All Hat

by Brad Smith

  “We can’t all dress like we’re one of the Village People,” Dean said. “I don’t feel like tearing apart barns or being your gofer, Jackson. What reason do I have to stay with Stanton Stables if that’s all I’m ever gonna do?”

  “This isn’t exactly the time to start talking about your future with the company,” Jackson said. “Nothing’s gonna change so long as the old man’s laid up. If I was you, I’d try to make myself useful in the meantime. You think you’ve been pulling your weight, Dean?”

  “You gonna tell me Sonny’s been pulling his weight?” Dean demanded.

  “What’s Sonny got to do with it?” Jackson asked. “You seem to have it in your head that you’re somehow on an equal footing with Sonny around here. Well, you’re not. Sonny’s about as useless as tits on a boar hog, but he’s the old man’s son, and that’s something you’re never gonna be. Now you’re gonna have to learn to accept that or hit the road, Dean. The fact of the matter is, we don’t have enough money right now to pay you to fuck the dog.”

  “But Sonny can piss it away at the casino.”

  “What did I just say?” Jackson asked. “Sonny has got nothing to do with you.”

  Jackson finished his soup and pushed the bowl away, wiped his mouth with a piece of paper towel. He looked at the tabletop a moment.

  “Paulie, head over to Bertle’s with that tractor. It’ll take you longer than Dean to get there.”

  Jackson waited until Paulie had gone. “I know what Sonny’s up to,” he said. “I know he spends time at the casino.”

  “I’m talking about the back room, Jack,” Dean said. “Big Billy Coon and the boys are tapping Sonny like he’s the mother lode. They got fucking totes back there, you know that? Futures, too. All under the table. You can bet any race in North America. Not to mention the poker.”

  Jackson got to his feet and walked out of the office. He went to the open door of the barn and looked toward the house. Dean hung back and watched. After a minute they heard the tractor roar to life and then saw Paulie head down the driveway in the big diesel.

  “You sure about Sonny and that bunch?” Jackson asked Dean.

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit.”

  Dean picked Paulie up at the Massey dealership, and then they headed out to the other farm, stopping first at the Colonel’s for a bucket of crispy chicken and the beer store for a twelve-pack.

  The farm was one concession south of the home farm. There was a large frame farmhouse, with a full porch across the front and down one side. The house had green shutters and roof, and it was where Jackson had lived since Earl Stanton hired him twenty-three years earlier.

  There were two barns. The one was only a couple of years old, and it housed the yearlings and two-year-olds until they were ready to be broke. The second barn, the original, was older, and it was built completely of wood. It had been sitting vacant for some time.

  Paulie went straight to work when they arrived. Using a crowbar and sledgehammer, he broke up the stalls and carried the pieces out back, where he stacked them on the old manure pile. The wood was full of dry rot, and the work was dirty, and the air was soon filled with dust. Paulie wished he’d thought to bring along a dust mask. After a few minutes he removed his T-shirt and tied it over his mouth and nose.

  Dean ate most of the chicken and drank half the beer. Then he had a nap.

  Paulie worked away all afternoon. As usual, he didn’t mind that Dean was loafing. He’d rather work alone in silence. As he cleared the old barn out, he returned to his dream, pretending that the barn was his, and that he was fixing it up for himself. He’d have a rabbit hutch in the corner and maybe a chicken coop for laying hens. A couple of stalls for horses and a stanchion for a Jersey milk cow. Paulie’d never milked a cow, but he figured he could learn. And he’d have a goat; he liked goats because of their eyes, their rectangular pupils. There’d be fresh hay in the mow and grain for the horses and a good dog for a pal. A yellow tomcat to keep the rats and mice out of the feed.

  It would be nice to have a place of his own.

  Late in the afternoon, Dean woke up and helped Paulie carry the last of the debris outside. Then they swept the place clean and dumped the sweepings on the pile in the barnyard. When they were finished they leaned the tools against the wall just inside the door and then opened a couple of beers. Dean surveyed the scene.

  “Well, I’d like to see that sonofabitch Jackson say we didn’t earn our money today,” he said. “Right, Paulie?”

  Paulie looked over and tried to decide just where among his imaginary horses and rabbits and chickens and dogs he might find a place for someone like Dean. He was still contemplating the question when they finished the beer and headed for home.

  * * *

  Jackson went into town after lunch. He had a dentist’s appointment at two o’clock, and what was scheduled as a routine checkup became a painful root canal. Leaving the clinic, his cheek puffed with cotton like a squirrel hoarding acorns, he walked over to the bank and checked out the company accounts. Taking the statements back to the farm, he passed the rest of the afternoon paying bills and attempting to make sense of the paperwork.

  It was dark when he finally left the barn. The lights were on in the house now, and he walked over, entered through the kitchen door. The freezing was gone from his jaw, and the tooth hurt worse than before.

  Sonny was in the dining room, eating a thick steak and french fries. He was wearing sweatpants and a polo shirt. Jackson pulled out a chair and sat down across from him.

  “Hey, Jackson,” Sonny said, his mouth full. “You bring our horse home?”

  “What’s going on with you and Billy Coon?”

  “What?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “I asked you if you brought the stud home,” Sonny said sharply.

  “Why don’t you look in the barn?” Jackson asked. “It’s the big red building across the way. Now answer the question.”

  “What the fuck’s it to you? You got a problem with Billy Coon?”

  “I don’t know Billy Coon. It’s you I got a problem with. I got the statements from the bank. Looks like you’ve been writing some sizable checks on the business account. Some of them are down payments for the farms you’ve been buying. But not all of them.”

  “Poker debts, Jack. Sometimes you win; sometimes you lose.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, I guess you must be due to win, Sonny. Looks like you’re down about seventy grand the past two months. How’d you plan on explaining that to the old man?”

  “That’s not for you to worry about, Jack.”

  Jackson shrugged his indifference. “You’re right. But I’m telling you right now, stay out of that account, Sonny. We’ve got enough cash problems with the old man out of commission. We don’t need to be pissing money up against the wall just because you don’t have enough fucking brains to fold a pair of eights.”

  Sonny pushed his meal away from him, tried a look on Jackson that he liked to think was threatening. “Don’t tell me what to do, Jack,” he warned. And then: “Jesus Christ! What the fuck’s got into you today?”

  Jackson got up from the table and headed for the door. “What’s got into me?” he asked, turning back. “I got a spoiled rich kid spending money like a drunken sailor. I got Dean, who won’t do a lick of work but figures he should be on the board of directors. I got an overweight horse who acts like a goddamn movie star and who’s about to run in the biggest race on the planet, and I got a molar that feels like somebody’s poking it with a hot stick. Now I’m going home, Sonny, and if I don’t have a better day tomorrow, I swear I might decide to geld you, just out of pure fucking meanness.”

  * * *

  Sonny, for his part, couldn’t say he was sorry to see Jackson go. His appetite was gone now; he poured himself a glass of vodka, dropped in a couple of ice cubes. He sat at the table and considered firing him. There were a couple of problems with that, though. One, he didn’t know if he had the aut
hority. And two, if he fired Jackson, who was going to do the work around here?

  There would come a time when he could give Jackson his walking papers. Once he bought the Parr farm, he’d have the whole piece sewn up and he could get on with the development, including the new track. When that happened he’d sell off the whole racing operation, every damn horse. He couldn’t exactly be running horses on his own track anyway; it wouldn’t look right and might even be illegal.

  Of course, the old man wouldn’t go for selling off the breeding stock, but Sonny was counting on him doing the right thing and dying by then anyway. Sonny could then pay off Gena, that scheming cunt, sell off Stanton Stables in its entirety, and fire Jackson’s black ass in the process. He could see it all happening simultaneously, like the scene at the end of The Godfather when Al Pacino settles everybody’s hash at once. Sonny could imagine it, with the music playing in the background, and him sitting here in the big house, above it all.

  It was going to take some time, though. The main thing right now was getting enough cash together to carry on until the situation with the old man righted itself. He had the race in Fort Erie on the weekend, then the Stanton Stakes at Woodbine, where they were running the Irish horse Rather Rambunctious, and where the purse was a quarter million. And then the big one at Belmont. If they won all three, there’d be plenty of cash to see him through until the other matter was resolved. And they had the horses to win all three.

  He drank off the vodka and decided to drive into town. He showered and shaved and put on clean jeans and a shirt. He twisted his knee pulling on his cowboy boots, and the pain shot up his leg, forcing him to lie on the bed for a few minutes until it passed. When he got up he took two Demerol. He was going to have to let them operate on the knee again.

  That was another score he was going to have to settle.

  It was a cool night, and there was a slight drizzle falling as he drove. He considered calling Susie but then dismissed the idea. He was behind two months on the alimony, for one thing, and he’d also heard that Susie had a new boyfriend who was some sort of martial arts freak. The guy was supposedly upset with some bullshit Susie’d told him about Sonny smacking her around when they were married. She was like a broken record with that stuff. She never got around to mentioning that she was living in a $500,000 house, compliments of Sonny. Not bad for an ex-Argo cheerleader with a high school education.

  Thinking about Susie just pissed him off. He’d only married her because he suspected she was going out with the Argo running back, a hotshot from Arkansas who’d been the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy and who’d come to Toronto to play when his agent couldn’t wring enough bonus money out of the Rams. Of course, it turned out that Susie wasn’t dating the guy; Sonny’d got married for no reason at all. Just his luck. The hotshot played one year in Toronto and then headed for New York, where he played half a season for the Jets, broke his leg in three places, retired, and was now the host of some lame reality TV show. Sonny got a nine-month marriage and an eternity of alimony payments.

  Thinking about Susie got Sonny to thinking about strippers—to Sonny, cheerleaders were just strippers with no nerve—and he drove over to the Slamdance to see if any of the boys from the golf course were there.

  Inside, he sat at the end of the bar and ordered a Heineken from the bartender. The place was mostly full, but in the darkness Sonny couldn’t spot anybody from the links. He drank his beer and watched the action on the stage, where a dark-haired women in flimsy Egyptian attire was charming what appeared to be a mechanical snake. The snake’s prospects were predictably good, and the boys around the stage were loving this little slice of high culture.

  Sonny sipped at his beer, and when his eyes adjusted to the dark he noticed Dean and Paulie, sitting against the wall with a blond woman in a tight white dress. Sonny bought another beer and headed over, the two bottles in one hand and his cane in the other.

  Paulie was watching the snake charmer on the stage, wondering if the snake was real and if it was, how it could breathe. Dean was leaning in to the blonde, who was a pretty impressive piece in a synthetic Baywatch sort of way, Sonny thought.

  When Dean saw Sonny his eyes went flat as creek water, but Sonny just smiled and pulled up a chair to sit down. He hooked his cane over the chair’s arm.

  “Hey, boys,” he said.

  “Hi, Sonny,” Paulie said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Imagine that,” Sonny said. “You’re usually right on top of things, Paulie. You gonna introduce me to your friend, Dean?”

  The blonde looked at Sonny with disinterest.

  “This is Misty,” Dean said unhappily.

  Misty showed a slight disdainful smile, then looked away. Sonny leaned over and extended his hand.

  “Sonny Stanton,” he said.

  Misty ignored the hand. “Yeah, I been hearing about you.”

  Sonny, undeterred, shifted to his good-old-boy persona. “I knew the boys were spending a lot of time here, but until this moment I didn’t know the reason why. They may not be the sharpest lads around, but they’ve got good taste in women. I’ll give ’em that.”

  Misty looked at Dean. “You’re right; he’s a load.”

  Sonny turned and made a big production of signaling the waitress, even though she wasn’t looking their way. Dean sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. The snake lady was finished now, and Paulie turned back to the table and placed his beer in front of him.

  “What’s with the cane?” Misty asked Sonny.

  “Oh, I used to rodeo,” Sonny told her without hesitation. “Got into a tussle one night with a fifteen-hundred-pound Brahma bull. I was a little out of my weight class.”

  “Where was that, Sonny?” Dean asked.

  “Calgary,” Sonny said at once. “During the Stampede. Three years ago.”

  Misty laughed. “Does anybody believe this shit?”

  “I thought you hurt your leg at the golf course,” Paulie said.

  “Yeah, you thought,” Sonny said. “Now that’s where you get into trouble, Paulie. Thinking. You weren’t put on this earth to think. You just wear your funny hat and watch the lady on the stage with the fake snake, and you’ll be okay.”

  Dean saw Paulie’s face flush. Paulie glanced over to Misty, but she was still watching Sonny, her eyes cold.

  “Tell me something,” she said to Sonny as she stood up. “Did you become an asshole because you’re rich, or did you become rich because you’re an asshole?”

  “Works both ways, baby,” Sonny said.

  “I gotta go dance,” she said.

  Sonny was smiling yet, watching her walk, then he turned and got the waitress’s attention, circled his hand to indicate a round.

  “So what did you guys do to Jackson today?” he asked. “Shit in his cornflakes?”

  “We didn’t do nothing,” Dean said. “We were out at the other place all day, working on the old barn.”

  “You didn’t see Jackson?”

  “Yeah, we saw him,” Paulie said. His face was still red.

  “He said you were about as useless as tits on a boar hog, Sonny,” Dean added.

  “That so? And what’d you say?”

  “Well, you know Jackson,” Dean said. “When he’s right, he’s right.”

  The waitress brought the beers. Sonny, with the woman gone and nobody to impress, paid for his and left the other two to pay for their own. A moment later Misty came onstage and began to dance.

  “So what you guys got going with Miss Implants here?” Sonny asked. “You dicking her or what?”

  “None of your fucking business,” Dean said.

  Sonny smiled. “Maybe I’ll expand my business to include her. She looks to me like she could suck the stripe off a skunk.”

  “Maybe she’s a nice person, Sonny,” Paulie said.

  Sonny took a long drink of beer and then adjusted his chair to get a better look at the stage. Misty, removing her top, was looking straight at him, contempt
in her eyes. Sonny rubbed the neck of the beer bottle across his chin and leered.

  “That your poker face, Sonny?” Dean asked. “No wonder you’re such a lousy card player.”

  “You fucking guys are pathetic,” Sonny said. “I have no idea why I even keep you around.”

  13

  Chrissie received a seven-day suspension for the roundhouse right she’d landed on Juan Romano’s mug. It probably would have been longer, but there’d been an inquiry on the race and the track officials had ruled that Romano had fouled Chrissie’s mount and he was disqualified from the win. That didn’t help Pete Culpepper’s wallet any; Fast Market never actually finished the race and therefore didn’t qualify for any purse money.

  Chrissie hung around the farm for the week and helped Pete out when she could, kept an eye on the horse the rest of the time. Not that the gelding needed much tending to; he took to the cast pretty well, kept the weight off the leg as Ben Houston had suggested he would. It looked as if the leg would knit.

  “So what are you gonna do with him?” Chrissie asked one day after she and Pete had turned the two mares out into the corral and had just finished shoveling out the stalls. The pile of warm horse manure in the barnyard sat steaming in the cold morning air.

  Pete hung his shovel on a wooden peg that jutted out from the main support beam in the barn, and he bit the end from a plug of Redman as he looked at the gelding in his stall.

  “I don’t rightly know,” he said. “He ain’t as high-strung as most thoroughbreds; I guess he might make a good pleasure horse for somebody. Providing that leg heals proper.”

  “He won’t fetch much of a price as a trail horse,” Chrissie said. She was still in the stall, leaning on the shovel, her chin on her hand.

  “I expect not. A thousand, fifteen hundred maybe. A week ago I might’ve got eight or ten thousand for him. But that’s the racing game.”

  “Well … that’s my fault,” Chrissie said.

  “I want you to stop that talk,” Pete told her. “You got fouled. Hell, even the commission backs that up. Otherwise, you’d have got a month for slugging Romano.”