Jaimy Gordon - Lord of Misrule

When Tommy is back, they never touch or eat in the trailer. Margaret no longer tries to cook on the faux wood counters with their black gummy cracks and peeling celluloid edges. At night after the races they are exhausted, at four in the morning, getting up to feed, they are not awake. Sometimes Tommy doesn't come back to the trailer at all. Whatever they are, they are not laborers. Their bodies don't thank them for this long reminder that they are not brother and sister pharaoh, not prince and courtesan, not even a proper hustler and his moll. They are working too hard for that. Or at least Maggie is-it's not entirely clear what sort of business occupies Tommy.

That first summer they knew each other, when he came home in the afternoon from the track and she from the paper, they were in bed in five minutes, with all of it: newsprint and horse manure, saddle leather, ink and hashish, past performance charts and food pages, sweet feed and recipes for blancmange and corn souffle. The sheets literally reeked of all that. The sweat-damp canyons of the featherbed were gritty with their mixture. In some way their unmiscible lives fused. Here they live the same life and are rivals to come out of it alive. They meet in the prickly dark of the tack room or not at all. They couple on haybales or in old loose straw on the dirt floor or not at all. It starts with some hoarse utterance, I want to get in your ass, and hard fingers down the front of her jeans, or the back of them, fuck me now. They are naked but scaly, with clothes pushed out of the way of orifices, they come together like insects, claspers, ovipositors, wet vacuoles. They talk in this straw-speckled darkness or not at all. Will you marry me? She laughs. Is that such a ridiculous question?

She knew she should say it, it would have been the honorable thing to say it, but she was afraid of pushing him over some edge: I'm getting out of here as soon as I can. I don't know exactly what's going on, but a girl like me-I can't be playing around with gangsters. I keep thinking I'm in a movie and then I realize I could get killed. The strangeness draws me in but in the end I can't afford it. I haven't done anything with my life.

THEY WERE ALL LOOKING for a van like a Chinese jewel box, like no horse van that had ever been seen on a backside, something red and black and glossy, with gold letters, LORD OF MISRULE, arched across each side. All the same when a plain truck with Nebraska plates rolled into the Mound on the hottest day of the year, they knew who it was. They were watching, though the van was unmarked and dirty white, one of those big box trailers with rusty quilting like an old mattress pad you've given to the dog. The van bounced and groaned on its springs along the backside fence, headed for the stallman's office. Red dust boiled around it. They blinked as it dragged two wheels through the puddle that never dried, the puddle that had no bottom. They all waited for the van to tilt and lurch to a stop; it didn't even slow down. They peered through the vents when the van went by and saw the horse's head, calm, black and poisonous of mien as a slag pile in a coal yard. He had a funny white stripe like a question mark on his forehead.

The van stopped, woof, down comes the ramp, and a kid, unhealthy-looking like all racetrack kids, worm white, skull bones poking out of his skinny head, stood at the top of the ramp with a small black horse that couldn't even stand right: Lord of Misrule already rocked, or seemed to rock, on the flat floor of the van like a table with one short leg. And those legs-they were so swelled out from long-ago bowed tendons on both sides that they were one straight line from knee to ankle, drainpipes without contour except for the waffling left over from firing and blistering agents and god knows what.

Old Devil get behind of me, said Medicine Ed.

I'm scared, Maggie said, why am I scared?

You see what it's gonna cost Spinoza here just to chase after him, Deucey said.

What do you mean? Maggie said. We're not racing him. Are we?

Deucey added: Because that horse don't know from pain.

Notice the white six of syphilis on his forehead, Tommy Hansel said. They all looked away from the horse, and looked at him. Tommy leaned against the tack room door. The planes under his eyes were luminous with some peculiar idea, and sweat pearled his handsome, heavy forehead.

Say what? Medicine Ed asked.

But Tommy Hansel smiled as if he had been making a joke, and, relieved, they turned back to look at the horse.

Tell you what, Medicine Ed said. He ain't get them bad wheels from standing in no stall.

All kinds of people had come to watch from the grass bib of the shedrow, horsemen, grooms and ponygirls, hot-walkers and assorted riff-raff. They were waiting. Then the terrible thing happened. The back door of the Racing Secretary's pre-fab office shack opened and a large bald man with mastiff jowls and tea-colored eyeglasses came out and stood on the wooden stair. It was Standish Chenille himself. People blinked, for the racing secretary was seldom seen. He descended the stair and scuffed at a leisurely pace towards Lord of Misrule's van. The face in the cab of the van was freckled, boyish and rough, with a Western squint and a broad snub nose. Mr. Standish Chenille leaned over and said to him, low, but not so low that everybody couldn't hear: Barn Z. Raymond called ahead. His eyes pinched up, and all at once he had a hole similar to a smile punched into his heavy face. It was a welcome, a princely welcome. They all looked at each other. They could scarcely believe their ears. They looked at each other, and they thought, This is big, and, How can we get a piece of it, and, We'll take anything, even a hoof paring, sawdust, loose change.

The horses around them felt it too. Joe Dale Bigg's were all of a sudden beating up the red dust under the hot-walking machine, tearing around the aluminum carousel at a thrilled gallop that few of them ever showed at the far turn.

Going into the stretch it's Nobody's Nothing, with Nowhere making his move on the inside, Deucey called the race. A few people laughed. Lord of Misrule threw back his head, snorted out dust and rolled his eye at the other cheap horses. His black tail arched and, ugly as Rumpelstiltskin, he let drop great soft nuggets, part gold, part straw, all the way down the ramp.

THERE WAS A HAYBALE up against the shingle between the young fool's tack room and his stalls, and Medicine Ed sat here in the afternoon and studied, and after a while he let his heavy head fall back against the wall and he might doze. He didn't care these days to walk out the back gate over to Zeno's old Winnebago. He couldn't sleep in it no more if he did, for now he start to worry that he gone to lose it. Yes, he had that draggyfied feeling he was about to lose his good home one more time.

It wasn't the horses gone sour. Horses gone good: Mahdi. Pelter. Even the mare and Railroad Joe run in the money now and then. Wasn't the money. Seem like all of a sudden it was money in the young fool's pocket, New York money, might could be money from some crime character, since the young fool so jumpy and no owner in sight. No. The young fool's reason have clouded, what it is. Ever since he come back with Pelter from Joe Dale Bigg's farm, he be wandering in his mind. He talked to the horses about King Death, then he listened to the quiet, like they talking back-it give Ed the creeper crawlers to hear it. You think you are stronger? he say to Mahdi, remember, they come from Nebraska, where King Death keeps his court in beauty and decay. The little hairs stand up and wave on the back of Medicine Ed's neck.

He fixing to put The Mahdi in that special race against Lord of Misrule, and not just for the teenchy cut of the purse they slipping to all the entries, half a per cent or two hundred bucks or what it is. No, he gone try against common sense to win with the horse, good against evil, some catawamptious idea, sure to bring the Devil down on him if it ain't the Devil messing up his mind already. And if the gangsters whose race it is don't get to him first, him and anybody work for him. Or Joe Dale Bigg-since they take away Pelter off his farm, Joe Dale has turned cold as grave dirt. You can see why Death run in the young fool's mind, even if he is crazy. Medicine Ed pushed two fingers deep in his shut eyes, gold scum rippled through the black in his head, and hot as it was, he shivered.