Marvel and a Wonder (7 page)

Jim nodded and shook the stranger’s hand. It was the practiced grip of a politician or businessman. Jim set the rooster down near his feet.

“You looking to sell?” Evens asked.

Jim shook his head, turning to look at the mare.

“You race her?”

“We let her run.”

“Against other horses?”

Jim shook his head. “I’m not familiar with the ins and outs of your profession.”

“Profession? Hell, you talk about it like it’s a legitimate business. All it is is a disease. My wife got me to enroll in Gamblers Anonymous. I go to the meetings then right off to the track.”

Jim frowned.

“Jim Northfield told me you got her as an inheritance. Is that right?”

Jim nodded again.

“Some inheritance. Well, I’d like to see her run. I’d like to see if she’s as game as she looks.”

Jim called for Rodrigo, who set down the peeps’ medicine and walked over, tipping his hat.

“Mister Jim?”

“Rodrigo, Mr. Evens here wants to see the horse run. Do you mind taking her for a ride?”

Rodrigo glanced from Evens back to Jim and winked. “Sure, sure, no problem.” He dashed off and then grabbed the saddle from inside the dog-hanged stable.

Ten minutes later they were off, Rodrigo riding close like a jockey, the mare tearing across the field with a headlong ferocity, coming up to the turn at the end of the oblong meadow, hooves colliding against the dirt with their daring rhythm. Then they bolted back around, Evens turning to watch the gray-white blur; he let out another wet-sounding whistle and pushed back his hat.

“You need to get her on a track. See what time she draws.”

Jim nodded, unsure how to respond. Evens took note of the other man’s suspicion and grinned. “Here’s what I tell you I’m going to do. I’d like to set up a race, your horse against one of mine. I’ll give you three-to-one odds. To be honest, I’d just like to see what she can do.”

Jim gave the man an uneasy stare. There was $112 in his checking account until the first of the month. He itched his nose and considered the bet. Evens offered another big-operator smile. “So what do you say?”

“I’ll take your bet,” Jim muttered. “I’ll put up two hundred. But I want five-to-one.”

They shook on it, deciding the race would be the following afternoon. “My wife goes to church all day,” Bill said.

Jim nodded softly and then they both turned back to stare at the animal, their eyes wincing in the sunlight.

* * *

As soon as it was dawn that Sunday morning, Jim went out alone to feed the horse and watch it run, not bothering to tack up, letting the animal hurl itself this way and that without a rider, loose, momentary, its eyes gleaming as it tore along the fence. The grandfather snuck a Fuji apple from his coat pocket and, pulling out his utility knife, split it into a pair of uneven halves. A bleary wetness filled the air, from the metallic tang of the blade and the sweetness of the fruit. The grandfather held one half of the apple in his hand while placing the other half along the irregular plane of the fence rail to be gobbled up as the animal fled past.

Sometime later the boy joined him at the fence line. The horse jetted before them. The grandfather again had a feeling that their lives were about to change.

* * *

That afternoon they looked in on the corn; the grandfather pulling a green ear free, checking to be sure it was clean of worms. Together he and the boy squatted in the rows, the wind whispering through the leaves, the silks brushing up against one another like some forgotten music. “Here,” he said, handing the ear to the boy. “What do you see?”

The boy looked at the green ear and shrugged. “Some corn.”

“Any bugs?”

The boy dug his fingernails into the kernels. “No.”

“You sure?”

The boy squinted again. “Pretty sure.”

The grandfather nodded, satisfied, and said, “Good.” The rows swayed over their heads like the echoes of a distant church. In all honesty, it was as close as the grandfather liked to get to any kind of service. He listened to the cornrows for a moment longer and then said: “Shhh. Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” the boy asked.

“Just listen.”

The boy sniffled and tilted his ear toward the sky. “What am I listening for?”

“Shhh.”

The boy tilted his head again, eyes squinting in concentration. There again was the pleasant murmur. The grandfather smiled, then hearing it, the boy did too.

* * *

Rodrigo soon arrived from town, having hitchhiked the few miles over. They were not used to seeing him on a Sunday and noticed his black hair had been slicked back with soap, his vaquero shirt buttoned all the way up. Together the three of them led the horse into the trailer. The boy kept the animal calm by talking quietly to it. What he was whispering neither the grandfather nor Rodrigo was sure. But it was placid clomping inside the trailer, and even when the door was locked shut, it still didn’t utter a neigh. Then they drove over to Evens’s spread, on the back forty of which he had built a racetrack, complete with aluminum stands. Evens, in his straw hat, waved the blue pickup over, then helped lead the mare out himself.

“If you want a jockey, I’d be happy to loan you one of mine,” he grinned. “Free of charge, of course. Your fella, he looks a little long is all.”

Jim glanced over at Rodrigo, who quietly nodded.

* * *

The race took place on Evens’s racetrack with Evens’s horse and two of his jockeys. Jim thought that he had made a mistake somewhere. The other horse was a black, long-necked gelding, which took careful, high, prancing steps. It was ridden by a jockey in blue. Jim’s mare was being ridden by a stubby man in an orange helmet. Evens patted the orange-helmed jockey on his rear and pretended to whisper, “Just because I’m your boss doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it your all,” smacking the flanks of the mare with the same easy motion. The white horse whinnied, charging at Evens until the jockey reined her in. Then another farmhand fitted the mare with purple blinders. The horse kicked a little so the grandfather gently touched its nose, placing the palm of his hand against its muzzle. Then he and the boy and Rodrigo followed Evens to the aluminum stands and stood behind the metal railing. There were eight or nine onlookers—some neighbors, retired layabouts, all friends of Evens. He greeted each cordially and offered the grandfather a cigar, which Jim accepted but did not light. The two horses came down the track, their jockeys piloting them into their stalls. One of Evens’s farmhands closed the gates and backed away from the course.

Then there was a loud ringing bell and the green gates flung open.

Jim watched the animal and the jockey take off, a bolt of white horseflesh followed by a cloud of dust, a spray of dirt. The horse bounded across the track in a phantasmagoric blur, all steady whiteness and steam, its coat shiny, hurling itself like a muscled locomotive. The report of the mare’s hooves against the dry earth rang out like thunder,
whoom, whoom, whoom
, the hooves hitting the dirt with their specific, tremendous explosivity, the sound of horses running unlike any other sound in the world, a sound suggesting tireless movement, joy, an escape from the past, from the present, from the uncertainty of the future. Seeing the mare go, the grandfather imagined the sound of its hooves against the clotted dirt was his own heart racing to meet its end. He felt something well up inside his chest and forgot what it was, the word for it. Then he turned and glanced at the boy and saw the same expression on his rounded gray face.
What if?
the grandfather began to think again, turning to watch his animal pull three lengths ahead, then four. The horse and rider flew past the finish line, coming in at twenty-one seconds on the nose. Evens looked at Jim, bug-eyed, wet cigar sloping from his mouth. Jim refused to give him the satisfaction of being surprised. As the dust settled, Evens opened his wallet and snorted. They collected on five-to-one odds, returning to the blue pickup with a billfold padded roundly with cash.

* * *

In bed later that Sunday night, Jim flipped through his wife’s Bible. He stopped on a page near the middle and read:

When the daughter of Herodias herself came in and danced, she pleased Herod and those sitting with him. The king said to the young lady, “Ask me whatever you want, and I will give it to you.” He swore to her, “Whatever you shall ask of me, I will give you, up to half of my kingdom.” She went out, and said to her mother, “What shall I ask?” She said, “The head of John the Baptizer.” She came in immediately with haste to the king, and asked, “I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptizer on a platter.” The king was exceedingly sorry, but for the sake of his oaths, and of his dinner guests, he didn’t wish to refuse her. Immediately the king sent out a soldier of his guard, and commanded to bring John’s head, and he went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the young lady; and the young lady gave it to her mother.

_________________

Before the sun had made its way over the tree line on that last Saturday of August, they mucked the horse’s quarters, fed it, and curried it as best as they knew how. The grandfather broke a carrot in half and handed one part to the animal, who gobbled it down. The other part he handed to the boy.

“Watch this,” the boy said. Quentin took a bite and then leaned over, holding the carrot in his mouth, laughing as the horse carefully took it from his teeth.

The grandfather smiled and said, “It’s good to see you two are friends again.”

“We are,” the boy said. “We’ll be friends, even after our deaths.”

The grandfather shook his head, unsure what the words actually meant, though for some reason he was pleased.

Next they counted out the peeps—checking their beaks, their fluffy stomachs, their reptilian feet—for any sign of infection. The boy squatted beside his grandfather, petting the head of a round chick, letting it nip at his finger. Then he looked up.

“Sir?”

“Hm.”

“Nothing.” The boy glanced back down at the peeps.

“Go on,” the grandfather said.

“Did you . . .” But the boy paused again.

“Go on.”

“Did ever you hear from my mom?”

Jim frowned, unable to hide his disappointment. “Not yet.”

“Do you think she’s coming back?”

Jim itched his nose and gave a short nod. “Like as not. But she’s got a lot to figure out first.”

“Did she tell you where she’s staying?”

The grandfather stood up, setting the peep back into the brooder, and shook his head. “I bet she’s with friends though. I’m sure she’s all right. How come you’re asking?”

“I dunno,” the boy said, scratching at a scab on his arm. “I guess I’d like to call her.”

Jim gave a slow smile. “Of course you would. It’s nice, a boy thinking of his mother like that.”

“I’d like to tell her about the horse. I think it would make her happy.”

“Sure it would,” Jim said.

“I’d like to tell her.”

Jim tilted his hat a little and put a hand on the boy’s head, feeling the coarse, fine hair, and mussed it gently. “Anything is possible,” the grandfather said.

* * *

The boy rode with his grandfather into town to get supplies that Saturday. As they drove, the grandfather glanced over from the rubberized steering wheel and asked the kind of question he always seemed to propose during these sorts of trips. “What would you do with a million dollars?”

The boy answered without thinking: “I’d try to breed a rattlesnake with a water moccasin. Or a cobra.”

Jim smiled. “Breed a what? You’d spend all your money on that?”

“I’d sell their offspring and then I’d be even richer.”

The grandfather nodded, though with an undisguised air of doubt.

On his lap in the passenger seat, the boy held a small shoe box with holes in the top, which had been jabbed with the rounded edge of a butter knife. There was a sound, an indefinable, nearly indescribable movement, a kind of gentle scraping, coming from inside the box. The boy turned and faced his grandfather with a curious expression.

“Sir?”

“Hm.”

“Are we gonna race her again?” he asked. “The horse, I mean.”

“Hope to.”

“You think she’ll win?”

“It’d be nice,” he said, turning back to face the road.

* * *

They parked the pickup in its usual spot near the closed-down café. Opening the driver’s-side door before the street of similar-looking, redbrick, two-story buildings, Jim pulled his cattleman hat down to shade his eyes and said, “All right, I’ll meet you back here around five o’clock. Mind you’re not late. We still have some other work to do when we get back.”

“We’re not gonna eat in town?”

“No sir. I got to get home and give them hens their medicine.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

“Okay.”

Quentin heaved his backpack over his shoulder, took hold of the small shoe box, and walked off. A rusted-out Camaro with a Confederate flag license-plate holder rattled past. The boy took notice of the faded plastic stars and bars and inwardly felt aggrieved, though no actual sign showed on his face. He was used to it by now. He walked on. In a strip mall around the corner was the exotic pet store, located right between a Chinese takeout place and a you-wash-it laundry. The sign above the pet shop was fading white—a painting of a lizard above the words,
Exotic Reptiles
, all spelled out in blue, though Mr. Peel, the store’s owner, had been smart enough to branch out into other kinds of pets—a few odd mammals like chinchillas, all types of snakes and lizards, some of which were legal, some of which weren’t, and a tortoise which the store claimed was more than a hundred years old.

The boy stopped by the store whenever he could; he had an interest in getting rich, specifically through the illegal and sometimes forcible breeding of a random selection of exotic pets. He considered himself a regular amateur herpetologist, though no one in the boy’s life but the pet store owner Mr. Peel or Gilby—the distracted, ill-kept, twenty-two-year-old pet store clerk—had any sense of what that particular word meant. The boy had said it once, by accident, as a means of introduction, to a group of girls at a church picnic a few years before, and had spent the rest of the day off in the woods alone, itching mosquito bites on his arm, watching various strangers squint at him and laugh. He thought of that now, that embarrassing moment, two or three years removed, and muttered, “A herpetologist is someone who studies reptiles,” to the empty town, to the sound of the abandoned buildings staring back.