Stormy Weather Page 16

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Borrow one.”

  Jeanine went back and stood resting against the door of the truck, her hat in her hand. She didn’t know what to do, here at the point of handing the horse over to somebody else, or not. In this dark auction yard, the empty livestock pens like a construction of mazes and the sun going down in Comanche County; abandon him in this unknown place to strangers.

  Ross Everett came and sat down on the running board. Jeanine listened to the rasp as he struck a match to his cigarette. She lifted her head. The flame lit his face for three seconds and then he shook it out.

  Jeanine bit her lower lip. “He hasn’t been warmed up.”

  Ross Everett sat without saying anything for a while and then took off his hat and turned it in his hands. As if he were searching out holes in the felt or maybe wondering if it were time to buy a new one.

  “Jeanine, I know you need the money.”

  “Maybe I changed my mind,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “But you want to see what he can do,” said Jeanine.

  “That’s about it.”

  Jeanine regarded the low hills sliding off into the horizon and the dark coming on. She was the only woman at this gathering of men, their trucks and trailers and horses and saddles, in the unlighted spread of buildings and pens. The rails and bars threw crisscross shadows against one another in faint grids.

  “Who are all these people?” said Jeanine.

  “Some fellows got up a match race. My gray stud against a Midnight colt. Fellow that owns him is from Abilene.”

  “Are other people going to race?”

  “Depends.” He sat with his forearms on his thighs and watched the other men and their horses intently. “On what the competition looks like.” He stood up. “There’s a flat place out there where they run. Ride with me. I’ll get a kid to ride your horse out there. That will warm him up.”

  A procession of trucks and trailers and horses moved away from the auction barn. Dust sifted up into the air. It was right at sundown and the sparse grasses of the open field were lit at the tips by the level rays. Whoever owned the field was burning piles of cedar bulldozed out of the pastures, and in the distance, black shadows moved around the great fires.

  He said, “Don’t get attached to a horse, Jeanine.”

  “You can say that. He’s the only one I got.”

  “We always outlive them. Except the last one.”

  On the seat of Everett’s Dodge truck things slid forward onto the floorboard and she reached out to catch them; a thermometer case and a pair of pliers and a work glove and a brown bottle that said sulfonate. A 1932 license plate. Welding bills for a calf chute, a bill for Perpetual Care from the Comanche Cemetery Association. The radio talked on and on in a dim murmur.

  “Just throw that stuff on the floor,” he said, but she placed them all back on the seat beside her and held them as the truck crashed over ruts and stones. He drove with one hand. His large body took up all of his seat and part of hers. He reached up and turned the radio off. The light of the flames shone on the flat planes of his face and his dark blue eyes. He stared straight ahead.

  They came to a plowed straightaway. On either side of the track midwinter mesquite trees twisted black and leafless in the last rich remains of the sun and the burning brush-piles of cedar blazed up in volcanic reds. The burnt needles drifted in small ashy fragments like soft hail. He parked, and they both got out.

  Everett shook out a bag of hydrated lime into a long score line. A man in a plaid coat paced off the 440 yards of the track with the other two men beside him. They hung flags from mesquite branches at the 200-, the 220-, and 440-yard points.

  “What’s his name?” she asked Everett. His frantic, dancing gray stallion was up against a dark stallion from Abilene.

  “Kat Tracks,” he said. “You remember his mother from when I raced in East Texas. She Kitty. That’s her colt.”

  Everett turned and took the reins of his gray horse. The dappled stallion was edgy with the crackling flames and the prospect of a race and the noisy trucks.

  The man from Abilene came up to Everett. In his bow tie, he had the appearance of a banker. He said, “What will you agree to?”

  “Quarter mile,” said Everett. “And a dollar a yard.”

  They lined up the two stallions at the score line. Cactus pads shone like red plates out in the brush. Everett slapped the jockey’s butt and told him to just stay aboard and don’t do anything cute. Don’t pull him down at the end, run him in a circle or you’ll get your head taken off on a mesquite. A man dropped his hat. A loud shout of men’s deep voices sent the horses out into the burning fields. The jockeys were carried into the weaving shadows at thirty miles an hour, balanced on out-of-control horses, tearing through the mesquite and pasture grasses afire with the sunset light. They charged through the blue smoke from the cedar fires and in the last stretch Kat Tracks caught up and passed the brown and flew through the flagger’s arc a length ahead.

  Jeanine listened to the talk around her, saw a great amount of money counted out in twenties and fifties. Everett collected his money from the man in the suit and bright yellow bow tie. He rolled the four one-hundred-dollar bills and four tens into a tube and shoved them into his watch pocket. He walked back to her. “Are you racing that horse or not?”

  “Yes.” In the distance she heard the frail whistling of blue quail scattering over the pasture, disturbed by the burning cedar and the noise of the race. The flames had risen so high that they detached at the top, sending off red scarves that evaporated against the night sky. “I’ll match up against you.”

  “What will you agree to?”

  “Quarter mile. Four hundred and forty yards,” she said. She hesitated. “And a hundred dollars.”

  “That’s a hundred dollars you don’t have.”

  “If I lose, take it off Smoky’s price.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “If I buy him.”

  Smoky Joe became nearly uncontrollable when he saw the track in front of him. He danced and lashed out. Jeanine stood with her hand out, as if to help, or to ward him off. Ross Everett threw a borrowed saddlecloth and racing saddle on Smoky Joe and cinched up tight, both the undergirth and the overgirth. He held out his hand, down low, to the jockey. He said, “Up you go.” The jockey cocked one leg behind him and Everett took hold of his ankle and threw him up into the saddle, lightly, as if he were releasing a bird into the air.

  “Just bust him loose with all you got,” said Jeanine. She danced back and forth with Smoky’s erratic plunging. She held out her hand against his shoulder. “I think he’ll outlast Everett’s horse. He’s run already. And only use that bat once. He won’t stand for it a second time. He’ll put you on the ground. You get one hit and that’s all.”

  Down at the far end the flagger stood with a white flour sack in his hand. A truck caught him in its bright flood lamps.

  “Lap and tap,” said Everett. “Cola y cola.”

  Jeanine left Smoky Joe and his jockey at the score line and ran past the line of pickups and cars parked along the track until she was two-thirds of the way down. She scrambled up onto the running board of a Chevrolet pickup.

  She watched as the two horses were ridden away from the track. Their shadows poured away from their bodies and their legs danced in the headlights. As soon as their tails were even at the starting line, the man at the score line dropped his hat on the ground for the go signal, the horses were wrenched around to face the track just as Smoky Joe reared, losing seconds, and Kat Tracks burst away with his jockey nearly up between his ears.

  Smoky leaped forward like a trout and sprang after him with his heavy dark legs reaching and striking and reaching again, as if he would snatch the dirt track up under him and then fling it away behind.

  He stretched out his heavy neck and caught up to Kat Tracks within five seconds, his nose at the gray’s tail. The men among the twisted cast-iron limbs of the me
squites began to shout. Jeanine held on to her hat as if it would fly away. The horses tore through the angular beams of headlights, between ranks of yelling men. They flew through the light of the brushfires. Dust foamed up behind them and the great engines of their bodies.

  Smoky streaked past the eighth-of-a-mile flag; the gray had now used up his sprint and didn’t have much left in him. Smoky came boring through the air, his nostrils wide open. He passed the gray and poured himself down the dusty brown track, hurling up dirt and gravel into Kat Tracks’s face and his head pounded up and down like a walking beam.

  Kat Tracks’s jockey swung his bat, and even though the gray stallion had used up his air he reached out and gave it more, and within three long seconds he was again at Smoky’s tail and crowding him and then he passed him.

  They streaked past Jeanine with Smoky’s pounding head at the gray stallion’s stirrup and the jockey brought the bat down once again, for the second time, and instead of pitching his jockey into the air, Smoky poured out yet more speed as if he possessed an endless reservoir of it. He flattened out. Jeanine’s entire life narrowed and reduced itself to one horse flying runaway down a dirt track carrying a hundred dollars on a wild bet. It seemed to Jeanine she could hear the percussion of his enormous heart. He was born to run, under any name and on any track whatever.

  Smoky Joe caught up to the gray stallion, and then passed him, running through the flaggers’ streaming arc. The jockey stood up in the stirrups and Jeanine realized they had won. She sat down heavily on the truck’s running board with her head in her hands.

  The jockey ran Smoky Joe straight on, into the dark field. After a while the jockey managed to get him turned back. Smoky began to slow and pitched one or two bucks out of triumph and joy. The jockey jumped to the ground and landed on his feet while men crowded around to grab Smoky’s reins.

  Everett came up to her with a pocket watch in his hand. It was a big old nickel-plated railroad ticker.

  He said, “He did it in twenty-three point five seconds.”

  “Twenty-three five?”

  “Near as I can tell.”

  The businessman from Abilene, with his suit and yellow bow tie, came up. He held up his stopwatch.

  “Twenty-three two,” he said. “Miss, I heard that horse was for sale.”

  “Yes, he is,” said Ross. “And I’m buying him.”

  Jeanine stepped forward to take Smoky’s reins. “Ain’t you a rocket?” she said. She patted his neck and he stared around eagerly, with both ears cocked up, and his eyes were bright. He lashed his tail and bounced at the ends of the reins, his great heated body streaked with sweat.

  Everett took his wallet from his rear pocket and opened it and handed her a hundred-dollar bill. She had won it in twenty-three seconds. She reached out for the sweet, easy money. She took the bill and folded it over with one hand and tucked it into the watch pocket of her jeans.

  “He’s all right,” said Everett. Jeanine smiled up at him and gripped Smoky’s reins. “Will you run him again?” He looked down at her and said, “The man with that Midnight colt will take you on.”

  “No,” said Jeanine. She smoothed her hands over Smoky Joe’s eyes, but he was in no mood to be petted. He threw his heavy, hard-boned head and the eggbutt snaffle bit jangled and flashed. “No, I’ll stay with what I have. I can’t afford to lose.”

  At the sale barn Jeanine walked Smoky Joe out of his sweat. She walked him back and forth in the stockyard. She held his lead rope and they paced between the sale barn and the pens. The dark horse’s breath slowed and he stepped along lightly. He tried to take Jeanine’s hat from her head and she took it back from him and patted him on his great round jaw. Jeanine kept on walking Smoky Joe long after he cooled out.

  A man came past her. “Miss, there’s a stock tank there in back of the auction barn. There’s a pole light on.”

  She watched Smoky Joe drink his fill. The horse’s ears flicked slightly with every swallow, as if they were part of some tiny, hidden, intricate pumping system in his head. Then she led him back to the trailer. Truck motors started up, headlights made a long snaking line out of the stockyards.

  Ross came toward her.

  “Load him up,” Everett said. “And follow me back to my place. I’ll write you out a bill of sale.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  He drove his truck and trailer at top speed, the gray stallion’s tail streaming over the trailer gate and glowing bright red in the taillights. At the top of one of the great rises she saw the lights of Comanche in the distance and the faint sparks of distant houses. After a good many miles she saw him turn into a ranch gate. She slowed and turned in. After a mile or a mile and a half she came to a stone house shaded by two massive live oaks. Behind the house was a large barn and a shearing platform with a fire burning on its level concrete table. Several men sat around the fire and threw chunks of wood into it. The fan of the windmill rolled with a continual knocking clank where one of the blades was missing.

  He came out to greet her, closing the doors of the house behind him. He walked out from beneath the shadow of the galleria with his canvas coat collar turned up. A loose spur rang on the stony ground.

  She said, “I got to turn Smoky out.”

  “My boy will do that.” He turned toward the house and shouted, “Innis? Innis? Get out here and turn this woman’s horse in the lot.” He sat and watched as his young son held on to Joe’s lead rope and walked him toward the barn and the corrals. “Come in.” He stood up. “I got a windmill crew here. I guess they already ate. The cook’s here.”

  She followed him to the house and they walked across the galleria floor and its veined limestones and through a set of double doors. It was hard to shut the doors. He had to slam them twice.

  “Sit down,” he said. “While I get this fire going. What can I offer you?” Jeanine sat on a hard-backed chair in front of the fire. Everett sat down and unbuckled his spurs and pulled them from his boots. He dropped them on the telephone stand. Jeanine realized he was not wearing his spurs in the house as a gesture of politeness, and that if there wasn’t a woman around he and his son and the cook and the boys probably wore their spurs at the dining room table and hooked them on the chair rungs and caught them in the curtains. They probably wore them in the bathtub and in bed as far as she knew.

  “You know, I think I would drink a bottle of beer.”

  Everett said, “All right.” He went to the kitchen door and called to the cook.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get this young woman a bottle of beer.”

  The cook came out again with the beer. His face sparkled with a week’s growth of red beard and he was covered with a heavy rubber apron as if he had been scalding turkeys.

  He said, “Them boys is finished up and ate. I guess I’ll go on back.”

  “Well, tell them I’d come out but I got business.”

  The cook rubbed his whiskery chin. “I’ll do it,” he said. Then he went back in the kitchen.

  Everett found a bottle of whiskey inside a glass-fronted bookcase. He took up a coffee cup from the dining room table and blew the dust out of it and then poured two fingers of whiskey into it. He opened her beer bottle on his belt buckle and handed it to her. He sat down again. He tipped up the coffee cup to drink his whiskey and then stood up and quietly choked and threw the rest of the whiskey into the fire. He threw the cup after it and it smashed against the grate. He went and took the bottle out of the bookcase and dropped it into a wastebasket.

  “I’ll find out who did that,” he said. Jeanine moved her earrings from one hand to another. She heard voices outside; men laughing. The broken cup was full of blue flames where it held some dangerous, low-grade fuel.

  “I’m not afraid of you, Mr. Everett,” she said.

  “I know you’re not. Where are you staying tonight?”

  “Here,” Jeanine said. “You’ve got to have a spare room around here somewhere. Unless that whole windmill crew is coming in here.
I know you got a spare room.”

  “You’d better drive on into Ranger. To save your reputation.” He sat back and took in her short, thatched hair of various sunburnt colors and her slight body and her nervous hands.

  “I don’t have one,” she said.

  “I’d be happy to tell you the name of a tourist court in Ranger. I’ll give you five dollars to go there and get a cabin.”

  “No. Why should I drive on tonight? I’m wore out.”

  He said, “You’re a hard woman, Jeanine.”

  “Make it ten and I’ll think about it.”

  He bit his lower lip to keep from laughing at her. “You’re out of my price range.” He held out a callused hand. “Let’s see your paper.”

  She handed him the bill of sale from her tweed jacket pocket and he sat down at a long dining room table with it. Jeanine walked around the room. On the walls were photographs of him and his wife at about the time Jeanine had seen her last, it must have been five or six years ago. His wife wore a sheer dress with a tiny collar and a straw hat. The picture had been taken in the bright daylight so that the shadows were very black and her eyes were squinted against the sun. Ross Everett and his wife stood at a train station with suitcases around them and a freight wagon behind them. It was the San Angelo station because Jeanine could see the sign. They were going somewhere and they were happy and they smiled at whoever was taking the picture. Jeanine turned away.

  “Your paper is good,” he said.

  He laid the bill of sale in front of him that said Smoky Joe Hancock, a two-year-old stallion, had been sold by Manuel Benavides to John C. Stoddard March 9, 1935. Height 15.2 hands. Color: seal. Markings: none. By Joe Hancock by John Wilkins by Peter McCue. Out of a Rainy Day mare on the Waggoner ranch.

  He took another cigarette and set it on fire with a metal lighter. He squinted at her over the smoke.

  “You don’t want to sell him.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve kind of got to like him.” She sat down on the other side of the long table and crossed one blue-jean leg over the other, then uncrossed them again and nervously twisted her hands on her bony kneecaps. “Now all of a sudden.”