THEY WERE ALL LOOKING for a van like a Chinese jewel box, like no horse van that had ever been seen on a backside, something red and black and glossy, with gold letters, LORD OF MISRULE, arched across each side. All the same when a plain truck with Nebraska plates rolled into the Mound on the hottest day of the year, they knew who it was. They were watching, though the van was unmarked and dirty white, one of those big box trailers with rusty quilting like an old mattress pad you've given to the dog. The van bounced and groaned on its springs along the backside fence, headed for the stallman's office. Red dust boiled around it. They blinked as it dragged two wheels through the puddle that never dried, the puddle that had no bottom. They all waited for the van to tilt and lurch to a stop; it didn't even slow down. They peered through the vents when the van went by and saw the horse's head, calm, black and poisonous of mien as a slag pile in a coal yard. He had a funny white stripe like a question mark on his forehead.
The van stopped, woof, down comes the ramp, and a kid, unhealthy-looking like all racetrack kids, worm white, skull bones poking out of his skinny head, stood at the top of the ramp with a small black horse that couldn't even stand right: Lord of Misrule already rocked, or seemed to rock, on the flat floor of the van like a table with one short leg. And those legs-they were so swelled out from long-ago bowed tendons on both sides that they were one straight line from knee to ankle, drainpipes without contour except for the waffling left over from firing and blistering agents and god knows what.
Old Devil get behind of me, said Medicine Ed.
I'm scared, Maggie said, why am I scared?
You see what it's gonna cost Spinoza here just to chase after him, Deucey said.
What do you mean? Maggie said. We're not racing him. Are we?
Deucey added: Because that horse don't know from pain.
Notice the white six of syphilis on his forehead, Tommy Hansel said. They all looked away from the horse, and looked at him. Tommy leaned against the tack room door. The planes under his eyes were luminous with some peculiar idea, and sweat pearled his handsome, heavy forehead.
Say what? Medicine Ed asked.
But Tommy Hansel smiled as if he had been making a joke, and, relieved, they turned back to look at the horse.
Tell you what, Medicine Ed said. He ain't get them bad wheels from standing in no stall.
All kinds of people had come to watch from the grass bib of the shedrow, horsemen, grooms and ponygirls, hot-walkers and assorted riff-raff. They were waiting. Then the terrible thing happened. The back door of the Racing Secretary's pre-fab office shack opened and a large bald man with mastiff jowls and tea-colored eyeglasses came out and stood on the wooden stair. It was Standish Chenille himself. People blinked, for the racing secretary was seldom seen. He descended the stair and scuffed at a leisurely pace towards Lord of Misrule's van. The face in the cab of the van was freckled, boyish and rough, with a Western squint and a broad snub nose. Mr. Standish Chenille leaned over and said to him, low, but not so low that everybody couldn't hear: Barn Z. Raymond called ahead. His eyes pinched up, and all at once he had a hole similar to a smile punched into his heavy face. It was a welcome, a princely welcome. They all looked at each other. They could scarcely believe their ears. They looked at each other, and they thought, This is big, and, How can we get a piece of it, and, We'll take anything, even a hoof paring, sawdust, loose change.
The horses around them felt it too. Joe Dale Bigg's were all of a sudden beating up the red dust under the hot-walking machine, tearing around the aluminum carousel at a thrilled gallop that few of them ever showed at the far turn.
Going into the stretch it's Nobody's Nothing, with Nowhere making his move on the inside, Deucey called the race. A few people laughed. Lord of Misrule threw back his head, snorted out dust and rolled his eye at the other cheap horses. His black tail arched and, ugly as Rumpelstiltskin, he let drop great soft nuggets, part gold, part straw, all the way down the ramp.
THERE WAS A HAYBALE up against the shingle between the young fool's tack room and his stalls, and Medicine Ed sat here in the afternoon and studied, and after a while he let his heavy head fall back against the wall and he might doze. He didn't care these days to walk out the back gate over to Zeno's old Winnebago. He couldn't sleep in it no more if he did, for now he start to worry that he gone to lose it. Yes, he had that draggyfied feeling he was about to lose his good home one more time.
It wasn't the horses gone sour. Horses gone good: Mahdi. Pelter. Even the mare and Railroad Joe run in the money now and then. Wasn't the money. Seem like all of a sudden it was money in the young fool's pocket, New York money, might could be money from some crime character, since the young fool so jumpy and no owner in sight. No. The young fool's reason have clouded, what it is. Ever since he come back with Pelter from Joe Dale Bigg's farm, he be wandering in his mind. He talked to the horses about King Death, then he listened to the quiet, like they talking back-it give Ed the creeper crawlers to hear it. You think you are stronger? he say to Mahdi, remember, they come from Nebraska, where King Death keeps his court in beauty and decay. The little hairs stand up and wave on the back of Medicine Ed's neck.
He fixing to put The Mahdi in that special race against Lord of Misrule, and not just for the teenchy cut of the purse they slipping to all the entries, half a per cent or two hundred bucks or what it is. No, he gone try against common sense to win with the horse, good against evil, some catawamptious idea, sure to bring the Devil down on him if it ain't the Devil messing up his mind already. And if the gangsters whose race it is don't get to him first, him and anybody work for him. Or Joe Dale Bigg-since they take away Pelter off his farm, Joe Dale has turned cold as grave dirt. You can see why Death run in the young fool's mind, even if he is crazy. Medicine Ed pushed two fingers deep in his shut eyes, gold scum rippled through the black in his head, and hot as it was, he shivered.
Somebody pulled his sleeve. What do you know, Ed? It was the frizzly girl. She sat down on the haybale next to him, she say What do you know? and then she don't say nothing. Since she come back from Joe Dale Bigg's farm with Pelter, the hot sauce was gone out of her, the longnose newsbag too. She taken care of her horse, that was about it. She showed up in the morning before even Ed and mucked the stalls and set out the feed buckets and don't say nothing to nobody, and by the time Ed dragged in, and he ain't lay in no bed past four in the morning in forty years, she walking her horse. Pelter-he her horse now. She walked him slow, slow as the horse in front, whosomever it happened to be.
She say, Ed, what do you know? and the rest of the time she quiet. Or what she will say: I gotta get us home. All I want is to get us home in one piece. Who is us, Medicine Ed want to ask. Do that count him, Medicine Ed? But he don't ask and she don't say.
She knows things is falling apart, that's all she know. Deucey and her and Medicine Ed standing under the eaves Sadday last in the steaming hot rain, and the young fool look in and say, Nebraska, k, n, a, sumpm, sumpm, he spelled it out-even Medicine Ed knows Nebraska don't start with no k. That spells knacker, he say, you see how it's almost the same word? Medicine Ed, he don't say nothing. He don't want to get in no disputes with his boss about how you spell this and how you spell that.
But Deucey say, Nebraska spells b, u, t, e, bute, you mean. That's the only thing they got going for them up there, I been there, I know what I'm talking about, and that's the only reason that horse still wins. They pickled him in bute.
It's more to that horse than bute, Medicine Ed put in.
Bute or no bute, the young fool say. Bute is the work of man. We'll see who the forces of good like on race day. Anyhow, bute is not entirely unknown here at the Mound.
The young fool's woman don't pipe up like she used to: Don't they test for bute?
She know better. She knows that spitbox a sometimey thing anymore at all these half-mile tracks. Nobody told her. She finally figure it out for herself. Working for the young fool all this while, she learn to say I don't know nuthin bout no needle with the rest of em. These last years everybody creep closer and closer to post time with that needle, and lessen the office tryna rule somebody off who done made a nuisance of hisself some other way, very very seldom do it come up positive.
Yet and still, the frizzly hair girl too has her entry in that special race. Pelter. Pelter will run and collect his two hundred dollars and maybe even a few more dollars to show, she say. Soon as this race is done, we're going home in dark of night out the back gate if necessary, she say, going back to Charles Town, that's why we need us every dollar I can lay in. Do that us include him, Medicine Ed? Don't count on it.
Now of a sudden she say, I gotta get him out of here, Ed, before he hurts somebody or somebody hurts him. But I don't know if he'll go. Of a sudden she let it out.
He have his own idea about things, Medicine Ed agreed.
He's got it all worked out now where everything fits. I don't know what to do.
She looks at him like he can tell her something. It gives him a peculiar feeling, like inside his throat is tryna grow wings. He tries to think what he can say. From what he know of doctoring, he could tell the frizzly hair girl various ways to set a person crazy. A drilled coconut with his name inside and thrown into a river put a person on a long drag and a drift until his mind get to wavering and go away. A rayroad spike through his clothes keep him a-going and a-going, can't get no rest and never satisfied nowhere he goes. Or his name on a paper in a rotted apple and buried, then he just fall. Can't figure out nothing. Get what you call like mindless before he do go.
But the young fool? Something have made him think he big when he small and strong when he weak, something have set him thinking he the king when he ain't nothing. Long as he think he king, he can't see how low he is, don't know to ask the bad luck to leave him while it's still time, and put it back on them that brung it, and send it back to the Devil where it come from.
Medicine Ed could tell the frizzly hair girl about all that, and even if she don't end up thinking he the crazy one, what she gone do about it? What can he say to give her hope for better? Old Deucey declared the other day it was certain medicines now for crazy people, to clarify they mind. A hospital doctor could write you a prescription for that. But he didn't hold with it: If it was so, and you could cure the insane with a little pill, why was all the state hospitals full as a tick, them for white peoples same as black?
He wished to help the girl. He tried to put his lost home out of his mind and think how he could help her, but what could he say to give her hope when he don't hope himself. He felt her shoulder start to shaking and he knew she was crying. He put his hand on her frizzly head. It was a little stickly, like a old feather pillow, and anymany shades of brown, like the baby sparrows squawking this time of year under the barn eaves, ruffling their small wings and holding their mouths wide open for their mothers to come feed them.
LIKE EVERY RACETRACK DUMMY, Jojo Wood considered himself a prognosticator. Like, he could of wrote the tip sheets, if he hadna been so busy losing races on the same horses. So, in possession for once of a universally touted sure thing, on the way out the door he drilled Two-Tie, the only holdout, between the bow ties with a stubby pointer finger. Lord of Misrule in the seventh, grampop, he said, and don't forget who told you.
Like Two-Tie could forget-he smiled patiently-and the mutt pack trailed with its usual beery racket down the wooden stair, into the summer dawn. Every one of em was getting down on Lord of Misrule. However they could, and whether they owned up to it or not. D'Ambrisi, whose credit was not good, had had to get off his lime green silk shantung suit to borrow a quarter. Deucey Gifford was banking on the entry percentage for Little Spinoza. Little Spinny had a bonafide shot in the race, she said shiftily, running a flat hand over her crewcut the same as she did whenever she was holding better than a pair. She was a worse liar than Elizabeth. And Jojo was riding Pelter, which Two-Tie took it to mean that even little Margaret must be investing in Nebraska. Even if an intelligent person would put Jojo Wood on any horse that could figure, which they wouldn't, everybody knew the jocks, too, were going with Lord of Misrule. They didn't even bother to make no secret of it, though few were as indiscreet as the ever blabbing Jojo, whose dexedrine jitters went straight to his jawbone.
Two-Tie yawned, straightened his two bow ties in the glass doorpane and picked up Elizabeth's leash. He had to wait while she splayed her front feet and stretched herself down like a bridge cable, first the front end, then the back. She couldn't quite get the old altitude, glanced over at him embarrassed, and he politely looked away. Then they were off. Elizabeth thumped and bumped her way down the stair. Anymore she went down like a wooden pull horsey, reared back a little and let down the two in front, bump, then came the two behind, da-bump. For the last three years she was losing the spring in her hind legs and now she was off in her left front too, since she had chased a squirrel into a board fence by the old natrium plant. Usually anymore she only went after the squirrels in first gear, if that, and he had the feeling when she did give chase it was a issue of self respect, so she could call herself a dog, not with no hope of catching nutting. Which was only reasonable. In twelve years she had not caught up with a single squirrel. Then again he did not encourage the killer instinct in Elizabeth. She was more of a thinker, not a athlete, nutting like one of those idiot fox-running dogs, all yap and slobber, which the good old boys from Wetzel County turned loose from their station wagons to tear all round the country while they stayed behind and reclined their seats, drinking Carling Black Label Beer.
Outside on Ohio Avenue already the air was pearly with the heat to come, the sidewalks had that dry gleam and Elizabeth dropped behind. Two-Tie looked at the two of them in the window of Mouser's Furniture. His own face shocked him, gray and hanging over his neck. He was dragging worse than she was. Something was eating him-why, when he finally knew his niece, little Margaret, and might be able to do something for her? Something about that race-knowing Lillian's Donald was in town and the boy, who must be after all 45, 46 years old now, hadn't even come to see him. He had a feeling that helping Margaret was too late, and maybe even the wrong person. Sure he had made this race for Donald, but back then too he had bought plenty of stuff for the snarling boy, with his little lady's eyebrow of a first mustache, who hated him, whatever he needed, underwear, a winter coat, plus for his birthday in April educational models he never built, puzzles he never took out of the box, and used to give him a couple bucks whenever he asked for it. But there was no getting out of it: When Lillian had put down her foot about getting married, before the Pimlico Futurity or else, and the morning after (Privileged lose it on a foul), she had packed her valise, and told the boy to pack his, and called a taxi for the train, he had watched from their bed. He let them go. Then in 1940, when he heard that Lillian had died in a Catholic nursing home in South Chicago, he never even picked up the phone. He should have asked right then if he could do something for the boy. But he already knew that Donald blamed him, and he was afraid.
Two-Tie sat down on a concrete bench at the edge of the cemetery. Today Elizabeth didn't even poke her nose in the yellowing grass at its foot but let herself down at his feet with a grunt. Whether we take a piece of Nebraska or not? he asked her. After all he had practically wrote the race, he had as good a right as anybody, but he had a funny feeling about it. He lined up the reasons why he should keep his money in his pocket. True, the public had no way of knowing the race was made for Lord of Misrule. The outside bettor was not going to like the horse, who had finished, if you called that finishing, 64 lengths out of it last spring at Aksarben, when he had took that spill. Fell, said the chart; it didn't point out that the horse got up and walked home. And then there was a long nutting in the paper, and finally two more outings since Memorial Day, one emptier than the one before. So the public was not going to bet the horse, but every racetracker in the Northern Panhandle was. Every horseman in the know, every groom who had a horse in the race, or every groom who knew a groom who had a horse in the race, every big-eared loafer and sponger and hanger-on, which covered about everybody. There was far, far too many k'nockers involved in the race already, loudmouths up and down the line. The word was out. Around here two hundred bucks to enter didn't happen every day. In short the odds on the horse could only be none too good, and worse in the event the betting public was swifter than usual and a late falling price on such a fabulously sorry animal from a kingdom far away tipped them off.
But it wasn't even the price that troubled Two-Tie. The game was funny, not funny ha-ha, funny like green lunchmeat. It had to be tainted, maybe not for everybody but for him, Two-Tie, personally. By the time she left Baltimore, Lillian did not wish him well. And the grownup boy, her son, Donald, still did not wish him well. He don't come by or even call, though Two-Tie hears he's been at the Mound three days already.
Then he sees Donald in the Polky Dot Cafe last night. They didn't expect to meet and suddenly they're face to face, each of them with a round plate of meatloaf in his hand. And the look in Donald's eyes was terrible, before he checked it. Then he grinned, a big freckle-face grin. Say, Two-Tie, how's it kicking? A cowboy, straight out of South Baltimore. It wasn't Irish, smiling like that when you hated somebody-the boy's father might of been part Italian.
Moreover last night Two-Tie hears from Deucey and others that Standish Chenille himself had come out of the racing secretary's office to pump the kid's hand when he rolled in with that museum piece of a horse. True, Lord of Misrule was a great horse in his day, but only a individual who was fundamentally cold, very cold would still be throwing the horse out on the track and racing him. It was different when they first found out Misrule had bum seed and brung him back to racing. Then he was only five, six years old and had plenty of tread left, and he liked to run, anyway that was the story, which some horses do. But after a while he got sorer, and slower, and his bigtime owner fell on hard times and the horse passed from hand to hand. Ever downward, of course. Two-Tie had figured Donald must be in some kind of dire personal need, but no-the word was that Donald was doing good, very good, at Aksarben where he had ended up. At Aksarben, alone on the planet, bute was a mitzvah, one hundred per cent legal. The boy didn't have to come here to play his hole card, that was clear, so why did he? Keep away from that race, Two-Tie advised himself out loud. It was a funny feeling he had. Elizabeth in the rough grass picked her head up off her paws and gave him a worried glance. He could fly down to Gulfstream for a couple weeks, or show his face at Fort Erie, or catch the end of the meeting at Ruidoso Downs. Anymore nobody knew him from Adam at those tracks. But what would he do with Elizabeth? He picked himself up off the concrete bench, brushed off his trousers and set out for home.
Now it was hot, and Elizabeth was poorly, dragging two lengths behind as they crossed the sun-bleached ferry landing, but as soon as they turned onto Ohio Avenue she passed him at a trot. He had to whistle to make her wait at B Street and then she was off again, with even some creaky lightness in her hocks, some remnant of a coltish bounce in the way her old feet touched pavement and curled up behind her. She was always faster back to the barn.
She turned the corner of the alley by the Ritzy Lunch and when he caught up, she was climbing in the open door of Roy's Taxicab, which sat idling by the garbage cans as usual. Elizabeth putting herself in the taxi coulda been a sign, if you believed in signs, if you were a prophet instead of a businessman. But he was no prophet, and he had definitely made up his mind not to ride one dime on the horse, nor even to go by the Polky Dot and find out, if he could, which way the action was going. Come on, Elizabeth, let's go home, he said without conviction. For he was interested, his niece to say nutting of the whole mutt pack was in it one way or another, he had some other people's dough to lay off, and Elizabeth was always up for a taxi ride. But no, he had a funny feeling about the race. Stay away. He whistled sharply. Elizabeth still didn't come. It was a fact her hearing wasn't what it used to be. Time was she could hear him peel a banana two rooms away-strangely enough the dog liked bananas, whatever he ate she wanted to eat, with the exception of pickles-but she wasn't above playing his sympathy now and then and pretending she didn't hear him when she did. If some suggestion didn't suit her. He leaned inside the taxi. Come on out of there, Elizabeth.
Can't you see the dog likes it where he is? A heavy body was pushing him from behind. But you get in. That's right, get in the car. He felt a hardness against his kishkes that he knew was a gun. It wasn't too late to get away, he could twist clear of the door or fall down in the gutter where he was, even a bulvan like Biggy-it was Biggy he saw over his shoulder-wouldn't shoot him in the public street, not in Carbonport. The moron would have strict instructions. Biggy and who else? Two-Tie peered into the inner shadows of the sunlit cab. Only Roy. He saw Elizabeth sitting up at the far window, panting happily, ready for a ride. Roy was leaning over the driver's seat, patting her, sliding his hand under her collar-fucking faithless mutts the both of em-just in case she decided to listen to Two-Tie, for once, and get out of the car. Only it wasn't Roy. It was Roy's cap and jacket on D'Ambrisi. Elizabeth lets that ten-cent nutting make up to her, he thought jealously, and at the same time: It's all over for both of us. He realized he had been expecting this. He couldn't believe that such inconsequential lowlifes like these two would be the ones to take him out. But they had Elizabeth. He got in the car.
Nice doggy, D'Ambrisi said, nice dog, and Two-Tie saw that his hands were trembling as he twisted them in her collar.
She ain't gonna hurt you, Two-Tie said. Let her alone.
I swear it wasn't my idea, D'Ambrisi whined.
What's it about?
Shut up, Biggy said, and nudged Two-Tie with the barrel of whatever he was packing.
Possibly it was only a warning, not that he was taking any warnings, not from these two, not from nobody. Maybe they were supposed to bring him to Joe Dale, or to Donald. He would have thought that Donald, or Joe Dale, being the type of men they were, would wish to take care of such a thing themselves. Sew the matter up with their own hands, so to speak. Tell him in his face where he had went wrong, try to make him whine how sorry he was, let him beg for a break, now that he was a dead man, then burn him anyway. He had been expecting this for some time now. He sat back in the back seat of Roy's Taxicab and watched the blue cables of Powhatan Point Bridge dip down and tick by, one by one, like magic wands that weren't working. He didn't want a break. He didn't have to degrade himself. Only, there was Elizabeth to think about.
In the crack at the bottom of its steel-plate railing, the river glittered like broiler paper. Then they were off the bridge. Bushes whizzed by, and trees. If this was what he thought it was, he should be looking at Nature for the last time. But, maybe he was a klutz at heart, Nature didn't interest him. Even when he was a young man, what he liked was taking care of somebody. The big picture wasn't like a painted picture on a wall, it was more like a scroll, an ever unfolding piece of goods, pulling forward so many lives, the living threads. He liked to be the shuttle what touched them all and brought them together, whether they knew it or not. When he was young he had never really moved out of his family, not even once he hooked up with Lillian and settled her in an apartment. By then his parents were old and they needed him and he had the money from his finance business, so he never even noticed he was doing it, taking care of somebody. Maybe he didn't do that good a job of it, Lillian would have said so, she did say so, but still it must be what he was put on earth to do, considering how much he'd ended up doing it, one way or the other. Then Mickey went to jail and Lillian took Donald and flew the coop, not that he blamed her for quitting him, and pretty soon Alvin was dead and his mother in Levindale and his sisters scattered. After that it was just the money, his various partners and business deals, his protection, the tarnish odor of money and the mutt pack for company. For a few years he had low-grade muscle around him all the time, getting into scrapes in bars, bad crap games, brainless rhubarbs and shoving matches in his kitchen. The boys didn't have enough to do. After a while, around when Ike was elected the second time, he let the protection go.
That was when he got Elizabeth. For protection. What a laugh. She would have looked after him if he'd let her. But he was too afraid she would get hurt. Like now, she knew something was wrong and she was worrying-looking across at him with a dent in her black forehead, her gold-pointed eyebrows bunched together, just like a mother. He put his hand on the back of her neck. She was an old lady, a little slow on the uptake, anymore she didn't see so good or hear so good, and she didn't like her routine interrupted, but she was clocking now and ready to rumble, if it came to that.
Roy's Taxicab passed the cut-off to Indian Mound Downs-Two-Tie looked over his shoulder but got no last eyeful of the jewel green bullring, the bottomland by the river was still a basin of fog-sped past the Horseman's Motel and Trailer Court, the length of the little strip that passed for a town, and up into the hills. Two-Tie prepared a few words, I always run a honest business, I thought more of you, family comes first, but then the cab bounced past the steep driveway down to Joe Dale Bigg's farm. D'Ambrisi was pushing it too fast for the patched and cracked West Virginia blacktop, taking the snaky curves along the ridge on two wheels, stomping the brake at the same time. He was no lowrider, he must be afraid somebody would see them. It looked bad and sounded bad-nobody saying a goddamn word and D'Ambrisi's hands shaking on the steering wheel.
Do me one favor, Breezy. Don't leave the dog with nobody to look after her. She's an old dog. She won't know what's happening. Where I go she goes. You follow me?
Nobody ain't gonna hurt the dog, Biggy said. I like dogs. You want to come home with me, fella? Whaddaya say, duke? He roughhoused Elizabeth's head, and her lip curled up.
She's a lady, she don't like that rough stuff, Two-Tie said. He despaired of explaining anything to Biggy. Promise me, Breezy. You hear? She won't know where she is. If anything happens to me, put a bullet in her head. He had a picture of Elizabeth shambling blindly around some pile of rubble deep in the woods that still smelled like him, confused and hungry, lying down, getting up, lying down again, walking around in circles looking for him, waiting for him to come back, till she starved.
He wants we should off the dog, Biggy said indignantly. His own dog! What kinda guy is that?
I ain't packing, Breezy whined.
These two lames would be no help whatsoever. Two-Tie sank back hopelessly into the seat cushions. If it wasn't for Elizabeth, he saw, and it was like a slap across the head with a two-by-four, he wouldn't care if they took him out. Not even these assholes. Be my guest. He was so sick of assholes he was almost ready to go. He looked back in his mind and saw the zig-zag line of his actions lately, that craziness with the niece, he done things that weren't like him, weren't prudent. Why? What did he care if little Margaret knew him or not? If they croaked him, would she cry? She'd gasp when she heard the news, then forget him in five minutes. You could even believe he'd been trying to buy it, the way he'd been making a weird nuisance of himself lately, like he'd seen other chumps who didn't have nobody to look after them go off the deep end in the past.
But the big boys should at least have sent somebody halfway intelligent, somebody more respectful. The best you could say, it was fast, the way these dumb hoods brought it to you-or otherwise he waits to get decrepit like Elizabeth, and who looks after him when he's old and blind? Nobody. If he didn't have Elizabeth to worry about, he'd have to worry about himself, and where was the sense in that? He didn't care no more, if he had ever cared. Of course nobody likes the idea of turning up dead in a garbage bag in a culvert, scaring some poor Cub Scout out of his wits with your empty eye holes and eaten-up head, it ain't dignified.
The taxicab jolted off down an oiled rock lane behind a little black and white arrow sign, Ohio County Landfill 1, then they turned at once on another unmarked two-track into the woods, some old mining or logging road, or maybe a back way into the dump. They passed one of those country oil wells that nod up and down like mechanical donkeys at the trough. Then the road got worse. The taxicab splashed into a puddle that was really a creek bed, and spun its wheels coming out the other side.
Goddamn cab's gonna be mud all over, Biggy lamented, you heard Daddy, just don't throw me no heat, now what if we get stuck back here? I thought you said the road was okay.
It used to be okay. You didn't give me no time to think, Breezy said.
Bushes swatted the windows, like Nature wanted to punish them but didn't have the equipment. The cab's old springs creaked as they dipped into a hole. Bastid, Biggy muttered, rolling against the door, and the gun wavered where it was pushed up against Two-Tie's kidney. Just then the sun popped through the trees and smacked Two-Tie's eyes in a great big blank of glittering light. He couldn't take no more.
Gimme that, you idiot. He snatched at the rude hardware of the gun barrel in his side and yanked it upward and twisted on it. He had some crazy, hopeless idea of getting hold of it and shooting Elizabeth himself, and at the same time everything opened up very wide around him, and he knew this was giving up, like taking a fabulous suite at the Sans Souci in Miami Beach for a week, which he knew he wouldn't be around to pay for it. Three shots, bang bang bang. He saw the first one, a little round hole winking at him from the back of the driver's seat, smoking and frying black along its edges, and he was studying it, thinking it wasn't so bad, when he remembered about the other two. Where were they? I'm hit, Breezy yelled, then heavy crunching and swishing leaves, like a elephant in the jungle, and, whomp, a tree in the middle of the windshield. Fuck, fuck, fuck, Biggy screamed, Daddy said don't shoot him in the car, and look what I done, I shot him in the car. Elizabeth, barking in this one's face, that one's face, not grasping what had went wrong, making a terrible racket. I'm hit, Breezy wept, oh jesus, oh jesus, let's get outa here. A whirr like getting sucked up in some machine-the taxicab, tryna back out. Wait, punk. Biggy slapped the back of Breezy's head and they rocked to a stop. Two-Tie wanted to explain that it didn't matter, he always thought if you died, everything went black, like, the whole picture went and you was off like a TV set, but it wasn't like that at all. He could feel some of his middle was gone, gut, tubes, pupik, the whole bucket of shit, you would think you needed your middle but it was better like this, blown away was the right word, sky blue, wide open, all like bubbles going up. Quiet, he wanted to say, quiet, but he couldn't find his breath.
Light, shade, light. He was travelling through the woods, his head bouncing softly along, trying to piece together the cut-out puzzle of sky between the treetops. And then it really was quiet, perfectly quiet, not even Biggy grunting no more, so he didn't have to say it. Quiet. Elizabeth's face was looking down into his. She had that black mole under her chin, and the long shiny black whiskers that sprayed out of it, like a daddy-long-legs. The face sank away, he couldn't see her, she groaned that familiar groan, settling in-he moved his wet hand an inch or so and there she was. God forgive him, some caretaker he turned out to be, he was glad she was there. He should of kept the lid on till they threw him in the dump. Then, who knew, some clyde out shooting squirrels might have come across her and took her home. Only she'd never go, she'd lie there affen shpilkes, worried but patient, waiting for him to come back. She would make like she didn't see the guy calling to her, till the fool decided she was sick or mad and got his gun and shot her. Which wouldn't be the worst thing. Here, who knew what would happen to her? Nothing would happen to her. That was the worst thing. It wouldn't end. It would keep on ending as far as you could see. But everything ended. He tried to move his fingers in her beautiful fur. He couldn't feel her no more. But he knew she was there.
BUT THAT HADN'T BEEN the hottest day of the summer, for this one was. All of them sat on haybales in the shade under the shedrow, panting like dogs and squinting stupidly into the heat. Through eyes in the backs of their heads they watched their horses. They watched them because of the race, even though the race was a queer race that none of them was supposed to win.
The sun beat down and by three the red dirt glowed back around each barn and strip of grass like the works of a toaster. The heat was a bullying heat that muffled sound, so that a person saw a brush or bucket fall or a tiechain drop and heard nothing, just a kind of clap of air, a flat toneless echo. Every now and then a sparrow flopped down in the dirt and scratched around. Even the baby sparrows in the eaves gave up, peeped listlessly under the heat as under a strangler's pillow. Every puddle save the one by the back gate had given up the ghost, and now even that one shrank between hideous cracked lips. Some joker had left a horse's skull drying beside it. You didn't want to think where he'd gotten it, the ivory molars still sharp-edged and young.
Barn Z, the transient barn, stretched low along the backside fence, the heat from its long tin roof a waggling, meaningless mirage. In front of almost every stall a cheap box window fan whirred and shuddered irrelevantly at the end of an extension cord, its back side bearded with straw and cobweb. Usually a trainer would be fearful of fire but with the heat and the race a go-to-hell mood rolled over them all. On Friday afternoon, racetrackers cleaned every fan out of Ted's Appliances, West Carbonport. By Saturday they hooked up anything that turned, even old electric heaters with the heat turned off.
Margaret came around the corner and blinked at the sheer oddity of the sight. The shedrow was like a temple to pain, its hay-specked portico held up by the row of noble sore horses, each rising out of a zinc tub of ice with a palsied electric fan next to it. Every one of them was going to the same race, and the race itself was funny, not quite a fixed race but not quite square either. Pelter, Spinoza, The Mahdi, a few more nameless bays and chestnuts, and in the end stall, Lord of Misrule, a small, black, slinky horse who nosed around his stall with a certain junkyard style. Now and then he raised his head to slash vindictively at his hay bag, and sized up the traffic out of the custard white corner of his eye.
In front of his stall sat the sickly-looking punk with the almost shaved head and bumpy headbones, smacking flies on his legs with a rolled-up comic. The boy was too young to be in anybody's pay. He must belong to Nebraska. He had his father's curving soapcake of a nose. His fingernail worked some red spot near his mouth corner. He made a point of looking baldly at the sweaty crotch of every girl who passed. Look at the prune on that, he said out loud, over and over, hawked and spat. That's how bad he wanted some grown person to talk to him.
MEDICINE ED DON'T WANT to talk to him. He can't be distracted. He watches the boy through a crack in the tack room wall. The goofer dirt need a little time to take. He must be very deeply in earnest. Maybe he should have throwed it round last night, but last night he ain't make up his mind yet. Everybody say that horse can't lose. The jocks in on it. All the grooms in it. Every big trainer at the meeting have a piece of it. Yet and still, he have to be sure. His hope, his peace, his little tomorrow be riding on it. You want to be down on a sure thing-long as it is a sure thing-even if the horse don't pay but even money. He can double his nut in one minute and, after all, what do the Peoples Savings and Trust of Wheeling pay? Three point four percent in a year! If he call Two-Tie and draw on his whole bankroll and win he land up with 5000 dollars, exactly enough to buy him that trailer in Hallandale, the one with the green stripe awning in the old park for colored behind the track and the little yard of clean gravel with a palm tree sticking up out of it. If he have him a home, he won't hardly have to work no more. Then if he still be getting up awake all night like he do now he can get him a little job-somebody be glad to put him on as stall watch for pocket change. And then he don't need nobody. No more young fool. No more frizzly hair girl. That is his plan.
For every night the young fool can't sit nor rest, he going up and down the shedrow, going in the stall and out again. He talk craziness to that red horse, the one Zeno taken from him, and which he claim back, and which he think is going to win that race for him. He whisper about the expected one and saints in Ireland and that. He think that secret is between him and the horse. He don't even see where Joe Dale Bigg's boys are cruising up and down the dirt road watching him through the blind windows of that midnight blue gangster car.
Yesday Medicine Ed just cooling on his haybale, braiding a busted shank, waiting to hose out the feed tubs, when the De Ville come grinding over the red dirt in front of him, so slow it don't even raise no dust. The window slides down in the door and it's Joe Dale Bigg.
You going to collect a couple dollars for losing tomorrow?
Sho is, Mr. Bigg.
That Speculation grandson don't figure, am I right?
Sho is.
I know you ladies ain't gonna turn Nebraska around. You ain't that stupid.
Medicine Ed watched the air wiggle over the manure pile.
What about Hansel's horse? The one he filed his nut hand over? Whassaname of that horse?
Medicine Ed shook his head.
Red horse.
I disremember the name.
Don't know nothing, eh? I'll bet. Hansel drops him in for twelve fifty it'll come back to you. His name. Something like Mahdi. Could that be right?
Medicine Ed shook his head.
So I hear Hansel's buying up castles in Ireland from that horse. I hear Hansel thinks he's St. Jack and the Beanstalk or Jack the Giant Killer or somebody. He freed all the slaves of Ireland, is that right? Hope I'm not the giant. Joe Dale laughed. I better not be the giant. Am I?
Medicine Ed shook his head again, Don't know nuthin bout nuthin, and looked away at a sparrow taking a bath in the dirt. For these was the type of wandrous secrets the young fool was swapping with that horse all night long.
They say this business will drive you crazy, Joe Dale said. The lying and the cheating and you can't be sure of nothing. I think that college boy ain't coming back from wherever he ended up at. Which is a sad sight to see, a talented young man like that, but it ain't no excuse for getting in other people's business. If Hansel has to go around with his fly hanging open, his shoes untied and his hair sticking up on end, that's his lookout. If he comes untied, that's your-all's lookout. He better not bust up my deal, you colly?
Joe Dale practically yelling now and Medicine Ed cut his eyes up at him briefly, went on with his plaiting
I'm putting you on that case, you hear? You old timey negroes from down around Aiken in the hunt country, I know you got your little ways. You use em, you hear me?
That red horse ain't gonna last in no race with Lord of Misery, Medicine Ed said. He a sprinter, nemmind what the young fella say.
I don't want him even trying, Joe Dale shouted. I don't want no loose wheels out on that race course. I don't want no uncontrollable factors. I'm holding you responsible to stop it or let me know. You hear what I say?
Slowly Medicine Ed raised his eyes to him. Already the purple window was riding back up in the door. Joe Dale's black sunglasses gleamed in the crack of it. Unh-huh, Medicine Ed said. Sho is.
Yesday he full of cautionary thoughts. He a owner now and a co-trainer too. The horses gone good. Everything coming they way. He, Medicine Ed, might could have five more years. Or six. Or ten. His eyes be good, his ears still good, his draggy leg no worse, ma'fact better than it was last January when the shedrow spigots freeze and he have to haul full buckets down from the clubhouse; his remembrance still good, can't he be content to make it little by little? His pay coming in punctual, plus twenty dollars when anything run in. The young fool wander in his mind, yes, but he freehearted. He dig even deeper than Zeno. He don't forget Medicine Ed. Yesday evening Medicine Ed was thinking let it go, call Two-Tie, put some down on the horse, only just a little-don't get greedy, don't stir up the Devil, don't cunjure with that old stakes horse from Nebraska, don't take his life. And then there come Joe Dale, all the sign he need that bad evil is lurking round and he must cover himself.
In the Winnebago he pulls together the pink plastic curtains over the sink and sinks his head and washes his hands. He must think about his dust and nothing else save his dust. All the while he is mixing it up he must think about his dust until his thinking put a kind of holy spirit on it. He takes the jars out the wall one by one, and he is careful to bring to mind what they each contain. He must be very deeply in earnest. This one is a controlling powder, coltsfoot, not just dusty coltsfoot from beside of any road, but the dark green velvet hand-shape leaves, soft as a lady's glove, that creep along the ruin of a stone stable deep in a woods in Cambray, South Carolina. In this stable his grandfather, Eduardo Salters, born in slavery, once was king. Ain't nobody ever had the control of a four-legged animal better than Eddy Salters. When he was coming up, folks say, he could climb on a fence and jump on a cow and make her run.
He ain't invite it, and it's no use crying. Yet and still. Evil has come out after him. Something must be done. Back in his crushed in trailer he make what he need. First, forward and foremost, he need speed enough to overtake and turn the wind of a horse into money. And money, too, need drawing and controlling: In a little whiskey bottle is boil of moneyplant, moneyplant gathered far from water which run itself away.
In this jar is one teenchy pinch, all he have left, of the blood of Platonic. Platonic is early speed, and Cannonball is speed early and late, and here, mixed in the grave dirt of Cannonball, if you dig you find four glassy glittery things-wings of the botfly that can overtake and grab on the legs of any horse, so long as he be running. Yet and still. No use crying. Common judgment tell you that. For fact is, and it say so right in the Bible, a horse never saved nobody. Psalm 33. On a plate of glass, he move around a little of this, a little of that. He seek for that spirit of imagination wonder, to know what to do, and when is enough. You must be very deeply in earnest, Madame Eulalie said to him when she learned him doctoring, then luck will come. But he has trouble tonight to keep his mind on one thing only. His remembrance acting up, he can't get that little filly Broomstick off his mind. He keep thinking of the frizzly hair girl, he can choose to tie her to him, he know how. He can tie the bad luck off himself. But he can't make out to himself like he used to done that it is a harmless goofer he mixing. He know the truth now. Harm is coming, it ain't his fault, but still he is doctoring so that hurt, when it come, it will go on others and not on him.
He can say he is only tying the bad luck off himself and he mean no harm to anyone. He can say the young fool has drawn this trouble on the three of them, like he always knew he would. He can say the young fool is a lost, crossed, through-and-through fixed man-soul. And which he is: there ain't no cure nor doctor to undone what has already been done to the young fool. He don't eat nor either sleep. He don't pray nor cunjure. He whisper all night to that red horse, the one he lost to Zeno, and which he claim back, and which he think is going to win that race for him.
Therefore it ain't no fault nor doing of his and he must save himself as he can. No one else will. Yet and still, when Medicine Ed try to lay his spirit into this dust, he hear the young fool whispering. Medicine Ed writes sixes in the dust with the fat of his thumb, cuts it in nine lines with a razor blade. He tries to stay on the good side of the Devil, but that holy spirit of wonder be missing from him and when he has mixed up the dirt, it don't feel the same in his fingers and he don't wholly trust it. It don't feel like hissen. For once in this life he is not sure of his dust.
What exactly do he mean to do? Is he fixing to goofer that red horse who is near used up anyhow? Should he see to his bankroll and help that old black stakes horse out of this life? He has knowed tired horses too proud to loaf. He has knowed sour animals that wanted out even if they still could run. But Nebraska, sore and tired, have that special hard heart, black as acey spades, which will hold him out past his burying day. And mean he was never nothing but alone in this world, with his bum seed and getting passed down owner to owner, all the way down to the ground, and he know it. And yet and still he want to live and do, he can't help hisself. Which medicine can sort the right end out? Which dust will serve? He cannot be sure. He need help, O Lord. And he try to pray, from the 35th Psalm of David, loud over the young fool's whispering: Pick up my cause, O God, against them that's driving me. Fight against them that fights against me. Let them fall in the net they done stretched out to catch me. How long, o Lord, wilt thou stand there looking? Now get me away from these lions.
The frizzly hair girl come by hauling two buckets, a shank in her mouth. Wanna have a party? ask the sickly boy from Nebraska. Frizzly hair girl turn round and look at him. Has she heard right? Got a cigarette? he say. Medicine Ed steal up behind the boy and show himself to the frizzly hair girl, nods his head. Frizzly hair girl moves on down the shedrow with the sloshing buckets, makes a sign with her head for the little boy to follow, and which he do.
Medicine Ed slips into the stall behind that black horse, Lord of Mercy, who is standing with his front feet in a tub of ice like he ain't have a trouble in this world. Medicine Ed limps fast as he can from south to north and east to west in the straw, first crossways of the world, then putting the world back right again. He has a handful of dust for each way of the cross, opens his hand, and blows. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I ask you to take all the bad luck offen me and send it back to the Devil where it come from. Spare this horse if you can, but if hurt must come, make it go on them that would hurt me. I swear O Lord when I have my home I am through with the medicine. Only this one last time, do my work.
SHE SANK HER STRONG, ignorant fingers into her horse. She felt along the gnarly scar tissue at his spine, which she pictured as roots and branches, or the foot of a roc. Knob, burl, carbuncle-soften, she told them. Draw your claws in. Let go. She tried to believe in the blind connectedness of her body, its unknown powers. She felt if she had faith enough she could make it happen.
You're going to show in this race, she told Pelter. It's the poor people's derby. Now it's hot as the devil out there so take it easy. You have seven-eighths of a mile to come to yourself and you don't have to win. You don't want to win even if you could win, that wouldn't be healthy, for me or for you. But even with that clown on your back you ought to run third. Just get some exercise and run your race.
Little by little the pool of pale pink oil of wintergreen horse liniment vanished under her fingers. She felt deep tremors moving like waves below the brown glistening fur, from shoulders to loins of the horse's very long back. He buckled away from her with a whinny and came up biting and kicking a little. She stepped out of the way. We just need getaway money now, she told him. That's why I'm betting Nebraska. Just run your race, you'll make me 800 dollars. I have a good feeling about you. I don't know what the heck it means but I do.
THE SUN HAD FINALLY gone down. The yellow twilight, made out of air that fried all day, had something greasy about it. The backside smelt like hot pennies, turpentine and dung. The horses picked their way along a dusty track, first beside a parking lot, then along the racecourse fence. This dotted line of bald spots in the grass was the shortest route to the racetrack from Barn Z. Everybody went this way.
An ancient pony-boy came for Lord of Misrule on a tall spotted rodeo pony. The old pony-boy, known as Wuzzy, was always exactly on time. So Lord of Misrule set out first on the long walk to the paddock, the wormy kid trailing along behind.
Wuzzy had been hired just for show. Lord of Misrule went calmly and lightly on his small pitch-painted feet, although above them the waffled, battered black ankles stuck out of long white bandages, not even clean.
Tommy Hansel came next in the parade. He too walked lightly, for he had lost a few pounds, since he no longer needed to eat or sleep. He wore a black vest with some sort of round emerald green and gold saint's medallion pinned to one side. He knew it was a bowling club stick pin from a Czech social club in Steubenville. He had found it in the trailer. But he also knew it was a magic pin, a mark from St. Jack.
On the way to a race he had used to dawdle till last or next to last, a habit left over from the schoolyard and the family gas station and used car lot in Trempeleau, Wisconsin, but madness (he knew he was mad) had polished away the crude burr of all that schoolboy sedition and procrastination. It had been a way of dreaming off, and at the same time of needling his father, his teachers and his bosses, but that was over. He knew now he couldn't lose and so did his horse. It was impossible to lose to lesser beings than you were-no mere mortal man, not even a king, could swallow up God, though he might eat of Him. You looked around for your twin. She wasn't there. She carried a curse for taking away your horse. She would get to post last.
Now that he had it all figured out, he gleamed like a king in a classic comic (he saw this himself), although his ruffled shirt was a little grimy, something he could not make out by himself in the dead blue fluorescent light of the trailer. A cold blue fire burned at the backs of his eyes and the eyes seemed off on their separate missions, one east one west, wider apart than ever. His boots had been burnished to amber by a Charles Town bootblack, but he wore, not by accident, one red sock, one blue. His madness had wrecked the careful economy of the body. His color was high, his beauty spendthrift. It couldn't last.
Tommy Hansel leads the Mahdi. The Mahdi won five times in the winter. Then Hansel claimed him back. In March, in jail for 2500 dollars, he showed once, closing; in April, ran second, then sixth, then fifth. Last week he didn't quite last for 1650. What does it mean? Just because Hansel is nuts, you can't say for sure he doesn't know what he's doing. He might be working for Nebraska, he might think he's taking orders from some reptile king on Pluto and he still might win, who knows? The Mahdi rolls along the path to the race track as red, broad and shining as a John Deere tractor, but when he walks, can that be a tiny catch or halt, an almost insignificant shortening of the smooth action of his brawny forearms, some little tightness or twisting in the subcutaneous cables? Can he be sore?
Sonia's Birthday, a tall gray six-year-old mare with rundown heels in front and a ruffle of sweat like a dingy tutu between her thighs, crunches her way along the gravel path, swinging her head from side to side and backing up as they near the paddock gate. She is not happy about this race, but her trainer needs 200 dollars. Next comes Sudanese, a neat and abstract black horse, no markings, well made, with a crop of uneven knots about his delicate joints and an air of deep self-absorption. Who recalls that six years ago Sudanese ran in the Gold Bug Futurity for $200,000, led to the sixteenth pole and held on to show? Certainly not he. Next come Wolgamot, Island Life and Hung The Moon, all mainstays of the 2000-dollar allowance field, la creme de la crud of Indian Mound Downs, track favorites, each with his loyal following, all routers, all grizzled regulars of the ninth and tenth race, named on many an exacta ticket, each dragging his day of glory behind him, some Farmers and Merchants Cup or Pickle Packers Association Handicap or even some just-missed minor stakes. All are reasonably clean for this race, scarred and gleaming dark bays of various shades and descriptions-the commonest run of racehorse, dirt cheap, bone sore and all more beautiful than chests of viols of inlaid rosewood and pear. Hung The Moon, an amiable gelding of ten years old, stops to snatch at a dusty tuft of crabgrass along the parking lot fence. If this race is anything special he hasn't noticed.
Next to last comes Little Spinoza. Old Deucey Gifford has borrowed Penny's exercise pony Bob, put on a cowboy shirt and a bandana and they go to the track in style, Spinoza doing a crab dance on his tippy toes, rubbed and oiled to a brown-black pearl. He might be sweating a little under the floodlights but who ain't? The little philosopher is in the highest of spirits. All his friends are near.
Deucey leaned down and whispered to Medicine Ed: It's his distance and he's ready. Alice wants to try with him. What do we got to lose by letting him run? Goddamn he's ready to ramble. Goddamn he looks fine. It's no way in the world, said Medicine Ed. Yall don't want to win with that horse today even if he could win. You might could stir up the Devil that way and how you gone settle him down again when it's done? Somebody could get hurt. Hell I'm getting paid two hundred dollars to run the horse, not hold him. I didn't sign up for nothing but to bring him to the gate at post time, and here I am. I don't want it on me, Medicine Ed said. Joe Dale Bigg in with Nebraska. If you cross them gangsters or mess with they game, you don't want to meet them riding nor walking. I already don't want to meet them riding or walking, Deucey said. Ain't that good enough? Say, you down on Nebraska? Hell I am too, but I'll take that purse money instead, come to that, I'll be covered and wouldn't that just be horse racing. I never been afraid of dying. This world ain't been so good to me I can't stand the thought of leaving it. Deucey ball up her jaw like a bullfrog and march on.
Medicine Ed lowered his eyes from her. For that's how it was for him too. Ma'fact it was behind that one thing, how the world ain't give up her bounty to him yet, that he couldn't make up his mind to leave her but give her, over and over, one more chance and one more chance. He look in back of him for the frizzly hair girl. She kicking along in the dirt with Pelter, gray as a ghost. He drift her way. Alice and Deucey, they fixin to turn Spinoza loose, he whispered. She stared at him, shook her head. Then she laughed a little. My word. Whatever happened to majority rule in this partnership? Everyone seems to have lost their way on the road to this weirdo race. But what can we do, Ed? She laughed again, still shaking that frizzly head but but scared awake and beginning to believe. I guess we can't complain to the racing secretary that our partners are on the square. Somebody could get hurt, Ed said. I know. Spinoza might could run round that black horse. What then? She shrugged. Take the money and run?
By now they walking the paddock fence. Medicine Ed leaned on the rail with his heart going too fast and she walked on, looking at him across Pelter's back with a worried wrinkle in her forehead. Medicine Ed scoured the crowd for a tall gray gentleman with high-heel rusty red paddock boots, a string tie and a curl in the middle of his forehead. He will be laughing through his long gold teeth. Ed didn't see Death nor either the Devil and his heart slowed down. Well fine and good if somebody got somewhere to run to, Medicine Ed said to himself. If not, you can go to the wind.
Now he standing by the hundred-dollar parimutuel window deep in thought. His whole bankroll, through the helping agency of Two-Tie, is already riding on Lord of Misery. It is too late to take back. Yet and still, his pocket full of money-though he owe Two-Tie that money-and the medicine might not take. Yesday when he was at his work, why, it wasn't that spirit of wonder and so consequently he ain't sure. In the end he take and put the powder to the four corners of the world but he ain't sure.
It's time to bet and Medicine Ed still hasn't made no move. He is standing by the parimutuel window thinking, Seven furlongs is Little Spinoza race. Horse could run in. Well fine and good if somebody got somewhere to run to, he mutter, but at the same time he is thinking, Horse might could run in.
The young fool's horse, that Mr Boll Weevil twin which last summer ain't had a mark on him, look sore and common and out of his class. Pelter is number 9, well out of it, for him the race too short and anyway he seem to know what's what, he don't even break a sweat. Could be he figured it out when that do-less jockey Jojo Woods climb up on his long back. The warhorses, all them old milers, whatever they name is, number 4 with the knee, number 5 with the feet, number 6 with some other misery so his head go down when his left foreleg come up-they will run honest enough, put no shame on nobody and do nothing to speak of. And which is exactly what they supposed to do, collect 200 dollars and go home.
But Little Spinoza, the 3 horse, his horse and the women's horse, now that horse might could run in. Deep dapples have rose in his round mahogany flanks. He jog a little, feeling good. He shine like a parlor piano. He seem to have lost his years behind the kind treatment he get, this feeling of home and family and nature with the goat and the women and that. Some way you always feel the danger laying in ambush for an animal so childish carefree in his mind. Yet and still. It's something between that horse and Alice Nuzum, who is up on the horse now in they secondhand silver silks, with them funny little half legs pressed up under her. It's something in the way she ain't man nor either woman, ain't people nor either animal, and the horse too, Little Spinoza, have never quite had his four feet in this world. It's like them two know each other mind and have somewheres to meet, some halfway place. They ain't stuck with things the same what they've always been.
Horses out on the track now and up on the board the numbers jumping like a toadfrog pond, all except Lord of Misery, he is steady at even money. Nobody was supposed to know nothing about the Nebraska deal save them that has a horse in the race, and yet and still it is so much down on the horse that nothing can pry that big 1 loose off the board. Three minutes to post and Little Spinoza stand at 6 to 1. Can Little Spinoza win? It be a peculiar day when Medicine Ed go down there and lay a bet against his own medicine. But things has changed, even if he, Medicine Ed, ain't changed. Or has he? He is not sure of his medicine no more. He sure it do something. What it do, that he can't see. Yet and still. How can Lord of Misery lose on this crooked track with all that gangster money saying he win? That bunch that play poker every night at Two-Tie's has run through money like Grant through Richmond to play they last dollar on the horse; how can the horse run out?
He is standing by the parimutuel window thinking, Yet and still: seven furlongs is Little Spinoza race. Horse could run in. If he do run in, them that hate me is brought low and destroyed. They will be hot at me and they will pursue me to hurt me but, gone to glory, if he do run in, wouldn't that be fine. I take that money and fly-and Medicine Ed step in line, reach his hand deep in his pocket. There is one man in front of him, and now he done.
Your wager? say the clerk.
Medicine Ed can't move his tongue. He is thinking:
But if it's no place for you and you run off, before you is nobody knowing you, nothing but disappointment, trouble, nobody that care a red nickel for you, emergencies in the night, disease, hospital cases and death.
The bell rings, the window is closed, the race is off.
NOW IT ALL FALLS INTO PLACE. Before, you thought you knew, and felt your way along blindly. And though this world is a black tunnel of love where the gods admonished you to search without rest for your lost twin, it's also haired all over with false pointers, evil instructions, lost-forever dead-ends. Thus you let Joe Dale Bigg, alias Joe Dale Biglia, get his fingers in your pie. And he gave you (maybe he didn't mean to, but she liked you better than she was supposed to) Natalie, the New Rochelle auto parts chainstore divorcee, with her big pink open mouth like a toilet seat. And she got you tangled in that New York money, and now her hoodlum son wants to take you out and Joe Dale wouldn't complain if he did. So much for the things of this world. But things of the world have this distinction: they end. They can only chase you so far, then they end, whereas you'll go on. You know, you know so much you're your own private Southland Electric, you're all energy, you no longer need food or sleep. The animals talk to you, no intermediaries needed, no condition books, no clockers, no vets. They tell you what they need.
The Mahdi wants this race. You recognize that he is out against his old enemy, that this is an epic confrontation and he may lose. This world itself may end. The frontier between the worlds awaits all heroes. You go for broke, both of you. You've put every dollar you had, or could borrow from Natalie, on The Mahdi. It's good against evil, The Mahdi, the expected one, redeemer of this world, your representative, against Lord of Misrule, the knacker from Nebraska, the Devil himself; and ranged all in between are sundry demons, lost souls, underlings and benighted ones. Including her. You know them all. Everything talks to you. The messages square. Everyone fits in the picture. You could write the book and the glossary of the book, forget the glossary, the fucking encyclopedia, all twenty volumes, but there's no time. Or rather, there is a time for the things of this world, which is now: The Mahdi wants this race. So you give it to him. You let him run.
The jockey, Earlie, has his exact instructions. Drop his head. The boy looked at you cross-eyed. In this race? You sure? Before, you always said to him: Horse has got to run again. This time: Like there's no tomorrow, because there ain't. You smiled. He got the picture. And anyway, the horse knows what to do.
The Mahdi, redeemer of this world, is a perfect actor in the gate. The gods so design that he has your lucky number, the number of her beauties and her sorrows: 7. And he has the blessed early speed to cross the racetrack in front of the noble old bums in the middle. But in this world the Devil draws a better post position. The Devil is tight with Racing Secretary Chenille, he runs stall man Smithers, Joe Dale Bigg is one of his pet flunkies, ergo, Lord of Misrule gets the post position, God, echod, ONE, 1. Disguised as God, the Devil is pretty damn cool in the gate too.
Her horse has the witch's number, 9. She would have liked to do better-she isn't a bad witch, she is only a stupid young witch but she has been taken in. She has taken your horse and now he is her horse, Pelter, a spirit of mischief, neither good nor bad. In this kind of contest, he has no chance.
But Spinoza, the three horse, TRINITY, could figure, out of the 3 hole. God likes this horse. It isn't His horse, it isn't the redeemer of this world, but He's always had a soft spot for that number.
Everything else is bums. Underlings. Dust. Assorted lost souls.
Ehe bell rings. (You recognize that bell: it's a school bell, Falls Elementary, Trempeleau, Wisconsin. Miss Swearingen is there, she was always one of the good, she calls out: Tommy? Tommy Hansel? You smile at her but are careful not to say: Here.)
The bell rings. The gates to each little jail cell fold away. The Mahdi digs in right out of the gate, going to where the Devil is, Lord of Misrule, a shiny black beetle of a horse, running along the rail. In fact he's almost leaning on that rail. His action is rocky, jerky like an old-time silent movie, something is wrong there but he stays up anyhow, easy, no effort, he's floating above four broken legs is why-if you didn't believe in the Devil before, wait till you see the corpse he's running around in now! Never mind, The Mahdi is there, he's got his teeth in the Devil's neck by the clubhouse turn, but, face it, getting there took something out of the redeemer of this world. Now he's got to work.
Something, a comet, shoots up in front of them, it's the big roan mare with the number 2 of a bad marriage (irreconcilable differences) getting it over with, burning herself out to a pinkish gray clinker. She has a little bit of terrified speed and, amazingly, she's still up a length when they come out of the turn into the back stretch, not coming anymore, just hanging. Mahdi wants to keep the Devil honest and press the pace but the hero has come too far, he's a big red muscleman glittering with oily sweat, the Devil looks small and cool, but as for The Mahdi it's all he can do. The pace ain't breaking any records.
Five lengths back is the whole middle world, Sudanese and all the old platers, the solid citizens, the moderately corrupt-a whole platoon of them churning up a bunker of dust along the rail, out there to collect their only slightly dirty two hundred a piece-and her horse, Pelter, on the outside. And stuck behind them, not that he's trying to get through, wrapped up in himself in that holy way he has under his tadpole-girl jockey, the 3 horse, TRINITY, Little Spinoza. The gray mare sinks back through the pack like snow when she finally dies at the half, then the dull burghers drop out of it too, one by one. Except Pelter. Her Pelter. At the far turn he's still camped there four lengths back of the hung match between Misrule and The Mahdi, not trying, just being a spectator at the last great contest.
And now here goes. Little Spinoza wakes out of his dream and runs, bounds, leaps like a holy fool after the Devil and his harrower. Earlie brings up his viper-entwined stick and busts on The Mahdi, reminding him why he is here, and the expected one opens his stride and surges in front of Lord of Misrule at the quarter pole, gets his whole body by and then something is wrong, he bunches oddly or crumples in the last turn, some kind of spasm maybe only you can see, and hits the stretch trying to die. You feel his pain. You have sent him too far. (But of course you knew all along you had sent him too far, him and yourself too. Courage, son. All we can lose is this world.)
Still, dying is hard. You feel his pain. He wants to die, he needs to die, needs to back up, has nowhere to go. The Devil is right behind him and won't slow down, and on the Devil's right side at the sixteenth pole is Little Spinoza, trinity, still coming. That crazy little one-run Speculation grandson that lost his nuts before your eyes, who you knew could figure but didn't ride a nickel on, comes driving, driving, driving. You hear a sob and she is standing there next to you at the rail, crying for the glory of it, or maybe she played the wrong horse too.
So the Devil goes down after all, you are thinking, roughly satisfied. Though the redeemer doesn't pick up the win, still he's outdone himself, used up the Devil and died a hero-and there it is, the Mahdi's backwards fade-why then to And then he does go down. The small, glittering, patched-together black devil, Lord of Misrule, rolling, skidding in the dust, scarred black legs flailing. Because the dying Mahdi has backed into him. Bumped him. And Lord of Misrule, only a phantom horse, twisted together in haste in the Devil's workshop out of abortionists' black wire hangers and the patent leather raincoats of pimps and whores, can't possibly move like a living thing, change leads, get out of the way. Down, down he goes and rolls away from the rail-into Little Spinoza, who goes down too.
Only Pelter, the Darkesville Stalker, never in a hurry, laying five lengths back, watching the show, is still on his feet. The boy takes him wide around the two horses thrashing in the dirt. He crosses the finish line.
Sudanese and the pack of venerable routers straggle in.
Lord of Misrule gets up, shakes off, and, riderless, jogs across the finish line. What can you expect from the Devil? He looks no worse than when he started.
The ambulance comes onto the track. It's for the horse of the three feckless innocents, the acey-deucey hag, the ancient black groom, and her. He's finished, Little Spinoza-you heard the crack like a rifle shot, see the flopping bloody wedge at the end of the cannon bone.
But now you run for the gap. Earlie leads the Mahdi, bug-eyed, limping, embossed with glistening veins, and bleeding from his great red nostrils.
SHE WAS IN THE winner's circle when Little Spinoza became a soul, his body hauled away, his eye gone out, a great warm death in a horse ambulance going to the processor. Medicine Ed, so old and dried out he couldn't cry, was the only one left to stand behind the screen they folded around the horse, to lean on his stiff leg and see the horse off. Margaret saw only the flapping canvas, the squeaking winch, the vets in seersucker, the hurrying ambulance drivers who knew the way to the place behind the maintenance plant in their sleep. Meanwhile bettors of all shapes and sizes crowded the rail, so well paid by the sight of the dying horse on the track that for once they forgot to swear at the jockeys. (It was always the jockeys they blamed.) Then more commotion-The Mahdi jogged through the gap, nostrils bubbling red, trying not to drown in his own blood. Big and red and now, in a way, more ordinary than ever-a cheap wreck of a horse, being led away to his barn, maybe for the last time. She heard Tommy's weird singsong: All part of the plan. From where I sit, to lose is to win. Who was he talking to? No one she could see.
Then another sight she would not soon forget-Alice Nuzum, who didn't know where she was, crawling on her hands and knees in a blind circle in the gritty blond dirt of the finish line. Two valets lifted her off the track by her elbows. Deucey, kneading her mesh cap, faithful as a dog-or you might say the only real gentleman there-followed them away. Would care for Alice. Deucey always did the heartfelt thing. I never been afraid of dying. This world ain't been so good to me I can't stand the thought of leaving it. But I can't leave it yet, Margaret explained to Deucey in her mind-as she watched them disappear through the little green door to the jockeys' weight room at the back of the paddock. I am attached to this world, she said, and when she looked up again in the winner's circle, there was Joe Dale. Maggie stood at Pelter's head, holding the shank like a groom, while Joe Dale stood at his tail, looking fixedly at her, his arms folded across his thick chest, a bit of gold glittering inside the open collar of his black polo shirt, his legs planted apart in lemon silk slacks, his face unreadable. The photographer took him for the trainer. The flashbulb popped, with Joe Dale still in the picture.
She must have blinked up too grimly at Jojo. The jockey began to speak: We wasn't even trying, he whined, I never called on him but he wasn't that far out of it and then it opened up and he just strolled across the finish. She wanted to say, Schlemiel, I can't even count on you to lose when our two lives depend on it, but she knew he was telling the truth. Jojo had surely bet his pushke on Nebraska like everybody else. Forget it, she said. Jojo slid down from the horse, took his saddle and slunk away.
Joe Dale was still staring at her with an oddly empty face. I'll catch you later, baby, he finally said. I'm going to try not to waste you. I'm going to try to keep each part of this thing in the right box where it belongs. I'm going to give you a chance to work your way out of the deep hole you're in. Then he walked away in his slacks that were sleek but puckered at the hip-just a little too tight. Maggie looked around for someone, but all the others, Deucey, Tommy, Alice, Medicine Ed, were seeing to their horses, or themselves.
The worm white kid went by with Lord of Misrule, whom outriders had finally cornered in the backstretch. The small black horse pranced loopily, somehow off whenever he moved-could he be nerved in all four feet? As they passed through the crowd the kid, showing off, snatched at the shank, the horse threw up his head and by chance his liver-flecked, oddly malicious eyes swept over Maggie. She felt an electrical crawling at the back of her neck. He was so far past the point where other horses quit that he had come out the other side. They would have to shoot him to stop him. But you see, I do have to live, Margaret explained to Deucey. I do want the world. I can't die yet. I need to find out how it all ends.
Then there was nothing left for her to see there, no one left for her to talk to. Two men from the spit box loafed politely in the gap, waiting for her. Slow as she could drag him, she started up the gravel path with Pelter, towards the test barn. Pelter was in a fine mood, and why not-he'd had an easy outing, he'd just been getting going when the race ended, and his blood was silky with bute. He blew gusts that smelled like flowers out his handsome nostrils, shook his head, maps of rich sweat broke out along both his flanks. His winner's number dangled under his throatlatch. The two men from the spit box had hung it there. Now they scuffed along, one at his head, one at his tail-Lyle and Johnny were their names, she recalled-the Odom brothers, supposedly on the lookout for cheats, though they themselves were cheats, somebody's cousins from the secretary's office, or worse. Were they what you bought, if you bought the spit box? Who knew? They were ordinary looking country boys, round leathery faces and short weak chins, one blond and going bald, one dark with a stringy pompadour. The dark one looked sullen, the fair one, smug, but they had faces like gravediggers, not murderers.
Whether they were crooks or not, she knew she was dead, at least as far as the purse went. So much for getaway money: For a race she hadn't even meant to win, she would come up positive. She could make it easy for the boys and drop a tablet of phenylbutazone in their specimen cup right now. Plop. She had one on her: ran a finger down her pocket, felt the carbuncle of the big white horse pill studding her hipbone. By now bute would likely be found in every cc of blood or urine the spit box took at this low-rent bullring-or would be if they bothered to test for it. This time they were sure to test for it. Weren't they? Of course, lost money was only money, shame was moonshine and maya, and getting ruled off the track would be a relief. It was the other kind of death that had her worried.
So she was in no hurry. She even hoped that Pelter would stretch and piss on the gravel path like a nervous filly, done before the boys could get the plastic wrap off the cup. Then maybe she'd be safe in the test barn all night, walking round and round and round behind the razor-wire fence, letting the horse lead her while she slept with her eyes open. But of course no such thing would happen. Pelter was a schooled gelding with exemplary manners. They walked slowly on. Some bettors had had enough. Their automobiles, leaving early, mashed over grass and pebbles in the ruined meadows that were overflow parking lots. Headlights swept the path, then it was dark and quiet again as only a racetrack is quiet-munching, scratching, glimmering. In the dome of false dusk over the still-lit racetrack, a million bugs were whirling, and from time to time, slow and studious by comparison, came the fluttering swoop of a bat. The eighth race went off. Surge of voices like a big rolling surf-the rest of the bettors, at it again.
This here hoss bought me my '56 Chevy pickup, the blond brother suddenly remarked to the dark brother, over Maggie's head. Yep. Pelter, the Darkesville Stalker. First Horse of West Virginia. The truck that would not die. Good little truck. Blue. Was that the one had a hole in the floor by the gearshift where you could see the road going by? the dark brother asked. I remember that freezing piece of blue shit. Well now. You go on and be that way, said the blond brother, rolling the ends of his mustache in his fingers. I reckon quite a few people are in a sour mood because they lost money tonight. But not me. The dark brother said: Aw, you bet like a girl. Put twenty dollars on Pelter to show, please, Mr. Two-Tie, sir. You bet like a damn girl and except for a miracle you can't win enough to buy you a grease job.
The blond brother turned to Maggie. Who's signing the card on this horse? You work for that Hansel fellow? The brothers exchanged sly grins. I can sign, she said, starting to shiver in her little striped jersey. The black damp rising from the river had rolled away the heat like a stone. Is them goose pamples? said the blond brother said, running a finger along her arm. She drew her arm away. I wasn't planning to be here this late, she said. Let's get it over with.
On they walked around the rim of the test barn, Maggie and Pelter as slow as they could go, the brothers strolling behind. She peered into the glinting, clanking dark beyond the test compound and asked herself why she had medicated the horse for a race he couldn't win. She didn't seem to know anymore how an animal would act if required to live on the racetrack in its own nature. In fact she wished she, too, were padded right now in a good gray cloud of drugs-a dome of false dusk with Gothic bats in it, a soft pearl of the mind. She feared disfigurement. Death next. Pain least. But she feared pain too.
She was in no hurry to go back to Barn Z, but Pelter was. He drank, they walked a turn, he drank again, and before she could whistle, the horse was pissing into the steaming sand. Then there was nothing else to do but to head for the gate of the compound. They passed a tiny office lined with dusty bottles where a light was shining. The long flickering fluorescent tube hung a greenish mask on a small man hunched at a desk. In front of him was an open fifth of some off-brand bourbon. She saw the familiar lariats on his cowboy boots. It was Kidstuff.
Howdy, Miss Margaret, he said.
What the hell are you doing here? she whispered.
Filling in for my friend Rollie. I believe there was some horse he wanted to play.
This place is crooked as a dog's hind leg, Maggie said.
It's just for the one race, Kidstuff smiled. It was a special race. He passed her the open bottle. She took a swig and so did he. It was clearly not his first.
Tell me, is Indian Mound Downs going to send my urine sample to the lab with its usual diligence?
Now why would you ask that question? Kidstuff said. Yall haven't been trying that new B vitamin out on this horse, have you?
Certainly not, Maggie said, although I must say at his advanced age it would be a kindness.
Kidstuff cleared his throat. I believe the racetrack will handle that test with just as much care as every other day. Nobody in racing needs a positive.
I might not be in racing too much longer, Maggie said.
Anyhow, plenty of old geezers liked Pelter in that race. Not everybody was as smart as we was. He smiled again, his good teeth glowing like lightning bugs in the queer green light.
Kidstuff, if I make it off this racetrack alive, I will always think of you fondly, she said.
O? Why is that?
Because you were the best of them, she said.
He looked at her sadly and she noticed for the first time-but maybe it was the light-that his handsome face was drawn into fine lines by something more than hard weather, and the whites of his eyes were the color of putty.
I hope I ain't the best you can do, Maggie, he said. I'm a-going down the drain.
MEDICINE ED, LIMING DOWN Little Spinoza's stall, looked for the frizzly girl to come back with Pelter, and meanwhile he listened to the crazy talk of the young fool, the whapping of tie chains against the wall and the bashing and thrashing of the big horse still bleeding in his lungs and tryna catch air. Tommy Hansel had shut hisself and the horse up in they stall over on the far side of the barn. Medicine Ed pressed his ear against the wall to make out what he could. He fear to hear them and fear even more not to hear them-what it might mean. He was scared to the roots of his hair, and woolgathered all in all as to what the night was trying to tell him. I went to the goofer and even so the prince of darkness taken my horse and my money, I never see the gray gentleman but I feel him all around me. And all this while out the back of his eye he have to watch that midnight blue gangster car purring like a big black cat in the dirt road, set back a little ways for once from the light pole and the thin skirt of light it throw round the back gate. Of course he couldn't see through the dark glass who was in it, but he could guess. Medicine Ed raked and strewed white Zs of bitter lime about the stall until his eyes teared up, and all the while out the side of his eye he watched for any roll of the black glass, any hand or either long small barrel out the window or the door.
And that was how he come to seen it at the last hose of Barn Z, the hose pulled tight round the far corner of the barn and the river of water pooling and muddling there where no horse was. He had more sense than to walk round the shedrow and eyeball that in the open. He went to his tack room, leaned to the chink in the back wall and tried to make out what it might mean. It was that yellow taxicab from downstairs of his apartment in Carbonport that Mr. Two-Tie use to rode around in. Roy's Taxicab, from the lunchroom, what it was, with all four doors flapped open in the skrimpy light of the darkest corner of the fence, getting hosed up and down like a hot horse, only it wasn't no horse. The soap bubbles crawled to the big puddle by the back gate in a rusty fuzzy line, and before he could even see the color of blood in that foam he had a bad ugly feeling why they would wash the car that way with the doors wide open. Then he seen the hose run inside, the low pinkish waterfall across the running board and he knew. He knew what happened to Mr. Two-Tie. To the creeper crawlers in the roots of his hair he knew what he knew: the Devil ain't taken his money, the Devil don't need his money, for his money was all markers in Mr. Two-Tie's pocket. Now Mr. Two-Tie is gone and Little Spinoza is gone. The young fool's reason is gone, soon his horses be gone, and his woman too, and Medicine Ed's home with them. But his bankroll still wrapped up tight as head cabbage in the Peoples Savings and Trust of Wheeling. His money, not much, but yet and still not nothing-the same like it was before. And hisself alive and working, working forever, world without end. O god, soul of the world, foe of the Devil who taken the young fool's reason, so help me god, I have learned my lesson, stop now, spare my life and spare out them others life and I will never practice medicine no more.
MAGGIE AND PELTER set off across the backside, Maggie crawling with nerves, Pelter in need of his dinner. On both sides of the fence, things were alive: above the racetrack, the lights had faded to a half-world and losers streamed for the exits, shedding their dead tickets as they went. Now the headlights of a thousand snarling autos crisscrossed the path that she and Pelter picked their way along, while up and down the shedrows the long, dove gray, grainy beams sifted in and out of each other like long tall ghosts. The losers in their automobiles-Margaret trusted they narrowed their bloodshot eyes at all they saw. She felt almost safe walking here.
Inside the fence, too, the long barns were alive. Here and there hot horses were still walking, buckets squeaked, hoses hissed on and off, nozzles burst into rhinestone fans and the soapy water that grooms scraped off their horses hit the dirt with a rude clack like a hand across a face. In every shedrow a stall or two glowed yellow, and bodies, plenty of bodies, crossed back and forth in front of them. Alive.
All the shedrows were alive, but most of all Barn Z. At the far corner of the transient barn, blocking the last dirt lane before the outside fence, with its back wide open and its furrowed silver carpet rolled out, was the van that was not like a Chinese jewel box, that was in fact unmarked, pocked and dirty white, its Nebraska license plate screwed on at a tilt and dog-eared in one corner. Open, empty, black inside, it waited for its seedy royal traveler, and even so, even after the miserable race he had run, it was a gleaming lacquered box of red-gold letters. Lord of Misrule was up on his blistered fetlocks and on his way in, the worm white kid swatting absently at his rump with a rolled-up comic book. His shoes scrabbled at the frets, green sparks flew and all of a sudden one silver arc shot out, like a spring from a bad toy, and caught the worm white boy in the belly. Bastid! the boy jumped backwards and fluted half soprano. What you get for sleeping, said Nebraska, laughing, in the cab. He coulda ruined me for life. End of the line for you, old man. Aaanh, one of youse is enough.
In the yellow frame of Little Spinoza's stall Maggie saw Medicine Ed, stick thin and bent forward from the small of his back like a knife with a bad hinge. The old man's bad leg dragged its sideways foot and his long deeply grooved face was closed. To look at him, you wouldn't know anything special had happened tonight at all. He was carrying away the last pads of wet straw from the empty stall on a pitchfork. Behind him lime dust powdered the wet black floor, the sugar that ghost horses eat. He had mucked Pelter's stall first and it stood open, a cube of warm gold floating above a deep floor of fresh straw. Then he had emptied Spinoza's down to nothing. She saw that he worked to fill empty time and she remembered that he too had lost Little Spinoza. How much of a material loss that might be to the old groom she had no way to know. A few of these old guys squirreled away thousands, or that's what people said. He had no vices that she could detect. He didn't drink or smoke or snort but surely he cashed a ticket now and then. Soon she wouldn't see him anymore. Why did this distress her so? He thought her a fool and his deep suspicion of her had awakened in her, over time, its opposite emotion, a deep trust in his wisdom. She needed a counselor who had no use for her and suddenly she felt she would be helpless without him. He on the other hand probably wished he had never laid eyes on her, or Tommy Hansel either. Suddenly she laughed. No doubt she was exaggerating their importance. Medicine Ed would always find a job.
But when he saw her, something came into the closed face after all. Boss done hammer and nail hisself in the stall box with the red horse, he said.
She looked at the back wall. What is that noise?
Horse can't settle down. Horse can't get his breath. Horse ain't walked yet or either eat. Horse don't come out they soon he might probly never come out.
I could get Haslipp, she said. Try to talk Tommy into letting him in.
Don't fuss at him about that horse. Veternary can't save that horse. Horse all through.
You mean he'll die?
He moved away from her with the pitchfork. He ain't no race horse no more. What I mean.
They were whispering. Are you with me? Tommy rang out suddenly, not at them, but at something only he heard. With me! He laughed, rather scornfully. Is that such a ridiculous question?
Tommy, she called. Won't you please come out of there?
Maggie? Where are you?
I'm out here.
How did you get out there?
What do you mean?
You were in here, Maggie. A minute ago. On account of the light-you have to get out of that light. You know the light I mean. From the gatehouse.
Why, she said reluctantly.
They use it to give you a weird kind of feeling they're drawing the insides out of you. You know that feeling? Maggie?
Yes? she said.
Why did you leave me?
I'm here, she said.
You may be a traitor.
Well, Maggie said. Maybe.
I know you can't help it. You're weak.
He's lost his mind, she whispered to Medicine Ed. Now what do I do?
Why you want to do anything? They carry him away soon enough without you doing nothing.
I need to get a van right now, she said. Why did I wait? That fucking race, that's why. Now where can I get us a van at this time of night?
You don't need no van.
I want to call my Uncle Rudy. You know my Uncle Rudy. The one they call Two-Tie.
I know Mr. Two-Tie.
He has vans. He told me to call him if I got in trouble. If I needed anything. He gave me his number, I swear he did, but I lost it. You have his number, don't you.
Mr. Two-Tie done had vans, Medicine Ed replied carefully. He many long years out that bidness. Who say he have vans?
She shrugged. It had been the Koderer family version, sanitized, she supposed, of Uncle Rudy's business. I bet he could get me a van, Maggie said, all the same.
Might probly he could, if he was home. But he ain't home.
After the races, Two-Tie is always home. Everybody says that. Even I know that.
He ain't home, Medicine Ed said. You can call him if you want to. I give you the number. But he ain't home. He busied himself about Pelter's feet. You want that number? He looked up at her for the first time and she saw the stony judgment in the set of his mouth. He had taken his teeth out, and his long, thin-lipped mouth made one deep line like a stitch. She did not reply. After a while he repeated: You don't need no van.
Tommy won't leave without the horses.
They gone send a van all right. They gone send a van directly. But not for yalls horses.
What do you mean?
They ain't gone let you take them horses. The trainer ain't fit. And he owe money. They gone take his horses.
I don't believe you. How can they just take away his horses?
He looked up at her again with something between pain and fury. Ima tell you, young woman. His horses ain't nothing. And he ain't nothing. They do what they want. It's no owners for them horses. His horses is gone to the block. Why you worry about them sorry horses? You gone have enough trouble to get you man out the can again, or either out the state hospital, or wayever they put him.
Get him out? Maggie said. For she had never perceived the care of Tommy as her job. Tommy's horses were one thing. Tommy was quite another.
Nobody gone pay the keep on them horses. They at the end of the line. They gone to the block. So much a pound to pay his bills.
They can't have my horse. Pelter is not going to the dog food factory. I'll see to that much.
You gone train him? Or pay somebody else to train him?
Maggie searched in her pockets, unfolded the foaling papers with shaking hands. I'll take care of that right now. How do you spell Salters?
You a fool. I got no money to fool with that horse. He ain't improving. I throw him on the block tomorrow if he come up lame.
There's a little horse left there. You know there is. It's an honor to own this horse.
Nothing but trouble is what. Big race gone wrong, and Mr. Hickok's old horse, he come out of nowhere and win it. First Horse of West Virginia. It gone be in the papers. And then some young girl who ought not to own the horse in the first place, gone sign the horse over to a colored groom. They gone try to take him from me. They will look for some way.
There's not that much horse left, Maggie said sharply. Come on. Be a man. S-A-L-T-E-R-S. Is that right? Or should I just write X? She wrote the name, then pressed the paper at Medicine Ed, whose hands stayed where they were, patiently unrolling yellowed bandage bolt by bolt. He wouldn't look at her. The paper fluttered down to the straw. She ducked under the webbing. She did not have to watch him pick it up. She knew he wanted that horse. True, the old man wasn't the mask of joy. His long, deeply graven face was closer, indeed, to the mask of grief than the mask of joy, but what he resembled most was himself. She wasn't sure she hadn't been snookered. She could not look behind her at Pelter, his darkling ankles as if he had stepped in rich black swamp water, his long, gleaming back. She looked up and down the shedrow, feeling broken in two. The ancient racetrackers who had discouraged this attachment all along nodded their ghostly heads, satisfied.
An Indian Mounds Police Department station wagon was inching its way up the dirt road, so slow it boiled in the greenish dust of its own headlights, and scuffing along duckfooted in front of it, pointing the way, was Archie, the track stooge who manned the back gatehouse when races were on. Suitcase Smithers hadn't even seen fit to come in person to clear away the difficulty. Ima tell you, young woman. His horses ain't nothing. And he ain't nothing. The racetrack had called in the town police. Maggie wanted to borrow the can't-see-me act of Medicine Ed and slip away sidewise between the shedrows, but she felt obliged to stand there and show the police that Tommy was not vacant of human ties and connections. She stepped back around the corner and waited in front of the barricaded stall. That was all it occurred to her to do.
Boss, Medicine Ed whispered roughly from Pelter's stall on the other side of the shedrow. She heard it through two walls. Po-lice car is coming. Two town policemans and Archie.
She realized that for some little while there had been no more jerks of chain, no more gritty thuds and swipes of the great body against the stall wall. One way or the other, The Mahdi was past struggling.
Maggie?
I'm here.
Is it true? a cop car?
Yes, she said.
Did you call the cops on me? He waited. Maggie? Did you?
Stallman drop a dime, boss, Medicine Ed said tiredly. Everybody know.
She heard a great clatter and squeal of wood splintering. Up and down the shedrow horses trumpeted in panic, thumped and swished around in their stalls. Tommy was kicking his way out of the back of the stall. It was quickly done. Some of the planks near the dirt floor were short and new, a patch job where the wall had been kicked in by horses many times before. They had kept The Mahdi in here because he was an easy horse.
The police wagon came around the corner, ground to a stop and idled irresolutely. In its head beams, white dust dully chased itself. After a time the car doors flopped open. Maggie woke up. Now that Tommy was gone, she didn't have to answer any questions. She backed out of the light and ran back around to the far side of Barn Z. At Pelter's stall she paused. The foaling papers had vanished. Pelter nosed the hay bag in the front of his stall, calm, brushed and shining. As Medicine Ed's horse, he looked better already.
Medicine Ed squatted before a ragged hole in the back of the next stall, his stiff leg out to one side in its usual mirthless kazatsky. He was inspecting a mass of shadow on the other side of the wall. The thick sleek throat curved up where The Mahdi had sunk to the ground on his tie-chain. His mouth was wide open. The horse was dead. The town constables were knocking on the other side of the barricaded door. Tommy Hansel? Tommy Hansel? Indian Mounds Police. Please open the door. Medicine Ed's lips twitched, getting ready to say Mr. Hansel he gone and I don't know nothing bout nothing. Maggie faded off zigzag between the shedrows.
She left as Medicine Ed used to do, ducking into the walking rings where they were boxed in at the ends of shedrows, never hurrying and never looking back. But suddenly she heard, too close to her, the priestly daven of an expensive car. The midnight blue Cadillac was in the dirt road, not following her but pacing her to the exit. Leave disappearing acts to the old man. She ran-ran straight for the fence that divided the backside on that end from the surrounding field. A little gully rolled away from the fence on the other side, so that the bottom wasn't flush. She scrambled under, stood up in blackberry brambles, ironweed, and queen anne's lace. It was the edge of some fenced wilderness belonging to track maintenance. In the dim glow that spilled over from the backside she saw a general downhill tumble of junk, piles of asphalt roof tiles and scrap lumber, then came limestone outcroppings abloom with bullseyes of lichen, and at last the weedy slope fell away into darkness. Lower still was the well of luminous fog that rose from the floodplains of the river.
That was the way she went at first, out of the light and towards the river. When the dank fog swirled around her, she dipped back up into scattered security lights-yet another maintenance compound. But this place was lower and wider open than the junkyard by the backside fence, and all at once her sneaker sank deep in sand. At her feet, clouds of clammy brittle touch-me-not, but underneath, rich sand. She knew that sensation. Pulled up a handful of jewelweed, and there it was, an old ghostly washed-out racetrack, what was left of one. Saw other flashes of bone white sand here and there, and remembered people saying so, that there had been another half-mile ring out here once upon a time, used for match races and fair meetings and such, before Ives opened his chain of cheap racetracks in the thirties. The old track had washed out in storm after storm, and when they built the new Indian Mound Downs, that was where they had put the place, out of sight behind chainlink fence and sumac thicket, down a few crumbling rungs of limestone, guarded by owls and copperheads, well out of sight of the racetrack as it was now.
So this was the place-site of the track generator and pumping station, but also the place where they dragged their dead, lair of the horse ambulances, loading dock of animal processing plant and tanyard. She slowed down, treaded cautiously, for now the fog had risen from the river and lay across the old infield in long torn drifts. Above it floated fuzzy disembodied heads of joe-pye weed, and now a whole wrecked starting gate stuck up suddenly out of the weeds and mist, lopsided, rusted, sagging down on one side. Here an old dung pile, shrunken, sun-crusted, speared all over with ripe plantain. Her feet, kicking through weeds, began to strike this and that-leavings of someone who had camped up here, tin cans, chunks of fire-blackened wood, a couple of lawn chairs trailing broken plastic webbing and a chunk of plyboard to lay between them, like the old grooms used to sleep on in a spare stall, when there were spare stalls. Some gyp must have lived up here, maybe a real gypsy back then, for here was his dessicated gyp rope doubling as a clothesline, here his dried out longjohns, his dead socks, even a set of jockey silks bleached gray and rotted to shreds. Maybe he had had to get out of town fast. Such things happened.
One of her feet wedged up against a concrete apron-the gypsy's clothesline had been threaded through the padlock of a steel door, generator shed or something, she heard a low hum, down into the fog to one outer sprung spoke of what looked like the picked bones of a giant umbrella-a broken-down hot-walking machine, dumped, unceremoniously, over the side of the hill from the washed-out track. Up above, ash barrels, a weak yellow mosquito light, and something else on the concrete strip beyond the pathetic clothesline, a mound rising out of the fog, dark and slick with dew, that she knew at once had been alive, knew it was Little Spinoza, knew she'd been looking for him. He lay on the pavement of the loading platform, and he who had looked small and even dainty when alive looked all too big as a dead body-looked like something hard to get rid of. Fog swathed the platform but swam around the dead horse like a startled spirit. She looked at the fluting behind the velvety nostril, the arched, vaulted throat, the dry glimmer of tooth and eye and felt guilty of a huge desertion, as though she had starved him to death. She had the feeling they had all left him here to rot-but that was foolish. It was just that the Mound was a cheap track, and out in the sticks. After the night races let out, no one was at work in the rendering plant. The knackers would pick up the carcass in the morning. If the rats ate his eyes in the night or foxes chewed the cannon bone, the broken flesh savory with hormones of pain and fear, who would know? who would see?
She had always liked to sink her hands into Spinoza, the Speculation grandson, at first feared to be a killer, in fact the most pliable body of all once he foolishly gave his trust. She remembered how she used to drape herself sloppily across his rump with one arm while she worked on his tail and thighs with the other-how after a while his spine would curve up like a bow and his knees slightly buckle, so they would end like two amiable drunks holding each other up before a magistrate. Now she made herself run a hand over his dead body. The hair was gritty and clotted like a mat on the floor of a taxicab, or a rug for wiping your feet in a public entrance on an ugly day. It felt filthy and contagious. She drew her hand back, wiped the open palm down the side of her jeans and leaned against the wall. She had thought the ghost of the horse might be around here somewhere, but whatever she had meant to say to him by touching his body, she had surely told him the opposite.
Hey. Do you know how much I hate you?
Joe Dale. She peered into the darkness. He was sitting four or five yards from her out in the wet weeds in the gypsy's plastic lawn chair, with the fog boiling around him and his legs crossed. Behind him in the old infield, in a starry sea of queen anne's lace, the midnight blue Sedan de Ville idled-she imagined it idled, all she heard was the low growl of the generator and the throb of cicadas. A lighter snapped, Joe Dale lit a cigar and she saw the black grain of beard on his white cheeks and the bags under his eyes.
Too much to kill you, which is lucky for you, he said. I try never to hate a girl that much so she gets interesting again. But then it happens and, hey, it's a trip. The staying power I get! And the brains, like a detective. I wake up when I never knew I was asleep. You thought you got away from me, didn't you? Hey, once I hated you, I found you just like that. Bam. How did I know you'd be in the place? I knew. Now I won't feel so bad about losing my money on Lord of Misrule tonight. I know I'm going to get something out of it. I know you ain't going to turn me down after I tell you how much I hate you. You won't want to miss this. I mean, you don't get this too off-ten. At least I don't. Am I scaring you? Hey, relax. When I hate a girl that much I only want to be with her. To experience her, you might say. There's nothing like it. Love can't compare. You know what I mean? Probably not. Well, like love is to you, hate is to me. I got to be with her while it lasts. Then she's like any other broad again and I can throw her out. I'm free, she's free. You colly?
He did not get up and she was conscious of looking down at him in the infield over the dead body of the horse. So what do you say? he asked. She opened her mouth but nothing came out; the cicadas swelled up in the interval as loud as a discotheque.
Then she saw another person coming across the infield, glinting silk sleeves, dark vest, tall and well made, the walk at once elegant and faintly simian owing to the turned-back hands. Carrying a pitchfork. Tommy. Head tipped to one side, as if listening, listening to voices-were they in or out of his head? She saw him, saw him see them, saw him lean in leisurely attention on the fins of the midnight blue Cadillac. He was insane, he thought people were trying to destroy him, to suck out his guts, but, she noted, in the rare event that someone was trying to destroy you, to suck out your guts, insanity was a goodly metaphysics.
I see your point, she said carefully. What could be more alien to the body than someone that you hate. I understand the physical attraction of the alien. I've always been drawn to the alien-I mean, to anything alive that's a completely different species from me.
Hey, that's me, Joe Dale said. I'm a bulldog. I mean, naked I'm a little overweight, more than a little, my trainer don't like it but you'll like it. Wait'll you see-balls all over me. Balls on my neck, balls around my middle, balls on my balls. When I fuck you, I'm going to tell you the whole time how much I hate you. All the time, like some kinda new music you never heard before. You've been waiting for something like that for a long time now-am I right or wrong?
I've got to admit, she said, that you are alien to me, enough so… so I can imagine you… meeting you like some kind of monster in a labyrinth.
He laughed. Some kinda monster in a labyrinth. I like that.
But there's some aspect that kills it, freezes it, when I see you actually sitting there in front of me. Takes the life out of it.
The snuff aspect, he said.
Exactly. The snuff aspect. That you could take my life.
Hey, I'm unarmed. He pulled open his white windbreaker to show her. You could still run away from me, he said cheerfully. Go ahead. Try. You got room.
I could, couldn't I. But I'd like to know what it is you hate about me.
Okay. To be frank-you love trouble, he said. That disgusts me. You think you're too intelligent. You think you just accidentally end up where it's at, like, it's a coincidence that horses get wasted around you, maybe people too. But it ain't an accident. You make it happen.
How exactly do I do that?
You should have gone along with me the first time I suggested something to you, he said. It was just a small thing then. I tried to make it easy for you. To take the matter out of your hands. But you got no trust.
That's true. But I don't see why you couldn't just stay on your side and me on mine.
Hey, I didn't invite you into my world, did I? You showed up. You took, not one, two horses from me. You fought me, because you're a destroyer. You eat corpses, like that one there. I just fight back.
Then we're not so very different after all, are we.
Fuck yes we're different. I do cold things but you make it happen. It's like weather, it goes where it's summoned. I wouldn't do what I do if it wasn't for low pressure cunts like you. I wouldn't even think of such things, believe me.
I believe you.
You better go if you're going to go, he said, getting to his feet. Otherwise I'm going to get my hands on you. I waited long enough to get you out of my system.
I'd like to get out of your system, Maggie said. I honestly would. But I don't think I can help you there.
Sure you can. First I'm going to get those little-boy tits out of the way, which I admit I always kinda liked them. I bet they're full of hard little bumps, though, like a golfball-probably cancer. He laughed. That's a foretaste. Hey, didn't I figure you right? Isn't that what you like? Somebody who can reach his hand up inside you and tell you what disease you're dying of.
He was standing at the edge of the loading platform now, his hands level with the head of the dead horse.
You know, I think you'd better stay away from me after all, she said. I don't think you should come any closer.
What, you're going to use that fucking dead horse to keep me away? I don't see what else you got.
That's because you haven't really looked, Tommy said. He was pushing through the tall, tough blooms, pitchfork in hand. If you stood in the right place, you could see everything. But down in the dreck where you live, you can't see.
Tommy Hansel, Joe Dale said, turning around. He raised his two empty hands in the air like a preacher, and slowly backed away towards the washed-out edge of the racetrack. You crept on me. I gotta hand it to you. Fuck, man, you got me good. But then, I didn't know you were the sneaking up kind. I thought you were the raving looney kind. I was just saying to your woman here Tommy swung the pitchfork at his face sideways, like a bat. Maggie watched, in fascination, the tines of it close on the round white jowls like a barred window. He staggered backwards, his hands curled on his face. She stared at the little bush of whisker on each upper knuckle, the square glow of each clean white fingernail. He had had a manicure. Tommy swung again. The elbows in their yellow windbreaker pointed up like two yellow sails in the fog, and he went down. Tommy stood over him, holding the pitchfork low around its neck. He dislikes horses, actually, Tommy said. It's beyond indifference.
Are you going to kill him? If you kill him, Tommy, when they catch you, they'll never let you out.
You're leaving me and I don't care what happens to me, he said quite lucidly.
Things might look different in a little while. I'm not worth it. I'm really not.
It doesn't matter if you're worth it, he said. We're one thing, only you're too weak to know it. You think I'm nuts. You're lucky I'm not nuts. Do you know why?
Why, she asked reluctantly.
Because if I was really nuts I wouldn't let you make that mistake. I'd correct it.
She nodded. She thought there was something to that.
Joe Dale, groaning, rolled over on one side, then got his knees under him and pushed up in a salaam, his face still down in the dirt in the basket of his hands. Fuck. You two deserve each other, he said.
Tommy laughed. There you are, Maggie. Even that sick prick can see it. Why can't you see it?
Do me one favor, Joe Dale said. I can't see too good. Put me in my car. I need to get to a hospital.
I'm thinking of going to Ireland, Tommy said. Would you want to live in Ireland some day? You know I'm supposed to be descended from an Irish revolutionary hero on my mother's side. James Napper Tandy?
Is that so? Maggie said. I never knew that. And she sang:
O Erin must we leave you, driven by the tyrant's hand? Must we ask a mother's welcome from a strange but happier land?
They smiled at each other.
That's fine, she said, but I don't think we're going to Ireland.
You know I'm a bastard, he said. I'm not really my father's child.
Maggie recalled the gray mechanic, a dried-up mask of Tommy, behind the cluttered desk at Hansel's Esso and Used Auto, Trempeleau, Wisconsin. No. No, I think you really are.
You could see a resemblance?
I'm afraid I must say I did. He was almost your double. Shrunken and lifeless I admit.
He blinked at her, hurt and disappointed. I don't think so, he said.
Joe Dale rose to a half-crouch and took three shambling steps towards the infield where the Cadillac was idling. But his ankles tangled in the jungly touch-me-not that choked the old sand track, and he sank down again and crawled on all fours. His hands on the ground were black with blood. Get me to a hospital, he muttered.
I'll get you to the same hospital where you take your sore horses, Tommy said.
What, Hansel, you think you treated your horses so good? Joe Dale peered up at Tommy out of eyes that were swollen shut.
I did not, Tommy said. I did not. But I am leaving horse racing. I don't believe I've heard you bid the sport farewell. I, however, am leaving horse racing tonight. My fallen twin sister can come with me if she wishes. Well, Maggie? Do you wish? He waited a moment. No. Well, tell me this. Do you think I could be a dancer? No answer to that either. He laughed. Then fare thee well.
He walked, in his princely yet faintly simian way, carrying the pitchfork parallel to the ground like a spear, out to the infield where the Sedan de Ville idled behind the ghostly cones of its headlights.
Joe Dale managed to hunch up unsteadily one more time in the jewelweed, trying to get a footing in the deep sand where the track had washed out to a steep slope. Finally he lurched to his feet. You two are through on every racetrack in West Virginia, he shouted.
Tommy ducked into the Sedan de Ville and revved the euphonious engine a few times without shutting the door. The Cadillac roosted a moment on its pearly exhaust, then swished forward through the queen anne's lace, gaining speed.
Hey, get out of my car, Joe Dale shouted, waving his bloody hands over his head. The midnight blue Cadillac left the infield and ploughed into the sand of the ruined track. Its nose bounced down and up and Joe Dale popped heavily into the air, arced backwards over the crumbly heel of the washout and landed in the spindly arms of the broken down hot-walking machine. Incredibly enough, clanking and whirring, dragging one segmented silvery leg and waving another, it started to turn with Joe Dale dangling from the housing of the motor. But then it stopped.