And then it's like Medicine Ed has called the race. The young fool's horse does just that. He looks around. He pulls up at the head of the stretch, drifts out from the rail, maybe eyeballing all the white paper flapping in the grandstand, which is all them people looking at they cards, trying to make out who that 2 horse is. What is the matter with that boy on his back? Well, now he comes to life, busting on the horse. But Mr Boll Weevil has crawled up on the inside in his weevilly way, eats along the rail, gets his ugly red nose in first.
Medicine Ed and Zeno pass the young fool in the gap on their way to the infield. Hansel has a torn-in-half look in his burning eye, like he aspires to be freehearted and to exult with Zeno, but he ain't able. Well, Zeno, that's the last time a nothing horse beats The Mahdi, he hollers.
I ain't worried, Zeno says, and they shake hands. The frizzly girl has slipped away to cash her tickets. Medicine Ed sees the young fool's hands are trembling.
When they got to the winner's circle, it was just the two of them. Soon as the young fool was out of sight, Zeno blew it out his top like a factory whistle, so only Medicine Ed could hear. Jeezie peezie, Ed! I got us a live one this time. Did you see the way that horse run?
Sho is, sho is. He pay pretty good too. I see he gone off a little on his right behind foot… Medicine Ed craned up on his good leg, gazed at the hot horse that the jockey was jogging back to them. He wanted to set Zeno down gently, let him know he won't have this horse much longer.
Not this one, man! Boll Weevil ain't shit. I mean The Mahdi. Hansel's horse. The one I claimed. Zeno shook the extra shank at him.
The one I claimed. How had he missed it? Zeno never said a word in front to nobody when he was fixing to take a horse, but generally Medicine Ed would see it coming. Mr Boll Weevil had blinded his eye. Now fierce dread fingered him in the back of his neck, for he recognized the confusing and riddlesome power of the gray green goofer dust. You know it gone change your luck, they it is, but what it will change into, that you cannot know.
You're going down and get him for me in a minute, soon as Stieglitz here gets his camera loaded. The track photographer was fussing with his plates. Treat him like Kelso, you hear? He run a half mile in under 45, and if there'd been a jock on his back instead of a sofa he would have kept on running at the sixteenth pole. He wasn't used up. He thought the goddamn race was over.
The photographer was finally ready and Gus Zeno smiled tremendous into the camera. Medicine Ed smiled a little too, even with them icy fingers in the back of his neck. He was relieved Zeno didn't set too much store by his own horse, for solid as Mr Boll Weevil looked now, standing there blowing and sweating, Zeno was sure to lose him.
Still, the horse had paid 13.40. Zeno had the red horse he had claimed, and his own bet, and the purse. And Medicine Ed could pay a little down on a trailer he knew about in Hallandale, in the old lot for colored behind Major Longstreet Park.
I already made my nut on Boll Weevil, Zeno preened. If he win one or two more on top of his maiden, that's gravy, but Tommy Hansel's horse, Ed-that one's a raceho-ho-ho-Gus Zeno got stuck on that word. He tried to wheeze his way around it-ho-ho-ho-ho-His lips peeled back and set in that wet red O, and his eyes bulged out of their dark rose rims. Medicine Ed leaned around to look down his throat. The flash drenched them in white and Gus Zeno was still stuck behind that word-ho-ho-ho-His happy face went plum color, then black.
Medicine Ed saw what it was. Luck, a ho if there ever was one, got her bony fingers in his throat and was pulling on that word. She wanted that word back. Zeno wasn't giving it up. He tried to go the other way but she pulled and pulled. She pulled him flat over on his face. He was still kicking a little behind. You want your luck? There's your damn luck, she say. And he was dead.
Medicine Ed looked up and saw the young fool, with his eyes like burnt-out stove coals, standing empty-handed in the gap. Then he saw himself in the time to come, hauling five-gallon buckets for the young fool, bandaging ankles on his doomed horses, walking hots for him, waiting for the fall.
That was when Medicine Ed finally heard what Mr Boll Weevil had been trying to tell him. He's looking for a home. That was one way of singing that song. Gonna get your home. That was another. Gray green goofer powder hanging on the wind: Wasn't no big win and free money that Mr Boll Weevil was singing to him about. It was the passing of Gus Zeno. And it wasn't no new home for Medicine Ed he was bragging on, no down payment on a little mobile home with a green stripe awning and a palm tree behind the track in Hallandale. It was the end of the good home he do have. It was goodbye to the easy life he know now.
THE RACETRACK ASLEEP AT NIGHT is a live and spooky place, especially if you think somebody might jump out at you, and she did think so-small world that ends at a fence, the dark blue restless air fragrant with medicinals, Absorbine, liniment, pine tar-everywhere light chains clanking, water buckets creaking and sloshing, round glimmers of water, horses masticating or snorting out dust, straw rustling, skinny cats glimpsed everywhere but only for a moment, always in motion, noiseless. She could not make herself walk in a straight line to Barn Z without stopping, stiffening, seeing something move in the corner of her eye, feeling a strand of fine cobweb blow across her face.
They had no horse to bring back from their race. There was a queer feeling of empty-handedness and when she looked up again, Tommy wasn't there. She had wandered away across the backside, looked in on Miss F in one barn and Railroad Joe in another. She espied the handsome blacksmith Kidstuff drawing a red-haired exercise girl into the shadows. She stepped into other shadows, the better to look on.
She was a little scared to go home, not that they had a home-they had only that tack room for the night, but they had already managed to wake up the flesh in there, they were good at that, and so had surely awakened, too, the animal ghosts that were everywhere you looked on the racetrack, and everywhere you didn't look, restless and hungry but off their feed forever, mouths that couldn't taste food, the shades of so many large animals, stirrings of so many throwaway lives.
Scared to get to Barn Z, she loitered in the dark of the unlit parking lot fence beside Barns X and Y, the twenty-odd stalls of the leading trainer at the Mound, whose hot-walking machine, JOE DALE BIGG STABLES stencilled on its housing, squeaked all day in the back gate and was still idly turning, whose horses looked like shit-dry dung puckering their flanks, straw dangling from their tails-but who knew how to win at a riverfront half-mile track in the West Virginia panhandle. She wondered had she seen this paragon of cut-price horsemanship, peered up his shedrows, what would he look like? when she heard a noise that eased her back into the shadows, a sound that, come to think of it, you didn't hear around the backside near enough-some man or woman crying.
Then here was Deucey Gifford, and that little bay horse again, pretty as a palfrey, and she was walking him, one arm slung over his neck, her face next to his, and crying. She was walking him on somebody else's shedrow, after midnight, which made no sense, since he hadn't been to the races, just plodded sleepily along. And along side of her, rolling so slow in the dirt road it made less sound than her weeping, just popping a stone now and then, was a dark, dark car with a swanky silver roof, a Cadillac, Maggie surmised, but she couldn't see who was driving it.
You fuck! Deucey sobbed. I'll rub him for nothing, when I got the time, but you can't make me take this horse.
You're taking him.
I ain't taking him.