Jaimy Gordon - Lord of Misrule

He stand behind the door in the tack room, peering through the crack, trying to think up a word of comfort he might say. But nothing come to mind before the midnight blue steel-top Cadillac noses up the frozen dirt road between shedrows, crackling the skin of ice on all them puddles. The Sedan de Ville stops on a slant so nobody can't drive by, going or either coming. Then the driver's purple window sinks into the door. Joe Dale alone and driving. He leans out over his big gold watch. He smiles and blinks his eyes into the stall where the frizzly hair girl is laying down and he say, Time on your hands, eh? This the first one you lost? She don't say nothing. No pain like that first one. Say, can I ask you something?

What?

Medicine Ed say this for the young fool's woman, she don't give a damn if it is Joe Dale. She don't like him. Her voice say you ain't nothing.

D'Ambrisi don't know what to do with that horse, he say. So suppose I hear something like the horse goes off his feed. Can I come around and ask you what to do with him? Which I know it ain't exactly kosher but… He shrugged.

Medicine Ed squints through the crack behind the tack room door at Joe Dale Bigg, tryna see what the young girl see. Gold watch and diamond finger rings, fifteen-dollar barber job on his big head, high on top, brushed not greased. Everything high class. But she don't like him. What kind of idiot do you think I am? she says.

Hey, you care about that horse, ain't it?

The frizzly hair girl don't answer.

I mean, who can say what keeps a horse running at ten years old?

Nine, she say.

Class can't explain it. Science can't explain it. Alls I know-old Hickok had it. You had it. But for goddamn sure D'Ambrisi don't have it. It's going to be all downhill from here for Pelter. If Breezy don't cripple him, maybe some young ladies' riding school will buy him cheap. He's a nice horse, ain't it? Good manners?

He's a very nice horse.

So maybe he gets a few more years of trail rides and virgin twats around his neck. It ain't a bad life. He eyeball her. Naaa, come to think of it, the society girls will never go for Pelter. He's got a Jewish nose.

Go to hell, the frizzly hair girl say.

Joe Dale laughed. I wonder what got into D'Ambrisi anyway. He's no horseman and he even knows it. He's gonna wish he never heard of that horse. Maybe he's sorry already. You want I should talk to him?

What do you mean? Talk to him about what? the girl say real slow. She nosing round the bait now. Leave it alone, Medicine Ed say into her.

D'Ambrisi's an old gom-bah, Joe Dale say. He already knows he's got a problem. I mean the horse is in jail for a month. He comes to me cause he don't know what to do with the horse, so now I'm twisting his arm, I tell him, get off the horse right away, he gets his dough back-how he's gonna say no to a nice young girl like you?

He's a friend of yours?

Works for me sometimes. This and that. Who didn't use to work for me around here? Hey-Joe Dale start to blinking like he just had him a idea, something he ain't thought of it before. Hey, baby, get in the car. We'll go talk to the Breeze right now.

Go where? the girl say. What barn is he in? I'll walk over there and meet you.

Naaa, ya see, Breezy was thinking about turning him out for two, three weeks, long as he's in jail. Let him cool out, eat grass. He ain't running the horse for no twenty-five hundred. I don't think so! Even Breezy ain't that dumb.

Go where? she say again. Where is he?

So I tell Breezy he can use a stall at my place if he wants. He took me up on it.

Pelter is at your farm? She's in the door of the stall now, swaying back and forth in her blindman glasses. Medicine Ed think she taking a caution, but no.

I can get him back for you, Joe Dale tell her.

Don't get in that dark window automobile with that gangster, you know he has hurt people, Medicine Ed try to say into her, but she ain't listening. The more she know she ought not to go near that car the color of night, the closer she drift. The door shut behind her with a soft chunk like a ice box and she gone. Behind them purple windows Medicine Ed can't see nothing. The midnight blue Sedan de Ville crush over thin-ice puddles and round the corner. Behind Barn L, then Barn J, he catch the Cadillac rolling slow towards the front gate. Medicine Ed light out for the pay phone back of the track kitchen, fast as his stick leg can wamble.

NOT GOOD, EDWARD. Not good. When was this?

Only just now.

This is not good news, Two-Tie said. This ain't good news at all, because D'Ambrisi goes over there himself this afternoon to pick up the horse, as soon as he organizes a van. It won't take him long because I happen to know that D'Ambrisi is hot to get out from under that horse any way he can. I hear he has talked to certain important people out of town and he don't want Pelter no more. He don't want his name on those foaling papers even one more night. Have you seen him yet?

I ain't seen him.

Well, you will. The horse is coming back to Hansel and the girl. And to you, Edward.

Medicine Ed was silent.

Naturally Joe Dale won't like it when he finds out he has to get off that horse. You sure they went to his farm?

That's what he say.

Did Joe Dale have his boys with him?

Wasn't nobody in the car but Joe Dale. And her.

Thank you, Edward.

Two-Tie reached in back of his twenty-volume set of The Book of Knowledge for his Browning 9mm, and called down at the Ritzy Lunch for Roy, of Roy's Taxicab. He went to the back window and fumbled with the rod of the dusty venetian blind; his small fat hand was trembling. He hadn't touched a gun in eighteen months, since he'd backed off making the circuit of race meetings. He had never carried a gun in town. It was starting to rain. Already when Roy pulled his cab around a mound of brown paper boxes into Two-Tie's alley, the boxes were slumping and the rain lay on the dirty ice of the parking lot in glowing gray sheets. He got down his umbrella. Elizabeth went to the door and, refusing to make way for him, eyeballed the door knob insistently. Not today, Elizabeth. Go lay down. She didn't move. O for god's sake. All right. Come on, he said, knowing it was a bad idea. Obviously, if anything happened to him, Elizabeth had no future. The fact was, neither of them had much future, even if they never ran into trouble like this. It was also true that two hours in Roy's backseat in the cold left Elizabeth lame behind for a week. When they crossed the Powhatan Point bridge she was still looking around at her bony tush and turning clumsy circles back there, trying to get comfortable.

TWO DAYS AFTER she lost Pelter, two days after you claimed back The Mahdi, you noticed she wasn't there and you went looking for her. In fact she had been remote and somewhat morose ever since you came back from the city with the money. Now that you had The Mahdi back, you could afford to be generous. It was time to tell her that, beside her, the women of the caravanseries were as the dust that blows across the highway. She meant more than any rapacious blonde you met on the road who offered you a loose thousand or two and her husband's bed for a night. She, your twin, had your soul in her keeping, pinned at her waist in her little rose sachet.

When she didn't show up in the trailer at noon you went looking for her. But she wasn't straightening the tack room or mucking a stall or hauling water or walking some fractious horse, she was nowhere. You looked in the track kitchen. Lately she had been flirting there after the morning works with that little blacksmith Kidstuff, a bona fide cowboy from Louisiana, former rodeo clown, red brown, probably half Indian, who drank a bit. You liked her to flirt, and more than to flirt-to tempt herself with these good fellows. You liked the general ripple of nerves when you dangled her in front of them, and the surge of muscle when you reeled her back. But she wasn't in the track kitchen, though Kidstuff was there, sprawled in an orange dinette chair in his cowboy boots, with a toothpick traveling up and down his very white teeth.