Lord of Misrule

by Jaimy Gordon

  I wouldn't put no horse of mine out on the racetrack next to that wreck.

  Say, five grand added. Nice little pots for the finishers down to six, to make sure the race fills up.

  I don't know. I have to think about that.

  You think about it. Plenty of time. Meanwhile, on another, unrelated matter, Vernon. My elderly cousin in the city tells me a distant relation of mine, a young lady, may be headed this way. She is the daughter of a person once dear to me, my niece Dorothy, a brilliant, beautiful girl, a college graduate, who died in a trainwreck on the Pennsylvania Railroad in, lemme see, 1955. The niece left two small children and this is one. She is no racetracker, this young woman, but she got herself hooked up with a racetracker. I like to know if she gets here-Koderer-Margaret Koderer is the name. Should be around 25 years old. I wish to keep an eye on her for the mother's sake.

  Suitcase said just a minute, he might have wrote down a groom's license for a girl with that name last night. Yeah, as a matter of fact she come in with the guy who run the two horse.

  Is that so? Ain't that a coincidence. What's his name?

  Hansel.

  Irish, Two-Tie sniffed. I would like to know everything about that fellow, where he come from, what he's got for horses, whether he's a gentleman, educated, what. Where he banks, so to speak. And Vernon, you didn't hang up my great-niece for stalls, did you?

  There was a one-day temporary shortage, Suitcase said. There won't be no problem today.

  I should hope not.

  I'll look into it.

  And by the way, Vernon. This young lady doesn't know me from a hole in the ground. The families wasn't close in recent years. Don't mention my name. It's not that kind of thing.

  I'll get back to you, Suitcase says.

  Two-Tie picked up Elizabeth's leash, which nowadays he mainly carried, waiting for her to catch up with him at the curbs and street corners. And she followed along after him, toenails tapping as if she was blind as well as old, out the door and down the stairs.

  They had a route through the streets of Carbonport that took nearly an hour, although the town was made up of only five streets, two avenues that turned into county roads and ran up in the hills, and one riverfront park, really a rundown parking lot, by the ferry landing. He had long since observed that Elizabeth had superfluous IQ for her line of work, and inside all that free space in her brain she was completing a philosophy of the world wove together out of all the smells she had ever smelled. Maybe her memory was not the longest. Every day she had to go over every line of it again from top to bottom, just like the day before. She was history-minded: she wanted a piece of every dog who had come before her to every landmark, the whole roll call, every tuft of grass at the foot of the loading platform by the old natrium plant, every pile of boards or lost truck part in the fringe of weeds along the shore at the four-car ferry, every corner stump or clump of pee-bleached iris on the shaggy line where front yards ended in pavement. The one-time ice house. The Wheeling amp; Lake Erie water tower. Every boundary stone still standing, however crookedly, in front of the town cemetery. Where putting her own bit into this olfactory model of the world was concerned, Elizabeth was not demure but lifted her leg like any male dog, a little decrepitly now that she was old. Come outa there, Elizabeth. He didn't want her pissing on the gravestones.

  He used to know certain horses like that-personally-before he got ruled off. Getting ruled off the backside for alleged conflicts of interest and unsavory associations after Mickey went to jail for the dirty bookstore was humiliating and at first inconvenient, but he began to realize in due course that it was all to the good if what you were trying to do was see the whole world of half-mile racetracks and the people and animals that lived on them as one world, and not just a big, all-over-the-place, unseemly business. Of course horse racing was a business too, whatever else it might be, and in some ways he actually found it easier to keep his hand on the long strings if he didn't have to look up close at the valiant and tragic animals and the greedy conniving assholes, himself included, who took advantage of the horses' noble natures. To be ruled off gave him-yes-distance.

  Distance helped him to see straight back to his father playing the horses with shrewd joy to the day he died. Long after the old man could limp to the track anymore he had his Telegraph folded on the little table next to the dusty water glass that held his false teeth. That was the one picture Two-Tie could still call up of Dorothy's little girls. Dorothy painted pictures, her husband was in the theater and of course the children were being raised as heathens, but they'd been warned to be respectful in a kosher house. The oldest, Margaret, was learning to read, she leaned over her great-grandfather's paper next to the teeth, looked at all those funny columns with the bold print and the symbols and the numbers and said, Is it Hebrew? and everybody had a big laugh.

  His father had earned the reputation of a pretty good handicapper over the years. Anyway he got his diamond stickpin out of the crown of the sport of kings, or at worst he broke even, and it made him a dapper little man who thought good of himself and was a gentleman to his wife and a benefactor to the unfortunate.

  He almost passed for a man of the world, Alvin. When it all came out about Lillian-that Preakness Saturday in 1937, when she was riding the streetcar out to Pimlico with her boy, looking pretty in her new hat, the white straw Suzy hat with the green spotted veil, and the roving photographer from the Sunpapers took her picture and she blurted that lie, that she was Mrs. Lillian Samuels, wife of Rudy Samuels of 211 Patterson Park Avenue, although she was still Miss Lillian Murphy and they had been living for four years on Queensberry Avenue in Pimlico, two blocks down from the fence where the first turn rounds into the backstretch; and his mother saw the picture in the Sunday paper and the truth came out-he had a feeling that Alvin would have been philosophical about the Catholic girlfriend and maybe even gone along with a wedding. After all, Lillian was a track clocker's daughter and the real god of the Samuels boys was the racetrack god. His mother threatened to kill herself and wept into her lokshen, but never missed a single meal.

  He should have married Lillian. He knew that now. It wasn't Alvin, it wasn't Mama, he couldn't even blame Lillian for forcing his hand with the big hopeful lie-for some reason the doll really loved him-but at the time he was a puffed up young macher with a fat roll and had that sportsman's attitude you shouldn't let a girl get the upper hand. And besides he never could stomach that woodenhead kossack her son. So Lillian went to Chicago where she died, and he moved back home. The truth was he had never really moved out of the rowhouse on Patterson Park, since that's where the all-night card game was, with Alvin presiding, and he had slept there two, three nights a week, if you call that sleeping.

  Some would argue, surely, that the influence of Alvin Samuels was not so healthy on his boys-look at Mickey-the bookstore after all was a family concern, and Two-Tie had barely missed going to jail himself. But for better or worse, when it come time to situate his finance business, the racetrack was what he knew, or thought he knew. And years later, once he really knew a little about that type of men and animals, getting ruled off only helped him to see the big picture.

  The way he looked at it now, there was something unseemly about a grown man running around from track to track to hustle a buck. In your maturity, if you'd made yourself sufficiently useful to people, if you'd earned a place in their society, let them hoof it to you. Everybody needed money sometimes. Everybody, down to the lowliest hotwalker or toothless groom living in a tack room on a two-dollar dose of King Kong liquor per day, saw his little piece of the picture. Deals didn't have to be stuck together with spit and chewing gum if a man had credit. That's what goddamn telephones were for.

  Besides, he had to think of Elizabeth. The year he got ruled off she turned eleven. He had just noticed the old joy had went out of it for her when they drove to new places and walked around. She got a worried look in her eye, and he saw that the round lens of her eyes was a little milky where
it used to be clear as jelly. She hunched her shoulders and stuck close to his knee and never even tried to sniff around the barn poles and mouseholes and manure piles at a new track.

  So it all came together. He could have fought it. Repeated appeals, screaming lawyers, incessant string pulling and greasing of doors had paid off in similar cases for far more repulsive characters than himself. But he decided not to. Unseemly. He liked that word. Enough was enough. He settled down in Carbonport, right here, on the Ohio side, where he could walk up on the little rise behind the elementary school on Second Street and look down the bluff and across the water at the specks creeping around the brown oval inside the green oval, at least he thought he saw such specks, if the fog was off the river and the morning was clear.

  THE FRIZZLY-HEAD GIRL, the young fool's woman, was barking up his heels again with Pelter. She would walk a horse fast, that girl. She liked to hurry a horse, and him too. Sometime she got so fresh she tipped clean out from under the shedrow, carried Pelter in the dirt road and passed Medicine Ed and the horse he was walking on the right hand side. Not if the young fool was watching she wouldn't-he'd fuss with her if she tried that. Must be worried he stick out enough round here already, and for good reason. Anyhow he want everything done the old way, according to etiquette. The cleanest hay, timothy and alfalfa. Best quality pine tar foot dressing-Zeno used to mix up his own, out of used motor oil and turpentine. Best grain. Hundred percent Castile shampoo. And the most experienced old-time groom fool enough to take his job.

  Naturally, Pelter go along with the girl just fine-Pelter was a game animal, he was always that, bit of a clown, even before he was born he had jumped round the usual etiquette of the business, for he was a unusual creature on the racetrack even if you been around as long as Medicine Ed, namely, a field-bred horse. Or that was the story. Some stud horse, maybe not the one officially certified on the papers, who knew, had sneaked round or over a fence somewhere and went with his mother. Some name like Home Cookin, she wasn't much of a mare and nobody wasn't expecting much out of her, and she got this witch-eyed long-backed colt who turn into a legend. Pelter. And which, if he could talk, and Medicine Ed wouldn't put it past him, why, what couldn't the two of them say about the type of folks they had fell in with now?

  The girl, the young fool's woman-she didn't know nothing and she couldn't do nothing, but she would work, he'd give her that much. Haul them buckets, sling them bales, just like a man, better'n a man if you look at what they got for men round here anymore. If she didn't know nothing to do, she'd find something to do and get all in your hair or climb up your heels like now. She'd make it up as she go along. In the hole in her head where experience would have stacked up, if she had any experience, that's where she must find em, her chucklehead ideas.

  You can't gallop an old horse every day, am I right? she say.

  Hmmm.

  So he gets walked, correct?

  Medicine Ed just eyeball her.

  Okay, if it keeps Pelter sound to walk, isn't it reasonable that walking him fast is a little better than walking him slow?

  Don't you be putting off your eeby jeebies on Pelter there. He ain't nervous. You nervous. He ain't in a hurry. You in a hurry.

  I didn't say he was nervous. I said maybe it'd be good for him to go a little faster.

  Good for you, you mean.

  Good for you too, you old Halloween bones-get your appetite up. And she grinned evilly.

  I had a stick leg since before you was born, young woman. (This wasn't quite true, but somehow the vintage of an injury seem like it ought to get some respect, like what he used to had for his granddaddy who still limped from the war-whichever war that was.) Does I go round calling you Four Eyes?

  You probably call me worse than that behind my back.

  What I call you?

  Ignorant. Green.

  You's all of that.

  Finally it was nothing else to do but show her, learn her a thing or two, in self-defense. He taught her how to rub down the horse's leg and put on the cottons and bandage, smooth and not too tight, without poking it through with the pin and putting a hole in the animal. Then she thought she knew something. Then she want to bandage everything in sight. She go around bandaging young and old, lame and sound, on her own say-so, and Medicine Ed come around behind her unbandaging. What can it hurt? she say.

  Young woman, it is a price on everything. Every change make some other change that you can't see. I know some trainers have never bandaged a horse and they got horses outrun the word of God. When you run against them horses you better have your tap-dancing shoes on.

  Well-you're talking about somebody's fifty-thousand-dollar horse. We've got nothing but cripples.

  You think stakes horses is sound? He shook his head at the pure foolishness of her. Naturally he was thinking of Platonic, and his feet that used to remind Medicine Ed of gluing together two broken China soup plates from little pieces, him and the horseshoer worked on them so much-them two front feet, coming up to the Seashell, was one long bellyache, probably worth two weeks in the butcher shop (Sinai Hospital) all by theyselves. Stake horses like all the rest, he added.

  So how you do you know what to do?

  You follow custom, young woman. They is no I know, he know, like what you talking bout. Until you have put some years in this business, you watch the old grooms and do like they do.

  That doesn't sound very scientific to me, she say.

  I tell you a secret, horse racing is not no science. Some of em tries to make it a science, with the drugs and the chemicals and that, but ma' fact it's more like a religion. It's a clouded thing. You can't see through it. It come down to a person's beliefs. One person believe this and the other person believe that. It's like the National Baptists bandage and the Southern Baptists use liniment, you see what I'm trying to say? Nobody exactly know.

  His cheeks ached under his eyes-she made him talk too much, made him say peculiar things he was sorry later that he give up. He slipped around the corner of the shedrow and faded away from her behind wagons and buildings in a certain way he had learned to do long ago, before he had his good job with Gus Zeno.

  This was when he missed having his old crushed Winnebago there on the shedrow. It was the one thing Mrs. Zeno had said from the start he could keep-it taken phone calls from certain people, Mr. Two-Tie, Jim Hamm, Kidstuff, to remind her of other sums and bonuses that was decent and customary, under the circumstances, but the Winnebago she didn't even care to look at no more. Only, Suitcase Smithers gave him twenty-four hours, if he wanted it, to haul that thing off the backside. The young fool say he'd take care of it. That was part of they deal. He had it towed round to the trailer park behind the Horseman's Motel, a couple blocks from the back gate. They put the Winnebago way in the rear, out of sight, in a clump of serviceberry bushes. They run an extension cable from the young fool's trailer all the way to his trailer. And that was how Medicine Ed fell into this job.

  It would have been too raggedy an outfit even for Ed to work for if Hansel's horses was still thrown to four separate barns in every corner of the backside and everybody at the Mound laughing at him. But already the morning after the young fool rolled in, Suitcase come round personally and asked him this and that, where he from and how he be getting along, and then he let him have Zeno's old stalls in Barn Z.

  That's Pelter? the Pelter? Roland Hickok's Pelter? Suitcase say. He's peering in the dark stall. The young fool make like he ain't hear. He turn on his heel and hang up a tangle of shanks and halters and shaken out some chain, but finally he say Mr. Hickok have sold him Pelter in a private deal, and Suitcase say, Well I'll be damned, because he know Mr. Hickok won't sell the West Virginia-bred winner of the Popcorn Stakes and the Little Blue Ridge to just anyone. So maybe the young fool's price go up a little bit just then.

  Medicine Ed himself had to admit that Pelter looked good, almost too good-ain't he heard that the once-upon-a-time Darkesville Stalker broke down bad in the stretch only a shor
t while back? And they was that red bomber too that Zeno had claimed, and which had already win one for fifteen hundred in Charles Town, so the young fool must be doing something right for these horses.

  Medicine Ed had his hand on the screen door of the track kitchen-but then between buildings he spied Deucey Gifford, looking round for him to walk the Speculation grandson. It was something about this colt (colt! he was long past a colt) that touched him. He hurried his stiff leg back to the barn and took him off her. Medicine Ed like to get him round the corner of the shedrow, where Deucey couldn't see, and slip him out to the grass patch, let him graze, graze and gaze. He looked round at things, like he really want to know what it is. Why? Like nobody pay you a dollar more in this business to braid up a tail or put a checkerboard on the flank of a horse going to a race. So why? It was the plain beauty of the thing.

  He do scare easy, the horse. When they swing back to the shedrow, a she-cat with a backbone like knuckles, so bagged up her titties bounced on the dirt, chased a mouse across their path, and the horse threw up his head and stood quivering. What she want with you, son? Medicine Ed talked to him. She done got herself in a deep hole and she need some of that fast luck oil to get her out. She ain't thinking bout you. He gave the horse his kind eye, he came back to himself and they plodded on.

  The way Medicine Ed hear it, Joe Dale Bigg run the horse off and so he was Deucey's but he wasn't Deucey's, wasn't nobody's horse right now. A Speculation grandson and looking for a home! Jesus put me wise. Now, what was the name of this boy? Medicine Ed couldn't recall. For all his fancy blood he had a ankle almost as big as he was, but that wasn't what caused him to lose his home. It was Biggy, Joe Dale Bigg's boy, one day when Biggy was helping Fletcher the dentist in the back of the horse's stall and the horse pinned and about killed him. Biggy what you call simple, a gorilla-size child-for-life, and now he was back from the industrial school in Pruntytown. Joe Dale Bigg thought he better be shed of the animal before something go down.