Lord of Misrule (14 page)

Earlie was hot as a pistol at Two-Tie’s last night, so I asked him quick while he was raking in a pot, and he said yes.

That’s fine, Ed commented.

Are you sure we can get Earlie Beaufait? Maggie asked. What does the leading rider at the meeting want with the likes of us, she was thinking.

He’s doing me a favor, Deucey said, and that ain’t good, but he’s the best they got in this dump.

Earlie so big this year he don’t even show up at Joe Dale’s barn till he good and ready. They hot at him too, what I hear.

They felt better to have a jockey if Joe Dale Bigg was mad at him too.

I hope you all know what you’re doing, Maggie said. I mean it. I can’t tell anything about jockeys from looking at them. Not their age. Not what they’re thinking. Not their morals and not their good will towards men.

Hell’s bells, nobody knows what a jock is thinking, Deucey said. Their brains are so hot-wired, what with speed and the hot box and flipping the Saturday night smorgasbord at the Polky Dot Cafe, they don’t know what they think.

Earlie out of Loosiana.

What does that mean?

He’s Cajun or something out the backwoods, Deucey said, what’s the difference? I watched him all year. The midget is strong in his hands, smart on the track and brave as a bobcat. He’s busy, though. Can’t see Spinny till Friday. Alice’ll have to get him ready.

In fact the jockey came by Friday noon to look at the horse. He was shorter than Maggie, a very little man in pressed slacks and a spotless canary yellow windbreaker, with the collar turned up high and wrap-around shades. He had a deeply lined brown face, a tight, taciturn upper lip and a shiny pompadour on top like the painted hair on a doll. He stared at Spinoza in the shadow of the stall for some time and then said: Say, this the hoss that kick in Biggy’s headlights?

Shucks. Biggy was born with his head kicked in. The horse just scratched him a little on top of that, Deucey said.

I punish the horse if he act bad on me, the jockey said.

Fair enough, Deucey said. He’s been easy as kiss my hand over here. A little too easy, if you wanna know.

I find the run in the horse, Earlie said, if he has any run.

Just remember he has to run again, Deucey said. We ain’t trying to win this time out. We just want to find out how much horse is there and what he wants to do without letting it show.

Okay. I don’t let him win. But I make him work.

I don’t think that work ethic stuff is going down so good with Little Spinoza, Maggie said when the jockey’s hard little fist of an ass in its knife-pressed chinos turned the corner.

Somebody got to get serious with the horse, Deucey said. This ain’t the 4-H Club Rodeo at the Pocahontas County Fair.

…

Friday evening, Little Spinoza stood dreaming with his feet in a bucket of ice. Deucey, a towel marked
COMMERCIAL HOTEL, GRAND ISLAND, NEBR
. over her shoulder, was feeling all around his ankle.

Anything? Maggie asked.

Cold as a flounder. It’s big but no bigger’n it ever was. He’s got no excuses that I can tell. That don’t mean he’ll run.

Then all of a sudden the midnight blue Sedan de Ville with the starry silver hard-top was taking up the whole dirt road between shedrows. The driver’s side window dropped into the door beneath it with a noise like a bumblebee. They couldn’t help it, they both looked up.

Deucey, said a hoarse voice, fatty yet reproachful, a kind of masculine gravy with metal shavings in it.

Hello, Joe Dale, Deucey said. Maggie squinted at him. In a heavy-fleshed way, he was handsome, she thought, felt her cheeks warm and registered her own incipient interest with something like despair. He was a Byronic libertine type in the face, clean shaven, with blue shadows modelling his plushy red lips, and thick black groves crowning the temples behind an evenly receding hairline. He didn’t look old enough, or crude enough, to have a great grown bully of a son like Biggy.

Hey, Deucey, he said. I’d like to know what kinda joke this is, with the girl groom and the spook. You tryna make a monkey outa me or what?

Crude enough after all, Maggie thought.

Excuse me?

What’s with the girl and the colored groom in the owner’s column for my horse?

You don’t expect me to ruin my own good name with the horse, do you? Deucey said.

You don’t think Little Spinoza’s gonna run good?

It ain’t impossible, Deucey said. Sumpm might fall into his feed bucket between now and then, who knows? This is horse racing.

You got my boy up on him, I see.

Maybe Earlie can tell me what’s wrong with the horse.

Deucey, I told you. You didn’t have to put nothing down on the deal until he showed you what he could do.

That’s not how I do business.

Joe Dale Bigg shrugged. I want you to have your money back. Hold on, I got it right here—He leaned into the car, reaching for the roll under his buttock.

It ain’t my money. Not anymore it ain’t.

Don’t gimme that, Deucey.

I ain’t giving you anything, Deucey said. And I ain’t taking anything from you either. I got the foaling papers. You’re out of it.

Have you been thinking about that good deal I offered you? Joe Dale Bigg said patiently.

No I haven’t, Deucey said.

Well, I think you better. I’m looking out for your business even if you ain’t. Is this the girl?

What if it is? Deucey said.

Nice little body, not even hardly there—my favorite kind, that’s all. What’s your name, sweetheart?

Margaret Koderer. What’s yours?

He smiled unpleasantly, with his rather beautiful dark red mouth. You like it on the racetrack?

Yeah. Except for all the dirt, Maggie said.

He looked her over carefully. The window purred up and he drove away.

A
MONG MANY UNRULY ACTS
, my dear Maggie, this was certainly your unruliest.

You were aware of yourself fully dressed and standing over her in her little pink silk underpants, the
Telegraph
folded back in your hands and—something new—another
Telegraph
open in her hands. She circled something awkwardly with a pencil.

Yes it was, wasn’t it, she said, and you both smiled.

You were aware of standing over her in her ragged soft sweatshirt and little pink panties, Maggie on her back, with her bare feet up on a stool near the heater. The ugly brown grate hummed along in tiny hysteria, turned up full blast. As long as she had to live in a fish tin she considered it her right to set the thermostat for iguanas and flamingos, and of course for her naked pink self. (Against the flimsy pink membrane of her panties, her naked pink lips pressed, and the skin under the elastic so oddly damp and fatty yet easily creased, like gardenia petals.)

What do you think would be the proper punishment for such unruliness?

I’m sure you know that better than I, she murmured. Almost imperceptibly (but you saw it) her toes pointed a little, and her legs strained tremulously apart—just slightly—saying she was aware of you and more than aware of you—she was in your power.

It was all a kind of theater with her, but you could call her into
it. You were aware—she made you aware—of your superior size, speed and cunning. You were aware of your somewhat gross—
traif
, uncut—but highly prized manhood, biding its confinement a little while longer. You looked down on her in her sweatshirt and little pink panties. It was theater where the two of you met, but, as Plato said of the theater, stronger and truer than life. Suddenly the squalid trailer, with its crooked Venetian blinds and grainy afternoon light, was a schoolroom in some mansion house, hung with purple velvet and gold-tasseled portières.

Take them off and show me. You made a lazy sign—
Omit—
with the one forefinger, and she did as she was told. The panties fell to the floor like a bit of film. She glistened there without touching herself.

May I ask what you mean by such unruliness?

I don’t know. Perhaps I’m simply hopelessly wicked.

You are headstrong.

Yes.

Are you ashamed of yourself?

Yes.

You’re incorrigible.

Yes.

So that you know you require my attention?

Barely audible: Yes.

Then I suppose I have no choice but to correct you. Turn over. Rise up on your knees.

And then you did as you liked with her. It was theater but it bound you together. Afterwards she would be more than a little bad-tempered if you left her tied or held her pinned long enough for her to wake up and see herself like that. It was understandable, and usually you didn’t wish to humiliate her further: You both knew she was your better, but she had sworn herself, yet
again, into your power. You didn’t need to hold her face in it.

Only, this time she had been so egregiously disrespectful, even perfidious: buying that horse. You could have claimed The Mahdi back now—he was still worth the price—if you had that money to spare. Or another way of looking at it: This was a small racetrack with only a couple dozen horses on the grounds worth more than a handful of peanuts. It was by no means inconceivable, or even unlikely, that her racehorse would have to run against your racehorse, and soon. You got up and left her there, tied. Her pink asshole glittered inside its sparse little wreath of whiskers like a
putto’s
singing mouth.

Let me up, she said peevishly. You picked up the
Telegraph
and paced the room.

Try harder to explain to me, you said, what you mean by such unruliness.

What do you mean what do I mean? She sighed. All right, as long as you asked. Jesus, Tommy. You should have put Pelter in for fifteen hundred dollars. I have to find out from the
Telegraph
, yet, he’s in for two grand.

Can’t you see what love for you there was in that? I don’t want to risk him.

But
I
want to risk him, for all our sakes.

Pelter can win for two thousand. Hell, he figures for twenty-five.

We came here to cash a bet. If we don’t cash a bet we’re just—here. Jesus Christ, will you untie me?

What’s wrong with here?

You both looked around the trailer, at the yellow crinkly plastic curtains like chicken skin, at the aluminum stripping hanging down from the door of the sardine-can toilet, at the orange vinyl kitchen chairs with their crooked scars of duct tape, at the blank
frame of a long-gone mirror glued to the wall, its cardboard backing smeared with black smoke-trails of glue.

You’ve got to be kidding. Both of you laughed.

Believe me, you can still cash a bet on Pelter at two grand.

It’s not the same. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? she said bitterly. He’s going to run in the money and then everybody will know how good he is, whether he wins or not. Then we’re stuck.

Maggie, everybody already knows how good he is.

All right. Well, I’m just trying to give myself enough to do so I won’t think about it. So I won’t have to leave, she said.

It was so amazingly brutal you had to sit down. You sank, and then perched rather primly on the edge of the couch, avoiding her tied hands. Out of nowhere like a wind it had come. You were so amazed to hear those words you weren’t even angry at first.

Why would you want to leave? you asked. You’ve noticed I give you a great deal of freedom.

I
have a
great deal of freedom, she said. I wouldn’t say you give it to me.

How can you even think of leaving me? you said, and you heard the torn off note between a whine and a sob, saw in a black flash your infant self, your naked helplessless. You had almost fallen into enemy hands. Just as you were starting to know your way about the place, you felt it shrink back together and cramp and disgorge you, cough you back up with terrible sick violence—the tomb of the lost twin. Did she know what she was doing to you, or had she herself been duped? You leaned to the latter view, but the effect was the same. You had thought her your consort and bride, and she was still that, of course. But now you saw in her, for one moment, the snarling dog at the sealed door, servant of the trolls, the keepers of the mystery.

Surely it’s struck you that I never stayed very long with anyone in the past, she said sullenly.

What does that matter? you said, and now she turned her thousand-curled head and looked at you in surprise. You brought your hands to your face and breathed them. They were steeped,
steeped
was the right word, in the vaguely marine, amphibious smell of her. Now they circled her slender neck. Do you have any idea how easily I could kill you? you asked. She didn’t answer but kept looking at you rather wakefully over her shoulder. You were scaring her. She didn’t want to call it that but her nostrils flared with indignation.

You tightened your hands. Her neck was small as a cat’s. One swift hard jerk is all it would take, you know, with you tied like that.

Undoubtedly, she agreed, the voice calm and cold.

She was looking at you, not like theater this time, not like rich dark nightmare lined with fur that you both inhabited. No, this time from outside. Using that fake objectivity that human beings use to seal each other out, so that, for example, they can sit next to each other without speaking on a bus. Like a cheap newspaper picture. You became aware of bad design, washed out grays and wooly whites, tedious dots per square inch. You were suddenly bored with the whole scene. Your hands fell to your sides.