled off. Getting ruled off the backside for alleged conflicts of interest and unsavory associations after Mickey went to jail for the dirty bookstore was humiliating and at first inconvenient, but he began to realize in due course that it was all to the good if what you were trying to do was see the whole world of half-mile racetracks and the people and animals that lived on them as one world, and not just a big, all-over-the-place, unseemly business. Of course horse racing was a business too, whatever else it might be, and in some ways he actually found it easier to keep his hand on the long strings if he didn't have to look up close at the valiant and tragic animals and the greedy conniving assholes, himself included, who took advantage of the horses' noble natures. To be ruled off gave him-yes-distance.
Distance helped him to see straight back to his father playing the horses with shrewd joy to the day he died. Long after the old man could limp to the track anymore he had his Telegraph folded on the little table next to the dusty water glass that held his false teeth. That was the one picture Two-Tie could still call up of Dorothy's little girls. Dorothy painted pictures, her husband was in the theater and of course the children were being raised as heathens, but they'd been warned to be respectful in a kosher house. The oldest, Margaret, was learning to read, she leaned over her great-grandfather's paper next to the teeth, looked at all those funny columns with the bold print and the symbols and the numbers and said, Is it Hebrew? and everybody had a big laugh.
His father had earned the reputation of a pretty good handicapper over the years. Anyway he got his diamond stickpin out of the crown of the sport of kings, or at worst he broke even, and it made him a dapper little man who thought good of himself and was a gentleman to his wife and a benefactor to the unfortunate.
He almost passed for a man of the world, Alvin. When it all came out about Lillian-that Preakness Saturday in 1937, when she was riding the streetcar out to Pimlico with her boy, looking pretty in her new hat, the white straw Suzy hat with the green spotted veil, and the roving photographer from the Sunpapers took her picture and she blurted that lie, that she was Mrs. Lillian Samuels, wife of Rudy Samuels of 211 Patterson Park Avenue, although she was still Miss Lillian Murphy and they had been living for four years on Queensberry Avenue in Pimlico, two blocks down from the fence where the first turn rounds into the backstretch; and his mother saw the picture in the Sunday paper and the truth came out-he had a feeling that Alvin would have been philosophical about the Catholic girlfriend and maybe even gone along with a wedding. After all, Lillian was a track clocker's daughter and the real god of the Samuels boys was the racetrack god. His mother threatened to kill herself and wept into her lokshen, but never missed a single meal.
He should have married Lillian. He knew that now. It wasn't Alvin, it wasn't Mama, he couldn't even blame Lillian for forcing his hand with the big hopeful lie-for some reason the doll really loved him-but at the time he was a puffed up young macher with a fat roll and had that sportsman's attitude you shouldn't let a girl get the upper hand. And besides he never could stomach that woodenhead kossack her son. So Lillian went to Chicago where she died, and he moved back home. The truth was he had never really moved out of the rowhouse on Patterson Park, since that's where the all-night card game was, with Alvin presiding, and he had slept there two, three nights a week, if you call that sleeping.
Some would argue, surely, that the influence of Alvin Samuels was not so healthy on his boys-look at Mickey-the bookstore after all was a family concern, and Two-Tie had barely missed going to jail himself. But for better or worse, when it come time to situate his finance business, the racetrack was what he knew, or thought he knew. And years later, once he really knew a little about that type of men and animals, getting ruled off only helped him to see the big picture.
The way he looked at it now, there was something unseemly about a grown man running around from track to track to hustle a buck. In your maturity, if you'd made yourself sufficiently useful to people, if you'd earned a place in their society, let them hoof it to you. Everybody needed money sometimes. Everybody, down to the lowliest hotwalker or toothless groom living in a tack room on a two-dollar dose of King Kong liquor per day, saw his little piece of the picture. Deals didn't have to be stuck together with spit and chewing gum if a man had credit. That's what goddamn telephones were for.
Besides, he had to think of Elizabeth. The year he got ruled off she turned eleven. He had just noticed the old joy had went out of it for her when they drove to new places and walked around. She got a worried look in her eye, and he saw that the round lens of her eyes was a little milky where it used to be clear as jelly. She hunched her shoulders and stuck close to his knee and never even tried to sniff around the barn poles and mouseholes and manure piles at a new track.
So it all came together. He could have fought it. Repeated appeals, screaming lawyers, incessant string pulling and greasing of doors had paid off in similar cases for far more repulsive characters than himself. But he decided not to. Unseemly. He liked that word. Enough was enough. He settled down in Carbonport, right here, on the Ohio side, where he could walk up on the little rise behind the elementary school on Second Street and look down the bluff and across the water at the specks creeping around the brown oval inside the green oval, at least he thought he saw such specks, if the fog was off the river and the morning was clear.
THE FRIZZLY-HEAD GIRL, the young fool's woman, was barking up his heels again with Pelter. She would walk a horse fast, that girl. She liked to hurry a horse, and him too. Sometime she got so fresh she tipped clean out from under the shedrow, carried Pelter in the dirt road and passed Medicine Ed and the horse he was walking on the right hand side. Not if the young fool was watching she wouldn't-he'd fuss with her if she tried that. Must be worried he stick out enough round here already, and for good reason. Anyhow he want everything done the old way, according to etiquette. The cleanest hay, timothy and alfalfa. Best quality pine tar foot dressing-Zeno used to mix up his own, out of used motor oil and turpentine. Best grain. Hundred percent Castile shampoo. And the most experienced old-time groom fool enough to take his job.
Naturally, Pelter go along with the girl just fine-Pelter was a game animal, he was always that, bit of a clown, even before he was born he had jumped round the usual etiquette of the business, for he was a unusual creature on the racetrack even if you been around as long as Medicine Ed, namely, a field-bred horse. Or that was the story. Some stud horse, maybe not the one officially certified on the papers, who knew, had sneaked round or over a fence somewhere and went with his mother. Some name like Home Cookin, she wasn't much of a mare and nobody wasn't expecting much out of her, and she got this witch-eyed long-backed colt who turn into a legend. Pelter. And which, if he could talk, and Medicine Ed wouldn't put it past him, why, what couldn't the two of them say about the type of folks they had fell in with now?
The girl, the young fool's woman-she didn't know nothing and she couldn't do nothing, but she would work, he'd give her that much. Haul them buckets, sling them bales, just like a man, better'n a man if you look at what they got for men round here anymore. If she didn't know nothing to do, she'd find something to do and get all in your hair or climb up your heels like now. She'd make it up as she go along. In the hole in her head where experience would have stacked up, if she had any experience, that's where she must find em, her chucklehead ideas.
You can't gallop an old horse every day, am I right? she say.
Hmmm.
So he gets walked, correct?
Medicine Ed just eyeball her.
Okay, if it keeps Pelter sound to walk, isn't it reasonable that walking him fast is a little better than walking him slow?
Don't you be putting off your eeby jeebies on Pelter there. He ain't nervous. You nervous. He ain't in a hurry. You in a hurry.
I didn't say he was nervous. I said maybe it'd be good for him to go a little faster.
Good for you, you mean.
Good for you too, you old Halloween bones-get your appetite up. And she grinned evilly.
I had a stick leg since before you was born, young woman. (This wasn't quite true, but somehow the vintage of an injury seem like it ought to get some respect, like what he used to had for his granddaddy who still limped from the war-whichever war that was.) Does I go round calling you Four Eyes?
You probably call me worse than that behind my back.
What I call you?
Ignorant. Green.
You's all of that.
Finally it was nothing else to do but show her, learn her a thing or two, in self-defense. He taught her how to rub down the horse's leg and put on the cottons and bandage, smooth and not too tight, without poking it through with the pin and putting a hole in the animal. Then she thought she knew something. Then she want to bandage everything in sight. She go around bandaging young and old, lame and sound, on her own say-so, and Medicine Ed come around behind her unbandaging. What can it hurt? she say.
Young woman, it is a price on everything. Every change make some other change that you can't see. I know some trainers have never bandaged a horse and they got horses outrun the word of God. When you run against them horses you better have your tap-dancing shoes on.
Well-you're talking about somebody's fifty-thousand-dollar horse. We've got nothing but cripples.
You think stakes horses is sound? He shook his head at the pure foolishness of her. Naturally he was thinking of Platonic, and his feet that used to remind Medicine Ed of gluing together two broken China soup plates from little pieces, him and the horseshoer worked on them so much-them two front feet, coming up to the Seashell, was one long bellyache, probably worth two weeks in the butcher shop (Sinai Hospital) all by theyselves. Stake horses like all the rest, he added.
So how you do you know what to do?
You follow custom, young woman. They is no I know, he know, like what you talking bout. Until you have put some years in this business, you watch the old grooms and do like they do.
That doesn't sound very scientific to me, she say.
I tell you a secret, horse racing is not no science. Some of em tries to make it a science, with the drugs and the chemicals and that, but ma' fact it's more like a religion. It's a clouded thing. You can't see through it. It come down to a person's beliefs. One person believe this and the other person believe that. It's like the National Baptists bandage and the Southern Baptists use liniment, you see what I'm trying to say? Nobody exactly know.
His cheeks ached under his eyes-she made him talk too much, made him say peculiar things he was sorry later that he give up. He slipped around the corner of the shedrow and faded away from her behind wagons and buildings in a certain way he had learned to do long ago, before he had his good job with Gus Zeno.
This was when he missed having his old crushed Winnebago there on the shedrow. It was the one thing Mrs. Zeno had said from the start he could keep-it taken phone calls from certain people, Mr. Two-Tie, Jim Hamm, Kidstuff, to remind her of other sums and bonuses that was decent and customary, under the circumstances, but the Winnebago she didn't even care to look at no more. Only, Suitcase Smithers gave him twenty-four hours, if he wanted it, to haul that thing off the backside. The young fool say he'd take care of it. That was part of they deal. He had it towed round to the trailer park behind the Horseman's Motel, a couple blocks from the back gate. They put the Winnebago way in the rear, out of sight, in a clump of serviceberry bushes. They run an extension cable from the young fool's trailer all the way to his trailer. And that was how Medicine Ed fell into this job.
It would have been too raggedy an outfit even for Ed to work for if Hansel's horses was still thrown to four separate barns in every corner of the backside and everybody at the Mound laughing at him. But already the morning after the young fool rolled in, Suitcase come round personally and asked him this and that, where he from and how he be getting along, and then he let him have Zeno's old stalls in Barn Z.
That's Pelter? the Pelter? Roland Hickok's Pelter? Suitcase say. He's peering in the dark stall. The young fool make like he ain't hear. He turn on his heel and hang up a tangle of shanks and halters and shaken out some chain, but finally he say Mr. Hickok have sold him Pelter in a private deal, and Suitcase say, Well I'll be damned, because he know Mr. Hickok won't sell the West Virginia-bred winner of the Popcorn Stakes and the Little Blue Ridge to just anyone. So maybe the young fool's price go up a little bit just then.
Medicine Ed himself had to admit that Pelter looked good, almost too good-ain't he heard that the once-upon-a-time Darkesville Stalker broke down bad in the stretch only a short while back? And they was that red bomber too that Zeno had claimed, and which had already win one for fifteen hundred in Charles Town, so the young fool must be doing something right for these horses.
Medicine Ed had his hand on the screen door of the track kitchen-but then between buildings he spied Deucey Gifford, looking round for him to walk the Speculation grandson. It was something about this colt (colt! he was long past a colt) that touched him. He hurried his stiff leg back to the barn and took him off her. Medicine Ed like to get him round the corner of the shedrow, where Deucey couldn't see, and slip him out to the grass patch, let him graze, graze and gaze. He looked round at things, like he really want to know what it is. Why? Like nobody pay you a dollar more in this business to braid up a tail or put a checkerboard on the flank of a horse going to a race. So why? It was the plain beauty of the thing.
He do scare easy, the horse. When they swing back to the shedrow, a she-cat with a backbone like knuckles, so bagged up her titties bounced on the dirt, chased a mouse across their path, and the horse threw up his head and stood quivering. What she want with you, son? Medicine Ed talked to him. She done got herself in a deep hole and she need some of that fast luck oil to get her out. She ain't thinking bout you. He gave the horse his kind eye, he came back to himself and they plodded on.
The way Medicine Ed hear it, Joe Dale Bigg run the horse off and so he was Deucey's but he wasn't Deucey's, wasn't nobody's horse right now. A Speculation grandson and looking for a home! Jesus put me wise. Now, what was the name of this boy? Medicine Ed couldn't recall. For all his fancy blood he had a ankle almost as big as he was, but that wasn't what caused him to lose his home. It was Biggy, Joe Dale Bigg's boy, one day when Biggy was helping Fletcher the dentist in the back of the horse's stall and the horse pinned and about killed him. Biggy what you call simple, a gorilla-size child-for-life, and now he was back from the industrial school in Pruntytown. Joe Dale Bigg thought he better be shed of the animal before something go down.
Medicine Ed smiled inside of himself with deep contentment when he recalled that hot afternoon. First he had had to hear it on the far side of Barn Z, Biggy screaming and kicking the animal in the belly, and the fool dentist Fletcher up at his head jimmying the speculum into the horse's jaws and snatching the shank on him, trying to work in his file-the horse just up from the farm that morning-and soon that crazy black light come on in the horse's eye and his whole back end fly at Biggy's face in the corner. And left a deep print of his bar shoe on Biggy Bigg's forehead, where they say you could still read it.
Well, wouldn't nobody know it to look at you now, son. The horse shuffled dreamily on, back into his babyhood of not knowing nothing, slow as any sane animal in August if nobody push him.
That was his name, it come back to him now-Baby something-no, Little, Little Spinoza. He was little, one of those little prince-looking horses, dark bay with bourbon whiskey color lights and a big round panic eye, a bird eye. People like to say how every Speculation grandson was a killer in his heart, but this one just childish-one of those terrible babies that never learn nothing and know they're never gone to learn nothing, for once they scare, they don't wait, they take wing.
And he was a horse. For some reason they never taken his nuts. Joe Dale Bigg used to notice him down there on the farm one or two times a meeting, enter him for five thousand or sixty-two hundred, and have one of his boys carry him to the track in the afternoon. Then the animal would worry and sweat out all his speed bouncing over potholes on the road, jump out the gate like a rabbit-if he come out at all (a few times he didn't)-and land up running fourth or fifth against horses that didn't have half his class. Maybe he win oncet at that price. If so, it was a long time ago.
Medicine Ed round the shedrow of Barn Z back to Deucey's stalls, and there she was, talking to Deucey, the young fool's woman, hanging on the corner post like grim death.
Oooo, look at that, she say. Gee whiz, what a beauty, I've never seen a horse like that on a half-mile track before.
That's right you ain't, Deucey told her, grinning, puffing up like a chicken in a stiff wind. This is what you call class, girlie. This is a Speculation grandson, out of Little Dutch Girl. He's called Little Spinoza.
Little Spinoza. He looks like a baby.
He ain't no baby. He's six.
He's made so very perfect-he has those golden highlights near the black at his points-like-like tortoise shell, you know?
O yeah, I see what you mean, like tortoise shell specs or sumpm, Deucey said, kind of egging her on. She took the horse from Ed for a moment, like to show him off. They stood sideways in the dirt road.
He is small, though, isn't he?
That there is a optical illusion of horses with perfect conformation. He ain't large but he ain't small. He's just got everything put away in the right place.
You are a very beautiful boy. The girl got her hand right in his face and for some reason he ain't bite her. She slipped her grubby gray fingers under his halter and scratched. He leaned his head over them, snorted and tried to go sideways but Deucey snatched on him and led him off around the corner. Oooo, let me walk him for you, say the girl, following after.
Deucey looked her up and down. Well, usually Medicine Ed walks him for me, she say, weakening, though she know better. He can be a handful sometimes.
Around the corner she whispered to the girl, but he could still hear it: Medicine Ed can use the couple bucks. You gotta learn to think about things like that, girlie. You ain't in this world by yourself.
O Ed can have the money. I'll walk him for nothing. Lil Spinny, she crooned, you want me to walk you, don't you?
You just follow along with Medicine Ed. He can teach you plenty.
But he's so slo-ow.
Downright insulting, and she don't know the power of money. And them is the people he's working for now. The which, to be honest, was not all bad. He'd say this for the young fool, he paid good. He asked Medicine Ed what Gus Zeno paid and, good to his word, he paid ten dollars better, 110 dollars a week plus the lot for the Winnebago. But Zeno had been paying more than a groom, something like a assistant trainer, though he wouldn't call him that in the papers. That was the job Medicine Ed always done for him. But Zeno wanted his own name up there on every race.
Zeno had had a string of owners you could see with your own eyes. They used to come round the barn in their silk neckties and shiny fur coats, trailing airs of perfume and whiskey and getting in the way until Zeno steered them off to the clubhouse. Where was the money coming from in this operation? Here it was no sense of the value of money, spending like the Hares and the Ogdens, best grain, best hay, best veternary, how long could they keep this up? So that's what he had to put up with now-suchlike foolishness from the young fool's woman, good pay on a sinking ship, and him farther from his future home than ever.
Round and round the shedrow they went for thirty minutes, Medicine Ed and Little Spinoza, and the girl weaving in and out of them like a puppy dog.
Did you ever rub a Speculation baby?
Um-hmm. Sho is.
They shuffled on. Now she was in front looking back. Now she was in back of him catching up. The girl waited for Medicine Ed to yacky-yack to her about famous horses he have known, but he wouldn't give her the satisfaction.
Who was it? she finally ask. The Speculation baby.
Platonic.
Gee whiz, Platonic. Whirligig Farm?
Um-hmm.
Didn't he win something big?
This was too much for Medicine Ed. Cobweb Futurity. Rising Sun Cup. Trellis Handicap. Greenbriar Realization. Seashell Stakes.
My god. What's it like working for billionaires?
She done run up ahead of him again and was walking backwards, which was bad luck. He looked at her round green blindman glasses and her foolish pickney braids.
Do they at least pay well? she want to know.
He looked at her. He sucked in his hollow cheeks. Halfway good, he finally say.
Then they was all back in front of the stall again, Deucey making sweet eyes at the girl and the girl making sweet eyes at Little Spinoza.
Oooo, let me brush him for you, say the young fool's woman. I'll bring up his dapples.
I don't know if he'll stand for it, honey. He ain't used to that good treatment. I guess you can try. But you be careful, he could bust your head.
Oooo goodie, the girl say. Don't worry, he's going to like it. Deucey laughed and Medicine Ed just shook his head.
But you better hurry if you want to tame him, Deucey say. I ain't keeping this horse.
What! said the young fool's woman. What do you mean? Is he for sale?
No he ain't for sale, Deucey snapped. She had better judgment than to try and explain.
Medicine Ed shrugged. He ain't have no dog in this fight. Nobody ain't ask for his spare change. Nobody ain't begged him to take a Speculation grandson off they hands. But then he say: It's a sorry shame. Ain't every day a six-thousand-dollar horse come along waving a three-thousand-dollar price tag, no claim necessary. A horse like that. That horse been abused. You could fix that horse.
You're gonna tell me to buy this horse? Deucey say. I'm a gyp. You know I don't got luck enough for two horses, Ed. Every time I ever had two horses I end up with none.
Why don't you give that other old boy his rest? Medicine Ed said.
I ain't got three grand, Speculation grandson or no Speculation grandson.
I thought Joe Dale done fronted you the animal no strings attached.
Come on, Ed, where'd you ever see a deal on the track with no strings attached? Sometimes, you know, when times was very very tough, I have took this or that service on the cuff from some prince among men-like Kidstuff for example-and even then they own you a little…
Sho is, sho is, Ed said slowly. He knew how it was-your operations was not quite your own. Somebody might want to know something, somebody might put you a question about something you ought not to be telling-even if they never bring it up about the money, not for months, or years.
So how much more don't I want to get tangled up with thirty-horse strings. Now, I ain't high class. If I need a quick couple bucks, me and Two-Tie, we see eye to eye. But I can't see to the bottom of Joe Dale Bigg.
Sho is. Them boys can be mean, Ed had to agree, remembering that enjoyable hot afternoon and the imprint of Little Spinoza's heel calk rising up on Biggy Bigg's forehead like a meat stamp.
And I don't want to, either. Some of em's-speak well of the devil The big car come crunching over the gravel at a slow rate of speed, raising a low cloud, more floating on the dried-out puddles and potholes, the way it looked, than driving-a Cadillac Sedan de Ville with purple-tinted windows and gangster doors, midnight blue with a brushed stainless steel top like silvery fur, and white wall tires that one of Joe Dale Bigg's boys have to be washing down regular, because the pink dust of the backside never sink into them but was new every day, like a thin smear of lady's face powder. When it was right beside of them, a yard off the shedrow and that big in the middle of the dirt road as if it just have to block the way wherever it go, the passenger's side window slid into the door with a silky whirr and, deep inside, where it was dark like a saloon, a finger crooked.
Hey, Deucey! Get in! Joe Dale wants to discuss sumpm wit ya.
Deucey got in the car, pulled the door closed after her, and it just float there, everything invisible behind the blue glass, motor on, humming.
This place is too weird for me, the young fool's frizzly hair woman announced to the world, and not in no soft voice neither, but luckily Medicine Ed had already did his fade-had ducked back in the stall with Little Spinoza and hung him on a tie chain and busied himself in one corner, where he could eyeball the midnight blue Cadillac through a chink in the wall without Joe Dale's boys looking at him. The girl was standing there with one hand on her head, just blinking at that car. Geez, she say, is that car real or did I make it up?
After a while Deucey bundled back out the passenger door, her bottom jaw lumped up like a boxing glove, mumbling cusswords through her teeth.
And right then the backseat window purred and dropped into the door. And there, to Medicine Ed's amazement, sat Two-Tie, who everybody know is ruled off. Two-Tie don't even look round to see if somebody else be watching. He stare at the girl, just stare at her. Her hand is still on her head. Good morning, Margaret, he finally say. I must say you are the picture of your lovely mother at twenty-but for the hair-she had the most beautiful auburn hair.
Then his eyes rolled up in the air as if he sooner remember than look-and the window rolled up too-and slow as a funeral, the car drove off.
That hick-town bully, Deucey says, he thinks he's Al Capone.
You done backed out?
No I ain't backed out and I ain't gonna back out. I'm in to stay. I'm gonna pay that bloodsucker off free and clear so he can't crawl back in nowheres. Then I don't owe him nothing and I can do what I want to, which I was going to anyway.
Maybe you best give up that horse if Joe Dale gone come back in and tell you where to run him.
That ain't all. He wants me to do sumpm else for him. Even Deucey wouldn't shout what she say next. She leaned over and hissed around her black front teeth: He means me to be the owner-trainer for somebody else's horses, some jailbird I guess. I don't want to front for a bunch of ruled-off crooks. I won't have no parts of it.
Medicine Ed cut his eyes at the frizzly-head girl to remind Deucey they was in company, discretion not guaranteed.
Was that baggy-face guy in the back seat by any chance Rudy Samuels? the girl asked, looking from one of them to the other, but nobody answered her, for that was not a name familiar to anyone present.
Now if I can just figger out where to lay hold of three grand fast. I got some. If Grizzly win one more for me for fifteen hundred, and I don't eat but out of a can for a month, and the feed man will wait…
Feed man always wait, Medicine Ed said.
Deucey mopped her head with a bunched up but clean man's handkerchief, and walked around in circles. I can't ask Two-Tie-he was in there with them. Although if I didn't see it with my own eyes I wouldn't believe he let them lowlifes sneak him on the grounds. He ain't said a word to me or even looked at me. I don't think he knew I was there. You think he's slipping, Ed?
Mr. Two-Tie ain't slipping, Medicine Ed said firmly. But he was worried. Generally Two-Tie was strictly law-abiding, down to the smallest details, except of course for his main business, which was finance. He would never bust through a gate if he was not invited. That would run completely against his nature and business practice, or so Medicine Ed would have said. Medicine Ed did wonder what a gentleman like Two-Tie could have to do with the young fool's woman, wayward, ignorant and obviously raised all wrong. Two-Tie had spoke of her mother. Could they be blood kin? It was too vexing to think of it.
Two-Tie ain't even old, Ed said.
I don't ask Father Time who's young or old, Deucey said.
The young fool come striding round the corner in his fedora hat and polished boots. The pack of them, Ed, Deucey and the frizzly hair girl, just naturally fell silent. His eyes flashed over them, half pleased, half suspicious, and he went his way.
That horse win for 3500 easy, Ed said. He wondered why nobody ask him to front as the owner-trainer for some fine animal. He'd be only too glad, for the right price-he'd even come cut-rate. But nobody don't even think of asking.
I've got a little money, the frizzly-head girl say.
Medicine Ed looked hard at her. He knew where she had that money from-from betting against her man. Did that make it unlucky money? Money was money.
I got a thousand, the girl give up in a whisper.
Well, I got a thousand too. Don't you need that dough to run your outfit? Won't Hansel be mad at you? Deucey asked her.
The young fool's woman turned red in her cheeks like the back of a steam crab. He doesn't want that particular roll, she say.
So it was that bad luck money, sho is, sho is, but it buy a horse just as good as any other money.
I bet Halloween Ed over there got a grand squirreled away, the frizzly hair girl said. I see him going to those windows.
Maybe she was just trying to be fresh, but old Deucey looked up in surprise.
Naaa, Medicine Ed needs his money, he wants to move down Florida some day soon, she say. But then she must have seen something in his face. Whaddaya say, Ed? Am I wrong?
He's the one keeps talking up this horse, the girl say.
It was a good thing he had the barn behind him. They couldn't see how he have to lean on it to stand upright with his weak leg trembling inside his pants. Right now he only have 750 dollars, if like a fool he take and throw behind this horse every nickel he has scraped together towards a new home since Zeno pass. Maybe somebody has run him crazy. Maybe somebody has fixed him good. Yet and still. Ain't nobody ever asked him to come in with them on a horse. And this a good horse. Baby-minded, but a very very good horse.
I study it, he say. I don't have it. I could get it.
SHE HAD SEVEN BEAUTIES like Mary mother of God, three sets of two, dexter and sinister, and one seventh universal oil that melted them all down and bound them together for you in a magic recipe-one ultimate Menu by Margaret, as she used to call her recipe column in the Winchester papers.
She had her highborn air, this came of being a Jew, of an ancient, select, and secretive people, though she didn't think anything about this herself. (You could sometimes catch her, though, idly picking out the Jewish names on any list-opera patrons, plane crashes, Nobel prize winners, This Week's Marriage Licenses, KNOWN FELONS WITH MOB CONNECTIONS REPORTED TO BE CURRENTLY OPERATING IN THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON AREA.) Whether it made her easy or uneasy to count herself one of this family, she was of it-she could bother to count or not, she had that luxury-and a great old family was deeply to be coveted. So much the better if they were an outsider race and small in number. They were never far from the centers of power.
This is another way women were luck and she was the luck of the luck. You could suck up family from them, even as you loosened them from it. Blood bound her and you together even as you commanded her, Leave your father's house and follow me. They would do it, too, that was the wonderful, the amazing, thing. On her own, she hadn't telephoned her father in eighteen months. She had even had to be told at Rosh Hashonah and Thanksgiving, Maggie, call your father. (Such courtesies might be of value later on, who knew.)
She had her highborn air, dexter, and right next to it she had her lowborn air, sinister, which also came of being a Jew, an outcast, a gypsy, and not giving one goddamn. She could up and follow a racetracker, a coarse adventurer, if she so chose. Moreover you could get to her through her body. It was a black, rich, well-watered way, between rock faces. The word podzol came to mind. The word humus. Soil. Slut. You could ask all you wanted of that flesh, you could whisper outrages into her ear and, no matter what she said, the flesh would tremble and fall open to you.
She was a slut, and not only that, she was a Mediterranean slob. She picked at scabs, she picked her nose, it was nothing to find one of her bloody tampons forgotten, stuck fast in a pool of browning gore to the side of the bathtub. Small as she was, she loved to eat and could put it away like a peasant. She had learned to cook from one of her clever lowborn boyfriends and now made free with that clown's excellent rustic cuisine-beans, ham hocks and rice, fish fried in golden dust, earthy bread, corn fritters light as bugs. Nothing was by definition too sweet for her. Once she discovered an old jar of crystallized honey in the back of the pantry-it had little black specks in it. Those are mouse turds, you pointed out, and she laughed, and ate the whole thing with a spoon. And her face was peasant, less Jewish than Cossack, even framed inside those prickly braids.
The beauties of her body dexter and sinister echoed the contraries of her breeding, the elegance of her shoulders and long neck as against the extreme punishable insolence of her ass. You didn't often see an ass like that on a white girl, a long flexible back ending in a short round bulb-like structure that really was rather rude. How dare it try to hide anything from you? The muscular lobes under its dimples begged to be pried apart, and of course you obliged.
Contraries of rank and body-ditto the spirit. She was intelligent. She had crisp clean logic to throw away, like a harbor of sunny, empty warehouses, and the value of this, besides that you could put into her with very little trouble anything you wished to teach her, was how lavishly she let it all go for you-O the sight of all those beautiful shining granaries receding into the distance! How willingly she put your shambles in place of her order, although she was smarter than you were, and often remade your mess into her order without even knowing it. Then you had to shake her out of thought altogether (for a time), which was easy to do, because of her matching stupidity.
Her stupidity. Her unruliness. You loved it best, for it gave all the other traits their reference to you. She needed someone to fight, her mirror image, only upside down-her twin, and that was you. Her unruliness seemed to lie just under her skull, at the roots of her kinky hair, and to be the continuation of that hair, or its germ. It was natural, then, to sink your whole hand in her incredibly thick, coarse hair, to bind her to you that way, all five fingers, with animal bluntness. Her own unruliness made it impossible for her to get loose from you, and if you whispered obscenities into her ear then, and reached the other hand between her legs, she was always wet.
And that was the seventh beauty, her perfect willingness to you, which was the basic ingredient of this particular Menu by Margaret, the tie of ties. The little key was pain, which turned the lock of every pleasure. No great credit to yourself, who had been born with it in the palm of your hand. It had taken a long time to realize what luck it was-how rare.
And not that that willingness was unique to her-it was in fact the commonest, the vulgarest quality of woman. It was the universal oil. It was the wonder of women, all in all, their willingness to receive you-you had that golden key-and why you in turn had to have a woman or you were lost. Your twin sister carried your soul in her little box, it came down to that. True, other traits, particularities, beauty, unruliness, were dissolved in her. Uniqueness drowned itself in her-all for you.
Betting her own money on Zeno's horse-that was a gorgeous, supreme bit of unruliness-well, you could hardly have taken away her last pathetic paycheck from that recipe writing job, now could you? Or have pounded the barrelhead for the cash from her dead mother's dining table. But who could have guessed that she would jump in with both feet-and even so how much were you talking-a hundred, two hundred bucks? So she walked back out with maybe eleven hundred dollars-all as if to say she wouldn't stop you, or even ask you how much of the common roll you had staked and blown-none of that low-grade wifely nagging for her-but if you could do it, by god so could she, she wasn't going to sit home and roll out biscuits.
And not that she was above nagging. She just dragged it up to her monumentally unruly level, drilling you with green-yellow monkey-witch eyes every time you came back from the racing secretary's office, wanting to know whether you had entered Pelter in a race yet, and if so for how much? None of this out loud, of course, at least not yet, but it went without saying you were a chicken and a liar too if you ran him in anything better than a 1500-dollar claimer after all this.
But if you lost that horse wouldn't all your hidden luck go with him? Wouldn't the magic of a chosen one desert you? Your twin sister carried your soul in her velvet box, but after all it had been Mr. Hickok who picked you out, gave you a job, saw something in you. It was better than winning any race, that red, beautiful, melancholy autumn afternoon, when the old man had limped around the corner and sat down on a bale of hay by you, seeming idly to want to talk horses-you always knew how to get him going, he liked your respect for the old ways-the subject of bute, luckily, hadn't come up. And suddenly turned and offered you, resignedly, wearily, for 1500 dollars, what was left of his one great horse-and so hooked to you that silken thread of merit that bound you forever to him as it had bound him to his famous father before him. Class. A month later he was dead.
Hickok himself had run Pelter in low-grade allowance races, non-winners of a bologna sandwich in their last three starts, that kind of thing, no fear of a claim there, but now and then in a 1500-dollar claimer too, for a two-grand purse, and the horse win easily at that price. Hickok had so much class he could put up the legend of that horse against the risk of an upstart claim, and no one dared to take him, and no one cried lese majeste. It was a kind of gallant joke, on the racetrack at that time, to let the old stakes horse pay for his own dinner. Now she challenged you with her monkey green eyes to do the same, but she didn't understand what it was to have no glorious family ties, nothing and nobody knitting you into this world but a grimy snarling gnome of a so-called father in the shop of a used car lot in Trempeleau, Wisconsin. What sort of class could you use to fend off an upstart's claim, when you were an upstart yourself? She didn't have to know what you knew, that if you lost that horse, you would lose her too.
WHEN MEDICINE ED FINALLY HAD Little Spinoza alone, he tell it into him: Get ready, son. The women gone to take your manhood, he broke the news, not like it was the end of the world, and next come disease, hospital cases, and death, but like it was a thing the horse ought to know. The first cold had come and they were walking round and round the shedrow in a silver fog that beaded up the cobwebs and the horses' eyelashes.
Wasn't no idea of mine. I say wait a short while, see how he do. Nothing ain't gone change that horse much at his age. I say he a little bit of a crybaby, that's all, but easy to settle once he riled. You be surprised, I tell em. Ain't even all that interested in the senoritas compared to what you would think. They don't want to listen. They don't want to take no chances. They don't want to lose they edge. I say what if casteration change him the other direction, into a chucklehead girl? They start to laughing. Pretty soon they cackling like witches. Got me outnumbered, what it is.
Medicine Ed checked himself. This was a stab-back and two-face thing to say about the women. They don't mean no harm, he added. He didn't want to be a wrong influence on the horse. What good it do if the horse love him and hate them others? They a bidness now.
Little Spinoza don't fuss. Ma' fact he had to admit the horse taken to prancing and corvetting round lately, high in his nature compared to how he used to do. He was always in a good mood these days-could be too good. Maybe it was the change in the weather. Maybe he don't rightly follow about his manhood. He always was a baby. He scoping round at the cats, the raindrops pimpling the puddles, the sparrows hopping up and down and cussing each other in the eaves. He stopped and had him a long sniff of Grizzly's goat. Now that Deucey had the two horses, she bought Grizzly a ten-dollar goat to keep him company. When the goat wasn't in the stall he was tied up like now on a chain in the grass patch between the shedrows, but he always pulled it out tight as a fiddle string if folks was around, for he was nosy.
Medicine Ed returned to the subject at hand. It's one thing you can count on, son. When they gone they gone. You never know what you missing. Onliest thing, you be lighter of heart. Anyhow, he say into the horse-first he spied round to see what devilborn varmint might be listening, a crow, say, or Deucey's slit-eye goat-you know I be a little of a doctor-man. I take them things and do you good with em, you hear? You don't got to worry, you in good hands.
But Little Spinoza was only interested in that satchel-bellied ten-dollar billy goat. First he jumped back like insulted when the goat lift his head at him and stare. What you think this is, son? Ain't nothing but a spotted he-goat, good for nothing save to be the horse's friend. He gone urinate in you hay and shove his head in you feed bucket and race you to you eats. You don't mind out, he win too. You want that? Medicine Ed reached down and touched that peculiar armor-plate forehead of the goat between his coin-slot eyes, and shuddered. But Little Spinoza dance around and look happy and want a billy goat all his own.
…
The time to call Mr. Two-Tie was nine in the morning from the payphone back of the track kitchen. Midnight until four, Two-Tie be taken up with his after-hours card game. Then the backside come alive and Medicine Ed himself couldn't get away, and if he could, Two-Tie's line be always busy. At eight he out walking his dog. By noon he be fast asleep.
Two-fifty will be no problem at all, Edward, your credit is always good. May I ask do you need the cash in front of any particular race? Possibly sumpm I shoulda heard about it but ain't? I can have one of my associates bring over the dough any time.
Naw, Medicine Ed reply, it ain't no race, but then it go quiet, too quiet, save for a little itchy noise deep in the phone.
Gone to the dentist, Medicine Ed explained. Toothache.
How soon you say you need that two fifty?
Soon's I can get it.
I'll send somebody over this afternoon. How you like that new job, Edward?
It all right, Medicine Ed tell him.
I hear that Hansel fellow shipped in here from the Eastern Panhandle. Charles Town.
That's right. Two-Tie was silent and Ed understood he should give up more. Four horses. Zeno claim one the first night out. Hansel he still talking bout that horse.
This seemed safe to say. He couldn't believe the young fool would be so fool to claim the horse back, nemmind what he say now.
You don't happen to know where he was before that?
Hansel? Well, Medicine Ed said slowly, surprised and a little worried at Two-Tie's interest in the young fool. I believe he work for Roland Hickok oncet. Before he have his own string. I don't know when. He say he spend last winter selling cars.
Selling cars! Where the hell was that?
Some cold place way it's no horse racing. One of them states up by Canada. I disremember the name.
Selling cars, Two-Tie echoed in disgust. Edward. You and I have done plenty of business over the years.
Sho is.
We understand each other, ain't it?
Sho is.
Like you already know, I look on it as a pleasure to do business with people that has a mature insider's view of life on the backside. I find their conversation highly educational. I prefer to forgo interest for such preferred individuals when I can. Like you already know.
Sho is. Thank you, Mr. Two-Tie.
Edward, I would like to know more about that young man.
Hansel? Medicine Ed said again, in surprise.
Hansel. It's a personal thing, a family thing. How does he get along with his girl?
So it was the young fool's woman after all. But this was highly disputatious territory, for if blood run thicker than water, and which it always do, then even sensible Two-Tie will come down blind on her side.
Does he treat her right? Does he act like a gentleman? Two-Tie was inquiring.
Look to me like them two go pretty good together, Medicine Ed said carefully. When it come to training horses he look young but think old. You know he have old Mr. Hickok's Pelter in his string.
You don't say, Two-Tie said.
Medicine Ed saw himself laying down track away from Little Spinoza and felt a pierce of regret. If he get over on the old gentleman it won't be for long. Then he have to face him when at last he colly.
She crazy bout that old horse, he say. She care for him too. You be surprised. She can work like a man. You ought to see her haul them buckets.
Umbeshrien, Two-Tie talk in his Hebrew language, not sounding all that pleased. A little thing like her? She'll ruin her back.
Yet and still. You see what I'm saying. They gets along, Medicine Ed continued. She like them old classy horses and he like the old ways best.
What are they-twenty-five years old? Thirty? What do they know from old? Come on, Edward. Toches on the table. Is he a smart horse trainer or not? You know what I mean. We're talking money coming in, regular money, per diems, like that. Does he get paid to train somebody else's horses for them or is he in the business so he can sit in the track kitchen and cross his legs and tell people I'm a horseman?
He all right, Medicine Ed say darkly. He free-handed. I don't know where he gets it.
He's a bum. What does she see in him? What's the girl like, anyway?
It was a note of genuine misery. Medicine Ed felt called on in some new way, for something he ain't never have to dip out the well before in his life. He want to come up with it, but he don't know where to look. He suddenly remembered Bernice, who worked in the kitchen at Whirligig Stables-her daughter Marie. Bernice had worked and worked for that girl. Not worked. Slaved. Marie was neat and quiet and never sassed and she had even started to college up at Coppins, but soon's she meet that Diamond Doug in some club she want to throw herself away after him. Then the more you talked to her, even though she know you right, the more she felt the pull. The more she want to give herself up to the hot melt of that Diamond Doug dragging his net in the deep water. What it was-something strong and washed in the blood like religion done got her. Some old romance story. Then nothing work on her, not sense, not money, not nature feelings, not her mother begging her, not even the twenty-dollar spell from some root woman, nothing.
It ain't him, Medicine Ed said. She caught in the net of romance. It's a deep thing. Horses is part of it, he say, but she don't have it like some. In my judgment it is a passing thing. I believe it pass off her afta while.
What is she like. He had never in his life been asked a bald-headed question like that by a white man. She frizzly like old rope, Medicine Ed told Two-Tie. She like a old knot. She tie herself to this and that. She strong and hard to hold. She stronger than he is. You soon see.
It was dead quiet in the phone save for that deep down green-bottle buzz, then Two-Tie say, Don't say nutting to her, you hear? She don't know me. Just lemme know if she needs any help, you understand?
Sho is.
Thank you, Edward.
Thank you, Edward. He felt pity for Two-Tie, and pity for the white man was rich and sweet. He hung up the phone and sat there, thinking of Bernice. Diamond Doug went to jail, a twenty-year bit, and the big romance story run out. Marie went to see him a few times, then sat around in her bathrobe, watching TV. She didn't have to get rid of the baby, Bernice wanted it, she had a sense it was a girl baby, but Marie say if she have to look at it she might want to harm it. Later she went to secretary school. Funny part was it wasn't even no love in it. It was the gray drain of love. It use up everybody's love, not only Marie's. When it was done, Bernice hadn't had no love left. Not for him, Medicine Ed; or either for any man.
He pictured Bernice's Marie in front of the TV with her angry scowl and pink robe and comb-fried hair every whichaway, and that frizzly gee-whizzing white girl who somebody else done raised-she could harden against a man too. Something had happened, he looked at the two of them in his mind and he saw the left-behind toughness and meanness that tied them together. It come to him how everything was tied to everything else by secret ties invisible or as thin as cobwebs. It amazed him that he could see such a thing. It give him such a sense of knowing the frizzly-haired girl that he almost liked her a little-after all she kin to Two-Tie.
Later that day he hear the young fool and her arguing on the other side of the tack room wall, and afterwards he had the nerve to say to her: You hagride that young man long enough, you lose your happy home.
And she don't even sass him back. She push her braids behind her ear and say: You're right, I know it. I should never have quit my job. I can't just take my whole brains and talent and everything I got and invest them in somebody else's work and then shovel shit and keep my mouth shut.
Why you can't do that? That's what working folks does. I done fifty-eight years of that. It didn't kill me.
She cut him an evil eye. How could you stand it?
He was a little affronted. Ma' fact, young lady, he said with dignity, the way I always see it, I ain't have too much choice in the matter.
No wonder you wanted to buy that horse.
And which was true. He faded off between the shedrows to study the thing.
WHEN HASLIPP, THE VET, finally showed up with his little bag in the afternoon, in the rain, looking mud-spattered and harassed, Deucey happened to have taken a ride into town to buy a pair of reading glasses at the dimestore. Tommy, who had been asked to help if this happened (Maggie winced-somehow she hadn't got around to telling him yet whose-all horse Little Spinoza actually was), paraded them all out to the grass patch at the end of the shedrow, where it was cleaner and they would have more room, and then they stood there in the cold drizzle, shifting from foot to foot while Tommy dragged away the ten-dollar goat that Deucey had bought for Grizzly. They had forgotten about the goat.
Maggie held the interested but unsuspecting Little Spinoza, who despite his notorious encounter with a racetrack dentist (everyone knew that story) seemed more drawn by the weird blue crucifix eyes of the goat than troubled by the brusque stranger with the black bag.
Little Spinoza was still looking over his shoulder into the empty stall (his own) where the small but smelly and baa-ing goat had disappeared, when a little commotion happened at his neck and suddenly the earth fell up to meet him, his blood turned to warm solder, his penis dropped limp out of his body and his knees melted. He sank to the grass. His elbows and stifles drained away. He rolled over on his side. His huge tongue wanted to fall out of his mouth. He was not sleepy but gravity had won a great victory and he wished never to get up again. He watched incuriously as the two men went around behind him and squatted, and one of them somehow picked up his leg and moved it a little and held the great black riverine tail out of the way. There was a pleasant tinkle of metal, a feeling of deep and strange but painless emptying, another not so agreeable snip snip, snip snip-two grayish-pink, wet, egg-like bodies, sparsely threaded with blood vessels, lay in the grass. That was it. Already his face looked less alien and goofy. They stood there waiting for his legs to come back under him.
The queerest thing was the long, thin, infinitely elastic tubes hanging down like spittle from the shiny balls before Haslipp snipped them away. Maggie saw Medicine Ed slide out of the tack room and pick up the testicles out of the grass in a silver can-it could have been a soup can, nicely washed out and with the label neatly removed. And then he faded away again, presumably around the corner. She blinked. She hadn't known he was there. In fact he hadn't been there, or Tommy would certainly have called him over and made him drag away the ten-dollar goat, instead of doing that ridiculous job himself.
These days when Maggie was alone with Little Spinoza, after he had walked or worked and had his bath, she rubbed him-she didn't exactly know the derivation of this ancient slang for what a groom is supposed to do to a horse, only that was what the old guys told people they did: Been rubbing horses nigh on thirty-five years now, or, Back when I rub horses for Happy Blount at Hot Springs, whatever it meant. But she sensed a thread had been dropped somewhere, the route to some secret heart of this business had been lost. She didn't know anyone who literally rubbed a horse, not even old Deucey.
She asked Medicine Ed. That come from way back, in England or Paris, France, or somewhere, when the thoroughbred racehorse run five miles over open ground, hills and stone walls and that, and come back half dead under a blanket to a barn with no running hose water, let alone hot. So they rubbed the horse dry and warm. Babies get rubbed, he added, if you work for a barn that got babies. Rich folks had babies. Tommy Hansel had the geezers of the trade.
Back in Charles Town she had hauled to the laundromat a bunch of old croker sacks she had found in Pichot's barn. They had been many times stained, washed and dried until they were the color of a healing bruise; long ago, someone had left the pile of them stiffening in a corner. But she figured that like the mysterious hand-tied leather netting hanging from a nail, and the old wooden names-lord knew what anybody had farmed on that flinty spread before racehorses-they must be there for a reason, and they washed out soft and sweet. And now she rubbed Little Spinoza up with them from his ankles to his ears.
She rubbed in a round, hypnotic fingerpainting motion, but hard, feeling for some remotely erotic synapse of z's from the ends of her fingers into his bones and muscles, which wasn't as easy through the pink gunny as it had always been barehanded with Pelter. She had to slow down time, go into a kind of trance state where sweet electricity pooled at her nerve endings like nectar on the pistil of a honeysuckle. And then by running her fingers over the animal she could find his hidden landing places. Not that these were jungle airstrips, few and hard to find. They were all over the place. But you had to approach the body boundary reduced to this one brooding spark. You dangled from a headland, black empty space rushing by, and suddenly you were across. The key was being tuned down so fine that you felt the crossing. Without that your fingers were just dead prongs on a rake and nothing happened.
True, it helped to be stoned, which she was rather often. Zeno had left behind in the crushed trailer a chunk of hashish the size of a square of baking chocolate, the ginger color and yielding consistency of puppy feces, and Tommy had bought it from Medicine Ed, who had no use for that stuff, for a yard. Plenty of times they had a little curl like a cedar shaving for breakfast.
Rubbing Little Spinoza without it took more concentration, a willed death of talky ratiocination up there under the pigtails. She had to hang up on the telephone of her mind and then it worked. O, didn't it work. Come to find out the dangerous Speculation grandson was a pushover, the model of innocent delight. It was alarming, in fact, how trusting he was once you made him feel good, how forgiving of all the predecessor pain, how unsuspecting that joy would ever end. Unlike Pelter who shot up out of her intimate handling from time to time without warning, with a rip-roaring snort and the urge to do mischief, nip or kick, Little Spinoza melted away into the dream of bliss. He let her do anything to him. After she rubbed him dry and warm, she brushed him deep all over with an ordinary charwoman's scrub brush, then every day worked a little at his mane and tail, patiently dug through and pulled the years of knots and snags.
Then she worried. Why did she like doing this so much? How was it that she could bear these hypnotic repetitive tasks at all, such physical primitivity in the service of some other living organism? She used to love to brush her sister's hair, not that Ursie often let her. Maggie let herself down so easily into the engorged pastime of physical service. It was a kind of honeyed sleep, with only a thread of something repulsive about it that she could not pluck out. She was at home there, except for that. Was she some kind of born slave herself, a prostitute in a temple, a hierodule?
Little Spinoza stood for all of it, his dapples came up like god's golden fingerprints, he crackled, he glowed. Even when she felt the pleasure running along his withers and flanks in waves and literally crimping up his spine, he didn't protest, just bent into it like a ballerina in a pas de deux.
Look at you, you big silly, how are you ever going to fend for yourself, she mumbled into the warm curve of his back, but then, you never were a man's man either, were you. Well, I hope you can still run, now that you're not scared. She looked him in the eye and he blew into her face a great warm drench of hayflowers.
You know, she said, take my word for it, a sex life would have been far too hectic for a boy like you. What you need is a world that's just a whole lot of different flavors of good.
His answer to this was rather grandly, like a dog at a dog show, to stretch taut behind him his shining black ankles, to let down his ashen penis and piss a fine steady arc into the straw.
Spinoza, she whispered, I know you won't see this-sex is a kind of slavery at best, I mean it's a great thing, kind of like religion, original religion, I mean that old-time religion you can grab with your senses, but the long and short of it is, you as you get burned away…
But Little Spinoza had lost interest in the subject, showed her his plum-shaped rump and nosed through the bedding at the back of his stall for some bit of golden straw that pleased his eye.
She fretted over him. He was a gelding now, but he lacked that gelding irony. A gelding needed-and she needed-a more byzantine itinerary. An old gelding always seemed to her as complex as Disraeli. Sly, civilized and determined, well aware he hadn't got the world exactly to his order, he got there one way or another. Now that he was a gelding, could Little Spinoza do it on pure arrant babyhood alone?
Deucey had led him back from the track in the early morning shaking her buzz-cut head. I hope that Little Lord Fauntleroy here ain't taking it easy as a lifetime project, now that he ain't scared.
He isn't scared anymore, is he, Maggie agreed, as long as the secret was out.
Alice says he ain't. Deucey suddenly kicked at the billy goat who had pushed his long face into the open tails of her raincoat. Alice was the exercise girl. Damn it all, ain't I said I can't get lucky with more than one horse? Now I get what's coming to me. I got a feeling this is the pay-off, Deucey said.
Aw you always saying this the pay-off, Medicine Ed pointed out.
I'd like to know what's wrong with a horse taking a little pleasure in life, said Deucey. He eats up his dinner now, that's progress, ain't it?
What else does Alice say? Maggie asked.
He like that damn goat, Medicine Ed observed.
I tell her there's speed in that animal somewheres. I seen it myself. Just cause you ain't found it don't mean he ain't got it. Well I don't know where it's hiding, she says, maybe it's on vacation now that he ain't scared. And if I show him the stick he up and quits on me.
Now that he got all these female women petting and nursering him, Medicine Ed mumbled. He took from his pocket a box of black Smith Brothers cough drops, worked one out of the inside paper for himself, one for the horse.
Kidstuff was shoeing a gray horse in a dry spot under the shedrow, and now he looked behind his shoulder and said: Maybe yall ought not to have tinkered with the natural machinery of the horse. I mean, him being as old as he is. He was pressing the horse's foot upside down between his knees, in a posture at once adept and oddly feminine. He smiled at Maggie, his scuffed black cowboy boots curled up at their toes like genie slippers, and she thought to herself: You're the one I love.
This is what I get for showing off for Alice, Deucey said. You know I got a thing for Alice. I thought she would take an interest in Little Spinny. Make a project out of him. Now Alice says he's dreaming and don't want to wake up.
Earlie Beaufait gone to ride that horse, not Alice, Medicine Ed said.
I know that, Deucey said. But I wanted her to beg me to put her on him. I was gonna say no. But I would like her to beg me.
Can Alice ride in a race? Maggie asked.
Kidstuff laughed. Now that there is debatable, he said. I believe Alice has had a bug since last spring. She don't pick up any mounts except at the fairs.
That's prejudice, Deucey said. She is the living expert on them pokeweed and poison ivy racecourses. You gotta give her that. On them tight turns she is slick as gut. She has win some races on horses that shouldn't be walking, never mind running.
That's because she don't fear for her pretty face, Kidstuff said.
You ain't looked at her right, Deucey said.
What else does Alice say? Maggie repeated.
You know, for the first few days I rousted Spinny out to the track so early I was taking a chance on breaking Alice's legs and his, Deucey said. The moon ain't set yet and the infield had the morning star over it, pitch black. It looked like a Shriner's ring out there-that's how scared I was a clocker would get a load of his speed. Well I got me all hissified for nothing. Alice says he's moony. Don't get me wrong, she tells me, he's having a good time out there, looking at the geese flying down to the river and listening to the wind. You know, when he was still scared, at least he busted out of the gate every time like something was chasing him.
Except when he didn't, Kidstuff said.
Yeah. And now Alice can't hardly get him to gallop.
Maggie looked at the horse's delicately modelled head, which seemed, more than ever, small and charming, with huge, alert, artless eyes, fringed with sentimental lashes. It's embarrassing, like any minute now he's gonna ask when the birthday party starts or can he hang up his Christmas stocking, she said. Like he used to be tragic and beautiful, now he's cute.
You wait till he come back from running his first race after six months off, he'll wish the world was made outa cotton. He ain't gone be cute then, Ed said.
If he runs, Deucey said.
There came along a good race for Little Spinoza, a good race, that is, for him to lose, for the race was too high-priced, too far and too soon for the horse to win, but at least they could be sure that no one would want Spinoza at that price. A 5000-dollar claimer was a princely race at the Mound, where 6000 was the highest price tag an animal could wear (to go higher you sent a horse to the Races, but the traffic generally was headed the other way), and Little Spinoza was no longer a prince. He was a Speculation grandson, but he was common, a bad-acting six-year-old who was more trouble than his little bit of run could pay for, who had not raced in half a year, who had changed hands not long ago from the leading trainer at the Mound to a half crazed old lady gyp who won races now and then with the reanimated dead. And the owners, who were they? There was room in the chart in the Telegraph for only two names under Own.- I owned a dozen horses before, Deucey said, what do I care? So it was Salters Edward II amp; Koderer M. Medicine Ed and that girl. Racetrackers snickered or shook their heads. The distance, a mile, was at least an eighth and maybe even a quarter of a mile too long for Little Spinoza to keep up his speed, if he had any speed. Still, it was time. Little Spinoza needed a race, a race to harden his muscles and prove his spirit, if he had any spirit, a race to get him ready for a race, but also a kind of crystal ball of a race so the three of them, old Deucey, and Maggie, and Medicine Ed, could see what type of misery they had in front of them.
Earlie was hot as a pistol at Two-Tie's last night, so I asked him quick while he was raking in a pot, and he said yes.
That's fine, Ed commented.
Are you sure we can get Earlie Beaufait? Maggie asked. What does the leading rider at the meeting want with the likes of us, she was thinking.
He's doing me a favor, Deucey said, and that ain't good, but he's the best they got in this dump.
Earlie so big this year he don't even show up at Joe Dale's barn till he good and ready. They hot at him too, what I hear.
They felt better to have a jockey if Joe Dale Bigg was mad at him too.
I hope you all know what you're doing, Maggie said. I mean it. I can't tell anything about jockeys from looking at them. Not their age. Not what they're thinking. Not their morals and not their good will towards men.
Hell's bells, nobody knows what a jock is thinking, Deucey said. Their brains are so hot-wired, what with speed and the hot box and flipping the Saturday night smorgasbord at the Polky Dot Cafe, they don't know what they think.
Earlie out of Loosiana.
What does that mean?
He's Cajun or something out the backwoods, Deucey said, what's the difference? I watched him all year. The midget is strong in his hands, smart on the track and brave as a bobcat. He's busy, though. Can't see Spinny till Friday. Alice'll have to get him ready.
In fact the jockey came by Friday noon to look at the horse. He was shorter than Maggie, a very little man in pressed slacks and a spotless canary yellow windbreaker, with the collar turned up high and wrap-around shades. He had a deeply lined brown face, a tight, taciturn upper lip and a shiny pompadour on top like the painted hair on a doll. He stared at Spinoza in the shadow of the stall for some time and then said: Say, this the hoss that kick in Biggy's headlights?
Shucks. Biggy was born with his head kicked in. The horse just scratched him a little on top of that, Deucey said.
I punish the horse if he act bad on me, the jockey said.
Fair enough, Deucey said. He's been easy as kiss my hand over here. A little too easy, if you wanna know.
I find the run in the horse, Earlie said, if he has any run.
Just remember he has to run again, Deucey said. We ain't trying to win this time out. We just want to find out how much horse is there and what he wants to do without letting it show.
Okay. I don't let him win. But I make him work.
I don't think that work ethic stuff is going down so good with Little Spinoza, Maggie said when the jockey's hard little fist of an ass in its knife-pressed chinos turned the corner.
Somebody got to get serious with the horse, Deucey said. This ain't the 4-H Club Rodeo at the Pocahontas County Fair.
…
Friday evening, Little Spinoza stood dreaming with his feet in a bucket of ice. Deucey, a towel marked COMMERCIAL HOTEL, GRAND ISLAND, NEBR. over her shoulder, was feeling all around his ankle.
Anything? Maggie asked.
Cold as a flounder. It's big but no bigger'n it ever was. He's got no excuses that I can tell. That don't mean he'll run.
Then all of a sudden the midnight blue Sedan de Ville with the starry silver hard-top was taking up the whole dirt road between shedrows. The driver's side window dropped into the door beneath it with a noise like a bumblebee. They couldn't help it, they both looked up.
Deucey, said a hoarse voice, fatty yet reproachful, a kind of masculine gravy with metal shavings in it.
Hello, Joe Dale, Deucey said. Maggie squinted at him. In a heavy-fleshed way, he was handsome, she thought, felt her cheeks warm and registered her own incipient interest with something like despair. He was a Byronic libertine type in the face, clean shaven, with blue shadows modelling his plushy red lips, and thick black groves crowning the temples behind an evenly receding hairline. He didn't look old enough, or crude enough, to have a great grown bully of a son like Biggy.
Hey, Deucey, he said. I'd like to know what kinda joke this is, with the girl groom and the spook. You tryna make a monkey outa me or what?
Crude enough after all, Maggie thought.
Excuse me?
What's with the girl and the colored groom in the owner's column for my horse?
You don't expect me to ruin my own good name with the horse, do you? Deucey said.
You don't think Little Spinoza's gonna run good?
It ain't impossible, Deucey said. Sumpm might fall into his feed bucket between now and then, who knows? This is horse racing.
You got my boy up on him, I see.
Maybe Earlie can tell me what's wrong with the horse.
Deucey, I told you. You didn't have to put nothing down on the deal until he showed you what he could do.
That's not how I do business.
Joe Dale Bigg shrugged. I want you to have your money back. Hold on, I got it right here-He leaned into the car, reaching for the roll under his buttock.
It ain't my money. Not anymore it ain't.
Don't gimme that, Deucey.
I ain't giving you anything, Deucey said. And I ain't taking anything from you either. I got the foaling papers. You're out of it.
Have you been thinking about that good deal I offered you? Joe Dale Bigg said patiently.
No I haven't, Deucey said.
Well, I think you better. I'm looking out for your business even if you ain't. Is this the girl?
What if it is? Deucey said.
Nice little body, not even hardly there-my favorite kind, that's all. What's your name, sweetheart?
Margaret Koderer. What's yours?
He smiled unpleasantly, with his rather beautiful dark red mouth. You like it on the racetrack?
Yeah. Except for all the dirt, Maggie said.
He looked her over carefully. The window purred up and he drove away.
AMONG MANY UNRULY ACTS, my dear Maggie, this was certainly your unruliest.
You were aware of yourself fully dressed and standing over her in her little pink silk underpants, the Telegraph folded back in your hands and-something new-another Telegraph open in her hands. She circled something awkwardly with a pencil.
Yes it was, wasn't it, she said, and you both smiled.
You were aware of standing over her in her ragged soft sweatshirt and little pink panties, Maggie on her back, with her bare feet up on a stool near the heater. The ugly brown grate hummed along in tiny hysteria, turned up full blast. As long as she had to live in a fish tin she considered it her right to set the thermostat for iguanas and flamingos, and of course for her naked pink self. (Against the flimsy pink membrane of her panties, her naked pink lips pressed, and the skin under the elastic so oddly damp and fatty yet easily creased, like gardenia petals.)
What do you think would be the proper punishment for such unruliness?
I'm sure you know that better than I, she murmured. Almost imperceptibly (but you saw it) her toes pointed a little, and her legs strained tremulously apart-just slightly-saying she was aware of you and more than aware of you-she was in your power.
It was all a kind of theater with her, but you could call her into it. You were aware-she made you aware-of your superior size, speed and cunning. You were aware of your somewhat gross-traif, uncut-but highly prized manhood, biding its confinement a little while longer. You looked down on her in her sweatshirt and little pink panties. It was theater where the two of you met, but, as Plato said of the theater, stronger and truer than life. Suddenly the squalid trailer, with its crooked Venetian blinds and grainy afternoon light, was a schoolroom in some mansion house, hung with purple velvet and gold-tasseled portieres.
Take them off and show me. You made a lazy sign-Omit-with the one forefinger, and she did as she was told. The panties fell to the floor like a bit of film. She glistened there without touching herself.
May I ask what you mean by such unruliness?
I don't know. Perhaps I'm simply hopelessly wicked.
You are headstrong.
Yes.
Are you ashamed of yourself?
Yes.
You're incorrigible.
Yes.
So that you know you require my attention?
Barely audible: Yes.
Then I suppose I have no choice but to correct you. Turn over. Rise up on your knees.
And then you did as you liked with her. It was theater but it bound you together. Afterwards she would be more than a little bad-tempered if you left her tied or held her pinned long enough for her to wake up and see herself like that. It was understandable, and usually you didn't wish to humiliate her further: You both knew she was your better, but she had sworn herself, yet again, into your power. You didn't need to hold her face in it.
Only, this time she had been so egregiously disrespectful, even perfidious: buying that horse. You could have claimed The Mahdi back now-he was still worth the price-if you had that money to spare. Or another way of looking at it: This was a small racetrack with only a couple dozen horses on the grounds worth more than a handful of peanuts. It was by no means inconceivable, or even unlikely, that her racehorse would have to run against your racehorse, and soon. You got up and left her there, tied. Her pink asshole glittered inside its sparse little wreath of whiskers like a putto's singing mouth.
Let me up, she said peevishly. You picked up the Telegraph and paced the room.
Try harder to explain to me, you said, what you mean by such unruliness.
What do you mean what do I mean? She sighed. All right, as long as you asked. Jesus, Tommy. You should have put Pelter in for fifteen hundred dollars. I have to find out from the Telegraph, yet, he's in for two grand.
Can't you see what love for you there was in that? I don't want to risk him.
But I want to risk him, for all our sakes.
Pelter can win for two thousand. Hell, he figures for twenty-five.
We came here to cash a bet. If we don't cash a bet we're just-here. Jesus Christ, will you untie me?
What's wrong with here?
You both looked around the trailer, at the yellow crinkly plastic curtains like chicken skin, at the aluminum stripping hanging down from the door of the sardine-can toilet, at the orange vinyl kitchen chairs with their crooked scars of duct tape, at the blank frame of a long-gone mirror glued to the wall, its cardboard backing smeared with black smoke-trails of glue.
You've got to be kidding. Both of you laughed.
Believe me, you can still cash a bet on Pelter at two grand.
It's not the same. You know what's going to happen, don't you? she said bitterly. He's going to run in the money and then everybody will know how good he is, whether he wins or not. Then we're stuck.
Maggie, everybody already knows how good he is.
All right. Well, I'm just trying to give myself enough to do so I won't think about it. So I won't have to leave, she said.
It was so amazingly brutal you had to sit down. You sank, and then perched rather primly on the edge of the couch, avoiding her tied hands. Out of nowhere like a wind it had come. You were so amazed to hear those words you weren't even angry at first.
Why would you want to leave? you asked. You've noticed I give you a great deal of freedom.
I have a great deal of freedom, she said. I wouldn't say you give it to me.
How can you even think of leaving me? you said, and you heard the torn off note between a whine and a sob, saw in a black flash your infant self, your naked helplessless. You had almost fallen into enemy hands. Just as you were starting to know your way about the place, you felt it shrink back together and cramp and disgorge you, cough you back up with terrible sick violence-the tomb of the lost twin. Did she know what she was doing to you, or had she herself been duped? You leaned to the latter view, but the effect was the same. You had thought her your consort and bride, and she was still that, of course. But now you saw in her, for one moment, the snarling dog at the sealed door, servant of the trolls, the keepers of the mystery.
Surely it's struck you that I never stayed very long with anyone in the past, she said sullenly.
What does that matter? you said, and now she turned her thousand-curled head and looked at you in surprise. You brought your hands to your face and breathed them. They were steeped, steeped was the right word, in the vaguely marine, amphibious smell of her. Now they circled her slender neck. Do you have any idea how easily I could kill you? you asked. She didn't answer but kept looking at you rather wakefully over her shoulder. You were scaring her. She didn't want to call it that but her nostrils flared with indignation.
You tightened your hands. Her neck was small as a cat's. One swift hard jerk is all it would take, you know, with you tied like that.
Undoubtedly, she agreed, the voice calm and cold.
She was looking at you, not like theater this time, not like rich dark nightmare lined with fur that you both inhabited. No, this time from outside. Using that fake objectivity that human beings use to seal each other out, so that, for example, they can sit next to each other without speaking on a bus. Like a cheap newspaper picture. You became aware of bad design, washed out grays and wooly whites, tedious dots per square inch. You were suddenly bored with the whole scene. Your hands fell to your sides.
But I don't really feel like killing you, you said.
Let me up now, she said in a low voice. Her face said You've spoiled everything and you quickly untied her, looking away. Of course not in a million years was she going to say to you what you had so many times bowed down in front of her and said:
Thank you, my twin, for granting me my life.