The farm was up one of the red dirt roads that led into the hills, those state roads named for logging camps or mines or chocolatey creeks, here called runs, all without marker or sign. For all his dough, Joe Dale turned down a two-track as rutted and unprepossessing as the one to the Pichot place in Charles Town. She could see steep fenced pastures through the trees, horses grazing in patchy snow. The fences were sturdy but they were cow fences, wire, not wood. A deep ditch on the lower side of the dirt two-track got her attention. It had washed out so badly that the heavy car slid again and again on the slick red edge of a crevasse. Maggie wished that the Cadillac would roll over into it, breaking both their heads, but as ever her magical powers were unsupported by faith. Her weak curses had protected many a miscreant in the past and did so again now. The Cadillac floated over violent declivities and across fatal canyons and rolled to the bottom of the hill unscratched.
Joe Dale pulled up in a bare yard of house trailers and horse trailers strewn about without logic. The paddocks were squares of frozen mud, an idle hot-walking machine rose out of a churned brown ring in the snow, and at the far end of the hollow stood two long wooden horse barns in need of paint that probably looked more dilapidated than they were. Horses were everywhere she looked, shaggy like big wild ponies in their winter coats. It was a low overhead, high turnover operation. She wondered if Joe Dale's owners ever came around. Everybody said he was in with the mob but he had owners who certainly weren't crooks. Probably they were as scared of him as she was. Maggie had seen them around the shedrow, looking nervous and out of their depth in their high heels and dressy overcoats, not even all that rich by the look of them, and they too turned over fast. It probably didn't take Joe Dale long to shake them down for more than they could spare.
Three hands who looked more like sawyers than grooms were leaning against the paddock fence. Joe Dale crooked his finger and the biggest of them came over to the car. The giant wore a tight red bandana around a forehead too small for his big cheeks; it didn't quite hide the dented half moon of a scar over little blue eyes. Biggy, Spinoza, and the dentist. Everyone knew that story.
Get this young lady a soft drink, son, she's going to be here a while. And get me one too.
She followed Joe Dale towards the most presentable of the trailers. It stood at the far end of the hollow, next to the second barn; unfenced woods ran up the slope behind it. You can still run away, Maggie reminded herself, but then she followed him up the metal stair.
The trailer was overheated, and like every warm building on a horse farm in March, parched and bleary with pinkish dust. Joe Dale sat in the desk chair. She sat between stacks of yellowing Telegraphs on the sofa. Biggy brought them open Cokes in bottles and she nervously drank hers down at once. For some reason this felt queerly like a job interview, and for a lowly waitress gig at that, with Maggie begging for a job in her rundown shoes, cheap watch and smelly hair, and Joe Dale, the manager, looking her over, his clean hairy hands spread on plump thighs. His thick legs made his blond silk trousers as tight as a pair of good cigars. His over-ripeness made her dizzy. She set the Coke bottle on the floor.
Okay, baby, now I got you here I'm going to tell you something I did which I hope you won't be mad at me, on account of you have to see I really got a thing for you. Did you know I got a thing for you? Maggie slouched deeper into the couch and watched him.
I claimed that horse. Yeah. I put D'Ambrisi up to it. D'Ambrisi don't have a pot to pee in. You colly? He was working for me. He does what I say. Do you know why I claimed that horse?
Maggie shook her head. She felt irrelevantly insulted. She saw that to Joe Dale the worthlessness of her horse went without saying.
I claimed that horse because I want to have something you care about. I don't want to take him away from you. The opposite of that. I want to give him to you. If I like a lady I want to give her something, something she really wants, something so big she'll see she needs me. I want to give her something that will tie her to me, for a little while anyway. I want her to see I was really thinking about her, who she is, when I got this something for her-you see what I mean? I wasn't going to buy you a diamond bracelet. You ain't the type. I wouldn't even want to see you in a diamond bracelet. I like you in that little stripe shirt you wear. Yeah. Tell you the truth, from the first time I see you I want to reach my hands under it. You think that might ever happen? You think I might get to you? O well. He sighed, turned his hands over in appeal, and his big ring clinked against the desk top. Excuse me. I shouldn't of brought it up. You want to see the horse first.
She saw that Joe Dale was standing in the metal doorway of the trailer smiling at her, waiting for her, and she wondered distantly why she wasn't there next to him, why she was sinking deeper into this filthy plaid couch that had the booby-trapped feel of a sleeper sofa, hollow and mined with dangerous springs. Somebody seemed to have opened her veins and poured cement into them. She was wide awake but heavy, so heavy that the thought of standing up and picking her way across the paper-piled floor was almost laughable. She raised a hand to push her three-blind-mice sunglasses back up her nose where they had slipped, and the whole arm felt like a bag of wet sand. She could barely lift it. There was feeling in it-she pushed her thumbnail into her fingerpads to make sure-but the muscles she was so proud of seemed to have dissolved.
… see Pelter? Joe Dale was saying. Without asking herself why, she decided not to let on to Joe Dale what was happening to her. But what exactly was happening to her? Her body was inert or almost inert, her mind bobbed above it on a short string, like a helium balloon, unchanged from itself but aware of its own smooth pointlessness… your horse? he smiled. His custard pallor was making her sick. But she could pretend not to notice. She couldn't run in this condition. She had to use that little balloon to lift herself off the couch and go along with him until she saw some chance. Her feet pushed against the floor and she lurched across the room. It was like swimming through glass. The effort made her hot and nauseous and caused a great din, like an open hydrant, so that in the doorway she saw his mouth move but had no idea what he was saying.
Coming, she said, coming. He was still smiling but watching her carefully. All at once she understood that he had given her some drug and was waiting for it to show. She tried to stiffen her joints inside the jelly they were turning into, but for all her concentration she aimed at the door and tacked slowly to the window. She straightened up, pushed off the sill and tried again.
You aren't sick, baby, are you? You need help? Joe Dale said.
I'm fine, she replied, from a cave in a black rock, one mossy tonsil dangling from its wet roof. She followed him out the doorway, down the unpainted wooden stoop, into the barn, her hands catching clumsily at anything that stuck out along the way.
Then they were standing in a dark stall inside a high wooden gate, no flimsy webbing, and here was Pelter. She could hardly raise her chin to look at her horse; the effort to put a hand on him rocked her back against the planking. Yes, the place was solidly built. Unpainted but built to last. Which brought up the question, how long could all this last. Get this young lady a soft drink. She's going to be here awhile. What, then, was the plan? When she tried to focus on Joe Dale's face, her legs sank away underneath her, she sat down heavily on her tailbone in the straw, and she was looking not in his eyes but at his kneecap. She observed again that he was fleshy, plushy, so that his beautiful trousers were tight at the thigh. His right leg had a faint gray smudge on the pleat along the shin. The round thigh, the perfect crease, the gray smudge, made her deeply sick.