Stormy Weather Page 4

  Often the owners of these quarter-mile racehorses asked someone to take a picture of themselves with their champion in the front yard of the farmhouse or the ranch house. There are a great many of these photographs. Somebody to one side is flapping a blanket or opening an umbrella to get the horse to point his ears, to look alert, like the speed demon he is supposed to be. Many of these horses came to be famous in later years but in the Kodak Brownie photographs they always look commonplace and sleepy. If they did not win at the races they would go home and start herding cattle and dragging wood to the chuck fire.

  In one photo the man named Ross Everett who had rescued Jeanine at the blacksmith shop sits on the running board of a new 1934 Chevrolet truck with his western hat at the back of his head. A roan pony stands tied to the slats of the stock rack. The pony was for his boy, who was only five, and Jeanine was in a state of acute anguish over the fact that a five-year-old kid got his own horse and she, at seventeen, had none. And so she told Ross Everett that she used to like horses but she didn’t anymore, she was looking for something that talked and could sit in a seat at the movie theater and eat popcorn with its hands. She said it to be smart like Claudette Colbert. She really wanted to live in the country, married to a banker, where she could have Thoroughbreds and Airedales.

  He said, Well, that happens. He had come all the way from Abilene to East Texas to write down the names of famous winning racing quarter-mile horses in a notebook. They had to be stallions. He thought they ought to be a recognized breed, but some people regarded them as being in the same category as bathtub gin. He was off to Louisiana here in a minute to deal with the coonasses. Ross Everett smiled into the lens and sat on the running board and pushed his hat to the back of his head and gazed out into the black-and-white world of the potential photograph. Mrs. Everett was very pretty. She stared down with deep concentration into the viewfinder to see that Jeanine had also appeared in one corner of it, looking back at her sister Mayme, her thin arms going in different directions and so she clicked it twice. She told Jeanine’s mother she would send her one of the pictures. In the background a train is taking on water.

  Jack Stoddard stands holding the halter of Smoky Joe Hancock, in a pressed shirt and khaki pants. The horse is blocky and ungraceful and no amount of blanket-flapping or umbrella-opening will make him look like he could cover 440 yards in twenty-four seconds. His forelock is short and frazzled, his ears flop each to one side. But Jack Stoddard has his hat brim snapped over his face and a cigar between his fingers.

  This is how people wanted to appear to the world and to later generations. It is how they wished to be remembered no matter how hard life might have become. They framed themselves in their best clothes and with their most valuable possessions and smiled. Hard times and collapsing marriages and heavy labor was nobody’s business but their own.

  Nobody’s business

  Nobody’s dirty business

  Nobody’s business but my own

  Nobody’s business, how my little baby treats me

  Nobody’s business but my own

  So Bukka White sang in the East Texas juke joints in Houston, Conroe, Corsicana. He held the neck of the Dobro guitar like a baseball bat and wrung blues from it, and after him came Ma Rainey’s Jazz Hounds. Her father lifted the dice in his fist and all eyes were on him alone until he threw and then the magical moment would be gone. The singer turned to the old 1920s song “Red Cap Porter” and the dice moved with infinite slowness around the circle from hand to hand, manic little creatures with dots for brains. He either bought or won Smoky Joe in 1935, when they moved to Conroe, north of Houston. The Conroe field lay inside the skirts of drifting fog that came from the Gulf of Mexico. He drove up to the house shouting for them all to come out, they’d got their first real racehorse.

  Smoky Joe Hancock was an own son of Old Joe Hancock, a dark two-year-old stud with a savage temper and horizontal scars on his legs where he had fought his way out of a trailer. He had stubby ears and a head like a shoe box. His mane sprayed up from his stallion’s crest in short, wild tassels. He was known as a hard case. He threw his jockeys. The seller admitted he had once run off a railless brush track and tore through several barbecue tables and a line of people with plates in their hands like a boxy rocket before they could get him to the score line. It was why her father got him for a low price.

  Bea said, “He’s had a hard life.” Little Bea had been assigned the novel Black Beauty in her reading circle at the new Conroe Elementary and the book had taken a fixed grip on her imagination with its injustices and its defiantly happy ending. “He used to belong to a rich widow, and she had her coachman to beat him with a bumbershoot until he fell to his knees.” Bea paused and then said, in a low, dramatic voice, “On the hard cobblestones.”

  He turned the stallion into an abandoned brick yard down the street from their rent house in Conroe. Smoky was both defiant and lonely in all the trash thrown into the oil-soaked earth, alert and suspicious among the broken toilet seats and greasy paper sacks.

  “We got our speed demon, Jeanine,” he said. “We’re going to run the competition around here into the ground. He’s blazing hell at four hundred forty yards. He just needs a hit over the head once in a while.” He said this carelessly, as if it were a matter easily taken care of with a two-by-four or a section of pipe. “I think he can stay the longer distances. We can win some money with this horse, Pistol. And I don’t want you trying to handle him. He’s dangerous.”

  “I don’t want to take care of him,” said Jeanine. “I got other things to do.” The brightly printed flour sacks were hard to get. Many other girls had figured out the place to get them was at the bakery or the big hotels in Conroe, where bakers and cooks emptied them and then piled them in the storage rooms. It took six flour sacks to make a dress, and you had to get them all matched. Jeanine was at present working on collecting a pattern in aqua and dark blue. It had a risqué slash of red in it.

  She tossed her new short bob in a way that made the blunt ends fly up. She made astonished gestures at herself in the cracked mirror.

  “Either that or he starves.”

  Whatever her father took up it was bound to go wrong. They would move and leave Smoky Joe behind somewhere. They would lose him. He would die of sleeping sickness, he would break one of his legs. It was the same for everybody. The feeling that things were falling apart and that nothing worked. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had been killed over in Louisiana, a hundred miles away, and for ten cents you could see the tan Ford V-8 shot all to pieces, it still had blood and the stain of brains all over the seats. The baby son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered. Not even rich and famous people could protect themselves from alien beings creeping in during the dark hours and destroying your life. Even if you were virtuous. Nothing was stable or safe. Even the earth itself lifted into the sky of the high plains of Texas and Oklahoma and blew into dust storms as thick as airborne petroleum.

  Jeanine had a sample tube of lipstick in a harsh red and with it she made herself several new kinds of lips. She was interested in young men. Young men were attracted by good hair and open-toed shoes with inch-and-a-half heels and dresses with the new drooping shawl collars, fall fashions of 1934. They wanted to go places and see things; you could see a demonstration of how they faked the play-by-play ball games in front of the Conroe radio station, where a man knocked two pencils together to imitate a base hit. That was free. Play ball! the announcer shouted into the microphone, and a man spun crowd sounds on a record. She understood that her father slid from addiction to addiction, a shape changer, and nothing would hold him in one place for long, and she knew this with a childlike combination of disillusion and forgiveness.

  “Horse, you are in for a hard life,” she said. “Hope you like potato peelings.”

  She and her father walked away and Jeanine turned back to see the dark horse staring after her with his ears up, a frightened young stallion only two years old, who did not know wher
e he was nor who had bought him nor what was to happen to him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At a race outside of Conroe they made the immense sum of fifty dollars. Jeanine began to think of how she could keep a part of it for herself. Her Conroe High School boyfriend had just abandoned her in favor of a girl who was from Conroe and had always been from Conroe. Jeanine did not know why. This was the worst of it. And in other places people had no idea why. On the front page of the Conroe newspaper that morning was a strange photograph of the cold black dust storm of April 1935 that turned the Texas and Kansas plains dark as night and buried entire towns. Nobody knew how to stop them, or why there was a Depression. But Jeanine felt at the moment reasonably safe in Conroe on the humid coast and with twenty-five dollars in bet money.

  Smoky Joe ran against a Houston horse named Cherokee Chief.

  “Don’t hit him,” Jeanine said to the jockey. “Maybe once. But you don’t get a second.” She bent forward and held up one finger in case he was deaf or had water in his ears. “One hit is all you get. Okay?” Her body was slim and taut beneath the cotton dress, she had the gestural vocabulary of a mime.

  “I know how to ride,” said the boy. “I ain’t taking advice from no girl.”

  Jeanine hurried out among the crowd of men to place bets. She wrapped dollar bills around her fingers for each separate bet, she was intent and serious. She was one of the few women in the crowd but she carried herself in this male territory as if she had special privileges. Smoky beat Cherokee chief by a length. Jeanine had clambered up the stock racks of a truck with the agility of a monkey to watch the dark stallion charge past the finish-line flag as if he were running down some enemy and suddenly it was a wonderful day and here she was in her new dress in the aqua print. She jumped down and ran to the horse’s owner to collect her money. He wore a suit and tie and his hat tipped back, he had a new Buick and a drink in his hand. His car radio was on. The announcer was talking about the first overnight transcontinental flights and that Generalissimo Franco was besieging Barcelona.

  “Hand it over,” she said. The young man laughed and held it high above his head where she couldn’t reach it.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Jeanine Stoddard,” she said. She took hold of his tie and said in a gangbuster’s voice, “Hand over that money, Pretty Boy, and nobody gets hurt.”

  He held it out to her in his closed fist. She unbent his fingers and took the bills, and then stepped forward and kissed him.

  She turned into the hot, noisy evening before it faded into dark, before her father came looking for her. Before he found out she had been kissing strange men. The amount of money she gripped in her hand made her nervous. Andrew Jackson’s severe, drawn face stared up from out of the center of the wadded banknotes. She was afraid she might lose it or it would be stolen, or her father would come lurching out from behind a trailer and demand it from her. Then he would gamble it away on a blanket somewhere. It would end up as a wad in somebody else’s pocket.

  Jeanine ducked around the late-model Ford truck and trailer and nearly crashed into a man. Half his face was white and frothy. At first she thought he had a white beard or was foaming at the mouth, and then realized he was shaving. He grasped her arm to stop her.

  “Here! You’re going to make me cut my throat,” he said. He shook soap from a straight razor and then let go of her. He looked at himself in the truck’s side mirror and continued shaving.

  It was Ross Everett.

  He said, “Is this the entire extent of your social life, Jeanine?” he said. “Kissing strange drunks at horse races?”

  Jeanine’s face flushed hot. “Mr. Everett. You were spying on me.”

  “Well, it was kind of public.” He ran the razor down his cheek and flung off the foam. “I was just standing here shaving.”

  “You’re going to tell my father.”

  “I expect he’s too goddamned busy.”

  Jeanine put out her hand. “Don’t tell him. I mean it.” She kicked one of his tires. “You are going to tell him. Because you are rotten and evil.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s developed some fatherly instincts all of a sudden. What would he do about it?”

  “He’ll tell my mother.”

  “Good.” He stroked the razor down his throat and slung the soap to the ground. He rinsed the blade and folded it. Splashed water onto his face from a basin sitting on the fender, wiped his face on a pink towel. His face was made up of flat planes, a square mouth. “At least you’ve got one functioning parent.”

  “Promise me you won’t tell him.”

  “All right.” In his trailer, a gray horse shifted and tapped at the floor planks. “Well, since I just won my race, I’d probably better cut my luck and go.”

  “Good.” She walked over to the trailer and peered in through the slats. A gray mare, tidy and clean-legged, shifted around on the floorboards. On the fender was a good racing saddle and a saddlecloth. “What have you got? This is a good-looking horse.”

  “Her name is She Kitty.” Ross Everett buttoned up his shirt. “Out of Krazy Kat. I got her when old man Carruthers gave up. They shot all his cattle. He was overstocked.” He wiped at his face with one hand. “You wouldn’t know him. Your dad drags y’all around the world like a gypsy.”

  “I know it.”

  “You quit school?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve been on the road three days from Comanche and made three races. Bought a horse. Now I have to go to a meeting in Houston and then head home again. My wife puts up with all this and the least I can do is show up shaved.” He pulled a tie around his neck under his collar and tied it. “In all three races this is the first time I’ve seen a young girl running around by herself. If your daddy wanted a boy to be his running buddy he should go hire one.”

  She wasn’t his running buddy, she was his daughter, but on the other hand there he was, dancing openly with the woman in the green satin dress in the middle of the afternoon in front of everybody like a fool.

  So she said, “He couldn’t keep me away if he tried.”

  Everett took out a sack of tobacco and rolled a cigarette, lit it with a silver lighter that flared up several inches. He squinted his eyes against it. “You all still got that Reo Speed Wagon with the trailer?”

  “Yes. And I’m going to drive it home.”

  “I guess so. You started hauling him home drunk when you were nine.” Smoke from the cigarette ran up his nose. “And so you better do it.” He flicked off the ashes. “I’ll keep my mouth shut this time.”

  She found her father at a tailgate. It was a new truck and he was dancing around in the grass to the music of “Dinah” from a car radio. Dancing with the woman in a stained green satin dress and heavy lipstick.

  “Well, Jeanine girl. How’s my Pistol?” He was somewhat drunk. “Let’s see what we won.”

  The woman said, “Does she always collect your winnings for you?”

  “Yeah,” her father said. “She’s my buddy.” He took the thirty-five dollars from Jeanine. She kept fifteen in her pocket and said nothing. He handed her a cold Dr Pepper. “That’s so you don’t tell.”

  “You’re cute,” the woman said.

  Jeanine ignored her. “I’m going on home, Dad,” she said. She tipped up the ice-cold soda and it tasted like heaven.

  “Go on. Tell your mother that I’m dickering about a new horse or something. Make something up. You’re good at making things up.” He laughed and wiped back the lock of dark hair that fell in his face. “I’m going to be gone for two weeks here in a little bit. Up to Central Texas. So I got to stay on her good side.”

  She ran to find Smoky Joe and came upon the jockey walking the dark stallion back and forth in the grove of pines, along with other handlers and their horses. Smoky’s veins stood out in his hide like coursing liquid ropes and he was still sucking air hard into his wide nostrils. She threw the soda bottle into the shadows.

  “All right, I
’ll get him home now.” She took the lead line and patted the stallion’s hot neck. “Ain’t you a rocket?” She held out a five-dollar bill to the jockey.

  He snatched at it and jammed the five in his pocket. “I should charge double for riding this goddamned maniac,” he said.

  “You’re going to hell for swearing,” she said.

  “So’s your old man.”

  She led Smoky back to the trailer. He jumped in and turned to face backward. He always rode backward, he wanted to see anything that might come up on him from behind. When she pulled the headlight knob the interior light came on and shone in her face and when she lifted her head she saw Ross Everett with one boot up on his running board watching her. She leaned out of the window and stuck her tongue out at him. He blew smoke from his nose and lifted a hand.

  CHAPTER SIX

  At the time when Jack Stoddard was felled by sour gas, few men were required to wear gas masks on the rigs. It was impossible to wear the bulky gear and get work done because it was hard to see or talk and your own breath fogged up in your faceplate. The occurrence of hydrogen sulfide gas is capricious and unpredictable. H2S is often precipitated out of the oil itself and gathers in half-filled tanks, seeps into low places beneath the rigs, suddenly appears along with the sweet gas without warning. H2S knocks people unconscious at 300 parts per million, and at 600 ppm it is fatal within seconds. It has a distinctive taint of rotten eggs, but the gas also has the peculiar quality of destroying the sense of smell after the first inhalation, as if designed by the devil himself to draw the unsuspecting into the odorless world of brain injury and death.

  Two other freight haulers brought Jack Stoddard home in the back of a truck, in a warm September rain straight off the Gulf of Mexico. He was laid out on a stack of blankets somebody had scooped up from the engine shack; he was covered with a slicker and awash in rainwater. His face and hands had the obscure, blue color of someone with cyanide poisoning, and although he was not conscious he floundered with vague shifting movements. Jeanine and Mayme told Bea to stop crying, he was going to be all right.