She left as Medicine Ed used to do, ducking into the walking rings where they were boxed in at the ends of shedrows, never hurrying and never looking back. But suddenly she heard, too close to her, the priestly daven of an expensive car. The midnight blue Cadillac was in the dirt road, not following her but pacing her to the exit. Leave disappearing acts to the old man. She ran-ran straight for the fence that divided the backside on that end from the surrounding field. A little gully rolled away from the fence on the other side, so that the bottom wasn't flush. She scrambled under, stood up in blackberry brambles, ironweed, and queen anne's lace. It was the edge of some fenced wilderness belonging to track maintenance. In the dim glow that spilled over from the backside she saw a general downhill tumble of junk, piles of asphalt roof tiles and scrap lumber, then came limestone outcroppings abloom with bullseyes of lichen, and at last the weedy slope fell away into darkness. Lower still was the well of luminous fog that rose from the floodplains of the river.
That was the way she went at first, out of the light and towards the river. When the dank fog swirled around her, she dipped back up into scattered security lights-yet another maintenance compound. But this place was lower and wider open than the junkyard by the backside fence, and all at once her sneaker sank deep in sand. At her feet, clouds of clammy brittle touch-me-not, but underneath, rich sand. She knew that sensation. Pulled up a handful of jewelweed, and there it was, an old ghostly washed-out racetrack, what was left of one. Saw other flashes of bone white sand here and there, and remembered people saying so, that there had been another half-mile ring out here once upon a time, used for match races and fair meetings and such, before Ives opened his chain of cheap racetracks in the thirties. The old track had washed out in storm after storm, and when they built the new Indian Mound Downs, that was where they had put the place, out of sight behind chainlink fence and sumac thicket, down a few crumbling rungs of limestone, guarded by owls and copperheads, well out of sight of the racetrack as it was now.
So this was the place-site of the track generator and pumping station, but also the place where they dragged their dead, lair of the horse ambulances, loading dock of animal processing plant and tanyard. She slowed down, treaded cautiously, for now the fog had risen from the river and lay across the old infield in long torn drifts. Above it floated fuzzy disembodied heads of joe-pye weed, and now a whole wrecked starting gate stuck up suddenly out of the weeds and mist, lopsided, rusted, sagging down on one side. Here an old dung pile, shrunken, sun-crusted, speared all over with ripe plantain. Her feet, kicking through weeds, began to strike this and that-leavings of someone who had camped up here, tin cans, chunks of fire-blackened wood, a couple of lawn chairs trailing broken plastic webbing and a chunk of plyboard to lay between them, like the old grooms used to sleep on in a spare stall, when there were spare stalls. Some gyp must have lived up here, maybe a real gypsy back then, for here was his dessicated gyp rope doubling as a clothesline, here his dried out longjohns, his dead socks, even a set of jockey silks bleached gray and rotted to shreds. Maybe he had had to get out of town fast. Such things happened.
One of her feet wedged up against a concrete apron-the gypsy's clothesline had been threaded through the padlock of a steel door, generator shed or something, she heard a low hum, down into the fog to one outer sprung spoke of what looked like the picked bones of a giant umbrella-a broken-down hot-walking machine, dumped, unceremoniously, over the side of the hill from the washed-out track. Up above, ash barrels, a weak yellow mosquito light, and something else on the concrete strip beyond the pathetic clothesline, a mound rising out of the fog, dark and slick with dew, that she knew at once had been alive, knew it was Little Spinoza, knew she'd been looking for him. He lay on the pavement of the loading platform, and he who had looked small and even dainty when alive looked all too big as a dead body-looked like something hard to get rid of. Fog swathed the platform but swam around the dead horse like a startled spirit. She looked at the fluting behind the velvety nostril, the arched, vaulted throat, the dry glimmer of tooth and eye and felt guilty of a huge desertion, as though she had starved him to death. She had the feeling they had all left him here to rot-but that was foolish. It was just that the Mound was a cheap track, and out in the sticks. After the night races let out, no one was at work in the rendering plant. The knackers would pick up the carcass in the morning. If the rats ate his eyes in the night or foxes chewed the cannon bone, the broken flesh savory with hormones of pain and fear, who would know? who would see?
She had always liked to sink her hands into Spinoza, the Speculation grandson, at first feared to be a killer, in fact the most pliable body of all once he foolishly gave his trust. She remembered how she used to drape herself sloppily across his rump with one arm while she worked on his tail and thighs with the other-how after a while his spine would curve up like a bow and his knees slightly buckle, so they would end like two amiable drunks holding each other up before a magistrate. Now she made herself run a hand over his dead body. The hair was gritty and clotted like a mat on the floor of a taxicab, or a rug for wiping your feet in a public entrance on an ugly day. It felt filthy and contagious. She drew her hand back, wiped the open palm down the side of her jeans and leaned against the wall. She had thought the ghost of the horse might be around here somewhere, but whatever she had meant to say to him by touching his body, she had surely told him the opposite.
Hey. Do you know how much I hate you?
Joe Dale. She peered into the darkness. He was sitting four or five yards from her out in the wet weeds in the gypsy's plastic lawn chair, with the fog boiling around him and his legs crossed. Behind him in the old infield, in a starry sea of queen anne's lace, the midnight blue Sedan de Ville idled-she imagined it idled, all she heard was the low growl of the generator and the throb of cicadas. A lighter snapped, Joe Dale lit a cigar and she saw the black grain of beard on his white cheeks and the bags under his eyes.
Too much to kill you, which is lucky for you, he said. I try never to hate a girl that much so she gets interesting again. But then it happens and, hey, it's a trip. The staying power I get! And the brains, like a detective. I wake up when I never knew I was asleep. You thought you got away from me, didn't you? Hey, once I hated you, I found you just like that. Bam. How did I know you'd be in the place? I knew. Now I won't feel so bad about losing my money on Lord of Misrule tonight. I know I'm going to get something out of it. I know you ain't going to turn me down after I tell you how much I hate you. You won't want to miss this. I mean, you don't get this too off-ten. At least I don't. Am I scaring you? Hey, relax. When I hate a girl that much I only want to be with her. To experience her, you might say. There's nothing like it. Love can't compare. You know what I mean? Probably not. Well, like love is to you, hate is to me. I got to be with her while it lasts. Then she's like any other broad again and I can throw her out. I'm free, she's free. You colly?
He did not get up and she was conscious of looking down at him in the infield over the dead body of the horse. So what do you say? he asked. She opened her mouth but nothing came out; the cicadas swelled up in the interval as loud as a discotheque.
Then she saw another person coming across the infield, glinting silk sleeves, dark vest, tall and well made, the walk at once elegant and faintly simian owing to the turned-back hands. Carrying a pitchfork. Tommy. Head tipped to one side, as if listening, listening to voices-were they in or out of his head? She saw him, saw him see them, saw him lean in leisurely attention on the fins of the midnight blue Cadillac. He was insane, he thought people were trying to destroy him, to suck out his guts, but, she noted, in the rare event that someone was trying to destroy you, to suck out your guts, insanity was a goodly metaphysics.