Lord of Misrule (23 page)

Walk! Maggie said. I can’t even stand. I weigh a thousand pounds.

Joe Dale laughed delightedly. Hey, he said, a thousand pounds. Just like a horse. So I guess Biggy got the right bottle, for once. You know Biggy ain’t the swiftest.

Maggie stared at him. I believe you’re telling me you gave me goddamn acepromazine.

Joe Dale just smiled.

But why? Why would you do a thing like that?

Not that I gave you anything—I ain’t owning up to anything like that—but when I entertain a lady I like her to be completely in my hands. If you follow me.

I was already in your hands, Maggie said.

Yeah, but I don’t like her to be running off as soon as she gets a little spooked. Until she has a chance to think about everything
I can do for her. I want her to say, Joe Dale, I’m glad I hooked up with you whatever happens. Better in than out. Better mine than somebody else’s. And I got to tell you the truth, baby, I don’t see nobody else out there for you.

What do you have in mind? Maggie said.

Unh, unh, unh, that’s just what I don’t want—questions. No questions. What I want from you is your okay: whatever happens, Joe Dale. See? You’re still in charge. If I was going to harm you, would I ask your permission? You got to show a little faith, baby. I promise you won’t get hurt. You got your horse back, ain’t it? You’re going home in one piece. You’re going home as good as you got here. In fact, better. You don’t have to tell nobody nothing about what happened over here. All’s you have to say is: okay, Joe Dale, I’m with you. And I’m going to make you as happy as you made me.

He crossed his arms and waited.

My name isn’t baby.

How can I call you Maggie? he said. Maggie. It sounds like an old bag.

Maggie stopped fighting the urge to flop back in the straw. She lay down and stared up at the rough gray rafters, which were gloomy but thick and tightly joined and not even old. She had been right, the place was solid as a cavalry stockade. But there could be no question of staying here and doing what he wanted. She was quite sure that if she said no, he would hurt her, and if she said yes, he would hurt her very much.

She felt something familiar and pleasant at her knees—Pelter nosing through straw between her sprawled legs. Without having to raise her arm she could press the side of a hand against his nostril and feel its balmy gust.

When do I get the papers on my horse? Maggie asked.

No questions, Joe Dale smiled.

No papers no deal.

This ain’t a deal, Joe Dale said. It’s a gift. I don’t think you get that yet.

No, I don’t get it.

Well, I want you to stay here and think about it until you get it. I don’t want you to go away and have to remember you blew your luck. I don’t want you saying to yourself I could have had my horse back,
and
I could have had Joe Dale Bigg for a friend, just by putting my trust in him for one cotton-picking day. All I had to do was give my—

There was a commotion outside—some kind of distant shouting, probably an animal running loose—and Joe Dale, who already had his hand on the latch, went out in no hurry and shut the gate behind him. Maggie heard the outside bolt slide across and, through the crack at the bottom of the gate, watched his feet clap away on the earth floor. The crack was only a crack. On the other hand the high gate had no lock. Joe Dale was that sure she wouldn’t even try to get away.

He presumed correctly. She tried to feel angry, for anger might pump up her muscles, but anger seemed to need a body to conceive of itself at all. If she could jimmy herself up the planking inch by inch, she could reach over and unlatch the latch at the top of the gate, but then what? Drag herself out of the barn on her belly? How far would she get like that?

And he had even left her with her horse. He had a nerve to figure her for such a klutz—but he was right, she had never been much of a rider and in all her life had never sat a horse bareback, let alone Pelter, a racehorse, without even reins and a bit in his mouth. Still, think of it: Maggie on Pelter. No, she greatly doubted she could get her body up off the ground and onto the
horse, never mind stay on the horse once she got there.

She had to try, of course. Nowadays you couldn’t just let some Black Bart tie you to the railroad tracks and walk away and leave you. The age demanded signs of a struggle even from a corpse. And there was another way of looking at this: the drug made gravity her friend, so that all at once the earth and her body loved each other dearly and fought to be together and worked as one against the forces that might part them. She had always thought that if she knew what was worth hanging onto in life, nothing could shake her off. She’d be a saint, or at least a nun, if she knew God. She’d be Griselda if she could find a man she could live with for more than twelve months. But so far she’d been spared any such moorings. Now she had a feeling that if she could once get the horse under her, she would stick to Pelter like a tattoo—nothing could get her off him.

Once in a pet store she had brushed inattentively by a cage and the small monkey inside had snatched her by a shirt button and would not let go. She pulled backwards. The monkey had eyed her with all the grave desperation of his boredom and twisted the button tighter. She pried at the monkey’s fingers with her fingers, but it was clear she would have to do him some violence, break his little fingers one by one, to get free. She finally had to rip apart her blouse. She didn’t mind. She was moved. She knew she was that monkey.

That was how she dragged herself up the gate, thinking of the monkey. She felt along the rough planks for pits and cracks with her bony prehensile fingers, leaning her bag of bones against them and squeezing herself up. She ended up lying across the top of the gate with one shoe on, one shoe off, her naked foot shakily stuffed in the water bucket. She kissed the air for Pelter and he came over.

She slung an arm and leg over him. He stiffened and danced away a little. Whoa, whoa, she begged him. One hand still clung to the top of the gate while her foot weakly pried at his long back end. The gap widened and she sagged into the hole. Come back, come back, come back, come back. Suddenly, for no reason, he stepped under her. She was on. Okay, papa, here goes. Her hand eased over the far side of the planking, turned the bolt, opened the latch, and the gate swung open.

Pelter stared forward a moment. He took in the wide open shedrow, the dark wooded slope all around, men shouting in the yard below and, straight ahead, the unobstructed sweep of light to the dirt road. He felt Maggie’s warm weight on his back and the strange freedom of his head, and burst into a gallop. She sank her fingers in his mane, tried to spread her dead body all over his neck and shoulders like a cape. When he ran flat out she found he was level as a table. It was easy. She felt sure that if he didn’t prop or swerve she would never fall off. She wasn’t sure why he ran so fast, whether it was mischief or exuberance, whether he knew how little it would take to lose her, whether he schemed on losing her, but for the moment she felt the same strand of light drawing them both on. The long dirt driveway cut across the hillside for a short way, its red naked ruts lined with filmy ice like waxed paper. Pelter made a great racket galloping over the skeletal puddles but didn’t slip. Maggie was elated. A wonderful thing had happened. She was numb and disconnected but still she was making a getaway on Pelter. She could already see the open meadows tilting steeply up towards the county road. She was riding a racehorse out of the hands of a storybook villain. Her luck had changed. She would make it.

Then suddenly the road dipped down to a white metal ranchhouse
before it bent back up to the high meadows and the road to town. Somehow she held on as they barreled downhill. In front of the long one-story building, plain as a shoebox, a yellow taxicab was idling. In the cold bottomland it floated on a little cloud of its own exhaust like a chicken on a platter. The cabdriver, a lanky old fellow in a gray felt baseball jacket, sat smoking a cigarette in the open window. As Maggie and Pelter galloped alongside, the window behind his head was suddenly cram full of the pointed ears and broad muzzle of a wildly barking German shepherd. Pelter veered away, back towards the wooded hill, and Maggie rolled off his back, rolled over and over through the frozen puddles and came to a stop against the taxicab. She lay on her back blinking up at the furious dog. On second glance the animal looked old and blind and as shocked to find itself carrying on this way as Pelter had been. It looked down into Maggie’s upturned face, seemed abashed, as though Maggie had yelled at it, pinned its grizzled ears, and ducked its grizzled jaw back into the cab.

The storm door of the metal ranchhouse wheezed open and an elderly gentleman in a rumpled misbuttoned camel’s hair overcoat and a—Maggie blinked, could that be two bow ties, one black, one striped?—came limping out. His face was deeply grooved. He was bag-bellied and thin-legged and his wooly eyebrows tilted up to a point in the middle of his forehead that was philosophical and almost comically sad. He was a lacrimose and remarkable-looking fellow, and Maggie saw at once two other even more remarkable things about him: he was waving a big blue squarish gun and he looked oddly familiar—suddenly she recognized the face in the backseat of Joe Dale’s car from long ago.
You are the picture of your lovely mother at twenty—but for the hair
, he had said. Now he said: Margaret, my dear, are you
ill? You look terrible. If Joe Dale Bigg has laid a hand on you, I swear to god he’s a dead man.

Uncle Rudy? she said.

Was he Uncle Rudy? It was a question of cosmic significance. He took off his black felt hat with the green silk puggree band and held it to his chest, his sad eyebrows joined in the middle and he opened his mouth to answer. Before he could speak, Biggy burst out the aluminum door behind him and caught him a great swipe in the back of the neck. The gun went off. Biggy jumped back with a blank look, feeling his chest for holes. Maggie felt crumbs of frozen dirt bite her in the face. The dog filled the window again, barking crazily. The cabbie ducked down out of sight. Uncle Rudy, if he was Uncle Rudy, stumbled hard into the unpainted railing of the rough little stoop, bounced off and whirled around in a stiff crouch, with the blue gun smoking in front of him. Maggie noticed how small, white and hairless the hand on the gun was—a woman’s plump hand in some old painting, without bones.

That’s enough, Elizabeth. Quiet down. Biggy, get back in the house. I ain’t going to hurt you. Your old man don’t need you, you colly? Nobody gets hurt, because here’s my niece. You lied in my face, you dumb jerk, but I got no beef with you. You don’t got the brains to know what you did. Now get in the house. He made little pushing movements with the gun.

Biggy sniffled with rage but backed away into the ranchhouse, feeling behind him for the storm door.

Whaddaya expect of a pityfull retard like that, Uncle Rudy said. Come on, I’ll take you home, Margaret.

She was crawling over the frozen bumpy ground toward the back door of the taxicab. The door handle looked as high as a weathervane.

What about the horse? He’s running loose, she said hopelessly. It was all too complex. She had no strength to chase the horse, D’Ambrisi owned the horse Joe Dale Bigg had paid for the horse, and the horse had disappeared up the long dirt driveway into the woods.

You get your horse back tonight, my dear. Guaranteed. I took care of it already. Now let’s get the hell out of here, Margaret. We don’t want trouble. I come to take you home.

Maggie stared up at him in amazement. She had a funny feeling it was all true—that she would get her horse back tonight even though Pelter had never really been
her horse
, he was Tommy’s—that mountains had been moved for her by this seedy fastidious gangster for unfathomable reasons, mysterious threadlike reasons that all looped around to the unseen and long ago.

Did Joe Dale harm you in any way? the man with two bow ties asked, gazing delicately off to the left of her and up into the woods. A hood’s gun dangled down by his side but he had the introverted and long-suffering face of a
melamid
, one who teaches the rude young and gets little thanks for it.

No, she replied, thinking that, as long as she was rescued, she honestly couldn’t say just what Joe Dale Bigg had been up to, and besides, if she kept her mouth shut, she might still end up with the foaling papers for Pelter, all clean and legal and everything. So she might be glad to have been tied up with Joe Dale Bigg after all.

You’re getting your horse back, my dear. Certain important people, I don’t mean me, looked into it for you. You believe me?

Maggie nodded.

And do me a favor. From now on, don’t take nutting else from Joe Dale Bigg. Not a ride home. Not a french fry. Nutting. You colly?

Maggie nodded.

Not a nickel.
Babkes
, he clarified. You need money? Listen carefully, my dear. Lord of Misrule, he whispered loudly. Lord of Misrule, Margaret. Memorize that name.

T
HE DESIRE TO BLOW
Joe Dale Bigg’s head off with the Browning 9mm was so unreasonable yet so vast that Two-Tie was sorry to see him come running out of the near barn towards his cab. In a mood like this, things could come apart. Two-Tie had the aging loan shark’s strong disinclination to die in jail, which would be the likely result of giving in to a passing fit of temper and emptying the Browning into Joe Dale’s white forehead. In the can, Two-Tie knew, if his ticker went bad, he would have to pull strings to get a ten-minute appointment with some state-issue sawbones from Pakistan who probably spoke less English than a Mexican groom, and besides, Two-Tie had people depending on him, and he had Elizabeth.