I got thirty-two head of horses on this farm, Joe Dale said. How you gonna tell which one is which?
My garsh, I'd know that Pelter anywhere, Roy said, he's a real dark bay like co'cola in the bottle, got the long back and that old Roman nose like Man o' War. I win a hundred and twenty bucks on him in the Glass Classic in 1966.
Take a shank, Maggie yelled out the window, but D'Ambrisi only hid behind the goo-patched horse trailer. Damn it, I'm going to crawl up there myself, she muttered. She sprang the door handle and fell out on the frozen mud.
Elizabeth hung out the open door above her, barking passionately. Roy got out and carefully closed the door. They heard a whinny up the hill. There was the horse, shiny with sweat, stepping drunkenly down the steep part of the rutted driveway, like after a big race, with Hansel leading him. Hansel wore a pearl gray fedora, black trousers and a wine red vest. He resembled a Galitzianer horse trader out of one of Alvin's stories.
I shoulda known you didn't have the balls to come for that horse by yourself, Joe Dale said to D'Ambrisi. You had to bring the track looney.
What makes you say Hansel is looney? Two-Tie asked worriedly. He was still collecting evidence against his niece's young man, but no one answered the question. Up close, despite his flamboyant dress, Hansel looked like a man of consequence. He had a firm, straight-legged walk which gave him authority-he might be a looney, but he was no drooling gimp. He sent Pelter up the ramp with a sharp slap on the behind.
I need you in the van, Maggie, he said. What the hell are you doing down there anyway? The girl was still sitting on the frozen ground under the door of the taxicab. He's hot-you need to rub him and keep on rubbing him till we get to the track-now let's get the hell out of here.
Can't, she said. Can't move.
She's had a bit too much, Two-Tie explained vaguely. Now that the episode was drawing to a satisfactory close, he saw no point in making personal accusations.
Somebody gave me a rhino trank, Maggie said, with a disbelieving little laugh.
Hmmm. What's that like-any fun?
Uhhh-not recommended. Kind of a graveyard preview. You get your usual boring mind, trapped in a dead body-that's it.
Hansel nodded. Hey, thanks for looking after my woman, he said pleasantly to Joe Dale, who started to smile and never saw the fist flying towards his face. Joe Dale stiffened and fell sideways into his boys like a bowling pin.
Biggy bellowed and jumped for the deergun, but Two-Tie pushed the rifle off the stoop with his rubber-soled dress shoe. The Browning still dangled from his own small hand. Elizabeth threw herself at the open taxicab window in an explosion of barks and snarls.
Want I should let her out? Roy yelled to Two-Tie, rolling the window up halfway.
Jesus no-umbeshrien-she might hurt herself.
Biggy launched himself off the stoop at Hansel and threw a roundhouse punch at his face. Hansel stepped away so that the blow only swished across his ear. Biggy stumbled back to swing again, and Hansel ducked towards the ranchhouse, picked up the deergun and swung it like a club, by the barrel, at the back of Biggy's head. The crack silenced them all. Biggy gave out a groan of weird contentment, swayed, and went down on his face like a felled tree.
The Irish boyfriends fast and strong, he ain't a coward, and he can take care of himself, Two-Tie thought. He was impressed. On the other hand he knew, with hot dizzy certainty, that there would be no end of trouble now.
Joe Dale stood propped between his boys, holding a bloody tattersall handkerchief under his nose. It's a goddamn good thing for you clowns that I'm a respectable businessman, he said quietly, through the handkerchief, or you'd have to be shitting your pants, all three of youse, knowing you're going to get hurt.
Do what you have to do. Just don't touch the niece, Two-Tie said.
The niece, Joe Dale laughed. I forgot about her. I ain't going to hurt the niece. I got other plans for the niece. Say, maybe I could swap you Biggy for her. As is. He pointed down at Biggy, who was making little crawling motions, still face down on the frozen, rootbeer-colored mud. Not much to look at, is he, he said. But neither is she.
I have met a great many slugs and sleazeballs in my racetrack days, Two-Tie announced, but you get the crown. I see you don't care if that pityfull retard lives or dies.
Okay, okay Joe Dale shrugged. I'll keep him. I'll get her some other way. Won't I, baby? She owes me and she knows she owes me.
You'll get what she owes you presently, Tommy Hansel said.
IN THE SUMMER, stunned by heat and work, she lost track of Tommy. He was in New York, seeing about a horse. The midnight blue Sedan de Ville rolled up as she was walking Pelter. They walked on, and the car inched along the shedrow beside them.
Say, that was something how he roped in that Natalie broad from New Rochelle. I keep underestimating the guy. I knew her for years-she ain't that easy. I mean she's vulgar, I-want-you-should-this and I-want-you-should-that, but she's game and she's got the bucks-for a while. Still, I worry about Tommy. Don't you worry about Tommy? He kids himself he can take what's mine without paying for it and if he flies high enough, nothing bad will happen to him. But he's so fucked I don't have to do nothing. He's so high he can't look down. Or he crashes. He's going to crash. Want to ride a dime on it? No? Hey, I thought you'd play. Joe Dale shrugged and the window rolled up and he drove away.
When Tommy is back, they never touch or eat in the trailer. Margaret no longer tries to cook on the faux wood counters with their black gummy cracks and peeling celluloid edges. At night after the races they are exhausted, at four in the morning, getting up to feed, they are not awake. Sometimes Tommy doesn't come back to the trailer at all. Whatever they are, they are not laborers. Their bodies don't thank them for this long reminder that they are not brother and sister pharaoh, not prince and courtesan, not even a proper hustler and his moll. They are working too hard for that. Or at least Maggie is-it's not entirely clear what sort of business occupies Tommy.
That first summer they knew each other, when he came home in the afternoon from the track and she from the paper, they were in bed in five minutes, with all of it: newsprint and horse manure, saddle leather, ink and hashish, past performance charts and food pages, sweet feed and recipes for blancmange and corn souffle. The sheets literally reeked of all that. The sweat-damp canyons of the featherbed were gritty with their mixture. In some way their unmiscible lives fused. Here they live the same life and are rivals to come out of it alive. They meet in the prickly dark of the tack room or not at all. They couple on haybales or in old loose straw on the dirt floor or not at all. It starts with some hoarse utterance, I want to get in your ass, and hard fingers down the front of her jeans, or the back of them, fuck me now. They are naked but scaly, with clothes pushed out of the way of orifices, they come together like insects, claspers, ovipositors, wet vacuoles. They talk in this straw-speckled darkness or not at all. Will you marry me? She laughs. Is that such a ridiculous question?
She knew she should say it, it would have been the honorable thing to say it, but she was afraid of pushing him over some edge: I'm getting out of here as soon as I can. I don't know exactly what's going on, but a girl like me-I can't be playing around with gangsters. I keep thinking I'm in a movie and then I realize I could get killed. The strangeness draws me in but in the end I can't afford it. I haven't done anything with my life.
FOURTH RACE
THEY WERE ALL LOOKING for a van like a Chinese jewel box, like no horse van that had ever been seen on a backside, something red and black and glossy, with gold letters, LORD OF MISRULE, arched across each side. All the same when a plain truck with Nebraska plates rolled into the Mound on the hottest day of the year, they knew who it was. They were watching, though the van was unmarked and dirty white, one of those big box trailers with rusty quilting like an old mattress pad you've given to the dog. The van bounced and groaned on its springs along the backside fence, headed for the stallman's office. Red dust boiled around it. They blinked as it dragged two wheels through the puddle that never dried, the puddle that had no bottom. They all waited for the van to tilt and lurch to a stop; it didn't even slow down. They peered through the vents when the van went by and saw the horse's head, calm, black and poisonous of mien as a slag pile in a coal yard. He had a funny white stripe like a question mark on his forehead.