Lord of Misrule

by Jaimy Gordon

  Hey. Do you know how much I hate you?

  Joe Dale. She peered into the darkness. He was sitting four or five yards from her out in the wet weeds in the gypsy's plastic lawn chair, with the fog boiling around him and his legs crossed. Behind him in the old infield, in a starry sea of queen anne's lace, the midnight blue Sedan de Ville idled-she imagined it idled, all she heard was the low growl of the generator and the throb of cicadas. A lighter snapped, Joe Dale lit a cigar and she saw the black grain of beard on his white cheeks and the bags under his eyes.

  Too much to kill you, which is lucky for you, he said. I try never to hate a girl that much so she gets interesting again. But then it happens and, hey, it's a trip. The staying power I get! And the brains, like a detective. I wake up when I never knew I was asleep. You thought you got away from me, didn't you? Hey, once I hated you, I found you just like that. Bam. How did I know you'd be in the place? I knew. Now I won't feel so bad about losing my money on Lord of Misrule tonight. I know I'm going to get something out of it. I know you ain't going to turn me down after I tell you how much I hate you. You won't want to miss this. I mean, you don't get this too off-ten. At least I don't. Am I scaring you? Hey, relax. When I hate a girl that much I only want to be with her. To experience her, you might say. There's nothing like it. Love can't compare. You know what I mean? Probably not. Well, like love is to you, hate is to me. I got to be with her while it lasts. Then she's like any other broad again and I can throw her out. I'm free, she's free. You colly?

  He did not get up and she was conscious of looking down at him in the infield over the dead body of the horse. So what do you say? he asked. She opened her mouth but nothing came out; the cicadas swelled up in the interval as loud as a discotheque.

  Then she saw another person coming across the infield, glinting silk sleeves, dark vest, tall and well made, the walk at once elegant and faintly simian owing to the turned-back hands. Carrying a pitchfork. Tommy. Head tipped to one side, as if listening, listening to voices-were they in or out of his head? She saw him, saw him see them, saw him lean in leisurely attention on the fins of the midnight blue Cadillac. He was insane, he thought people were trying to destroy him, to suck out his guts, but, she noted, in the rare event that someone was trying to destroy you, to suck out your guts, insanity was a goodly metaphysics.

  I see your point, she said carefully. What could be more alien to the body than someone that you hate. I understand the physical attraction of the alien. I've always been drawn to the alien-I mean, to anything alive that's a completely different species from me.

  Hey, that's me, Joe Dale said. I'm a bulldog. I mean, naked I'm a little overweight, more than a little, my trainer don't like it but you'll like it. Wait'll you see-balls all over me. Balls on my neck, balls around my middle, balls on my balls. When I fuck you, I'm going to tell you the whole time how much I hate you. All the time, like some kinda new music you never heard before. You've been waiting for something like that for a long time now-am I right or wrong?

  I've got to admit, she said, that you are alien to me, enough so… so I can imagine you… meeting you like some kind of monster in a labyrinth.

  He laughed. Some kinda monster in a labyrinth. I like that.

  But there's some aspect that kills it, freezes it, when I see you actually sitting there in front of me. Takes the life out of it.

  The snuff aspect, he said.

  Exactly. The snuff aspect. That you could take my life.

  Hey, I'm unarmed. He pulled open his white windbreaker to show her. You could still run away from me, he said cheerfully. Go ahead. Try. You got room.

  I could, couldn't I. But I'd like to know what it is you hate about me.

  Okay. To be frank-you love trouble, he said. That disgusts me. You think you're too intelligent. You think you just accidentally end up where it's at, like, it's a coincidence that horses get wasted around you, maybe people too. But it ain't an accident. You make it happen.

  How exactly do I do that?

  You should have gone along with me the first time I suggested something to you, he said. It was just a small thing then. I tried to make it easy for you. To take the matter out of your hands. But you got no trust.

  That's true. But I don't see why you couldn't just stay on your side and me on mine.

  Hey, I didn't invite you into my world, did I? You showed up. You took, not one, two horses from me. You fought me, because you're a destroyer. You eat corpses, like that one there. I just fight back.

  Then we're not so very different after all, are we.

  Fuck yes we're different. I do cold things but you make it happen. It's like weather, it goes where it's summoned. I wouldn't do what I do if it wasn't for low pressure cunts like you. I wouldn't even think of such things, believe me.

  I believe you.

  You better go if you're going to go, he said, getting to his feet. Otherwise I'm going to get my hands on you. I waited long enough to get you out of my system.

  I'd like to get out of your system, Maggie said. I honestly would. But I don't think I can help you there.

  Sure you can. First I'm going to get those little-boy tits out of the way, which I admit I always kinda liked them. I bet they're full of hard little bumps, though, like a golfball-probably cancer. He laughed. That's a foretaste. Hey, didn't I figure you right? Isn't that what you like? Somebody who can reach his hand up inside you and tell you what disease you're dying of.

  He was standing at the edge of the loading platform now, his hands level with the head of the dead horse.

  You know, I think you'd better stay away from me after all, she said. I don't think you should come any closer.

  What, you're going to use that fucking dead horse to keep me away? I don't see what else you got.

  That's because you haven't really looked, Tommy said. He was pushing through the tall, tough blooms, pitchfork in hand. If you stood in the right place, you could see everything. But down in the dreck where you live, you can't see.

  Tommy Hansel, Joe Dale said, turning around. He raised his two empty hands in the air like a preacher, and slowly backed away towards the washed-out edge of the racetrack. You crept on me. I gotta hand it to you. Fuck, man, you got me good. But then, I didn't know you were the sneaking up kind. I thought you were the raving looney kind. I was just saying to your woman here Tommy swung the pitchfork at his face sideways, like a bat. Maggie watched, in fascination, the tines of it close on the round white jowls like a barred window. He staggered backwards, his hands curled on his face. She stared at the little bush of whisker on each upper knuckle, the square glow of each clean white fingernail. He had had a manicure. Tommy swung again. The elbows in their yellow windbreaker pointed up like two yellow sails in the fog, and he went down. Tommy stood over him, holding the pitchfork low around its neck. He dislikes horses, actually, Tommy said. It's beyond indifference.

  Are you going to kill him? If you kill him, Tommy, when they catch you, they'll never let you out.

  You're leaving me and I don't care what happens to me, he said quite lucidly.

  Things might look different in a little while. I'm not worth it. I'm really not.

  It doesn't matter if you're worth it, he said. We're one thing, only you're too weak to know it. You think I'm nuts. You're lucky I'm not nuts. Do you know why?

  Why, she asked reluctantly.

  Because if I was really nuts I wouldn't let you make that mistake. I'd correct it.

  She nodded. She thought there was something to that.

  Joe Dale, groaning, rolled over on one side, then got his knees under him and pushed up in a salaam, his face still down in the dirt in the basket of his hands. Fuck. You two deserve each other, he said.

  Tommy laughed. There you are, Maggie. Even that sick prick can see it. Why can't you see it?

  Do me one favor, Joe Dale said. I can't see too good. Put me in my car. I need to get to a hospital.

  I'm thinking of going to Ireland, Tommy said. Would you want to li
ve in Ireland some day? You know I'm supposed to be descended from an Irish revolutionary hero on my mother's side. James Napper Tandy?

  Is that so? Maggie said. I never knew that. And she sang:

  O Erin must we leave you, driven by the tyrant's hand? Must we ask a mother's welcome from a strange but happier land?

  They smiled at each other.

  That's fine, she said, but I don't think we're going to Ireland.

  You know I'm a bastard, he said. I'm not really my father's child.

  Maggie recalled the gray mechanic, a dried-up mask of Tommy, behind the cluttered desk at Hansel's Esso and Used Auto, Trempeleau, Wisconsin. No. No, I think you really are.

  You could see a resemblance?

  I'm afraid I must say I did. He was almost your double. Shrunken and lifeless I admit.

  He blinked at her, hurt and disappointed. I don't think so, he said.

  Joe Dale rose to a half-crouch and took three shambling steps towards the infield where the Cadillac was idling. But his ankles tangled in the jungly touch-me-not that choked the old sand track, and he sank down again and crawled on all fours. His hands on the ground were black with blood. Get me to a hospital, he muttered.

  I'll get you to the same hospital where you take your sore horses, Tommy said.

  What, Hansel, you think you treated your horses so good? Joe Dale peered up at Tommy out of eyes that were swollen shut.

  I did not, Tommy said. I did not. But I am leaving horse racing. I don't believe I've heard you bid the sport farewell. I, however, am leaving horse racing tonight. My fallen twin sister can come with me if she wishes. Well, Maggie? Do you wish? He waited a moment. No. Well, tell me this. Do you think I could be a dancer? No answer to that either. He laughed. Then fare thee well.

  He walked, in his princely yet faintly simian way, carrying the pitchfork parallel to the ground like a spear, out to the infield where the Sedan de Ville idled behind the ghostly cones of its headlights.

  Joe Dale managed to hunch up unsteadily one more time in the jewelweed, trying to get a footing in the deep sand where the track had washed out to a steep slope. Finally he lurched to his feet. You two are through on every racetrack in West Virginia, he shouted.

  Tommy ducked into the Sedan de Ville and revved the euphonious engine a few times without shutting the door. The Cadillac roosted a moment on its pearly exhaust, then swished forward through the queen anne's lace, gaining speed.

  Hey, get out of my car, Joe Dale shouted, waving his bloody hands over his head. The midnight blue Cadillac left the infield and ploughed into the sand of the ruined track. Its nose bounced down and up and Joe Dale popped heavily into the air, arced backwards over the crumbly heel of the washout and landed in the spindly arms of the broken down hot-walking machine. Incredibly enough, clanking and whirring, dragging one segmented silvery leg and waving another, it started to turn with Joe Dale dangling from the housing of the motor. But then it stopped.

  I

  She comes to see you, not too often, at this place, zigzagging down the mountains on a Saturday visiting day in that white Grand Prix with its bumper hanging off, the grand prize which is all she got out of it. So in the end you got the magic car for a night, drove it off a bridge and ended up here, she got the decrepit Grand Prix and it's still going. And she's still going. She's back writing recipes for that Winchester rag for a yard a week. A couple times you found an old Thursday Mail lying around the dayroom, perused the recipes, FOR SATURDAY SOCIAL, TRY AUNT MARGARET'S 4-BEAN SALAD and like that, for secret messages, but either her oracles have gone so deep they're beyond even you, or without you she's lost it. Lost her magic. You prefer to think the latter.

  She wanted to know how your face got split. Even she couldn't miss the stitches down the edge of your cheek and up one side of your nose-you look like a fucking tooled wallet, like the lifers make in the shop downstairs in this place. She wanted to know what happened so you tried to tell her.

  Finally everything came together. The deep blue car with a silver top was a magic car, you were called to go different places and it was there to take you. You had your pitchfork, to symbolize your victory over the forces of darkness. And you had your book-it was the scrapbook of her recipe columns, Menus by Margaret. You could refer to it for anything. Sometimes it seemed to be making fun of you, new pages kept appearing every time you opened it, new lines, but on the whole it was on your side.

  But why didn't you ever tell me it was a magic book? That's why I don't exactly trust you, you don't always tell me everything, do you, Maggie? So it's good I've learned to get along without you now.

  You had your book and your pitchfork and you drove and drove in your magic car. In a dark woods you came to a road that went over a bridge with a lion on each side of it and you knew, because you looked in the book and saw MARGARET MEETS THE KING OF THE JUNGLE (it was a recipe for barbecue sauce) that you should turn here. You came to a big barn and went in. It was full of animals lying down sleepy and almost dead-calves, bulls, cows, even a couple of goats. You touched them and they rose again. One by one they came back to life. A man opened the door with a bird gun in his hands, wearing a striped robe. Prometheus? he said, and you knew he was right. I am, you said. Then he disappeared and possibly he called the cops because when you came to the lions again in your magic car the police were blocking the road. You knew nothing could hurt you. You drove off the bridge. You woke up here. You think the cops might have put something inside your brain when they sewed up your face.

  But it isn't a bad place. Well, there's something queer about the toilets, a funny green light in them like they're trying to draw your guts out. (And the cigarettes she brought you-this you didn't tell her-they were another way of sucking your insides out. You had to throw them away.) But you can live here for now. You have a lot to think about-why you were chosen for various things, like the trip that landed you here. After what you've been through, you need rest.

  And you can go now, Maggie, since I see you don't believe me. I'm only telling you a hundredth of what happened. But it doesn't matter what you think. I was there! I heard! I know! The one good thing is, I'm a complete person now, both halves, which I never was before. I'm a finished man, at home in my skin-but tired, so tired I might sleep till the world ends or they let me out-whichever comes first.

  II

  To no one but herself she said it was a kind of luck after all, what had happened. It was lucky that Joe Dale had ended up dead, and luckier still that she hadn't had to kill him herself. Not that she would have easily found the nerve to kill him, or the equipment, but just as this world came to feel like an unbearably tight squeeze with Joe Dale and her both in it, Tommy stepped in and took care of that for her. And then it was lucky that, if Tommy had to kill Joe Dale, he killed him when he was out of his mind, so that they just put Tommy in the place he was headed for anyway. Granted, now they would keep him rather longer in that place, but that could be all to the good. She did not forget that Tommy too had once flirted with the idea of killing her, had even ruminated on this course with his hands around her neck. Even though he had decided against it, one had not felt entirely safe in the bastion of his caprice. And that had been for merely thinking about deserting him-in the end she had been mentally packing to leave. So in some ways it was lucky, for her, at least, that he was where he was.

  It was even a kind of luck to have seen it happen. But should she have seen it coming? Shouldn't she have known by instinct which man of hers could lose his mind, or by the same token which man was as stoutly framed in the confines of his senses as she was in hers? It was the racetrack that had thrown her off. What did she know from horseplayers? Tommy had seemed too rich in venerable and exotic ways to self-destruct to have any need of madness. Gambling, she had judged, as ancient in the culture as grapes and barley, would keep him safe. In Tacitus the Germans gamble themselves into slavery with a laugh. They don't lose their reason, never having had any to begin with. And that was Tommy too. He was a Ger
man from up in the woods and coulees of Wisconsin. He had that spinning empty place in him, true, but he was magnetic and handsome and women were drawn to him whatever he did. Even if he never made money, women would do his work for him, keep him afloat. Why should he go crazy when he could just gamble himself, and them, down the drain?

  If he had gambled himself into slavery, she would-might-have gone along. But he was not going to Rome in chains, stark naked except for his little fur cape and Swabian topknot. He had gone crazy-all the way mad-he had gone off his head and left her behind. He had made the world over so that it all made shining sense, but only he could see it. As for the racetrack, they had both lost that. And she had lost him. Why didn't she weep?

  That he could slip that border alone, and completely-she admired him. She felt she had seen wonders. She had no right to cry. What had become of Tommy was as immense, as terrible and final as a volcano or an earthquake. She almost envied him. She hadn't seen it coming and it had gotten quite away from her. She must never have understood Tommy at all.

  She made it a project to get to know the new Tommy in the hospital, though she could only get in to see him every third Saturday, if that. And it was curious how he thought he didn't want to know her now, almost as if she-his twin-had been one of the confusions he needed to put behind him. It was strange, too, that he didn't seem to miss her, when he must be lonely as a planet in that place. But she knew he needed some human tie, whether he knew it or not.