Lord of Misrule

by Jaimy Gordon

  The driver's scared face showed in the window, one cheek stuffed with bubblegum.

  Now who the fuck wants to get in my hair. D'Ambrisi, Joe Dale said in disgust. He paced up and down, but he was beginning to be a believer. As soon as the driveway widened out, D'Ambrisi tried to back the trailer around-he wanted to park the thing in position for a fast getaway, which you really couldn't blame the shlub-and ended up with one wheel dangling over the ditch. He got out, his short neck sunk down as low as possible in his leather jacket, and started to fuss with the gate without saying nothing to nobody.

  What is this fucking circus? Joe Dale shouted.

  D'Ambrisi went on shakily folding out the ramp.

  He got a phone call from Baltimore, said Two-Tie. He don't want that horse no more.

  Let him tell me himself. What are you doing here, Breeze? You come to take your horse?

  D'Ambrisi busied himself with a rusty piece of chain that had come loose from the metal plate. He waved it around helplessly, waiting for someone to tell him where it attached. No one spoke.

  What the fuck can I do? he finally burst out. Posner called me up. Posner in person.

  What did he say?

  He said I was way out of line.

  So? So? Joe Dale was not taking this well. His upper lip was icing up, for he was panting like a bull.

  But I could fix it by giving the girl back her horse.

  Joe Dale walked slowly over to the horse van, looked at it, and gave it a savage kick in the fender. The wheel well crumpled in like cardboard. He turned and shouted in Two-Tie's face:

  You got ties? I got ties too. I'll tell you this, old man. I don't have to go crying to goddamn Baltimore to get something done. I can take care of it right here. What do you want to get in my business for? What do you care about this dropout floozy anyhow?

  Maggie had managed to roll down the backseat window. Her chin was on the sill.

  Look at that girl. She can't hardly hold her head up, Two-Tie observed mournfully.

  Goddamn it, I ain't getting off the horse, Joe Dale shouted, until I get something back for it. This ain't the United Way.

  He's my uncle, Maggie said to Joe Dale. I think.

  Two-Tie almost smiled. She thought she had to explain. It was a family trait.

  You think, Joe Dale said. Do me a favor-don't think.

  I'm trying not to, Maggie replied, if you'd all just be quiet.

  You will be compensated, Two-Tie told Joe Dale, remembering it was his part to be generous. Better than a hundred percent. I'll take care of it myself. Now where's the horse.

  How do I know? Joe Dale shrugged. It's the Breeze's horse. The Breeze can do what he wants with his horse, if he can find it.

  Roy of Roy's Taxicab leaned out the window. The horse dumped the girl and run up the hill into the woods, he reported. Twenty minutes ago. I seen the whole thing.

  I got thirty-two head of horses on this farm, Joe Dale said. How you gonna tell which one is which?

  My garsh, I'd know that Pelter anywhere, Roy said, he's a real dark bay like co'cola in the bottle, got the long back and that old Roman nose like Man o' War. I win a hundred and twenty bucks on him in the Glass Classic in 1966.

  Take a shank, Maggie yelled out the window, but D'Ambrisi only hid behind the goo-patched horse trailer. Damn it, I'm going to crawl up there myself, she muttered. She sprang the door handle and fell out on the frozen mud.

  Elizabeth hung out the open door above her, barking passionately. Roy got out and carefully closed the door. They heard a whinny up the hill. There was the horse, shiny with sweat, stepping drunkenly down the steep part of the rutted driveway, like after a big race, with Hansel leading him. Hansel wore a pearl gray fedora, black trousers and a wine red vest. He resembled a Galitzianer horse trader out of one of Alvin's stories.

  I shoulda known you didn't have the balls to come for that horse by yourself, Joe Dale said to D'Ambrisi. You had to bring the track looney.

  What makes you say Hansel is looney? Two-Tie asked worriedly. He was still collecting evidence against his niece's young man, but no one answered the question. Up close, despite his flamboyant dress, Hansel looked like a man of consequence. He had a firm, straight-legged walk which gave him authority-he might be a looney, but he was no drooling gimp. He sent Pelter up the ramp with a sharp slap on the behind.

  I need you in the van, Maggie, he said. What the hell are you doing down there anyway? The girl was still sitting on the frozen ground under the door of the taxicab. He's hot-you need to rub him and keep on rubbing him till we get to the track-now let's get the hell out of here.

  Can't, she said. Can't move.

  She's had a bit too much, Two-Tie explained vaguely. Now that the episode was drawing to a satisfactory close, he saw no point in making personal accusations.

  Somebody gave me a rhino trank, Maggie said, with a disbelieving little laugh.

  Hmmm. What's that like-any fun?

  Uhhh-not recommended. Kind of a graveyard preview. You get your usual boring mind, trapped in a dead body-that's it.

  Hansel nodded. Hey, thanks for looking after my woman, he said pleasantly to Joe Dale, who started to smile and never saw the fist flying towards his face. Joe Dale stiffened and fell sideways into his boys like a bowling pin.

  Biggy bellowed and jumped for the deergun, but Two-Tie pushed the rifle off the stoop with his rubber-soled dress shoe. The Browning still dangled from his own small hand. Elizabeth threw herself at the open taxicab window in an explosion of barks and snarls.

  Want I should let her out? Roy yelled to Two-Tie, rolling the window up halfway.

  Jesus no-umbeshrien-she might hurt herself.

  Biggy launched himself off the stoop at Hansel and threw a roundhouse punch at his face. Hansel stepped away so that the blow only swished across his ear. Biggy stumbled back to swing again, and Hansel ducked towards the ranchhouse, picked up the deergun and swung it like a club, by the barrel, at the back of Biggy's head. The crack silenced them all. Biggy gave out a groan of weird contentment, swayed, and went down on his face like a felled tree.

  The Irish boyfriends fast and strong, he ain't a coward, and he can take care of himself, Two-Tie thought. He was impressed. On the other hand he knew, with hot dizzy certainty, that there would be no end of trouble now.

  Joe Dale stood propped between his boys, holding a bloody tattersall handkerchief under his nose. It's a goddamn good thing for you clowns that I'm a respectable businessman, he said quietly, through the handkerchief, or you'd have to be shitting your pants, all three of youse, knowing you're going to get hurt.

  Do what you have to do. Just don't touch the niece, Two-Tie said.

  The niece, Joe Dale laughed. I forgot about her. I ain't going to hurt the niece. I got other plans for the niece. Say, maybe I could swap you Biggy for her. As is. He pointed down at Biggy, who was making little crawling motions, still face down on the frozen, rootbeer-colored mud. Not much to look at, is he, he said. But neither is she.

  I have met a great many slugs and sleazeballs in my racetrack days, Two-Tie announced, but you get the crown. I see you don't care if that pityfull retard lives or dies.

  Okay, okay Joe Dale shrugged. I'll keep him. I'll get her some other way. Won't I, baby? She owes me and she knows she owes me.

  You'll get what she owes you presently, Tommy Hansel said.

  IN THE SUMMER, stunned by heat and work, she lost track of Tommy. He was in New York, seeing about a horse. The midnight blue Sedan de Ville rolled up as she was walking Pelter. They walked on, and the car inched along the shedrow beside them.

  Say, that was something how he roped in that Natalie broad from New Rochelle. I keep underestimating the guy. I knew her for years-she ain't that easy. I mean she's vulgar, I-want-you-should-this and I-want-you-should-that, but she's game and she's got the bucks-for a while. Still, I worry about Tommy. Don't you worry about Tommy? He kids himself he can take what's mine without paying for it and if he flies high enough,
nothing bad will happen to him. But he's so fucked I don't have to do nothing. He's so high he can't look down. Or he crashes. He's going to crash. Want to ride a dime on it? No? Hey, I thought you'd play. Joe Dale shrugged and the window rolled up and he drove away.

  When Tommy is back, they never touch or eat in the trailer. Margaret no longer tries to cook on the faux wood counters with their black gummy cracks and peeling celluloid edges. At night after the races they are exhausted, at four in the morning, getting up to feed, they are not awake. Sometimes Tommy doesn't come back to the trailer at all. Whatever they are, they are not laborers. Their bodies don't thank them for this long reminder that they are not brother and sister pharaoh, not prince and courtesan, not even a proper hustler and his moll. They are working too hard for that. Or at least Maggie is-it's not entirely clear what sort of business occupies Tommy.

  That first summer they knew each other, when he came home in the afternoon from the track and she from the paper, they were in bed in five minutes, with all of it: newsprint and horse manure, saddle leather, ink and hashish, past performance charts and food pages, sweet feed and recipes for blancmange and corn souffle. The sheets literally reeked of all that. The sweat-damp canyons of the featherbed were gritty with their mixture. In some way their unmiscible lives fused. Here they live the same life and are rivals to come out of it alive. They meet in the prickly dark of the tack room or not at all. They couple on haybales or in old loose straw on the dirt floor or not at all. It starts with some hoarse utterance, I want to get in your ass, and hard fingers down the front of her jeans, or the back of them, fuck me now. They are naked but scaly, with clothes pushed out of the way of orifices, they come together like insects, claspers, ovipositors, wet vacuoles. They talk in this straw-speckled darkness or not at all. Will you marry me? She laughs. Is that such a ridiculous question?

  She knew she should say it, it would have been the honorable thing to say it, but she was afraid of pushing him over some edge: I'm getting out of here as soon as I can. I don't know exactly what's going on, but a girl like me-I can't be playing around with gangsters. I keep thinking I'm in a movie and then I realize I could get killed. The strangeness draws me in but in the end I can't afford it. I haven't done anything with my life.

  FOURTH RACE

  Lord of Misrule

  THEY WERE ALL LOOKING for a van like a Chinese jewel box, like no horse van that had ever been seen on a backside, something red and black and glossy, with gold letters, LORD OF MISRULE, arched across each side. All the same when a plain truck with Nebraska plates rolled into the Mound on the hottest day of the year, they knew who it was. They were watching, though the van was unmarked and dirty white, one of those big box trailers with rusty quilting like an old mattress pad you've given to the dog. The van bounced and groaned on its springs along the backside fence, headed for the stallman's office. Red dust boiled around it. They blinked as it dragged two wheels through the puddle that never dried, the puddle that had no bottom. They all waited for the van to tilt and lurch to a stop; it didn't even slow down. They peered through the vents when the van went by and saw the horse's head, calm, black and poisonous of mien as a slag pile in a coal yard. He had a funny white stripe like a question mark on his forehead.

  The van stopped, woof, down comes the ramp, and a kid, unhealthy-looking like all racetrack kids, worm white, skull bones poking out of his skinny head, stood at the top of the ramp with a small black horse that couldn't even stand right: Lord of Misrule already rocked, or seemed to rock, on the flat floor of the van like a table with one short leg. And those legs-they were so swelled out from long-ago bowed tendons on both sides that they were one straight line from knee to ankle, drainpipes without contour except for the waffling left over from firing and blistering agents and god knows what.

  Old Devil get behind of me, said Medicine Ed.

  I'm scared, Maggie said, why am I scared?

  You see what it's gonna cost Spinoza here just to chase after him, Deucey said.

  What do you mean? Maggie said. We're not racing him. Are we?

  Deucey added: Because that horse don't know from pain.

  Notice the white six of syphilis on his forehead, Tommy Hansel said. They all looked away from the horse, and looked at him. Tommy leaned against the tack room door. The planes under his eyes were luminous with some peculiar idea, and sweat pearled his handsome, heavy forehead.

  Say what? Medicine Ed asked.

  But Tommy Hansel smiled as if he had been making a joke, and, relieved, they turned back to look at the horse.

  Tell you what, Medicine Ed said. He ain't get them bad wheels from standing in no stall.

  All kinds of people had come to watch from the grass bib of the shedrow, horsemen, grooms and ponygirls, hot-walkers and assorted riff-raff. They were waiting. Then the terrible thing happened. The back door of the Racing Secretary's pre-fab office shack opened and a large bald man with mastiff jowls and tea-colored eyeglasses came out and stood on the wooden stair. It was Standish Chenille himself. People blinked, for the racing secretary was seldom seen. He descended the stair and scuffed at a leisurely pace towards Lord of Misrule's van. The face in the cab of the van was freckled, boyish and rough, with a Western squint and a broad snub nose. Mr. Standish Chenille leaned over and said to him, low, but not so low that everybody couldn't hear: Barn Z. Raymond called ahead. His eyes pinched up, and all at once he had a hole similar to a smile punched into his heavy face. It was a welcome, a princely welcome. They all looked at each other. They could scarcely believe their ears. They looked at each other, and they thought, This is big, and, How can we get a piece of it, and, We'll take anything, even a hoof paring, sawdust, loose change.

  The horses around them felt it too. Joe Dale Bigg's were all of a sudden beating up the red dust under the hot-walking machine, tearing around the aluminum carousel at a thrilled gallop that few of them ever showed at the far turn.

  Going into the stretch it's Nobody's Nothing, with Nowhere making his move on the inside, Deucey called the race. A few people laughed. Lord of Misrule threw back his head, snorted out dust and rolled his eye at the other cheap horses. His black tail arched and, ugly as Rumpelstiltskin, he let drop great soft nuggets, part gold, part straw, all the way down the ramp.

  THERE WAS A HAYBALE up against the shingle between the young fool's tack room and his stalls, and Medicine Ed sat here in the afternoon and studied, and after a while he let his heavy head fall back against the wall and he might doze. He didn't care these days to walk out the back gate over to Zeno's old Winnebago. He couldn't sleep in it no more if he did, for now he start to worry that he gone to lose it. Yes, he had that draggyfied feeling he was about to lose his good home one more time.

  It wasn't the horses gone sour. Horses gone good: Mahdi. Pelter. Even the mare and Railroad Joe run in the money now and then. Wasn't the money. Seem like all of a sudden it was money in the young fool's pocket, New York money, might could be money from some crime character, since the young fool so jumpy and no owner in sight. No. The young fool's reason have clouded, what it is. Ever since he come back with Pelter from Joe Dale Bigg's farm, he be wandering in his mind. He talked to the horses about King Death, then he listened to the quiet, like they talking back-it give Ed the creeper crawlers to hear it. You think you are stronger? he say to Mahdi, remember, they come from Nebraska, where King Death keeps his court in beauty and decay. The little hairs stand up and wave on the back of Medicine Ed's neck.

  He fixing to put The Mahdi in that special race against Lord of Misrule, and not just for the teenchy cut of the purse they slipping to all the entries, half a per cent or two hundred bucks or what it is. No, he gone try against common sense to win with the horse, good against evil, some catawamptious idea, sure to bring the Devil down on him if it ain't the Devil messing up his mind already. And if the gangsters whose race it is don't get to him first, him and anybody work for him. Or Joe Dale Bigg-since they take away Pelter off his farm, Joe Dale has turned cold as
grave dirt. You can see why Death run in the young fool's mind, even if he is crazy. Medicine Ed pushed two fingers deep in his shut eyes, gold scum rippled through the black in his head, and hot as it was, he shivered.

  Somebody pulled his sleeve. What do you know, Ed? It was the frizzly girl. She sat down on the haybale next to him, she say What do you know? and then she don't say nothing. Since she come back from Joe Dale Bigg's farm with Pelter, the hot sauce was gone out of her, the longnose newsbag too. She taken care of her horse, that was about it. She showed up in the morning before even Ed and mucked the stalls and set out the feed buckets and don't say nothing to nobody, and by the time Ed dragged in, and he ain't lay in no bed past four in the morning in forty years, she walking her horse. Pelter-he her horse now. She walked him slow, slow as the horse in front, whosomever it happened to be.

  She say, Ed, what do you know? and the rest of the time she quiet. Or what she will say: I gotta get us home. All I want is to get us home in one piece. Who is us, Medicine Ed want to ask. Do that count him, Medicine Ed? But he don't ask and she don't say.