Medicine Ed taken the red flannel bag between his fingers and rub. He said: In the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, I ask you to take all the bad luck off me and make it go on them who tryna take from me, what I done rightly win, put the harm on them and let it go back to the Devil where it come from. And he rubbed and listened to them clicking softly together in this strong Leave Alone powder, the carefully parched manly parts of Little Spinoza, smoked down to the size of marbles, over a dry wood fire.
THIRD RACE
ONE JANUARY NIGHT when snow was sifting white moons into the rusty rims of the kitchen portholes and softening the periscopes of the sewer hookups in the Horseman's Motel trailer park, Maggie realized that she liked this life. Not life in general-this life right now. She was pouring cans of beer over soaked drained cowpeas and all at once she understood she was happy on the racetrack with Tommy.
True, whenever she had had a similar revelation in the past, the man of the day had been temporarily off somewhere, and Tommy happened to be in New York, seeing about a horse. But he had to be home by tomorrow night to saddle Pelter. And anyhow he was present in the food she was cooking. When she had had no lover, she had had to write about food instead of cooking it. Maggie liked food, but food had to be offered, that was its nature; therefore, Menus by Margaret in the old days. Now she had Tommy, and these coarse savory dishes powerfully expected him. He was in the beans lazily seething and plopping like tarpits, in the braided loaves bloating by the stove.
She could cook and yet she was not the homey kind. She was the restless, unsatisfied, insomniac kind. But when she came to rest, it was often with a ladle in her hands. She had been surprised to find out that beans and bread could bind anyone to her, but then, there had never been any telling what would bind anyone to anyone. Tommy also liked her collarbone, and the flat Cossack triangles under her eyes.
Three pounds of beans, three cans of beer. Three cloves of garlic smashed to a xanthous pulp. Three smoked ham hocks, purple-striped, stiff, and reeking, like obscene little baseball socks. Cider vinegar. Thyme honey. Hammered pepper. McNinch's Loosiana Devil Aged Intensified Chili-Water (From an Olde Family Receipt). In her family house (her mother had hardly cooked and had died young), dry beans had been unknown, and Maggie could believe that the lifelessness of her childhood had had something to do with that fact, for surely sterile luck follows the exile of the bean. Beans, as the Pythagoreans knew, were the temporary lodgings of souls on the highway of transmigration. They sprouted beanstalks to giants in nameless upper regions. They were lots in the lottery for Lord of Misrule and his lady, king and queen of Saturnalia, when the order of the world turned upside down. They were cheap. They were proverbial. They were three blue beans in a blue bladder. They wouldn't give two beans. They didn't amount to a hill of beans. They weren't babkes-which also meant goat turds. In order to feel like a savvy old crone in her own kitchen, a woman need know only two things: the stations of the bean, and the immanence of a loaf of bread in a sack of flour. She had to know not only how, but how easy. Bread, bake thyself. Bean, boil thyself. Then she was free to fly about the snowy skies on her broomstick, while, below, ancient arts uncoiled from her hands.
She knew Tommy a lot better now than when they had set forth on this racetrack adventure. Just as she had been thinking, How could I ever trust a guy like that?-wormwood green eyes, blueblack mustachios, torn silk shirts, pure theater-she noticed she was happy. She was relieved. She'd been feeling flashes of shame like she'd fallen for some ridiculous confidence man. And was that what he was? If so, he believed himself in what he was flogging. She was glad she didn't have to introduce him to her father, but she was beginning to see that Tommy was a genuine racetracker, in his virtues as well as his defects. He was riddled with suspicion but also flamboyantly credulous-far more credulous than she was. Sometimes he even admitted it, for instance, the day he'd driven that ten-year-old white Grand Prix, with torn red naugahyde bucket seats, bumpety bump down the long dirt driveway to the Pichot place. Pitifully blatant was what that car was, showy and humiliated, not in equal parts but in the same part, a sick pimp in gem-studded shoes begging a buck for a drink. He had taken it for a nine hundred dollar stable debt from the last of his blown owners, Bugsy Bugnaski of Bugsy's Auto Sales. I thought it was a pretty good deal, Tommy said, and Maggie exclaimed: My god, and you used to sell used cars. Tommy shrugged: Nobody springs easier than a salesman, and she saw that it was true.
Likewise no one believed the racetrack legends like a racetracker. Tommy's glamorous plans had turned out to be the standard racetrack yarn, you heard it every day: I'm going to get me a heavy-head motherfucker. Break his jaw all spring-take him to the fairs come August and drop his head… Everyone said, Run em where they belong, i.e., don't worry about losing the animal-throw a sure winner in the cheapest possible claiming race and cash that big bet instead. But how many actually did it? How many winners were that sure? How many thought themselves that lucky? A person had to see himself, or herself, as lucky not just once in a while, but plugged into a steady current of luck like an electrical appliance, a fan or a toaster. People who thought they couldn't lose-Joe Dale Bigg, for one-were some kind of machinery. That's what old Deucey said. Deucey sometimes believed. You really couldn't tell what on earth Medicine Ed believed. Tommy's eyes burned wormwood green with the need to believe. Maggie would never, ever, believe.
Sometimes she even wondered if Tommy, whose life she was living, wasn't a little mad. After all he, like her, was a college-educated person. (True, he had gambled his way through his years in Madison-one exhausting daily game of Hollywood Gin, elaborately scored in three streets-but somehow, barely, graduated.) He needed to believe, for example, in Maggie as-she smiled-his predestined one. That long-lost twin. As if there were such things as destinies, tying the loose threads together, times past and future, worlds congruous and incongruous, random intersections of total strangers. The way he thought he was bound to her, half mad though it was, nevertheless compelled her, gave him some sort of key to her body that nobody else had got hold of.
Maybe it was creepy. She would have hated to explain her present mode of life to, say, Bertrand Russell. But as with beans and bread, so the body. Without believing anything she got drawn into the stories of others, the older and more cobwebby the better. She would have hated to be left out of the trap of the flesh altogether.
And not that she could pretend it wasn't dangerous. O it was dangerous-she yawned and mopped her brow on a crusty dishtowel. She was sweating into her black-eyed peas even as she admired the snow flailing like chaff under the trailer park floodlights. She was wearing a ribbed tank undershirt gray-pink from washing with a maroon horse blanket, and a pair of blue-striped boxer shorts, but still she was sweating. She had that thermostat set for mamba snakes, jacaranda trees and flamingos, as long as she had to live in a twenty-foot tin lunchbox.
No, it was definitely getting dangerous, all of it. Terrible things had happened lately in this racetrack life-actually she had a nerve being happy. First Deucey had shown up with her front teeth knocked out. It was the morning after Little Spinoza had paid 23.80. Maggie and Ed were stamping around the shedrow in the new snow, waiting for Deucey to show up with the money. They were feeling good, of course, for even after they had paid off the feed man and the hay man, and Kidstuff, and the tack shop, and Haslipp the vet and the wholesale veterinary supply, and Alice, and anyone else they were in hock to, privately or together, they were all going to have dough-at least a little dough-when here comes old Deucey limping into the barn with a veil of bloody mucus hanging down from her nostrils to her chin, and black blood and pink snow caked in her spiky hair. A fat roll of bills in her pocket. But no front teeth. She said she had fallen down drunk and woken up toothless. Them snags was black anyway. I'll get me some new ones, now that I got dough.