Inside the back gate of Indian Mound Downs, a hot-walking machine creaked round and round. In the judgment of Medicine Ed, walking a horse himself on the shedrow of Barn Z, the going-nowhere contraption must be the lost soul of this cheap racetrack where he been ended up at. It was stuck there in the gate, so you couldn't get out. It filled up the whole road between a hill of horse manure against the backside fence, stubbled with pale dirty straw like a penitentiary haircut, and a long red puddle in the red dirt, a puddle that was almost a pond. Right down to the sore horses at each point of the silver star, it resembled some woebegone carnival ride, some skeleton of a two-bit ride dreamed up by a dreamer too tired to dream. There'd been no rain all August and by now the fresh worked horses were half lost in the pink cloud of their own shuffling. Red dust from those West Virginia hills rode in their wide open nostrils and stuck to their squeezebox lungs. Red dust, working its devilment, he observed to himself, but he shut his mouth. They were not his horses.
Medicine Ed led his own horse round the corner of the shedrow. What was the name of this animal? If he had heard it, Medicine Ed didn't recall. It was a big red three-year-old, dumb as dirt, that Zeno had vanned up for the fourth race, a maiden without a scratch on him. A van ride on race day did for many a horse, but this boy had rolled out the van as calm as that puddle yonder, for he felt good and didn't know nothing. True, he had no class. He was the throwaway kind, a heavy-head sprinter who looked like a quarter horse, with a chest like a car radiator. He must not know what was coming, for once he was sore, he might last to age five, with luck.
How long would Medicine Ed last? He had been on the racetrack since he was eight years old. After sixty-four years of this racetrack life he, too, was sore and tired, and like the boll weevil in the song, he was looking for a home. He knew he would always have work, long as he could work. But where was it wrote that he had to rub horses till the day he died? And as for the medicine he could do and which long ago gave him his name, best folks forgot about that, and in these parts so far they had.
Up ahead was Deucey Gifford walking Grizzly, her moneymaker. Grizzly was the opposite end of the Mound, a used-up stakes horse, a miler, nerved in his feet, who knew everything. Medicine Ed liked to devil her: Why you don't give that old boy his rest? How old Grizzly be by now? Fourteen? fi'teen?
He's twelve, Deucey said, like she always said, and he don't need no rest. Grizzly knows what comes next for him in this world, after me, I mean. He likes things the way they are.
I bet you done told him, you hard-nose old half-man.
That's right. I told him. He'd rather run.
Medicine Ed laughed a little. I reckon that Grizzly nerved in all four feet, he said. I know he don't feel no pain.
Hell he is. Two's plenty, Deucey snapped. Her watery eyes looked shifty in their pouches, and whether she be lying or not, Medicine Ed couldn't tell. Anyhow Grizzly got heart. He could run without feet, she said.
And which he do, Medicine Ed thought, and he walked on with the red youngster.
Deucey called back to Ed now: You got something in tonight?
Zeno ship up this big three-year-old for the fourth, give him a race.
They went their two ways with their night-and-day cheap horses, and suddenly they were wrassling the two of them like broncs. It had come one of them death squawks from an automobile spring, which you heard when some ignorant individual attempted to bust into the backside of Indian Mound Downs by the back gate. The four horses still on the hot-walking machine taken off, galloping foolishly in the pink cloud round the pole like they did on any excuse. It was a dirt-caked and crumpled white Pontiac Grand Prix, ten years old, longer and lower than it ought to be, resembling a flattened shoe box, with its front bumper hanging down on one side. A girl was driving it, a stranger girl with round blindman sunglasses and two fat brown pigtails sticking out frizzly from her small head. She must have hit that puddle flying since the Grand Prix bounced right out again. Red clay-water squirted on all sides like cream of tomato soup.
The stall man, Suitcase Smithers, stepped out of the racing secretary's shack, brushing doughnut crumbs off the soft bag of guts that pushed out his lime pastel short-sleeve shirt and gray stripe suspenders. He was an unhealthy looking man of a drained cement color, and in that aggravating way he had of never looking straight at nobody, he said past, not into, the open window of the Pontiac: What is your business on this racetrack, miss?
I would like to talk to the stall superintendent, Mr. Vernon Smithers, said the girl. Are you him?
He was him. She said, like they always said, that she worked for a horseman from Charles Town, or coulda been Laurel, or Pocono Downs. He was on the road right now with three, four, five horses. She come ahead to get the stalls ready.
Suitcase read her the sign that hung over the back gate. RACETRACK BUSINESS USE FRONT GATE ONLY.
She stood there. Dusty sweat was gluing her eyebrows together. She wiped across them with the fat part of her hand.
Talk to Archie in the green uniform, said Suitcase, nodding at the faraway gatehouse.
I talked to Archie in the green uniform.
Well, I'm going to tell you the same as what Archie told you. Suitcase cleared his throat. I got no stalls.
Tommy Hansel called ahead! she said, like they always said. Her frizzly dirt-brown pigtails stuck out another inch.
Henry who? Suitcase said. You don't walk in a busy race meeting and say gimme five stalls.
She said on his say-so they give up five stalls in the old place for five stalls in this new place.
Suitcase shrugged. A van don't always show up on time, he explained. Horsemen stay longer than they said. Horses get sick. Everything don't always go exactly on schedule.
The girl stood there. She felt through her jeans pockets front and back and showed Suitcase, down in her palm, a pityfull little roll of bills.
Green as grass, Deucey muttered. Medicine Ed felt her falling in love already.
Suitcase Smithers shook his head but smiled down forgivingly.
Your money ain't long enough to buy five stalls next to each other in this dump, girlie, Deucey commented. First they scatter you all around the place, see what you got. Check it all out while you ain't looking, lessen you got nine eyes.
That's enough now, you damn old newsbag, Suitcase barked, and the girl jumped. Deucey laughed, so her freckled, saggy breasts barged around in her man's white tank-top undershirt. Suitcase smiled at everybody to show he wasn't really angry. Deucey, why you tryna alarm this young lady? Come in the office, miss. Lemme see what I can find for you.
They stood watching as Suitcase led the girl down the packed clay alley between shedrows.
She'll take anything now, Deucey said.
She look after herself all right, Ed said. Ain't she push her way in the back gate when Archie hang her up at the front?
Doing it all for some handsome deadbeat horseman who works her to death while he rolls high. I seen a million like her, Deucey said.
Ain't you the hard-shell. Tomorrow you be nursering and petting her your own self, said Ed.
Medicine Ed was on the watch, for Medicine Ed, like the boll weevil in the song, was looking for a home. He had seen the clabbered cobwebs hanging down in the roof joints, though fall was far from here. He had seen a sparrow with blood red wings. It was taking a dust bath, and when Medicine Ed walked by with a horse, the sparrow looked up and asked him a question, in a language he could almost understand. They were signs that the thread that held it all together was rotting, letting loose and falling apart. He had a funny, goofered feeling about the way things was going, although Zeno treated him well.
Medicine Edleft Zeno's three-year-old in the stall, then looked back at him again from the Winnebago, for the door of the trailer was hanging wide open and this raised the question why Zeno would hang around to bring the animal to the post himself if the red horse was as no count as he appeared to be, and which Zeno said he was. And for that matter why had Zeno drove the van up himself, the van with just the one horse in it?
Medicine Ed would be seventy-three on Labor Day. Since he give up drinking he never even had a cold no more. Breathing that pine tar and horse manure all the day was a kind of devil tonic. On account of his froze-up left leg, the result of being run over by a big mare named High Soprano at Agua Caliente in 1958, he had to lie down in the straw on one hip, like a ho posing for a nasty picture, when he worked on a horse's feet. He had to lie on his good side and stick his bad leg straight out. But there wasn't anything a groom or either a trainer did, that Medicine Ed could not still do. And Zeno, for all he was chubbyfat and getting fatter, was a horseman of the old school, a gentleman who never forgot to dip down and stake you when he win. He was more ashamed to be stingy than to be broke, so as long as he had two dollars you had one, whereas a lot of them anymore so tight they scream, they so tight.
Best of all, Zeno left Medicine Ed to run this little side operation here at Indian Mounds by himself. He trusted Ed to medicate, as right he should. Behind a loosened wall plate in the crumpled end of the trailer, Medicine Ed kept Zeno's doctor bag of ampules and syringes. The blue ampule was bute. If you missed the vein with it, the horse would have a goiter hanging off his neck for three days and he was a scratch. The red ampule was ACTH-Medicine Ed could have easily read those letters, if that's what was wrote there, but instead a name as long as your arm wrapped round the little bottle. It was some kind of tropical harmony, for all hormones, he had learned, have to do with the lost harmony. Electrolytes came in a little blue and silver sac like a lunch bag of potato chips. The aspirin pills were loose in the bottom of the bag, white and as big around as a quarter. Oral bute was white too, but longer and squared off at the ends, like little rowboats, or coffins. Bucha leaves brought forth piss. The asthmador mix, smoldered under a horse's nose, drew long glistening ropes of mucus from his sinuses. But butazolidin was the fast luck oil round here, bute, the horseman's Vitamin B.
Generally, Medicine Ed carried a horse to the post and saddled it himself. Zeno stayed at Charles Town, sent somebody over with a couple horses every week or so when he saw spots for them, and vanned the used ones away. Zeno kept just the four stalls at the Mound, one for a tack room near solid with bales of hay and straw from the cobwebby rafters down to the dirt floor. At many a cheap track or at the fairs in the old days, Medicine Ed would have found himself propping two bent old lawn chairs together in the tack room to sleep on, but Zeno had got him leave to haul in that half-caved-in Winnebago which a tree fell over on it oncet, when it was still in the trailer park in Charles Town, and which by far wasn't the worst place Medicine Ed ever laid his head. He could look out the window from his bunk in the afternoon and see all three of his horses nosing hay round their stalls. The toilet wasn't hooked up, and nobody who had right judgment would open the shower curtain and look in, but two burners on the propane stove worked, and behind was a tidy cabinet in which Medicine Ed kept his soups and powders and other ingredients and preparations.
He turned on its head a can of cream of mushroom in a pan, propped his stiff leg on the bunk and stared at the slimy silo of soup while it melted. Zeno's fat back was hunched over the pink-and-black tic tac toe counter of the dinette. Zeno huffed and puffed like he never stopped doing, and meanwhile he was crushing a glowing white pebble into a fine powder with the back of a kitchen knife. When he got that all up in his nose, he turned to Medicine Ed and instructed him in his cooking.
You oughta put some food in that food, he panted, some milk or vegetables or sumpm. I never see you eat nothing but that mung which housewives use it to mix with sumpm else. You ain't eighteen no more, Ed. Gotta think about them bones.
My friend the late Charles Philpott, Medicine Ed said slowly. You remember Charles?
Sure I remember. Used to work for the Ogdens. Rubbed Equinox when he won the Preakness. I forget how he ended up at the Mound.
Charles Philpott was eighty-five years of age when they carried him out that gate.
I thought the gaffer was a hundred and twenty, much as he claimed to know, said Zeno, popping open a cream soda. Where'd they bury him anyhow?
Carried him in a box on the train to South Carolina. His people wanted him back after all them years.
Maybe he sent em money regular, said Zeno.
Medicine Ed was silent, except for the spoon clinking around the pan.
Say, Ed! Zeno said. You see a funny-looking couple from Charles Town ship in here today? Looking to steal a race or two with four horses. Tommy Hansel. Eyes like a royal nut case. Decent horseman, though. I smoked weed with them a few times. Girl with hair out to here? You give em a hand if they need it. If I know him, Suitcase stiffs em.
Medicine Ed considered the thing. He hadn't taken to that frizzly hair girl. But Zeno moved right on. So what about Charlie Philpott? What was his secret, cause I gotta go look at a horse. What did he eat? I know you ain't gonna tell me mushroom soup.
Charles never ate much of nothing. He had that little check from the Social Security every month, and I mean little. First thing he do, he take and buy him three cartons of Camel cigarettes. He smoked those Camels till he died.
Zeno laughed, stopping on his way out the doorway. So what did kill Charlie Philpott? One of his bets came in? He used to have no luck at all, except for knowing the Ogdens.
I don't know, maybe you right. Track finey let him have one of them new rooms over the kitchen. On the Ogdens' say-so. Tryna do right by him after thirty years. First night in there, he keeled over…
But Zeno was gone-his pickup truck just a spurt of gravel, cloud of red dust. That was Zeno, excited, wheezing, out of breath, whistles leaking out his nose that ought not to be there, probably from sniffing that stuff. Fat Zeno busting through doors, squeezing into payphones, running around, dealing off this one, lining up that one. No rest and a little fatter every week, you could see it sticking to him. And now he was off again, without telling Medicine Ed whether he shouldn't ought to ride ten dollars on that big red maiden in the fourth. Zeno had left his Telegraph on the counter and Medicine Ed opened to INDIAN MOUND DOWNS, FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 1970, counted down four races and tried to make something out.
He didn't try to read all the words in the chart, or the horses' names. Time was short and that was beyond his learning. Z-e-n-o he found readily enough. Over on the owner's side, to his surprise, he saw the same thing again, Own.-Zeno G II. Then he looked at the numbers. Numbers he could read as good as Einstein. The thing that struck him right away about Zeno's three-year-old was the fewness of the numbers. For some reason they had shut the fellow down after two races as a two-year-old. He was somebody's big red secret, for the horse had hardly run.
Maggie raked and limed and spread golden bedding in one very fine stall in Barn B, by the front entrance, with a view through the backside fence of rufous hills packed close as tripe east of the river. But then it turned out the crewcut old hag knew what she was talking about. The next stall that Suitcase dealt her lay five minutes south in Barn J, out of sight behind the track kitchen. When she finished in Barn J, it was only three minutes to Barn M, but this was a dank concrete block building with heavy traffic going by on its way to the track, and from this particular corner a nervous horse could watch the heads of exercise boys and girls bobbing along the racetrack fence, and hear the constant drumming of hooves. Some previous tenant had worn a trench a foot deep around the four walls, like the dried-up moat of a castle. Maggie found a shovel and did what she could with it. You'd put the horse you didn't care about in here.
What was Tommy going to say? He might laugh. He had that side. But this was not meant to be a long shot, this move. Shipping into Indian Mound Downs was the logical culmination of Tommy Hansel's science of running them where they belonged. He planned to steal with these horses, who were all better than they looked on paper. It was slumming and flim flam, yes, but a sure thing. Almost. Or so he said. Or so she thought he'd said.
Back in Charles Town, T. Hansel Stables was deep in the red. To get to the Mound, Tommy was staking everything they had, and a few things they didn't exactly have-the souring patience of the last owner, the good will of the feed man, the hay man, the tack shop, the last tired spark of game in Mrs. Pichot, their landlady, a racetrack widow herself. They had staked Maggie's puny tax return, Maggie's dead mother's cherry Queen Anne dining room table, chairs and highboy, even Maggie's job in the real world, as a writer of food copy for the Winchester Mail Thursday grocery store supplement-a laughable calling, but one job she was sad to let go.
And now that he had cash to play and Maggie's free labor and four ready horses who looked pitiful on paper, the trick was to get in and get out fast. It was Tommy who said so, Maggie had only soaked this stuff up faithfully for months-sitting on the curb of the shedrow writing headlines for Menus by Margaret: ORANGE RUM FILLING RAIDS MARGARET'S TEA RING, MANY LIVES OF WORLD'S OLDEST BEAN (no one watched what she wrote at that rag), and gazing up at Tommy more hypnotized than credulous, like a chawbacon at a snake-oil show. Get in and get out fast, he chanted. They had to arrive at a small track unnoticed (small but not too small-it had to have a respectable handle), drop each horse in the cheapest possible claiming race before anybody knew what they had, cash their bets, and ship out again, maybe without losing a single horse.
And now already part one, Get in fast, was down the drain. They hadn't managed to sneak under the fence unseen, as planned, with their penny-ante operation. They had been noticed. Just like that, the sure thing careened out of management. Now they had to figure out what the track officials were trying to do. Busted by a stall man named Suitcase Smithers, for the love of god! These guys were cartoon creepy-but someone could get hurt. She was ready to back out right now.
But Tommy wouldn't back out. Tommy might well laugh. Fat risk made his eyes brighten and soften, his forehead clarify, his nails harden, his black hair shine. The way Tommy thought, if you could call that thinking: He had been born lonely, therefore some bountiful girl would always come to him-he required it. Luck was the same. It came because you called to it, whistled for it, because it saw you wouldn't take no for an answer. Luck was the world leaping into your arms across a deep ditch and long odds. It was love, which is never deserved; all the rest was drudgery. So he might well laugh at this news-laugh that soft, fond, mocking laugh-just as he laughed at all fools, including himself, who rose to iridescent, dangerous bait, where they could be caught-the same way he laughed, softly, in bed, when she came.
(That soft laugh had got its hook in her, yes, but she thought she knew where Tommy came by his guts. He wasn't quite right in the soul, really. There was that missing twin he talked about all the time-his mother, Alberta, a waitress in Yonkers who rarely made sense, swore she'd been carrying twins, but one had got lost in the womb, she said, and for once Tommy believed her. He had the notion he'd swallowed his twin up himself, her he said, swallowed her up, big fish little fish, before he knew any better. Anyway there was a kind of spinning emptiness in him where things like sensible fear should be, a living hollow where light was dark. As some grown trees, oaks even, are full of leaf but wind-shook, with a stain of hole at their center.)
And finally another five minutes south to barn Z, one wooden stall in fair repair in the transient shedrow near the back gate. Gus Zeno, a trainer they knew from Charles Town, kept some stalls here, watched over by an old black groom; and so did the buzz-cut crone, Deucey, the one who had seen this coming. Well, you were right about the whole deal, Maggie said when she saw her, and Deucey said: I wrote the book on two-faced false-hearted luck, girlie, anything you want to know about going it on your own at the races, come to me. And grinned at her with black-edged teeth. She was a dilapidated hull of a woman with wrestler's muscles and a bulge at the waist of her filthy undershirt that could only be what was left of her breasts. She had one stall with a horse in it, and not even a second stall for a tack room, but you had to think she was getting by. More than getting by-in the know, scared of no one and don't care who knows it, although Maggie thought her half mad and far too cozy.
Psst, girlie, the old woman stuck her head in the stall that Maggie was raking. You looking for a place to coop for the night?
I'm not certain, Maggie said carefully. Of my situation. It could change any time. Thanks, though.
Your do-less boyfriend might roll in here yet with them horses, is that it? And whatever is he gonna say, tsk, tsk.
Maggie dragged a rake to the darkest corner of the stall. How did she know, that was the question. Do you really have just the one horse? she asked.
One horse and no home, that there is your basic definition of a gyp, which I am, Deucey said. Although I am right now under some pressure to expand my stable to take in this beauty-full boy-only now Maggie looked up and saw that the old girl was walking, on a loose shank, the loveliest little dark bay horse she had ever seen on a cheap track-only, A, I don't got no playing room, which is the long definition of a gyp operation, and B, I don't like them that's pushing me. And anyway, you know me-(Maggie didn't know her)-gyp I was born and gyp I'll die, or hope to, in the saddle and not in no hospital, that is.
Maggie peered at her. Are you an actual gypsy?
Ha. Soon as I can understand it, Deucey said, I'm a nothing. Though I wouldn't put it past me. They took everybody in them coalmines at the start, even gypsies. To be honest I don't know what I am. Just a coalville orphan from Dola, 40 mile down the Short Line from the river. Everything I know about horses was learned me by the age of eight in a one-man one-pony punch mine, where me and this pony Redrags pulled the tub. Uncle Stevo was the man, I was just part of the pony. I used to sleep on haybales in a coal mine, which makes Barn Z look like the Dewdrop Inn, dearie. Now you let me know if you need a room in this fine hotel. And she winked hideously.
Maggie was ready to sleep on haybales, or even half naked down in the itchy straw. Finally you open your arms to sleep even if it's nightmare you see coming. She had been going for fourteen hours-no one, certainly not Tommy, had her stamina, and she was vain of it. She had been up at 3:00, fed, mucked stalls, shlepped bales and water buckets. At dawn she had walked the horses one by one. She had picked out feet and packed them with fragrant clay, crated the loose tack. And still the van didn't show, the van or Tommy, who had made one of those airy deals with the van man that Tommy lived on, "on the cuff" where all cash was notional, future, moiling in the clouds like weather, until some horse ran in; and nobody ever wrote down a number or forgot one. But it was somehow part of the deal that Tommy, with a bit of dope in his pocket, never too proud to be a roustabout, might be asked along for the ride. Like today, Tommy in that creaky, rust-flowered van.
Around noon, the van finally rolled down the driveway, and she was off in the Grand Prix over the mountains and up the river, while Tommy and the van man took the long way, the slow way, dropping and loading horses for racetrackers who paid cash. But what had she done with her morning, while she waited in the fly-loud barn for Tommy and the van man? Maggie had found a bottle of eye-stinging brand X pink wintergreen horse liniment in the Pichots' tack shed, mixed, for all she knew, according to the late Gaston Pichot's secret recipe, and with it and strong fingers, she worked on Pelter, more or less making it up as she went along. Why did she so love the slant-eyed bump-nosed horse that her hands wished to parse every inch of his famously long back? It was true she had no scientific reason to believe she knew what she was doing, but surreptitiously she did think so. For all her stamina, as a human girl she knew she was lazy and unambitious, except for this one thing: She could find her way to the boundary where she ended and some other strain of living creature began. On the last little spit of being human, staring through rags of fog into the not human, where you weren't supposed to be able to see let alone cross, she could make a kind of home.
Her hands felt their way blindly along the ridges and canyons and defiles of the spine, the firm root-spread hillocks of the withers. She rolled her bony knuckles all along the fallen tree of scar tissue at the crest of the back, prying up its branches, loosening its teeth. And it must be having some effect: when she walked Pelter these days he wasn't the sour fellow he used to be, he was sportive, even funny. She had walked him this morning until the rising sun snagged in the hackberry thicket. As they swung around the barn, she took a carrot from her pocket and gave him the butt and noisily toothed the good half herself. He curvetted like a colt, squealed, and cow-kicked alarmingly near her groin. Okay, okay, she said, and handed it over. She was glad there was no man around just then to tell her to show that horse who was boss. When they were back in the stall and she turned to leave she found he had taken her whole raincoat in his mouth and was chewing it-the one she was wearing. She twisted around with difficulty and pried it out of his mouth. He eyed her ironically. Just between us, is this the sort of horse act I really ought to discipline? she asked him, smoothing out her coat. I simply incline to your company, he replied.
The frizzly hair girl landed up with one stall in barn Z, that next-to-last stall ruinated by a deep ditch around the walls that some thousand-pound stallwalker had dug on his endless round trips. It taken muscle to shovel over enough dirt to fill that up, but she made it halfway right, he'd give her that.
Psst, Deucey leaned around the corner of the stall and crooked her finger at the girl. You running anything in the next few days?
It was a long pause, then, I don't think so, she say, and Medicine Ed watched the frizzly hair girl try to empty her face. In the lying capital of the world, she would have to do better than that.
Well if you do run sumpm, and you don't want to let him out of your sight, Deucey said, which I wouldn't if I was you, put him in the stall here and ask Medicine Ed to let you sleep in Zeno's tack room. He lets me. She winked, it was a dreadful thing to see, and the frizzly hair girl backed off from her. Calm down, girlie, I don't mean you and me. I sleep in the stall with my moneymaker Grizzly, he appreciates me-she cackled. That tack room ya see got a chink in the east wall, you can lay on hay bales and look through the chink and watch a horse all night, if you can hold your eyes open. Talk to Medicine Ed. That's him. And she pointed to where he was, standing in the dirt road with the red horse and Kidstuff, the blacksmith.
Medicine Ed saw the frizzly hair girl's eyes light, not on him, but on the blacksmith. Heh! heh! It happened every time. Kidstuff was a pretty little man, chestnut brown, with a tilted smile and very white teeth, out of Louisiana, part colored, part Cajun, part Injun, like as not.
The girl tiptoed up. She said excuse me.
You end up with stalls in this here barn, young lady?
One, she said.
Suitcase scatter they horses all over the grounds, Medicine Ed told Kidstuff.
Aaanh, don't take it personal, the blacksmith advised. It's the ten-cent Hitlers run this place. They like to break your spirit before you ever get to a race. Who you with?
Tommy Hansel.
The horseshoer looked quizzically at Medicine Ed. They shook their heads politely.
She needs a place to sack out for the night, Deucey hollered over. Can she get in your tack room, Ed?
Medicine Ed shrugged. Ain't nothing in it, he said. Hay. Welcome to it.
The farrier put away his tools. Zeno gonna let this boy run tonight? he asked.
Might could figure, Medicine Ed said-what he always said-if he don't come up lame.
So where did Zeno pick up this Mr Boll Weevil? I seen the sire before but who's this High Cotton-talk about breeders you never heard of-Sunk Ferry, Arkansas The old groom stumbled back as though he had been struck. What you talkin bout, Mr Boll Weevil?
This horse you're holding right here. In tonight for twelve-fifty, maiden claimer, fourth race. Say, here's Tommy Hansel, the blacksmith said to the girl. This your guy?
May I see that paper please? the frizzly girl said faintly. She looked in the Telegraph, where Kidstuff was pointing, and out of her mouth come a terrible cuss word, not quite under her breath. Medicine Ed blinked at her. For a little while, time went backwards, for her the same as for him. Then he piled the shank right on top of that paper, and backed away. His long ash brown fingers shook. He appeared to be buckling, fading; got smaller and smaller in the direction of the half crushed mobile home he lived in. He held a hand over his heart as he staggered backwards, like an actor in a play. His mouth was a ragged hole, no word came out, now they saw the gray stumps of his gums.
The blacksmith was shaken. Damn me, he said. Damn me, maybe he needs the doc. Hey, Ed! you all right? he yelled after him. The door of the bashed-in trailer clicked shut. I seen these old-timers pitch over dead more than once, he said to the girl shyly, now that they were alone. You never know.
I think it was something about that horse, she wondered. And that was that. A cool green light came on in the blacksmith's eyes. His handsome lips quivered like a rabbit's, smelling something, then he slightly smiled. He looked back at the trailer. Already the tall old groom was returning to them, limping across the dirt alleyway with a calm grimace. He had even remembered to put in his teeth. Then they were all in on it. If the old man wasn't dying, it came down to a flash about a horse.
IT WAS NO NEED FOR studying and dreaming. Often in the past if Medicine Ed need to know about a horse, he could sit over a hand made of tail and mane hairs of the horse and tied with a red string, and a hoof shaving, and one green corner-bit of his lucky money, push them around in hot candle-sperm with a hoof pick under the light of the same white candle, and dream until the answer came to him. But today was no need, no time. Soon as he heard the name of the horse Zeno was running, he knew what he must do. He must ride his lucky money on Mr Boll Weevil, who had beckoned to him-and somehow he felt he had to touch his lucky money just then. They it is, nemmind if it look strange-he stumbled into the trailer.
It was a fifty Zeno give him last year when they stole a nice little race in the Poconos with Small Town Doc. He kept it pressed flat and neat between the lid and the waxed-cardboard seal of a pickle jar of hedge-beech leaf. The bill was evenly folded four times so Ulysses S. Grant looked up thoughtful at you out of the lower left-hand corner. It was no use wishing it was a hundred, or a couple of hundreds. He'd seen better years than them with Zeno, and worse years. Thing of it was, he had lucky money, like the boll weevil he was looking for a home, and here was Mr Boll Weevil in the four slot in the fourth race, beckoning to him.
It was not a harming goofer that Medicine Ed knew the makings of. This ghost gray powder had never been meant to undo a horse. It was a rootwork of strong encouragement, of reaching deep into the lost harmony and milking up one drop of what was needed at the last. The gray rolled leaf which stuck to itself like cobweb came from a hedge-beech in the old Salters family plot hard by New Life Baptist churchyard in Cambray, South Carolina. The tree grew sideways out of the grave of his grandfather, Eduardo Salters, greatest jockey ever known in South Carolina, born in slavery, killed in a match race in 1888. It sprung out of the grave dirt twisted in the shape of a man riding, with one straight limb shooting out of it like a whip, and its leaves must be collected at dark of moon from that limb only. This jar was dried heartleaf, this one was horse mushroom, this here was boneset. The fine graygold sugar with specks of black peat in it was sand and shatters from the infield of Major Longstreet Park, in that little arc of elderberry bush where Cannonball was buried. And finally he had needed blood of great speed, and what he got musta was good enough. This was the blood of Platonic, who he had rubbed for Whirligig Farm, and who give him his own bleeding ulcer. Platonic had scratched his fetlock in the gate the day he won the Seashell, and Ed had scrooched down before he let the horse have his bath and scraped every black flake into this little bottle here.
And that, once he mixed it to his recipe, was Medicine Ed's horse-goofer dust. But he had give up doctoring. Come to find out if you asked by powerful means for more than the animal had to give, you could not manage the results. Every time he had cast the powder the horse had won, but won for the last time. Some way that was the last race of the horse, at least the last he ever saw. Either he was all done like Willie W, who was nerved and hooked a front sticker on his behind foot and ripped out his frog and had to be put down; or Scraggly Lake, who bled for the third time and was banned and auctioned and he never saw him again; or Broomstick, the onliest horse Medicine Ed ever loved, who win for him at Hollywood Park and snapped her cannon bone in the van on the short drive home. And which was why he had let the medicine go, all except his name, which nobody up here was wise to where it come from. And that was a good thing.
Fact was, after that first time with Willie W, he had had to need the money extremely bad. At Santa Anita he bought himself a change of address fast, behind what-was-her-name, Estelle, whose pachuco boyfriend come looking for him with a knife. After Broomstick he vowed never to touch the horse-goofer again. This was in 19 and 55.
But now the peculiar harmony of Mr Boll Weevil running in the fourth race had beckoned to him. He was seventy-two years old and tired. He never paid no mind to horses' names, disremembered most of em. This one sneaked up on him: He's looking for a home. He's looking for a ho-ome. Must be some kind of home out there looking for him, Medicine Ed.
He had done for horses all his life. If he had spent his working days in one place, with just one stable, like Charles Philpott, maybe they would give him a tack room in the end, or even a room to himself over the track kitchen and let him fade. He would turn into one of them old pops who get up at four in the morning to the day they die and limp to the track and run errands for folks, get ice and coffee and such. But as a young man he'd been restless. If somebody's girlfriend caught his eye, he was heedless. In the old days he'd get to drinking, get to fighting. Then worry over Platonic give him that ulcer which put him in Sinai Hospital and damn near killed him. Afraid to make a mistake, afraid something gone happen to the horse before he get him to his race, study and worry all the time and after I win the Seashell what they give me? They it is-a damn gold watch. He was bad sick when he worked on Platonic. It was only that jealous pachuco boyfriend with a knife who got him out of that, the time he used the goofer with Broomstick. He cashed his bet and went down to Tijuana for two years, got him a room over a dentist shop and didn't miss no racetrack either, unh-unh, not one bit. Except for what happened to his filly, he used to think sometimes he ought to find that crazy Mexican and thank him.
Down Tijuana, that was when he got his teeth. He had plenty of time to get fitted downstairs for a nice set of teeth until his cash run down. Bad teeth could kill you, slowly poison your blood, ruinate the other organs. Now he had the good teeth and no home. Maybe if he hadn't got his teeth, but he had.
If he could know death would snatch him quick, like it took Charles Philpott. But last time he seen the doc-it was for a tetanus shot after some horse shipped up from Florida jumped out the stall and bit him, and Zeno made him go-the doc said his heart and lungs were twenty years younger than he was. If he hadn't give up drinking after that ulcer, but after he got out the hospital he couldn't look at the stuff no more. And then he forgot about drinking, found he grew ponderful in the evenings on his own anymore, didn't need no likka, no nothing. He had deep thoughts. He had no learning, no way to write his thoughts, but this was his own fault. If he hadn't run away to his Uncle Wilbur at the races at the age of eight, so his other family was lost to him-on his father's side, a good many of them was educated, teachers and barbers and such. After his mother died he could have gone to her people in Arkansas, but they were Christian path folk who farmed cotton on shares and didn't want nothing to do with racehorses.
Looking for a home at the age of seventy-two! It was his own damn fault. He could feel bitter about certain things-after he win the Seashell Stakes, a 225,000 dollar race, a gold watch that stopped the first year-but some way he was lucky. He could see something in the whirling dust, the shadows. The harmony showed itself to him. It made strong suggestions to him, as to why things were the way they were. But this was the onliest time it had told him in words what to do. Mr Boll Weevil.
He put the fifty back for now and screwed the lid on tight, and as he walked out of the trailer to collect his abandoned horse from the frizzly hair girl and the blacksmith, he caught his brown sunken face under its pad of white hair in the shaving mirror over the kitchen sink. Even in his hurryment it stopped him-how it seemed to quiver and heave and then all at once to crack open, not like a death mask, but like a woman's beauty mask which a newborn face is just coming out of. In the same moment he remembered to reach in the glass on the counter and slip in his teeth. Outside it was a young lady present. This was always a good sign.
SHE LIES ASLEEP in the straw in some tiny striped shirt that won't pull down all the way over her belly button, and her jeans are taut and shiny over the keelbones of her hips. She is so small in the middle that you can pull the jeans down to her knees by opening just the one button with a soft pinch of two fingers, and look out now if she doesn't let you do it, without even opening her eyes to ask who it is, the slut, golden straw sticking in her dense fuzzy hair, thorning the kinky pigtails. And that cossack face of hers, slashed by just the one blade of dusty light that comes through the crack in the barn door. She is so light even in that most rounded and muscular part of her, where the strong sinews twist together in a basin, that you never see her push up to let you, rather she arcs and floats a little over the sweet straw to meet your hand, like a magic lamp with its wick floating in oil. Your hand slips easily over the small knob at the brim of her pelvis, so light, and helps her. And this precisely tooled handle that only you know leaves you still the two fingers free, the ring finger and the little finger, to prod her open. Now you can light the wick from the flame at the tip of any finger.
And now awash with love of you, not that she knows who you are, or cares, the slut, she opens into that cave of spirits, tomb of your lost twin, and you cast off upon the black satin waters, gliding, gliding. And so easily in that medium, so deep so quick, so soon sliding over the falls rather than patiently stroking, it is impossible for you not-to laugh. O yes, O yes, the perfect over-brimming willingness of her to you! She is the very body of luck giving herself to you, asking no questions. In fact she thanks you for taking her, such a blind wave of thanks that she never even sees you down on your knees in the straw in front of her, shooting dice for her mercy, begging her never to leave you.
HE DID LAUGH. She woke up, and he was clinging to her in the straw like a boy to a driftwood raft. What's going on? she asked him, picking straw out of her hair. But the horses were waiting. Miss Fowlerville went in the bad stall. Railroad Joe was escorted to the stall hidden behind the track kitchen, in Barn J. They put The Mahdi in Z, the transient barn, where Maggie could have watched him through a spy hole if he were going to a race tonight. But it was already five in the evening: no way he was going to a race tonight, Maggie thought, thanked god and the hurryless van man, hid the Telegraph and kept her counsel.
And now Tommy was backing Pelter out of the van-he was a long horse and had a long way to come. His shoes screeked on the diamond frets of the aluminum ramp and she pressed her hand on the warm rump to steady it, raising a hand-shaped dust mark on the velvety nap. Pelter had the commonest coloring for a racehorse, which was, to Maggie, also the most beautiful: dark bay, a dense nut brown with black mane, black ear points and tail, and gleaming black knees, ankles and feet. She liked especially the shallow, faintly darker gulley that deepened over his spine just above the tail, dividing the hindquarters into plum-like lobes. Now she pushed her nose into his hip and smelled him.
They started across the backside, towards the beautiful faraway stall in Barn B. What does it mean? What are they trying to do? she asked Tommy again.
Who the hell knows, Maggie? Maybe they got no stalls.
That's when he laughed. She peered at Tommy to see if he was joking, it wasn't quite possible to tell and instead she found herself staring at little aquamarine flakes like bits of glass in his pond-dark eyes. They made threads of a similar color jangle in his old tweed vest. Without even trying he was a dapper man-he'd pick up some gray rag for a quarter off a church rummage-sale table in Martinsburg and the next day it was a shirt that draped around his throat just so, even ruffed a bit in the back, and had turned a smoldering sage green. With perfect cuffs. But shoes he bought new, and only the best: ankle high paddock boots of a burnished-copper color with zippers up the back and cecropia-moth elastic insets, custom-ordered, ninety dollars a pair, from Hornbuckle of London.
What do you mean, Maggie said, I saw dozens of stalls when I was traipsing around the backside getting these ready. There are four in Barn Z alone, all better than the one they gave us.
They're not going to inconvenience horsemen they know just to accommodate me. They think I'm a nobody. I am a nobody. And again he laughed. He pulled a straw out of her hair, then tangled his fingers in the dark rich knots of it. Look, Maggie, if you're so worried, maybe you ought to call up that shady Uncle Rudy of yours, see what he can do for us.
Chrissake, Tommy! That's just what we need to get in and out of here fast-to get ourselves tied up with some petty gangster who used to go to seder with my mother.
Tommy laughed uproariously. Presumably he had been joking. Uncle Rudy, he said fondly, what was he anyway-some kind of tout or tip-sheet writer, or what?
I have no idea. It was not a suitable topic at the family dinner table. Tommy, this old girl of a gyp, Deucey is her name, says they want to get a look at what we have.
Tommy shrugged. Let em look. Hell, I've been around cheap claimers long enough to know you can't tell from looking at these horses whether they'll run or not. Everyone of them's beat up, bowed, got a knee, a foot, a sessamoid, something. Plenty of times, on a track like this, the worse they look, the better they run. If they run.
Ours look that bad?
Let me see… Railroad Joe…
O yes.
O yes.
There was no disagreement here. The right front cannon bone on the black horse resembled an old ragged galosh right down to the lumpy buckles. Blister, cautery, everything had been done. And in Maggie's eyes he had a giant, prehistoric head-armor plated, scarred like a boxer and ugly as a rhinoceros.
Pelter?
Pelter. I don't know, Tommy said. He's old. He was a famous horse in his day. There was no claim. Mr. Hickok used to take very, very good care of him. Nothing wrong with his legs. His back always was too long and it looks lumpy now, if anybody's looking at his back.
Maggie ran a hand down the side of the horse, the long dark barrel of his ribs. The short hair there, like good dope, left a slight stickiness on her fingers, not unpleasant. They were in the fine stall now and Pelter let out a squeal and threw himself on his famous back in the straw and rolled. They stepped away, watching him carefully. The horse had been known to get cast in a stall, just when he was feeling good. Tommy hooked the webbing behind them.
You'll be sorry you fell in love with that horse, he said.
I know.
Because I'm going to run him where he belongs.
I know. But I still don't see somebody claiming him after all these years.
It was Mr. Hickok they left alone, not the horse. I'm not Roland Hickok.
Maggie was silent. They walked back along the ranks of shedrows to Barn Z.
Tommy sighed. I don't know, Maggie, I don't know what people will think. He's old, that's the best thing. He looks mercifully bad on paper-except for the Lifetime Record, of course-not even a show in the last year. And he bled, not that long ago. Some of these oldtimers probably saw it.
We should make him a blanket that says One more race and I'm through, Maggie said. It would be the truth.
If we did, somebody'd be sure to take him, Tommy said.
How about The Mahdi?
The Mahdi, The Mahdi, The Mahdi, Tommy said. The Mahdi is one of us.
They stood at the webbing and looked at the gleaming red bull of a three-year-old who was settling, with his usual composure, into the fairly good stall in Barn Z. He was not the most interesting to her of the horses. The Mahdi was a heavyweight, remote and gentlemanly in a men's club sort of way, and he was red, although, to be fair, not red like a carrot-rather the more medieval red that stains the edges of old books. He was a sprinter, deeply wrapped in his muscle and sure of himself. He wasn't sore. He did not require the coaxings of women. Any businesslike groom would do.
Still, you could not say he lacked poetry. The Mahdi stood at the webbing, awake and calmly looking into the dark, like an airplane pilot. Maggie's eye traced the lyre of muscle up his heavy chest. She suddenly realized that, despite his calm, he was not at all as usual for this hour of night. The horse almost seemed to think, himself, that he was going to a race. Why hadn't Tommy fed him yet? She didn't want to know.
What do you mean, The Mahdi is one of us? she asked. Who exactly is us?
Tommy's face opened like a fan. This is my horse, he said. This is the one I wanted, the one I worry about. Not a mark on him.
Tommy had eyes a mile apart and, when he was gambling, a kind of pearl shone on the long planes under them. He looked like a bodega saint in a rapture. Maggie stared at him in uneasy admiration.
You mean he'll get claimed?
You may be absolutely sure of it, Tommy whispered in a sort of singsong. As soon as they know. If they get the chance.
First time out?
It's not impossible. (Laughing again-like something flying apart.) Well. We'll soon find out. That's one consolation.
How soon?
Very soon.
Not that soon, Tommy.
O yes. Even sooner
Not tonight soon.
Tonight, Maggie. Maiden claimer. Fourth race. Now don't give me a hard time. Get us the big tub, will you? He should be standing in ice already.
THE FRIZZLY HAIR GIRL wasn't watchful like Deucey had told her. Thus and consequently, it was easy for Medicine Ed to be watchful. He went in his tack room and put his eye up on that chink and taken a deep look at them, the funny-looking couple from Charles Town, reefer-smoking friends of Zeno, Tommy Hansel and the frizzly hair girl, and their big red horse.
It was a peculiar thing: how Zeno's horse and this young fool's showed up today like might-could-be twin brothers, common enough horses but like seeing double, both maidens, both geldings, fat, red, with nary a mark on them, not even a white sock, and both the color of store-bought whiskey. As for Tommy Hansel, what was the story on that young fellow? It had Medicine Ed woolgathered, trying to fit him in where he belonged. He was a racetracker in his moves, but he wasn't a racetracker in his face. He had a Jordan John look about him which gave Medicine Ed the creeper crawlers-wide forehead, black curly beard, high color for a white man, and burning eyes-big smoking charcoal eyes. This business will run men crazy, Zeno always say. The young fool had a crazy look about him. He had a wild man's laugh. It gave Medicine Ed the creeper crawlers down to the bottom of his hair, and he could not understand why Mr Boll Weevil should have a look alike in that man's company.
I don't get why we had to come here, Tommy, the frizzly hair girl say to him, it's all crooks running this place, and he say, Maybe they think I'm a nobody. I am a nobody. And he laughed that king-size laugh, not like he really thinks he is a nobody.
This old gyp Deucey says they want to get a look at what we have.
Let em look. What can they tell from looking? Half the time, the worse they look, on a track like this, the better they run, if they run.
Yeah? what about this boy? she said, and together they looked at the fat red horse.
Young fool's voice dropped way down. This the one, he whispered. This is my horse. Not a mark on him. That's why I'm not waiting till somebody sees.
She fetched the pitchfork, poked up a mat of dark pissed straw and carried it to the front of the stall on the flat of the tines.
How soon? she asked.
Tonight.
You really put him in.
While I can.
You're not going to scratch.
Nope.
He just got out of the van.
He can handle it.
Seven, eight hours standing on his feet. Noisy hot ride. Horse that's hardly raced. I'm just saying what you taught me, Tommy.
All true.
Who are you putting on him?
Jojo Wood. Hector couldn't get here.
Shit, the girl said.
Look, all he has to do is get the horse out of the gate. The Mahdi will do the rest.
Jojo is a clutz, as you've told me fifty times.
We have a very good shot in this race, the young fool say.
We didn't leave our home to take a shot, Tommy. What's wrong with you?
The young fool ain't answer and she went stomping out the stall in her bargain basement sneakers. He had on hundred dollar horseman's shoes, from London, England, color of new pennies, with zippers up the back.
She was back directly with her own paper.
You put him in for six furlongs, she say. He never went more than five.
Young fool stand there a-petting his big three-year-old. Gus Zeno's got a horse in this race.
That's right.
I think he might be gambling on that horse. His old groom had such a look on his face, like something was up.
No way, the young fool said. It's a nothing horse, big red baby, hardly been out, and he's giving it a race.
He looks just like our horse, the frizzly girl said. I saw him myself.
To the ignorant, The Mahdi might look like a nothing horse, but Zeno's horse is a nothing horse, as he'd be the first to tell you. Let me see that paper.
He snapped it flat in his hands, so sharp that the red horse threw his head up and screamed a little, and the young fool glared over the quarter-folded Telegraph at the girl. It's a nothing horse, he repeated after a moment.
He threw the paper at her feet and she picked it up, turned her back on him, and studied it.
Zeno's horse always goes six furlongs, the frizzly girl said.
He snatched her off the ground by the loose of her jeans, her arms flew up and out and she landed on her belly in the straw. And then he picked her up by her rear waistband and pushed her against the wall, leaned hard on her from behind and run his hand down the front of her pants. He was no pygmy racetracker. He was a well-grown man.
You shut up, you hear me? he said in her ear. That's enough out of you.
Let me go, she said. Someone might come by.
Just shut. Do you hear me? Do you understand?
What do you want? she whispered.
I want you to capitulate.
All right. All right, she said.
The young fool went off somewhere, and now, like Deucey said, the frizzly girl don't let the animal out of her eyesight. She sat in the straw memorizing the horse, with her hands wrapped around her bony knees and her back against the wall. It wasn't all that much to see. She looked at his clean red legs, at the long tendons where they rolled in and out each other as he moved his weight, like strings on a bass fiddle. For a horse going to a race in sixty minutes he ain't have much to say for himself, just standing in a tub of ice, staring in the dark, like his twin Mr Boll Weevil, standing in a tub of ice five stalls down.
I want you to capitulate. Along the muscular curve of her buttocks, in the notch between them, she had felt him harden against her. His knees pushed her knees apart and his hand slid down her belly and inside her jeans, pressed at the soft wet rivet that held her limbs together. And then he had speared her on his fingers. She uttered some senseless syllable.
That's enough now, do you hear me, Maggie? he said.
Let me go. Someone might come by.
You're going to shut up, starting now. Do you hear me? Do you understand?
What do you want? she said very low.
I want you to capitulate.
All right. All right, she whispered.
And then she was falling, falling. But he didn't let her up. He pushed farther, and curved them, his fingers, hard against the wall of her. And his thumb found the other moist portal and curved around inside her to meet them, and hooked her.
She was spinning upwards. Her loosened jeans bound her knees together. One hand under her belly, he lifted her to himself. And then some small thing gave way and he pressed to her center. Somewhere he laughed at her, not unkindly.
THEN THEY WERE WALKING to the track, Hansel in front, the girl leading the one red horse, Medicine Ed leading the other a few lengths back. The tall old groom dragged his stiff right leg lightly through the gravel, mumbling some old song to himself or the horse. It was a maiden race for a cheap price and these two horses, though you could not easily tell them apart, stood well out from the other horses. Both were chunky and solid, both the red of weather-beaten fire hydrants, with big square chests and a heavy, easy way of going. The Mahdi even pranced, in all his big red cheer, wearing his burnished chest like a Torah breastplate. Mr Boll Weevil went more stylishly, his mane braided and knotted and his feet prettily oiled, for he had a groom of the old school. The others? They were shufflers with their heads hanging down like plough animals, or tremblers, or rearers, their scared penises battened out of sight in purses of loose gray skin, underbellies awash in yellow foam.
The paddock judge flipped up the horses' lips and read their tattoos, the jockeys were lifted into the saddle. Hansel and the girl were standing at the walking ring when they saw Zeno. They whispered to each other, got a where-did-he-come-from look, and Medicine Ed, watching from under the clubhouse overhang, noted they ain't happy.
…
Why didn't you tell me Zeno was here?
I didn't know, the girl said. He must have been hiding.
What's he doing here? He can't be betting that horse.
Why not? Maggie said. Maybe he's been schooling him on the quiet. That's what I was telling you.
Don't be dumb. It's a nothing horse and he knows it. The horse wouldn't be worth the trouble. Maybe he's hoping to draw a claim.
This reminded Hansel he was worried about drawing a claim himself-though it was too late to do anything about it-but still he scoured the fringe of seedy horseplayers that milled around the outside of the walking ring in their rumpled jackets and stingy brims for a familiar vulture, and found none.
Now their two horses went off to the track, and Zeno, whether his company was desired or not, smiling like a man giving a banquet, joined Hansel at the rail. Gus Zeno, who was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, liked to dress like a rich rancher: he wore a string tie and a silver belt buckle on which was tooled G / Z between a pair of longhorn skulls. The buckle bit deep into his belly. His cord-piped light blue jacket bunched poorboy style under his arms. Next to this finery, the coiled leather shank in his hand looked small and plain.
All bums except our two, Zeno panted to Hansel. It's a match race.
And one of them's a bum too, Hansel said, smiling, and then he stopped smiling. He was looking at the coiled-up shank in Zeno's hand. It was an ordinary, indifferently cared for piece of tack, used for leading a horse anywhere, any time. Medicine Ed was standing under the clubhouse overhang some way off, holding another shank just like it. No racehorse needs two shanks.
Goddamnit, Zeno, Hansel said, you bought my horse.
He's a very, very good horse for the money, Zeno said. But you know, Tommy, I like my horse in this race. Sure he's a bum, but the price is right and he likes the distance.
Damn it, Hansel said. Damn it to hell. He didn't raise his voice, but his eyes were wild. He was pacing up and down the gap, looking at Zeno as if there might be some hole in the deal, some clause or sleight of hand he hadn't yet thought of. But then he burst out raggedly laughing.
Hey, Tommy, this business will run you crazy, Zeno said, slapping him on the back. They stood there together with their backs to the clubhouse, looking at the tote board.
IT WAS MOST PECULIAR, them two big heavy-head red youngsters just like twins, save how one was wearing that number 4 with green silks for Zeno, and the other, that number 2 and red and purple, for the young fool. Zeno come out of the clubhouse to saddle the horse, his pop-eyes shining. What could it mean save that Zeno had been to the windows, getting down heavy on his own horse? Mr Boll Weevil went on toepoints to the track and so did his ringer in front of him, his might-could-be twin brother owned by that young fool. But the horse goofer had been made up for one horse and one horse only.
Under the clubhouse overhang, Medicine Ed, too, watched the tote board. The two horses kept trading back and forth, 6-1, 11-2, 5-1, 6-1. Praise Jesus, the folks with the money liked another horse entirely. The frizzly hair girl flew in her holey sneakers up into the grandstand. The young fool ain't even see her go.
Two minutes to post and now the young fool also went off to bet. It happen him and Medicine Ed hit the windows at the same time. From his eye corner Medicine Ed couldn't see, to the fifty-dollar window, exactly how much come off that roll, but the young fool was in for a bundle.
Medicine Ed was fading away down the center stair to the lower deck when the young fool taken him by the shoulder. I like the way you handle horses, he say. Whatever Zeno pays you, I'll add a dime to that. My woman, you saw her, she's strong as a horse, he smiled, but I need an experienced hand.
I done work for Mr. Zeno eight years now, Medicine Ed said, and he has been good to me.
You think about it, the young fool say, and Medicine Ed say: I think about it. What he don't say: Gus Zeno gone be here tomorrow. Gus Zeno gone be here next year and three years from now. Where will you be? And more he don't say: I done heard that run-crazy laugh, I seen you throw the frizzly girl in the dirt for talking her mind. In the name of the Holy Ghost, let this man go home to hell where he come from, let him take away that Devil he's carrying, and keep me wide of a boss such as that.
For he liked the frizzly hair girl a little better now. Old Deucey had spied into the heart of this young woman and seen there slavery of the man-woman kind. Medicine Ed could see the chains on the girl. They were thick and heavy as railroad couplings, but they lay in a loose necklace round her neck and shoulders. She was no little bitty silky thing. The weight of them chains had raised muscles on her. She had a long bird neck with strong cords in it, and square shoulders. And Medicine Ed saw this: While the young fool ain't looking-suddenly he had something else, probably the money he fixing to lose, on his mind-the frizzly hair girl lifted the heavy chains off her shoulders like a daisy chain and laid them down again. She stepped out from the place where the young fool thought she was and run away on goofered feet up into the clubhouse, gone to play some other horse than the master play. She was a slave but she had the power to ride the grandstand just like the master do, if she see her chance.
Gates clang open and Mr Boll Weevil, he is looking for a home all right. He's still looking around that gate like he's thinking about putting up wallpaper in it, making a down payment on a living room suit, moving in for life. Finally he drops his big head and it soaks in that all them other horses have done already gone and left him behind. He takes off running, passing horses right and left, and you can see he ain't half trying yet. He just eats holes for hisself between them other animals in his weevilly way.
But the young fool's red horse has long since flew to the rail and all Ed can see is the dusty thunder under his red behind, barreling round the clubhouse turn. Then Medicine Ed blinks his eyes and he is into the back stretch. The horse has some speed, Jesus take me home, that horse be at the half-mile pole already heading into the far turn-and he is five lengths in front, going on six, by the time Mr Boll Weevil comes creeping. If this keeps up, Medicine Ed is gone to lose his lucky money, never mind how much goofer powder he has thrown.
Meanwhile Mr Boll Weevil has steadily climbed up the rest of the racetrack in his sideways-frontways weevilly way. He passes all the rest of the pack but he's still running in the red dust of the young fool's horse. He ain't gaining on him, just hanging four, five lengths behind him, and the young fool's horse look like loping out there, jogging down the medder for a morning look-around.
And then it's like Medicine Ed has called the race. The young fool's horse does just that. He looks around. He pulls up at the head of the stretch, drifts out from the rail, maybe eyeballing all the white paper flapping in the grandstand, which is all them people looking at they cards, trying to make out who that 2 horse is. What is the matter with that boy on his back? Well, now he comes to life, busting on the horse. But Mr Boll Weevil has crawled up on the inside in his weevilly way, eats along the rail, gets his ugly red nose in first.
Medicine Ed and Zeno pass the young fool in the gap on their way to the infield. Hansel has a torn-in-half look in his burning eye, like he aspires to be freehearted and to exult with Zeno, but he ain't able. Well, Zeno, that's the last time a nothing horse beats The Mahdi, he hollers.
I ain't worried, Zeno says, and they shake hands. The frizzly girl has slipped away to cash her tickets. Medicine Ed sees the young fool's hands are trembling.
When they got to the winner's circle, it was just the two of them. Soon as the young fool was out of sight, Zeno blew it out his top like a factory whistle, so only Medicine Ed could hear. Jeezie peezie, Ed! I got us a live one this time. Did you see the way that horse run?
Sho is, sho is. He pay pretty good too. I see he gone off a little on his right behind foot… Medicine Ed craned up on his good leg, gazed at the hot horse that the jockey was jogging back to them. He wanted to set Zeno down gently, let him know he won't have this horse much longer.
Not this one, man! Boll Weevil ain't shit. I mean The Mahdi. Hansel's horse. The one I claimed. Zeno shook the extra shank at him.
The one I claimed. How had he missed it? Zeno never said a word in front to nobody when he was fixing to take a horse, but generally Medicine Ed would see it coming. Mr Boll Weevil had blinded his eye. Now fierce dread fingered him in the back of his neck, for he recognized the confusing and riddlesome power of the gray green goofer dust. You know it gone change your luck, they it is, but what it will change into, that you cannot know.
You're going down and get him for me in a minute, soon as Stieglitz here gets his camera loaded. The track photographer was fussing with his plates. Treat him like Kelso, you hear? He run a half mile in under 45, and if there'd been a jock on his back instead of a sofa he would have kept on running at the sixteenth pole. He wasn't used up. He thought the goddamn race was over.
The photographer was finally ready and Gus Zeno smiled tremendous into the camera. Medicine Ed smiled a little too, even with them icy fingers in the back of his neck. He was relieved Zeno didn't set too much store by his own horse, for solid as Mr Boll Weevil looked now, standing there blowing and sweating, Zeno was sure to lose him.
Still, the horse had paid 13.40. Zeno had the red horse he had claimed, and his own bet, and the purse. And Medicine Ed could pay a little down on a trailer he knew about in Hallandale, in the old lot for colored behind Major Longstreet Park.
I already made my nut on Boll Weevil, Zeno preened. If he win one or two more on top of his maiden, that's gravy, but Tommy Hansel's horse, Ed-that one's a raceho-ho-ho-Gus Zeno got stuck on that word. He tried to wheeze his way around it-ho-ho-ho-ho-His lips peeled back and set in that wet red O, and his eyes bulged out of their dark rose rims. Medicine Ed leaned around to look down his throat. The flash drenched them in white and Gus Zeno was still stuck behind that word-ho-ho-ho-His happy face went plum color, then black.
Medicine Ed saw what it was. Luck, a ho if there ever was one, got her bony fingers in his throat and was pulling on that word. She wanted that word back. Zeno wasn't giving it up. He tried to go the other way but she pulled and pulled. She pulled him flat over on his face. He was still kicking a little behind. You want your luck? There's your damn luck, she say. And he was dead.
Medicine Ed looked up and saw the young fool, with his eyes like burnt-out stove coals, standing empty-handed in the gap. Then he saw himself in the time to come, hauling five-gallon buckets for the young fool, bandaging ankles on his doomed horses, walking hots for him, waiting for the fall.
That was when Medicine Ed finally heard what Mr Boll Weevil had been trying to tell him. He's looking for a home. That was one way of singing that song. Gonna get your home. That was another. Gray green goofer powder hanging on the wind: Wasn't no big win and free money that Mr Boll Weevil was singing to him about. It was the passing of Gus Zeno. And it wasn't no new home for Medicine Ed he was bragging on, no down payment on a little mobile home with a green stripe awning and a palm tree behind the track in Hallandale. It was the end of the good home he do have. It was goodbye to the easy life he know now.
THE RACETRACK ASLEEP AT NIGHT is a live and spooky place, especially if you think somebody might jump out at you, and she did think so-small world that ends at a fence, the dark blue restless air fragrant with medicinals, Absorbine, liniment, pine tar-everywhere light chains clanking, water buckets creaking and sloshing, round glimmers of water, horses masticating or snorting out dust, straw rustling, skinny cats glimpsed everywhere but only for a moment, always in motion, noiseless. She could not make herself walk in a straight line to Barn Z without stopping, stiffening, seeing something move in the corner of her eye, feeling a strand of fine cobweb blow across her face.
They had no horse to bring back from their race. There was a queer feeling of empty-handedness and when she looked up again, Tommy wasn't there. She had wandered away across the backside, looked in on Miss F in one barn and Railroad Joe in another. She espied the handsome blacksmith Kidstuff drawing a red-haired exercise girl into the shadows. She stepped into other shadows, the better to look on.
She was a little scared to go home, not that they had a home-they had only that tack room for the night, but they had already managed to wake up the flesh in there, they were good at that, and so had surely awakened, too, the animal ghosts that were everywhere you looked on the racetrack, and everywhere you didn't look, restless and hungry but off their feed forever, mouths that couldn't taste food, the shades of so many large animals, stirrings of so many throwaway lives.
Scared to get to Barn Z, she loitered in the dark of the unlit parking lot fence beside Barns X and Y, the twenty-odd stalls of the leading trainer at the Mound, whose hot-walking machine, JOE DALE BIGG STABLES stencilled on its housing, squeaked all day in the back gate and was still idly turning, whose horses looked like shit-dry dung puckering their flanks, straw dangling from their tails-but who knew how to win at a riverfront half-mile track in the West Virginia panhandle. She wondered had she seen this paragon of cut-price horsemanship, peered up his shedrows, what would he look like? when she heard a noise that eased her back into the shadows, a sound that, come to think of it, you didn't hear around the backside near enough-some man or woman crying.
Then here was Deucey Gifford, and that little bay horse again, pretty as a palfrey, and she was walking him, one arm slung over his neck, her face next to his, and crying. She was walking him on somebody else's shedrow, after midnight, which made no sense, since he hadn't been to the races, just plodded sleepily along. And along side of her, rolling so slow in the dirt road it made less sound than her weeping, just popping a stone now and then, was a dark, dark car with a swanky silver roof, a Cadillac, Maggie surmised, but she couldn't see who was driving it.
You fuck! Deucey sobbed. I'll rub him for nothing, when I got the time, but you can't make me take this horse.
You're taking him.
I ain't taking him.
I hate this horse. You're taking him. He's your horse, Deucey. He'll win for you. You don't know how much I'd like to dump him at the fairs, use him up, finish him, but the horse owes me.
I ain't scared of you. I don't owe you nothing. I ain't taking him.
They turned the corner of the shedrow.
Deucey, who didn't scare, so scared of a man in a dark Cadillac she was crying. His calm, insistent, fake-reasonable voice-New York, not West Virginia-scared Maggie too. And Maggie was scared of Tommy. She was scared to find out how much money he had lost, scared to let him see her own wallet bulging with cash from a bet on the other man's-the dead man's-horse, even though she could call it a sensible hedge of his own bet and put it at his disposal. She was scared to see him in any weakness, scared to let him see her seeing him. It felt like turning the key, fatal whir and crunch of tumblers, on Bluebeard's locked room. But that was crazy-why should she even think of such a thing?
She had a sense that his kingly pride would suffer no abridgement. It was a complete world, but it was a flat world too-one pure unmitigated plane of being, all the way to the edge, where you fell off. Then it was all void, all menace. He had a beautiful feline walk, spare, athletic, no cowboy loose-jointedness about it, but there was something odd about his hands. They curled backwards behind his wrists, hiding themselves, as if they knew they were not to be trusted. She knew, herself, that they did not always mean her well. They knew how to do many things, or rather, they knew how to do one thing, how to tame animals, but this they did from a whole forest of angles, and always on sufferance, for under their gentleness was threat.
Or maybe it was all on account of the way she and Tommy had first met, why she should fear he would spring out at her and bring her down. Two years ago she had been living in a little house with only cold water in the kitchen, down by the two rivers at Harper's Ferry, on the Maryland side, and when she got dirty enough she would walk a couple miles down the canal tow path to the youth hostel late at night and feel for the key on a hook under the eaves and take a shower. Hazel, the Irish girl who ran the place, was used to her and wouldn't even get up to see who it was, and anyway Hazel was away a lot herself those days. Maggie liked her. She was a slight, grinning, hard-handed, never-say-die young woman in an orphan boy's chopped haircut, the kind of woman who would have cheerfully run a hospital for amputees during the war.
This night when Maggie passed by Sandy Hook, fog rose in a white loaf out of the river, such that she couldn't see her own feet clapping along the towpath. They sounded wrapped in gauze and faraway, and when she finally spotted the bare electric bulb glowing fuzzily on the lintel of the youth hostel, she had somehow got it on her right hand side, so why hadn't she fallen into the canal? She made for it, one wary step at a time, and when her hand groped the crumbly shingles for the key, it came on another hand. And something queer happened: their two hands seized each other fast, and before they had ever really looked at each other, Maggie and Tommy embraced, or at least clinched like boxers.
Then she ran away back down the towpath. She knew that if she made any gesture to the man, he would come home with her for the night, although she sensed he was expected within. All the same he found her the next day and that was that, he moved in, and by Saturday night's races, she was learning how to pack a horse's feet. Maggie realized only later that Hazel must have been the next-to-last of Tommy's willing handmaidens, mucking stalls and walking hots and feeding for him at five in the morning. Maggie had been her replacement.
Don't try to fix it. Don't say anything, she instructed herself. Keep your mouth shut. See what happens. Her hand was on the latch of the tack room. She had made it this far. She pulled the door open, blinked into the opaque, itchy dark, a deep gray hole with only a tic of light here or there where the floodlight from the back gate touched a strap or buckle. The air was dead. He wasn't here. She felt along the wall for the light switch and a hand closed over her hand.
That's right. Shut up, he said, firmly but not roughly-and had she really said that out loud? Or had he read her mind? Maybe because he had that empty space where her own drawers and pigeonholes were stuffed with words, he often, spookily, out of a silence, echoed back to her her most treacherous thought-as if he vibrated with even the dead or unspoken noises whose ghostly scraps floated around her. In an almost soothing gesture his fingers circled her wrist, his thumb pressed deep into her palm, curled it, flattened it again, brought the hand down behind her, and suddenly he was binding both her hands together with the leather shank, then the chain. She heard the double-end snap. He had hooked her to the wall. And then he quickly pulled off her shoes, and, with a minute flick of a button, her jeans. She felt the cool night air moving between her legs. Then he pulled the door closed hard and they were in darkness.
Do you think I didn't see you, he whispered, cashing your bet on Zeno's horse? Don't answer, he warned, listen. Money is nothing to me. You can't imagine how little. Can you?
He pressed up against her back, gave her a little shake. She didn't answer.
Good. I want you to play with money the same as I do. I want you to kick around bills and coins same as me, like sand on the seashore. You don't have to explain to me anything about it. Have fun but don't insult me by telling me. I'll always catch up with you. I'll always know what you're doing. Won't I?
He spoke into her ear, her neck, her hair, but didn't touch her this time. She felt his heat, the nearness of his hands, and her own captivity pulling her into dreamy counter-exertion. Talking as he was, straight out of some dark dream of his own, she began to long for him to touch her, spell to spell, in her most private places, and thought she must be out of her senses.
You want me to see through you anyway, don't you? He ran his fingers up inside her, milked the shameless wetness of her. Don't you? Her knees almost buckled. He caught her on his hand.
She nodded, her face brushing against him.
It's your money. I don't want to know anything about it. I'll ask for it if I need it and I know you'll give it to me if you have it. Won't you?
He had taken her by the small hard handles of her hips and now with a swift deft twist he lifted her and brought her down on himself. Won't you.
But he held his palm over her mouth, and she thought more than said: Yes. No. Yes.