The Reivers (21 page)

"That track tomorrow aint but a half a mile, so you gonter go around it twice. Make like this is it, so when he sees that real track tomorrow, he'll already know beforehand what to expect and to do. You understand?"

"Yes," I said. "Ride him around it twice—" He handed me the switch. "Get him going quick and hard. Cut him once with this before he even knows it. Then dont touch him again with it until I tells you to. Keep him going as fast as you can with your heels and talking to him but dont bother him: just set there. Keep your mind on it that you're going around twice, and try to think his mind onto that too, like you done with them colts out at McCaslin. You cant do it, but you got the switch this time. But dont touch him with it until I tells you to." He turned his back; he was doing something now inside the shelter of his coat—something infinitesimal with his hidden hands; suddenly I smelled something, faint yet sharp; I realise now that I should have recognised it at once but I didn't have time then. He turned back; as when he had coaxed the horse into the boxcar this morning, his hand touched, caressed Lightning's muzzle for maybe a second, then he stepped back, Lightning already trying to follow him had I not reined him back. "Go!" Ned said. "Cut him!"

I did. He leapt, sprang, out of simple fright: nothing else; it took a half-stride to get his head back and another stride before he realised we wanted to follow the track, path again, at full gallop now, on just enough outside rein to hold him on the course; I already heeling him as hard as I could even before the fright began to fade. Only, there we were again, just like this morning: going good, obedient enough, plenty of power, but once more with that sense that his head didn't really want to go anywhere; until we entered the back stretch and he saw Ned again on the opposite side of the ring. It was the explosion again; he had taken the bit away from me; he had already left the path and was cutting straight across to Ned before I got balance enough to reach my good hand down and take the rein short and haul, wrench him angling back into the track, going hard now; I had to hold him on the outside to make the back turn and into the stretch where he could see Ned again and once more reached for the bit to go straight to him; I was using the cut hand too now to hold him onto the track; it seemed forever until Ned spoke. "Cut him," he said. "Then throw the switch away."

I did so and flung the switch backward; the leap again but I had him now since it only took one rein, the outside one, to keep him on the course, going good now, around the first turn and I was ready for him this time when he would see Ned, on through the back stretch still going, into and around the last turn, still going, Ned standing now about twenty yards beyond where our finish line would be, speaking just exactly loud enough for Lightning to hear him and just exactly as he had spoken to him in the boxcar door last night—and I didn't need the switch now; I wouldn't have had time to use it if I had had it and I thought until then that I had ridden at least one horse that I called hot anyway: a half-bred colt of Cousin Zack's with Morgan on the bottom: but nothing like this, this burst, surge, as if until now we had been dragging a rope with a chunk of wood at the end of it behind us and Ned's voice had cut the rope: "Come on, son. I got it."

So we were standing there, Lightning's muzzle buried to the nostrils in Ned's hand, though all I could smell now was horse-reek and all I could see was the handful of grass which Lightning was eating; Ned himself saying "Hee hee hee" so gentle and quiet that I whispered too:

"What?" I said. "What?" But Boon didn't whisper, coming up.

"I'll be God damned. What the hell did you tell him?"

"Nothing," Ned said. "Just if he want his supper, to come on and get it." And not Butch either: bold, confident, unconvinceable, without scruple or pity.

"Well, well," he said. He didn't draw Lightning's head up out of Ned's hand: he jerked it up, then rammed the bit home when Lightning started back.

"Lemme do it," Ned said quickly. "What you want to find out?"

"Any time I need help handling horses around here, I'll holler," Butch said. "And not for you. I'll save you to holler for down in Missippi." He lifted Lightning's lip and looked at his gums, then at his eyes. "Dont you know it's against the law to dope a horse for a race? Maybe you folks down there in them swamps aint heard about it, but it's so."

"We got horse doctors in Missippi though," Ned said. "Send for one of them to come and see if he been doped."

"Sure, sure," Butch said. "Only, why did you give it to him a day ahead of the race? to see if it would work?"

"That's right," Ned said. "If I give him nothing. Which I aint. Which if you knows horses, you already knows."

"Sure, sure," Butch said again. "I don't interfere with no man's business secrets—providing they work. Is this horse going to run like that again tomorrow? I dont mean once: I mean three times."

"He dont need to do it but twice," Ned said. "All right," Butch said. "Twice. Is he?"

"Ask Mr Hogganbeck there if he hadn't better do it twice," Ned said.

"I aint asking Mr Sugar Boy," Butch said. "I'm asking you,

"I can make him do it twice," Ned said. "Fair enough," Butch said. "In fact, if all you got is three more doses, I wouldn't even risk but twice. Then if he misses the second one, you can use the last one to get back to Missippi on."

"I done thought of that too," Ned said. "Walk him back to the barn," he said to me. "Cool him out. Then we'll bath him."

Butch watched that too, some of it. We went back to the barn and untacked and Lycurgus brought a bucket and a rag and Lycurgus washed him down and dried him with crokersacks before stalling and feeding him—or had started to. Because Butch said, "Here, boy, run to the house and set the water bucket and some sugar on the front gallery. Me and Mr Sugar Boy are going to have a toddy." Though Lycurgus didn't move until Uncle Par-sham said, "Go." He went then, Boon and Butch following. Uncle Parsham stood at the door of the stable, watching them (Butch, that is)—a lean dramatic old man all black-and-white: black pants, white shirt, black face and hat behind the white hair and moustache and imperial. "Law," he said. He said it calmly, with cold and detached contempt.

"A man that never had nothing in it nohow, one of them little badges goes to his head so fast it makes yourn swim too," Ned said. "Except it aint the badge so much as that pistol, that likely all the time he was a little boy, he wanted to tote, only he knowed all the time that soon as he got big enough to own one, the law wouldn't let him tote it. Now with that badge too, he dont run no risk of being throwed in jail and having it took away from him; he can still be a little boy in spite of he had to grow up. The risk is, that pistol gonter stay on that little boy mind just so long before some day it gonter shoot at something alive before he even knowed he aimed to." Then Lycurgus came back.

"They waiting for you," he told me. "The surrey."

"It's back from town already?" I said. "It never went to town," Lycurgus said. "It never left. She been setting in it out there with that-ere boy all the time, waiting for you all. She say to come on."

"Wait," Ned said. I stopped; I still had the riding-sock on and I thought he meant that. But he was looking at me. "You gonter start running into folks now."

"What folks?" I said.

"That word has done got around to. About this race."

"How got around?" I said.

"How do word ever get around?" he said. "It dont need no messenger; all it needs is two horses that can run to be inside the same ten miles of each other. How you reckon that Law got here? maybe smelled that white girl four or five miles away like a dog? I know; maybe I hoped like Boon Hogganbeck still believes: that we could get these two horses together here all nice and private and run that race, win or lose, and me and you and him could either go back home or go any other place we wants providing it's longer away than Boss Priest's arm. But not now. You gonter start meeting them from now on. And tomorrow they gonter be thicker still."

"You mean we can run the race?"

"We go to now. Maybe we been had to ever since me and Boon realised that Boss had done took his hand off of that automobile for as long as twenty-four hours. But now we sho got to run it."

"What do you want me to do?" I said.

"Nothing. I'm just telling you so you wont be surprised in advance. All we got to do is get them two horses on the same track and pointed the same way and you just set there on Lightning and do like I tell you. Go on, now, before they start hollering for you."

Chapter 9

Ned was right. I mean, about word already being around. There was nothing wrong with my hand when Everbe took the riding-sock off. I mean, it felt like anybody's hand would that had been cut across the inside of the fingers yesterday. I dont believe it had bled any more even when I used it against Lightning's pulling this afternoon. But not Everbe. So we stopped at the doctor's first, about a mile this side of town. Butch knew him, knew where but I dont know how Everbe persuaded him to take us there— nagged him or threatened or promised or maybe just did it like a big girl trout so busy fussing around a child trout that she quit behaving like there was any such thing in existence as a barbed hook with a line fastened to it and so the fisherman had to do something even if only getting rid of the child trout. Or maybe it was not Everbe but rather the empty flask, since the next drink would have to be at the hotel in Parsham. Because as I came around the house, Lycurgus's mother was standing at the edge of the gallery holding a sugar bowl and a water bucket with a gourd dipper and Butch and Boon were just draining the two tumblers and Lycurgus was just picking up the empty flask where Butch had flung it into a rosebush.

So Butch took us to the doctor's—a little once-white house in a little yard filled with the kind of rank-growing rank-smelling dusty flowers that bloom in the late summer and fall, a fat iron-gray woman in pince-nez like a retired schoolteacher who even fifteen years later still hated eight-year-old children, who came to the door and looked at us once (Ned was right) and said back into the house, "It's them race-horse folks," and turned and vanished toward the back, Butch moving right on in before she could turn, jovial, already welcome—or somebody damn well better see that he was (the badge again, you see; wearing it or simply being known to possess one, to enter any house in any other manner would be not a mere individual betrayal but a caste betrayal and debasement)—saying,

"Howdy, Doc; got a patient for you," to an iron-gray man too if the tobacco juice were bleached out of his unshaven whiskers, in a white shirt like Ned's but not as clean, and a black coat too with a long streak of day before yesterday's egg on it, who looked and smelled like something also, except it wasn't just alcohol, or anyway all alcohol. "Me and Brother Hogganbeck will wait in the parlor," Butch said. "Dont bother; I know where the bottle's at. Dont worry about Doc," he said to Boon. "He dont hardly ever touch whiskey unless he just has to. The law allows him one shot of ether as a part of the cure for every patient that can show blood or a broken bone. If it's just a little old cut or broke finger or ripped hide like this, Doc divides the treatment with the patient: he drinks all the ether and lets the patient have all the cure. Haw haw haw. This way."

So Butch and Boon went that way, and Everbe and I (you have doubtless noticed that nobody had missed Otis yet. We got out of the surrey; it appeared to be Butch's; anyway he was driving it; there had been some delay at Uncle Parsham's while Butch tried to persuade, then cajole, then force Everbe to get in the front seat with him, which she foiled by getting into the back seat and holding me by one arm and holding Otis in the surrey with her other hand, until Boon got in front with Butch—and first Butch, then the rest of us were somehow inside the doctor's hall but nobody remembered Otis at that moment) followed the doctor into another room containing a horsehair sofa with a dirty pillow and a wadded quilt on it, and a roll-top desk cluttered with medicine bottles and more of them on the mantel beneath which the ashes of last winter's final fire had not yet been disturbed, and a washstand with a bowl and pitcher and a chamber pot that somebody hadn't emptied yet either in one corner and a shotgun in the other; and if Mother had been there his fingernails would have touched no scratch belonging to her, let alone four cut fingers, and evidently Everbe agreed with her; she —Everbe—said, "I'll unwrap it," and did so. I said the hand was all right. The doctor looked at it through his steel-rimmed spectacles.

"What did you put on it?" he said. Everbe told him. I know what it is now. The doctor looked at her. "How'd you happen to have that handy?" he said. Then he lifted the spectacles by one corner and looked at her again and said, "Oh." Then he said, "Well, well," and lowered the spectacles again and—yes he did: it was a sigh—said, "I aint been to Memphis in thirty-five years," and stood there a minute and—I tell you, it was a sigh—said, "Yes. Thirty-five years," and said, "If I was you I wouldn't do anything to it. Just bandage it again." Yes, exactly like Mother: he got the bandage out but she put it on. "You the boy going to ride that horse tomorrow?" he said. "Yes," Everbe said.

"Beat that Linscomb horse this time, durn him."

"We'll try," Everbe said. "How much do we owe you?" '"Nothing," he said. "You already cured it. Just beat that durn Linscomb horse tomorrow."

"I want to pay you something for looking at it," Everbe said. "For telling us it's all right."

"No," he said. He looked at her: the old man's eyes behind the spectacles magnified yet unfocusable, as irreparable as eggs, until you would think they couldn't possibly grasp and hold anything as recent as me and Everbe. "Yes," Everbe said. "What is it?"

"Maybe if you had a extra handkerchief or something . . ." He said: "Yes, thirty-five years. I had one once, when I was a young man, thirty, thirty-five years ago. Then I got married, and it . . ." He said, "Yes. Thirty-five years."

"Oh," Everbe said. She turned her back to us and bent over; her skirts rustled; it was not long; they rustled again and she turned back. "Here," she said. It was a garter. "Beat that durn horse!" he said. "Beat him! You can do it!" Now we heard the voices—voice, that is, Butch's— loud in the little hall before we got there: