Maggie was ready to sleep on haybales, or even half naked down in the itchy straw. Finally you open your arms to sleep even if it's nightmare you see coming. She had been going for fourteen hours-no one, certainly not Tommy, had her stamina, and she was vain of it. She had been up at 3:00, fed, mucked stalls, shlepped bales and water buckets. At dawn she had walked the horses one by one. She had picked out feet and packed them with fragrant clay, crated the loose tack. And still the van didn't show, the van or Tommy, who had made one of those airy deals with the van man that Tommy lived on, "on the cuff" where all cash was notional, future, moiling in the clouds like weather, until some horse ran in; and nobody ever wrote down a number or forgot one. But it was somehow part of the deal that Tommy, with a bit of dope in his pocket, never too proud to be a roustabout, might be asked along for the ride. Like today, Tommy in that creaky, rust-flowered van.
Around noon, the van finally rolled down the driveway, and she was off in the Grand Prix over the mountains and up the river, while Tommy and the van man took the long way, the slow way, dropping and loading horses for racetrackers who paid cash. But what had she done with her morning, while she waited in the fly-loud barn for Tommy and the van man? Maggie had found a bottle of eye-stinging brand X pink wintergreen horse liniment in the Pichots' tack shed, mixed, for all she knew, according to the late Gaston Pichot's secret recipe, and with it and strong fingers, she worked on Pelter, more or less making it up as she went along. Why did she so love the slant-eyed bump-nosed horse that her hands wished to parse every inch of his famously long back? It was true she had no scientific reason to believe she knew what she was doing, but surreptitiously she did think so. For all her stamina, as a human girl she knew she was lazy and unambitious, except for this one thing: She could find her way to the boundary where she ended and some other strain of living creature began. On the last little spit of being human, staring through rags of fog into the not human, where you weren't supposed to be able to see let alone cross, she could make a kind of home.
Her hands felt their way blindly along the ridges and canyons and defiles of the spine, the firm root-spread hillocks of the withers. She rolled her bony knuckles all along the fallen tree of scar tissue at the crest of the back, prying up its branches, loosening its teeth. And it must be having some effect: when she walked Pelter these days he wasn't the sour fellow he used to be, he was sportive, even funny. She had walked him this morning until the rising sun snagged in the hackberry thicket. As they swung around the barn, she took a carrot from her pocket and gave him the butt and noisily toothed the good half herself. He curvetted like a colt, squealed, and cow-kicked alarmingly near her groin. Okay, okay, she said, and handed it over. She was glad there was no man around just then to tell her to show that horse who was boss. When they were back in the stall and she turned to leave she found he had taken her whole raincoat in his mouth and was chewing it-the one she was wearing. She twisted around with difficulty and pried it out of his mouth. He eyed her ironically. Just between us, is this the sort of horse act I really ought to discipline? she asked him, smoothing out her coat. I simply incline to your company, he replied.
The frizzly hair girl landed up with one stall in barn Z, that next-to-last stall ruinated by a deep ditch around the walls that some thousand-pound stallwalker had dug on his endless round trips. It taken muscle to shovel over enough dirt to fill that up, but she made it halfway right, he'd give her that.
Psst, Deucey leaned around the corner of the stall and crooked her finger at the girl. You running anything in the next few days?
It was a long pause, then, I don't think so, she say, and Medicine Ed watched the frizzly hair girl try to empty her face. In the lying capital of the world, she would have to do better than that.
Well if you do run sumpm, and you don't want to let him out of your sight, Deucey said, which I wouldn't if I was you, put him in the stall here and ask Medicine Ed to let you sleep in Zeno's tack room. He lets me. She winked, it was a dreadful thing to see, and the frizzly hair girl backed off from her. Calm down, girlie, I don't mean you and me. I sleep in the stall with my moneymaker Grizzly, he appreciates me-she cackled. That tack room ya see got a chink in the east wall, you can lay on hay bales and look through the chink and watch a horse all night, if you can hold your eyes open. Talk to Medicine Ed. That's him. And she pointed to where he was, standing in the dirt road with the red horse and Kidstuff, the blacksmith.
Medicine Ed saw the frizzly hair girl's eyes light, not on him, but on the blacksmith. Heh! heh! It happened every time. Kidstuff was a pretty little man, chestnut brown, with a tilted smile and very white teeth, out of Louisiana, part colored, part Cajun, part Injun, like as not.
The girl tiptoed up. She said excuse me.
You end up with stalls in this here barn, young lady?
One, she said.
Suitcase scatter they horses all over the grounds, Medicine Ed told Kidstuff.
Aaanh, don't take it personal, the blacksmith advised. It's the ten-cent Hitlers run this place. They like to break your spirit before you ever get to a race. Who you with?
Tommy Hansel.
The horseshoer looked quizzically at Medicine Ed. They shook their heads politely.
She needs a place to sack out for the night, Deucey hollered over. Can she get in your tack room, Ed?
Medicine Ed shrugged. Ain't nothing in it, he said. Hay. Welcome to it.
The farrier put away his tools. Zeno gonna let this boy run tonight? he asked.
Might could figure, Medicine Ed said-what he always said-if he don't come up lame.
So where did Zeno pick up this Mr Boll Weevil? I seen the sire before but who's this High Cotton-talk about breeders you never heard of-Sunk Ferry, Arkansas The old groom stumbled back as though he had been struck. What you talkin bout, Mr Boll Weevil?
This horse you're holding right here. In tonight for twelve-fifty, maiden claimer, fourth race. Say, here's Tommy Hansel, the blacksmith said to the girl. This your guy?
May I see that paper please? the frizzly girl said faintly. She looked in the Telegraph, where Kidstuff was pointing, and out of her mouth come a terrible cuss word, not quite under her breath. Medicine Ed blinked at her. For a little while, time went backwards, for her the same as for him. Then he piled the shank right on top of that paper, and backed away. His long ash brown fingers shook. He appeared to be buckling, fading; got smaller and smaller in the direction of the half crushed mobile home he lived in. He held a hand over his heart as he staggered backwards, like an actor in a play. His mouth was a ragged hole, no word came out, now they saw the gray stumps of his gums.
The blacksmith was shaken. Damn me, he said. Damn me, maybe he needs the doc. Hey, Ed! you all right? he yelled after him. The door of the bashed-in trailer clicked shut. I seen these old-timers pitch over dead more than once, he said to the girl shyly, now that they were alone. You never know.
I think it was something about that horse, she wondered. And that was that. A cool green light came on in the blacksmith's eyes. His handsome lips quivered like a rabbit's, smelling something, then he slightly smiled. He looked back at the trailer. Already the tall old groom was returning to them, limping across the dirt alleyway with a calm grimace. He had even remembered to put in his teeth. Then they were all in on it. If the old man wasn't dying, it came down to a flash about a horse.
IT WAS NO NEED FOR studying and dreaming. Often in the past if Medicine Ed need to know about a horse, he could sit over a hand made of tail and mane hairs of the horse and tied with a red string, and a hoof shaving, and one green corner-bit of his lucky money, push them around in hot candle-sperm with a hoof pick under the light of the same white candle, and dream until the answer came to him. But today was no need, no time. Soon as he heard the name of the horse Zeno was running, he knew what he must do. He must ride his lucky money on Mr Boll Weevil, who had beckoned to him-and somehow he felt he had to touch his lucky money just then. They it is, nemmind if it look strange-he stumbled into the trailer.