All Hat (17 page)

“You still need stitches,” he told her.

“What am I—some fucking fashion model?”

She moved around the horse, the curry comb in her hand, and as she brushed him out she maintained a steady conversation with the animal, her voice low and soothing.

“You must've had a rough night last night,” Ray said.

“That's it, that's it,” she was saying to the horse. Then: “Last night was nothing. I'll tell you my life story sometime.”

“You will?”

“No, I won't,” she said. “Take it easy now,” she said to the horse.

Ben Houston arrived and X-rayed the gelding's leg right in the stall. Ray wouldn't have thought it possible. Ben developed the pictures in the cube van he'd arrived in and then brought them into the barn. He was wearing what appeared to be his fly-fishing outfit. He'd just come back from the Grand River when he got Pete's call, and he looked like he'd stepped out of an ad for
Field and Stream.

“You're not hoping to run him again?” he said to Pete when he came back with the X rays.

“No, I'd just like to save the animal,” Pete said.

“Well, he's got a hairline fracture in his tibia,” Ben said.

Ray looked into the stall to see Chrissie watching the vet, her eyes narrow and judgmental, as if she was only prepared to accept Ben's prognosis if it was good.

“What's the horse's disposition?” Ben asked then.

“He's pretty quiet,” Pete said.

“I thought so,” Ben said. “Well, we can try him with a walking cast. Keep him in the stall for three or four weeks. He's gotta stay quiet. He'll keep the weight off it himself so long as it's hurting him, and that's good. You just don't want him in a situation where he might spook and throw his weight on it. Outside in the corral, or something like that.”

Chrissie was watching Pete, and it seemed she was holding her breath. Then Pete nodded his head and said, “Let's do it.”

It was ten o'clock when Ben Houston finished. He'd given the gelding a shot of painkiller to keep him settled while he applied the cast, and the horse was practically asleep when he left. Chrissie was in the stall yet. Ray watched as she knelt and gave the finished cast on the horse's leg a critical once-over.

“I could use a drink,” Pete said.

They convinced Chrissie that the gelding would be all right on his own, and went into the house. Pete opened a bottle of rum, Morgan's dark. They drank it with Coke and ice.

“You, know,” Pete said, sipping at his drink. “I had a three-year-old colt at Greenwood, back when they still ran the flats there. Broke his front leg in the backstretch and still won the race by seven lengths.”

Ray looked doubtfully at the old man and then over at Chrissie, who was watching Pete over the brim of her glass.

“Now, you sure his leg was broken?” Ray asked.

“Well, it was a bad sprain anyway,” Pete said, and he took off his hat and tossed it in the corner.

After the first drink Chrissie had a good look at herself; she was still wearing the stale clothes from the night before, and there was dirt from the track in her hair and in her ears and pretty much everywhere else dirt could find a place to stick. She asked Pete if she could use the bathtub, adding, “I don't have any clean clothes.”

“You ain't much smaller than me,” Pete said. “I expect I got something you can wear.”

She was in the tub a long time. Pete had another rum and then said he thought he'd turn in. He looked tired, Ray thought. He'd looked tired a lot lately, but then he'd had kind of a rough day.

The woman in the tub was singing to herself, songs Ray couldn't recognize, hip-hop or dance, some crap like that. Her voice was terrible; Ray was surprised the hound wasn't howling in protest. He poured himself another drink and decided to go check on the horse.

The night was starless and the moon not yet up. Ray didn't bother to turn the porch light on, crossed the barnyard in the pitch blackness, the rum running easily through his veins and through his head.

The gelding was sleeping, leaning three-legged against the side of the stall. Ray set his glass of rum on the top rail and watched the horse's shallow breathing. The animal had had a hard day, but he'd come through it. The gelding had character and a heart as big as a washtub. He was never destined to be anything more than a ten-thousand-dollar claimer, but that didn't change the fact that he had heart. It was something you couldn't take from him.

Ray heard the clang of a tin bucket being kicked and Chrissie cursing loudly. She came into the barn a moment later, hopping on one foot, rubbing her shin with her hand.

“Can you make a little more noise?” Ray asked. “You got a horn you want to blow?”

“Ever hear of turning on a fucking light?”

She was wearing blue jeans and a plaid shirt, each a couple of sizes too big for her. She sat down on a bale of straw inside the door and lifted the pant leg of Pete Culpepper's Wranglers and had a look at her leg. There wasn't a mark that Ray could see. But it was an attractive leg, he was moved to admit.

She tugged the pant leg into place and walked over to have a look at the gelding, took Ray's drink without asking, and had a long pull on it. Her hair was still damp from the bath, and she smelled of Ivory soap. Her lip was swollen from the cut there, but up close Ray could see that it wasn't as bad as he'd thought. She took another drink and then handed the glass over to him.

“He nodded right off,” she said of the horse.

“Yeah,” Ray said. “The drugs help. He might sleep through the night, providing we go easy on the bucket kicking and such.”

She turned to him, leaned against the stall gate. “You don't like me very much, do you?”

“That's not true,” he told her. “I like you just fine.”

“You don't act like it.”

“Well, sometimes I don't know how to act. Or so I've been told.”

He took a drink and then handed the glass over to her. It was nearly empty, and she finished it off.

“I figured you were pissed at me today when I showed up the way I did,” she said.

Ray shrugged, nodded toward the house. “I was afraid you were gonna let him down.”

“Yeah? And what's he to you?”

“He's my friend.”

She set the empty glass on the rail and gingerly touched her forefinger to her lip. Her eyes were soft brown, and they never seemed to be still. Even when she was looking at him, they seemed to be moving constantly, from his eyes to his mouth, his chin to his forehead.

“He's your friend,” she said. “And is that something important to you?”

“These days, it's about the only thing that is.”

She nodded slowly. “I've never had that many friends.”

“I don't know that quantity is the main objective.”

“I guess not.”

She walked over to the corner, where Pete kept his western saddle and other tack. The saddle was a deep brown, of tooled leather and raised stitching, and the cantle and horn were pronounced after the Mexican style. She ran her hand over the leather and then pulled down a couple of blankets from a shelf above the saddle and walked back with them.

“I'm gonna sleep out here,” she told him.

“There's plenty room in the house,” Ray said.

“I'd like to stay with the horse if it's all right. If he wakes up in pain and gets to stomping around, I can settle him maybe. I've slept in plenty of barns. I had a Shetland pony when I was a kid, and my dad used to let me sleep in the stall.”

Ray looked at her in the hand-me-downs and smiled. “I figured you'd be going out on the town in those duds.”

She folded the blankets over the top of the stall wall and turned back to him. “It's not about the clothes. Figured a guy like you would know that.”

Suddenly she stepped close, in her boots almost as tall as him, and she put her hand behind his neck and breathed of him a moment, a curious thing. When he kissed her, he could taste the rum and smell the soap. He kissed her carefully, mindful of the cut on her lip. She turned her head for a better vantage point, slipped her tongue quickly in and then out of his mouth. He put his arms around her and pulled her to him. She was sinewy and strong, and her heart was beating quickly. After several moments she stepped back from him and reached for the blankets.

“I hope you know you're not getting any head,” she told him bluntly. “I got an awful lip on me after that horse rolled me over.”

“You had an awful lip on you before that horse rolled you over,” he said.

But he followed her into the stall.

12

Early Monday morning Jackson trailered Jumping Jack Flash from Woodbine, where he'd been working, to the home farm, where he would get him ready to ship to New York City. The horse had put on a few pounds since the Queen Anne Stakes, and Jackson wanted to monitor his diet. He suspected that the grooms and exercise riders at Woodbine had been spoiling the celebrated steed.

At the farm he put him in the front stall in the main barn. There were a couple of mares in season in the other barn, and Jackson was afraid that the stallion would hurt himself trying to get at them if he was left out in the paddock.

Sonny showed up midmorning, having been gone all night. Jackson wanted to talk to him about shipping the horse, but Sonny got out of his car and limped straight into the house. Jackson didn't see him again for the rest of the day.

Dean and Paulie arrived at noon. Jackson was in the tack room, heating soup on an electric grill. He looked at the pair when they walked in. Paulie wore jeans and a sweatshirt, work boots on his feet, that goofy hat. Dean was decked out in dark dress pants with a crease and a silky-looking shirt, black pointed-toe shoes. Jackson went back to stirring his soup.

“What's up, Jackson?” Dean asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what you got for us today?”

Jackson took a handful of crackers and crumbled them into his soup. “What the hell does it matter what I got for you? You never do anything you're asked anyway.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Dean asked.

“I told you to drop that gray at Fort Erie and then get your asses back here. You show up a day and a half later.”

“It wasn't our fault,” Dean said.

“No?”

“It wasn't our fault they built that big casino in the Falls.” Dean laughed. “We couldn't get by it, Jack.”

“That's real funny, Dean,” Jackson said, and he sat down with his lunch. “You're gonna laugh yourself right out of a job.”

“We're sorry, Jackson,” Paulie said. “We screwed up.”

“I believe you're sorry, Paulie,” Jackson said. “And I doubt it was you that screwed up. It's just that I'm to the point where I can't depend on you anymore.”

He blew on a spoonful of soup, tried it carefully on his tongue. Dean gave Paulie a look, rolling his eyes like a smart-ass kid in the principal's office. Paulie, hands stuffed in his pockets, turned and looked out into the barn, saw the stallion there.

“When did you bring the Flash home?” he asked.

“This morning,” Jackson said around the soup.

“I guess we'll be taking him to New York,” Dean said.

“That's where the race is,” Jackson said.

“We'll need some expense money for that trip,” Dean said. “We're a little underpaid as it is, Jackson.”

“If you spent half as much time proving your worth as you did complaining about your worth, you might be worth something,” Jackson said. “Maybe,” he added. And then: “Paulie, I want you to run that Massey tractor over to Bertle's in Middletown. The hydraulics are acting up again; they might have to replace the pump.”

“Okay,” Paulie said.

“Dean, you can pick him up. Then I want you to head over to the other place and start gutting the old barn. I want everything out of there. I'm gonna pour new concrete for the floor, and then we're gonna build some stalls along the south side. I want it ready for the new year, when those mares start to foal.”

In the doorway Dean stiffened up. He was already chafing under the comments regarding his worth, and the prospect of spending the afternoon tearing rotten boards out of a barn didn't improve his disposition any.

“I'm not exactly dressed for construction,” he told Jackson.

“It ain't
con
struction; it's
de
struction,” Jackson said. “Maybe you should start dressing like a man who works for a living. Half the time you look like a damn pimp.”

“We can't all dress like we're one of the Village People,” Dean said. “I don't feel like tearing apart barns or being your gofer, Jackson. What reason do I have to stay with Stanton Stables if that's all I'm ever gonna do?”

“This isn't exactly the time to start talking about your future with the company,” Jackson said. “Nothing's gonna change so long as the old man's laid up. If I was you, I'd try to make myself useful in the meantime. You think you've been pulling your weight, Dean?”

“You gonna tell me Sonny's been pulling his weight?” Dean demanded.

“What's Sonny got to do with it?” Jackson asked. “You seem to have it in your head that you're somehow on an equal footing with Sonny around here. Well, you're not. Sonny's about as useless as tits on a boar hog, but he's the old man's son, and that's something you're never gonna be. Now you're gonna have to learn to accept that or hit the road, Dean. The fact of the matter is, we don't have enough money right now to pay you to fuck the dog.”

“But Sonny can piss it away at the casino.”

“What did I just say?” Jackson asked. “Sonny has got nothing to do with you.”

Jackson finished his soup and pushed the bowl away, wiped his mouth with a piece of paper towel. He looked at the tabletop a moment.