Jaimy Gordon - Lord of Misrule

But Little Spinoza hadn't waited, they were five lengths behind the worst horse at the clubhouse turn when Little Spinoza opened out, pumping in long glides like a water strider, and closed on the ragged back end of the field. He ate up the two horse who had dropped out of it. What did he want the ones in front for? Maybe he was just trying to get away from the claws stuck in his neck. He threaded his way into the flying mud and chopping legs, climbed through that up to fourth in the backstretch, where he hung, and then at the half-mile pole there was a kind of subtle jump or jerk: it was Earlie finally taking hold of him, asking him to work.

Little Spinoza began to die. The five horse moved slowly by him on the outside, the ten horse and the three horse on the rail. Earlie rolled his hands and raised his stick, tried neck, flank, withers, and it was only remarkable how completely nothing happened. I make him work. But the horse wanted only to lose-no, not lose, just disappear in plain air, shrink out of the world altogether.

The jockey now lost his head, began screaming words into the shapely but deaf black ears and cutting him under his belly and in any strange place that hadn't been tried, any soft flesh-the whip crisscrossed his sheath, slashed the loose folds under his forearms. It was the sixteenth pole and Little Spinoza was through. He visibly drew into himself and one by one the others streamed around him. You would have thought it would take more than the length of the stretch to end up tenth behind a horse as bad as the two horse, but he did it, or maybe he only seemed to be moving his legs.

Standing in the stirrups, Earlie swept by the gap where they stood, not looking at them. When he pushed up the goggles his face was two brilliant little punctures in a mask of gray mud. He was furious. He wasn't afraid of them. He wasn't hiding from them. Maggie could already see in the gritty furrows along his mouth his story of the thing: He didn't owe them a horse back-they had almost got him killed. As he pulled up he cut Little Spinoza three last times with the stick, once across the nose, once across the ears, once across the flat of his cheek.

Get off my horse, you crazy frenchie. Deucey came charging through the gap.

The jockey jumped off Little Spinoza while he was still slowing to a lope, wheeled and kicked him in the belly. And let go of the reins. Little Spinoza's head flew up and the horse plunged forward into the small party gathering at the winner's circle. A woman screamed and another in a black picture hat sat down in the dirt.

He lit out for the inky darkness of the infield and Maggie ran that way too. Itty bitty, eeny meeny, eine kleine, Spin, o, za, she cried in the high meaningless singsong she reserved for the horse, nature naturing, and he stopped, seeming to know that voice. She inched closer. No no no, not the rail, not the rail, you goose, all in nursery-rhyme falsetto, to fill up the crackling space between them. Then she snatched. He reared but her hand was on the bridle. Snapped the shank on him, bunched the reins, and they made a wide arc into the darkness, away from the winner's circle, towards the gap.

Deucey came panting, Medicine Ed dragged his leg along behind her.

He can't open that eye, Maggie told them, suddenly sobbing.

He be all right, Ed said.

I might kill that sonofabitch with my bare hands, said Deucey.

Boy scared for his life, Ed said.

We'll be lucky if we ever get this horse back in a gate now.

And yet Little Spinoza was tripping along with them collectedly enough, considering he hadn't been jogged to cool him down. His nostrils were wet, ruby red and cavernous. Sandy mud caked his face and chest and even his closed eye.

At least you got to see a little of his speed, honey, Deucey added, shaking the rain off her golfing cap.

Jesus, when was that? Maggie said, looking around in amazement.

He come out of the gate backwards, girlie, backwards, with the boy hanging off him, and he still gets up there in the mud in fifty and change. Did you see his stride? He digs in like a steam shovel.

But then he died, Maggie said.

He ain't died, he quit.

What's the big difference?

Soon as that boy use the stick on him he quit, Ed said.

No-it was before that-already when Earlie took hold of him at the half he lost interest, I saw it, Maggie said.

Well, he certainly looked like shit, Deucey said, with satisfaction.

Maybe that's because he is shit, Maggie said.

Deucey and Ed looked at her with pity, then at each other.

Only if you ignorant, Ed said. The story gone be right there in them little numbers if you can reckon.

Well I never said I could reckon. What I'd like to know is who can get that goofy horse to run all the way to the end?

There, that shut them up. They trudged along in silence. Medicine Ed sighed. They's ways, he could have said to them, they's ways of bringing a horse to his self at least one time before he, Medicine Ed, lose his nut and all hope of a home. He wasn't about to tell the women that.

Instead he asked: Who gone ride this horse now?

Alice Nuzum, Maggie said, has a theory.

I mean to talk to that Alice. Deucey narrowed her eyes as if this were all Alice's doing.

Can you tell what Alice is thinking? Maggie asked.

Hell no, said Deucey.

Nome, Medicine Ed agreed. Yet and still. Alice probably the onliest one will get on this horse after that damn race. If Alice will.

She will, Maggie said, picturing the band jacket like a black satin pumpkin, the pipe cleaner legs, the long oily pony-tail in its broccoli-bunch rubberband.

She better, Deucey said.

PERFUMED, BARBERED, SLUG-LIPPED Joe Dale Bigg, alias (no doubt) Biglia or something of the sort, came looking for her in his big blue Cadillac, and that's what gave you your power over him from the start. The leading trainer came cruising over the rusty frozen mud between the shedrows in his dark-blue-and-stainless-steel Sedan de Ville, doing about two miles an hour. He ground to a stop and leaned out familiarly over his thousand-dollar gold wristwatch and talked to you for thirty minutes straight about this and that, about nothing really, with the motor purring the whole time, the most affable man in the world as only Sicilians can be affable, but you knew from the start, before he even rolled down those violet windows, it was Maggie he had come looking for. You could see past those laughing, fleshy, blue-shadowed cheeks right to the back of his cave.

He was hungry. Restless, deprived, empty as a wolf. You knew the look.

He wanted her, not you. He hadn't even thought about why or whose she was or what it was in particular about her, he just followed his thick, flat nose. Maybe it wasn't used to getting pulled, his nose. At any rate, shame didn't compel the guy to talk to you, much less guilt, so what could it be? The man couldn't stop operating, that was what it was. He was aggressive but also indirect, like warm grease. He came close and soaked in.

You got a nice little string of horses. Yeah. You can pick em. Everybody says that. I noticed that. I wish I had that. That's talent. Naaaa, I mean it. I'm a salesman, a businessman, not a horse trader. I got good people working for me, that's all. I come up with the money, I got owners to throw away, which is something you don't got, Hansel. Am I right or wrong? But I depend on other people's smarts to tell me which horse when.

You said nothing and he watched you tap flakes of hay into the hanging rack one by one. It was Pelter's stall, but the tall, dark, mile-long horse was lurking in the inner shadows, poking his fine Roman nose curiously through his bedding. Did Joe Dale know it was Pelter?

Hey, I heard old Roland Hickok thought the world of you, Joe Dale said, and so he answered your question. I'm not surprised. He could pick em. I tell you what: he never thought much of me. When the money starts rolling in I say to myself, All right, now the old man will show me some respect, but no, he won't even talk to me. After a while I get the idea he thinks I'm a sleazeball. Not that he would ever say so. He had manners, you know? Class. Like he came from the type of family, the boys go to some school in New England where they play lacrosse and it snows three feet in the winter, and the girls' weddings get write-ups in the New York Times. I mean, his father and brother trained for the Ogdens-in the Hickok family he was the black sheep, and in West Virginia he had a holy air around him like fucking George Washington. So what does he need me for? But you he gives his champion horse, his old-time stakes winner-what's the name of that horse?