The young fool's woman don't pipe up like she used to: Don't they test for bute?
She know better. She knows that spitbox a sometimey thing anymore at all these half-mile tracks. Nobody told her. She finally figure it out for herself. Working for the young fool all this while, she learn to say I don't know nuthin bout no needle with the rest of em. These last years everybody creep closer and closer to post time with that needle, and lessen the office tryna rule somebody off who done made a nuisance of hisself some other way, very very seldom do it come up positive.
Yet and still, the frizzly hair girl too has her entry in that special race. Pelter. Pelter will run and collect his two hundred dollars and maybe even a few more dollars to show, she say. Soon as this race is done, we're going home in dark of night out the back gate if necessary, she say, going back to Charles Town, that's why we need us every dollar I can lay in. Do that us include him, Medicine Ed? Don't count on it.
Now of a sudden she say, I gotta get him out of here, Ed, before he hurts somebody or somebody hurts him. But I don't know if he'll go. Of a sudden she let it out.
He have his own idea about things, Medicine Ed agreed.
He's got it all worked out now where everything fits. I don't know what to do.
She looks at him like he can tell her something. It gives him a peculiar feeling, like inside his throat is tryna grow wings. He tries to think what he can say. From what he know of doctoring, he could tell the frizzly hair girl various ways to set a person crazy. A drilled coconut with his name inside and thrown into a river put a person on a long drag and a drift until his mind get to wavering and go away. A rayroad spike through his clothes keep him a-going and a-going, can't get no rest and never satisfied nowhere he goes. Or his name on a paper in a rotted apple and buried, then he just fall. Can't figure out nothing. Get what you call like mindless before he do go.
But the young fool? Something have made him think he big when he small and strong when he weak, something have set him thinking he the king when he ain't nothing. Long as he think he king, he can't see how low he is, don't know to ask the bad luck to leave him while it's still time, and put it back on them that brung it, and send it back to the Devil where it come from.
Medicine Ed could tell the frizzly hair girl about all that, and even if she don't end up thinking he the crazy one, what she gone do about it? What can he say to give her hope for better? Old Deucey declared the other day it was certain medicines now for crazy people, to clarify they mind. A hospital doctor could write you a prescription for that. But he didn't hold with it: If it was so, and you could cure the insane with a little pill, why was all the state hospitals full as a tick, them for white peoples same as black?
He wished to help the girl. He tried to put his lost home out of his mind and think how he could help her, but what could he say to give her hope when he don't hope himself. He felt her shoulder start to shaking and he knew she was crying. He put his hand on her frizzly head. It was a little stickly, like a old feather pillow, and anymany shades of brown, like the baby sparrows squawking this time of year under the barn eaves, ruffling their small wings and holding their mouths wide open for their mothers to come feed them.
LIKE EVERY RACETRACK DUMMY, Jojo Wood considered himself a prognosticator. Like, he could of wrote the tip sheets, if he hadna been so busy losing races on the same horses. So, in possession for once of a universally touted sure thing, on the way out the door he drilled Two-Tie, the only holdout, between the bow ties with a stubby pointer finger. Lord of Misrule in the seventh, grampop, he said, and don't forget who told you.
Like Two-Tie could forget-he smiled patiently-and the mutt pack trailed with its usual beery racket down the wooden stair, into the summer dawn. Every one of em was getting down on Lord of Misrule. However they could, and whether they owned up to it or not. D'Ambrisi, whose credit was not good, had had to get off his lime green silk shantung suit to borrow a quarter. Deucey Gifford was banking on the entry percentage for Little Spinoza. Little Spinny had a bonafide shot in the race, she said shiftily, running a flat hand over her crewcut the same as she did whenever she was holding better than a pair. She was a worse liar than Elizabeth. And Jojo was riding Pelter, which Two-Tie took it to mean that even little Margaret must be investing in Nebraska. Even if an intelligent person would put Jojo Wood on any horse that could figure, which they wouldn't, everybody knew the jocks, too, were going with Lord of Misrule. They didn't even bother to make no secret of it, though few were as indiscreet as the ever blabbing Jojo, whose dexedrine jitters went straight to his jawbone.
Two-Tie yawned, straightened his two bow ties in the glass doorpane and picked up Elizabeth's leash. He had to wait while she splayed her front feet and stretched herself down like a bridge cable, first the front end, then the back. She couldn't quite get the old altitude, glanced over at him embarrassed, and he politely looked away. Then they were off. Elizabeth thumped and bumped her way down the stair. Anymore she went down like a wooden pull horsey, reared back a little and let down the two in front, bump, then came the two behind, da-bump. For the last three years she was losing the spring in her hind legs and now she was off in her left front too, since she had chased a squirrel into a board fence by the old natrium plant. Usually anymore she only went after the squirrels in first gear, if that, and he had the feeling when she did give chase it was a issue of self respect, so she could call herself a dog, not with no hope of catching nutting. Which was only reasonable. In twelve years she had not caught up with a single squirrel. Then again he did not encourage the killer instinct in Elizabeth. She was more of a thinker, not a athlete, nutting like one of those idiot fox-running dogs, all yap and slobber, which the good old boys from Wetzel County turned loose from their station wagons to tear all round the country while they stayed behind and reclined their seats, drinking Carling Black Label Beer.
Outside on Ohio Avenue already the air was pearly with the heat to come, the sidewalks had that dry gleam and Elizabeth dropped behind. Two-Tie looked at the two of them in the window of Mouser's Furniture. His own face shocked him, gray and hanging over his neck. He was dragging worse than she was. Something was eating him-why, when he finally knew his niece, little Margaret, and might be able to do something for her? Something about that race-knowing Lillian's Donald was in town and the boy, who must be after all 45, 46 years old now, hadn't even come to see him. He had a feeling that helping Margaret was too late, and maybe even the wrong person. Sure he had made this race for Donald, but back then too he had bought plenty of stuff for the snarling boy, with his little lady's eyebrow of a first mustache, who hated him, whatever he needed, underwear, a winter coat, plus for his birthday in April educational models he never built, puzzles he never took out of the box, and used to give him a couple bucks whenever he asked for it. But there was no getting out of it: When Lillian had put down her foot about getting married, before the Pimlico Futurity or else, and the morning after (Privileged lose it on a foul), she had packed her valise, and told the boy to pack his, and called a taxi for the train, he had watched from their bed. He let them go. Then in 1940, when he heard that Lillian had died in a Catholic nursing home in South Chicago, he never even picked up the phone. He should have asked right then if he could do something for the boy. But he already knew that Donald blamed him, and he was afraid.
Two-Tie sat down on a concrete bench at the edge of the cemetery. Today Elizabeth didn't even poke her nose in the yellowing grass at its foot but let herself down at his feet with a grunt. Whether we take a piece of Nebraska or not? he asked her. After all he had practically wrote the race, he had as good a right as anybody, but he had a funny feeling about it. He lined up the reasons why he should keep his money in his pocket. True, the public had no way of knowing the race was made for Lord of Misrule. The outside bettor was not going to like the horse, who had finished, if you called that finishing, 64 lengths out of it last spring at Aksarben, when he had took that spill. Fell, said the chart; it didn't point out that the horse got up and walked home. And then there was a long nutting in the paper, and finally two more outings since Memorial Day, one emptier than the one before. So the public was not going to bet the horse, but every racetracker in the Northern Panhandle was. Every horseman in the know, every groom who had a horse in the race, or every groom who knew a groom who had a horse in the race, every big-eared loafer and sponger and hanger-on, which covered about everybody. There was far, far too many k'nockers involved in the race already, loudmouths up and down the line. The word was out. Around here two hundred bucks to enter didn't happen every day. In short the odds on the horse could only be none too good, and worse in the event the betting public was swifter than usual and a late falling price on such a fabulously sorry animal from a kingdom far away tipped them off.