Lord of Misrule (3 page)

What was Tommy going to say? He might laugh. He had that side. But this was not meant to be a long shot, this move. Shipping into Indian Mound Downs was the logical culmination of Tommy Hansel’s science of running them where they belonged. He planned to steal with these horses, who were all better than they looked on paper. It was slumming and flim flam, yes, but a sure thing. Almost. Or so he said. Or so she thought he’d said.

Back in Charles Town, T. Hansel Stables was deep in the red. To get to the Mound, Tommy was staking everything they had, and a few things they didn’t exactly have—the souring patience of the last owner, the good will of the feed man, the hay man, the tack shop, the last tired spark of game in Mrs. Pichot, their landlady, a racetrack widow herself. They had staked Maggie’s puny tax return, Maggie’s dead mother’s cherry Queen Anne dining room table, chairs and highboy, even Maggie’s job in the real world, as a writer of food copy for the
Winchester Mail
Thursday grocery store supplement—a laughable calling, but one job she was sad to let go.

And now that he had cash to play and Maggie’s free labor and four ready horses who looked pitiful on paper, the trick was to
get in and get out fast
. It was Tommy who said so, Maggie had only soaked this stuff up faithfully for months—sitting on the curb of the shedrow writing headlines for
Menus by Margaret:
ORANGE RUM FILLING RAIDS MARGARET’S TEA RING, MANY LIVES OF WORLD’S OLDEST BEAN
(no one watched what she wrote at that rag), and gazing up at Tommy more hypnotized than credulous, like a chawbacon at a snake-oil show.
Get in and get out fast
, he chanted. They had to arrive at a small track unnoticed (small but not too small—it had to have a respectable handle), drop each horse in the cheapest possible claiming race before anybody knew what they had, cash their bets, and ship out again, maybe without losing a single horse.

And now already part one,
Get in fast
, was down the drain. They hadn’t managed to sneak under the fence unseen, as planned, with their penny-ante operation. They had been noticed. Just like that, the sure thing careened out of management. Now they had to figure out what the track officials were trying to do. Busted by a stall man named Suitcase Smithers, for the love of
god! These guys were cartoon creepy—but someone could get hurt. She was ready to back out right now.

But Tommy wouldn’t back out. Tommy might well laugh. Fat risk made his eyes brighten and soften, his forehead clarify, his nails harden, his black hair shine. The way Tommy thought, if you could call that thinking: He had been born lonely, therefore some bountiful girl would always come to him—he required it. Luck was the same. It came because you called to it, whistled for it,
because it saw you wouldn’t take no for an answer. Luck was the world leaping into your arms across a deep ditch and long odds. It was love, which is never deserved; all the rest was drudgery. So he might well laugh at this news—laugh that soft, fond, mocking laugh—just as he laughed at all fools, including himself, who rose to iridescent, dangerous bait, where they could be caught—the same way he laughed, softly, in bed, when she came.

(That soft laugh had got its hook in her, yes, but she thought she knew where Tommy came by his guts.
He wasn’t quite right in the soul, really. There was that missing twin he talked about all the time—his mother, Alberta, a waitress in Yonkers who rarely made sense, swore she’d been carrying twins, but one had got lost in the womb, she said, and for once Tommy believed her. He had the notion he’d swallowed his twin up himself,
her
he said, swallowed
her
up, big fish little fish, before he knew any better. Anyway there was a kind of spinning emptiness in him where things like sensible fear should be, a living hollow where light was dark. As some grown trees, oaks even, are full of leaf but wind-shook, with a stain of hole at their center.)

And finally another five minutes south to barn Z, one wooden stall in fair repair in the transient shedrow near the back gate. Gus Zeno, a trainer they knew from Charles Town, kept some stalls here, watched over by an old black groom; and so did the buzz-cut
crone, Deucey, the one who had seen this coming. Well, you were right about the whole deal, Maggie said when she saw her, and Deucey said:
I wrote the book on two-faced false-hearted luck, girlie, anything you want to know about going it on your own at the races, come to me. And grinned at her with black-edged teeth. She was a dilapidated hull of a woman with wrestler’s muscles and a bulge at the waist of her filthy undershirt that could only be what was left of her breasts. She had one stall with a horse in it, and not even a second stall for a tack room, but you had to think she was getting by. More than getting by—in the know, scared of no one and don’t care who knows it, although Maggie thought her half mad and far too cozy.

Psst, girlie, the old woman stuck her head in the stall that Maggie was raking. You looking for a place to coop for the night?

I’m not certain, Maggie said carefully. Of my situation. It could change any time. Thanks, though.

Your do-less boyfriend might roll in here yet with them horses, is that it? And whatever is he gonna say, tsk, tsk.

Maggie dragged a rake to the darkest corner of the stall. How did she know, that was the question. Do you really have just the one horse? she asked.

One horse and no home, that there is your basic definition of a gyp, which I am, Deucey said. Although I am right now under some pressure to expand my stable to take in this beauty-full boy—only now Maggie looked up and saw that the old girl was walking, on a loose shank, the loveliest little dark bay horse she had ever seen on a cheap track—only, A, I don’t got no playing room, which is the long definition of a gyp operation, and B, I don’t like them that’s pushing me. And anyway, you know me—(Maggie didn’t know her)—gyp I was born and gyp I’ll die, or hope to, in the saddle and not in no hospital, that is.

Maggie peered at her. Are you an actual gypsy?

Ha. Soon as I can understand it, Deucey said, I’m a nothing. Though I wouldn’t put it past me. They took everybody in them coalmines at the start, even gypsies. To be honest I don’t know what I am. Just a coalville orphan from Dola, 40 mile down the Short Line from the river. Everything I know about horses was learned me by the age of eight in a one-man one-pony punch mine, where me and this pony Redrags pulled the tub. Uncle Stevo was the man, I was just part of the pony. I used to sleep on haybales in a coal mine, which makes Barn Z look like the Dewdrop Inn, dearie. Now you let me know if you need a room in this fine hotel. And she winked hideously.

Maggie was ready to sleep on haybales, or even half naked down in the itchy straw. Finally you open your arms to sleep even if it’s nightmare you see coming. She had been going for fourteen hours—no one, certainly not Tommy, had her stamina, and she was vain of it. She had been up at 3:00, fed, mucked stalls, shlepped bales and water buckets. At dawn she had walked the horses one by one. She had picked out feet and packed them with fragrant clay, crated the loose tack. And still the van didn’t show, the van or Tommy, who had made one of those airy deals with the van man that Tommy lived on, “on the cuff” where all cash was notional, future, moiling in the clouds like weather, until some horse ran in; and nobody ever wrote down a number or forgot one. But it was somehow part of the deal that Tommy, with a bit of dope in his pocket, never too proud to be a roustabout, might be asked along for the ride. Like today, Tommy in that creaky, rust-flowered van.

Around noon, the van finally rolled down the driveway, and she was off in the Grand Prix over the mountains and up the river, while Tommy and the van man took the long way, the slow way,
dropping and loading horses for racetrackers who paid cash. But what had she done with her morning, while she waited in the fly-loud barn for Tommy and the van man? Maggie had found a bottle of eye-stinging brand X pink wintergreen horse liniment in the Pichots’ tack shed, mixed, for all she knew, according to the late Gaston Pichot’s secret recipe, and with it and strong fingers, she worked on Pelter, more or less making it up as she went along. Why did she so love the slant-eyed bump-nosed horse that her hands wished to parse every inch of his famously long back? It was true she had no scientific reason to believe she knew what she was doing, but surreptitiously she did think so. For all her stamina, as a human girl she knew she was lazy and unambitious, except for this one thing: She could find her way to the boundary where she ended and some other strain of living creature began. On the last little spit of being human, staring through rags of fog into the not human, where you weren’t supposed to be able to see let alone cross, she could make a kind of home.

Her hands felt their way blindly along the ridges and canyons and defiles of the spine, the firm root-spread hillocks of the withers. She rolled her bony knuckles all along the fallen tree of scar tissue at the crest of the back, prying up its branches, loosening its teeth. And it must be having some effect: when she walked Pelter these days he wasn’t the sour fellow he used to be, he was sportive, even funny. She had walked him this morning until the rising sun snagged in the hackberry thicket. As they swung around the barn, she took a carrot from her pocket and gave him the butt and noisily toothed the good half herself. He curvetted like a colt, squealed, and cow-kicked alarmingly near her groin. Okay, okay, she said, and handed it over. She was glad there was no man around just then to tell her to show that horse who was boss. When they were back in the stall and she turned to leave
she found he had taken her whole raincoat in his mouth and was chewing it—the one she was wearing. She twisted around with difficulty and pried it out of his mouth. He eyed her ironically. Just between us, is this the sort of horse act I really ought to discipline? she asked him, smoothing out her coat. I simply incline to your company, he replied.

T
HE FRIZZLY HAIR GIRL
landed up with one stall in barn Z, that next-to-last stall ruinated by a deep ditch around the walls that some thousand-pound stallwalker had dug on his endless round trips. It taken muscle to shovel over enough dirt to fill that up, but she made it halfway right, he’d give her that.

Psst, Deucey leaned around the corner of the stall and crooked her finger at the girl. You running anything in the next few days?

It was a long pause, then, I don’t think so, she say, and Medicine Ed watched the frizzly hair girl try to empty her face. In the lying capital of the world, she would have to do better than that.

Well if you do run sumpm, and you don’t want to let him out of your sight, Deucey said, which I wouldn’t if I was you, put him in the stall here and ask Medicine Ed to let you sleep in Zeno’s tack room. He lets me. She winked, it was a dreadful thing to see, and the frizzly hair girl backed off from her. Calm down, girlie, I don’t mean you and me. I sleep in the stall with my moneymaker Grizzly, he appreciates me—she cackled. That tack room ya see got a chink in the east wall, you can lay on hay bales and look through the chink and watch a horse all night, if you can hold your eyes open. Talk to Medicine Ed. That’s him. And she pointed to where he was, standing in the dirt road with the red horse and Kidstuff, the blacksmith.

Medicine Ed saw the frizzly hair girl’s eyes light, not on him,
but on the blacksmith. Heh! heh! It happened every time. Kidstuff was a pretty little man, chestnut brown, with a tilted smile and very white teeth, out of Louisiana, part colored, part Cajun, part Injun, like as not.

The girl tiptoed up. She said excuse me.

You end up with stalls in this here barn, young lady?

One, she said.

Suitcase scatter they horses all over the grounds, Medicine Ed told Kidstuff.

Aaanh, don’t take it personal, the blacksmith advised. It’s the ten-cent Hitlers run this place. They like to break your spirit before you ever get to a race. Who you with?

Tommy Hansel.

The horseshoer looked quizzically at Medicine Ed. They shook their heads politely.

She needs a place to sack out for the night, Deucey hollered over. Can she get in your tack room, Ed?

Medicine Ed shrugged. Ain’t nothing in it, he said. Hay. Welcome to it.

The farrier put away his tools. Zeno gonna let this boy run tonight? he asked.

Might could figure, Medicine Ed said—what he always said—if he don’t come up lame.

So where did Zeno pick up this Mr Boll Weevil? I seen the sire before but who’s this High Cotton—talk about breeders you never heard of—Sunk Ferry, Arkansas—

The old groom stumbled back as though he had been struck. What you talkin bout, Mr Boll Weevil?

This horse you’re holding right here. In tonight for twelve-fifty, maiden claimer, fourth race. Say, here’s Tommy Hansel, the blacksmith said to the girl. This your guy?

May I see that paper please? the frizzly girl said faintly. She looked in the
Telegraph
, where Kidstuff was pointing, and out of her mouth come a terrible cuss word, not quite under her breath. Medicine Ed blinked at her. For a little while, time went backwards, for her the same as for him. Then he piled the shank right on top of that paper, and backed away. His long ash brown fingers shook. He appeared to be buckling, fading; got smaller and smaller in the direction of the half crushed mobile home he lived in. He held a hand over his heart as he staggered backwards, like an actor in a play. His mouth was a ragged hole, no word came out, now they saw the gray stumps of his gums.