The girl, the young fool's woman-she didn't know nothing and she couldn't do nothing, but she would work, he'd give her that much. Haul them buckets, sling them bales, just like a man, better'n a man if you look at what they got for men round here anymore. If she didn't know nothing to do, she'd find something to do and get all in your hair or climb up your heels like now. She'd make it up as she go along. In the hole in her head where experience would have stacked up, if she had any experience, that's where she must find em, her chucklehead ideas.
You can't gallop an old horse every day, am I right? she say.
Hmmm.
So he gets walked, correct?
Medicine Ed just eyeball her.
Okay, if it keeps Pelter sound to walk, isn't it reasonable that walking him fast is a little better than walking him slow?
Don't you be putting off your eeby jeebies on Pelter there. He ain't nervous. You nervous. He ain't in a hurry. You in a hurry.
I didn't say he was nervous. I said maybe it'd be good for him to go a little faster.
Good for you, you mean.
Good for you too, you old Halloween bones-get your appetite up. And she grinned evilly.
I had a stick leg since before you was born, young woman. (This wasn't quite true, but somehow the vintage of an injury seem like it ought to get some respect, like what he used to had for his granddaddy who still limped from the war-whichever war that was.) Does I go round calling you Four Eyes?
You probably call me worse than that behind my back.
What I call you?
Ignorant. Green.
You's all of that.
Finally it was nothing else to do but show her, learn her a thing or two, in self-defense. He taught her how to rub down the horse's leg and put on the cottons and bandage, smooth and not too tight, without poking it through with the pin and putting a hole in the animal. Then she thought she knew something. Then she want to bandage everything in sight. She go around bandaging young and old, lame and sound, on her own say-so, and Medicine Ed come around behind her unbandaging. What can it hurt? she say.
Young woman, it is a price on everything. Every change make some other change that you can't see. I know some trainers have never bandaged a horse and they got horses outrun the word of God. When you run against them horses you better have your tap-dancing shoes on.
Well-you're talking about somebody's fifty-thousand-dollar horse. We've got nothing but cripples.
You think stakes horses is sound? He shook his head at the pure foolishness of her. Naturally he was thinking of Platonic, and his feet that used to remind Medicine Ed of gluing together two broken China soup plates from little pieces, him and the horseshoer worked on them so much-them two front feet, coming up to the Seashell, was one long bellyache, probably worth two weeks in the butcher shop (Sinai Hospital) all by theyselves. Stake horses like all the rest, he added.
So how you do you know what to do?
You follow custom, young woman. They is no I know, he know, like what you talking bout. Until you have put some years in this business, you watch the old grooms and do like they do.
That doesn't sound very scientific to me, she say.
I tell you a secret, horse racing is not no science. Some of em tries to make it a science, with the drugs and the chemicals and that, but ma' fact it's more like a religion. It's a clouded thing. You can't see through it. It come down to a person's beliefs. One person believe this and the other person believe that. It's like the National Baptists bandage and the Southern Baptists use liniment, you see what I'm trying to say? Nobody exactly know.
His cheeks ached under his eyes-she made him talk too much, made him say peculiar things he was sorry later that he give up. He slipped around the corner of the shedrow and faded away from her behind wagons and buildings in a certain way he had learned to do long ago, before he had his good job with Gus Zeno.
This was when he missed having his old crushed Winnebago there on the shedrow. It was the one thing Mrs. Zeno had said from the start he could keep-it taken phone calls from certain people, Mr. Two-Tie, Jim Hamm, Kidstuff, to remind her of other sums and bonuses that was decent and customary, under the circumstances, but the Winnebago she didn't even care to look at no more. Only, Suitcase Smithers gave him twenty-four hours, if he wanted it, to haul that thing off the backside. The young fool say he'd take care of it. That was part of they deal. He had it towed round to the trailer park behind the Horseman's Motel, a couple blocks from the back gate. They put the Winnebago way in the rear, out of sight, in a clump of serviceberry bushes. They run an extension cable from the young fool's trailer all the way to his trailer. And that was how Medicine Ed fell into this job.
It would have been too raggedy an outfit even for Ed to work for if Hansel's horses was still thrown to four separate barns in every corner of the backside and everybody at the Mound laughing at him. But already the morning after the young fool rolled in, Suitcase come round personally and asked him this and that, where he from and how he be getting along, and then he let him have Zeno's old stalls in Barn Z.
That's Pelter? the Pelter? Roland Hickok's Pelter? Suitcase say. He's peering in the dark stall. The young fool make like he ain't hear. He turn on his heel and hang up a tangle of shanks and halters and shaken out some chain, but finally he say Mr. Hickok have sold him Pelter in a private deal, and Suitcase say, Well I'll be damned, because he know Mr. Hickok won't sell the West Virginia-bred winner of the Popcorn Stakes and the Little Blue Ridge to just anyone. So maybe the young fool's price go up a little bit just then.
Medicine Ed himself had to admit that Pelter looked good, almost too good-ain't he heard that the once-upon-a-time Darkesville Stalker broke down bad in the stretch only a short while back? And they was that red bomber too that Zeno had claimed, and which had already win one for fifteen hundred in Charles Town, so the young fool must be doing something right for these horses.
Medicine Ed had his hand on the screen door of the track kitchen-but then between buildings he spied Deucey Gifford, looking round for him to walk the Speculation grandson. It was something about this colt (colt! he was long past a colt) that touched him. He hurried his stiff leg back to the barn and took him off her. Medicine Ed like to get him round the corner of the shedrow, where Deucey couldn't see, and slip him out to the grass patch, let him graze, graze and gaze. He looked round at things, like he really want to know what it is. Why? Like nobody pay you a dollar more in this business to braid up a tail or put a checkerboard on the flank of a horse going to a race. So why? It was the plain beauty of the thing.
He do scare easy, the horse. When they swing back to the shedrow, a she-cat with a backbone like knuckles, so bagged up her titties bounced on the dirt, chased a mouse across their path, and the horse threw up his head and stood quivering. What she want with you, son? Medicine Ed talked to him. She done got herself in a deep hole and she need some of that fast luck oil to get her out. She ain't thinking bout you. He gave the horse his kind eye, he came back to himself and they plodded on.
The way Medicine Ed hear it, Joe Dale Bigg run the horse off and so he was Deucey's but he wasn't Deucey's, wasn't nobody's horse right now. A Speculation grandson and looking for a home! Jesus put me wise. Now, what was the name of this boy? Medicine Ed couldn't recall. For all his fancy blood he had a ankle almost as big as he was, but that wasn't what caused him to lose his home. It was Biggy, Joe Dale Bigg's boy, one day when Biggy was helping Fletcher the dentist in the back of the horse's stall and the horse pinned and about killed him. Biggy what you call simple, a gorilla-size child-for-life, and now he was back from the industrial school in Pruntytown. Joe Dale Bigg thought he better be shed of the animal before something go down.