Lord of Misrule (31 page)

The worm white kid went by with Lord of Misrule, whom outriders had finally cornered in the backstretch. The small black horse pranced loopily, somehow off whenever he moved—could he be nerved in all four feet? As they passed through the crowd the kid, showing off, snatched at the shank, the horse threw up his head and by chance his liver-flecked, oddly malicious eyes swept over Maggie. She felt an electrical crawling at the back of her neck. He was so far past the point where other horses quit that he had come out the other side. They would have to shoot him to stop him. But you see, I do have to live, Margaret explained to Deucey. I do want the world. I can’t die yet. I need to find out how it all ends.

Then there was nothing left for her to see there, no one left for her to talk to. Two men from the spit box loafed politely in the gap, waiting for her. Slow as she could drag him, she started up the gravel path with Pelter, towards the test barn. Pelter was in a fine mood, and why not—he’d had an easy outing, he’d just been getting going when the race ended, and his blood was silky with bute. He blew gusts that smelled like flowers out his handsome nostrils, shook his head, maps of rich sweat broke out along both his flanks. His winner’s number dangled under his throatlatch. The two men from the spit box had hung it there. Now they scuffed along, one at his head, one at his tail—Lyle and Johnny were their names, she recalled—the Odom brothers, supposedly on the lookout for cheats, though they themselves were cheats, somebody’s cousins from the secretary’s office, or worse. Were they what you bought, if you bought the spit box? Who knew? They were ordinary looking country boys, round leathery faces and short weak chins, one blond and going bald, one dark with a stringy pompadour. The dark one looked sullen, the fair one, smug, but they had faces like gravediggers, not murderers.

Whether they were crooks or not, she knew she was dead, at least as far as the purse went. So much for getaway money: For a race she hadn’t even meant to win, she would come up positive. She could make it easy for the boys and drop a tablet of phenylbutazone in their specimen cup right now. Plop. She had one on her: ran a finger down her pocket, felt the carbuncle of the big white horse pill studding her hipbone. By now bute would likely be found in every cc of blood or urine the spit box took at this low-rent bullring—or would be if they bothered to test for it. This time they were sure to test for it. Weren’t they? Of course, lost money was only money, shame was moonshine and maya, and getting ruled off the track would be a relief. It was the other kind of death that had her worried.

So she was in no hurry. She even hoped that Pelter would stretch and piss on the gravel path like a nervous filly, done before the boys could get the plastic wrap off the cup. Then maybe she’d be safe in the test barn all night, walking round and round and round behind the razor-wire fence, letting the horse lead her while she slept with her eyes open. But of course no such thing would happen. Pelter was a schooled gelding with exemplary manners. They walked slowly on. Some bettors had had enough. Their automobiles, leaving early, mashed over grass and pebbles in the ruined meadows that were overflow parking lots. Headlights swept the path, then it was dark and quiet again as only a racetrack is quiet—munching, scratching, glimmering. In the dome of false dusk over the still-lit racetrack, a million bugs were whirling, and from time to time, slow and studious by comparison, came the fluttering swoop of a bat. The eighth race went off. Surge of voices like a big rolling surf—the rest of the bettors, at it again.

This here hoss bought me my ’56 Chevy pickup, the blond
brother suddenly remarked to the dark brother, over Maggie’s head. Yep. Pelter, the Darkesville Stalker. First Horse of West Virginia. The truck that would not die.
Good
little truck. Blue. Was that the one had a hole in the floor by the gearshift where you could see the road going by? the dark brother asked. I remember that freezing piece of blue shit. Well now. You go on and be that way, said the blond brother, rolling the ends of his mustache in his fingers. I reckon quite a few people are in a sour mood because they lost money tonight. But not me. The dark brother said: Aw, you bet like a girl.
Put twenty dollars on Pelter to show, please, Mr. Two-Tie, sir
. You bet like a damn girl and except for a miracle you can’t win enough to buy you a grease job.

The blond brother turned to Maggie. Who’s signing the card on this horse? You work for that Hansel fellow? The brothers exchanged sly grins. I can sign, she said, starting to shiver in her little striped jersey. The black damp rising from the river had rolled away the heat like a stone. Is them goose pamples? said the blond brother said, running a finger along her arm. She drew her arm away. I wasn’t planning to be here this late, she said. Let’s get it over with.

On they walked around the rim of the test barn, Maggie and Pelter as slow as they could go, the brothers strolling behind. She peered into the glinting, clanking dark beyond the test compound and asked herself why she had medicated the horse for a race he couldn’t win. She didn’t seem to know anymore how an animal would act if required to live on the racetrack in its own nature. In fact she wished she, too, were padded right now in a good gray cloud of drugs—a dome of false dusk with Gothic bats in it, a soft pearl of the mind. She feared disfigurement. Death next. Pain least. But she feared pain too.

She was in no hurry to go back to Barn Z, but Pelter was. He
drank, they walked a turn, he drank again, and before she could whistle, the horse was pissing into the steaming sand. Then there was nothing else to do but to head for the gate of the compound. They passed a tiny office lined with dusty bottles where a light was shining. The long flickering fluorescent tube hung a greenish mask on a small man hunched at a desk. In front of him was an open fifth of some off-brand bourbon. She saw the familiar lariats on his cowboy boots. It was Kidstuff.

Howdy, Miss Margaret, he said.

What the hell are you doing here? she whispered.

Filling in for my friend Rollie. I believe there was some horse he wanted to play.

This place is crooked as a dog’s hind leg, Maggie said.

It’s just for the one race, Kidstuff smiled. It was a special race. He passed her the open bottle. She took a swig and so did he. It was clearly not his first.

Tell me, is Indian Mound Downs going to send my urine sample to the lab with its usual diligence?

Now why would you ask that question? Kidstuff said. Yall haven’t been trying that new B vitamin out on this horse, have you?

Certainly not, Maggie said, although I must say at his advanced age it would be a kindness.

Kidstuff cleared his throat. I believe the racetrack will handle that test with just as much care as every other day. Nobody in racing needs a positive.

I might not be in racing too much longer, Maggie said.

Anyhow, plenty of old geezers liked Pelter in that race. Not everybody was as smart as we was. He smiled again, his good teeth glowing like lightning bugs in the queer green light.

Kidstuff, if I make it off this racetrack alive, I will always think of you fondly, she said.

O? Why is that?

Because you were the best of them, she said.

He looked at her sadly and she noticed for the first time—but maybe it was the light—that his handsome face was drawn into fine lines by something more than hard weather, and the whites of his eyes were the color of putty.

I hope I ain’t the best you can do, Maggie, he said. I’m a-going down the drain.

M
EDICINE ED, LIMING DOWN
Little Spinoza’s stall, looked for the frizzly girl to come back with Pelter, and meanwhile he listened to the crazy talk of the young fool, the whapping of tie chains against the wall and the bashing and thrashing of the big horse still bleeding in his lungs and tryna catch air. Tommy Hansel had shut hisself and the horse up in they stall over on the far side of the barn. Medicine Ed pressed his ear against the wall to make out what he could. He fear to hear them and fear even more not to hear them—what it might mean. He was scared to the roots of his hair, and woolgathered all in all as to what the night was trying to tell him.
I went to the goofer and even so the prince of darkness taken my horse and my money, I never see the gray gentleman but I feel him all around me
. And all this while out the back of his eye he have to watch that midnight blue gangster car purring like a big black cat in the dirt road, set back a little ways for once from the light pole and the thin skirt of light it throw round the back gate. Of course he couldn’t see through the dark glass who was in it, but he could guess. Medicine Ed raked and strewed white Zs of bitter lime about the stall until his eyes teared up, and all the while out the side of his eye he watched for any roll of the black glass, any hand or either long small barrel out the window or the door.

And that was how he come to seen it at the last hose of Barn
Z, the hose pulled tight round the far corner of the barn and the river of water pooling and muddling there where no horse was. He had more sense than to walk round the shedrow and eyeball that in the open. He went to his tack room, leaned to the chink in the back wall and tried to make out what it might mean. It was that yellow taxicab from downstairs of his apartment in Carbonport that Mr. Two-Tie use to rode around in. Roy’s Taxicab, from the lunchroom, what it was, with all four doors flapped open in the skrimpy light of the darkest corner of the fence, getting hosed up and down like a hot horse, only it wasn’t no horse. The soap bubbles crawled to the big puddle by the back gate in a rusty fuzzy line, and before he could even see the color of blood in that foam he had a bad ugly feeling why they would wash the car that way with the doors wide open. Then he seen the hose run inside, the low pinkish waterfall across the running board and he knew. He knew what happened to Mr. Two-Tie. To the creeper crawlers in the roots of his hair he knew what he knew: the Devil ain’t taken his money, the Devil don’t need his money, for his money was all markers in Mr. Two-Tie’s pocket. Now Mr. Two-Tie is gone and Little Spinoza is gone. The young fool’s reason is gone, soon his horses be gone, and his woman too, and Medicine Ed’s home with them. But his bankroll still wrapped up tight as head cabbage in the Peoples Savings and Trust of Wheeling. His money, not much, but yet and still not nothing—the same like it was before. And hisself alive and working, working forever, world without end.
O god, soul of the world, foe of the Devil who taken the young fool’s reason, so help me god, I have learned my lesson, stop now, spare my life and spare out them others life and I will never practice medicine no more
.

M
AGGIE AND PELTER
set off across the backside, Maggie crawling with nerves, Pelter in need of his dinner. On both sides of the fence, things were alive: above the racetrack, the lights had faded to a half-world and losers streamed for the exits, shedding their dead tickets as they went. Now the headlights of a thousand snarling autos crisscrossed the path that she and Pelter picked their way along, while up and down the shedrows the long, dove gray, grainy beams sifted in and out of each other like long tall ghosts. The losers in their automobiles—Margaret trusted they narrowed their bloodshot eyes at all they saw. She felt almost safe walking here.

Inside the fence, too, the long barns were alive. Here and there hot horses were still walking, buckets squeaked, hoses hissed on and off, nozzles burst into rhinestone fans and the soapy water that grooms scraped off their horses hit the dirt with a rude clack like a hand across a face. In every shedrow a stall or two glowed yellow, and bodies, plenty of bodies, crossed back and forth in front of them. Alive.

All the shedrows were alive, but most of all Barn Z. At the far corner of the transient barn, blocking the last dirt lane before the outside fence, with its back wide open and its furrowed silver carpet rolled out, was the van that was
not
like a Chinese jewel box, that was in fact unmarked, pocked and dirty white, its Nebraska
license plate screwed on at a tilt and dog-eared in one corner. Open, empty, black inside, it waited for its seedy royal traveler, and even so, even after the miserable race he had run, it
was
a gleaming lacquered box of red-gold letters. Lord of Misrule was up on his blistered fetlocks and on his way in, the worm white kid swatting absently at his rump with a rolled-up comic book. His shoes scrabbled at the frets, green sparks flew and all of a sudden one silver arc shot out, like a spring from a bad toy, and caught the worm white boy in the belly. Bastid! the boy jumped backwards and fluted half soprano. What you get for sleeping, said Nebraska, laughing, in the cab. He coulda ruined me for life. End of the line for you, old man. Aaanh, one of youse is enough.