by Jaimy Gordon
His eyes even in the dim light of the visiting cell were electric, shedding almost visible beams, and there was a tremor in the eyelids like the buzz of fly wings, regular but too fast to see or count-maybe it was the medication they had him on, but from where she sat it was like observing the spouting eye of an hallucination. She thought she was watching madness create its world atom by atom, or pixel by pixel.
If he asked her to leave before visiting ended at four, she would head north to the Mound from the state hospital, in time to catch the eighth or ninth race before driving east over the mountains. By now Medicine Ed had the horse back running for fifteen hundred dollars, often on a Saturday night. She watched them from the stands, or from the palisades of the walking ring. Medicine Ed would give her a nod, not unfriendly but well short of a smile. She had to admit it showed that Pelter had a caretaker now who had worked for Whirligig Farm. He gleamed like the great Platonic, with his mane tightly braided and a fancy checkerboard on his rump. Medicine Ed's stick leg looked no stiffer, and Pelter's long back no lumpier, than before. They were a pair of cripples who knew how to hold on as they were.
Kidstuff had been right about that five-thousand-added purse, but they had found ways to take it from her just the same. Place, show and fourth monies had to come out of the same sum, and those special finishers' percentages took another healthy slice. The track had treated Tommy's debts as her debts, she didn't care to argue the point, but then creditors came out of the woodwork. Certain persons-Jojo, Alice, Kidstuff, Medicine Ed-had to be staked from what little was left, and generously, in Tommy's name. What did it matter? Let it all go, call that life ended, behind her.
What also came down like luck was the claim the racing association paid on Little Spinoza. The destroyed horse was redeemed at three thousand dollars, a thousand for each of them. They were back where they had started. Deucey found a stalwart old claimer within a week and was back in business. But once Lord of Misrule came and went, it was Deucey and Alice against the world, and on those terms the world was more to Deucey's liking. Medicine Ed got a job with Jim Hamm, running shippers from Charles Town at the Mound in an arrangement much like the one he had had with Zeno. But in two weeks he also had Pelter chasing three thousand dollar horses and sinking back downward in class.
As for Maggie, she went back to the Pichot place outside Charles Town and Menus by Margaret for the Thursday Winchester Mail. When she looked out at the empty horse pasture and the untrampled skunk cabbage down by the creek, she wondered why she hadn't thought to bring Pelter home with her and retire him while he was still sound. But it was too late now, and, anyway, whose pleasure would that really have served? She had plenty of room for the horse and, for that matter, for Medicine Ed, but what would the two of them have done with themselves all day? And no doubt Pelter's nature, like Medicine Ed's, was to keep on going to the end and hope he never saw the end coming. Anyway, the two of them seemed tied to one another.
III
He couldn't exactly care for that horse, nor either did he think the witch-eyed horse cared much for him. Sometimes Medicine Ed would swear that horse knew more than a horse could know. When he walked Pelter, like now, in a beady fog in the morning dark of November, with they two breaths fuming like dragons and winter coming on, he tried to eyeball the horse out the side of his eye to learn what was what, and what do he see but the horse eyeballing him back. They eyeballed each other to find out how the other one was getting along, the feet, the legs, the back. They eyeballed to find out what the other one was eyeballing. They eyeballed to check if anymany little signs be present who will be the first to go.
Whenever Medicine Ed sneaked off to his Winnebago to warm him some soup in a pan, that horse eyeball him. You could hear him studying: Now what is that evil old cunjure fixing to do? If he go to that medicine, if he think either of us time is short and he commence to mixing that goofer, why, I'm going to get him first. Often when Medicine Ed be laying on his side in the straw, unrolling bandage or packing the horse's foot with clay and helpless as a baby under the horse's back end, he could hear him thinking that: I can last long as the old man can last, lessen he try to beat me to the door.
So far it was an even match and Medicine Ed wouldn't put it past the horse to get over on him when he was feeling poorly, just like he did the horse. When the young fool's woman still taken care of Pelter, he improved or at least he come to himself, for a while, for the joy of living. Now the animal stick it out for sheer commonness and mischief, and maybe to hang on longer than Medicine Ed. (It use to vex him so when they cut the fool. One time he seen her let the horse taken her whole head up in his teeth by the frizzly pigtails. He chewed on them like hay until she dig them out of his mouth with her fingers. Now was that right acting?)
He tried not to hold it against the frizzly girl that his friend Two-Tie had used her to help him out this life. After all, when Two-Tie disappeared for good, he had Medicine Ed's markers in his pocket. Now she showed up at the Mound sometimes on a Sadday night and looked down on him and Pelter in the walking ring. He could recognize Two-Tie in them fuzzy tilted-up eyebrows, and all he can see is Mr. Two-Tie lying on his face in a railroad culvert somewhere, or under a heap of stones in the deep woods, or sliding down a mountainside with the tin cans and old stoves and deer parts that people dump over the side of the road. Might could be they never find him, and all Medicine Ed can think is, she don't even know he died for her sake or who he was. It's a tie in the blood, and yet and still it's no remembrance, no one to mourn or either grieve for him.
Now that she was gone and out of his bidness, he had to give this much to the frizzly hair girl, she must have did something right with all that modern science she use to make it up as she go along. Damn if Medicine Ed be caught petting and nursering an animal like that, but he had taken sometimes to rubbing Pelter up with cloths after he worked, like a young horse. Couldn't hurt, and they had the time. The horse gone good for fifteen hundred, and sometimes when they walking the shedrow like now and eyeballing each other like now, he was careful to remember into the horse that the Mound has claimers at 1250 too. It's still another place left for them two to go, even if it is down.
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