Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

He said, Well, that happens. He had come all the way from Abilene to East Texas to write down the names of famous winning racing quarter-mile horses in a notebook. They had to be stallions. He thought they ought to be a recognized breed, but some people regarded them as being in the same category as bathtub gin. He was off to Louisiana here in a minute to deal with the coonasses. Ross Everett smiled into the lens and sat on the running board and pushed his hat to the back of his head and gazed out into the black-and-white world of the potential photograph. Mrs. Everett was very pretty. She stared down with deep concentration into the viewfinder to see that Jeanine had also appeared in one corner of it, looking back at her sister Mayme, her thin arms going in different directions and so she clicked it twice. She told Jeanine’s mother she would send her one of the pictures. In the background a train is taking on water.

Jack Stoddard stands holding the halter of Smoky Joe Hancock, in a pressed shirt and khaki pants. The horse is blocky and ungraceful and no amount of blanket-flapping or umbrella-opening will make him look like he could cover 440 yards in twenty-four seconds. His forelock is short and frazzled, his ears flop each to one side. But Jack Stoddard has his hat brim snapped over his face and a cigar between his fingers.

This is how people wanted to appear to the world and to later generations. It is how they wished to be remembered no matter how hard life might have become. They framed themselves in their best clothes and with their most valuable possessions and smiled. Hard times and collapsing marriages and heavy labor was nobody’s business but their own.

Nobody’s business

Nobody’s dirty business

Nobody’s business but my own

Nobody’s business, how my little baby treats me

Nobody’s business but my own

So Bukka White sang in the East Texas juke joints in Houston, Conroe, Corsicana. He held the neck of the Dobro guitar like a baseball bat and wrung blues from it, and after him came Ma Rainey’s Jazz Hounds. Her father lifted the dice in his fist and all eyes were on him alone until he threw and then the magical moment would be gone. The singer turned to the old 1920s song “Red Cap Porter” and the dice moved with infinite slowness around the circle from hand to hand, manic little creatures with dots for brains. He either bought or won Smoky Joe in 1935, when they moved to Conroe, north of Houston. The Conroe field lay inside the skirts of drifting fog that came from the Gulf of Mexico. He drove up to the house shouting for them all to come out, they’d got their first real racehorse.

Smoky Joe Hancock was an own son of Old Joe Hancock, a dark two-year-old stud with a savage temper and horizontal scars on his legs where he had fought his way out of a trailer. He had stubby ears and a head like a shoe box. His mane sprayed up from his stallion’s crest in short, wild tassels. He was known as a hard case. He threw his jockeys. The seller admitted he had once run off a railless brush track and tore through several barbecue tables and a line of people with plates in their hands like a boxy rocket before they could get him to the score line. It was why her father got him for a low price.

Bea said, “He’s had a hard life.” Little Bea had been assigned the novel Black Beauty in her reading circle at the new Conroe Elementary and the book had taken a fixed grip on her imagination with its injustices and its defiantly happy ending. “He used to belong to a rich widow, and she had her coachman to beat him with a bumbershoot until he fell to his knees.” Bea paused and then said, in a low, dramatic voice, “On the hard cobblestones.”

He turned the stallion into an abandoned brick yard down the street from their rent house in Conroe. Smoky was both defiant and lonely in all the trash thrown into the oil-soaked earth, alert and suspicious among the broken toilet seats and greasy paper sacks.

“We got our speed demon, Jeanine,” he said. “We’re going to run the competition around here into the ground. He’s blazing hell at four hundred forty yards. He just needs a hit over the head once in a while.” He said this carelessly, as if it were a matter easily taken care of with a two-by-four or a section of pipe. “I think he can stay the longer distances. We can win some money with this horse, Pistol. And I don’t want you trying to handle him. He’s dangerous.”

“I don’t want to take care of him,” said Jeanine. “I got other things to do.” The brightly printed flour sacks were hard to get. Many other girls had figured out the place to get them was at the bakery or the big hotels in Conroe, where bakers and cooks emptied them and then piled them in the storage rooms. It took six flour sacks to make a dress, and you had to get them all matched. Jeanine was at present working on collecting a pattern in aqua and dark blue. It had a risqué slash of red in it.

She tossed her new short bob in a way that made the blunt ends fly up. She made astonished gestures at herself in the cracked mirror.

“Either that or he starves.”

Whatever her father took up it was bound to go wrong. They would move and leave Smoky Joe behind somewhere. They would lose him. He would die of sleeping sickness, he would break one of his legs. It was the same for everybody. The feeling that things were falling apart and that nothing worked. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had been killed over in Louisiana, a hundred miles away, and for ten cents you could see the tan Ford V-8 shot all to pieces, it still had blood and the stain of brains all over the seats. The baby son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered. Not even rich and famous people could protect themselves from alien beings creeping in during the dark hours and destroying your life. Even if you were virtuous. Nothing was stable or safe. Even the earth itself lifted into the sky of the high plains of Texas and Oklahoma and blew into dust storms as thick as airborne petroleum.

Jeanine had a sample tube of lipstick in a harsh red and with it she made herself several new kinds of lips. She was interested in young men. Young men were attracted by good hair and open-toed shoes with inch-and-a-half heels and dresses with the new drooping shawl collars, fall fashions of 1934. They wanted to go places and see things; you could see a demonstration of how they faked the play-by-play ball games in front of the Conroe radio station, where a man knocked two pencils together to imitate a base hit. That was free. Play ball! the announcer shouted into the microphone, and a man spun crowd sounds on a record. She understood that her father slid from addiction to addiction, a shape changer, and nothing would hold him in one place for long, and she knew this with a childlike combination of disillusion and forgiveness.

“Horse, you are in for a hard life,” she said. “Hope you like potato peelings.”

She and her father walked away and Jeanine turned back to see the dark horse staring after her with his ears up, a frightened young stallion only two years old, who did not know where he was nor who had bought him nor what was to happen to him.

At a race outside of Conroe they made the immense sum of fifty dollars. Jeanine began to think of how she could keep a part of it for herself. Her Conroe High School boyfriend had just abandoned her in favor of a girl who was from Conroe and had always been from Conroe. Jeanine did not know why. This was the worst of it. And in other places people had no idea why. On the front page of the Conroe newspaper that morning was a strange photograph of the cold black dust storm of April 1935 that turned the Texas and Kansas plains dark as night and buried entire towns. Nobody knew how to stop them, or why there was a Depression. But Jeanine felt at the moment reasonably safe in Conroe on the humid coast and with twenty-five dollars in bet money.