The Midnight Cool

by Lydia Peelle

  Real high-class, then, Charles said, feeling better. Upright.

  The man shrugged. He pays us good. Tonight’s his big party. All the big bugs in town are up there at Everbright right now. Wouldn’t I like to be a fly on the wall.

  At the other end of the bar, Billy had his arm around somebody, talking low and quick. Trying to trade watches, just for the hell of it.

  The red-nosed man, growing philosophical, started talking about Black Tom Island again. It just goes to show, he said. When your number’s up, it’s up. Those people went to bed that night without the slightest inkling they might wake up dead. And the Statue of Liberty without the slightest inkling she was about to catch fire.

  Charles called for another drink. A warm calm spread through him with the whiskey. Everything was going to be fine. They were going to make a killing on that horse. The man was saying that the statue would stand for ten thousand years. Of course it would. His mother had a picture postcard of the statue. When she first arrived in New York Harbor as a girl alone in the world, she had elbowed up onto the deck trying to get a glimpse of it, managed to fight through the bodies all the way up to the rail and had had just enough time to see the big arm and hear someone say, And there’s the beautiful lady! before a child had been seasick on her.

  She always laughed when she told that story. She had a free and reckless laugh, the laugh of someone who had learned through terrible loss that it was the one thing that could not be taken from her. Charles loved it and loved her and had always imagined that the statue should have looked like her, a beauty with a heart-shaped face and a sly, foxy smile with a gap between the two front teeth.

  Seeing that smile on the girl today—well sometimes it was too much to bear, all the girls he had to leave behind. All he could do was pin the memory of Catherine Hatcher’s face to his chest, just as he had pinned Fern’s, just as he did with every girl everywhere. He would pull it out some cold lonesome night trying to sleep by a fire of smoldering coals while Billy snored and somewhere far away beautiful girls danced and laughed and ate cake and drank lemonade on ice out of cut-crystal glasses.

  Gold and silver in the ditches, his mother always said. That’s what they told me when I was a girl. In America there’s gold and silver in the ditches, and nothing to do but gather it. She used to take him to a neighborhood full of houses nearly as grand as Everbright, and they would wait for dusk, the space of time after the lamps had been lit and before the curtains had been drawn, the best time to see in all the windows.

  He turned back to the red-nosed man.

  My ma loved that statue, he said.

  Who doesn’t?

  Well she drew a real tough lot, my ma.

  And Charles had tried to tell the man the story he would have liked to have explained to the joker in the Pierce-Arrow who had called him trouble. The story of how his mother had come from Ireland with nothing, met and married his father, a man rich as Leland Hatcher, richer even, then lost it all when he was struck by a streetcar and killed just before Charles was born.

  The man held up his hand.

  Kid. The world’s got a million sad stories, and I got to work in the morning.

  Charles paced across the room to the window, the empty jar in his hand, shoving the broken pasteboard box with one foot. He could see the mare out there, bunched up in the corner of the pasture, and Billy, sitting on the fence, looked like he was having a conversation with the crows in the oak tree.

  He turned back to the girl in the Pears’ soap advertisement. Last night while he smoked his last cigarette Billy had sung to her, packing.

  Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do

  I’m half crazy all for the love of you

  It won’t be a stylish marriage

  I can’t afford a carriage

  But you’ll look sweet upon the seat

  Of a bicycle built for two

  Now he stood there, clutching the empty jar, studying her. His mother used to sing the same song. Or rather, she always sang the answer.

  William, William, I’ll give you my answer true

  I’d be crazy to marry the likes of you

  If you can’t afford a carriage

  How can you afford a marriage?

  Yes I’ll be damned if I’ll be crammed

  On a bicycle built for two

  She would sing it and then laugh her free and reckless laugh. She came to America all the way from Ireland expecting gold and silver in the ditches and nothing to do but gather it, and she had died in a whorehouse with nothing. And if, like the man in the blind tiger said, if tomorrow Charles should wake up dead, he would die with nothing too.

  He threw the empty jar across the room. It hit the wall but did not break. Rolled down the sloping floor and came to rest under one of the beds. That kind of thinking was no use. Crazy or not, that horse still looked good as gold. All they had to do was catch her and dope her up themselves. By tomorrow she could be someone else’s problem. And they would be in a new town. New horses. New girls. A thousand possibilities.

  He snatched a long rope out of one of the boxes and flung open the door. Burst back out into the glare. Racing past Gin, he blew her a kiss.

  Wish me luck!

  Billy was grinning at him when he got to the fence.

  I got it now, Billy said. I know exactly what we gotta do.

  Well good. Because I’m about to go out there and I don’t intend to come back until I got her by the pretty little nose.

  Billy scratched at his cheek. OK. Here’s what we do. We go on up to Dillehay’s place. Ask to use his telephone.

  And?

  And then call up the four riders of the apocalypse. Tell em to get down here. Surely one of them fellows is in the market for another horse.

  Bill Monday. You. Son. Of. A. Bitch.

  Billy looked back at the horse and kept on scratching his cheek.

  He must have used morphine, that Hatcher fellow. For it to last as long as it did.

  Hatcher! Charles shook his head. Hatcher wouldn’t have done it. It was the stablehand, surely. I knew I didn’t like the looks of him.

  Charles tested the weight of the loop, watching the horse. A man with a place like that didn’t go around doping up horses, he knew that much. For Christ’s sake, he’d had someone washing the leaves of his magnolia.

  He looked at Billy. What do you think we could get for her? Considering her mental state.

  Find the right kind of high-dollar fellow, dope her up on something stronger than that old Hatcher boy up there used? Two, three thousand. Maybe thirty-five hundred. What’s important is that we got to find a bigger sucker than you.

  Charles knocked the loop of rope against his thigh. Thirty-five hundred dollars! He looked at Billy from under his hat. Smiled.

  Billy looked at the rope. You ain’t gonna cowboy her.

  Yes I am.

  I don’t think she’s gonna like it.

  If I don’t come back, Monday, see that they put it on my headstone. ‘He went down fighting.’

  This time Charles stayed downwind. If she was going to act like a wild animal, he would treat her like one. He stalked up behind her glossy black hindquarters, close enough that he could hear the rip of the grass in her teeth. Easy. Easy. The rope in his hand was shaking. He threw a loop, but it missed the mark, smacked the mare’s rump, and then slid to the ground. She spun around and screamed as if the sun itself had dropped from the sky. Took off running and Charles took off after her. He could hear Billy shouting from the fence line but not what he was saying. It was just him and the horse now and he was going to catch her no matter what it took. He ran her into the fence corner, where she slid to a stop and spun to face him, nowhere to run. He moved in, his arms stretched like wings.

  The mare pinned her ears, making her face into a hideous arrow. Then she reared up. Ten stories tall. Jesus, she was huge. When she came down, her front hooves hit him like fireworks, like two million pounds of ammunition exploding, and lifted him into the air
. He saw a tumble of ground and sky and leaves. He heard Billy shout, or maybe it was just the horse’s snort, or his own blood in his ears, and then he heard nothing at all.

  Caveat Emptor

  It was four days later, and the summer heat had returned in full force, when Billy tied the two old mules to the sick poplar tree to paint them.

  In one pocket he had a tin of black shoe polish. In the other, a boiled egg.

  The mules groaned. Their old bones creaked and popped. They had been gray in their prime, but were now faded white as snow. With their long mule ears they looked like a couple of overgrown Easter rabbits. At this age they were next to worthless. He had traded the moldy harness for them.

  Three crows watched him through the worm-eaten yellow leaves above, shifting and rattling their wings. He looked up at them and winked. He had sent Charles up to town in search of black fabric dye, but still no sign of him, and he would have to make do without it if they were going to get to the auction on time. Fabric dye or no, he was going to work magic on these mules.

  Billy’s kit sat at the base of the tree. An old lunch pail, once painted red, with a lid on rusted hinges. In it, in order to cover up nearly any shortcoming or ailment a horse might suffer, were various colors of thread, wads of cotton, green coffee beans, a carved-up piece of gingerroot, castor oil, a metal file. Vials of carbolic acid, quinine, a box of Epsom salts. Wool to stuff the ears of an excitable horse, cocaine to inspire a lazy one. Linseed oil for a heaver. Arsenic, of which a knife’s edge could sometimes work wonders, but you had to be careful. A few grains too many and you had a dead horse on your hands.

  He lifted the lid and fished out a hypodermic needle and the metal file. Then he took the egg and the shoe polish out of his pockets and set them on the ground. He stepped back and studied the mules. One of them was already dozing, head bobbing. Billy nudged his shoulder.

  Need a cup of coffee, old boy?

  He checked his watch, a cheap watch with another man’s initials on it, taken as boot in a trade. What was keeping Charles? Four days since the black mare punted him into the fence, and he was still in a fog. He had been lucky, that was for sure. It should have been a hell of a lot worse. The mare had been vicious as a rattlesnake that day, and ever since. She was out there now, in the corner of the pasture, watching him, every muscle tensed, ready to run or fight. On the afternoon of the first day, she had even gone after Gin, who now gave her a wide berth. Smart Gin.

  Charles had been burned bad. But he was taking it too hard. Sometimes Billy would find him sitting on the fence, just staring at her. Or he’d come in muttering about what he was going to do to the Everbright stablehand. He still refused to believe that such a high-class fellow as Leland Hatcher could have deceived him, and held on to the crazy notion that it was the stablehand who had doped her, and that the stablehand surely had been deceiving this Hatcher all along too. Billy kept his mouth shut. If Charles was still green enough to think that rich men achieved their station in life because they deserved it, because of some purity of character or righteousness of heart, he hated to be the one to tell him otherwise.

  Charles had decided to try to cure her. It would take time and patience, but if they could win her trust and start over with her training from square one, he argued, they could make even more than they would if they just doped her up and passed her off again.

  Billy suspected that they ought to just cut their losses and run. As the saying went, trade her for a dog and drown the dog. But again he kept his mouth shut.

  Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. That was the cardinal rule in trading. But one you only ever learned the hard way.

  As for their current situation, they were dead broke. When Dillehay demanded another week’s rent up front, Billy had managed to talk him into taking the toilet in trade, in spite of the fact that the old man did not have indoor plumbing. When he came down to the shack to pick it up, he had stopped at the pasture gate.

  That ain’t Leland Hatcher’s horse out there, is it?

  Was, Billy said. Ours now.

  Dillehay’s small eyes had narrowed.

  Said I didn’t want no funny business down here.

  No funny business. We bought that horse fair and square. Let me help you get that there toilet up in your wagon.

  Then Billy had cleaned up the moldy harness and gone into the hills and traded it for these two half-dead mules. Convinced the farmer he was doing him a favor, taking two old hayburners off his hands. Today they would take them to the auction house and make a little cash and soon enough they would be back on their feet.

  He picked up the shoe polish tin and turned the key, wishing once again he had the fabric dye. He pulled the egg from his coat pocket and pressed it into the cake of polish, twisting it until it was good and black. With the contents of his kit, and a little smooth talking, Billy could make anything possible. Caveat emptor.

  Before he began, he paused one last time to look over the mule. Any fool could file down an animal’s teeth or shove gingerroot up his bunghole. But to paint a white horse or mule dapple-gray—and do a convincing job of it—required the touch of an artist.

  He had learned the trick years ago, when he was young and green himself, from a Levantine in Damascus, Virginia, who wore a gold hoop in one earlobe and hustled Billy out of a fine team of plow horses. It worked on the fact that a dapple-gray horse or mule was born black and then changed color over his lifetime, growing lighter every year, dark dapples fading, until he ended up almost pure white. For this reason just one glance at a dapple-gray could give you the animal’s age.

  Way back then in Damascus, the painted horse that the Levantine passed off on Billy turned out to be so old he could not even stand up in the morning. When Billy went back to the man’s campsite and demanded he give back his team of plow horses, he had refused, but finally agreed to teach him the trick. Sooner you learn, the better, boy, he had said, pulling on his earring. You get burned, you got to learn how to sit on the blister.

  Billy stepped forward, egg poised. Here goes nothing, he said, and both mules’ ears swiveled. He made his first mark, stamping a fat black dapple on the near animal’s shoulder. Beautiful. He inked the egg and made another. The mule closed his eyes again and sighed.

  Those days when he was a greenhorn traveling by himself seemed so distant as to have been lived by another man. Weeks of not seeing another person, talking only to the horses. He could hardly now remember what it was like to be alone. For nearly ten years, all he had to do was open his mouth and say his piece and Charles was right there beside him to hear it. And he did have a habit of saying everything and anything on his mind. Everything, except the one thing that could never be spoken.

  As he worked the sun drew higher over Dillehay’s tobacco fields, and the pasture’s green intensified. At one point the black mare suddenly screamed and wheeled, spooked by something, but he hardly looked up, he had grown so used to this.

  Demon, he had taken to calling her. Also: the Maniac, the Black Devil, Sweetheart, Angelface, Sugarpie. Out there slashing that tail that she held high and proud as a bride’s bouquet, flaunting her fraudulent beauty. How she swindled! Yesterday she had allowed him to come right up and put his hand on her shoulder. Then spun around and bit him in the meat of his arm.

  He had already fallen in love with her. He only fell for horses anymore, but he did fall hard. He would have thought by now, after everything, his heart would be just a hunk of petrified wood. Instead with the years it seemed to grow more tender and more reckless. And now here he was in love with a maniac horse out for his blood. He knew she had suffered something terrible.

  This place she came from, Leland Hatcher’s Everbright, had made such an impression on Charles that he was telling the story about his father again. Billy had heard him tell it in the blind tiger, the night he came back with the mare, and the red-nosed drunk listening had looked at the boy like he had two heads.

  The blackened egg lengthwise in his hand, he began to print
the mule’s belly, moving back towards his tail. The oblong shape of the egg, as well as its size, made perfect dapples, as if it had been invented for the job. He worked slowly, from time to time pausing to reink the egg and give the drowsy mule a scratch behind the ears.

  Leland Hatcher, in addition to employing most of Richfield, seemed to spend a lot of time telling its people what to think and what to do. He wrote a column for the local paper. Money Matters, it was called. Billy had overheard half a dozen discussions on the week’s installment, which addressed the temperance issue. In fact, the man Billy got these mules off of had been reading it when he showed up at his place. After the usual exchange about weather, crops, and horses, Billy had asked what he thought about it. He had taken off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  It is a bit perplexing, the man said. Six months ago Mister Hatcher was railing against temperance. Said it was a threat to a man’s liberty and that Tennessee should never have passed the law. Now he says drink’s the path to ruin and the whole nation ought to go dry. Says right here—he pointed to the paper—‘I’ve learned that the inalienable truth of America is that its people sometimes must be saved from themselves.’

  Billy clucked his tongue. Hard to trust a man who changes his mind as often as he changes his collar.

  The man had shrugged and put his glasses back on. They were held together with baling wire.

  I suppose when you’re as important a man as Mister Hatcher is, you always got to be thinking about what’s best for the people.

  The place was up on the Highland Rim, so deep in a holler that it was dark even in the middle of the day. Dirt on everything. Dirt in the meal the wife had served. It had crunched in Billy’s back teeth. An enormous, gut-busting meal. Always the poorest ones who fed you the most.

  The mule sighed. Billy swiped sweat from his brow. If it was a hot sale at the auction today, they might make four hundred bucks off of these mules. Four hundred blessed bucks out of nearly nothing. That was the inalienable truth that Billy had learned about America. Here in the land of plenty you could live mighty well off the trash. Coming from an Irish island of two hundred souls where no one had anything save what was pulled from the sea had helped him to see that. He had come over at the age of fourteen with the same fierce drive Charles now had, though in his case the desire was not to get rich. Simply to never die hungry.