Lord of Misrule (34 page)

Finally everything came together
. The deep blue car with a silver top was a magic car, you were called to go different places and it was there to take you. You had your pitchfork, to symbolize
your victory over the forces of darkness. And you had your book—it was the scrapbook of her recipe columns,
Menus by Margaret
. You could refer to it for anything. Sometimes it seemed to be making fun of you, new pages kept appearing every time you opened it, new lines, but on the whole it was on your side.

But why didn’t you ever tell me it was a magic book? That’s why I don’t exactly trust you, you don’t always tell me everything, do you, Maggie? So it’s good I’ve learned to get along without you now
.

You had your book and your pitchfork and you drove and drove in your magic car. In a dark woods you came to a road that went over a bridge with a lion on each side of it and you knew, because you looked in the book and saw
MARGARET MEETS THE KING OF THE JUNGLE
(it was a recipe for barbecue sauce) that you should turn here. You came to a big barn and went in. It was full of animals lying down sleepy and almost dead—calves, bulls, cows, even a couple of goats. You touched them and they rose again. One by one they came back to life. A man opened the door with a bird gun in his hands, wearing a striped robe. Prometheus? he said, and you knew he was right.
I am
, you said. Then he disappeared and possibly he called the cops because when you came to the lions again in your magic car the police were blocking the road. You knew nothing could hurt you. You drove off the bridge. You woke up here. You think the cops might have put something inside your brain when they sewed up your face.

But it isn’t a bad place. Well, there’s something queer about the toilets, a funny green light in them like they’re trying to draw your guts out. (And the cigarettes she brought you—this you didn’t tell her—they were another way of sucking your insides out. You had to throw them away.) But you can live here for now. You have a lot to think about—why you were chosen for various
things, like the trip that landed you here. After what you’ve been through, you need rest.

And you can go now, Maggie, since I see you don’t believe me. I’m only telling you a hundredth of what happened. But it doesn’t matter what you think. I was there! I heard! I know! The one good thing is, I’m a complete person now, both halves, which I never was before. I’m a finished man, at home in my skin—but tired, so tired I might sleep till the world ends or they let me out—whichever comes first
.

T
O NO ONE BUT HERSELF
she said it was a kind of luck after all, what had happened. It was lucky that Joe Dale had ended up dead, and luckier still that she hadn’t had to kill him herself. Not that she would have easily found the nerve to kill him, or the equipment, but just as this world came to feel like an unbearably tight squeeze with Joe Dale and her both in it, Tommy stepped in and took care of that for her. And then it was lucky that, if Tommy had to kill Joe Dale, he killed him when he was out of his mind, so that they just put Tommy in the place he was headed for anyway. Granted, now they would keep him rather longer in that place, but that could be all to the good. She did not forget that Tommy too had once flirted with the idea of killing her, had even ruminated on this course with his hands around her neck. Even though he had decided against it, one had not felt entirely safe in the bastion of his caprice. And that had been for merely thinking about deserting him—in the end she had been mentally packing to leave. So in some ways it was lucky, for her, at least, that he was where he was.

It was even a kind of luck to have seen it happen. But should she have seen it coming? Shouldn’t she have known by instinct
which man of hers could lose his mind, or by the same token which man was as stoutly framed in the confines of his senses as she was in hers? It was the racetrack that had thrown her off. What did she know from horseplayers? Tommy had seemed too rich in venerable and exotic ways to self-destruct to have any need of madness. Gambling, she had judged, as ancient in the culture as grapes and barley, would keep him safe. In Tacitus the Germans gamble themselves into slavery with a laugh. They don’t lose their reason, never having had any to begin with. And that was Tommy too. He was a German from up in the woods and coulees of Wisconsin. He had that spinning empty place in him, true, but he was magnetic and handsome and women were drawn to him whatever he did. Even if he never made money, women would do his work for him, keep him afloat. Why should he go crazy when he could just gamble himself, and them, down the drain?

If he had gambled himself into slavery, she would—might—have gone along. But he was not going to Rome in chains, stark naked except for his little fur cape and Swabian topknot. He had gone crazy—all the way mad—he had gone off his head and left her behind. He had made the world over so that it all made shining sense, but only he could see it. As for the racetrack, they had both lost that. And she had lost him. Why didn’t she weep?

That he could slip that border alone, and completely—she admired him. She felt she had seen wonders. She had no right to cry. What had become of Tommy was as immense, as terrible and final as a volcano or an earthquake. She almost envied him. She hadn’t seen it coming and it had gotten quite away from her. She must never have understood Tommy at all.

She made it a project to get to know the new Tommy in the hospital, though she could only get in to see him every third Saturday, if that. And it was curious how he thought he didn’t
want to know her now, almost as if she—his twin—had been one of the confusions he needed to put behind him. It was strange, too, that he didn’t seem to miss her, when he must be lonely as a planet in that place. But she knew he needed some human tie, whether he knew it or not.

His eyes even in the dim light of the visiting cell were electric, shedding almost visible beams, and there was a tremor in the eyelids like the buzz of fly wings, regular but too fast to see or count—maybe it was the medication they had him on, but from where she sat it was like observing the spouting eye of an hallucination. She thought she was watching madness create its world atom by atom, or pixel by pixel.

If he asked her to leave before visiting ended at four, she would head north to the Mound from the state hospital, in time to catch the eighth or ninth race before driving east over the mountains. By now Medicine Ed had the horse back running for fifteen hundred dollars, often on a Saturday night. She watched them from the stands, or from the palisades of the walking ring. Medicine Ed would give her a nod, not unfriendly but well short of a smile. She had to admit it showed that Pelter had a caretaker now who had worked for Whirligig Farm. He gleamed like the great Platonic, with his mane tightly braided and a fancy checkerboard on his rump. Medicine Ed’s stick leg looked no stiffer, and Pelter’s long back no lumpier, than before. They were a pair of cripples who knew how to hold on as they were.

Kidstuff had been right about that five-thousand-added purse, but they had found ways to take it from her just the same. Place, show and fourth monies had to come out of the same sum, and those special finishers’ percentages took another healthy slice. The track had treated Tommy’s debts as her debts, she didn’t care to argue the point, but then creditors came out of the woodwork.
Certain persons—Jojo, Alice, Kidstuff, Medicine Ed—had to be staked from what little was left, and generously, in Tommy’s name. What did it matter? Let it all go, call that life ended, behind her.

What also came down like luck was the claim the racing association paid on Little Spinoza. The destroyed horse was redeemed at three thousand dollars, a thousand for each of them. They were back where they had started. Deucey found a stalwart old claimer within a week and was back in business. But once Lord of Misrule came and went, it was Deucey and Alice against the world, and on those terms the world was more to Deucey’s liking. Medicine Ed got a job with Jim Hamm, running shippers from Charles Town at the Mound in an arrangement much like the one he had had with Zeno. But in two weeks he also had Pelter chasing three thousand dollar horses and sinking back downward in class.

As for Maggie, she went back to the Pichot place outside Charles Town and
Menus by Margaret
for the Thursday
Winchester Mail
. When she looked out at the empty horse pasture and the untrampled skunk cabbage down by the creek, she wondered why she hadn’t thought to bring Pelter home with her and retire him while he was still sound. But it was too late now, and, anyway, whose pleasure would that really have served? She had plenty of room for the horse and, for that matter, for Medicine Ed, but what would the two of them have done with themselves all day? And no doubt Pelter’s nature, like Medicine Ed’s, was to keep on going to the end and hope he never saw the end coming. Anyway, the two of them seemed tied to one another.

H
E COULDN’T EXACTLY CARE
for that horse, nor either did he think the witch-eyed horse cared much for him. Sometimes Medicine Ed would swear that horse knew more than a horse could know. When he walked Pelter, like now, in a beady fog in the morning dark of November, with they two breaths fuming like dragons and winter coming on, he tried to eyeball the horse out the side of his eye to learn what was what, and what do he see but the horse eyeballing him back. They eyeballed each other to find out how the other one was getting along, the feet, the legs, the back. They eyeballed to find out what the other one was eyeballing. They eyeballed to check if anymany little signs be present who will be the first to go.

Whenever Medicine Ed sneaked off to his Winnebago to warm him some soup in a pan, that horse eyeball him. You could hear him studying: Now what is that evil old cunjure fixing to do? If he go to that medicine, if he think either of us time is short and he commence to mixing that goofer, why, I’m going to get him first. Often when Medicine Ed be laying on his side in the straw, unrolling bandage or packing the horse’s foot with clay and helpless as a baby under the horse’s back end, he could hear him thinking that: I can last long as the old man can last, lessen he try to beat me to the door.

So far it was an even match and Medicine Ed wouldn’t put it past the horse to get over on him when he was feeling poorly, just like he did the horse. When the young fool’s woman still taken care of Pelter, he improved or at least he come to himself, for a while, for the joy of living. Now the animal stick it out for sheer commonness and mischief, and maybe to hang on longer
than Medicine Ed. (It use to vex him so when they cut the fool. One time he seen her let the horse taken her whole head up in his teeth by the frizzly pigtails. He chewed on them like hay until she dig them out of his mouth with her fingers. Now was that right acting?)

He tried not to hold it against the frizzly girl that his friend Two-Tie had used her to help him out this life. After all, when Two-Tie disappeared for good, he had Medicine Ed’s markers in his pocket. Now she showed up at the Mound sometimes on a Sadday night and looked down on him and Pelter in the walking ring. He could recognize Two-Tie in them fuzzy tilted-up eyebrows, and all he can see is Mr. Two-Tie lying on his face in a railroad culvert somewhere, or under a heap of stones in the deep woods, or sliding down a mountainside with the tin cans and old stoves and deer parts that people dump over the side of the road. Might could be they never find him, and all Medicine Ed can think is, she don’t even know he died for her sake or who he was. It’s a tie in the blood, and yet and still it’s no remembrance, no one to mourn or either grieve for him.

Now that she was gone and out of his bidness, he had to give this much to the frizzly hair girl, she must have did something right with all that modern science she use to make it up as she go along. Damn if Medicine Ed be caught petting and nursering an animal like that, but he had taken sometimes to rubbing Pelter up with cloths after he worked, like a young horse. Couldn’t hurt, and they had the time. The horse gone good for fifteen hundred, and sometimes when they walking the shedrow like now and eyeballing each other like now, he was careful to remember into the horse that the Mound has claimers at 1250 too. It’s still another place left for them two to go, even if it is down.

Lord of Misrule
Jaimy Gordon

The winner of the 2010 National Book Award,
Lord of Misrule
is a captivating excursion into a the lives of small-time schemers and big-time dreamers—men and women whose passions, perfidy, and obsessions are as highly charged and unpredictable as the horse races at the center of their world.

Using wonderfully idiosyncratic language and vibrant imagery, Jaimy Gordon transforms Indian Mound Downs, a dilapidated racetrack in West Virginia, into a theater of grand drama and quirky comedy featuring a remarkable cast of characters both human and equine. Maggie Koderer, an eager newcomer to the racing scene, arrives at the Mound with four gifted but pitiful-looking horses owned by her lover, Tommy Hansel. Hansel plans to run the horses before anyone knows how good they are, cash in his bets, and quickly move on. Medicine Ed, an aging groom and longtime practitioner of arcane magic and spells, takes Maggie under his wing. Maggie also has a secret guardian—the loan shark Two-Tie, who would fit right into a Damon Runyon story, has a very personal reason for protecting her. Over the course of the racing season, the characters pursue private desires and plans, but it is the horses that ultimately determine their fates. And, as Gordon makes clear, every horse racing at the Mound has a will and a personality all its own.