Lord of Misrule (13 page)

W
HEN HASLIPP, THE VET
, finally showed up with his little bag in the afternoon, in the rain, looking mud-spattered and harassed, Deucey happened to have taken a ride into town to buy a pair of reading glasses at the dimestore. Tommy, who had been asked to help if this happened (Maggie winced—somehow she hadn’t got around to telling him yet whose-all horse Little Spinoza actually was), paraded them all out to the grass patch at the end of the shedrow, where it was cleaner and they would have more room, and then they stood there in the cold drizzle, shifting from foot to foot while Tommy dragged away the ten-dollar goat that Deucey had bought for Grizzly. They had forgotten about the goat.

Maggie held the interested but unsuspecting Little Spinoza, who despite his notorious encounter with a racetrack dentist (everyone knew that story) seemed more drawn by the weird blue crucifix eyes of the goat than troubled by the brusque stranger with the black bag.

Little Spinoza was still looking over his shoulder into the empty stall (his own) where the small but smelly and
baa
-ing goat had disappeared, when a little commotion happened at his neck and suddenly the earth fell up to meet him, his blood turned to warm solder, his penis dropped limp out of his body and his knees melted. He sank to the grass. His elbows and stifles drained
away. He rolled over on his side. His huge tongue wanted to fall out of his mouth. He was not sleepy but gravity had won a great victory and he wished never to get up again. He watched incuriously as the two men went around behind him and squatted, and one of them somehow picked up his leg and moved it a little and held the great black riverine tail out of the way. There was a pleasant tinkle of metal, a feeling of deep and strange but painless emptying, another not so agreeable snip snip, snip snip—two grayish-pink, wet, egg-like bodies, sparsely threaded with blood vessels, lay in the grass. That was it. Already his face looked less alien and goofy. They stood there waiting for his legs to come back under him.

The queerest thing was the long, thin, infinitely elastic tubes hanging down like spittle from the shiny balls before Haslipp snipped them away. Maggie saw Medicine Ed slide out of the tack room and pick up the testicles out of the grass in a silver can—it could have been a soup can, nicely washed out and with the label neatly removed. And then he faded away again, presumably around the corner. She blinked. She hadn’t known he was there. In fact he hadn’t been there, or Tommy would certainly have called him over and made him drag away the ten-dollar goat, instead of doing that ridiculous job himself.

These days when Maggie was alone with Little Spinoza, after he had walked or worked and had his bath, she
rubbed
him—she didn’t exactly know the derivation of this ancient slang for what a groom is supposed to do to a horse, only that was what the old guys told people they did: Been rubbing horses nigh on thirty-five years now, or, Back when I rub horses for Happy Blount at Hot Springs, whatever it meant. But she sensed a thread had been dropped somewhere, the route to some secret heart of this business
had been lost. She didn’t know anyone who literally rubbed a horse, not even old Deucey.

She asked Medicine Ed. That come from way back, in England or Paris, France, or somewhere, when the thoroughbred racehorse run five miles over open ground, hills and stone walls and that, and come back half dead under a blanket to a barn with no running hose water, let alone hot. So they rubbed the horse dry and warm. Babies get rubbed, he added, if you work for a barn that got babies. Rich folks had babies. Tommy Hansel had the geezers of the trade.

Back in Charles Town she had hauled to the laundromat a bunch of old croker sacks she had found in Pichot’s barn. They had been many times stained, washed and dried until they were the color of a healing bruise; long ago, someone had left the pile of them stiffening in a corner. But she figured that like the mysterious hand-tied leather netting hanging from a nail, and the old wooden names—lord knew what anybody had farmed on that flinty spread before racehorses—they must be there for a reason, and they washed out soft and sweet. And now she rubbed Little Spinoza up with them from his ankles to his ears.

She rubbed in a round, hypnotic fingerpainting motion, but hard, feeling for some remotely erotic synapse of
z’s
from the ends of her fingers into his bones and muscles, which wasn’t as easy through the pink gunny as it had always been barehanded with Pelter. She had to slow down time, go into a kind of trance state where sweet electricity pooled at her nerve endings like nectar on the pistil of a honeysuckle. And then by running her fingers over the animal she could find his hidden landing places. Not that these were jungle airstrips, few and hard to find. They were all over the place. But you had to approach the body boundary reduced to this one brooding spark. You dangled from a headland,
black empty space rushing by, and suddenly you were across. The key was being tuned down so fine that you felt the crossing. Without that your fingers were just dead prongs on a rake and nothing happened.

True, it helped to be stoned, which she was rather often. Zeno had left behind in the crushed trailer a chunk of hashish the size of a square of baking chocolate, the ginger color and yielding consistency of puppy feces, and Tommy had bought it from Medicine Ed, who had no use for that stuff, for a yard. Plenty of times they had a little curl like a cedar shaving for breakfast.

Rubbing Little Spinoza without it took more concentration, a willed death of talky ratiocination up there under the pigtails. She had to hang up on the telephone of her mind and then it worked. O, didn’t it work. Come to find out the dangerous Speculation grandson was a pushover, the model of innocent delight. It was alarming, in fact, how trusting he was once you made him feel good, how forgiving of all the predecessor pain, how unsuspecting that joy would ever end. Unlike Pelter who shot up out of her intimate handling from time to time without warning, with a rip-roaring snort and the urge to do mischief, nip or kick, Little Spinoza melted away into the dream of bliss. He let her do anything to him. After she rubbed him dry and warm, she brushed him deep all over with an ordinary charwoman’s scrub brush, then every day worked a little at his mane and tail, patiently dug through and pulled the years of knots and snags.

Then she worried. Why did she like doing this so much? How was it that she could bear these hypnotic repetitive tasks at all, such physical primitivity in the service of some other living organism? She used to love to brush her sister’s hair, not that Ursie often let her. Maggie let herself down so easily into the engorged pastime of physical service. It was a kind of honeyed sleep, with
only a thread of something repulsive about it that she could not pluck out. She was at home there, except for that. Was she some kind of born slave herself, a prostitute in a temple, a hierodule?

Little Spinoza stood for all of it, his dapples came up like god’s golden fingerprints, he crackled, he glowed. Even when she felt the pleasure running along his withers and flanks in waves and literally crimping up his spine, he didn’t protest, just bent into it like a ballerina in a
pas de deux
.

Look at you, you big silly, how are you ever going to fend for yourself, she mumbled into the warm curve of his back, but then, you never were a man’s man either, were you. Well, I hope you can still run, now that you’re not scared. She looked him in the eye and he blew into her face a great warm drench of hayflowers.

You know, she said, take my word for it, a sex life would have been far too hectic for a boy like you. What you need is a world that’s just a whole lot of different flavors of good.

His answer to this was rather grandly, like a dog at a dog show, to stretch taut behind him his shining black ankles, to let down his ashen penis and piss a fine steady arc into the straw.

Spinoza, she whispered, I know you won’t see this—sex is a kind of slavery at best, I mean it’s a great thing, kind of like religion, original religion, I mean that old-time religion you can grab with your senses, but the long and short of it is, you as
you
get burned away …

But Little Spinoza had lost interest in the subject, showed her his plum-shaped rump and nosed through the bedding at the back of his stall for some bit of golden straw that pleased his eye.

She fretted over him. He was a gelding now, but he lacked that gelding irony. A gelding needed—and she needed—a more byzantine itinerary. An old gelding always seemed to her as complex as Disraeli. Sly, civilized and determined, well aware he hadn’t got
the world exactly to his order, he got there one way or another. Now that he was a gelding, could Little Spinoza do it on pure arrant babyhood alone?

Deucey had led him back from the track in the early morning shaking her buzz-cut head. I hope that Little Lord Fauntleroy here ain’t taking it easy as a lifetime project, now that he ain’t scared.

He isn’t scared anymore, is he, Maggie agreed, as long as the secret was out.

Alice says he ain’t. Deucey suddenly kicked at the billy goat who had pushed his long face into the open tails of her raincoat. Alice was the exercise girl. Damn it all, ain’t I said I can’t get lucky with more than one horse? Now I get what’s coming to me. I got a feeling this is the pay-off, Deucey said.

Aw you always saying this the pay-off, Medicine Ed pointed out.

I’d like to know what’s wrong with a horse taking a little pleasure in life, said Deucey. He eats up his dinner now, that’s progress, ain’t it?

What else does Alice say? Maggie asked.

He like that damn goat, Medicine Ed observed.

I tell her there’s speed in that animal somewheres. I seen it myself. Just cause
you
ain’t found it don’t mean he ain’t got it. Well I don’t know where it’s hiding, she says, maybe it’s on vacation now that he ain’t scared. And if I show him the stick he up and quits on me.

Now that he got all these female women petting and nursering him, Medicine Ed mumbled. He took from his pocket a box of black Smith Brothers cough drops, worked one out of the inside paper for himself, one for the horse.

Kidstuff was shoeing a gray horse in a dry spot under the shedrow, and now he looked behind his shoulder and said: Maybe
yall ought not to have tinkered with the natural machinery of the horse. I mean, him being as old as he is. He was pressing the horse’s foot upside down between his knees, in a posture at once adept and oddly feminine. He smiled at Maggie, his scuffed black cowboy boots curled up at their toes like genie slippers, and she thought to herself: You’re the one I love.

This is what I get for showing off for Alice, Deucey said. You know I got a thing for Alice. I thought she would take an interest in Little Spinny. Make a project out of him. Now Alice says he’s dreaming and don’t want to wake up.

Earlie Beaufait gone to ride that horse, not Alice, Medicine Ed said.

I know that, Deucey said. But I wanted her to beg me to put her on him. I was gonna say no. But I would like her to beg me.

Can Alice ride in a race? Maggie asked.

Kidstuff laughed. Now that there is debatable, he said. I believe Alice has had a bug since last spring. She don’t pick up any mounts except at the fairs.

That’s prejudice, Deucey said. She is the living expert on them pokeweed and poison ivy racecourses. You gotta give her that. On them tight turns she is slick as gut. She has win some races on horses that shouldn’t be walking, never mind running.

That’s because she don’t fear for her pretty face, Kidstuff said.

You ain’t looked at her right, Deucey said.

What else does Alice say? Maggie repeated.

You know, for the first few days I rousted Spinny out to the track so early I was taking a chance on breaking Alice’s legs and his, Deucey said. The moon ain’t set yet and the infield had the morning star over it, pitch black. It looked like a Shriner’s ring out there—that’s how scared I was a clocker would get a load of his
speed. Well I got me all hissified for nothing. Alice says he’s moony. Don’t get me wrong, she tells me, he’s having a good time out there, looking at the geese flying down to the river and listening to the wind. You know, when he was still scared, at least he busted out of the gate every time like something was chasing him.

Except when he didn’t, Kidstuff said.

Yeah. And now Alice can’t hardly get him to gallop.

Maggie looked at the horse’s delicately modelled head, which seemed, more than ever, small and charming, with huge, alert, artless eyes, fringed with sentimental lashes. It’s embarrassing, like any minute now he’s gonna ask when the birthday party starts or can he hang up his Christmas stocking, she said. Like he used to be tragic and beautiful, now he’s cute.

You wait till he come back from running his first race after six months off, he’ll wish the world was made outa cotton. He ain’t gone be cute then, Ed said.

If
he runs, Deucey said.

There came along a good race for Little Spinoza, a good race, that is, for him to lose, for the race was too high-priced, too far and too soon for the horse to win, but at least they could be sure that no one would want Spinoza at that price. A 5000-dollar claimer was a princely race at the Mound, where 6000 was the highest price tag an animal could wear (to go higher you sent a horse to the Races, but the traffic generally was headed the other way), and Little Spinoza was no longer a prince. He was a Speculation grandson, but he was common, a bad-acting six-year-old who was more trouble than his little bit of run could pay for, who had not raced in half a year, who had changed hands not long ago from the leading trainer at the Mound to a half crazed old lady gyp who won races now and then with the reanimated dead. And the owners, who were they? There was room in the chart in the
Telegraph
for only two names under
Own.
— I owned a dozen horses before, Deucey said, what do I care? So it was
Salters Edward II & Koderer M
. Medicine Ed and that girl. Racetrackers snickered or shook their heads. The distance, a mile, was at least an eighth and maybe even a quarter of a mile too long for Little Spinoza to keep up his speed, if he had any speed. Still, it was time. Little Spinoza needed a race, a race to harden his muscles and prove his spirit, if he had any spirit, a race to get him ready for a race, but also a kind of crystal ball of a race so the three of them, old Deucey, and Maggie, and Medicine Ed, could see what type of misery they had in front of them.