Jaimy Gordon - Lord of Misrule

When do I get the papers on my horse? Maggie asked.

No questions, Joe Dale smiled.

No papers no deal.

This ain't a deal, Joe Dale said. It's a gift. I don't think you get that yet.

No, I don't get it.

Well, I want you to stay here and think about it until you get it. I don't want you to go away and have to remember you blew your luck. I don't want you saying to yourself I could have had my horse back, and I could have had Joe Dale Bigg for a friend, just by putting my trust in him for one cotton-picking day. All I had to do was give my There was a commotion outside-some kind of distant shouting, probably an animal running loose-and Joe Dale, who already had his hand on the latch, went out in no hurry and shut the gate behind him. Maggie heard the outside bolt slide across and, through the crack at the bottom of the gate, watched his feet clap away on the earth floor. The crack was only a crack. On the other hand the high gate had no lock. Joe Dale was that sure she wouldn't even try to get away.

He presumed correctly. She tried to feel angry, for anger might pump up her muscles, but anger seemed to need a body to conceive of itself at all. If she could jimmy herself up the planking inch by inch, she could reach over and unlatch the latch at the top of the gate, but then what? Drag herself out of the barn on her belly? How far would she get like that?

And he had even left her with her horse. He had a nerve to figure her for such a klutz-but he was right, she had never been much of a rider and in all her life had never sat a horse bareback, let alone Pelter, a racehorse, without even reins and a bit in his mouth. Still, think of it: Maggie on Pelter. No, she greatly doubted she could get her body up off the ground and onto the horse, never mind stay on the horse once she got there.

She had to try, of course. Nowadays you couldn't just let some Black Bart tie you to the railroad tracks and walk away and leave you. The age demanded signs of a struggle even from a corpse. And there was another way of looking at this: the drug made gravity her friend, so that all at once the earth and her body loved each other dearly and fought to be together and worked as one against the forces that might part them. She had always thought that if she knew what was worth hanging onto in life, nothing could shake her off. She'd be a saint, or at least a nun, if she knew God. She'd be Griselda if she could find a man she could live with for more than twelve months. But so far she'd been spared any such moorings. Now she had a feeling that if she could once get the horse under her, she would stick to Pelter like a tattoo-nothing could get her off him.

Once in a pet store she had brushed inattentively by a cage and the small monkey inside had snatched her by a shirt button and would not let go. She pulled backwards. The monkey had eyed her with all the grave desperation of his boredom and twisted the button tighter. She pried at the monkey's fingers with her fingers, but it was clear she would have to do him some violence, break his little fingers one by one, to get free. She finally had to rip apart her blouse. She didn't mind. She was moved. She knew she was that monkey.

That was how she dragged herself up the gate, thinking of the monkey. She felt along the rough planks for pits and cracks with her bony prehensile fingers, leaning her bag of bones against them and squeezing herself up. She ended up lying across the top of the gate with one shoe on, one shoe off, her naked foot shakily stuffed in the water bucket. She kissed the air for Pelter and he came over.

She slung an arm and leg over him. He stiffened and danced away a little. Whoa, whoa, she begged him. One hand still clung to the top of the gate while her foot weakly pried at his long back end. The gap widened and she sagged into the hole. Come back, come back, come back, come back. Suddenly, for no reason, he stepped under her. She was on. Okay, papa, here goes. Her hand eased over the far side of the planking, turned the bolt, opened the latch, and the gate swung open.

Pelter stared forward a moment. He took in the wide open shedrow, the dark wooded slope all around, men shouting in the yard below and, straight ahead, the unobstructed sweep of light to the dirt road. He felt Maggie's warm weight on his back and the strange freedom of his head, and burst into a gallop. She sank her fingers in his mane, tried to spread her dead body all over his neck and shoulders like a cape. When he ran flat out she found he was level as a table. It was easy. She felt sure that if he didn't prop or swerve she would never fall off. She wasn't sure why he ran so fast, whether it was mischief or exuberance, whether he knew how little it would take to lose her, whether he schemed on losing her, but for the moment she felt the same strand of light drawing them both on. The long dirt driveway cut across the hillside for a short way, its red naked ruts lined with filmy ice like waxed paper. Pelter made a great racket galloping over the skeletal puddles but didn't slip. Maggie was elated. A wonderful thing had happened. She was numb and disconnected but still she was making a getaway on Pelter. She could already see the open meadows tilting steeply up towards the county road. She was riding a racehorse out of the hands of a storybook villain. Her luck had changed. She would make it.

Then suddenly the road dipped down to a white metal ranchhouse before it bent back up to the high meadows and the road to town. Somehow she held on as they barreled downhill. In front of the long one-story building, plain as a shoebox, a yellow taxicab was idling. In the cold bottomland it floated on a little cloud of its own exhaust like a chicken on a platter. The cabdriver, a lanky old fellow in a gray felt baseball jacket, sat smoking a cigarette in the open window. As Maggie and Pelter galloped alongside, the window behind his head was suddenly cram full of the pointed ears and broad muzzle of a wildly barking German shepherd. Pelter veered away, back towards the wooded hill, and Maggie rolled off his back, rolled over and over through the frozen puddles and came to a stop against the taxicab. She lay on her back blinking up at the furious dog. On second glance the animal looked old and blind and as shocked to find itself carrying on this way as Pelter had been. It looked down into Maggie's upturned face, seemed abashed, as though Maggie had yelled at it, pinned its grizzled ears, and ducked its grizzled jaw back into the cab.

The storm door of the metal ranchhouse wheezed open and an elderly gentleman in a rumpled misbuttoned camel's hair overcoat and a-Maggie blinked, could that be two bow ties, one black, one striped?-came limping out. His face was deeply grooved. He was bag-bellied and thin-legged and his wooly eyebrows tilted up to a point in the middle of his forehead that was philosophical and almost comically sad. He was a lacrimose and remarkable-looking fellow, and Maggie saw at once two other even more remarkable things about him: he was waving a big blue squarish gun and he looked oddly familiar-suddenly she recognized the face in the backseat of Joe Dale's car from long ago. You are the picture of your lovely mother at twenty-but for the hair, he had said. Now he said: Margaret, my dear, are you ill? You look terrible. If Joe Dale Bigg has laid a hand on you, I swear to god he's a dead man.

Uncle Rudy? she said.

Was he Uncle Rudy? It was a question of cosmic significance. He took off his black felt hat with the green silk puggree band and held it to his chest, his sad eyebrows joined in the middle and he opened his mouth to answer. Before he could speak, Biggy burst out the aluminum door behind him and caught him a great swipe in the back of the neck. The gun went off. Biggy jumped back with a blank look, feeling his chest for holes. Maggie felt crumbs of frozen dirt bite her in the face. The dog filled the window again, barking crazily. The cabbie ducked down out of sight. Uncle Rudy, if he was Uncle Rudy, stumbled hard into the unpainted railing of the rough little stoop, bounced off and whirled around in a stiff crouch, with the blue gun smoking in front of him. Maggie noticed how small, white and hairless the hand on the gun was-a woman's plump hand in some old painting, without bones.