Lord of Misrule (11 page)

Hey, Deucey! Get in! Joe Dale wants to discuss sumpm wit ya.

Deucey got in the car, pulled the door closed after her, and it just float there, everything invisible behind the blue glass, motor on, humming.

This place is too weird for me, the young fool’s frizzly hair woman announced to the world, and not in no soft voice neither, but luckily Medicine Ed had already did his fade—had ducked back in the stall with Little Spinoza and hung him on a tie chain and busied himself in one corner, where he could eyeball the midnight blue Cadillac through a chink in the wall without Joe Dale’s boys looking at him. The girl was standing there with one hand on her head, just blinking at that car. Geez, she say, is that car real or did I make it up?

After a while Deucey bundled back out the passenger door, her bottom jaw lumped up like a boxing glove, mumbling cusswords through her teeth.

And right then the backseat window purred and dropped
into the door. And there, to Medicine Ed’s amazement, sat Two-Tie, who everybody know is ruled off. Two-Tie don’t even look round to see if somebody else be watching. He stare at the girl, just stare at her. Her hand is still on her head. Good morning, Margaret, he finally say. I must say you are the picture of your lovely mother at twenty—but for the hair—she had the most beautiful auburn hair.

Then his eyes rolled up in the air as if he sooner remember than look—and the window rolled up too—and slow as a funeral, the car drove off.

That hick-town bully, Deucey says, he thinks he’s Al Capone.

You done backed out?

No I ain’t backed out and I ain’t gonna back out. I’m in to stay. I’m gonna pay that bloodsucker off free and clear so he can’t crawl back in nowheres. Then I don’t owe him nothing and I can do what I want to, which I was going to anyway.

Maybe you best give up that horse if Joe Dale gone come back in and tell you where to run him.

That ain’t all. He wants me to do sumpm else for him. Even Deucey wouldn’t shout what she say next. She leaned over and hissed around her black front teeth: He means me to be the owner-trainer for somebody else’s horses, some jailbird I guess. I don’t want to front for a bunch of ruled-off crooks. I won’t have no parts of it.

Medicine Ed cut his eyes at the frizzly-head girl to remind Deucey they was in company, discretion not guaranteed.

Was that baggy-face guy in the back seat by any chance Rudy Samuels? the girl asked, looking from one of them to the other, but nobody answered her, for that was not a name familiar to anyone present.

Now if I can just figger out where to lay hold of three grand fast. I got some. If Grizzly win one more for me for fifteen hundred, and I don’t eat but out of a can for a month, and the feed man will wait …

Feed man always wait, Medicine Ed said.

Deucey mopped her head with a bunched up but clean man’s handkerchief, and walked around in circles. I can’t ask Two-Tie—he was in there with them. Although if I didn’t see it with my own eyes I wouldn’t believe he let them lowlifes sneak him on the grounds. He ain’t said a word to me or even looked at me. I don’t think he knew I was there. You think he’s slipping, Ed?

Mr. Two-Tie ain’t slipping, Medicine Ed said firmly. But he was worried. Generally Two-Tie was strictly law-abiding, down to the smallest details, except of course for his main business, which was finance. He would never bust through a gate if he was not invited. That would run completely against his nature and business practice, or so Medicine Ed would have said. Medicine Ed did wonder what a gentleman like Two-Tie could have to do with the young fool’s woman, wayward, ignorant and obviously raised all wrong. Two-Tie had spoke of her mother. Could they be blood kin? It was too vexing to think of it.

Two-Tie ain’t even old, Ed said.

I don’t ask Father Time who’s young or old, Deucey said.

The young fool come striding round the corner in his fedora hat and polished boots. The pack of them, Ed, Deucey and the frizzly hair girl, just naturally fell silent. His eyes flashed over them, half pleased, half suspicious, and he went his way.

That horse win for 3500 easy, Ed said. He wondered why nobody ask him to front as the owner-trainer for some fine animal. He’d be only too glad, for the right price—he’d even come cut-rate. But nobody don’t even think of asking.

I’ve got a little money, the frizzly-head girl say.

Medicine Ed looked hard at her. He knew where she had that money from—from betting against her man. Did that make it unlucky money? Money was money.

I got a thousand, the girl give up in a whisper.

Well, I got a thousand too. Don’t you need that dough to run your outfit? Won’t Hansel be mad at you? Deucey asked her.

The young fool’s woman turned red in her cheeks like the back of a steam crab. He doesn’t want that particular roll, she say.

So it was that bad luck money, sho is, sho is, but it buy a horse just as good as any other money.

I bet Halloween Ed over there got a grand squirreled away, the frizzly hair girl said. I see him going to those windows.

Maybe she was just trying to be fresh, but old Deucey looked up in surprise.

Naaa, Medicine Ed needs his money, he wants to move down Florida some day soon, she say. But then she must have seen something in his face. Whaddaya say, Ed? Am I wrong?

He’s the one keeps talking up this horse, the girl say.

It was a good thing he had the barn behind him. They couldn’t see how he have to lean on it to stand upright with his weak leg trembling inside his pants. Right now he only have 750 dollars, if like a fool he take and throw behind this horse every nickel he has scraped together towards a new home since Zeno pass. Maybe somebody has run him crazy. Maybe somebody has fixed him good. Yet and still. Ain’t nobody ever asked him to come in with them on a horse. And this a good horse. Baby-minded, but a very very good horse.

I study it, he say. I don’t have it. I could get it.

S
HE HAD SEVEN BEAUTIES
like Mary mother of God, three sets of two, dexter and sinister, and one seventh universal oil that melted them all down and bound them together for you in a magic recipe—one ultimate
Menu by Margaret
, as she used to call her recipe column in the Winchester papers.

She had her highborn air, this came of being a Jew, of an ancient, select, and secretive people, though she didn’t think anything about this herself. (You could sometimes catch her, though, idly picking out the Jewish names on any list—opera patrons, plane crashes, Nobel prize winners,
This Week’s Marriage Licenses
,
KNOWN FELONS WITH MOB CONNECTIONS REPORTED TO BE CURRENTLY OPERATING IN THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON AREA
.) Whether it made her easy or uneasy to count herself one of this family, she was of it—she could bother to count or not, she had that luxury—and a great old family was deeply to be coveted. So much the better if they were an outsider race and small in number. They were never far from the centers of power.

This is another way women were luck and she was the luck of the luck. You could suck up family from them, even as you loosened them from it. Blood bound her and you together even as you commanded her,
Leave your father’s house and follow me
. They would do it, too, that was the wonderful, the amazing, thing. On her own, she hadn’t telephoned her father in eighteen months.
She had even had to be told at Rosh Hashonah and Thanksgiving,
Maggie, call your father
. (Such courtesies might be of value later on, who knew.)

She had her highborn air, dexter, and right next to it she had her lowborn air, sinister, which also came of being a Jew, an outcast, a gypsy, and not giving one goddamn. She could up and follow a racetracker, a coarse adventurer, if she so chose. Moreover you could get to her through her body. It was a black, rich, well-watered way, between rock faces. The word
podzol
came to mind. The word
humus
. Soil. Slut. You could ask all you wanted of that flesh, you could whisper outrages into her ear and, no matter what she said, the flesh would tremble and fall open to you.

She was a slut, and not only that, she was a Mediterranean slob. She picked at scabs, she picked her nose, it was nothing to find one of her bloody tampons forgotten, stuck fast in a pool of browning gore to the side of the bathtub. Small as she was, she loved to eat and could put it away like a peasant. She had learned to cook from one of her clever lowborn boyfriends and now made free with that clown’s excellent rustic cuisine—beans, ham hocks and rice, fish fried in golden dust, earthy bread, corn fritters light as bugs. Nothing was by definition too sweet for her. Once she discovered an old jar of crystallized honey in the back of the pantry—it had little black specks in it. Those are mouse turds, you pointed out, and she laughed, and ate the whole thing with a spoon. And her face was peasant, less Jewish than Cossack, even framed inside those prickly braids.

The beauties of her body dexter and sinister echoed the contraries of her breeding, the elegance of her shoulders and long neck as against the extreme punishable insolence of her ass. You didn’t often see an ass like that on a white girl, a long flexible back ending in a short round bulb-like structure that really was rather rude. How
dare it try to hide anything from you? The muscular lobes under its dimples begged to be pried apart, and of course you obliged.

Contraries of rank and body—ditto the spirit. She was intelligent. She had crisp clean logic to throw away, like a harbor of sunny, empty warehouses, and the value of this, besides that you could put into her with very little trouble anything you wished to teach her, was how lavishly she let it all go for you—O the sight of all those beautiful shining granaries receding into the distance! How willingly she put your shambles in place of her order, although she was smarter than you were, and often remade your mess into her order without even knowing it. Then you had to shake her out of thought altogether (for a time), which was easy to do, because of her matching stupidity.

Her stupidity. Her unruliness. You loved it best, for it gave all the other traits their reference to you. She needed someone to fight, her mirror image, only upside down—her twin, and that was you. Her unruliness seemed to lie just under her skull, at the roots of her kinky hair, and to be the continuation of that hair, or its germ. It was natural, then, to sink your whole hand in her incredibly thick, coarse hair, to bind her to you that way, all five fingers, with animal bluntness. Her own unruliness made it impossible for her to get loose from you, and if you whispered obscenities into her ear then, and reached the other hand between her legs, she was always wet.

And that was the seventh beauty, her perfect willingness to you, which was the basic ingredient of this particular
Menu by Margaret
, the tie of ties. The little key was pain, which turned the lock of every pleasure. No great credit to yourself, who had been born with it in the palm of your hand. It had taken a long time to realize what luck it was—how rare.

And not that that willingness was unique to her—it was in
fact the commonest, the vulgarest quality of woman. It was the universal oil. It was the wonder of women, all in all, their willingness to receive you—you had that golden key—and why you in turn had to have a woman or you were lost. Your twin sister carried your soul in her little box, it came down to that. True, other traits, particularities, beauty, unruliness, were dissolved in her. Uniqueness drowned itself in her—all for you.

Betting her own money on Zeno’s horse—that was a gorgeous, supreme bit of unruliness—well, you could hardly have taken away her last pathetic paycheck from that recipe writing job, now could you? Or have pounded the barrelhead for the cash from her dead mother’s dining table. But who could have guessed that she would jump in with both feet—and even so how much were you talking—a hundred, two hundred bucks? So she walked back out with maybe eleven hundred dollars—all as if to say she wouldn’t
stop you
, or even ask you how much of the common roll you had staked and blown—none of that low-grade wifely nagging for her—but if you could do it, by god so could she, she wasn’t going to sit home and roll out biscuits.

And not that she was above nagging. She just dragged it up to her monumentally unruly level, drilling you with green-yellow monkey-witch eyes every time you came back from the racing secretary’s office, wanting to know whether you had entered Pelter in a race yet, and if so for how much? None of this out loud, of course, at least not yet, but it went without saying you were a chicken and a liar too if you ran him in anything better than a 1500-dollar claimer after all this.

But if you lost that horse wouldn’t all your hidden luck go with him? Wouldn’t the magic of a chosen one desert you? Your twin sister carried your soul in her velvet box, but after all it had been Mr. Hickok who picked you out, gave you a job, saw something
in you. It was better than winning any race, that red, beautiful, melancholy autumn afternoon, when the old man had limped around the corner and sat down on a bale of hay by you, seeming idly to want to talk horses—you always knew how to get him going, he liked your respect for the old ways—the subject of bute, luckily, hadn’t come up. And suddenly turned and offered you, resignedly, wearily, for 1500 dollars, what was left of his one great horse—and so hooked to you that silken thread of merit that bound you forever to him as it had bound him to his famous father before him.
Class. A
month later he was dead.