Accordion Crimes (49 page)

After a few months of listening to Peewee’s Appaloosa tales, he asked him right out, “Peewee, you think a man could make a go of it breeding Appaloosas? You think the market is there?”

“A good question. You know, my youngest boy’s home from the university just now, talking about what he’s gonna do, and he breaks it to me, he’s not gonna stay on the ranch. Well, I says, you don’t have to, I’ll set you up good. And if I was a young feller starting out I’d think about Appaloosas, there’s more people starting to look at the Appaloosa with a favorable eye. And you know what he said to me? Said, no way, I’m not getting in no horse-breeding business, because I want to get into TV camera work, I told you that a thousand times. Well, he always tooken pictures since he was a kid, but they’re so damn strange nobody’s gonna pay money for them things, but he says this is different, there’s this new videotape stuff, whatever it is, and that’s what he means. Probly get mixed up with a bunch of damn Commonists. Anyhow, he’ll find out the hard way. Answer to your question, if you know something about breeding horses and you got the interest and somewhat of a bankroll or a tight belt, to my way of thinking the Appaloosa might be a good bet.”

“Suppose you don’t know much and your bankroll’s nonexistent?”

“Why then, you’ll learn or go broke, won’t you? There’s a
couple of people around working on bringing back the good Appaloosas. It’s practical because they make a damn good stock horse, yes, a fine riding horse with that natural flat-footed gait, the old Indian shuffle that lets him keep going. A couple of fellas started in the thirties but the war set ’em back. You talk to anybody yet?”

“Just you.”

“I don’t count! Might want to talk with somebody at Coke Roberd’s place down in Coloraydo. He’s been specializing in Appaloosa and Quarter Horse for long years, bred in high-quality Thoroughbred stock, some say he bred in from a Austrian or Polish spotted horse that was in a circus come through, oh, years and years ago, maybe what they call a Lippizaner, you heard of them, or they say maybe he got it off a gypsy when one of them bands come through. Then there’s Claude Thompson up in Oregon, he’s breeding in Arabian blood. A war vet from up around there, George Somebody, has throwed in with him and he has something to do with the Appaloosa Horse Club. I heard his great-great-uncle or grandmother or somebody bought a couple of the original Nez Percé horses at the government sale way back, so they got some of that good blood. And there’s a few more been working on it. You’d have to say they are restoring what was a lost breed. It’s only a couple of years since the breed was approved by the National Association. But you got your work cut out for you. If I was you I’d start myself a serious linebreeding program. Concentrate on quality, castrate anything that ain’t first mark, send the duds and cripples and poor ones to the canner. You got to be hard about that. And keep real good records.”

Half an hour later Kenneth saw Peewee over by the fence talking to Gibby Amacker, both of them laughing, and he
knew they were enjoying the joke of Kenneth Switch breeding Appaloosas, made up his mind to make them laugh on the other sides of their mouths. (He never got the chance. Peewee drowned in midwinter when a green colt he was riding through a shallow spillway took fright at the sensation of breaking ice around his ankles and plunged into the deep water. And on St. Patrick’s Day Gibby Amacker choked to death on a mouthful of rare sirloin while laughing at a string of jokes about Basque sheepherders—not the raw ones about sheep and rubber boots and crusty underwear, nor the one about shoe polish on the satin comforter, nor the one about the pressure cooker, but a childish play on words told by his brother-in-law Richard through his heavy blond mustache.

“Hey, Gibby, a family of Basques gets caught in a revolving door. Know what the moral is? Don’t put all your Basques in one exit … Jesus, it’s not that funny. Hey, Gibby, are you all right? Somebody? Hey, somebody GET SOME HELP.”)

The second morning of their visit Vergil awoke to the infernal shrieking of a rooster. The electric clock buzzed and hummed, showed 5:47.

Downstairs, Kenneth poured him a mug of lukewarm coffee, Josephine and Bette still asleep. He stood nervously near the kitchen table. There was a poster taped to the kitchen door, showing a bull rider in a ball of dust over the sentence “Lord, help me hang in there.” The sky was blood orange in the east. Kenneth’s deep voice crowded him into a Spanish-style chair with a plastic seat and octagonal-headed tacks that cut into the backs of his thighs. The creases from Kenneth’s nose to the corners of his mouth precisely mirrored the line of his chin,
stamping his face with a diamond shape horizontally bisected by wide, chapped lips. His eyes were enormous, huge grey irises partially obscured by the curtains of loose flesh under the eyebrows which rested on his eyelids. These eyes were further magnified by glasses set with half-moon bifocals. His eyebrows and thin hair were the color of his skin, a reddish tan.

“How much do you know about horse breeding, Vergil?”

“Not a fucking thing.” He wanted to ask Kenneth why he had never swung his daughter by her ankles, leaving it to the ranch hand.

“Well, I think that by the time you leave the Switch ranch you’ll know a little bit. Give you some idea of background, I didn’t know a goddamn thing either when we came out here twenty-seven years ago. What I knew about horses you could put on your thumbnail. I was smart enough to know I didn’t know anything and I hired Fay McGettigan who was working for Peewee Loveless, after Peewee drowned, and Fay knew horses—knows horses—like not many men do. We had a hard time the first few years out here, especially Bette who had a lot of trouble adapting, but all it took to turn things around was one horse,
one horse,
Umbrella Point, one of the most beautiful Appaloosa stallions that ever set hoof on the soil. Those pictures in the hall and the living room? Umbrella Point.” (There were dozens of photographs showing a muscular and athletic dun horse with a brilliant blanket of white over his rump and back, enlivened with peacock spots; white spotted forefeet; a white face; and on his throat a white shield. Besides the photographs there were a few bad paint-by-the-number acrylics featuring horses. Vergil guessed Kenneth had painted them. In his photographs Umbrella Point was depicted in a variety of positions and activities—galloping, calf roping, standing pensively, romping, rolling, in a sit-down
halt, running for the blue in a stump race, dashing into an area keyhole, nuzzling, sleeping, and standing on a high trail under a pine branch blurred by the wind—compact but perfectly formed and with a jaunty, good-humored eye, plump cheeks which gave him a roguish air, and a wispy rat tail that Vergil thought hideous.)

Kenneth swilled his coffee through his teeth, spoke in his acquired western drawl. “The way I came by this horse is mighty peculiar, so much so that I wouldn’t believe it myself if it didn’t happen to me. I was in Idaho at a rodeo, still working part-time for Gibby Amacker—this was just a few weeks before he killed himself laughing at the Bascos—and I was supposed to pick up a string of ponies that some Texas bronc buster had to sell and had got hold of Gibby’s name some way and called him up and the old man said, you bet, I’ll send Kenneth over to pick ’em up, that was typical of Gibby, it wasn’t my job to pick up horses but he rode roughshod over everybody. Fay had just started working for me, so I said we’ll go over there together, so Fay and me went down there and the guy’s Quarter Horses looked pretty good, and he was sick about selling them but he was having some kind of money trouble. Well, that’s what makes the horse world go around and around. So we load them up and I give him a receipt and one of the horses gives this nicker and the guy starts to bawl, oh that’s Pearl, I can’t sell Pearl, and he’s shoving the receipt at me and trying to get the door unlatched to get Pearl out. Look here, I says, you told me three horses, I got the damn receipt all made out and the horses loaded up. No, he says, I’m gonna get Pearl out and give you another horse to take in her place. I got a Appaloosa stallion, been using him for roping, he’s smart and quick, but I’ll swap him for Pearl. He don’t mean as much to me as she does. Fay gives
me a look when he hears the word ‘Appaloosa.’ So we go over to the other side of the fairground where he’s got this other horse, Bum Spots, and Fay jams his elbow in my ribs so hard I almost yelled. At the time I didn’t see anything special, but for Fay it was love at first sight. Bum Spots was six years old and he hadn’t been gelded and Fay knew he was perfect. Well I’m casual. Fay says, you know anything about him? I was ready to bet he was probably just some unregistered outcross breed. Oh yeah, the guy said. He’s a rodeo accident. This rodeo in Coloraydo a stallion got loose and served two mares; sure enough, one of ’em was Pearl. Don’t suppose you knew the name of the stallion, Fay says, offhand. Yeah, one of Coke Roberd’s horses, I believe it was Gee Whiskers or Gee Whizz. I paid that boy two hundred dollars for Bum Spots right then and there; no way was that horse going into Amacker’s ring. And Fay says on the way home, ‘that was when my heart started to go pit-a-pat, because Gee Whizz sired X-Ray Baby who just become the world champion running mare Quarter Horse, so Bum Spots is a half-brother to a world champion.’ Which, of course, this gravel-headed blubbering cowboy didn’t know or he wouldn’t never of sold Bum Spots, a.k.a. Umbrella Point, to us.”

“How the fuck’d you come to name him Umbrella Point?” The coffee was cold and the sun, streaming in hot and glittering, left him nowhere to look but at Kenneth, eating raw sausage from the package. The red light on the stove reflected in the double glass door behind Kenneth in a peculiar way that made it seem as if two intensely red berries were hanging in the disheveled forsythia shrub outside, poised somehow right above Kenneth’s hair. Vergil could make them shift by moving his head.

“You know, I was looking for a different kind of name,
every goddamn name you pick for a registered horse, somebody’s used it already, it’s hard to find a original name, but Fay and me was sitting here in the kitchen trying to think up one and I looked over at Bette’s umbrella hanging on the hook over there and said, Umbrella, there’s a unique name, but you know, it wasn’t, somebody already named a horse that, so I says, Umbrella Handle, and son-of-a-bitch,
that
was already in use, so Fay come up with Umbrella Point and that was acceptable to the powers that be. And we never looked back. We had him until 1973, fifteen years, and he made our living, he built this ranch. National Grand Champion Stallion, Grand Champion Performance Horse. He sired Umbrella Point’s Boy, the grand champion at the Montana State Fair; Gunsight Babe who holds the world record for the four forty and three hundred yards; Chief Hardshell, grand champion at halter and racing, national champion rope race horse; Jot ’Em Down, over a hundred ribbons and awards, every kind of cutting, reining, stump race, pleasure riding award they give; Old Egypt, that was Josephine’s horse, but he won over one hundred and fifty trophies in the show ring; Pegasus, Poetry, Raisin Pudding, Target—I could go on all day.” He swallowed the rest of his coffee and poured more. Vergil tilted his head this way and that, forcing the berries to hop to different branches. The hectoring voice began again.

“And then it was over, in the most
senseless
act of violence. Josephine came out for a visit with her then
husband,
this silent, sulky bastard, Ults, she got tangled up with him at one of those goddamn communes down there in New Mexico, men growing their hair down to their ass and dressed up in them psychedelic rags, jewelry and junk all over him—Christ, it
hurt
to shake hands with the son-of-a-bitch he had so many rings on. He had braids and a rag around his head like he was
expecting to sweat. We tried to bring her up decent, got her a horse when she was six, give her everything we could, and what does she do, goes off to one of them weed camps and wears a pioneer dress and gets tangled up with this Ults, his father’s a pipeline supplier, I think he was ashamed of his kid. Well, the son-of-a-bitch cracked, went crazy, got up one morning and took my thirty-thirty from over the door and went to the barn, led Umbrella out and shot him right outside the barn, started back in. Of course the shot woke me up and I looked out the window and saw Umbrella Point quivering on the ground and Ults walking away and carrying the rifle, this little smile on his face, you could tell he was all drugged up, not too hard to figure out what happened and what was going to happen, and I was down those stairs three at a time, I got to the back door just as he comes up on the porch, still holding the rifle, and he starts to bring it up—oh there’s no doubt in my mind he intended to shoot me, to shoot us all, kill Josephine, Bette, myself, the cat maybe—but my god, I don’t know how I did it to this day, surprise element, I think, but I grabbed that rifle out of his hands and shot him in the shoulder before he knew what was happening. He went right down the steps and laid there in the dirt hollering. I come back in and poured a glass of whiskey, drank it neat, ran outside to Umbrella Point—had to step right over Ults and I give him a good kick as I did—but my fine champion stallion was killed, and I called the sheriff’s office and said what happened and that if he didn’t come get Ults I might finish the job. Bette and Josephine was going nuts, they couldn’t understand it any more than I could. Josephine blamed me, said, you didn’t have to shoot him, did you? and we parted on bad terms, she drove off with him to the hospital or the dump, but you know, it wasn’t too long after that they got divorced.
I never knew the details, don’t know them to this day, but they were divorced inside a year, that is if they was ever married. Could of been some damn hippie ceremony with dope and sitar music and tofu. I don’t know. Ask her about it.”

“She don’t want to talk about it.”