Stormy Weather (16 page)

Smoky leaped forward like a trout and sprang after him with his heavy dark legs reaching and striking and reaching again, as if he would snatch the dirt track up under him and then fling it away behind.

He stretched out his heavy neck and caught up to Kat Tracks within five seconds, his nose at the gray’s tail. The men among the twisted cast-iron limbs of the mesquites began to shout. Jeanine held
on to her hat as if it would fly away. The horses tore through the angular beams of headlights, between ranks of yelling men. They flew through the light of the brushfires. Dust foamed up behind them and the great engines of their bodies.

Smoky streaked past the eighth-of-a-mile flag; the gray had now used up his sprint and didn’t have much left in him. Smoky came boring through the air, his nostrils wide open. He passed the gray and poured himself down the dusty brown track, hurling up dirt and gravel into Kat Tracks’s face and his head pounded up and down like a walking beam.

Kat Tracks’s jockey swung his bat, and even though the gray stallion had used up his air he reached out and gave it more, and within three long seconds he was again at Smoky’s tail and crowding him and then he passed him.

They streaked past Jeanine with Smoky’s pounding head at the gray stallion’s stirrup and the jockey brought the bat down once again, for the second time, and instead of pitching his jockey into the air, Smoky poured out yet more speed as if he possessed an endless reservoir of it. He flattened out. Jeanine’s entire life narrowed and reduced itself to one horse flying runaway down a dirt track carrying a hundred dollars on a wild bet. It seemed to Jeanine she could hear the percussion of his enormous heart. He was born to run, under any name and on any track whatever.

Smoky Joe caught up to the gray stallion, and then passed him, running through the flaggers’ streaming arc. The jockey stood up in the stirrups and Jeanine realized they had won. She sat down heavily on the truck’s running board with her head in her hands.

The jockey ran Smoky Joe straight on, into the dark field. After a while the jockey managed to get him turned back. Smoky began to slow and pitched one or two bucks out of triumph and joy. The jockey jumped to the ground and landed on his feet while men crowded around to grab Smoky’s reins.

Everett came up to her with a pocket watch in his hand. It was a big old nickel-plated railroad ticker.

He said, “He did it in twenty-three point five seconds.”

“Twenty-three five?”

“Near as I can tell.”

The businessman from Abilene, with his suit and yellow bow tie, came up. He held up his stopwatch.

“Twenty-three two,” he said. “Miss, I heard that horse was for sale.”

“Yes, he is,” said Ross. “And I’m buying him.”

Jeanine stepped forward to take Smoky’s reins. “Ain’t you a rocket?” she said. She patted his neck and he stared around eagerly, with both ears cocked up, and his eyes were bright. He lashed his tail and bounced at the ends of the reins, his great heated body streaked with sweat.

Everett took his wallet from his rear pocket and opened it and handed her a hundred-dollar bill. She had won it in twenty-three seconds. She reached out for the sweet, easy money. She took the bill and folded it over with one hand and tucked it into the watch pocket of her jeans.

“He’s all right,” said Everett. Jeanine smiled up at him and gripped Smoky’s reins. “Will you run him again?” He looked down at her and said, “The man with that Midnight colt will take you on.”

“No,” said Jeanine. She smoothed her hands over Smoky Joe’s eyes, but he was in no mood to be petted. He threw his heavy, hard-boned head and the eggbutt snaffle bit jangled and flashed. “No, I’ll stay with what I have. I can’t afford to lose.”

At the sale barn Jeanine walked Smoky Joe out of his sweat. She walked him back and forth in the stockyard. She held his lead rope and they paced between the sale barn and the pens. The dark horse’s breath slowed and he stepped along lightly. He tried to take Jeanine’s hat from her head and she took it back from him and patted him on his great round jaw. Jeanine kept on walking Smoky Joe long after he cooled out.

A man came past her. “Miss, there’s a stock tank there in back of the auction barn. There’s a pole light on.”

She watched Smoky Joe drink his fill. The horse’s ears flicked slightly with every swallow, as if they were part of some tiny, hidden, intricate pumping system in his head. Then she led him back to the trailer. Truck motors started up, headlights made a long snaking line out of the stockyards.

Ross came toward her.

“Load him up,” Everett said. “And follow me back to my place. I’ll write you out a bill of sale.”

H
e drove his truck and trailer at top speed, the gray stallion’s tail streaming over the trailer gate and glowing bright red in the taillights. At the top of one of the great rises she saw the lights of Comanche in the distance and the faint sparks of distant houses. After a good many miles she saw him turn into a ranch gate. She slowed and turned in. After a mile or a mile and a half she came to a stone house shaded by two massive live oaks. Behind the house was a large barn and a shearing platform with a fire burning on its level concrete table. Several men sat around the fire and threw chunks of wood into it. The fan of the windmill rolled with a continual knocking clank where one of the blades was missing.

He came out to greet her, closing the doors of the house behind him. He walked out from beneath the shadow of the galleria with his canvas coat collar turned up. A loose spur rang on the stony ground.

She said, “I got to turn Smoky out.”

“My boy will do that.” He turned toward the house and shouted, “Innis? Innis? Get out here and turn this woman’s horse in the lot.” He sat and watched as his young son held on to Joe’s lead rope and walked him toward the barn and the corrals. “Come in.” He stood up. “I got a windmill crew here. I guess they already ate. The cook’s here.”

She followed him to the house and they walked across the galleria floor and its veined limestones and through a set of double doors. It was hard to shut the doors. He had to slam them twice.

“Sit down,” he said. “While I get this fire going. What can I offer you?” Jeanine sat on a hard-backed chair in front of the fire. Everett sat down and unbuckled his spurs and pulled them from his boots. He dropped them on the telephone stand. Jeanine realized he was not wearing his spurs in the house as a gesture of politeness, and that if there wasn’t a woman around he and his son and the cook and the boys probably wore their spurs at the dining room table and hooked them on the chair rungs and caught them in the curtains. They probably wore them in the bathtub and in bed as far as she knew.

“You know, I think I would drink a bottle of beer.”

Everett said, “All right.” He went to the kitchen door and called to the cook.

“Yes, sir.”

“Get this young woman a bottle of beer.”

The cook came out again with the beer. His face sparkled with a week’s growth of red beard and he was covered with a heavy rubber apron as if he had been scalding turkeys.

He said, “Them boys is finished up and ate. I guess I’ll go on back.”

“Well, tell them I’d come out but I got business.”

The cook rubbed his whiskery chin. “I’ll do it,” he said. Then he went back in the kitchen.

Everett found a bottle of whiskey inside a glass-fronted bookcase.
He took up a coffee cup from the dining room table and blew the dust out of it and then poured two fingers of whiskey into it. He opened her beer bottle on his belt buckle and handed it to her. He sat down again. He tipped up the coffee cup to drink his whiskey and then stood up and quietly choked and threw the rest of the whiskey into the fire. He threw the cup after it and it smashed against the grate. He went and took the bottle out of the bookcase and dropped it into a wastebasket.

“I’ll find out who did that,” he said. Jeanine moved her earrings from one hand to another. She heard voices outside; men laughing. The broken cup was full of blue flames where it held some dangerous, low-grade fuel.

“I’m not afraid of you, Mr. Everett,” she said.

“I know you’re not. Where are you staying tonight?”

“Here,” Jeanine said. “You’ve got to have a spare room around here somewhere. Unless that whole windmill crew is coming in here. I know you got a spare room.”

“You’d better drive on into Ranger. To save your reputation.” He sat back and took in her short, thatched hair of various sunburnt colors and her slight body and her nervous hands.

“I don’t have one,” she said.

“I’d be happy to tell you the name of a tourist court in Ranger. I’ll give you five dollars to go there and get a cabin.”

“No. Why should I drive on tonight? I’m wore out.”

He said, “You’re a hard woman, Jeanine.”

“Make it ten and I’ll think about it.”

He bit his lower lip to keep from laughing at her. “You’re out of my price range.” He held out a callused hand. “Let’s see your paper.”

She handed him the bill of sale from her tweed jacket pocket and he sat down at a long dining room table with it. Jeanine walked around the room. On the walls were photographs of him and his wife at about the time Jeanine had seen her last, it must have been five or
six years ago. His wife wore a sheer dress with a tiny collar and a straw hat. The picture had been taken in the bright daylight so that the shadows were very black and her eyes were squinted against the sun. Ross Everett and his wife stood at a train station with suitcases around them and a freight wagon behind them. It was the San Angelo station because Jeanine could see the sign. They were going somewhere and they were happy and they smiled at whoever was taking the picture. Jeanine turned away.

“Your paper is good,” he said.

He laid the bill of sale in front of him that said Smoky Joe Hancock, a two-year-old stallion, had been sold by Manuel Benavides to John C. Stoddard March 9, 1935. Height 15.2 hands. Color: seal. Markings: none. By Joe Hancock by John Wilkins by Peter McCue. Out of a Rainy Day mare on the Waggoner ranch.

He took another cigarette and set it on fire with a metal lighter. He squinted at her over the smoke.

“You don’t want to sell him.”

“I don’t know, I’ve kind of got to like him.” She sat down on the other side of the long table and crossed one blue-jean leg over the other, then uncrossed them again and nervously twisted her hands on her bony kneecaps. “Now all of a sudden.”

“I told you,” he said. “Don’t get all wrapped around the axle about a horse.”

She went to stand once again in front of the hooded fireplace. The place was a mess. There was a saddle turned up on its fork against the wall and a stack of old
Farm and Ranch
magazines beside it, and
Time
and the
Providence Journal,
which seemed to be a newspaper from the East somewhere. A plate with half a dried-out sandwich on a chair. Trophies for prize cattle, championship Angora goats. The ageless contradictions of ranch life where creatures were cherished against storms and against sickness and other creatures, sometimes at the risk of a person’s health and even life, and then slaughtered. There was a
stuffed, dusty javelina head with a red plaster tongue sticking out between the teeth and a spur hanging from one of the curved tusks.

“Did you kill all this stuff?”

“Yes. I did.”

She untied her scarf and let it drape around her neck. It was getting warm; the fire had surrounded two large sections of live oak logs and lit up the zoo of taxidermy animals on the walls. She put the heel of her hand to her forehead and thrust her fingers into her hair.

“Tell me about Bea,” he said. She told him. As she spoke she saw Bea at the bottom of the well in the dim light like a cracked and discarded Skippy doll and the loose, fainting feeling of horror that had come over her when she saw her little sister and the blood. Of the doctor with his loose mouth and the smell of Lysol in the hospital.

“And she’s all right except for that leg?”

“Yes. She just needs a specialist. A surgeon. That’s how come I’m selling Smoky Joe to you.”

He stared at the fire for a moment. “And how are y’all holding out on that farm?”

“All right.”

“Lots of people are moving back to the country. At least you can raise chickens. Do y’all have chickens?”

“Yes. And Mayme got a job at the Magnolia office in Tarrant.”

He stared at the fire. “It seemed like things were going to get better for a while. In ’35. But the economy has cratered again.”

“That’s when I saw you last,” she said. “In Conroe. I mean before Tarrant last month. Last time I talked to you was in Conroe.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember me when I was fifteen?”

He started to say what it was he remembered and then he changed his mind. He got up and crossed the room, slamming storage doors and then he opened the gun cabinet. He found a bottle of Irish
whiskey behind the stock of a shotgun. He poured some into a dusty wineglass that said san angelo class of ’26.

“Well, let’s give this a try,” he said. “Yes, I remember you very well. I remember you all very well.”

Jeanine wrapped her arms around herself. “I guess you read it in the papers.”

“Are you cold?”

“No, I’m nervous.”

“Yes, I read about it. I read about his arrest.”

Jeanine considered her bitten nails. “For gambling.”

He sat for a long time in silence; the fire erupted in sparks and the sparks winked out on the tile floor.

“No, Jeanine. For statutory rape.” The whiskey charged into his bloodstream. Jeanine held her beer bottle wrapped in her fingers, as if she would break it. His cigarette burned and smoked out of the folded architecture of his two hands and the smoke drifted toward the fireplace and its draft. Finally he asked her, “Did you know the girl?”

She took up a stick of kindling and shoved fiercely at the coals on the edge of the fireplace. “How would I know somebody like that?”

“Jeanine, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

Jeanine felt her throat tighten and an odd, blocked feeling in her ears and realized that tears were rising to her eyes like mercury in a thermometer.

He said, “You’re about to break out crying.”

“I know it. I don’t want to.” If she started crying it would never stop. “Why?” she said. She lifted her head to him in search of an answer. “Why did he have to do that to us?”

Everett took a long breath and blew it out his nose, along with smoke. He said, “I’m not the person to ask, sweetheart, but then you’re not asking me.” He got up and walked over to the fireplace beside her and threw his cigarette butt into it. The flames shone across the tiled floor and she heard footsteps in the kitchen, the low voices of
children being very quiet and very intent. Then a slashing, sprung noise and the pinging sound of broken crockery.

He turned toward the kitchen and said, “Innis!”

Jeanine wiped at her eyes firmly. Ross reached to his back pocket and brought out a handkerchief, shook it out of its folds and handed it to her. She took it and scrubbed at her eyes and blew her nose.

The door from the kitchen opened. The boy stood there, his face spotted with large freckles, the doorknob in his hand. He wore a very dirty small Stetson and a stained sweater that zipped up the front. Behind him another boy kicked pieces of a china plate under the kitchen table.

“Yes, sir?”

“What are you doing?”

“Well, me and Aaron were going to get something to eat.” He had a slingshot in his hand cut from the Y crotch of a branch. It was made with strips of inner tube for slings and a leather pocket made of an old shoe tongue.

“You were going to get something to eat with a slingshot?”

Innis glanced down at the primitive weapon in his hand. “Kind of.” He stuck it into his coat pocket. “We were shooting at rats and Aaron broke one of those Spodes.”

Another smash. Jeanine saw chips of china spray across the kitchen floor.

Ross stood up. “Damn it!”

“Well, we were going to sit up and wait for that coon.” The boy had fair hair cut short with a whirled cowlick in the middle of his forehead. “Since I can’t use the twenty-two on him. Can Aaron stay all night?” He turned and said, “Aaron, stop shooting.”

“Not tonight.”

The boy stood silent in the doorway. He glanced at Jeanine and pressed his lips together and regarded his boot toes.

“Why not?”

Ross said, “Somebody is going to get snatched bald-headed in a minute. Aaron’s dad is going home. Aaron is going with him.”

“Yes, sir.”

The door closed.

Jeanine set her beer bottle down on the tiles beside the fireplace.

“I’ll drink another beer,” she said.

“No.” He said it in an absentminded sort of way. He crooked his forefinger over the bridge of his nose. “You’ll be up all night peeing.” He stood beside her, watching the fire. “The bathroom is behind the kitchen.” He lit another cigarette. Flaming bits of paper fell to the floor and he stepped on them. She watched the smoke wander into the bars of light and out again. “I’ll make you out a bill of sale,” he said.

She got up and walked from one end of his dining room to the other while he wrote. He used it for an office. His desk was the long dark dining table, made in the fashion of the 1920s, when people liked that spare straight look, and it was scarred with cigarette burns and lamp rings. Apparently he and the boy ate in the kitchen, probably living on tamales and chili and mutton or whatever the cook made up for them.

“It’s hard to give him up,” she said.

“You don’t have the money to campaign him properly. He needs to run on the good tracks in New Mexico and Arizona. He needs to get used to a starting gate, he needs to be exercised the right way, consistently.” Everett saw how spare she was, not big enough to hold the horse to a working gallop. Not much bigger than his son. “He’ll go down on one of these brush tracks before long and break a leg and you don’t even have the money for vet bills.”