Lord of Misrule (21 page)

S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
Medicine Ed seen the frizzly hair girl laying there in the straw in Pelter’s old stall, with her arms folded under her head and her face long as the busride home. She was dreaming on the cobwebs up by the roof, looking at the long beards that hung out of last year’s nests, and that’s when a hurtful remembrance come over him, no rest, no peace. He thought of that tough little filly Broomstick he worked on at Santa Anita, a ink-black two-year-old they were schooling for the Venus, a grass runner with ankles like champagne glasses. He used to whistle for her whenever he come on the shedrow, she would poke her head out the stall and nod her head up and down at him,
where you been
? At night he liked to drink and and lay down in the stall with her in the good smelling straw. She was the onliest horse he ever felt tied to in that way. Then he got in a deep hole—shooting crap was his downfall in them days, when he still drank—and he went to the goofer powder for the third time. He was in the van with Broomstick when she snapped her leg, coming home from her last race before the Venus, a tightening mile she win going away at Hollywood Park.

He could tell the frizzly hair girl that a groom might have that feeling in his life for one horse and one horse only. Then you put it away. For it tore out a piece of you to care for a horse like that. Only, last night he disremembered that he was ever that tangled
up in a horse. After she lose Pelter, she was sitting on the edge of the shedrow, with her feet dragging in the dirt road. Just staring at the white steam curling off the dung pile by the back gate and the cheap horses going round and round in the dark on Joe Dale Bigg’s hot-walking machine. Even with them blindman dark glasses hiding her eyes, Medicine Ed could read her mind: she was asking herself what she be doing here on the racetrack at all. It was a better question than what she worry him with every day: has he ever rode a horse and what barns has he worked for and where is his people. Last night she got on his last nerve with her sad and draggyfied face. Ain’t they got the win purse and the claim check for more than what they paid for the horse? What was the use of crying?

And meanwhile the young fool was fixing to claim back the red horse, The Mahdi, in the sixth, and so high on hisself he ain’t hardly notice about Pelter. He run up and down sparking, and for once he want to do all the work in the barn with his own soft white hand. The frizzly hair girl had him a stall ready round the back side of the barn, turned out it was no need behind Pelter getting claimed, but the young fool taken the far stall for the red horse anyhow. Maybe it was to stay with everything fresh, for luck, or maybe he just want to dwell on the other side of the barn where he don’t have to look at the girl.

Medicine Ed could understand. One look at her and a man could not feel satisfied. One look at her, the way she scrooched down on the curb of the shedrow and eyeballed that smoking dung pile in the ice cold dark, surely would cast the young fool down just when he was feeling lucky. A man like to believe his raggedy-patch days is finally behind him. Just to think it is like a cunjure on nature to do his bidding. Well, one look at such as her and a man could get down and lose his strong belief and begin
to linger and feel helpless as a newborn babe. So the young fool wouldn’t look at her. And which Medicine Ed could understand it: the young fool have to praise his luck while he can.

How do you like that, Ed, we got The Mahdi back, The Mahdi, Hansel was laughing, and he laid twenty dollars on Medicine Ed right then and they smacked the plank. Then the young fool give the red horse a bath and blanket and walk him. He fed him that hot mash and whistled off key to bring down his piss, and for an hour it was a lot of busy white steam rising offen the north side of the barn up to the stars. And meanwhile the frizzly hair girl setting there on the south side in the cold with not one word to nobody.

That was last night. Today she come on the shedrow at five in the morning and work like any other day, only she don’t say much. Then in the afternoon Medicine Ed see her laying down in Pelter’s stall, and suddenly he can’t feel satisfied.
She doing all right
, he told Two-Tie last night. But last night Two-Tie was saying he could get that horse back for her. It was some hope by today the old gentleman has come home to his senses. Medicine Ed don’t want to study on such craziness. But still she is Two-Tie blood kin. He ought not to leave her there without a kind word.

He stand behind the door in the tack room, peering through the crack, trying to think up a word of comfort he might say. But nothing come to mind before the midnight blue steel-top Cadillac noses up the frozen dirt road between shedrows, crackling the skin of ice on all them puddles. The Sedan de Ville stops on a slant so nobody can’t drive by, going or either coming. Then the driver’s purple window sinks into the door. Joe Dale alone and driving. He leans out over his big gold watch. He smiles and blinks his eyes into the stall where the frizzly hair girl is laying down and he say, Time on your hands, eh? This the first one you
lost? She don’t say nothing. No pain like that first one. Say, can I ask you something?

What?

Medicine Ed say this for the young fool’s woman, she don’t give a damn if it is Joe Dale. She don’t like him. Her voice say
you ain’t nothing
.

D’Ambrisi don’t know what to do with that horse, he say. So suppose I hear something like the horse goes off his feed. Can I come around and ask you what to do with him? Which I know it ain’t exactly kosher but … He shrugged.

Medicine Ed squints through the crack behind the tack room door at Joe Dale Bigg, tryna see what the young girl see. Gold watch and diamond finger rings, fifteen-dollar barber job on his big head, high on top, brushed not greased. Everything high class. But she don’t like him. What kind of idiot do you think I am? she says.

Hey, you care about that horse, ain’t it?

The frizzly hair girl don’t answer.

I mean, who can say what keeps a horse running at ten years old?

Nine, she say.

Class can’t explain it. Science can’t explain it. Alls I know—old Hickok had it. You had it. But for goddamn sure D’Ambrisi don’t have it. It’s going to be all downhill from here for Pelter. If Breezy don’t cripple him, maybe some young ladies’ riding school will buy him cheap. He’s a nice horse, ain’t it? Good manners?

He’s a very nice horse.

So maybe he gets a few more years of trail rides and virgin twats around his neck. It ain’t a bad life. He eyeball her. Naaa, come to think of it, the society girls will never go for Pelter. He’s got a Jewish nose.

Go to hell, the frizzly hair girl say.

Joe Dale laughed. I wonder what got into D’Ambrisi anyway. He’s no horseman and he even knows it. He’s gonna wish he never heard of that horse. Maybe he’s sorry already. You want I should talk to him?

What do you mean? Talk to him about what? the girl say real slow. She nosing round the bait now. Leave it alone, Medicine Ed say into her.

D’Ambrisi’s an old gom-bah, Joe Dale say. He already knows he’s got a problem. I mean the horse is in jail for a month. He comes to me cause he don’t know what to do with the horse, so now I’m twisting his arm, I tell him, get off the horse right away, he gets his dough back—how he’s gonna say no to a nice young girl like you?

He’s a friend of yours?

Works for me sometimes. This and that. Who didn’t use to work for me around here? Hey—Joe Dale start to blinking like he just had him a idea, something he ain’t thought of it before. Hey, baby, get in the car. We’ll go talk to the Breeze right now.

Go where? the girl say. What barn is he in? I’ll walk over there and meet you.

Naaa, ya see, Breezy was thinking about turning him out for two, three weeks, long as he’s in jail. Let him cool out, eat grass. He ain’t running the horse for no twenty-five hundred. I don’t think so! Even Breezy ain’t that dumb.

Go where? she say again. Where is he?

So I tell Breezy he can use a stall at my place if he wants. He took me up on it.

Pelter is at your farm? She’s in the door of the stall now, swaying back and forth in her blindman glasses. Medicine Ed think she taking a caution, but no.

I can get him back for you, Joe Dale tell her.

Don’t get in that dark window automobile with that gangster, you know he has hurt people, Medicine Ed try to say into her, but she ain’t listening. The more she know she ought not to go near that car the color of night, the closer she drift. The door shut behind her with a soft chunk like a ice box and she gone. Behind them purple windows Medicine Ed can’t see nothing. The midnight blue Sedan de Ville crush over thin-ice puddles and round the corner. Behind Barn L, then Barn J, he catch the Cadillac rolling slow towards the front gate. Medicine Ed light out for the pay phone back of the track kitchen, fast as his stick leg can wamble.

N
OT GOOD, EDWARD
. Not good. When was this?

Only just now.

This is not good news, Two-Tie said. This ain’t good news at all, because D’Ambrisi goes over there himself this afternoon to pick up the horse, as soon as he organizes a van. It won’t take him long because I happen to know that D’Ambrisi is hot to get out from under that horse any way he can. I hear he has talked to certain important people out of town and he don’t want Pelter no more. He don’t want his name on those foaling papers even one more night. Have you seen him yet?

I ain’t seen him.

Well, you will. The horse is coming back to Hansel and the girl. And to you, Edward.

Medicine Ed was silent.

Naturally Joe Dale won’t like it when he finds out he has to get off that horse. You sure they went to his farm?

That’s what he say.

Did Joe Dale have his boys with him?

Wasn’t nobody in the car but Joe Dale. And her.

Thank you, Edward.

Two-Tie reached in back of his twenty-volume set of
The Book of Knowledge
for his Browning 9mm, and called down at the Ritzy Lunch for Roy, of Roy’s Taxicab. He went to the back window
and fumbled with the rod of the dusty venetian blind; his small fat hand was trembling. He hadn’t touched a gun in eighteen months, since he’d backed off making the circuit of race meetings. He had never carried a gun in town. It was starting to rain. Already when Roy pulled his cab around a mound of brown paper boxes into Two-Tie’s alley, the boxes were slumping and the rain lay on the dirty ice of the parking lot in glowing gray sheets. He got down his umbrella. Elizabeth went to the door and, refusing to make way for him, eyeballed the door knob insistently. Not today, Elizabeth. Go lay down. She didn’t move. O for god’s sake. All right. Come on, he said, knowing it was a bad idea. Obviously, if anything happened to him, Elizabeth had no future. The fact was, neither of them had much future, even if they never ran into trouble like this. It was also true that two hours in Roy’s backseat in the cold left Elizabeth lame behind for a week. When they crossed the Powhatan Point bridge she was still looking around at her bony tush and turning clumsy circles back there, trying to get comfortable.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
she lost Pelter, two days after you claimed back The Mahdi, you noticed she wasn’t there and you went looking for her. In fact she had been remote and somewhat morose ever since you came back from the city with the money. Now that you had The Mahdi back, you could afford to be generous. It was time to tell her that, beside her, the women of the caravanseries were as the dust that blows across the highway. She meant more than any rapacious blonde you met on the road who offered you a loose thousand or two and her husband’s bed for a night. She, your twin, had your soul in her keeping, pinned at her waist in her little rose sachet.

When she didn’t show up in the trailer at noon you went looking for her. But she wasn’t straightening the tack room or mucking a stall or hauling water or walking some fractious horse, she was nowhere. You looked in the track kitchen. Lately she had been flirting there after the morning works with that little blacksmith Kidstuff, a bona fide cowboy from Louisiana, former rodeo clown, red brown, probably half Indian, who drank a bit. You liked her to flirt, and more than to flirt—to tempt herself with these good fellows. You liked the general ripple of nerves when you dangled her in front of them, and the surge of muscle when you reeled her back. But she wasn’t in the track kitchen, though Kidstuff was there, sprawled in an orange dinette chair
in his cowboy boots, with a toothpick traveling up and down his very white teeth.