Lord of Misrule

by Jaimy Gordon

Go to hell, the frizzly hair girl say.

  Joe Dale laughed. I wonder what got into D'Ambrisi anyway. He's no horseman and he even knows it. He's gonna wish he never heard of that horse. Maybe he's sorry already. You want I should talk to him?

  What do you mean? Talk to him about what? the girl say real slow. She nosing round the bait now. Leave it alone, Medicine Ed say into her.

  D'Ambrisi's an old gom-bah, Joe Dale say. He already knows he's got a problem. I mean the horse is in jail for a month. He comes to me cause he don't know what to do with the horse, so now I'm twisting his arm, I tell him, get off the horse right away, he gets his dough back-how he's gonna say no to a nice young girl like you?

  He's a friend of yours?

  Works for me sometimes. This and that. Who didn't use to work for me around here? Hey-Joe Dale start to blinking like he just had him a idea, something he ain't thought of it before. Hey, baby, get in the car. We'll go talk to the Breeze right now.

  Go where? the girl say. What barn is he in? I'll walk over there and meet you.

  Naaa, ya see, Breezy was thinking about turning him out for two, three weeks, long as he's in jail. Let him cool out, eat grass. He ain't running the horse for no twenty-five hundred. I don't think so! Even Breezy ain't that dumb.

  Go where? she say again. Where is he?

  So I tell Breezy he can use a stall at my place if he wants. He took me up on it.

  Pelter is at your farm? She's in the door of the stall now, swaying back and forth in her blindman glasses. Medicine Ed think she taking a caution, but no.

  I can get him back for you, Joe Dale tell her.

  Don't get in that dark window automobile with that gangster, you know he has hurt people, Medicine Ed try to say into her, but she ain't listening. The more she know she ought not to go near that car the color of night, the closer she drift. The door shut behind her with a soft chunk like a ice box and she gone. Behind them purple windows Medicine Ed can't see nothing. The midnight blue Sedan de Ville crush over thin-ice puddles and round the corner. Behind Barn L, then Barn J, he catch the Cadillac rolling slow towards the front gate. Medicine Ed light out for the pay phone back of the track kitchen, fast as his stick leg can wamble.

  NOT GOOD, EDWARD. Not good. When was this?

  Only just now.

  This is not good news, Two-Tie said. This ain't good news at all, because D'Ambrisi goes over there himself this afternoon to pick up the horse, as soon as he organizes a van. It won't take him long because I happen to know that D'Ambrisi is hot to get out from under that horse any way he can. I hear he has talked to certain important people out of town and he don't want Pelter no more. He don't want his name on those foaling papers even one more night. Have you seen him yet?

  I ain't seen him.

  Well, you will. The horse is coming back to Hansel and the girl. And to you, Edward.

  Medicine Ed was silent.

  Naturally Joe Dale won't like it when he finds out he has to get off that horse. You sure they went to his farm?

  That's what he say.

  Did Joe Dale have his boys with him?

  Wasn't nobody in the car but Joe Dale. And her.

  Thank you, Edward.

  Two-Tie reached in back of his twenty-volume set of The Book of Knowledge for his Browning 9mm, and called down at the Ritzy Lunch for Roy, of Roy's Taxicab. He went to the back window and fumbled with the rod of the dusty venetian blind; his small fat hand was trembling. He hadn't touched a gun in eighteen months, since he'd backed off making the circuit of race meetings. He had never carried a gun in town. It was starting to rain. Already when Roy pulled his cab around a mound of brown paper boxes into Two-Tie's alley, the boxes were slumping and the rain lay on the dirty ice of the parking lot in glowing gray sheets. He got down his umbrella. Elizabeth went to the door and, refusing to make way for him, eyeballed the door knob insistently. Not today, Elizabeth. Go lay down. She didn't move. O for god's sake. All right. Come on, he said, knowing it was a bad idea. Obviously, if anything happened to him, Elizabeth had no future. The fact was, neither of them had much future, even if they never ran into trouble like this. It was also true that two hours in Roy's backseat in the cold left Elizabeth lame behind for a week. When they crossed the Powhatan Point bridge she was still looking around at her bony tush and turning clumsy circles back there, trying to get comfortable.

  TWO DAYS AFTER she lost Pelter, two days after you claimed back The Mahdi, you noticed she wasn't there and you went looking for her. In fact she had been remote and somewhat morose ever since you came back from the city with the money. Now that you had The Mahdi back, you could afford to be generous. It was time to tell her that, beside her, the women of the caravanseries were as the dust that blows across the highway. She meant more than any rapacious blonde you met on the road who offered you a loose thousand or two and her husband's bed for a night. She, your twin, had your soul in her keeping, pinned at her waist in her little rose sachet.

  When she didn't show up in the trailer at noon you went looking for her. But she wasn't straightening the tack room or mucking a stall or hauling water or walking some fractious horse, she was nowhere. You looked in the track kitchen. Lately she had been flirting there after the morning works with that little blacksmith Kidstuff, a bona fide cowboy from Louisiana, former rodeo clown, red brown, probably half Indian, who drank a bit. You liked her to flirt, and more than to flirt-to tempt herself with these good fellows. You liked the general ripple of nerves when you dangled her in front of them, and the surge of muscle when you reeled her back. But she wasn't in the track kitchen, though Kidstuff was there, sprawled in an orange dinette chair in his cowboy boots, with a toothpick traveling up and down his very white teeth.

  You went back to Barn Z to look in Pelter's empty stall. Maybe she was curled up in there again under a cocoon of horse blankets. It was high time-now that you had The Mahdi back-to intrude on her innocence, to pet away her girlish grief, to prick her dark and deep and wake her to you-to remind her where the bottom really was, how steep and perilous, and to pull her steel-tipped boots on for her. For you two still had a long way to go.

  And that's why you recoiled in disgust to find him waiting for you there-that nothing D'Ambrisi-because of who he wasn't as much as who he was. The runt who claimed Pelter was slouching in front of Pelter's old stall like some some cowardly low-rent demon, in bad even with his master Asmodeus, literally quaking in his tasseled Italian loafers.

  You gotta help me, he pipes up.

  Idling in the dirt road next to Barn Z was that burnt-out pony-girl's, what's-her-name's, incredibly rusted Valiant, shlepping her even more decrepit one-horse trailer. Penny. Penny was famous because she would do anything for drugs, or even, you happened to know, for the right person, without drugs. But Penny wasn't behind the wheel. What do you want, Breezy?

  D'Ambrisi's nostrils quivered. He pointed his thumb over his shoulder at Pelter's empty stall. I know the word is out not to claim that horse, he stammered. I swear to god I never wanted the horse. Joe Dale made me take him. Joe Dale put up the bread.

  You shook your head, in distaste as much as disbelief. What's this all about? Why would Joe Dale want that horse? What do you want from me-you want me to take him back? I'll check him over and if he's okay, sure, I'll take him back.

  You moved toward the trailer, which was patched with great hardened gobs of something that looked like chewing gum, and smeared an unpleasant pink.

  No, that ain't it. The horse ain't here, D'Ambrisi whined. What Joe Dale wants the horse for, I swear I don't know. He's down Joe Dale's farm-ya see?

  No I don't see.

  What it is-I got a phone call from Baltimore today-you colly? Arnie Posner, personally, gives me down the road. I ain't thinking of the big picture. I gotta listen to people what are bigger than me, what can take care of certain things for me, and has done so in the past-like Two-Tie. Which is true, he almost sobbed, Two-Tie's been good to me. But what can I do if Joe Dale tangles me up in
this thing? Joe Dale's bigger than me too.

  So what do you want from me?

  Posner says give back the horse. Fine by me, I says, only I ain't going down there on the farm by myself and tell Joe Dale. Either Biggy'll tear my ears off or Posner fixes it so I can't show my face at any track east of Cleveland. What am I supposed to do?

  He was really crying now and you turned your face away in disgust. You happened to glance down the thin strip of grass behind the barn. And that way you saw, for once, Medicine Ed approach, catch sight of you, and start to fade off again between the shedrows.

  Hey, Ed. He stopped. Where is she? you snapped. You were getting just a glimmer now of what was going on. What's it all about? Where's Maggie?

  She gone. Left outa here half a hour ago.

  What do you mean she left? The Grand Prix has a flat and I've got the truck. How did she leave?

  She get in that blue silver-top Cadillac with Joe Dale Bigg.

  You seized a shank, gave D'Ambrisi a rough shove towards the dented, pink-smeared horse trailer, and followed him into the road.

  SHE KNEW SHE SHOULDN'T get in his car, but it was like Joe Dale Bigg exuded some kind of sticky stuff and she got caught in it and couldn't stop. She didn't even like his plump pale face, the satisfied smile on the rather beautiful Roman lips, and the blueblack growth of beard over his jowls that had the look of pepper on white cheese. She could see the dotted lines around everything he was trying to do, but she overestimated herself, let herself listen and then he was pulling her in. And next she knew, she was sinking into the silvery leather front seat of the Sedan de Ville. All right, he had mob connections and a sadistic streak but he wasn't going to kill her, was he? She heard the power locks suck in on all four sides of the Cadillac, ka-chunk. She remembered that nobody could see her through these blue-tinted windows. No one knew she was here.

  The farm was up one of the red dirt roads that led into the hills, those state roads named for logging camps or mines or chocolatey creeks, here called runs, all without marker or sign. For all his dough, Joe Dale turned down a two-track as rutted and unprepossessing as the one to the Pichot place in Charles Town. She could see steep fenced pastures through the trees, horses grazing in patchy snow. The fences were sturdy but they were cow fences, wire, not wood. A deep ditch on the lower side of the dirt two-track got her attention. It had washed out so badly that the heavy car slid again and again on the slick red edge of a crevasse. Maggie wished that the Cadillac would roll over into it, breaking both their heads, but as ever her magical powers were unsupported by faith. Her weak curses had protected many a miscreant in the past and did so again now. The Cadillac floated over violent declivities and across fatal canyons and rolled to the bottom of the hill unscratched.

  Joe Dale pulled up in a bare yard of house trailers and horse trailers strewn about without logic. The paddocks were squares of frozen mud, an idle hot-walking machine rose out of a churned brown ring in the snow, and at the far end of the hollow stood two long wooden horse barns in need of paint that probably looked more dilapidated than they were. Horses were everywhere she looked, shaggy like big wild ponies in their winter coats. It was a low overhead, high turnover operation. She wondered if Joe Dale's owners ever came around. Everybody said he was in with the mob but he had owners who certainly weren't crooks. Probably they were as scared of him as she was. Maggie had seen them around the shedrow, looking nervous and out of their depth in their high heels and dressy overcoats, not even all that rich by the look of them, and they too turned over fast. It probably didn't take Joe Dale long to shake them down for more than they could spare.

  Three hands who looked more like sawyers than grooms were leaning against the paddock fence. Joe Dale crooked his finger and the biggest of them came over to the car. The giant wore a tight red bandana around a forehead too small for his big cheeks; it didn't quite hide the dented half moon of a scar over little blue eyes. Biggy, Spinoza, and the dentist. Everyone knew that story.

  Get this young lady a soft drink, son, she's going to be here a while. And get me one too.

  She followed Joe Dale towards the most presentable of the trailers. It stood at the far end of the hollow, next to the second barn; unfenced woods ran up the slope behind it. You can still run away, Maggie reminded herself, but then she followed him up the metal stair.

  The trailer was overheated, and like every warm building on a horse farm in March, parched and bleary with pinkish dust. Joe Dale sat in the desk chair. She sat between stacks of yellowing Telegraphs on the sofa. Biggy brought them open Cokes in bottles and she nervously drank hers down at once. For some reason this felt queerly like a job interview, and for a lowly waitress gig at that, with Maggie begging for a job in her rundown shoes, cheap watch and smelly hair, and Joe Dale, the manager, looking her over, his clean hairy hands spread on plump thighs. His thick legs made his blond silk trousers as tight as a pair of good cigars. His over-ripeness made her dizzy. She set the Coke bottle on the floor.

  Okay, baby, now I got you here I'm going to tell you something I did which I hope you won't be mad at me, on account of you have to see I really got a thing for you. Did you know I got a thing for you? Maggie slouched deeper into the couch and watched him.

  I claimed that horse. Yeah. I put D'Ambrisi up to it. D'Ambrisi don't have a pot to pee in. You colly? He was working for me. He does what I say. Do you know why I claimed that horse?

  Maggie shook her head. She felt irrelevantly insulted. She saw that to Joe Dale the worthlessness of her horse went without saying.

  I claimed that horse because I want to have something you care about. I don't want to take him away from you. The opposite of that. I want to give him to you. If I like a lady I want to give her something, something she really wants, something so big she'll see she needs me. I want to give her something that will tie her to me, for a little while anyway. I want her to see I was really thinking about her, who she is, when I got this something for her-you see what I mean? I wasn't going to buy you a diamond bracelet. You ain't the type. I wouldn't even want to see you in a diamond bracelet. I like you in that little stripe shirt you wear. Yeah. Tell you the truth, from the first time I see you I want to reach my hands under it. You think that might ever happen? You think I might get to you? O well. He sighed, turned his hands over in appeal, and his big ring clinked against the desk top. Excuse me. I shouldn't of brought it up. You want to see the horse first.

  She saw that Joe Dale was standing in the metal doorway of the trailer smiling at her, waiting for her, and she wondered distantly why she wasn't there next to him, why she was sinking deeper into this filthy plaid couch that had the booby-trapped feel of a sleeper sofa, hollow and mined with dangerous springs. Somebody seemed to have opened her veins and poured cement into them. She was wide awake but heavy, so heavy that the thought of standing up and picking her way across the paper-piled floor was almost laughable. She raised a hand to push her three-blind-mice sunglasses back up her nose where they had slipped, and the whole arm felt like a bag of wet sand. She could barely lift it. There was feeling in it-she pushed her thumbnail into her fingerpads to make sure-but the muscles she was so proud of seemed to have dissolved.

  … see Pelter? Joe Dale was saying. Without asking herself why, she decided not to let on to Joe Dale what was happening to her. But what exactly was happening to her? Her body was inert or almost inert, her mind bobbed above it on a short string, like a helium balloon, unchanged from itself but aware of its own smooth pointlessness… your horse? he smiled. His custard pallor was making her sick. But she could pretend not to notice. She couldn't run in this condition. She had to use that little balloon to lift herself off the couch and go along with him until she saw some chance. Her feet pushed against the floor and she lurched across the room. It was like swimming through glass. The effort made her hot and nauseous and caused a great din, like an open hydrant, so that in the doorway she saw his mouth move but had no idea what he was saying.

  Coming, sh
e said, coming. He was still smiling but watching her carefully. All at once she understood that he had given her some drug and was waiting for it to show. She tried to stiffen her joints inside the jelly they were turning into, but for all her concentration she aimed at the door and tacked slowly to the window. She straightened up, pushed off the sill and tried again.

  You aren't sick, baby, are you? You need help? Joe Dale said.

  I'm fine, she replied, from a cave in a black rock, one mossy tonsil dangling from its wet roof. She followed him out the doorway, down the unpainted wooden stoop, into the barn, her hands catching clumsily at anything that stuck out along the way.

  Then they were standing in a dark stall inside a high wooden gate, no flimsy webbing, and here was Pelter. She could hardly raise her chin to look at her horse; the effort to put a hand on him rocked her back against the planking. Yes, the place was solidly built. Unpainted but built to last. Which brought up the question, how long could all this last. Get this young lady a soft drink. She's going to be here awhile. What, then, was the plan? When she tried to focus on Joe Dale's face, her legs sank away underneath her, she sat down heavily on her tailbone in the straw, and she was looking not in his eyes but at his kneecap. She observed again that he was fleshy, plushy, so that his beautiful trousers were tight at the thigh. His right leg had a faint gray smudge on the pleat along the shin. The round thigh, the perfect crease, the gray smudge, made her deeply sick.

  I'm sick, she groaned. What did you give me in that Coke?

  I didn't give you anything, he said, smiling broadly, but I could give you something. If you wanted. If I give a lady something, it's going to be to help her relax. A young lady is always more entertaining when she stops worrying about business. If you're feeling loose, why not go with it? Have some fun with it. You got your horse back, ain't it? You should be feeling good. Don't you think you owe me just a little bit of good feeling? Instead of looking at me all the time with that sad face like your canary bird died.