by Jaimy Gordon
MAGGIE AND PELTER set off across the backside, Maggie crawling with nerves, Pelter in need of his dinner. On both sides of the fence, things were alive: above the racetrack, the lights had faded to a half-world and losers streamed for the exits, shedding their dead tickets as they went. Now the headlights of a thousand snarling autos crisscrossed the path that she and Pelter picked their way along, while up and down the shedrows the long, dove gray, grainy beams sifted in and out of each other like long tall ghosts. The losers in their automobiles-Margaret trusted they narrowed their bloodshot eyes at all they saw. She felt almost safe walking here.
Inside the fence, too, the long barns were alive. Here and there hot horses were still walking, buckets squeaked, hoses hissed on and off, nozzles burst into rhinestone fans and the soapy water that grooms scraped off their horses hit the dirt with a rude clack like a hand across a face. In every shedrow a stall or two glowed yellow, and bodies, plenty of bodies, crossed back and forth in front of them. Alive.
All the shedrows were alive, but most of all Barn Z. At the far corner of the transient barn, blocking the last dirt lane before the outside fence, with its back wide open and its furrowed silver carpet rolled out, was the van that was not like a Chinese jewel box, that was in fact unmarked, pocked and dirty white, its Nebraska license plate screwed on at a tilt and dog-eared in one corner. Open, empty, black inside, it waited for its seedy royal traveler, and even so, even after the miserable race he had run, it was a gleaming lacquered box of red-gold letters. Lord of Misrule was up on his blistered fetlocks and on his way in, the worm white kid swatting absently at his rump with a rolled-up comic book. His shoes scrabbled at the frets, green sparks flew and all of a sudden one silver arc shot out, like a spring from a bad toy, and caught the worm white boy in the belly. Bastid! the boy jumped backwards and fluted half soprano. What you get for sleeping, said Nebraska, laughing, in the cab. He coulda ruined me for life. End of the line for you, old man. Aaanh, one of youse is enough.
In the yellow frame of Little Spinoza's stall Maggie saw Medicine Ed, stick thin and bent forward from the small of his back like a knife with a bad hinge. The old man's bad leg dragged its sideways foot and his long deeply grooved face was closed. To look at him, you wouldn't know anything special had happened tonight at all. He was carrying away the last pads of wet straw from the empty stall on a pitchfork. Behind him lime dust powdered the wet black floor, the sugar that ghost horses eat. He had mucked Pelter's stall first and it stood open, a cube of warm gold floating above a deep floor of fresh straw. Then he had emptied Spinoza's down to nothing. She saw that he worked to fill empty time and she remembered that he too had lost Little Spinoza. How much of a material loss that might be to the old groom she had no way to know. A few of these old guys squirreled away thousands, or that's what people said. He had no vices that she could detect. He didn't drink or smoke or snort but surely he cashed a ticket now and then. Soon she wouldn't see him anymore. Why did this distress her so? He thought her a fool and his deep suspicion of her had awakened in her, over time, its opposite emotion, a deep trust in his wisdom. She needed a counselor who had no use for her and suddenly she felt she would be helpless without him. He on the other hand probably wished he had never laid eyes on her, or Tommy Hansel either. Suddenly she laughed. No doubt she was exaggerating their importance. Medicine Ed would always find a job.
But when he saw her, something came into the closed face after all. Boss done hammer and nail hisself in the stall box with the red horse, he said.
She looked at the back wall. What is that noise?
Horse can't settle down. Horse can't get his breath. Horse ain't walked yet or either eat. Horse don't come out they soon he might probly never come out.
I could get Haslipp, she said. Try to talk Tommy into letting him in.
Don't fuss at him about that horse. Veternary can't save that horse. Horse all through.
You mean he'll die?
He moved away from her with the pitchfork. He ain't no race horse no more. What I mean.
They were whispering. Are you with me? Tommy rang out suddenly, not at them, but at something only he heard. With me! He laughed, rather scornfully. Is that such a ridiculous question?
Tommy, she called. Won't you please come out of there?
Maggie? Where are you?
I'm out here.
How did you get out there?
What do you mean?
You were in here, Maggie. A minute ago. On account of the light-you have to get out of that light. You know the light I mean. From the gatehouse.
Why, she said reluctantly.
They use it to give you a weird kind of feeling they're drawing the insides out of you. You know that feeling? Maggie?
Yes? she said.
Why did you leave me?
I'm here, she said.
You may be a traitor.
Well, Maggie said. Maybe.
I know you can't help it. You're weak.
He's lost his mind, she whispered to Medicine Ed. Now what do I do?
Why you want to do anything? They carry him away soon enough without you doing nothing.
I need to get a van right now, she said. Why did I wait? That fucking race, that's why. Now where can I get us a van at this time of night?
You don't need no van.
I want to call my Uncle Rudy. You know my Uncle Rudy. The one they call Two-Tie.
I know Mr. Two-Tie.
He has vans. He told me to call him if I got in trouble. If I needed anything. He gave me his number, I swear he did, but I lost it. You have his number, don't you.
Mr. Two-Tie done had vans, Medicine Ed replied carefully. He many long years out that bidness. Who say he have vans?
She shrugged. It had been the Koderer family version, sanitized, she supposed, of Uncle Rudy's business. I bet he could get me a van, Maggie said, all the same.
Might probly he could, if he was home. But he ain't home.
After the races, Two-Tie is always home. Everybody says that. Even I know that.
He ain't home, Medicine Ed said. You can call him if you want to. I give you the number. But he ain't home. He busied himself about Pelter's feet. You want that number? He looked up at her for the first time and she saw the stony judgment in the set of his mouth. He had taken his teeth out, and his long, thin-lipped mouth made one deep line like a stitch. She did not reply. After a while he repeated: You don't need no van.
Tommy won't leave without the horses.
They gone send a van all right. They gone send a van directly. But not for yalls horses.
What do you mean?
They ain't gone let you take them horses. The trainer ain't fit. And he owe money. They gone take his horses.
I don't believe you. How can they just take away his horses?
He looked up at her again with something between pain and fury. Ima tell you, young woman. His horses ain't nothing. And he ain't nothing. They do what they want. It's no owners for them horses. His horses is gone to the block. Why you worry about them sorry horses? You gone have enough trouble to get you man out the can again, or either out the state hospital, or wayever they put him.
Get him out? Maggie said. For she had never perceived the care of Tommy as her job. Tommy's horses were one thing. Tommy was quite another.
Nobody gone pay the keep on them horses. They at the end of the line. They gone to the block. So much a pound to pay his bills.
They can't have my horse. Pelter is not going to the dog food factory. I'll see to that much.
You gone train him? Or pay somebody else to train him?
Maggie searched in her pockets, unfolded the foaling papers with shaking hands. I'll take care of that right now. How do you spell Salters?
You a fool. I got no money to fool with that horse. He ain't improving. I throw him on the block tomorrow if he come up lame.
There's a little horse left there. You know there is. It's an honor to own this horse.
Nothing but troub
le is what. Big race gone wrong, and Mr. Hickok's old horse, he come out of nowhere and win it. First Horse of West Virginia. It gone be in the papers. And then some young girl who ought not to own the horse in the first place, gone sign the horse over to a colored groom. They gone try to take him from me. They will look for some way.
There's not that much horse left, Maggie said sharply. Come on. Be a man. S-A-L-T-E-R-S. Is that right? Or should I just write X? She wrote the name, then pressed the paper at Medicine Ed, whose hands stayed where they were, patiently unrolling yellowed bandage bolt by bolt. He wouldn't look at her. The paper fluttered down to the straw. She ducked under the webbing. She did not have to watch him pick it up. She knew he wanted that horse. True, the old man wasn't the mask of joy. His long, deeply graven face was closer, indeed, to the mask of grief than the mask of joy, but what he resembled most was himself. She wasn't sure she hadn't been snookered. She could not look behind her at Pelter, his darkling ankles as if he had stepped in rich black swamp water, his long, gleaming back. She looked up and down the shedrow, feeling broken in two. The ancient racetrackers who had discouraged this attachment all along nodded their ghostly heads, satisfied.
An Indian Mounds Police Department station wagon was inching its way up the dirt road, so slow it boiled in the greenish dust of its own headlights, and scuffing along duckfooted in front of it, pointing the way, was Archie, the track stooge who manned the back gatehouse when races were on. Suitcase Smithers hadn't even seen fit to come in person to clear away the difficulty. Ima tell you, young woman. His horses ain't nothing. And he ain't nothing. The racetrack had called in the town police. Maggie wanted to borrow the can't-see-me act of Medicine Ed and slip away sidewise between the shedrows, but she felt obliged to stand there and show the police that Tommy was not vacant of human ties and connections. She stepped back around the corner and waited in front of the barricaded stall. That was all it occurred to her to do.
Boss, Medicine Ed whispered roughly from Pelter's stall on the other side of the shedrow. She heard it through two walls. Po-lice car is coming. Two town policemans and Archie.
She realized that for some little while there had been no more jerks of chain, no more gritty thuds and swipes of the great body against the stall wall. One way or the other, The Mahdi was past struggling.
Maggie?
I'm here.
Is it true? a cop car?
Yes, she said.
Did you call the cops on me? He waited. Maggie? Did you?
Stallman drop a dime, boss, Medicine Ed said tiredly. Everybody know.
She heard a great clatter and squeal of wood splintering. Up and down the shedrow horses trumpeted in panic, thumped and swished around in their stalls. Tommy was kicking his way out of the back of the stall. It was quickly done. Some of the planks near the dirt floor were short and new, a patch job where the wall had been kicked in by horses many times before. They had kept The Mahdi in here because he was an easy horse.
The police wagon came around the corner, ground to a stop and idled irresolutely. In its head beams, white dust dully chased itself. After a time the car doors flopped open. Maggie woke up. Now that Tommy was gone, she didn't have to answer any questions. She backed out of the light and ran back around to the far side of Barn Z. At Pelter's stall she paused. The foaling papers had vanished. Pelter nosed the hay bag in the front of his stall, calm, brushed and shining. As Medicine Ed's horse, he looked better already.
Medicine Ed squatted before a ragged hole in the back of the next stall, his stiff leg out to one side in its usual mirthless kazatsky. He was inspecting a mass of shadow on the other side of the wall. The thick sleek throat curved up where The Mahdi had sunk to the ground on his tie-chain. His mouth was wide open. The horse was dead. The town constables were knocking on the other side of the barricaded door. Tommy Hansel? Tommy Hansel? Indian Mounds Police. Please open the door. Medicine Ed's lips twitched, getting ready to say Mr. Hansel he gone and I don't know nothing bout nothing. Maggie faded off zigzag between the shedrows.
She left as Medicine Ed used to do, ducking into the walking rings where they were boxed in at the ends of shedrows, never hurrying and never looking back. But suddenly she heard, too close to her, the priestly daven of an expensive car. The midnight blue Cadillac was in the dirt road, not following her but pacing her to the exit. Leave disappearing acts to the old man. She ran-ran straight for the fence that divided the backside on that end from the surrounding field. A little gully rolled away from the fence on the other side, so that the bottom wasn't flush. She scrambled under, stood up in blackberry brambles, ironweed, and queen anne's lace. It was the edge of some fenced wilderness belonging to track maintenance. In the dim glow that spilled over from the backside she saw a general downhill tumble of junk, piles of asphalt roof tiles and scrap lumber, then came limestone outcroppings abloom with bullseyes of lichen, and at last the weedy slope fell away into darkness. Lower still was the well of luminous fog that rose from the floodplains of the river.
That was the way she went at first, out of the light and towards the river. When the dank fog swirled around her, she dipped back up into scattered security lights-yet another maintenance compound. But this place was lower and wider open than the junkyard by the backside fence, and all at once her sneaker sank deep in sand. At her feet, clouds of clammy brittle touch-me-not, but underneath, rich sand. She knew that sensation. Pulled up a handful of jewelweed, and there it was, an old ghostly washed-out racetrack, what was left of one. Saw other flashes of bone white sand here and there, and remembered people saying so, that there had been another half-mile ring out here once upon a time, used for match races and fair meetings and such, before Ives opened his chain of cheap racetracks in the thirties. The old track had washed out in storm after storm, and when they built the new Indian Mound Downs, that was where they had put the place, out of sight behind chainlink fence and sumac thicket, down a few crumbling rungs of limestone, guarded by owls and copperheads, well out of sight of the racetrack as it was now.
So this was the place-site of the track generator and pumping station, but also the place where they dragged their dead, lair of the horse ambulances, loading dock of animal processing plant and tanyard. She slowed down, treaded cautiously, for now the fog had risen from the river and lay across the old infield in long torn drifts. Above it floated fuzzy disembodied heads of joe-pye weed, and now a whole wrecked starting gate stuck up suddenly out of the weeds and mist, lopsided, rusted, sagging down on one side. Here an old dung pile, shrunken, sun-crusted, speared all over with ripe plantain. Her feet, kicking through weeds, began to strike this and that-leavings of someone who had camped up here, tin cans, chunks of fire-blackened wood, a couple of lawn chairs trailing broken plastic webbing and a chunk of plyboard to lay between them, like the old grooms used to sleep on in a spare stall, when there were spare stalls. Some gyp must have lived up here, maybe a real gypsy back then, for here was his dessicated gyp rope doubling as a clothesline, here his dried out longjohns, his dead socks, even a set of jockey silks bleached gray and rotted to shreds. Maybe he had had to get out of town fast. Such things happened.
One of her feet wedged up against a concrete apron-the gypsy's clothesline had been threaded through the padlock of a steel door, generator shed or something, she heard a low hum, down into the fog to one outer sprung spoke of what looked like the picked bones of a giant umbrella-a broken-down hot-walking machine, dumped, unceremoniously, over the side of the hill from the washed-out track. Up above, ash barrels, a weak yellow mosquito light, and something else on the concrete strip beyond the pathetic clothesline, a mound rising out of the fog, dark and slick with dew, that she knew at once had been alive, knew it was Little Spinoza, knew she'd been looking for him. He lay on the pavement of the loading platform, and he who had looked small and even dainty when alive looked all too big as a dead body-looked like something hard to get rid of. Fog swathed the platform but swam around the dead horse like a startled spirit. She looked
at the fluting behind the velvety nostril, the arched, vaulted throat, the dry glimmer of tooth and eye and felt guilty of a huge desertion, as though she had starved him to death. She had the feeling they had all left him here to rot-but that was foolish. It was just that the Mound was a cheap track, and out in the sticks. After the night races let out, no one was at work in the rendering plant. The knackers would pick up the carcass in the morning. If the rats ate his eyes in the night or foxes chewed the cannon bone, the broken flesh savory with hormones of pain and fear, who would know? who would see?
She had always liked to sink her hands into Spinoza, the Speculation grandson, at first feared to be a killer, in fact the most pliable body of all once he foolishly gave his trust. She remembered how she used to drape herself sloppily across his rump with one arm while she worked on his tail and thighs with the other-how after a while his spine would curve up like a bow and his knees slightly buckle, so they would end like two amiable drunks holding each other up before a magistrate. Now she made herself run a hand over his dead body. The hair was gritty and clotted like a mat on the floor of a taxicab, or a rug for wiping your feet in a public entrance on an ugly day. It felt filthy and contagious. She drew her hand back, wiped the open palm down the side of her jeans and leaned against the wall. She had thought the ghost of the horse might be around here somewhere, but whatever she had meant to say to him by touching his body, she had surely told him the opposite.
