Lord of Misrule (10 page)

So how you do you
know
what to do?

You follow custom, young woman. They is no
I know, he know
, like what you talking bout. Until you have put some years in this
business, you watch the old grooms and do like they do.

That doesn’t sound very scientific to me, she say.

I tell you a secret, horse racing is not no science. Some of em tries to make it a science, with the drugs and the chemicals and that, but ma’ fact it’s more like a religion. It’s a clouded thing. You can’t see through it. It come down to a person’s beliefs. One person believe this and the other person believe that. It’s like the National Baptists bandage and the Southern Baptists use liniment, you see what I’m trying to say? Nobody exactly know.

His cheeks ached under his eyes—she made him talk too much, made him say peculiar things he was sorry later that he give up. He slipped around the corner of the shedrow and faded away from her behind wagons and buildings in a certain way he had learned to do long ago, before he had his good job with Gus Zeno.

This was when he missed having his old crushed Winnebago there on the shedrow. It was the one thing Mrs. Zeno had said from the start he could keep—it taken phone calls from certain people, Mr. Two-Tie, Jim Hamm, Kidstuff, to remind her of other sums and bonuses that was decent and customary, under the circumstances, but the Winnebago she didn’t even care to look at no more. Only, Suitcase Smithers gave him twenty-four hours, if he wanted it, to haul that thing off the backside. The young fool say he’d take care of it. That was part of they deal. He had it towed round to the trailer park behind the Horseman’s Motel, a couple blocks from the back gate. They put the Winnebago way in the rear, out of sight, in a clump of serviceberry bushes. They run an extension cable from the young fool’s trailer all the way to his trailer. And that was how Medicine Ed fell into this job.

It would have been too raggedy an outfit even for Ed to work for if Hansel’s horses was still thrown to four separate barns in
every corner of the backside and everybody at the Mound laughing at him. But already the morning after the young fool rolled in, Suitcase come round personally and asked him this and that, where he from and how he be getting along, and then he let him have Zeno’s old stalls in Barn Z.

That’s Pelter?
the
Pelter? Roland Hickok’s Pelter? Suitcase say. He’s peering in the dark stall. The young fool make like he ain’t hear. He turn on his heel and hang up a tangle of shanks and halters and shaken out some chain, but finally he say Mr. Hickok have sold him Pelter in a private deal, and Suitcase say, Well I’ll be damned, because he know Mr. Hickok won’t sell the West Virginia-bred winner of the Popcorn Stakes and the Little Blue Ridge to just anyone. So maybe the young fool’s price go up a little bit just then.

Medicine Ed himself had to admit that Pelter looked good, almost too good—ain’t he heard that the once-upon-a-time Darkesville Stalker broke down bad in the stretch only a short while back? And they was that red bomber too that Zeno had claimed, and which had already win one for fifteen hundred in Charles Town, so the young fool must be doing something right for these horses.

Medicine Ed had his hand on the screen door of the track kitchen—but then between buildings he spied Deucey Gifford, looking round for him to walk the Speculation grandson. It was something about this colt (colt! he was long past a colt) that touched him. He hurried his stiff leg back to the barn and took him off her. Medicine Ed like to get him round the corner of the shedrow, where Deucey couldn’t see, and slip him out to the grass patch, let him graze, graze and gaze. He looked round at things, like he really want to know what it is. Why? Like nobody pay you a dollar more in this business to braid up a tail or put a
checkerboard on the flank of a horse going to a race. So why? It was the plain beauty of the thing.

He do scare easy, the horse. When they swing back to the shedrow, a she-cat with a backbone like knuckles, so bagged up her titties bounced on the dirt, chased a mouse across their path, and the horse threw up his head and stood quivering. What she want with you, son? Medicine Ed talked to him. She done got herself in a deep hole and she need some of that fast luck oil to get her out. She ain’t thinking bout you. He gave the horse his kind eye, he came back to himself and they plodded on.

The way Medicine Ed hear it, Joe Dale Bigg run the horse off and so he was Deucey’s but he wasn’t Deucey’s, wasn’t nobody’s horse right now. A Speculation grandson and looking for a home! Jesus put me wise. Now, what was the name of this boy? Medicine Ed couldn’t recall. For all his fancy blood he had a ankle almost as big as he was, but that wasn’t what caused him to lose his home. It was Biggy, Joe Dale Bigg’s boy, one day when Biggy was helping Fletcher the dentist in the back of the horse’s stall and the horse pinned and about killed him. Biggy what you call simple, a gorilla-size child-for-life, and now he was back from the industrial school in Pruntytown. Joe Dale Bigg thought he better be shed of the animal before something go down.

Medicine Ed smiled inside of himself with deep contentment when he recalled that hot afternoon. First he had had to hear it on the far side of Barn Z, Biggy screaming and kicking the animal in the belly, and the fool dentist Fletcher up at his head jimmying the speculum into the horse’s jaws and snatching the shank on him, trying to work in his file—the horse just up from the farm that morning—and soon that crazy black light come on in the horse’s eye and his whole back end fly at Biggy’s face in the corner. And left a deep print of his bar shoe on Biggy
Bigg’s forehead, where they say you could still read it.

Well, wouldn’t nobody know it to look at you now, son. The horse shuffled dreamily on, back into his babyhood of not knowing nothing, slow as any sane animal in August if nobody push him.

That was his name, it come back to him now—Baby something—no,
Little
, Little Spinoza. He was little, one of those little prince-looking horses, dark bay with bourbon whiskey color lights and a big round panic eye, a bird eye. People like to say how every Speculation grandson was a killer in his heart, but this one just childish—one of those terrible babies that never learn nothing and know they’re never gone to learn nothing, for once they scare, they don’t wait, they take wing.

And he
was
a horse. For some reason they never taken his nuts. Joe Dale Bigg used to notice him down there on the farm one or two times a meeting, enter him for five thousand or sixty-two hundred, and have one of his boys carry him to the track in the afternoon. Then the animal would worry and sweat out all his speed bouncing over potholes on the road, jump out the gate like a rabbit—if he come out at all (a few times he didn’t)—and land up running fourth or fifth against horses that didn’t have half his class. Maybe he win oncet at that price. If so, it was a long time ago.

Medicine Ed round the shedrow of Barn Z back to Deucey’s stalls, and there she was, talking to Deucey, the young fool’s woman, hanging on the corner post like grim death.

Oooo, look at that, she say. Gee whiz, what a beauty, I’ve never seen a horse like that on a half-mile track before.

That’s right you ain’t, Deucey told her, grinning, puffing up like a chicken in a stiff wind. This is what you call class, girlie. This is a Speculation grandson, out of Little Dutch Girl. He’s called Little Spinoza.

Little
Spinoza. He looks like a baby.

He ain’t no baby. He’s six.

He’s made so very perfect—he has those golden highlights near the black at his points—like—like tortoise shell, you know?

O yeah, I see what you mean, like tortoise shell specs or sumpm, Deucey said, kind of egging her on. She took the horse from Ed for a moment, like to show him off. They stood sideways in the dirt road.

He is small, though, isn’t he?

That there is a optical illusion of horses with perfect conformation. He ain’t large but he ain’t small. He’s just got everything put away in the right place.

You are a very beautiful boy. The girl got her hand right in his face and for some reason he ain’t bite her. She slipped her grubby gray fingers under his halter and scratched. He leaned his head over them, snorted and tried to go sideways but Deucey snatched on him and led him off around the corner. Oooo, let me walk him for you, say the girl, following after.

Deucey looked her up and down. Well, usually Medicine Ed walks him for me, she say, weakening, though she know better. He can be a handful sometimes.

Around the corner she whispered to the girl, but he could still hear it: Medicine Ed can use the couple bucks. You gotta learn to think about things like that, girlie. You ain’t in this world by yourself.

O Ed can have the money. I’ll walk him for nothing. Lil Spinny, she crooned, you want me to walk you, don’t you?

You just follow along with Medicine Ed. He can teach you plenty.

But he’s so slo-ow.

Downright insulting,
and
she don’t know the power of money.
And them is the people he’s working for now. The which, to be honest, was not all bad. He’d say this for the young fool, he paid good. He asked Medicine Ed what Gus Zeno paid and, good to his word, he paid ten dollars better, 110 dollars a week plus the lot for the Winnebago. But Zeno had been paying more than a groom, something like a assistant trainer, though he wouldn’t call him that in the papers. That was the job Medicine Ed always done for him. But Zeno wanted his own name up there on every race.

Zeno had had a string of owners you could see with your own eyes. They used to come round the barn in their silk neckties and shiny fur coats, trailing airs of perfume and whiskey and getting in the way until Zeno steered them off to the clubhouse. Where was the money coming from in this operation? Here it was no sense of the value of money, spending like the Hares and the Ogdens, best grain, best hay, best veternary, how long could they keep this up? So that’s what he had to put up with now—suchlike foolishness from the young fool’s woman, good pay on a sinking ship, and him farther from his future home than ever.

Round and round the shedrow they went for thirty minutes, Medicine Ed and Little Spinoza, and the girl weaving in and out of them like a puppy dog.

Did you ever rub a Speculation baby?

Um-hmm. Sho is.

They shuffled on. Now she was in front looking back. Now she was in back of him catching up. The girl waited for Medicine Ed to yacky-yack to her about famous horses he have known, but he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

Who was it? she finally ask. The Speculation baby.

Platonic.

Gee whiz, Platonic. Whirligig Farm?

Um-hmm.

Didn’t he win something big?

This was too much for Medicine Ed. Cobweb Futurity. Rising Sun Cup. Trellis Handicap. Greenbriar Realization. Seashell Stakes.

My god. What’s it like working for billionaires?

She done run up ahead of him again and was walking backwards, which was bad luck. He looked at her round green blindman glasses and her foolish pickney braids.

Do they at least pay well? she want to know.

He looked at her. He sucked in his hollow cheeks. Halfway good, he finally say.

Then they was all back in front of the stall again, Deucey making sweet eyes at the girl and the girl making sweet eyes at Little Spinoza.

Oooo, let me brush him for you, say the young fool’s woman. I’ll bring up his dapples.

I don’t know if he’ll stand for it, honey. He ain’t used to that good treatment. I guess you can try. But you be careful, he could bust your head.

Oooo goodie, the girl say. Don’t worry, he’s going to like it. Deucey laughed and Medicine Ed just shook his head.

But you better hurry if you want to tame him, Deucey say. I ain’t keeping this horse.

What! said the young fool’s woman. What do you mean? Is he for sale?

No he ain’t for sale, Deucey snapped. She had better judgment than to try and explain.

Medicine Ed shrugged. He ain’t have no dog in this fight. Nobody ain’t ask for his spare change. Nobody ain’t begged him to take a Speculation grandson off they hands. But then he say: It’s a sorry shame. Ain’t every day a six-thousand-dollar horse
come along waving a three-thousand-dollar price tag, no claim necessary. A horse like that. That horse been abused. You could fix that horse.

You’re gonna tell me to buy this horse? Deucey say. I’m a gyp. You know I don’t got luck enough for two horses, Ed. Every time I ever had two horses I end up with none.

Why don’t you give that other old boy his rest? Medicine Ed said.

I ain’t got three grand, Speculation grandson or no Speculation grandson.

I thought Joe Dale done fronted you the animal no strings attached.

Come on, Ed, where’d you ever see a deal on the track with no strings attached? Sometimes, you know, when times was very very tough, I have took this or that service on the cuff from some prince among men—like Kidstuff for example—and even then they own you a little …

Sho is, sho is, Ed said slowly. He knew how it was—your operations was not quite your own. Somebody might want to know something, somebody might put you a question about something you ought not to be telling—even if they never bring it up about the money, not for months, or years.

So how much more don’t I want to get tangled up with thirty-horse strings. Now, I ain’t high class. If I need a quick couple bucks, me and Two-Tie, we see eye to eye. But I can’t see to the bottom of Joe Dale Bigg.

Sho is. Them boys can be mean, Ed had to agree, remembering that enjoyable hot afternoon and the imprint of Little Spinoza’s heel calk rising up on Biggy Bigg’s forehead like a meat stamp.

And I don’t want to, either. Some of em’s—speak well of the devil—

The big car come crunching over the gravel at a slow rate of speed, raising a low cloud, more floating on the dried-out puddles and potholes, the way it looked, than driving—a Cadillac Sedan de Ville with purple-tinted windows and gangster doors, midnight blue with a brushed stainless steel top like silvery fur, and white wall tires that one of Joe Dale Bigg’s boys have to be washing down regular, because the pink dust of the backside never sink into them but was new every day, like a thin smear of lady’s face powder. When it was right beside of them, a yard off the shedrow and that big in the middle of the dirt road as if it just have to block the way wherever it go, the passenger’s side window slid into the door with a silky whirr and, deep inside, where it was dark like a saloon, a finger crooked.