Lord of Misrule (7 page)

Medicine Ed saw what it was. Luck, a ho if there ever was one, got her bony fingers in his throat and was pulling on that word. She wanted that word back. Zeno wasn’t giving it up. He tried to go the other way but she pulled and pulled. She pulled him flat over on his face. He was still kicking a little behind.
You want your luck? There’s your damn luck
, she say. And he was dead.

Medicine Ed looked up and saw the young fool, with his eyes like burnt-out stove coals, standing empty-handed in the gap.
Then he saw himself in the time to come, hauling five-gallon buckets for the young fool, bandaging ankles on his doomed horses, walking hots for him, waiting for the fall.

That was when Medicine Ed finally heard what Mr Boll Weevil had been trying to tell him.
He’s looking for a home
. That was one way of singing that song.
Gonna get your home
. That was another. Gray green goofer powder hanging on the wind: Wasn’t no big win and free money that Mr Boll Weevil was singing to him about. It was the passing of Gus Zeno. And it wasn’t no new home for Medicine Ed he was bragging on, no down payment on a little mobile home with a green stripe awning and a palm tree behind the track in Hallandale. It was the end of the good home he do have. It was goodbye to the easy life he know now.

T
HE RACETRACK ASLEEP AT NIGHT
is a live and spooky place, especially if you think somebody might jump out at you, and she did think so—small world that ends at a fence, the dark blue restless air fragrant with medicinals, Absorbine, liniment, pine tar—everywhere light chains clanking, water buckets creaking and sloshing, round glimmers of water, horses masticating or snorting out dust, straw rustling, skinny cats glimpsed everywhere but only for a moment, always in motion, noiseless. She could not make herself walk in a straight line to Barn Z without stopping, stiffening, seeing something move in the corner of her eye, feeling a strand of fine cobweb blow across her face.

They had no horse to bring back from their race. There was a queer feeling of empty-handedness and when she looked up again, Tommy wasn’t there. She had wandered away across the backside, looked in on Miss F in one barn and Railroad Joe in another. She espied the handsome blacksmith Kidstuff drawing a red-haired exercise girl into the shadows. She stepped into other shadows, the better to look on.

She was a little scared to go home, not that they had a home—they had only that tack room for the night, but they had already managed to wake up the flesh in there, they were good at that, and so had surely awakened, too, the animal ghosts that were everywhere you looked on the racetrack, and everywhere you didn’t
look, restless and hungry but off their feed forever, mouths that couldn’t taste food, the shades of so many large animals, stirrings of so many throwaway lives.

Scared to get to Barn Z, she loitered in the dark of the unlit parking lot fence beside Barns X and Y, the twenty-odd stalls of the leading trainer at the Mound, whose hot-walking machine,
JOE DALE BIGG STABLES
stencilled on its housing, squeaked all day in the back gate and was still idly turning, whose horses looked like shit—dry dung puckering their flanks, straw dangling from their tails—but who knew how to win at a riverfront half-mile track in the West Virginia panhandle. She wondered had she seen this paragon of cut-price horsemanship, peered up his shedrows, what would he look like? when she heard a noise that eased her back into the shadows, a sound that, come to think of it, you didn’t hear around the backside near enough—some man or woman crying.

Then here was Deucey Gifford, and that little bay horse again, pretty as a palfrey, and she was walking him, one arm slung over his neck, her face next to his, and crying. She was walking him on somebody else’s shedrow, after midnight, which made no sense, since he hadn’t been to the races, just plodded sleepily along. And along side of her, rolling so slow in the dirt road it made less sound than her weeping, just popping a stone now and then, was a dark, dark car with a swanky silver roof, a Cadillac, Maggie surmised, but she couldn’t see who was driving it.

You fuck! Deucey sobbed. I’ll rub him for nothing, when I got the time, but you can’t make me take this horse.

You’re taking him.

I ain’t taking him.

I hate this horse. You’re taking him. He’s your horse, Deucey. He’ll win for you. You don’t know how much I’d like to dump
him at the fairs, use him up, finish him, but the horse owes me.

I ain’t scared of you. I don’t owe you nothing. I ain’t taking him.

They turned the corner of the shedrow.

Deucey, who didn’t scare, so scared of a man in a dark Cadillac she was crying. His calm, insistent, fake-reasonable voice—New York, not West Virginia—scared Maggie too. And Maggie was scared of Tommy. She was scared to find out how much money he had lost, scared to let him see her own wallet bulging with cash from a bet on the other man’s—the dead man’s—horse, even though she could call it a sensible hedge of his own bet and put it at his disposal. She was scared to see him in any weakness, scared to let him see her seeing him. It felt like turning the key, fatal whir and crunch of tumblers, on Bluebeard’s locked room. But that was crazy—why should she even think of such a thing?

She had a sense that his kingly pride would suffer no abridgement. It was a complete world, but it was a flat world too—one pure unmitigated plane of being, all the way to the edge, where you fell off. Then it was all void, all menace. He had a beautiful feline walk, spare, athletic, no cowboy loose-jointedness about it, but there was something odd about his hands. They curled backwards behind his wrists, hiding themselves, as if they knew they were not to be trusted. She knew, herself, that they did not always mean her well. They knew how to do many things, or rather, they knew how to do one thing, how to tame animals, but this they did from a whole forest of angles, and always on sufferance, for under their gentleness was threat.

Or maybe it was all on account of the way she and Tommy had first met, why she should fear he would spring out at her and bring her down. Two years ago she had been living in a little house with only cold water in the kitchen, down by the two rivers at Harper’s
Ferry, on the Maryland side, and when she got dirty enough she would walk a couple miles down the canal tow path to the youth hostel late at night and feel for the key on a hook under the eaves and take a shower. Hazel, the Irish girl who ran the place, was used to her and wouldn’t even get up to see who it was, and anyway Hazel was away a lot herself those days. Maggie liked her. She was a slight, grinning, hard-handed, never-say-die young woman in an orphan boy’s chopped haircut, the kind of woman who would have cheerfully run a hospital for amputees during the war.

This night when Maggie passed by Sandy Hook, fog rose in a white loaf out of the river, such that she couldn’t see her own feet clapping along the towpath. They sounded wrapped in gauze and faraway, and when she finally spotted the bare electric bulb glowing fuzzily on the lintel of the youth hostel, she had somehow got it on her right hand side, so why hadn’t she fallen into the canal? She made for it, one wary step at a time, and when her hand groped the crumbly shingles for the key, it came on another hand. And something queer happened: their two hands seized each other fast, and before they had ever really looked at each other, Maggie and Tommy embraced, or at least clinched like boxers.

Then she ran away back down the towpath. She knew that if she made any gesture to the man, he would come home with her for the night, although she sensed he was expected within. All the same he found her the next day and that was that, he moved in, and by Saturday night’s races, she was learning how to pack a horse’s feet. Maggie realized only later that Hazel must have been the next-to-last of Tommy’s willing handmaidens, mucking stalls and walking hots and feeding for him at five in the morning. Maggie had been her replacement.

Don’t try to fix it. Don’t say anything
, she instructed herself.
Keep your mouth shut. See what happens
. Her hand was on the
latch of the tack room. She had made it this far. She pulled the door open, blinked into the opaque, itchy dark, a deep gray hole with only a tic of light here or there where the floodlight from the back gate touched a strap or buckle. The air was dead. He wasn’t here. She felt along the wall for the light switch and a hand closed over her hand.

That’s right. Shut up, he said, firmly but not roughly—and had she really said that out loud? Or had he read her mind? Maybe because he had that empty space where her own drawers and pigeonholes were stuffed with words, he often, spookily, out of a silence, echoed back to her her most treacherous thought—as if he vibrated with even the dead or unspoken noises whose ghostly scraps floated around her. In an almost soothing gesture his fingers circled her wrist, his thumb pressed deep into her palm, curled it, flattened it again, brought the hand down behind her, and suddenly he was binding both her hands together with the leather shank, then the chain. She heard the double-end snap. He had hooked her to the wall. And then he quickly pulled off her shoes, and, with a minute flick of a button, her jeans. She felt the cool night air moving between her legs. Then he pulled the door closed hard and they were in darkness.

Do you think I didn’t see you, he whispered, cashing your bet on Zeno’s horse? Don’t answer, he warned, listen. Money is nothing to me. You can’t imagine how little. Can you?

He pressed up against her back, gave her a little shake. She didn’t answer.

Good. I want you to play with money the same as I do. I want you to kick around bills and coins same as me, like sand on the seashore. You don’t have to explain to me anything about it. Have fun but don’t insult me by telling me. I’ll always catch up with you. I’ll always know what you’re doing. Won’t I?

He spoke into her ear, her neck, her hair, but didn’t touch her this time. She felt his heat, the nearness of his hands, and her own captivity pulling her into dreamy counter-exertion. Talking as he was, straight out of some dark dream of his own, she began to long for him to touch her, spell to spell, in her most private places, and thought she must be out of her senses.

You want me to see through you anyway, don’t you? He ran his fingers up inside her, milked the shameless wetness of her. Don’t you? Her knees almost buckled. He caught her on his hand.

She nodded, her face brushing against him.

It’s your money. I don’t want to know anything about it. I’ll ask for it if I need it and I know you’ll give it to me if you have it. Won’t you?

He had taken her by the small hard handles of her hips and now with a swift deft twist he lifted her and brought her down on himself. Won’t you.

But he held his palm over her mouth, and she thought more than said:
Yes. No. Yes
.

B
ECAUSE IT AIN’T SAFE
for the horse with that
pazzo
back on the backside, D’Ambrisi said. Joe Dale don’t want the kid should get suspended again. Or worse.

Biggy? What is he, home from college? Earlie Beaufait said, and everyone laughed.

Heh-heh. Finally got his walking papers from Pruntytown, more like it. Once they lose their hair, state gotta send em home no matter what they done.

They were at Two-Tie’s all-night card game. The second floor, over the Ritzy Lunch in Carbonport, was roasting, the Frigidaire solid with Carling Black Label, two bits a bottle. Orange soda was free. A small electric fan hung upside down from the ruins of a dining room chandelier over Two-Tie’s green felt card table. Dangling askew between three naked light bulbs, it made just enough wind to keep the mutt pack from stinking each other out of the room, without blowing the cards off the table. Over and over it wagged its head no, but weakly, very weakly. No one ever listened.

What he done to get sent up there, again? Kidstuff inquired.