Stormy Weather (15 page)

T
he next morning very early Mayme opened the cookstove door to check on the corn bread and then took it out and left it on the sink to cool. It sent up steam against the window and the winter stars. Jeanine carried a lamp downstairs, the light bobbing down the steps. Her clothes hung on the back of a chair in front of the stove to warm. She pulled on a shirt and her Levi’s and then her tweed jacket. She scraped a bit of her lipstick from the tube with a hairpin. It was almost gone. She sat the dark green fedora on her head as if it were armor, a miner’s helmet. In the kitchen she took a wedge of hot corn bread and spread butter on it, wrapped it in a piece of newspaper, and gave her sister a hug for good-bye. Then she went out to back the truck up to the trailer, and then to catch Smoky.

He seemed to know he was leaving. He read her intentions in her hands and her nervous walk, the strain in her voice. She could not catch him for an hour, he bolted from the graveyard fence through the
peach orchard, he roared through the little grove of live oaks and darted into one end of the barn and out the other. Finally he stood beside the gate, trembling and breathing hard, watching her come for him with the halter.

Then it took her another thirty minutes to get him loaded. He balked and fought the lead rope. He didn’t want the hubcap full of oats that sat inside the trailer. It was only after she sat down on the trailer fender in despair to think what to do that he became quiet. Jeanine rubbed her rough hands together and asked why he had to make it so hard for her. She didn’t know who she was asking. After a moment he cocked his ears and stretched out his nose toward her.

She got to her feet slowly and threw the lead rope over his neck and said,
Load
. And he gave up and walked into the trailer. It took her another fifteen minutes to start the truck. She didn’t get away until noon.

She left Highway 80 at Rising Star and drove into Comanche County. It was the time of year when deer came into rut, and a large stag bearing his antlers like a troublesome crown stood staring at her truck before he sprang over the roadside fence. She drove with the cracked window rolled down. People were burning cedar and the smoke stung her eyes.

She stopped at a gas station and asked for directions and then went on toward the sale barn. It was nearing sundown. The sale barn was empty; outside a crowd of men in the unlit grounds, their faces shadowed by hats, their horses tied to trailer slats.

Jeanine got out of the truck. She brushed out her short hair and stood before the side mirror to tie on her silk scarf, with the point down in front, clipped on the round gold-colored earrings. In the mirror she saw a man standing behind her, his hat down and his coat collar standing up. She turned around.

“Mr. Everett?” she said. She walked toward him.

He lifted his hat. “You’re talking to him.” His chore coat was made of a heavy, wooden canvas. “Do you have that horse?”

“Yes, sir. He’s right here. In the trailer.”

“Let’s get him into a pen.”

The bulked shadow of the auction barn flooded outward over the gravel, reaching out to the stock pens. He walked up to the horse in the trailer. He regarded Smoky’s blunt, prehistoric head and the wired stand of mane, his thick neck.

“This is Smoky Joe Hancock?”

“Yes, sir.”

Smoky lifted his blunt nose to take in the news that the wind brought to him. Jeanine slipped the halter on him.

She said, “How are your wife and little boy?”

“She’s dead.” Ross Everett pushed his hat back by the brim. “He’s alive. He’s over there with the men.”

“Oh, Mr. Everett.” Her mouth opened and she put her hand to her lips. Her heart seemed to stop for a moment and she tried to think of something to say, but he seemed to be made of a kind of private granite. Jeanine finally said, “She’s
dead
?”

“She died of pneumonia during that dust storm in ’35. They called it dust pneumonia.” Everett turned to watch a horse being unloaded from a long stock trailer. “And she had asthma.”

Jeanine was silent for a space of time. He searched his coat pocket for his truck keys. “Well, that’s terrible, Mr. Everett. I’m so sorry.”

He nodded. “Let’s see about your horse.” She shrugged up her jacket around her shoulders. The wind slapped the silk scarf against her collar with small rippling sounds. “Get him unloaded and let him buck it out.”

Ross Everett and two other men stood watching her swing up onto the trailer fender. She untied the horse where he stood, riding backward. One of the men came forward to offer to help but Ross Everett motioned to him to leave her alone. He watched as she shoved the gate open, and Jeanine and the horse both jumped down from the trailer
at the same time, side by side. She took firm hold of his halter rope as the dark horse charged around against it.

Everett said, “All right,” and then walked straight on past her toward the livestock pens. She hurried to catch up.

Smoky Joe galloped around the small pen in short rushes. He stopped for a moment and stood stiff-legged and called to the mares in a violent shivering whinny. He bucked himself into the air with all four hooves off the ground and landed and hurled himself into the air again, shaking off all the hard miles.

Jeanine shook out the leather halter to straighten it. “I guess you still want him?”

Everett stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the horse.

“We got a match race going here, Miss Stoddard. Let’s see how he does.” His voice was hoarse from smoking.

“You said three hundred.” She reached out and grasped the canvas sleeve of his chore coat.

He glanced down at her hand. “I know I did. I also said I wasn’t tied to it.”

“Mr. Everett, you didn’t tell me I would have to race him.” Jeanine began to roll up the lead rope in loops.

“Well, girl, I didn’t tell you to come or not come.” He seemed preoccupied. “Have you got a flat saddle?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Borrow one.”

Jeanine went back and stood resting against the door of the truck, her hat in her hand. She didn’t know what to do, here at the point of handing the horse over to somebody else, or not. In this dark auction yard, the empty livestock pens like a construction of mazes and the sun going down in Comanche County; abandon him in this unknown place to strangers.

Ross Everett came and sat down on the running board. Jeanine
listened to the rasp as he struck a match to his cigarette. She lifted her head. The flame lit his face for three seconds and then he shook it out.

Jeanine bit her lower lip. “He hasn’t been warmed up.”

Ross Everett sat without saying anything for a while and then took off his hat and turned it in his hands. As if he were searching out holes in the felt or maybe wondering if it were time to buy a new one.

“Jeanine, I know you need the money.”

“Maybe I changed my mind,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“But you want to see what he can do,” said Jeanine.

“That’s about it.”

Jeanine regarded the low hills sliding off into the horizon and the dark coming on. She was the only woman at this gathering of men, their trucks and trailers and horses and saddles, in the unlighted spread of buildings and pens. The rails and bars threw crisscross shadows against one another in faint grids.

“Who are all these people?” said Jeanine.

“Some fellows got up a match race. My gray stud against a Midnight colt. Fellow that owns him is from Abilene.”

“Are other people going to race?”

“Depends.” He sat with his forearms on his thighs and watched the other men and their horses intently. “On what the competition looks like.” He stood up. “There’s a flat place out there where they run. Ride with me. I’ll get a kid to ride your horse out there. That will warm him up.”

A procession of trucks and trailers and horses moved away from the auction barn. Dust sifted up into the air. It was right at sundown and the sparse grasses of the open field were lit at the tips by the level rays. Whoever owned the field was burning piles of cedar bulldozed out of the pastures, and in the distance, black shadows moved around the great fires.

He said, “Don’t get attached to a horse, Jeanine.”

“You can say that. He’s the only one I got.”

“We always outlive them. Except the last one.”

On the seat of Everett’s Dodge truck things slid forward onto the floorboard and she reached out to catch them; a thermometer case and a pair of pliers and a work glove and a brown bottle that said sulfonate. A 1932 license plate. Welding bills for a calf chute, a bill for Perpetual Care from the Comanche Cemetery Association. The radio talked on and on in a dim murmur.

“Just throw that stuff on the floor,” he said, but she placed them all back on the seat beside her and held them as the truck crashed over ruts and stones. He drove with one hand. His large body took up all of his seat and part of hers. He reached up and turned the radio off. The light of the flames shone on the flat planes of his face and his dark blue eyes. He stared straight ahead.

They came to a plowed straightaway. On either side of the track midwinter mesquite trees twisted black and leafless in the last rich remains of the sun and the burning brush-piles of cedar blazed up in volcanic reds. The burnt needles drifted in small ashy fragments like soft hail. He parked, and they both got out.

Everett shook out a bag of hydrated lime into a long score line. A man in a plaid coat paced off the 440 yards of the track with the other two men beside him. They hung flags from mesquite branches at the 200-, the 220-, and 440-yard points.

“What’s his name?” she asked Everett. His frantic, dancing gray stallion was up against a dark stallion from Abilene.

“Kat Tracks,” he said. “You remember his mother from when I raced in East Texas. She Kitty. That’s her colt.”

Everett turned and took the reins of his gray horse. The dappled stallion was edgy with the crackling flames and the prospect of a race and the noisy trucks.

The man from Abilene came up to Everett. In his bow tie, he had the appearance of a banker. He said, “What will you agree to?”

“Quarter mile,” said Everett. “And a dollar a yard.”

They lined up the two stallions at the score line. Cactus pads shone like red plates out in the brush. Everett slapped the jockey’s butt and told him to just stay aboard and don’t do anything cute. Don’t pull him down at the end, run him in a circle or you’ll get your head taken off on a mesquite. A man dropped his hat. A loud shout of men’s deep voices sent the horses out into the burning fields. The jockeys were carried into the weaving shadows at thirty miles an hour, balanced on out-of-control horses, tearing through the mesquite and pasture grasses afire with the sunset light. They charged through the blue smoke from the cedar fires and in the last stretch Kat Tracks caught up and passed the brown and flew through the flagger’s arc a length ahead.

Jeanine listened to the talk around her, saw a great amount of money counted out in twenties and fifties. Everett collected his money from the man in the suit and bright yellow bow tie. He rolled the four one-hundred-dollar bills and four tens into a tube and shoved them into his watch pocket. He walked back to her. “Are you racing that horse or not?”

“Yes.” In the distance she heard the frail whistling of blue quail scattering over the pasture, disturbed by the burning cedar and the noise of the race. The flames had risen so high that they detached at the top, sending off red scarves that evaporated against the night sky. “I’ll match up against you.”

“What will you agree to?”

“Quarter mile. Four hundred and forty yards,” she said. She hesitated. “And a hundred dollars.”

“That’s a hundred dollars you don’t have.”

“If I lose, take it off Smoky’s price.”

He thought about it for a moment. “If I buy him.”

Smoky Joe became nearly uncontrollable when he saw the track in front of him. He danced and lashed out. Jeanine stood with her hand
out, as if to help, or to ward him off. Ross Everett threw a borrowed saddlecloth and racing saddle on Smoky Joe and cinched up tight, both the undergirth and the overgirth. He held out his hand, down low, to the jockey. He said, “Up you go.” The jockey cocked one leg behind him and Everett took hold of his ankle and threw him up into the saddle, lightly, as if he were releasing a bird into the air.

“Just bust him loose with all you got,” said Jeanine. She danced back and forth with Smoky’s erratic plunging. She held out her hand against his shoulder. “I think he’ll outlast Everett’s horse. He’s run already. And only use that bat once. He won’t stand for it a second time. He’ll put you on the ground. You get one hit and that’s all.”

Down at the far end the flagger stood with a white flour sack in his hand. A truck caught him in its bright flood lamps.

“Lap and tap,” said Everett. “Cola y cola.”

Jeanine left Smoky Joe and his jockey at the score line and ran past the line of pickups and cars parked along the track until she was two-thirds of the way down. She scrambled up onto the running board of a Chevrolet pickup.

She watched as the two horses were ridden away from the track. Their shadows poured away from their bodies and their legs danced in the headlights. As soon as their tails were even at the starting line, the man at the score line dropped his hat on the ground for the go signal, the horses were wrenched around to face the track just as Smoky Joe reared, losing seconds, and Kat Tracks burst away with his jockey nearly up between his ears.