by Pete Dexter
“So now you scared him, he isn’t a big shot anymore,” Peter says. “Let him have his bag.”
Michael cocks his head. “Tell me something,” he says. “Since when do you decide? This ain’t your horse, and it ain’t your business.”
There is a noise then, Jimmy Measles behind the stall, choking. His stomach empties and the noise keeps coming, like an engine that won’t start.
The sun moves deeper into the stall. Peter takes a quick glance at the horse. The flies have settled on him now, in the eyes and nose, making electric noises as they touch each other and move furiously into the air.
And then resettle, glistening green.
Michael is staring at the kid veterinarian. Suddenly he smiles. “Tell you what,” he says, pointing to the horse. “Why don’t youse kiss and make up?”
The noise from behind the stall stops as suddenly as it begins, and a moment later Jimmy Measles reappears, red-eyed, his mouth and chin glistening spit. “I haven’t been feeling too good,” he says.
“How you feeling, Doc?” Michael says to the veterinarian.
The vet takes half a step backwards and bumps into Leonard.
He says, “It’s Mr. Flood, right?”
Michael nods.
“Be careful with that shit, Mr. Flood,” he says, pointing at the syringe in Michael’s hand. “You got a cut or something and that gets in it, it doesn’t take much.”
Michael holds the syringe up for a closer look. “Like one drop of this …” he says.
“It gets in your bloodstream,” the veterinarian says, “yeah.” Peter can see the veterinarian beginning to feel more comfortable, moving on to a subject which is not kissing the horse.
Michael says, “And so you put this into a person …”
“They’d be dead before you could get it half in,” he says.
Michael nods, looking at the syringe. “How much of this you got?” he says.
“How much you need?”
Michael drops the syringe to his side and turns to Peter. “See? I like this guy better already.”
The veterinarian nods, a small nod, and tries to step backwards again, and bumps again into Leonard Crawley.
“I can have this one right here?” Michael says.
“All you want,” he says.
“And you don’t mind I take this.”
The veterinarian shakes his head. “No sir.”
Michael hands the bag to Leonard, who returns it to the veterinarian. “Now,” Michael says, “was there something you was going to ask me?”
“Just about taking care of your horse,” the veterinarian says. “If you wanted me to take care of him for you.”
Michael nods. “I would appreciate that very much.”
“No problem,” he says. “I’ll do it right now.”
“In a minute,” Michael says. “First, what do you say let’s kiss him good-bye.”
Peter walks back to the limo to wait.
Jimmy Measles tries to go with him, but Michael stops him with a look.
Peter climbs into the front seat of the car and closes his eyes. Ten minutes later a door opens and Michael gets in next to him, still carrying the syringe. The limo barely moves under his weight. Leonard and Jimmy Measles climb into the back.
There is a smell that comes in with them, part Jimmy Measles, part Leonard.
Leonard says, “Michael, man, that was fucking sick.” A compliment from the heart.
There is no answer and the men sit in silence another ten minutes, Michael wanting to see for himself that someone takes care of the horse.
The tractor is an old John Deere diesel, and the man driving could be a jockey, except he has no quickness at all. Michael watches him, thinking he is maybe a jockey who got kicked in the head.
He backs the tractor to a spot a few feet in front of the stall, and turns it off. The engine shakes and black smoke coughs out of the exhaust pipe. He climbs down awkwardly, stumbling as his feet hit the ground. He takes off his cap and scratches his head, as if he cannot remember what he is there to do. He looks at the horse then, and seems to remember.
He unwraps the chain from the winch in back and loops the end around the animal’s neck and then, using the winch, drags Helen’s Dream out of the stall, digging a wide, shallow track in the dirt. When the animal has cleared the stall, the man takes the chain off the neck and ties it to the hind feet.
He climbs back on the tractor and forces it into gear. He looks back once as he starts, and then, satisfied, hits the throttle and pulls his load off in the direction of the large green barn at the far end of the stables.
The men in the limousine watch the horse go, its huge head bouncing on bumps in the ground. They watch until the tractor turns a wide corner at the end of the line of stalls and disappears, and the horse follows it out of sight.
Peter opens the door and steps out of the car. In the back, Jimmy Measles opens his door too.
Leonard stops him, pinning his throat to the seat. Michael turns in his seat, showing him the needle.
“I can’t breathe,” he says.
“Never mind you can breathe,” Michael says. “You think about what you just seen.”
Jimmy Measles nods as much as Leonard’s hand will let him.
“I’m not fucking with you now,” Michael says. “I will put this motherfucker into your neck, you understand what I’m saying? I give you the same dose they gave the horse, the same place, and then I’m done with you the same way I’m done with him. One way or the other, it’s settled, and I don’t have you around anymore to remind me.”
He looks at Leonard. “Leave him go,” he says.
Jimmy Measles’s neck is white in the places where Leonard held him, and then the places begin to glow. He reaches into his pocket for his atomizer. Leonard leans across his lap and pushes the door to the limo open.
As soon as Jimmy has his feet on the ground, Leonard shuts the door, and a few seconds later, spitting dirt, the limo makes a U-turn and heads out the gate.
Peter sits in the Buick and watches Jimmy Measles coming toward him, walking now in the smooth path the horse left in the ground, between the tire marks of the John Deere tractor.
He is holding his neck and sweating, but he isn’t hurt. He stops for a moment, sticks the atomizer in his mouth and pumps half a dozen times, and then, after he has put the thing back in his pocket, he looks up and catches Peter watching him.
Peter closes his eyes, not to see him smile.
“I got to see my wife,” Jimmy says.
“You don’t mind my saying so, it wouldn’t hurt, you know, you brushed your teeth and changed clothes first.”
They are crossing lanes on Race Track Circle, headed back into the city. “You smell like they scared you inside out,” Peter says.
He sees Jimmy wrap his fingers around the door handle; he is thinking of jumping from the car. Peter knows there are people who will jump from a car as a gesture, and he knows Jimmy Measles is one of them. “Which way is it?” he says.
Grace’s sister lives in a 200-acre development of new two-story homes in Cherry Hill. The houses have small yards with newly planted grass and frail, dead-looking trees held in place with wires attached to stakes in the ground.
There are signs on the street warning thieves that the neighborhood participates in Community Watch, and signs warning drivers of deaf children. Jimmy Measles reads the street signs out loud, and the names—Valley Hollow, Meadowview, Pineview—take on an eerie quality coming out of his mouth.
The street they want is called Charity Lane. They see Prayer Circle and Hope Street, so they are in the right area. “What do these places go for, anyway?” Peter says. “A couple of hundred?”
Jimmy Measles stares at the street signs, looking grim and serious. It is the only time Peter can remember when he’s wanted to hear him talk, and he won’t.
“People pay a couple of hundred to get out of the city,” Peter says, “they get a tree they got to hold up with ropes.
What’s the point?”
Jimmy Measles spots the house across the street. “There,” he says. There is a Volvo station wagon parked in the driveway, and a tiny bicycle with training wheels wedged behind it against the back tire.
“Two kids, right?” Peter says. “The big one puts the little one’s bicycle underneath the car, and the mother runs over it and the little one gets blamed.”
The car stops. Jimmy sits still, looking across the street. He shakes his head. “There’s only one kid,” he says.
“He does that to his own stuff?”
Jimmy Measles’s voice is a monotone. “They got him going to a child psychologist.…”
Without another word, he gets out of the car and crosses the street. He knocks on the door, and a long time later it opens, Grace herself. Peter sees her from the car, sees her robe take the shape of her hip and thigh as she leans forward to hold open the door.
They speak and then Jimmy walks in; the door closes. Peter settles into his seat to wait, and, to get Jimmy’s wife off his mind, he thinks of Michael making the kid veterinarian at the track kiss a dead horse on the mouth.
It is getting out of hand.
Jimmy Measles is inside the house half an hour.
When he comes out his head is tucked into his shoulders, as if he were walking into a cold wind, and his hands are rolled into fists. As if they might be cold too. He crosses the lawn and the street without looking up.
Peter follows him all the way to the car door, trying to see how it has gone, and then, as the door opens, he notices Grace.
She is standing in the front window watching the yard, like somebody’s mother. She moves away as the door opens and Jimmy ducks into the car, back into the room behind the glass, and then the curtains close and she is gone.
Jimmy sticks the atomizer into his mouth and pumps. Peter backs out of Charity Lane, taking one last look at the bicycle behind the Volvo’s tire. He wouldn’t mind being here to see Grace’s sister back over it.
He picks his way back to Route 70, turning into half a dozen cul-de-sacs and dead ends before he finds it. Jimmy stares out the window without offering directions, and sucks at his atomizer.
“Tell me something, Pally,” he says when they are finally on the way back to the city, “how long’s Michael been fucking my wife?”
“Michael isn’t fucking your wife,” he says.
“All right, how long was he fucking my wife?”
Peter looks away, Jimmy Measles stares at him across the seat. “The first thing you got to ask yourself,” Peter says, “why would she tell you something like that?”
“The first thing I ask myself, how long was it going on?”
“He’s fucking her, but she isn’t fucking him.…”
“That morning they shot him walking across the street, he was coming from the house.”
“And you were coming from Atlantic City, where you got blown twice. So he gets blown, you get blown, and then he gets shot in the whang. How much justice you think there is in this world?”
They are back on the bridge before Jimmy Measles says anything else. “I think of all that fucking food I had Otto fix him and bring to the hospital.”
Peter drives the car.
“All those nights we went to the fights,” Jimmy Measles says, “you know Michael was with her then?”
Peter doesn’t answer.
There is a small park on the other side of the bridge with a large, modern sculpture in the middle of it, welcoming tourists to Philadelphia. To natives, it looks like something the city council might have built itself.
“Let me out.”
Peter pulls the car to the curb and waits. Jimmy sits with his hands folded over his atomizer.
Peter sees him building to something reckless now, probably to make up for whatever he did in front of his wife.
“Listen,” Peter says, “the truth is, I thought maybe you knew it too. Maybe you and Grace had one of those understandings.”
He turns off the car and waits, wishing he’d never taken him to see her.
“I treated you both like friends,” Jimmy says.
Peter takes his time. “The only way Michael knows something isn’t his, Jimmy,” he says, “he don’t want it anymore.”
Jimmy sits with one foot inside the car, one foot out. He seems to be looking into the tops of the trees in the park, or perhaps at the sculpture, deciding what to do. Peter doesn’t hurry him.
“I ought to send him a fucking bill,” he says finally. “All the food I sent him at the hospital, all the drinks I gave him at my place. I ought to send him a bill for all the fucking carrots I bought for his horse.…”
He gets out then without shutting the door, and sets out across the park.
Peter waits a few minutes, until he sees him on the sidewalk on the other side, walking up Vine Street toward center city. Then he starts the car and drives himself home and goes to bed thinking of the horse, of the unnatural stretch of its hind legs as it followed the chain and the tractor in the direction of the barn.
There is a call that afternoon from the Italians, the ones who own the streets.
Peter puts the phone against his ear and listens.
“We hear a story today,” the man says, “comes from the Cherry Hill police, something which occurred at the track.”
Peter waits.
“A veterinarian, one Dr. Walter Craddock, D.V.M., has filed a complaint against your brother.”
“My cousin,” Peter says. “He’s my cousin.”
“Right, your cousin. He forced a track veterinarian to kiss a deceased horse.”
The line is quiet; Peter hears his own breath against the receiver.
“What does that tell you about your business?” the man says. “How much time you got before this thing you have falls apart, somebody takes it away from you?”
Peter doesn’t answer.
“You there?” the man says.
“Yeah.”
“You want some help, saving what you got, maybe we can work something out,” he says. “One way or the other, though, Michael ain’t long for where he is.”
And then he hangs up.
An hour later, the phone rings again. Peter hears the wheeze before he hears the voice.
“You seen Michael?”
The sound of the atomizer.
“You tell him what I said about him and my wife?”
Peter says, “Jimmy, I left you off, I came home and took a nap. This is when I sleep.”
“I called before, the phone was busy.”
“That was some guy didn’t have anything to do with you,” he says.
“What guy?”
“Somebody you don’t know.”
There is a pause on the line, then, “Don’t tell him I know what he did, Pally.”
Peter sits up in bed and puts his feet on the floor.
“Pally?”
“I wasn’t going to,” he says.
Jimmy Measles is quiet.
Peter waits him out, waits for him half a minute, and then he hears the sound of the atomizer and the phone goes dead.
Two days later, Jimmy Measles is sitting in a cab outside Peter’s house. He hasn’t shaved or slept. His hair is collected in damp, oily clumps, and pieces of it fall across his forehead.
As Peter comes out, Jimmy opens the door and his shoes drop one at a time on the street beneath it. Loafers, no socks. He stands up slowly and turns to the driver, handing him everything in his pocket.
The driver accepts what Jimmy has given him, sorts it, turning the bills so they all face the same way, and then offers some of it back.
“Keep it,” Jimmy says.
“I don’t want your fucking driver’s license,” the driver says, but Jimmy doesn’t seem to hear him. He crosses the street without checking for traffic.
“How long you been waitin’ out here?” Peter says. “You should of come up.”
Jimmy Measles looks up and down the street. “I got to talk to you,”
he says.
Peter starts up the street, toward his car. “You didn’t have to wait outside,” he says.
Jimmy takes a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, lights it, and then lets it hang from the corner of his mouth. They walk slowly, Peter with his hands in his pockets, Jimmy Measles falling in next to him.
He feels safer now that he is walking.
“I thought of something, takes care of this problem I got with Michael,” he says, looking at the street.
Peter rubs his eyes.
“The thing is, I got an aunt left me a piece of property.”
Peter stops walking.
“Three acres in the middle of San Jose, California.”
It is quiet a moment. He looks up at Peter. “You ever been in San Jose?”
“Yeah, and I got to tell you Jimmy, somebody stole your land. There aren’t three acres of anything there.”
“It’s there,” he says. “Some kind of a trust I couldn’t break until I was forty-five years old. I forgot I had it.”
Peter begins to walk again; Jimmy Measles follows him, squinting through a line of smoke.
“So what do you think?” Jimmy says.
“You mean about the trust from your aunt that you just remembered?”
They look at each other.
Jimmy says, “Let Michael know for me the money’s coming for me …”
Peter shakes his head. “You’re going to run, Jimmy,” he says, “don’t tell him ahead of time.”
“I swear to God …”
Peter walks to his car, Jimmy Measles right behind him. He stops when Peter stops, and waits while Peter finds the key to the door. Peter gets in the car, and Jimmy leans close to the window until their faces, separated by glass, are half a foot apart. Peter rolls down the window.
“You want a ride?”
“Talk to Michael for me, Pally?”
“Get in the fucking car, let me take you home.”
Jimmy Measles sits with his head against the cushion of the seat, the cigarette still hanging from his bottom lip, staring at the ceiling of the Buick. He is sweating, and he works for his breath.
“What if it turns out the San Jose thing is real?” he says. He is still looking at the ceiling, dreaming.
Peter turns north on Broad Street, headed in the direction of center city.