Pelter stared forward a moment. He took in the wide open shedrow, the dark wooded slope all around, men shouting in the yard below and, straight ahead, the unobstructed sweep of light to the dirt road. He felt Maggie's warm weight on his back and the strange freedom of his head, and burst into a gallop. She sank her fingers in his mane, tried to spread her dead body all over his neck and shoulders like a cape. When he ran flat out she found he was level as a table. It was easy. She felt sure that if he didn't prop or swerve she would never fall off. She wasn't sure why he ran so fast, whether it was mischief or exuberance, whether he knew how little it would take to lose her, whether he schemed on losing her, but for the moment she felt the same strand of light drawing them both on. The long dirt driveway cut across the hillside for a short way, its red naked ruts lined with filmy ice like waxed paper. Pelter made a great racket galloping over the skeletal puddles but didn't slip. Maggie was elated. A wonderful thing had happened. She was numb and disconnected but still she was making a getaway on Pelter. She could already see the open meadows tilting steeply up towards the county road. She was riding a racehorse out of the hands of a storybook villain. Her luck had changed. She would make it.
Then suddenly the road dipped down to a white metal ranchhouse before it bent back up to the high meadows and the road to town. Somehow she held on as they barreled downhill. In front of the long one-story building, plain as a shoebox, a yellow taxicab was idling. In the cold bottomland it floated on a little cloud of its own exhaust like a chicken on a platter. The cabdriver, a lanky old fellow in a gray felt baseball jacket, sat smoking a cigarette in the open window. As Maggie and Pelter galloped alongside, the window behind his head was suddenly cram full of the pointed ears and broad muzzle of a wildly barking German shepherd. Pelter veered away, back towards the wooded hill, and Maggie rolled off his back, rolled over and over through the frozen puddles and came to a stop against the taxicab. She lay on her back blinking up at the furious dog. On second glance the animal looked old and blind and as shocked to find itself carrying on this way as Pelter had been. It looked down into Maggie's upturned face, seemed abashed, as though Maggie had yelled at it, pinned its grizzled ears, and ducked its grizzled jaw back into the cab.
The storm door of the metal ranchhouse wheezed open and an elderly gentleman in a rumpled misbuttoned camel's hair overcoat and a-Maggie blinked, could that be two bow ties, one black, one striped?-came limping out. His face was deeply grooved. He was bag-bellied and thin-legged and his wooly eyebrows tilted up to a point in the middle of his forehead that was philosophical and almost comically sad. He was a lacrimose and remarkable-looking fellow, and Maggie saw at once two other even more remarkable things about him: he was waving a big blue squarish gun and he looked oddly familiar-suddenly she recognized the face in the backseat of Joe Dale's car from long ago. You are the picture of your lovely mother at twenty-but for the hair, he had said. Now he said: Margaret, my dear, are you ill? You look terrible. If Joe Dale Bigg has laid a hand on you, I swear to god he's a dead man.
Uncle Rudy? she said.
Was he Uncle Rudy? It was a question of cosmic significance. He took off his black felt hat with the green silk puggree band and held it to his chest, his sad eyebrows joined in the middle and he opened his mouth to answer. Before he could speak, Biggy burst out the aluminum door behind him and caught him a great swipe in the back of the neck. The gun went off. Biggy jumped back with a blank look, feeling his chest for holes. Maggie felt crumbs of frozen dirt bite her in the face. The dog filled the window again, barking crazily. The cabbie ducked down out of sight. Uncle Rudy, if he was Uncle Rudy, stumbled hard into the unpainted railing of the rough little stoop, bounced off and whirled around in a stiff crouch, with the blue gun smoking in front of him. Maggie noticed how small, white and hairless the hand on the gun was-a woman's plump hand in some old painting, without bones.
That's enough, Elizabeth. Quiet down. Biggy, get back in the house. I ain't going to hurt you. Your old man don't need you, you colly? Nobody gets hurt, because here's my niece. You lied in my face, you dumb jerk, but I got no beef with you. You don't got the brains to know what you did. Now get in the house. He made little pushing movements with the gun.
Biggy sniffled with rage but backed away into the ranchhouse, feeling behind him for the storm door.
Whaddaya expect of a pityfull retard like that, Uncle Rudy said. Come on, I'll take you home, Margaret.
She was crawling over the frozen bumpy ground toward the back door of the taxicab. The door handle looked as high as a weathervane.
What about the horse? He's running loose, she said hopelessly. It was all too complex. She had no strength to chase the horse, D'Ambrisi owned the horse Joe Dale Bigg had paid for the horse, and the horse had disappeared up the long dirt driveway into the woods.
You get your horse back tonight, my dear. Guaranteed. I took care of it already. Now let's get the hell out of here, Margaret. We don't want trouble. I come to take you home.
Maggie stared up at him in amazement. She had a funny feeling it was all true-that she would get her horse back tonight even though Pelter had never really been her horse, he was Tommy's-that mountains had been moved for her by this seedy fastidious gangster for unfathomable reasons, mysterious threadlike reasons that all looped around to the unseen and long ago.
Did Joe Dale harm you in any way? the man with two bow ties asked, gazing delicately off to the left of her and up into the woods. A hood's gun dangled down by his side but he had the introverted and long-suffering face of a melamid, one who teaches the rude young and gets little thanks for it.
No, she replied, thinking that, as long as she was rescued, she honestly couldn't say just what Joe Dale Bigg had been up to, and besides, if she kept her mouth shut, she might still end up with the foaling papers for Pelter, all clean and legal and everything. So she might be glad to have been tied up with Joe Dale Bigg after all.
You're getting your horse back, my dear. Certain important people, I don't mean me, looked into it for you. You believe me?
Maggie nodded.
And do me a favor. From now on, don't take nutting else from Joe Dale Bigg. Not a ride home. Not a french fry. Nutting. You colly?
Maggie nodded.
Not a nickel. Babkes, he clarified. You need money? Listen carefully, my dear. Lord of Misrule, he whispered loudly. Lord of Misrule, Margaret. Memorize that name.
THE DESIRE TO BLOW Joe Dale Bigg's head off with the Browning 9mm was so unreasonable yet so vast that Two-Tie was sorry to see him come running out of the near barn towards his cab. In a mood like this, things could come apart. Two-Tie had the aging loan shark's strong disinclination to die in jail, which would be the likely result of giving in to a passing fit of temper and emptying the Browning into Joe Dale's white forehead. In the can, Two-Tie knew, if his ticker went bad, he would have to pull strings to get a ten-minute appointment with some state-issue sawbones from Pakistan who probably spoke less English than a Mexican groom, and besides, Two-Tie had people depending on him, and he had Elizabeth.
Therefore he thought it best to try and remember what he had used to like about Joe Dale Bigg before he got too big and the leading trainer thing went to his head and brought out his Mediterranean guile and his sicko skirt-chasing tendencies. As he ran along the paddock fence, Joe Dale was huffing and puffing. His tits bounced under his tweed jacket and his face turned gray. Two-Tie didn't wish to gloat, he himself had painful neuromas under his metatarsals and occasional angina, but Joe Dale was twenty years younger than he was.