Free Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon Page B

never bandaged a horse and they got horses outrun the word of God. When you run against them horses you better have your tap-dancing shoes on.
    Well—you’re talking about somebody’s fifty-thousand-dollar horse. We’ve got nothing but cripples.
    You think stakes horses is sound? He shook his head at the pure foolishness of her. Naturally he was thinking of Platonic, and his feet that used to remind Medicine Ed of gluing together two broken China soup plates from little pieces, him and the horseshoer worked on them so much—them two front feet, coming up to the Seashell, was one long bellyache, probably worth two weeks in the butcher shop (Sinai Hospital) all by theyselves. Stake horses like all the rest, he added.
    So how you do you
know
what to do?
    You follow custom, young woman. They is no
I know, he know
, like what you talking bout. Until you have put some years in thisbusiness, you watch the old grooms and do like they do.
    That doesn’t sound very scientific to me, she say.
    I tell you a secret, horse racing is not no science. Some of em tries to make it a science, with the drugs and the chemicals and that, but ma’ fact it’s more like a religion. It’s a clouded thing. You can’t see through it. It come down to a person’s beliefs. One person believe this and the other person believe that. It’s like the National Baptists bandage and the Southern Baptists use liniment, you see what I’m trying to say? Nobody exactly know.
    His cheeks ached under his eyes—she made him talk too much, made him say peculiar things he was sorry later that he give up. He slipped around the corner of the shedrow and faded away from her behind wagons and buildings in a certain way he had learned to do long ago, before he had his good job with Gus Zeno.
    This was when he missed having his old crushed Winnebago there on the shedrow. It was the one thing Mrs. Zeno had said from the start he could keep—it taken phone calls from certain people, Mr. Two-Tie, Jim Hamm, Kidstuff, to remind her of other sums and bonuses that was decent and customary, under the circumstances, but the Winnebago she didn’t even care to look at no more. Only, Suitcase Smithers gave him twenty-four hours, if he wanted it, to haul that thing off the backside. The young fool say he’d take care of it. That was part of they deal. He had it towed round to the trailer park behind the Horseman’s Motel, a couple blocks from the back gate. They put the Winnebago way in the rear, out of sight, in a clump of serviceberry bushes. They run an extension cable from the young fool’s trailer all the way to his trailer. And that was how Medicine Ed fell into this job.
    It would have been too raggedy an outfit even for Ed to work for if Hansel’s horses was still thrown to four separate barns inevery corner of the backside and everybody at the Mound laughing at him. But already the morning after the young fool rolled in, Suitcase come round personally and asked him this and that, where he from and how he be getting along, and then he let him have Zeno’s old stalls in Barn Z.
    That’s Pelter?
the
Pelter? Roland Hickok’s Pelter? Suitcase say. He’s peering in the dark stall. The young fool make like he ain’t hear. He turn on his heel and hang up a tangle of shanks and halters and shaken out some chain, but finally he say Mr. Hickok have sold him Pelter in a private deal, and Suitcase say, Well I’ll be damned, because he know Mr. Hickok won’t sell the West Virginia-bred winner of the Popcorn Stakes and the Little Blue Ridge to just anyone. So maybe the young fool’s price go up a little bit just then.
    Medicine Ed himself had to admit that Pelter looked good, almost too good—ain’t he heard that the once-upon-a-time Darkesville Stalker broke down bad in the stretch only a short while back? And they was that red bomber too that Zeno had claimed, and which had already win one for fifteen hundred in Charles Town, so the young fool must be doing something