Lord of Misrule (30 page)

The bell rings, the window is closed, the race is off.

N
OW IT ALL FALLS INTO PLACE
. Before, you thought you knew, and felt your way along blindly. And though this world is a black tunnel of love where the gods admonished you to search without rest for your lost twin, it’s also haired all over with false pointers, evil instructions, lost-forever dead-ends. Thus you let Joe Dale Bigg, alias Joe Dale Biglia, get his fingers in your pie. And he gave you (maybe he didn’t mean to, but she liked you better than she was supposed to) Natalie, the New Rochelle auto parts chainstore divorcee, with her big pink open mouth like a toilet seat. And she got you tangled in that New York money, and now her hoodlum son wants to take you out and Joe Dale wouldn’t complain if he did. So much for the things of this world. But things of the world have this distinction: they end. They can only chase you so far, then they end, whereas you’ll go on. You
know
, you know so much you’re your own private Southland Electric, you’re all energy, you no longer need food or sleep. The animals talk to you, no intermediaries needed, no condition books, no clockers, no vets. They tell you what they need.

The Mahdi wants this race
. You recognize that he is out against his old enemy, that this is an epic confrontation and he may lose. This world itself may end. The frontier between the worlds awaits all heroes. You go for broke, both of you. You’ve put every dollar you had, or could borrow from Natalie, on The Mahdi. It’s good
against evil, The Mahdi, the expected one, redeemer of this world, your representative, against Lord of Misrule, the knacker from Nebraska, the Devil himself; and ranged all in between are sundry demons, lost souls, underlings and benighted ones. Including
her
. You know them all. Everything talks to you. The messages square. Everyone fits in the picture. You could write the book and the glossary of the book, forget the glossary, the fucking encyclopedia, all twenty volumes, but there’s no time. Or rather, there is a time for the things of this world, which is now:
The Mahdi wants this race
. So you give it to him. You let him run.

The jockey, Earlie, has his exact instructions.
Drop his head
. The boy looked at you cross-eyed. In this race? You sure? Before, you always said to him: Horse has got to run again. This time: Like there’s no tomorrow, because there ain’t. You smiled. He got the picture. And anyway, the horse knows what to do.

The Mahdi, redeemer of this world, is a perfect actor in the gate. The gods so design that he has your lucky number, the number of
her
beauties and
her
sorrows: 7. And he has the blessed early speed to cross the racetrack in front of the noble old bums in the middle. But in this world the Devil draws a better post position. The Devil is tight with Racing Secretary Chenille, he runs stall man Smithers, Joe Dale Bigg is one of his pet flunkies, ergo, Lord of Misrule gets
the
post position, God,
echod
,
ONE
, 1. Disguised as God, the Devil is pretty damn cool in the gate too.

Her
horse has the witch’s number, 9. She would have liked to do better—she isn’t a bad witch, she is only a stupid young witch but she has been
taken
in. She has
taken
your horse and now he is her horse, Pelter, a spirit of mischief, neither good nor bad. In this kind of contest, he has no chance.

But Spinoza, the three horse,
TRINITY
, could figure, out of the 3 hole. God likes this horse. It isn’t His horse, it isn’t the redeemer
of this world, but He’s always had a soft spot for that number.

Everything else is bums. Underlings. Dust. Assorted lost souls.

Ehe bell rings. (You recognize that bell: it’s a school bell, Falls Elementary, Trempeleau, Wisconsin. Miss Swearingen is there, she was always one of the good, she calls out: Tommy? Tommy Hansel? You smile at her but are careful not to say:
Here.
)

The bell rings. The gates to each little jail cell fold away. The Mahdi digs in right out of the gate, going to where the Devil is, Lord of Misrule, a shiny black beetle of a horse, running along the rail. In fact he’s almost leaning on that rail. His action is rocky, jerky like an old-time silent movie, something is wrong there but he stays up anyhow, easy, no effort, he’s floating above four broken legs is why—if you didn’t believe in the Devil before, wait till you see the corpse he’s running around in now! Never mind, The Mahdi is there, he’s got his teeth in the Devil’s neck by the clubhouse turn, but, face it, getting there took something out of the redeemer of this world. Now he’s got to work.

Something, a comet, shoots up in front of them, it’s the big roan mare with the number 2 of a bad marriage (irreconcilable differences) getting it over with, burning herself out to a pinkish gray clinker. She has a little bit of terrified speed and, amazingly, she’s still up a length when they come out of the turn into the back stretch, not coming anymore, just hanging. Mahdi wants to keep the Devil honest and press the pace but the hero has come too far, he’s a big red muscleman glittering with oily sweat, the Devil looks small and cool, but as for The Mahdi it’s all he can do. The pace ain’t breaking any records.

Five lengths back is the whole middle world, Sudanese and all the old platers, the solid citizens, the moderately corrupt—a whole platoon of them churning up a bunker of dust along the rail, out there to collect their only slightly dirty two hundred a
piece—and
her
horse, Pelter, on the outside. And stuck behind them, not that he’s trying to get through, wrapped up in himself in that holy way he has under his tadpole-girl jockey, the 3 horse,
TRINITY
, Little Spinoza. The gray mare sinks back through the pack like snow when she finally dies at the half, then the dull burghers drop out of it too, one by one. Except Pelter.
Her
Pelter. At the far turn he’s still camped there four lengths back of the hung match between Misrule and The Mahdi, not trying, just being a spectator at the last great contest.

And now here goes. Little Spinoza wakes out of his dream and runs, bounds, leaps like a holy fool after the Devil and his harrower. Earlie brings up his viper-entwined stick and busts on The Mahdi, reminding him why he is here, and the expected one opens his stride and surges in front of Lord of Misrule at the quarter pole, gets his whole body by and then something is wrong, he bunches oddly or crumples in the last turn, some kind of spasm maybe only you can see, and hits the stretch trying to die. You feel his pain. You have sent him too far. (But of course you knew all along you had sent him too far, him and yourself too. Courage, son. All we can lose is this world.)

Still, dying is hard. You feel his pain. He wants to die, he needs to die, needs to back up, has nowhere to go. The Devil is right behind him and won’t slow down, and on the Devil’s right side at the sixteenth pole is Little Spinoza,
trinity
, still coming. That crazy little one-run Speculation grandson that lost his nuts before your eyes, who you knew could figure but didn’t ride a nickel on, comes driving, driving, driving. You hear a sob and
she
is standing there next to you at the rail, crying for the glory of it, or maybe she played the wrong horse too.

So the Devil goes down after all, you are thinking, roughly satisfied. Though the redeemer doesn’t pick up the win, still he’s
outdone himself, used up the Devil and died a hero—and there it is, the Mahdi’s backwards fade—why then to—

And then he does go down. The small, glittering, patched-together black devil, Lord of Misrule, rolling, skidding in the dust, scarred black legs flailing. Because the dying Mahdi has backed into him. Bumped him. And Lord of Misrule, only a phantom horse, twisted together in haste in the Devil’s workshop out of abortionists’ black wire hangers and the patent leather raincoats of pimps and whores, can’t possibly move like a living thing, change leads, get out of the way. Down, down he goes and rolls away from the rail—into Little Spinoza, who goes down too.

Only Pelter, the Darkesville Stalker, never in a hurry, laying five lengths back, watching the show, is still on his feet. The boy takes him wide around the two horses thrashing in the dirt. He crosses the finish line.

Sudanese and the pack of venerable routers straggle in.

Lord of Misrule gets up, shakes off, and, riderless, jogs across the finish line. What can you expect from the Devil? He looks no worse than when he started.

The ambulance comes onto the track. It’s for the horse of the three feckless innocents, the acey-deucey hag, the ancient black groom, and
her
. He’s finished, Little Spinoza—you heard the crack like a rifle shot, see the flopping bloody wedge at the end of the cannon bone.

But now you run for the gap. Earlie leads the Mahdi, bug-eyed, limping, embossed with glistening veins, and bleeding from his great red nostrils.

S
HE WAS IN THE
winner’s circle when Little Spinoza became a soul, his body hauled away, his eye gone out, a great warm death in a horse ambulance going to the processor. Medicine Ed, so old and dried out he couldn’t cry, was the only one left to stand behind the screen they folded around the horse, to lean on his stiff leg and see the horse off. Margaret saw only the flapping canvas, the squeaking winch, the vets in seersucker, the hurrying ambulance drivers who knew the way to the place behind the maintenance plant in their sleep. Meanwhile bettors of all shapes and sizes crowded the rail, so well paid by the sight of the dying horse on the track that for once they forgot to swear at the jockeys. (It was always the jockeys they blamed.) Then more commotion—The Mahdi jogged through the gap, nostrils bubbling red, trying not to drown in his own blood. Big and red and now, in a way, more ordinary than ever—a cheap wreck of a horse, being led away to his barn, maybe for the last time. She heard Tommy’s weird singsong: All part of the plan. From where I sit, to lose is to win. Who was he talking to? No one she could see.

Then another sight she would not soon forget—Alice Nuzum, who didn’t know where she was, crawling on her hands and knees in a blind circle in the gritty blond dirt of the finish line. Two valets lifted her off the track by her elbows. Deucey, kneading her mesh cap, faithful as a dog—or you might say the only real
gentleman there—followed them away. Would care for Alice. Deucey always did the heartfelt thing.
I never been afraid of dying. This world ain’t been so good to me I can’t stand the thought of leaving it
. But I can’t leave it yet, Margaret explained to Deucey in her mind—as she watched them disappear through the little green door to the jockeys’ weight room at the back of the paddock. I
am
attached to this world, she said, and when she looked up again in the winner’s circle, there was Joe Dale. Maggie stood at Pelter’s head, holding the shank like a groom, while Joe Dale stood at his tail, looking fixedly at her, his arms folded across his thick chest, a bit of gold glittering inside the open collar of his black polo shirt, his legs planted apart in lemon silk slacks, his face unreadable. The photographer took him for the trainer. The flashbulb popped, with Joe Dale still in the picture.

She must have blinked up too grimly at Jojo. The jockey began to speak: We wasn’t even trying, he whined, I never called on him but he wasn’t that far out of it and then it opened up and he just strolled across the finish. She wanted to say,
Schlemiel, I can’t even count on you to lose when our two lives depend on it
, but she knew he was telling the truth. Jojo had surely bet his pushke on Nebraska like everybody else. Forget it, she said. Jojo slid down from the horse, took his saddle and slunk away.

Joe Dale was still staring at her with an oddly empty face. I’ll catch you later, baby, he finally said. I’m going to try not to waste you. I’m going to try to keep each part of this thing in the right box where it belongs. I’m going to give you a chance to work your way out of the deep hole you’re in. Then he walked away in his slacks that were sleek but puckered at the hip—just a little too tight. Maggie looked around for someone, but all the others, Deucey, Tommy, Alice, Medicine Ed, were seeing to their horses, or themselves.