To no one but herself she said it was a kind of luck after all, what had happened. It was lucky that Joe Dale had ended up dead, and luckier still that she hadn't had to kill him herself. Not that she would have easily found the nerve to kill him, or the equipment, but just as this world came to feel like an unbearably tight squeeze with Joe Dale and her both in it, Tommy stepped in and took care of that for her. And then it was lucky that, if Tommy had to kill Joe Dale, he killed him when he was out of his mind, so that they just put Tommy in the place he was headed for anyway. Granted, now they would keep him rather longer in that place, but that could be all to the good. She did not forget that Tommy too had once flirted with the idea of killing her, had even ruminated on this course with his hands around her neck. Even though he had decided against it, one had not felt entirely safe in the bastion of his caprice. And that had been for merely thinking about deserting him-in the end she had been mentally packing to leave. So in some ways it was lucky, for her, at least, that he was where he was.
It was even a kind of luck to have seen it happen. But should she have seen it coming? Shouldn't she have known by instinct which man of hers could lose his mind, or by the same token which man was as stoutly framed in the confines of his senses as she was in hers? It was the racetrack that had thrown her off. What did she know from horseplayers? Tommy had seemed too rich in venerable and exotic ways to self-destruct to have any need of madness. Gambling, she had judged, as ancient in the culture as grapes and barley, would keep him safe. In Tacitus the Germans gamble themselves into slavery with a laugh. They don't lose their reason, never having had any to begin with. And that was Tommy too. He was a German from up in the woods and coulees of Wisconsin. He had that spinning empty place in him, true, but he was magnetic and handsome and women were drawn to him whatever he did. Even if he never made money, women would do his work for him, keep him afloat. Why should he go crazy when he could just gamble himself, and them, down the drain?
If he had gambled himself into slavery, she would-might-have gone along. But he was not going to Rome in chains, stark naked except for his little fur cape and Swabian topknot. He had gone crazy-all the way mad-he had gone off his head and left her behind. He had made the world over so that it all made shining sense, but only he could see it. As for the racetrack, they had both lost that. And she had lost him. Why didn't she weep?
That he could slip that border alone, and completely-she admired him. She felt she had seen wonders. She had no right to cry. What had become of Tommy was as immense, as terrible and final as a volcano or an earthquake. She almost envied him. She hadn't seen it coming and it had gotten quite away from her. She must never have understood Tommy at all.
She made it a project to get to know the new Tommy in the hospital, though she could only get in to see him every third Saturday, if that. And it was curious how he thought he didn't want to know her now, almost as if she-his twin-had been one of the confusions he needed to put behind him. It was strange, too, that he didn't seem to miss her, when he must be lonely as a planet in that place. But she knew he needed some human tie, whether he knew it or not.
His eyes even in the dim light of the visiting cell were electric, shedding almost visible beams, and there was a tremor in the eyelids like the buzz of fly wings, regular but too fast to see or count-maybe it was the medication they had him on, but from where she sat it was like observing the spouting eye of an hallucination. She thought she was watching madness create its world atom by atom, or pixel by pixel.
If he asked her to leave before visiting ended at four, she would head north to the Mound from the state hospital, in time to catch the eighth or ninth race before driving east over the mountains. By now Medicine Ed had the horse back running for fifteen hundred dollars, often on a Saturday night. She watched them from the stands, or from the palisades of the walking ring. Medicine Ed would give her a nod, not unfriendly but well short of a smile. She had to admit it showed that Pelter had a caretaker now who had worked for Whirligig Farm. He gleamed like the great Platonic, with his mane tightly braided and a fancy checkerboard on his rump. Medicine Ed's stick leg looked no stiffer, and Pelter's long back no lumpier, than before. They were a pair of cripples who knew how to hold on as they were.
Kidstuff had been right about that five-thousand-added purse, but they had found ways to take it from her just the same. Place, show and fourth monies had to come out of the same sum, and those special finishers' percentages took another healthy slice. The track had treated Tommy's debts as her debts, she didn't care to argue the point, but then creditors came out of the woodwork. Certain persons-Jojo, Alice, Kidstuff, Medicine Ed-had to be staked from what little was left, and generously, in Tommy's name. What did it matter? Let it all go, call that life ended, behind her.
What also came down like luck was the claim the racing association paid on Little Spinoza. The destroyed horse was redeemed at three thousand dollars, a thousand for each of them. They were back where they had started. Deucey found a stalwart old claimer within a week and was back in business. But once Lord of Misrule came and went, it was Deucey and Alice against the world, and on those terms the world was more to Deucey's liking. Medicine Ed got a job with Jim Hamm, running shippers from Charles Town at the Mound in an arrangement much like the one he had had with Zeno. But in two weeks he also had Pelter chasing three thousand dollar horses and sinking back downward in class.
As for Maggie, she went back to the Pichot place outside Charles Town and Menus by Margaret for the Thursday Winchester Mail. When she looked out at the empty horse pasture and the untrampled skunk cabbage down by the creek, she wondered why she hadn't thought to bring Pelter home with her and retire him while he was still sound. But it was too late now, and, anyway, whose pleasure would that really have served? She had plenty of room for the horse and, for that matter, for Medicine Ed, but what would the two of them have done with themselves all day? And no doubt Pelter's nature, like Medicine Ed's, was to keep on going to the end and hope he never saw the end coming. Anyway, the two of them seemed tied to one another.