Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Smoky leaped forward like a trout and sprang after him with his heavy dark legs reaching and striking and reaching again, as if he would snatch the dirt track up under him and then fling it away behind.

He stretched out his heavy neck and caught up to Kat Tracks within five seconds, his nose at the gray’s tail. The men among the twisted cast-iron limbs of the mesquites began to shout. Jeanine held on to her hat as if it would fly away. The horses tore through the angular beams of headlights, between ranks of yelling men. They flew through the light of the brushfires. Dust foamed up behind them and the great engines of their bodies.

Smoky streaked past the eighth-of-a-mile flag; the gray had now used up his sprint and didn’t have much left in him. Smoky came boring through the air, his nostrils wide open. He passed the gray and poured himself down the dusty brown track, hurling up dirt and gravel into Kat Tracks’s face and his head pounded up and down like a walking beam.

Kat Tracks’s jockey swung his bat, and even though the gray stallion had used up his air he reached out and gave it more, and within three long seconds he was again at Smoky’s tail and crowding him and then he passed him.

They streaked past Jeanine with Smoky’s pounding head at the gray stallion’s stirrup and the jockey brought the bat down once again, for the second time, and instead of pitching his jockey into the air, Smoky poured out yet more speed as if he possessed an endless reservoir of it. He flattened out. Jeanine’s entire life narrowed and reduced itself to one horse flying runaway down a dirt track carrying a hundred dollars on a wild bet. It seemed to Jeanine she could hear the percussion of his enormous heart. He was born to run, under any name and on any track whatever.

Smoky Joe caught up to the gray stallion, and then passed him, running through the flaggers’ streaming arc. The jockey stood up in the stirrups and Jeanine realized they had won. She sat down heavily on the truck’s running board with her head in her hands.

The jockey ran Smoky Joe straight on, into the dark field. After a while the jockey managed to get him turned back. Smoky began to slow and pitched one or two bucks out of triumph and joy. The jockey jumped to the ground and landed on his feet while men crowded around to grab Smoky’s reins.

Everett came up to her with a pocket watch in his hand. It was a big old nickel-plated railroad ticker.

He said, “He did it in twenty-three point five seconds.”

“Twenty-three five?”

“Near as I can tell.”

The businessman from Abilene, with his suit and yellow bow tie, came up. He held up his stopwatch.

“Twenty-three two,” he said. “Miss, I heard that horse was for sale.”

“Yes, he is,” said Ross. “And I’m buying him.”

Jeanine stepped forward to take Smoky’s reins. “Ain’t you a rocket?” she said. She patted his neck and he stared around eagerly, with both ears cocked up, and his eyes were bright. He lashed his tail and bounced at the ends of the reins, his great heated body streaked with sweat.

Everett took his wallet from his rear pocket and opened it and handed her a hundred-dollar bill. She had won it in twenty-three seconds. She reached out for the sweet, easy money. She took the bill and folded it over with one hand and tucked it into the watch pocket of her jeans.

“He’s all right,” said Everett. Jeanine smiled up at him and gripped Smoky’s reins. “Will you run him again?” He looked down at her and said, “The man with that Midnight colt will take you on.”

“No,” said Jeanine. She smoothed her hands over Smoky Joe’s eyes, but he was in no mood to be petted. He threw his heavy, hard-boned head and the eggbutt snaffle bit jangled and flashed. “No, I’ll stay with what I have. I can’t afford to lose.”

At the sale barn Jeanine walked Smoky Joe out of his sweat. She walked him back and forth in the stockyard. She held his lead rope and they paced between the sale barn and the pens. The dark horse’s breath slowed and he stepped along lightly. He tried to take Jeanine’s hat from her head and she took it back from him and patted him on his great round jaw. Jeanine kept on walking Smoky Joe long after he cooled out.

A man came past her. “Miss, there’s a stock tank there in back of the auction barn. There’s a pole light on.”

She watched Smoky Joe drink his fill. The horse’s ears flicked slightly with every swallow, as if they were part of some tiny, hidden, intricate pumping system in his head. Then she led him back to the trailer. Truck motors started up, headlights made a long snaking line out of the stockyards.

Ross came toward her.

“Load him up,” Everett said. “And follow me back to my place. I’ll write you out a bill of sale.”

He drove his truck and trailer at top speed, the gray stallion’s tail streaming over the trailer gate and glowing bright red in the taillights. At the top of one of the great rises she saw the lights of Comanche in the distance and the faint sparks of distant houses. After a good many miles she saw him turn into a ranch gate. She slowed and turned in. After a mile or a mile and a half she came to a stone house shaded by two massive live oaks. Behind the house was a large barn and a shearing platform with a fire burning on its level concrete table. Several men sat around the fire and threw chunks of wood into it. The fan of the windmill rolled with a continual knocking clank where one of the blades was missing.

He came out to greet her, closing the doors of the house behind him. He walked out from beneath the shadow of the galleria with his canvas coat collar turned up. A loose spur rang on the stony ground.

She said, “I got to turn Smoky out.”

“My boy will do that.” He turned toward the house and shouted, “Innis? Innis? Get out here and turn this woman’s horse in the lot.” He sat and watched as his young son held on to Joe’s lead rope and walked him toward the barn and the corrals. “Come in.” He stood up. “I got a windmill crew here. I guess they already ate. The cook’s here.”

She followed him to the house and they walked across the galleria floor and its veined limestones and through a set of double doors. It was hard to shut the doors. He had to slam them twice.

“Sit down,” he said. “While I get this fire going. What can I offer you?” Jeanine sat on a hard-backed chair in front of the fire. Everett sat down and unbuckled his spurs and pulled them from his boots. He dropped them on the telephone stand. Jeanine realized he was not wearing his spurs in the house as a gesture of politeness, and that if there wasn’t a woman around he and his son and the cook and the boys probably wore their spurs at the dining room table and hooked them on the chair rungs and caught them in the curtains. They probably wore them in the bathtub and in bed as far as she knew.

“You know, I think I would drink a bottle of beer.”

Everett said, “All right.” He went to the kitchen door and called to the cook.

“Yes, sir.”

“Get this young woman a bottle of beer.”

The cook came out again with the beer. His face sparkled with a week’s growth of red beard and he was covered with a heavy rubber apron as if he had been scalding turkeys.

He said, “Them boys is finished up and ate. I guess I’ll go on back.”

“Well, tell them I’d come out but I got business.”

The cook rubbed his whiskery chin. “I’ll do it,” he said. Then he went back in the kitchen.

Everett found a bottle of whiskey inside a glass-fronted bookcase. He took up a coffee cup from the dining room table and blew the dust out of it and then poured two fingers of whiskey into it. He opened her beer bottle on his belt buckle and handed it to her. He sat down again. He tipped up the coffee cup to drink his whiskey and then stood up and quietly choked and threw the rest of the whiskey into the fire. He threw the cup after it and it smashed against the grate. He went and took the bottle out of the bookcase and dropped it into a wastebasket.