“We got horse doctors in Missippi though,” Ned said. “Send for one of them to come and see if he been doped.”
“Sure, sure,” Butch said. “Only, why did you give it to him a day ahead of the race? to see if it would work?”
“That’s right,” Ned said. “If I give him nothing. Which I aint. Which if you knows horses, you already knows.”
“Sure, sure,” Butch said again. “I don’t interfere with no man’s business secrets—providing they work. Is this horse going to run like that again tomorrow? I dont mean once: I mean three times.”
“He dont need to do it but twice,” Ned said. “All right,” Butch said. “Twice. Is he?”
“Ask Mr Hogganbeck there if he hadn’t better do it twice,” Ned said.
“I aint asking Mr Sugar Boy,” Butch said. “I’m asking you,
“I can make him do it twice,” Ned said. “Fair enough,” Butch said. “In fact, if all you got is three more doses, I wouldn’t even risk but twice. Then if he misses the second one, you can use the last one to get back to Missippi on.”
“I done thought of that too,” Ned said. “Walk him back to the barn,” he said to me. “Cool him out. Then we’ll bath him.”
Butch watched that too, some of it. We went back to the barn and untacked and Lycurgus brought a bucket and a rag and Lycurgus washed him down and dried him with crokersacks before stalling and feeding him—or had started to. Because Butch said, “Here, boy, run to the house and set the water bucket and some sugar on the front gallery. Me and Mr Sugar Boy are going to have a toddy.” Though Lycurgus didn’t move until Uncle Par-sham said, “Go.” He went then, Boon and Butch following. Uncle Parsham stood at the door of the stable, watching them (Butch, that is)—a lean dramatic old man all black-and-white: black pants, white shirt, black face and hat behind the white hair and moustache and imperial. “Law,” he said. He said it calmly, with cold and detached contempt.
“A man that never had nothing in it nohow, one of them little badges goes to his head so fast it makes yourn swim too,” Ned said. “Except it aint the badge so much as that pistol, that likely all the time he was a little boy, he wanted to tote, only he knowed all the time that soon as he got big enough to own one, the law wouldn’t let him tote it. Now with that badge too, he dont run no risk of being throwed in jail and having it took away from him; he can still be a little boy in spite of he had to grow up. The risk is, that pistol gonter stay on that little boy mind just so long before some day it gonter shoot at something alive before he even knowed he aimed to.” Then Lycurgus came back.
“They waiting for you,” he told me. “The surrey.”
“It’s back from town already?” I said. “It never went to town,” Lycurgus said. “It never left. She been setting in it out there with that-ere boy all the time, waiting for you all. She say to come on.”
“Wait,” Ned said. I stopped; I still had the riding-sock on and I thought he meant that. But he was looking at me. “You gonter start running into folks now.”
“What folks?” I said.
“That word has done got around to. About this race.”
“How got around?” I said.
“How do word ever get around?” he said. “It dont need no messenger; all it needs is two horses that can run to be inside the same ten miles of each other. How you reckon that Law got here? maybe smelled that white girl four or five miles away like a dog? I know; maybe I hoped like Boon Hogganbeck still believes: that we could get these two horses together here all nice and private and run that race, win or lose, and me and you and him could either go back home or go any other place we wants providing it’s longer away than Boss Priest’s arm. But not now. You gonter start meeting them from now on. And tomorrow they gonter be thicker still.”
“You mean we can run the race?”
“We go to now. Maybe we been had to ever since me and Boon realised that Boss had done took his hand off of that automobile for as long as twenty-four hours. But now we sho got to run it.”
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Nothing. I’m just telling you so you wont be surprised in advance. All we got to do is get them two horses on the same track and pointed the same way and you just set there on Lightning and do like I tell you. Go on, now, before they start hollering for you.”
Chapter 9
Ned was right. I mean, about word already being around. There was nothing wrong with my hand when Everbe took the riding-sock off. I mean, it felt like anybody’s hand would that had been cut across the inside of the fingers yesterday. I dont believe it had bled any more even when I used it against Lightning’s pulling this afternoon. But not Everbe. So we stopped at the doctor’s first, about a mile this side of town. Butch knew him, knew where but I dont know how Everbe persuaded him to take us there— nagged him or threatened or promised or maybe just did it like a big girl trout so busy fussing around a child trout that she quit behaving like there was any such thing in existence as a barbed hook with a line fastened to it and so the fisherman had to do something even if only getting rid of the child trout. Or maybe it was not Everbe but rather the empty flask, since the next drink would have to be at the hotel in Parsham. Because as I came around the house, Lycurgus’s mother was standing at the edge of the gallery holding a sugar bowl and a water bucket with a gourd dipper and Butch and Boon were just draining the two tumblers and Lycurgus was just picking up the empty flask where Butch had flung it into a rosebush.
So Butch took us to the doctor’s—a little once-white house in a little yard filled with the kind of rank-growing rank-smelling dusty flowers that bloom in the late summer and fall, a fat iron-gray woman in pince-nez like a retired schoolteacher who even fifteen years later still hated eight-year-old children, who came to the door and looked at us once (Ned was right) and said back into the house, “It’s them race-horse folks,” and turned and vanished toward the back, Butch moving right on in before she could turn, jovial, already welcome—or somebody damn well better see that he was (the badge again, you see; wearing it or simply being known to possess one, to enter any house in any other manner would be not a mere individual betrayal but a caste betrayal and debasement)—saying,
“Howdy, Doc; got a patient for you,” to an iron-gray man too if the tobacco juice were bleached out of his unshaven whiskers, in a white shirt like Ned’s but not as clean, and a black coat too with a long streak of day before yesterday’s egg on it, who looked and smelled like something also, except it wasn’t just alcohol, or anyway all alcohol. “Me and Brother Hogganbeck will wait in the parlor,” Butch said. “Dont bother; I know where the bottle’s at. Dont worry about Doc,” he said to Boon. “He dont hardly ever touch whiskey unless he just has to. The law allows him one shot of ether as a part of the cure for every patient that can show blood or a broken bone. If it’s just a little old cut or broke finger or ripped hide like this, Doc divides the treatment with the patient: he drinks all the ether and lets the patient have all the cure. Haw haw haw. This way.”
So Butch and Boon went that way, and Everbe and I (you have doubtless noticed that nobody had missed Otis yet. We got out of the surrey; it appeared to be Butch’s; anyway he was driving it; there had been some delay at Uncle Parsham’s while Butch tried to persuade, then cajole, then force Everbe to get in the front seat with him, which she foiled by getting into the back seat and holding me by one arm and holding Otis in the surrey with her other hand, until Boon got in front with Butch—and first Butch, then the rest of us were somehow inside the doctor’s hall but nobody remembered Otis at that moment) followed the doctor into another room containing a horsehair sofa with a dirty pillow and a wadded quilt on it, and a roll-top desk cluttered with medicine bottles and more of them on the mantel beneath which the ashes of last winter’s final fire had not yet been disturbed, and a washstand with a bowl and pitcher and a chamber pot that somebody hadn’t emptied yet either in one corner and a shotgun in the other; and if Mother had been there his fingernails would hav
e touched no scratch belonging to her, let alone four cut fingers, and evidently Everbe agreed with her; she —Everbe—said, “I’ll unwrap it,” and did so. I said the hand was all right. The doctor looked at it through his steel-rimmed spectacles.
“What did you put on it?” he said. Everbe told him. I know what it is now. The doctor looked at her. “How’d you happen to have that handy?” he said. Then he lifted the spectacles by one corner and looked at her again and said, “Oh.” Then he said, “Well, well,” and lowered the spectacles again and—yes he did: it was a sigh—said, “I aint been to Memphis in thirty-five years,” and stood there a minute and—I tell you, it was a sigh—said, “Yes. Thirty-five years,” and said, “If I was you I wouldn’t do anything to it. Just bandage it again.” Yes, exactly like Mother: he got the bandage out but she put it on. “You the boy going to ride that horse tomorrow?” he said. “Yes,” Everbe said.
“Beat that Linscomb horse this time, durn him.”
“We’ll try,” Everbe said. “How much do we owe you?” ‘“Nothing,” he said. “You already cured it. Just beat that durn Linscomb horse tomorrow.”
“I want to pay you something for looking at it,” Everbe said. “For telling us it’s all right.”
“No,” he said. He looked at her: the old man’s eyes behind the spectacles magnified yet unfocusable, as irreparable as eggs, until you would think they couldn’t possibly grasp and hold anything as recent as me and Everbe. “Yes,” Everbe said. “What is it?”
“Maybe if you had a extra handkerchief or something …” He said: “Yes, thirty-five years. I had one once, when I was a young man, thirty, thirty-five years ago. Then I got married, and it …” He said, “Yes. Thirty-five years.”
“Oh,” Everbe said. She turned her back to us and bent over; her skirts rustled; it was not long; they rustled again and she turned back. “Here,” she said. It was a garter. “Beat that durn horse!” he said. “Beat him! You can do it!” Now we heard the voices—voice, that is, Butch’s— loud in the little hall before we got there:
“What do you know? Sugar Boy wont take a drink no more. All boys together, give and take, never snatch without whistling first, and now he insults me.” He stood grinning at Boon, triumphant, daring. Boon looked really dangerous now. Like Ned (all of us) he was worn out for sleep too. But all the load Ned had to carry was the horse; Everbe and Butch’s badge were not his burden. “Huh, boy?” Butch said; now he was going to slap Boon on the back again with that jovial force which was just a little too hard but not quite.
“Dont do it again,” Boon said. Butch stopped. He didn’t retract the motion: he just stopped it, grinning at Boon.
“My name’s Mister Lovemaiden,” he said. “But call me Butch.”
After a while Boon said, “Lovemaiden.”
“Butch,” Butch said.
After a while Boon said, “Butch.”
“That’s a boy,” Butch said. He said to Everbe: “Doc fix you up all right? Maybe I ought to warned you about Doc. They claim when he was a young squirt fifty-sixty years ago, he would a had one snatch at your drawers before he even tipped his hat.”
“Come on,” Boon said. “You paid him?”
“Yes,” Everbe said. We went outside. And that was when somebody said, Where is Otis? No, it was Everbe of course; she just looked once and said, “Otis!” quite loud, strong, not to say urgent, not to say alarmed and desperate.
“Dont tell me he’s scared of horses even tied to a gatepost,” Butch said.
“Come on,” Boon said. “He’s just gone on ahead; he ‘aint got nowhere else to go. We’ll pick him up.”
“But why?” Everbe said. “Why didn’t he—”
“How do I know?” Boon said. “Maybe he’s right.” He meant Butch. Then he meant Otis: “For all he’s as knowing a little son of a bitch as ever come out of Arkansas or Missippi either for that matter, he’s still a arrant coward. Come on.” So we got in the surrey and went on to town. Except that I was on Everbe’s side about Otis; when you couldn’t see him was a good time to be already wondering where he was and why. I never saw anybody lose public confidence as fast as he could; he would have had a hard time now finding anybody in this surrey to take him to another zoo or anywhere else. And it wasn’t going to be much longer before he couldn’t have found anybody in Parsham either.
Only we didn’t overtake him. He wasn’t on the road all the way to the hotel. And Ned was wrong. I mean about the increasing swarm of horse-race devotees we would be running into from now on. Maybe I had expected to mid the entire hotel veranda lined with them, waiting for us and watching us arrive. If so, I was wrong; there was nobody there at all. In the winter of course, during the quail season and especially during the two weeks of the National Trials, it would be different. But in those days, unlike London, Parsham had no summer season; people went elsewhere: to water or mountains: Raleigh, near Memphis, or luka not far away in Mississippi, or to the Ozarks or Cumberlands. (Nor, for that matter, does it have one now, nor indeed does any place else, either winter or summer season; there are no seasons at all any more, with interiors artificially contrived at sixty degrees in summer and ninety degrees in winter, so that mossbacked recidivists like me must go outside in summer to escape cold and in winter to escape heat; including the automobiles also which once were mere economic necessities but are now social ones, the moment already here when, if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize, solidify: there are too many of us; humanity will destroy itself not by fission but by another beginning with f which is a verb-active also as well as a conditional state; I wont see it but you may: a law compelled and enforced by dire and frantic social—not Economic: social—desperation permitting a woman but one child as she is now permitted but one husband.)
But in winter of course (as now), it was different, with the quail season and the Grand National Trials, with the rich money of oil and wheat barons from Wall Street and Chicago and Saskatchewan, and the fine dogs with pedigrees more jealous than princes, and the fine breeding and training kennels only minutes away now by automobile —Red Banks and Michigan City and La Grange and Ger-mantown, and the names—Colonel Linscomb, whose horse (we assumed) we were going to race against tomorrow, and Horace Lytle and George Peyton as magical among bird-dog people as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb among baseball aficionados, and Mr Jim Avant from Hickory Flat and Mr Paul Rainey just a few miles down Colonel Sartoris’s railroad toward Jefferson—hound men both, who (I suppose) among these mere pedigreed pointers and setters, called themselves slumming; the vast rambling hotel booming then, staffed and elegant, the very air itself suave and murmurous with money, littered with colored ribbons and cluttered with silver cups.
But there was nobody there now, the quiet street empty with May dust (it was after six now; Parsham would be at home eating—or preparing to eat—supper), vacant even of Otis, though he could be, probably was, inside. And what was even more surprising, to me anyway, vacant also of Butch. He simply drove us up to the door and put us out and drove away, pausing only long enough to give Ev-erbe one hard jeering leer and Boon one hard leering jeer, if anything a little harder than Everbe’s, saying, “Dont worry, boy, I’ll be back. If you got any business still hanging, better get it unhung before I get back or something might get tore,” and drove away. So apparently he also had somewhere he had to be occasionally: a home; I was still ignorant and innocent (not as much as I was twenty-four hours ago, but still tainted) but I was on Boon’s side, my loyalty was to him, not to mention to Everbe, and I had assimilated enough (whether I had digested all of it yet or not) since yesterday, to know exactly what I meant when I hoped that maybe he had a wife in it—some innocent ravished out of a convent whose friendless avengeless betrayal would add another charge to the final accounting of his natural ruthless baseness; or better: an ambidextrous harridan who could cope with him by at least recording into his face each one of his countermarital victories. Because probably half the ple
asure he got out of fornication was having it known who the victim was. But I wronged him. He was a bachelor.
But Otis was not inside either: only the single temporary clerk in the half-shrouded lobby and the single temporary waiter flapping his napkin in the door of the completely shrouded dining room save for a single table set out for such anonymous passers-by as we were—so far were, that is. But Otis had not been seen. “I aint wondering so much where he’s at,” Boon said, “as I am about what the hell he has done this time that we aint found out about yet.”
“Nothing!” Everbe said. “He’s just a child!”
“Sure,” Boon said. “Just a little armed child. When he gets big enough to steal—”
“Stop!” Everbe said. “I wont—”
“All right, all right,” Boon said. “Find, then. Find enough money to buy a knife with a six-inch blade in place of that two-inch pocketknife, anybody that turns his back on him had sho enough better be wearing one of them old-time iron union suits like you see in museums. I got to talk to you,” he told her. “Supper’ll be soon, and then we got to meet the train. And that tin-badge stallion will be neighing and prancing back here any time now.” He took her arm. “Come on.”
That was when I had to begin to listen to Boon. I mean, I had to. Everbe compelled it. She wouldn’t even go with him unless I came too. We—they—went to the ladies’ parlor; there wasn’t much time now; we would have to eat supper and then go to the depot to meet Miss Reba. In those days females didn’t run in and out of gentlemen’s rooms in hotels as, I am told, they do now, even wearing, I am told, what the advertisements call the shorts or scan-ties capable of giving women the freedom they need in their fight for freedom; in fact, I had never seen a woman alone in a hotel before (Mother would not have been here without Father) and I remember how I wondered how Everbe without a wedding ring even could have got in. They—the hotels—had what were known as ladies’ parlors, like this one where we now were—a smaller though still more elegant room, most of it likewise shrouded in holland bags. But I was still on Boon’s side; I didn’t pass the doorway but stopped outside, where Everbe could know where I was, within call, even if she couldn’t actually see me. So I heard. Oh yes, listened. I would have listened anyway; I had gone too far by now in sophistication and the facts of life to stop now, just as I had gone too far in stealing automobiles and race horses to quit now. So I could hear them: Everbe; and almost at once she was crying again: