Stormy Weather (27 page)

“We are going to have to tell the Texas Railroad Commission that what we have here is an eleven-thousand-foot well in order to increase your allowables.”

Elizabeth said, “Texas Railroad Commission?” She paused and touched his arm. “Allowables? Harold Ickes?”

Mr. Lacey said he would explain. He stood very still so she wouldn’t take her hand away, and his heart was drowned in a sweet, high-gravity sensation.

Lillian and Violet started making plans for a big dinner, and an entire turkey for the crew. Jeanine and Mayme brewed coffee and slammed cups on the kitchen table and sang snatches of songs;
That old black magic has me in its spell….

T
he skies in the summer of 1938 were gravid with rain clouds that passed over the Brazos valley dryshod and spilled their rain up against the wall of the Rocky Mountains or the Sangre de Cristos in New Mexico. Hurricane season turned the Gulf of Mexico into a tormented cauldron of wind and rain, and people said that this time the season would bring rain into north-central Texas and there would be grass again. Elizabeth and her daughters lived under an atmosphere that shifted its higher winds in a different direction throughout the remote strata miles above the earth. Some change was taking place. Droughts come and stay for seven years and in those seven years the weak are driven away; mistakes and miscalculations grow into catastrophes, there is no margin for error. Drought is a lack of something, a vacuum, an empty place in danger of implosion.

JEANINE STOOD IN
the stands with Innis at the Lubbock South Plains Livestock Show and Rodeo race grounds under the metal roof where people were packed together as if the limits of shade were an invisible fence. The national anthem ended and Innis and a thousand other men raised their hands to replace their hats on their heads. It looked like a broad shore of birds taking flight. Innis and Jeanine were uneasy with each other and so they showed great politeness and Innis said
Yes, ma’am
to everything she said or happened to mention. Sometimes he said
Yes, ma’am
before she even finished a sentence and so it made her forget what it was she was saying. Jeanine wore a straw hat with the brim turned up in front, a silk rose pinned to the hat-band, and a cool print dress in the new style. Everything was changing. Fashions were changing. Her dress had sharp padded shoulders and a Peter Pan collar. All the styles were sharper now; there was less of a feeling of stylish lassitude, drooping hems, no more sagging necklines that lolled like tongues.

Jeanine had been raised with sisters and Innis had been brought up around adult men and every day of his life he wished to be like them, to be a grown man instead of a child, and grown men did not sit in the bleachers with women when there was a horse race in the works. A grown man was down in the shedrow, among the horse trailers and the manure and the nervous horses, they made obscure references to women and livestock, in brief sentences. It was a love of language, never to waste a word.

He knew his father’s regard had undergone some great shift, toward this woman who was very mature, with lipstick and high heels and a rose in her hat. He wondered if he had to do whatever she said and just who was the enforcer around here. But there was nothing to be done about it except to say Yes, ma’am to whatever she said. He ran his hands along his hat brim to bring it down in front like Randolph
Scott’s hat. His cheeks were bright red in the heat. Far away he heard one of the high school bands that had come to play for the evening rodeo tooting and blowing spit out spit-valves. They began on “Mexicali Rose.”

Jeanine beat the hot, still air with the racing program. Innis sat in his white shirt and tie, his Stetson pulled down over his eyes, with both hands knotted between his knees. Down behind the starting gates Smoky Joe was held by two boys, one on each side of his halter. The jockey was worried. Smoky Joe Hancock was a hard case. Everybody knew he was a hard case. Smoky opened his nostrils wide and struck out at the horses around him. Horses that were springy two-year-olds and hot with energy lay in wait for him. But Smoky was seven years old and he would be running in a pack of other horses for the first time. It was an oval track with grandstands newly painted, with an official clock and a camera at the finish line whose eye was infallible and settled all arguments about nose-to-nose races. The two boys released him. The saddling area was a flaming white blur, and across it, Smoky Joe came at his lunging trot, with his navy and red saddlecloth, his coat shining brilliant as some vital, dark metal. They had done something with his mane; it lay down on his neck, tamed and silky. His tail streamed out in one solid banner.

Behind the stands the noise of the livestock show made a heated tangle of incoherent sounds; the noise and confusion of men grappling with prize sheep and goats, a very small girl speaking in sweet tones to an overheated rabbit in a cage, two boys riding double on a cow pony, the noise of horses and cattle being unloaded from trailers, engines starting up. Jeanine felt in the distance, far beyond the visible horizon, a bass sound of gathering wind and the knotted heart of a storm that could have been weather or maybe it was the life she saw opening in front of her.

Maybe she should begin her sentences with
Tell Me
, instead of
How Is
. Such as, tell me about your new foal, the red mare, and the
ringtailed cats, about how you shot horses. Tell me what the cook, Jugs, said about something. She had ten dollars in her purse, saved out of the household money. Maybe instead of saying
Tell Me
she should say
Don’t Tell
. She had been raised in a household of sisters and an absent father and the thing that had drawn them together into talk, spilled talk unreeling late into the night, was secrets.

She leaned closer to Innis and said, “Don’t tell your dad.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Then he glanced at her. “Don’t tell my dad what?”

“I’m going down to the shedrow and find a bet.” She settled her hat firmly on her head.

“Yes, ma’am.” He thought about it and then unknotted his hands. “Dang! I want to come too.”

“No. You got to stay here and hold the fort. I’m going to leave my purse, and with this crowd, it could get stolen.” She took out the ten dollars from her purse and set the purse on the bleacher seat. “Your dad is going to look up here and if we’re both gone he won’t know what to think.”

“Well dang,” he said. “Ma’am.”

“And don’t tell him unless he asks. You don’t have to lie.”

Innis thought about it for a long time. Then he made a sort of gesture with his right hand, an offhand drift toward her purse with a curled forefinger.

“You go on and make your bet,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on that purse.” When she hurried off down the bleacher’s wide concrete steps he folded his arms and sat back and surveyed the crowd like a Pinkerton man.

JEANINE WALKED ALONG
the shedrow confidently and saw a man she knew, Tom Baker, from Seguin.

“Anybody taking bets?” she said. Baker lifted his hat and smiled. “Right here they are, little lady.”

“Who are you running, Tom?”

“Soldier Boy. Out of Gonzales Joe Bailey.”

Baker and a man from Abilene and two men from the King ranch were amused by her, and smiled, and asked who she was putting her money on and she said Smoky Joe Hancock. Ross Everett was running him to qualify and she had five dollars that said he would break twenty-three seconds and five that he would daylight Soldier Boy out of the gate. Baker and the King ranch man took her bets, and she ran back up the bleacher steps to find Innis.

At the starting gate Smoky Joe was being backed in. All the gates shut in a sharp clang and he snaked his head to one side with his teeth showing in a white row like piano keys. The horse next to him screamed and tossed his head in a feeble, apologetic warning. Smoky’s narrow little jockey said, “Here! Here now!”

And so Smoky straightened out again and cocked his ears toward the track because he was satisfied with the other horse’s weak reaction. He wanted to run badly, not even to win, but to beat up and humiliate the other horses in the gates around him. Ross Everett climbed up on the rear bars behind Smoky’s starting gate and pulled off his belt.

“Ross, don’t hit him,” said the jockey. “Come on, don’t hit him.” His red and navy-blue silks shone in the dulled sunlight.

Ross said, “The son of a bitch is going to qualify or I’ll shoot him and drag him out to the pasture for the coyotes.”

“He’ll rear,” said the jockey. “He’ll bash my brains out in this gate.”

At the end of the line of gates an old man stepped up on a steel ladder and laid his hand on a heavy metal lever. When he pulled it down it would throw all the gates open. The other horses heard the ringing footsteps and began to dance. Smoky threw his head from side to side against the bit and slavered at the horses on both sides of him. He did not understand about the noise of the man’s footsteps.

Ross Everett watched the old man place himself on the top rung
and pull the lever. All the gates clanged open and he brought the belt and buckle down on Smoky Joe’s rear end with all his strength. The dark stallion bolted straight out of the open gate and left a length of daylight between himself and Soldier Boy. Smoky Joe ran toward the magic, otherworldly feeling that would overcome him in a short distance, where the other horses would fall behind him and disappear, shamed. Tenths of seconds splintered and broke up into fragments like sparks from cedar fires, they floated in his wake and burnt the eyes and nostrils of his enemies.

He had never had such clean ground underfoot, it was as level and unmarked as the first day of the world and he broke through the invisible line of the photo finish beam so far ahead of the others that the track steward lost sight of him.

The track steward saw only the horses bunched up five lengths behind Smoky and declared the foremost among them the winner. This was a horse from San Angelo named Yellow Buck. A man stood at the rail with a stopwatch held high in one hand and facing the steward. He was yelling. It was the banker from Abilene with the yellow bow tie and a derby who had wanted to buy Smoky. A lot of people were yelling and Jeanine scrambled up to stand on her bleacher seat to look at the time. The electric clock said 22.9. Smoky Joe was pitching his way around the unused far side of the track, trying to throw his jockey into the rails. Another man raced up the bleacher steps toward the steward’s tower.

“Where do we go?” asked Jeanine. She was hurrying down the steps behind Innis as fast as she could in her high heels. “Will he get a plate?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Innis. “Listen.”

The steward had so many men yelling at him to check the film that when he did and realized Smoky had been five lengths ahead, he simply threw the film out the observation post window and somebody caught it and carried it to Ross Everett.

“Does he want me to autograph it?” Everett said. He laughed and handed it to a boy and gave the boy a dime and said to carry it back to the steward and tell him to make a copy for Everett. The PA system coughed and said there was a correction, that Smoky Joe Hancock had won in 22.9 seconds. There were low whistles. Smoky had won on two different bets; he had broken 23 seconds and he’d daylighted Soldier Boy out of the gate.

Innis took off his hat and brushed it, set it back on his head.

“I’ve got to lead him into the winner’s circle, Miss Jeanine.”

“Oh good for you!” Jeanine said. Innis was clearing his throat and tucking in his shirt. This was to be his first public appearance other than reciting Kipling’s “Tommy” at the end-of-the-year school program. She said, “Go look for your dad. I’ll go this way.”

Innis said Yes, ma’am and went around the end of the bleachers toward the place where they were unsaddling the horses. Jeanine walked quickly back toward the jockeys’ rooms and saw Tom Baker standing with the man in the yellow bow tie. Baker shook his head ruefully and opened his wallet and handed her two ten-dollar bills. A jockey slouched by, near to fainting with heat and anorexia, carrying his saddlecloth and racing saddle.

The King ranch man lifted his hat. “Do I get a kiss? Loser’s privilege.”

“In your dreams,” said Jeanine and jammed the money in her purse. They lifted their hats again and watched her walk away. One of them sang
Hold tight, baby, hold tight.

She walked quickly toward the winner’s circle. She stepped through old dried horse manure; the twenty dollars meant luxuries for herself. Her mother’s oil money had paid all the back taxes, and she had bought an electric fan for the kitchen and a kerosene refrigerator. The sweaty wadded bills in her hand could now be spent on a bathtub and perfumed soap. She had to figure out how to tell her mother she came by it.

In the winner’s circle Jeanine turned in the wind in her new summer dress. She held out her hand to Smoky Joe. He was staring around, looking for other horses, the lowly geldings, a stallion to challenge, the sweet and lovely mares. Jeanine patted him on the neck and laughed with delight. He was the brave horse that lived in a trash yard, the thin underfed horse that ran his heart out on the brush tracks, and she did not remember the hard times but only his springing step and his courage and his bright, irrepressible gallantry. She said, “Ain’t you a rocket?”

Innis held up the championship silver plate and a man took his picture with his face glowing in the hot air. Ross put his hand on Jeanine’s shoulder and said, “Another one, please. Send me a copy and the bill.”

The sparkling silver plate ran its reflection of the intense sun across the crowd. Ross stood beside her wearing a summer jacket and tie, lace-up cordovan shoes and his good Stetson. She felt his hand on her elbow, it steadied her. The brim of her hat made flying motions in the breeze. It was a breeze that seemed to come out of the mouth of a furnace.

“Dad?”

“Yes.” Ross turned to his son and when he did his full attention was on the boy. He faced his son in a direct manner with his hands clasped behind his back, and in the intense sun his face was dark under the shadow of his hat.