Roscoe (11 page)

She came slowly back to the stables. Ticky was feeding the horses alfalfa and bran, and the shredded beet pulp. She stabled Mr. Bantry and looked toward the woods for Gilby. She
saw Roscoe coming out of the house, and the sight of him was tonic. Things would change now.

Then here came Gilby, riding across the west pasture. He swung himself out of the saddle, and she was again struck by his resemblance to Elisha: lean and lanky and growing taller, and that same
resolute jaw. His straight black hair blown wild, and those black eyes. Yusupov also had dark features. But from Gilby’s boyhood, Veronica suspected Elisha, not Yusupov, was his father. She
hinted this once to Roscoe, who explained that children grow up to look like the people they live with, and so do bulldogs.

“So you come back,” Ticky said as Gilby walked Jazz Baby to the hose bib outside the stable. “You gonna stay awhile?”

Gilby did not answer.

“Aren’t you going to talk to us?” Veronica asked.

Gilby did not answer, or look at her.

“What ails you, boy, you don’t talk to your mama?” Ticky said. “Where you get off on that?”

Gilby looped Jazz Baby’s reins over the rail fence and took off his saddle. He filled a bucket with water from the hose, and washed the horse with a sponge.

“Lookit this boy don’t talk to his mama. What kind of boy is that?”

“I don’t have anything to say,” Gilby said softly.

“You got a whole lot to say you ain’t sayin’.”

Gilby washed Jazz Baby’s nose and whispered to the horse.

“Boy talks to his horse but don’t talk to his mama.”

“It’s all right, Ticky,” Veronica said, “he’ll talk when he’s ready.”

“I did that with
my
mama,” Ticky said, “my papa’d say, You don’t wanna talk to peoples you get outa this house go live with that horse.”

“I can do that,” Gilby said.

“He can do that,” Ticky said. “He can live with Jazz Baby, and Jazz Baby gonna cook breakfast for him. Jazz Baby gonna buy his shirts. Hey, Roscoe, you know this boy here
don’t talk to his mama, he gonna live with his horse.”

Roscoe nodded to Ticky, touched Veronica hello on the shoulder.

“You believe in horses, is that it?” Roscoe said to Gilby.

Gilby dropped the sponge into the bucket, took the scraper off its nail, and scraped water off Jazz Baby’s flanks, shoulders, and haunches.

“Do you know how stupid horses are?” Roscoe said.

“They’re not stupid,” Gilby said, scraping the haunches.

“Stupider than crabmeat,” Roscoe said.

“Horses are smart,” Gilby said, scraping faster.

“Gimme that scraper,” Ticky said. “You gonna skin that horse.”

“Don’t tell me how smart horses are,” Roscoe said. “They tell too many lies.”

“Horses don’t lie,” Gilby said.

“Are you serious? There’s a broken horse for every light on Broadway. You ever try to hide a tennis ball in a horse’s ear? You can’t do it. On the other hand, I never met
a horse I didn’t like.”

“Me either,” said Gilby with a tight-lipped smile.

“Why do you want to live with your horse?”

“Nobody tells me anything.”

“You mean that stuff in the
Sentinel
about the lawsuit?”

Gilby nodded.

“That’s how you learn. You read the papers. You know you’ll need a lawyer to fight this thing in court. You have any lawyer friends?”

“No.”

“Sure you do. Me.”

“Are you a lawyer?”

“I’m
your
lawyer. Your mother hired me.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“She didn’t tell me that.”

“We don’t tell you everything all at once. We parcel it out. We ever tell you about Einstein’s theory that light curves with gravity? We ever tell you how John Calvin tried to
cancel Sunday baseball?”

“Nobody even told me where I was born.”

“San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was there.”

“You were? Where’s Puerto Rico?”

“Down there in the middle of it all. It was a very hot day. Bright and sunny, the trade winds blowing in off the Atlantic, palm trees, sandy beach, whitecaps on the ocean. You were very
good-looking when you were born. You looked like a pineapple. We brought you back here in your father’s airplane right after you left the clinic with whatsername.”

“Aunt Pamela?”

“That’s the one,” Roscoe said.

“Why does she want me? She doesn’t even like me.”

“I don’t know anybody she
does
like. She wants money and needs you to get at it, even though she couldn’t wait to get rid of you. But your parents loved you and wanted
you even before you were born.”

“What’s my real name?”

“Gilbert David Fitzgibbon, as always. A stately name.”

“What’s stately?”

“Dignified, magnificent. Don’t let anybody change it.”

“Me and Alex have the same name, but he’s not my brother.”

“He’ll always be your brother.”

“He’s my cousin.”

“Then he’s your brother-cousin. Do you love him?”

“I guess so.”

“No guesses. Do you love him, yes or no?”

“Yes. But my father’s not my father.”

“No, of course not.”

Roscoe took off his hat and coat, handed them to Veronica, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He tipped over a bale of hay and stood on it, took Jazz Baby’s reins, threw his right leg up, and
mounted the horse.

“You gonna ride him?” Gilby asked.

“I might.”

“I didn’t know you could ride. You don’t have a saddle.”

“I used to ride bareback in rodeos. I was in ten or fifteen rodeos, one after the other.”

“You were never in the rodeo.”

“Well, you’re right, but your father and I rode bareback plenty down in Texas. They all ride bareback down there.”

“My father didn’t ride.”

“He gave you a pony, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And when you outgrew it he gave you a horse.”

“Yes.”

“But he wasn’t much of a father, because he never rode a horse, right? And he never took you fishing, never took you to New York to see the lights of Times Square, never introduced
you to Jack Dempsey, never gave you a bicycle or started a bank account so you’d have your own money, never sent you to one of the greatest schools in town, never taught you how to throw a
baseball and a horseshoe, never took you down to Hyde Park so you could shake hands with the President, never let you sleep with him and your mother when burglars were coming up through the steam
pipes, never took you to Laurel-and-Hardy movies and bought you White Tower hamburgers, but, hey, we all know he whipped you with his riding whip so you’d bleed all over the bed. We also know
he woke up every day of your life and talked to you about something important. I know, because I was in on a whole lot of those breakfast conversations. Can you possibly imagine how much your
father shaped who you are? And you say he’s not your father? Baloney gravy, kid. Who else would’ve done those things for you?”

Gilby looked at his mother and at Ticky, who kept nodding his head. Gilby wanted to say his father shouldn’t have tricked him, but the image arrived of Elisha pitching a horseshoe. Before
Gilby could answer him, Roscoe moved Jazz Baby forward and, when he was in open pasture, rode him at a canter, then into a gallop, across the whole pasture to the woods, and then galloped back to
the stable and slid gracefully off the horse’s back, doubling over in pain.

“What happened?” Veronica said in panic, and she took Roscoe’s arm. “Are you hurt?”

“Just the usual bareback shock waves,” Roscoe said. “It happens to everybody.” He slowly straightened himself. “Ticky,” he said, sitting on the bale of hay,
“tell Gilby what your father told you about horses.”

“Oh, my father,” Ticky said. “Peoples used to say about my father, ‘Oh, he’s a good man with a horse,’ and I’d say, ‘Pa, what you doin’ with
that horse? Is that the way you do it?’ And he’d say, ‘Shut up, boy. You wanna learn, go out on your own,’ and he wouldn’t teach me. I worked for other horsemens and
they’d teach me. But I didn’t have no father about knowin’ horses.”

“Me either,” said Roscoe, who was trying to sit in a way that controlled his pain. “Now, you take
my
father. He created a big family and then he left us to live in a
hotel. When he lived home he never let me into his bedroom, and if he caught me there he’d lock me in the attic. So I’d stay in my room, reading atlases, memorizing poems and songs and
countries and cities, and my brain got so crowded there was no room for the baseball scores. But I liked it so much they took me to the doctor, who talked to me for a week and then said nothing was
wrong with my head and all I needed was to go up and see those ghosts again, the ones your father and I saw when we were kids up at Tristano—two old men who came out in the middle of the
night and sat by the fireplace in the Trophy House and drank brandy and talked and looked out at the moon until the sun came up on the lake, and then they got up and went away.”

Gilby stared at Roscoe and said, “You saw ghosts?”

“Absolutely.”

“You talked to them?”

“We could hear them whispering. They’d say to one another, ‘Wisha-wisha-wisha-wisha-wisha.’ ”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s ghost talk.”

“My father never told me about that.”

“He was saving it till you were old enough to appreciate ghosts.”

“I’m old enough.”

“Then I’ll tell you what. I’m of the opinion that your father could very well be up there at Tristano with those ghosts. It’s the sort of place fathers go when they die,
especially a father like yours, who liked to talk and fish and was very fond of ghosts. We’ll both go up there one of these days and wait till the ghosts come out, and then we’ll sit
and watch them and listen to what they say. And when the sun comes up and the ghosts go to bed, we might even do some fishing. Sound all right?”

“All right,” Gilby said. “All right.”

Ticky was nodding, and as Roscoe stood up, in obvious pain, Veronica handed the witch doctor his hat and coat. She felt blackly excited by his presence, a new thing that hinted there would come
a day when her marriage to Elisha would be over. She couldn’t tell Roscoe about this feeling, because she didn’t understand it herself. It was new and unwelcome and she felt guilty for
having it. Roscoe had made Gilby’s smile steadfast, but the boy wasn’t out of danger just because his mood had changed. It was possible to lose him, as she’d lost her sweet baby
Rosemary.

She put her arm around Gilby and squeezed him as they walked toward the house. Roscoe walked very slowly behind her, his coat slung over his shoulder, his hat on the back of his head, always
close in her life, always a puzzle, so gifted, so audacious, so shy Sometimes she decided Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild
deeds and boundless memory. She looked at him and saw a man of immense spirit, a man for loss, just as she was a woman for loss. She reached back and took his hand.

When they were in the main parlor of the house and Gilby had gone upstairs, she took both Roscoe’s hands in hers and, standing in the burnished light of this rare Tivoli afternoon, she
raised her face to his and kissed him on the mouth in a way she had kissed no other man since the Elisha of a sensual yesterday. Roscoe, suddenly transformed into six feet two and a half inches of
tapioca pudding, tried to firm himself; and he grew bold.

“Will you spend one day alone with me?” he asked.

“A day alone? Where?”

“Tristano. I’m asking for a day, not a night.”

“It takes half a day just to get there.”

“We can leave early, come home late. A long day. Or we can stay over if you want to, but that’s not what I’m asking.”

“We wouldn’t be alone. There are caretakers at Tristano.”

“We’ll blindfold them. Are you creating impediments to avoid an answer?”

“I have an answer.”

“What is it?”

“Perhaps.”

“You crush me,” Roscoe said, “under the burden of hope. I pray I can survive it.”

As he walked to his car, Roscoe saw a crow, blacker and larger than crows he had known, and female, which he deduced after she landed on an upper branch of an oak tree and was immediately set
upon by another large, black crow, which mounted her; and they lay sideways on the branch and copulated. Roscoe stopped the car to watch and became convinced the female crow was smiling. Roscoe
might have taken this to be a good omen, but it was too proximate to his kiss, the crows were black as sin, and they were crows enthralled by passion. They were the crows of fornication.

What did you expect, Roscoe, the bluebirds of happiness?

On the road, Roscoe met the women who died of love, some naked, some garbed as when love took them, a legion stretching to the horizon.

“Roscoe, Roscoe,” one warned as they passed, “love is a form of war.”

“I always knew that,” he said.

“Keep yourself chaste for your beloved,” said a woman dressed as a bride, “and if you want love, avoid lies and avarice.”

“I have no beloved, lies are my business, and without avarice we’d have chaos in City Hall,” Roscoe told her.