Get All The Money

Locked into the darkness of an endless starting gate, the rider saw field lamps burning in a mist, bordering a straightaway rains had left so wet that every lamp looked tethered.

Yet heard no horses restive in their stalls nor starters' warning cries. No gate had ever been this dark nor any crowd this still. As the flag went up, his horse came asweat: It feared the restless shadows those flickering field lamps cast. Scratch the whole field, he tried to cry out, as every gate swung wide but his own.

Lamed jockeys in black silks broke in a jostling pack, whip and spur to be first to the rail; all limped and several fell; some fell and could not rise. His horse hooked itself across the still-locked steel, its forelegs racing the air. He stood in the irons to double the reins and felt the right rein ripping. He reached for the mane, but it had no mane--rot in the reins, he knew, falling from a great height slowly, rot in the reins all along--and woke feeling disappointed in everything.

With somebody's hand lying light across his forehead. He jerked away from the hand.

Kate was standing above him. The tumult of her hair, uncombed and reddish-orange, looked to be aflame because of the lamp behind her. She was offering him coffee in a tin cup. Tin cups were for water, not for coffee.

"For God's sake," he sat up and refused the cup, "you have to shove a person across the room to wake him up?"

"You were tossing, I thought you were fevery." She placed the cup with care in reach of his hand.

He looks so young yet so old, she thought, Floweree looks so gray in the dark before day.

"'Fevery'?" he mocked her. "What in God's name is 'fevery'?"

She made no reply. It was going to be another mean day for them both, that was plain. With nothing the way it had been before the Mexican had begun nipping him at the wire. He'll be pecking at me now for my Ozark talk, she knew with resignation; or for being a head taller and half again his size. Or for looking so much younger while being six years older. Or for being born in the mountains or raised on a river. Or for not caring whether people call me Catfish. Or for wearing a GI cap or for wearing horse pins around the barn. What does he think I should use for bandaging--glue? He'll get on me for owning a horse that does a mile and 70 without coming asweat by morning and starts washing in the paddock that same night. A wonder he hasn't yet faulted me for his falls at Waterford. And maybe he does in his jealous mind.

For all of his pecking, she'd taken note, took some care to avoid its true salty cause. It was her trailer, her table and her bed--and Hollis Floweree was scarcely the man to take chances with a good thing. Not unless he had money in his pocket.

"If you're going to blow out Red," she reminded him, "you better get moving."

"Go blow him out yourself," he advised her.

Might not have things worked out better, Kate wondered now, had she not made it too easy for him at the beginning? All she'd done, of course, had been to take off his boots when he'd had too much whiskey in him, and had let him sleep it off on her bed.

Yet they'd lifted a few together before, at other parks, when he'd been riding better; and nothing had even begun to happen between them before. That he'd still been using a cane and had had his saddle in hock when he'd come here from Waterford hadn't had anything to do with her taking his boots off: She hoped for her own sake now, as well as for his.

Or had the falls--three in two months--had something to do with it? Yet the Mexican had not yet taken either a drink or a fall. And his boots had come off just as easily.

How can he hold it against me in his mind? Kate wondered. Don't he know that was before and not since?

There was the true salty cause Floweree wouldn't be pecking.

Unrequited love wasn't what was souring him so, she felt sure. It had to be because the rider who outraced him so often was the same who'd nipped him at the wire in bed. A touchy group, these riders, she'd learned, whose need of proving themselves could be felt in the mounting of women as well as of horses.

Excepting, of course, that Mexican thief. Whose mastery of mounts came to him so naturally, he felt no need of proving himself to either.

"What time is it?" Floweree asked her.

"Nigh to day."

"'Night to day'--What kind of time is that, for God's sake, 'night to day'? Didn't they even learn you to tell time in them hills?"

"Them weren't hills," Kate corrected him, "them were mountains. Though I do have to admit we lived pretty far back."

Stripped to his waist, Floweree stood with his disproportionately big hands clasping his cup the way a child holds a gift he fears may be snatched away.

"So far back the owls screwed the chickens," he decided; "that's my opinion."

"The farther back you live," she returned the usual answer to the usual taunt, "the tougher you get. And we lived in the last house in town."

"The reason that horse of yours don't win," he retorted, "is he's ashamed to have his picture took with you."

She had an answer to that one, too. But didn't bother repeating it. Instead, she handed him his boots with one hand and the Racing Form with the other.

"You're in the papers, rider," she filled him in.

Under "Official Rulings," he read, with lips moving:

"Ozark Downs

"Jockey Hollis Floweree has been suspended for one day and fined fifty dollars for entering a frivolous claim against jockey Elisio Casaflores following the eighth race of Thursday night, July third."

"I don't blame the Mexican, because his boss pushes the stewards around. That's Ishop, not Casa," Floweree felt.

"Well?" she wanted to know, "you got fifty dollars for the front office?"

"You take care of your end, I'll take care of mine," he told her.

Kate didn't bother pointing out that for two months, she'd been keeping up both ends.

"Front office don't get fifty by noon, you don't ride Red tomorrow night," she reminded him, "and I don't want your Cajun buddy on him."

"What's the matter with my Cajun buddy?" Floweree asked innocently. "He can outride any jock at this bull ring."

"Sure he can," Kate agreed quickly, "but who for? He can bring in a thousand-dollar plater against fifteen-hundred-dollar speed horses. But put him on a ten-thousand-dollar horse against the twenty-thousand kind and he'll leave you out of the money as fast as he can phone New Orleans. When I pay a rider to ride, I pay him to ride for me. Not for a bunch of New Orleans hustlers."

Holding one soiled sock in one fist, Floweree kept peering into the depths of various boots, in hope of finding one equally soiled.

"That don't make him a bad guy, does it?" he asked one of the boots.

"The Cajun rode for me once," Kate recalled, "at Evangeline Downs. 'This horse responds to the reins,' I told him that time, 'he don't respond to the stick. Don't use the stick on him. Use the reins.' So he goes for the stick, the horse begins crowhopping, and then he faults the horse."

"Why'd he go for the stick?" Floweree asked. "Did he say?"

"'Say?' All he said was, 'Well, I didn't fall off, did I?'--'n' walked away."

"That man can whup his own horse 'n' flick the nose of the horse behind, all in one motion," Floweree defended the Cajun, "as good as ever Don Meade could. 'N' that don't make him a bad guy, neither."

"Oh, toss those stinking things away," Kate ordered him, and tossed him a ball of fresh white socks.

"Just because he done a little time--" Floweree began.

"I know. I know," Kate interrupted him, "I know that don't make him a bad guy. But he got a big mouth and he got bigmouth people behind him. In my book, that makes him a bad guy."

"A person don't have to come from Louisiana to have a big mouth," Floweree observed quietly.

"The Cajun ain't riding Red," Kate ended the argument.

"How about that apprentice kid--Bethea?" Floweree sounded her out.

"Bethea rides with his shoulders instead of his hands," Kate pointed out.

"He thinks he's supposed to outstrong his mount. He rides every horse the same. Red takes a long rein. Bethea snugs up."

"Can't you get one of the Mexicans?" he asked her softly.

"No," she answered quickly, "all the good riders are contracted out around here."

He finished pulling on his socks before he answered. She could tell he was hot.

"Believe me when I tell you," he told her, standing up to his full height of five feet, one, "I can get a contract with any stable in the country. Believe me when I tell you."

"Sure I believe you when you tell me," she agreed easily. "Tell me a rooster can plow 'n' I'll hitch him up."

She drew a rubber-banded roll from the pocket of her jeans and laid five ten-dollar bills beside his cup.

"I don't want you borrowing off him, neither," she explained.

"It's your horse," he told her, "you take in the fine."

"The horse belongs to me, all right," she agreed again, "but the phony claim belongs to you."

"Them people up there look at me like I smell of the shed," he complained like a child.

"What do you care what you smell like to them?"

"You going to get photographed in them duds?" he persisted in knowing.

"Rider," she told him sharply, "your job is just to get me into the winner's circle. How I'm dressed for the occasion is my own affair."

"All right," he had to give in, "I'll take it in--but just don't think you're doing me some kind of big favor, that's all. I got friends all over the country."

"Sure you got friends all over the country. Tell me a duck is carrying a gun 'n' I'll stay out of his range of fire"--she whipped her GI fatigue cap down over his ears, tugged it tight and hurried through the door.

"I tell you a duck is carrying a gun," he shouted after her, with her cap still jammed on his skull, "you better look under the wing for the holster!"

But Kate kept right on walking and never turned her head.

She knew Floweree hadn't been fined for entering a phony claim. The fine had been imposed because the stewards didn't consider fistfighting among riders to be frivolous. What the stewards didn't know was that the brawl had had nothing to do with horses.

Floweree tossed Kate's cap onto the bed and drew on his boots. He stamped his feet to fit them tighter. He put on goggles. He put on his helmet and let the straps dangle. He flicked his little whip twice. Then--but only as an after-thought--he picked up the bills beside the cup.

Why had Casa come at him? It had been the Cajun who'd done the provoking--"Hey, Casa! You make fifty dolla! You have good time with your mother now, Casa?"--then the Mexican had been sitting on the floor, cupping his nose, and a touch of blood on the white of his silks. "You don't get the best of it all the time, Mex," the Cajun had rubbed it in a bit.

He'd sounded as if he'd thought he'd been the party who'd thrown that fast shot to Casa's nose. The Cajun had made a good move in pinning Casa's arms, Floweree conceded to himself.

Then the Mexican had driven his mount into place money in the very next race! His nose hadn't started to bleed again till he'd come down out of the irons.

The Mexican thief got his nerve, I got to give him that, Floweree allowed.

But that didn't make the Cajun a bad guy.

• • •

A heat haze was already banking above the ridge. Between the sheds, Negro grooms were sponging down horses with names like Sailor Kowal and Flash McBride and Billy V. and Kanaske's Pride. Two grooms were hauling a horse up a ramp into a coast-to-coast horse van, while another shoved the brute from behind. Six horses, already installed, stretched their necks out of their windows like so many shop stewards, to see how the work was going. The driver leaned idly against the van, holding a bill of lading in his hand and spitting tobacco juice now and then to show he didn't have to lift a finger.

The hay, heaped and baled between the barns, lent a yellowish scent to the air. Floor fans, whirring all night and into the breaking day, carried music cool or hot from rooms where hot-walkers dozed.

Owners saved a pretty penny here by permitting hot-walkers to do the work of grooms: A green youth could pick up a lifetime craft here. He could learn how to tape a horse without having galloped or blown one out. The trick, in bandaging, was to keep the tape level, so that cotton tufts showed at either end of the bandage. And if the thermometer he shoved into the animal's rectum read a degree and a half off, and the horse was backing off its feed, he knew that that horse should be scratched.

Yet, as like as not, the horse was led to post all the same. And the rider who refused a mount unfit to race might have a rough go getting another.

A stakes-winning rider earned only $50, and the rider behind him but $30. Third money earned $17 and fourth received $12. Out of which each rider paid a dollar to the Jockey's Club and two dollars to his valet.

Floweree waggled his whip at a couple of exercise boys but didn't stop to exchange stories. When the vasty light of morning struck, tilting the straightaway into day while leaving the backstretch in darkness, the odds for the coming night would start forming. Rumors of evening would shape the rest.

That, and turns so sharp that a rider on a $1500 horse, who knew the turns, could outrun a $3500 mount; there wasn't enough of a stretch for the better horse to prove his class. Its rider had either to take his mount around the leading horse or bull his way through at risk of being smashed against the rail. For the sake of a $50 purse, only apprentices and younger riders took such a risk.

Spring harness racing had left the track surface so hard, owners risked laming their horses here. The track's hard spots had soft spots that could throw a horse off stride. There wasn't a horse worth more than $3500 stabled here.

Kate's groom was painting Big Red's forelegs with Mercurochrome.

"Take care, Mike," Floweree warned the groom, "this horse was brought up by some fool who hollered at him instead of asking." Red's Big Red had torn chunks out of men as well as horses.

"If you move over, baby," Floweree singsonged softly into Red's ear, "Daddy'll have more room."

The horse shifted its rump to give his rider room in the stall, then rolled his neck in a half circle as much as to ask, "Have your room enough now, Daddy?"

"If he could talk to a woman that soft," Kate told the groom, "he wouldn't have to risk his neck riding horseback."

Cantering onto the track. Floweree held Big Red back until Kate stood on the scales at the finishing line, stop watch in hand. He wheedled the animal into the gate with only his toes in the irons. Then, leaning far forward, he shouted into the horse's ear, "Get all the money!"

Kate saw his perfect start but lost horse and rider in the shadows for one moment. Then--where the backstretch broke into day--saw a darkness driving against the sun, horse and rider a single creature, neck astretch and tail blowing. As it came, she caught light under all four hooves--and it came like a red-maned sun. Looming incredibly. She shielded her eyes against the showering dust, then heard its retreating hooves. Floweree was trying to pull up the horse.

Why don't you run like that at night, you son of a bitch, Kate swore quietly to herself.

Floweree gave her a confirming nod as he trotted the horse toward the barn. And as he passed, he wondered whether she'd seen the horse try to bolt after that perfect start. That flash of silvered daylight, knifing through the trees across its hooves, had sent a shock of fright through the animal that had taken the rider's full strength to shake off: Precisely the way the horse had been going off stride at night. The clubhouse light--that was it. Had she caught it? If not, he knew something about Red's Big Red nobody else knew.

He turned the horse over to a groom at the barn. Kate came up with the stop watch in her hand.

"How'd he make it?" Floweree tested her.

"One forty-one," she reported.

"Felt even faster," he risked suggesting.

"The watch don't lie."

It don't tell the truth all the time, neither, he thought. (continued on page 98)All The Money(continued from page 86)

She turned away to take the horse from the groom. Floweree pushed his helmet back on his head and began walking slowly toward the café. He wanted to hurry, yet he took his time. Although he knew something nobody else knew, he hadn't yet figured how to sell it.

The clip-clop clattering of horses, at a walk or a canter, and cries of rider to rider carried a clamor of preparation across the hurrying air. Floweree caught the bitter scent of leaves parching on the bluffs mixed with the odor of horses awash with sweat. The heat was building. In the Rider's Café, the horse-and-wood-leaf scent was overwhelmed by the greasified pall of hamfat frying, bacon sizzling and beef stew stewing while toast was burning in the oven and eggs were burning in the pan.

Great fans blew the kitchen's heat across the Negro muckers and walkers lounging in the café's back room. There a big juke banged away, just for them, while they ate fried chicken and gnawed on the bones. They accommodated themselves to the heat and noise more easily than the white riders and owners who ate with their women and children in the cafeteria's front room.

Riders, trainers, grooms and traders chunked the ice in their glasses while studying overnight sheets. Here sat the jockey turned agent, the carnie hand turned hot-walker, agent turned tout and the exercise boy who'd gotten his start in life by contracting rickets at the age of three.

Beside the ex-pro football coach now running a stable for a Chicago outfit (still wearing a whistle around his neck) sat the ravaged owner of three horses (two of them sick and one of them crippled), in hope of getaway money back to Louisiana.

"Good morning, horsemen," the P. A. system exclaimed above the metallic voices and the aluminum trays. "Here's how it looks! Thursday morning, July tenth; first race didn't fill. Out. Sixth race goes as she stands. Seventh race goes. Third substitute race out. Scratch Peaches K. in the fifth. Scratch Flash McBride in the eighth. Attention! The tattoo man is here! Please pay Mr. Kanaske five dollars. All horses must be tattooed within the week. Thank you."

This was the place where the rider who weighed 104 found out what had happened to the rider who now weighed 130. This was where the rider, whose riding days had been shortened by whiskey, asked the young rider, who'd ridden two winners the night before, to lend him ten dollars. It was where the rider who had never taken a fall heard out the rider who'd taken one fall too many--and resolved he would sleep alone, stay sober, save his money, avoid bad dreams and never take a fall.

This was the morning before the night's show and these were the ones who made the show go. The grooms who rubbed the soreness out of the horses' legs with ice or Absorbine; scraped the hooves and taped the legs; or held it still by a nose twitch to permit the vet to wrench out an abscessed tooth with pliers.

These were the ones of whom it could be said: To him who hath shall be given; and him who hath not, even that which he hath not. For it was the owner of 70 horses, such as Everett Ishop, who claimed the one sound horse left in the stable of the owner of only four: one crippled, one sick and one bowed. When photo finishes came up, it was the bigger owner who got the break, lest he withdraw his stable in a huff.

"Attention, stewards!" the P. A. system demanded. "Nominations for the Western Missouri Juvenile stakes, five thousand dollars added, two-year-olds Missouri bred, to be run Saturday, August second, will close Monday, July 28th."

Floweree spotted the Cajun. He was a rider who'd come up from the bushes too fast--and had gone down even faster. What had been unique about his career was that, having come to the Big A and gone down, he'd come up a second time. Before he'd gone down for keeps: Seven years for armed robbery had kept Clarence Houssayen from growing overweight.

Bush-league sporty-o's followed him, bush track to bush track; or waited for his long-distance call in some small hotel. Houssayen took no contract, because he had to choose his own mounts: His backers knew that, once the Cajun had committed himself to the kind of ride they wanted, he never reneged.

Now he sat with his unclean undershirt turned about, so that its red label looked like a spot of blood against his scrawny neck. All bones, hard living and distrust, Clarence Houssayen looked like a cross between a crow and a barbed-wire fence. You might believe he had been up to the Big A twice; but you knew he'd never be going up a third time.

At the table beside Houssayen's, Hector Vaes and Elisio Casaflores were chatting it up with Houssayen.

Looks like bygones are bygones, Floweree thought, making his way to their tables through the heat and the clamor.

Hector Vaes was a picture rider. He looked, in the saddle, like a man born to ride. And it was true that he knew all the right moves. But his single talent was that of staying on top of a horse all around the course, and he hardly ever fell off. This distinction he achieved by conveying an overweening sense of caution to his mount.

Any horse under Vaes sensed it was wiser to give ground than to get in a crush at the wire. Sacrificing $50, when the alternative was to risk getting your skull crushed, seemed a fair bargain to both rider and horse. It had therefore become customary for Vaes to arrive at the wire between four and seven seconds after the first three horses had crossed it: Fourth money wasn't much, but a rider could live on it. And he had more fourths than any rider at this bull ring of the summer night.

Dismounted, Hector immediately lost all caution. He went for the girls, he went for the whiskey; he went for the dice and he went for the cards.

The dice and the whiskey and the cards and the girls liked Hector. So did the bartenders and the crapshooting hustlers and the stud-poker mechanics. Even the slot machines liked Hector. If nobody cheated him out of his mount money, there was always some hooker who'd hold it for him. Hector Vaes didn't give a good goddamn for all the horses stabled at Ozark Downs. And he cared everything for cabareting.

Therefore, he had nothing in common with Elisio Casaflores, except that both were small men from the state of Oaxaca. Vaes called Casaflores an Indian because he mounted a horse from the right side, instead of from the left, like a white man. But Casaflores would always point out that, if Hector could learn to mount from the right side, as Indians did, he might break into the winningriders' column with the white men.

For no rider ever looked worse on a horse than Casa. The first thing he did wrong was to mount from the wrong side. And everything he did after that was worse. He moved in every direction, he stood up in the saddle and pumped, he waved his whip across the horse's mane and looked like he was about to jump off the horse, if the race were close, and drag the poor brute across the wire.

"If my horse ain't giving me everything he got," he told the apprentice rider Bethea, "I scare that son of a bitch till he give it."

Casaflores cared everything for horses and nothing at all for cabareting. When he had to sit out a race, he paced the jock-room floor, sulking as he paced, like a long-shot bettor shut out of a 40-to-1 winner. And all the while, he flicked his left-handed whip against his boots: that left-handed whip that so frightened chalk bettors when they heard it start popping a furlong from the wire against the flank of a long-price horse.

This flat-nosed little man whose eyes were Asiatic and who wore his hair too long, had no taste for liquor, could run a (continued on page 186)All The Money(continued from page 98) horse five furlongs in one minute by the clock in his head, was deaf to music and had no taste for gambling. Moreover, he was so faithful to his wife that, in all the 20 months since he'd last seen her, he had slept with another woman only twice.

When he put down 40 cents for a beer, that was 40 cents' worth of bread he was taking out of the mouths of children, of which he had four.

Yet he'd been known to spend as much as $1.60 in a single evening, just to keep an eye on Hector Vaes at the Silver Horseshoe. For though Vaes was ten years the senior of Casa, the younger man had become his protector.

Vaes, in return, read books, magazines and newspapers to Casaflores in both English and Spanish.

Clarence Houssayen, himself having picked up the fundamentals of reading and writing, suspected Casaflores of feigning illiteracy.

"Read what it tell here," he was now demanding of Casaflores, handing him the sports section of the St. Louis PostDispatch.

"How this man goin' read your paper?" Vaes laughed lightly. "He cannot read even his own."

Yet Casaflores put a finger directly upon the results of the fourth race of the previous night.

"It tell here Jazzbow pay fourteen-forty with Casaflor' up," he reported. "Here it tell Scatterbug pay twelve dolla' straight, Casaflor' up." He handed the charts to Vaes. "Where it tell there how many Houssayen win las' night? That boy make money like crazy, I hear."

"I made more money in one month in the port of New Orlean' than you've made your whole life," Houssayen let both Casaflores and Vaes know.

"I never make one damned dime in that port," Casaflores conceded. Then, noticing Floweree, turned to Vaes: "Here that fella pop some Mexican pretty good shot in the nose. Watch out when you pass this fella in the stretch--he gonna pop you a good one, too!"

Floweree nodded to Houssayen and turned toward the back room. Houssayen followed him to a corner table.

"That horse tied the track record out there this morning, Dad," he told the Cajun.

Being a man in his middle 30s, Houssayen wasn't particularly pleased to be called Dad by a rider himself old enough to be killing the grass.

"What's runnin' in the mornin' got to do with runnin' under lights?"

"That's just what it got to do with, old buddy"--Floweree changed his tone--"the light at the clubhouse turn. That's the shadow that horse been jumpin'. Can I but get him to the rail before he hit that turn, it'll be wire to wire. Casa'll look like he's standin' still--and that horse is going to be the price horse in the field. Old buddy."

"You might ask the Racing Commission to turn off the power when you have a mount."

Floweree put down his irritation by tilting his helmet back off his forehead.

"Catfish just clocked the horse in one forty-one," he explained, "but she didn't catch the shadow jump. I figure him one thirty-nine flat tomorrow night."

"Why not just use a one-eyed blinker and a shadow roll?" Houssayen inquired, becoming serious at last. "I cain't afford to git into no more of your jock-room brawls, Flower. Rememba, I'm on track parole."

"The horse won't run with equipment," Floweree filled the Cajun in. "Besides, if that redhead sniffs something's up, she'll have the word out all over the barn area. She'll drop the odds."

A gaunt, begoggled apparition materialized beside their table, holding out a handful of programs. Houssayen paid it a quarter for one. Yet the apparition merely stood looking sorrowfully at the coin in his palm.

"It's how much I pay for them myself," the apparition grieved. "There are folks here give me nickel extry for bringing them in early."

"Let's go to my place," Houssayen suggested.

Floweree handed the peddler a nickel and they left.

The tack room in which Houssayen slept contained an Army cot, a calendar that bounced against the wall when he switched his floor fan on, a tack box the size of a sea trunk, socks drying on a line, coffee-stained cups of plastic, empty Coke bottles, Spanish riding boots and flies that buzzed and mated as contentedly as though they'd never known any other home.

"I can make you the connection for a hundred-to-win ticket," Houssayen came right to the point, "but I cain't promise to git you inside. Only God can git you to the rail."

"If you're on the rail, I won't need God," Floweree assured the Cajun.

"I won't be on the rail. If the Mexican thief don't git it, Josohino or D'Arcia'll git it. Which come to the same thing."

"Or Vaes," Floweree saw the opening.

"Even worse," the Cajun warned Floweree, "the son of a bitch cain't ride a lick--but he'll bump you over the rail to let his Dago buddy git the jump."

Floweree brightened up at that. "Why, that's where you come in, old buddy--or did you think you'd be holding a hundred-to-win ticket on me for setting on top of a horse? It don't matter whether it's Casa or D'Arcia or Josohino or Vaes, you thwack that cat coming out of the gate--thwack!--like that" (he smacked the palm of his right hand with his left) "and I got the inside. When I get him past the light, I let him out. We'll leave the field tied to the rail, old buddy!"

Clarence Houssayen's pillified face looked out from the shadow of his helmet like that of a starving dog from a closet. He made the dry, choking sound in his throat that, with Clarence Houssayen, passed for inordinate merriment.

"What the hell you think I am, buddy?" he asked Floweree, "the Confederate cavalry? How many them damn horses you think I can cut out? I don't even know what that Mexican is riding."

"Moon River."

"You cain't hook Moon River," he assured Floweree, "I know. I've rode him myself. He runs from behind. How you goin' to hook a horse runnin' behind? You hook a horse between horses, when he try to git out front early. By the time the Mexican let Moon River run, whole field be strung out."

Houssayen stood up to indicate the discussion was done: "Cain't nobody hook Moon River."

Floweree seemed to be paying no mind. He was scratching away, with a pencil stub, on an overnight sheet. Flies buzzed against the screen. The floor fan rattled as if ready to quit. The light was hot, but the shadows were chill. And the scent of instant coffee mixed with the odors of hay and manure. Floweree handed his sketch to Houssayen and Houssayen read it standing.

He saw a starting gate numbered up to nine, with an H in gate four and an F in gate six, with a diagonal line from the H directly toward the rail and another diagonal, roughly paralleling it, from the F to the rail. With a crude representation of a clubhouse light purporting to be an eighth of a mile away.

"If Casa breaks slow like you say," Floweree argued, "that makes it all the simpler. Then all you have to take out is Vaes--and you know he'll give ground. You won't even have to thwack him--he'll haul ass the hell out of your way."

"What's Vaes's mount?" Houssayen asked.

"Fleur Rouge."

"What do you think is the class of the race?"

"Port-O-Pogo."

Houssayen shook his head no.

"Fleur Rouge."

Then he sat down, the sketch in his hand.

A flash of heat lightning turned the room pale green for one split second. In that moment, two small, gaunt men, in leather helmets, leaned rigidly toward each other, with their chin straps dangling.

Houssayen looked up when the flash was done.

"You're a mean little bastard, aren't you?" he asked Floweree.

"I have my reasons," Floweree replied.

• • •

Red's Big Red hung his great sad head across the stall webbing, shifting his forelegs, forth and back, in a slow, restive dance. A small floor fan whispered a changeless rhythm to his slow horse dance. While ruffling the feathers of a rust-colored rooster who shared the stall with the horse.

The rooster belonged to Big Red, not to Kate. She put up with the sorry bird because the horse was attached to it. When you're the owner of a one-horse stable, the horse becomes as tyrannical, in indulging his own moods, as an only child.

"Hold still, you long-striding son of a bitch," Kate scolded Red when he shied, pretending to be frightened by the brush against his flanks, but he didn't shy too much. Red's Big Red was a nervous brute who wasn't against cow-kicking her if he but dared. Yet he'd learned how, with one flat smack of her palm against his belly, she could bring him whinnying to his knees. He was sassier than usual this afternoon, because he knew she never knocked the wind out of him before he was going to the paddock.

Nor was the investment Kate had made in him altogether in cash. She was a woman who needed to minister to beings endowed less abundantly, in spirit, wit or flesh, than herself. She might have cared for retarded or disturbed children. She ministered, instead, to the spiritual and emotional needs of a great inbred four-legged neurotic, slightly retarded and perpetually disturbed. Warming, cooling, calming, currying, combing, feeding, Mercurochroming and watering Red's Big Red somewhat satisfied her own need of being of use in the world.

"Hold still, I said," she told Big Red now, "if you want to be a horse, act like a horse."

That all her horses had been losers and most of her lovers had just missed being dwarfs, Kate felt no need of a shrink to explain. When you're a single woman cutting toward 40, you don't need a doctor to tell you to take what is at hand. And if you weigh 179 pounds and like men, chances of being cow-kicked by a horse are less than those of being kicked by its rider.

The horse permitted her to pick his hooves with no more than an occasional twitching of his hide. He was feeling well, she could tell, despite the heat. A hint of rain in the air, however distant and faint, always had a calming effect on Red's Big Red.

"This was the kind of day we won in Ohio, Red," she reminded him. "It began coming down an hour before post. By the first race, it was slop. By our race, it was mud--it was raining mud. Would you like it to rain mud again, Red?"

Red nodded. Nothing he'd like better than rain bringing slop that turned to mud. To send him splashing past all those chalk horses that had been leaving him behind since the last time it had rained mud.

"Get all the money," she blessed him and kicked his rooster.

"Frivolous claim," kept going through her mind all the way back to her trailer. Her life seemed now a sequence of frivolous claims put in by riders whose saddles she'd bought out of hock. Now her last $50 had been spent to pay off for a man whom she wanted to trust yet could not. Because he trusted no one, not even himself. That, Kate reckoned on her trailer step, was about as frivolous as a woman can get with her last $50.

The bed was unmade, the floor unswept. Pots, pans and dishes waited in the sink and empty beer cans rusted below. A week of Floweree's shirts and shorts, mixed with her own underwear and dungarees, littered the trailer, front to back. Kate kicked a few pieces to one side, took a black-satin gown off a hook and a pair of red slippers out of the closet and slapped a floppy, flowered hat on her head; then took the bottle off the shelf.

And there she sat in her foolish hat, in the slow soft darkening of day, watching the headlights, beyond the woods, of the night's earliest bettors making their way.

This was the early-bettor's hour, when the tote board's 200 shuttered eyes showed neither win nor place nor show, nor whether the track was fast or slow. But only waited, like a blinded brute in a soybean field, for those far headlights between the trees.

The leaf-shadowed light and twilit glimmerings returned, to Kate, lamps and glooms of times now gone.

She remembered an autumn that had come down the Mississippi like a cloud coming home to rest. And how, the following spring, the waters had come through the woods.

When the flood had ebbed, each tree had stood stripped of its bright April finery; bare, dark and separate in a sea of sour mud. There, in the sinking ruins of somebody's kitchen, the handle of an iron frying pan had loomed like a lopsided grave marker. Just the thing, the girl had decided, to pry the rusted lock off some forgotten river pilot's sea trunk stuffed with treasure. Plodding barefoot through stinking gullies, the girl had searched, among drowned roosters, and cats the blueflies were already at, for the magic sea trunk. If the watches in it weren't pure gold, silver would do. If the dresses weren't silk and didn't fit, wool would do and she'd cut them down. Catfish Kate took a swig of rye for wry remembrance.

Thirty years now since the waters had ebbed, and here she sat with manure, instead of mud, on her boots. And armed with less than a frying pan. What was there to show for all those years of hauling horses from bull ring to bull ring? Only a trailer on which a payment was overdue. And a tawny-maned brute she'd have to sell or enter in a claiming race, if he didn't get into the winner's circle before this meet came to a close.

She'd had other horses before Red's Big Red, as she'd had other men before Hollis Floweree. The horses had all gone lame or been claimed; the men had lost heart or gone bad. It had always been a simpler thing for her to keep her pride with a horse than with a man; and most of the horses had stayed with her longer. Some had even earned their feed bills; none of her lovers had paid his own way.

She slipped into her dark party gown, put her feet into bright-red slippers and began braiding her hair, à la Ann Harding, about her head.

"Not bad," she decided, checking her reflection in the mirror. "I look strong enough to braid trees." She clasped a string of imitation pearls about her throat, clipped a pair of imitation jade earrings to her ears and smiled for the track photographer.

Dressed for a winner's circle, if not for a ball, Catfish Kate went to lead her horse out of his stall.

• • •

Now, the horses had been tried too often against the same horses. Moon River had outlasted Sailor Kowal, Sir Wingding had easily outrun Moon River, Port-O-Pogo had overtaken Sir Wingding in a rush, Djeddah's Folly had nipped Port-O-Pogo at the wire, then Sailor Kowal had beaten Djeddah's Folly.

Elisio Casaflores had ridden the double twice around this bull ring of the summer night. Then Houssayen had begun getting the jump on everybody, especially Casaflores. So Vaes had held Houssayen's saddlecloth long enough to let Casaflores get the jump and bring in a route horse at 40-to-1, and Houssayen had told Hollis Floweree that Mexican gets the best of it every time.

Then Casaflores, Floweree and Houssayen had come down the stretch stride for stride in a three-horse photo that had sent the tote board flashing 4-7-1-4-7-1 on and off and on, while the P. A. system had cried out most pitifully, "Will owner of red Corvair, Illinois license number DJ 5485, come to your car; motor is running doors are locked," and each sad scuffler said, "I'm glad it ain't me," till the Mexican thief won the photo.

So Floweree had broken Casaflores' nose in that jock-room brawl. Vaes swore Houssayen had pinned Casa's arms, a jockey's valet had claimed the Mexican swung first, Josohino asked Vaes why he'd just stood by, the clerk of scales said, "Leave me out of this," and the woman who sold popcorn under the stands said, "I never seen such a mob of popcorn-eating motherfuckers my whole born days."

That's one time the Mex got the worst of it, Houssayen had congratulated Floweree.

Keep your saddlecloth tucked in, Cajun, Floweree had told Houssayen.

But Djeddah's Folly is moving up in class, the horse degenerates swiftly explained, while Port-O-Pogo is moving down. First bet the breeding, each agreed, then bet the speed. "Breeding is best and wish for the rest."

Sure enough, the Mexican thief began beating everyone, especially the apprentice rider Bethea. And every night, when the small amber lamps of the paddock came up, the word went out: Watch out for Bethea, watch out for Houssayen, watch out for Josohino and Floweree, but mostly watch out for that Mexican thief and never forget that your strongest bet isn't on a horse but against it.

The boardmen moved big bets away from the track while screening their action with small throwaways on other horses. They padded the machines with other people's money to bring up the price on offtrack wagers.

Till the big field lights came on in a blue-white glare and everybody warned everybody to keep in mind that a short-legged horse could outrun a long-striding one in the stretch if his hooves are weighted.

Then all old sad scufflers began milling about, saying look out for a gray on the outside post if he's wearing a shadow roll, speed up when you're winning, slow down when you're losing and don't sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.

Lay off the horse that's taped to its rump, they warned one another--it may be bandaged that high to keep the price up.

Some studied samples of mud kept in Mason jars labeled Santa Anita, Centennial Race Track or Yakima Meadows. Some bet the stable and some bet the trainer and some stayed at home if the sun was out, sulking all day for lack of mud. Some stayed up half the night studying charts and turned in toward morning with a short prayer for slop.

Some went in search of tips in Chronicles and Kings. Some kept figures on rain, snow and sleet. Some knew that everything depended on wind.

Some waited at the sellers' windows with cash in hand, before the windows opened; others never bet till the flag went up.

Some balanced barometric readings against post positions; others rested all their hopes upon the depth of the dust.

While tiny tornadoes made of dust, chaff and rumor pursued each other tirelessly, around and around the abandoned track, all through the burning afternoons. Out of the chute and into the backstretch, hugging the rail or going wide, lugging in or lugging out, then into the turn for home: They made a perpetual mimicry of riders forever driving to win.

Upon horses forever dumbly driven.

Carrying hopes of bettors who first lost their cars and then their businesses, then their homes and then their wives because they discerned daily doubles in the position of the stars. All was lost: Yet they went on handicapping the everchangeful skies. And the dust devils went on pursuing each other around this bull ring of the burning afternoon.

Until the paddock pimps began filling in the turf-room touts. And old sad scufflers, long accustomed to rebuffs, heard of someone who'd won a big quiniela. Then they said, "I wisht that would of been me."

Saying, "Breeding is best and wish for the rest." Or "First bet the breeding, then bet the speed." Wondering all the while what in God's name they were talking about.

For nobody asked how much speed would count if the rider were bought and the trainer didn't care and the paddock judge hadn't heard that the groom had pried a calk just loose enough for the horse to throw it. Nobody reckoned that the rider could take the horse wide or, with the lightest of kicks just under its knee, throw it off stride. Or whether the bought rider might throw the battery away a furlong too soon.

As nobody seemed to know what his next move should be when he went to collect his big offtrack bet on a longprice horse and found his bookie had just left town.

Gone on the arfy-darfy.

Never to return.

• • •

Catfish Kate had her own vanity: No other woman would have risked making a fool of herself by dressing for the winner's circle while leading a 23-to-1 shot to the paddock. Yet, after the grooms in boots and blue jeans, here she came, stepping lightly to keep the dust off her red slippers, wearing a black party gown and a big flowery hat with a red bow on its crest, leading a big-chested ridgeling.

When she'd reached the riders' bench, she looked for Floweree, but he wasn't waiting there. It crossed her mind that he might have taken off with the $50 instead of paying the fine.

Then she saw him, leaning against the paddock, and he was in his silks; so she knew he'd paid off the front office.

But Red's Big Red decided, just then, he didn't want to race tonight, after all, and tried to turn back to the barn.

"Hold him, Catfish!" one rider called out.

In the paddock, she had trouble quieting him while he was being saddled.

"He's worried about his rooster is all," she assured the paddock judge. "He'll be all right in the gate."

"We once had a mare loved her goat so much we'd have to take him along to the paddock with her," the judge recalled. Then he cupped his palms and gave that barnyard shout, "Last bus for the Sunday-school picnic! Everybody up!"

The little men sauntered, in their bright silks, to their saddlings. Old sad scufflers peered through the gratings and said, every time a horse kicked the boards, "Boy, I'm glad that ain't me." Kate gave Floweree a leg up and Big Red wanted to leave right then.

Parading past the tote board in the British walking circle--a formality serving no purpose beyond heightening the horses' nervousness--Floweree kept his mount's head turned from the tote-board lights. Red had always feared the lights more than the cries of the crowd. He'd come out of the paddock dry and ready; but his hide would be shining with the sweat of anxiety after parading past the lights.

A wind as light as a winning quiniela drifted across the soybean field. The railbirds saw, with mild surprise, a moon of the backstretch barely risen, which returned their looks with no surprise whatsoever.

A moon that knew, when the daily-double pay-off possibilities moved across the tote board like a line of Illinois Central boxcars, all possible results.

A moon that remembered the last time it had rained.

Port-O-Pogo delayed the start of the third race by refusing to go more than halfway into his gate. Each time D'Arcia got him nearly in, the horse would rear. Two starters, one shoving him from behind while the other hauled him by his mane, got the gate locked behind the horse at last.

The flag went up.

The flag went down and Pogo came out of his gate a full jump in front of the field. With Casaflores, on Moon River, crowding Houssayen on Lady Night just behind. Houssayen swerved Lady Night right into Moon River, thwacking Moon River's flank and throwing Casa's horse off stride. Houssayen cut for the rail and took off after Port-O-Pogo.

Floweree moved Red's Big Red into the hole Houssayen had made and cut for the rail while Houssayen was trying to catch D'Arcia. All three lead horses were holding the rail at the clubhouse turn, but Houssayen took Lady Night wide and Floweree moved Red's Big Red up. The horse was running willingly.

Yet, fearing to spend Red's strength too early, he didn't let the horse have full rein: Every length gained now would cost him two in the final drive. Four lengths behind him, Vaes was holding Fleur Rouge as tight to the rail as Floweree was holding Big Red.

"Port-O-Pogo by two," the caller made it, "Red's Big Red on the rail by four Fleur Rouge by two and a half in the middle of the track Djeddah's Folly and Sailor Kowal head and head, Flash McBride"--and got a laugh from the crowd by adding--"and the distant trailer, Moon River with his tongue hanging out."

He stood in the irons, doubled the reins in his right hand and slashed Red's neck while holding the mane in his right. The lights came up blinding bright above the wire, the horse swerved in fright and Vaes drove Fleur Rouge straight up onto Red's heels.

Fleur Rouge propped, flinging a blue-and-orange ball head over heels head-on against the rail: Vaes lay face down, his boots trapped by the rail and his fingers spreading to get hold of ground.

As the great shout slowly died.

"Rider unseated," the caller made it.

And a stillness came down like a great slow hand upon clubhouse and grandstand alike.

Vaes kept trying to raise his head but could not. He lifted his hands toward his goggles, then put them on his ears: He had heard the horses coming.

Josohino cleared him, on Djeddah's Folly, the horse's left hind leg kicking a spurt of dust into Vaes's face.

"Loose horse on the track," the caller appealed, "please try to make as little noise as possible, ladies and gentlemen, so as not to frighten the animal." Then adding, like a sorrowing afterthought, "Ambulance to the finishing line."

As a wind went about tossing drifts of light rain into faces of winners and losers, all the same.

The crowd began moving back, murmuring as it moved, toward the sheltering stands.

Two groundkeepers raced to Vaes. One jumped the fence, but the other, a stout Negro wearing a red cap, tried to go under the fence and knocked the cap off. While he was recovering his cap, the other began prying at Vaes's left boot, trapped by the rail.

"Don't move him!" someone warned; and others took up the cry. Their cries broke the stillness and changed to troubled laughter.

While the Inquiry lights burned an angry red; and the numbers below kept winking:

1-1-2-2-4-4-2-2-1-1-2-2-4-4-1-1-

The ambulance was blocked by horses being led to paddock for the fourth race. By the time the car got onto the track and the stretcher-bearers had carried Vaes inside it, the pony riders had caught Fleur Rouge. And the crowd had grown indifferent to everything but the final result.

"A rider fell," a customer informed the popcorn woman, "his head hit the rail."

"If his head hit the rail, he'll lay there a spell," the popcorn woman decided.

"The boys were riding rough right out of the gate," he added. "Put some more butter on that stuff."

"I don't care whether that bunch kills theirselves off one by one or in a group," the popcorn woman assured him, adding a shot of oleo.

"He kept trying to lift up his head," the customer recalled.

"I can always tell a killer," the popcorn woman let the man know, "because he don't have a sense of humor. And if he does, he laughs all the time."

As the vasty hollows beneath the stands rang once again with the cries of tip-sheet hollerers; and paddock lamps burned in the heavy air like stars about to burn out.

"The outpatients are out in force tonight," the popcorn woman mused. "There must be an arfy-darfy moon."

The ambulance siren had long faded before the tote-board lights stopped blinking. And the red Official Result came on at last.

Floweree dressed slowly, feeling he had no further need to be in a hurry about anything. The crowd's cries came to him distantly. He glanced at the framed photographs of riders on the jock-room walls and felt that, though he had once known every one of them, now he didn't know one of them anymore.

Walking back to the barn area in the dark, he saw the small lamps of the shed rows burning like harbor lights in a fog. He stood under a shed row, in the off-and-on drizzle, waiting for Kate to come through with Big Red. She came with her flowered hat sodden and the horse shining with sweat or rain. Her slippers were caked with mud. He had nothing to say as she passed him.

"Pay your own fine this time," she told him without looking his way. And led the horse around the shed row's corner.

That meant he wouldn't have the horse's owner to back him at the inquiry. That in itself would testify against him. Houssayen, being on track parole, wouldn't be any help. And the toughest witness of all would be Vaes, just by not being able to be there.

The light above the trailer door was burning and the door was partly open. He saw a pair of rider's boots, so down-at-heel they weren't worth toting about the country any longer. He shut the door and turned back toward the stands.

He watched the night's final event from the jock-room bench outside the jock room. He watched the horses parading past the tote board: The drizzling rain was darkening the riders. The course had changed from fast to slow, from dust to slop. And just before the flag went up, it turned to mud. When he saw them coming into the turn for home, they were splashing mud as high as the horses' heads. If Big Red had been entered in the ninth instead of the third event, he considered ruefully, there would have been no need of all that block-and-tackle work. There wouldn't have had to be an inquiry.

Mud, like everything else, came too late.

The riders came out of the jock room one by one, dressed for the bars. He let them all pass, from where he sat on the bench in the dark, until the apprentice rider, Troy Bethea, came out, and called to him.

The boy peered into the dark to see who'd called.

"Hi, Dad," he greeted Floweree warily, "what's your story?"

"What's the word on Vaes?"

"Bust his damn-fool back in two places. He got a good contract with a wheelchair. Lifetime contract." Then he turned toward the stands, where the lights were already going out.

How ghostly a tote board looks when all its bright windows have been shuttered. And all the races are done. As if no race would ever be run anywhere again. How wan is a moon that still keeps watch though all races are over forever.

How chill the rain wind that blows over a field when no one is left in the stands but a single sweeper high in the stands.

And nothing remains of those figures that once moved like a line of yellow boxcars across the bright board. In a rain that stops, then starts again; like a rain belying everything.

The far lights of the barn area looked, to the rider, like lights of a land he would not see again. He turned toward the gate and only looked back when he was through it:

A line of horses, each one black and bearing a rider wearing black silks, was parading across the shuttered tote board.

One dark rider followed the other in a slow, funereal circle. He counted eight. Then, one by one, he saw them pass into the soybean field.

He waited a moment to see if they would circle back. Then knew they would not. And turned away from the gate in a pelting rain.

The coldest that ever fell.

• • •

When tote-board lights go blind with dusk

And other losers have gone home

Above the grandstand's damps and glooms

A moon of the backstretch on the wane

Sees a jock whose silks are long outworn.

Whose hands once guided, whose wrists once eased

Whose fingers could gentle or warn or praise

Whose hands that commanded have nothing now

But to riffle dead tickets like bad guesses through.

A moon with a ruled-off rider's eyes

Lights his way to those rain caves and night-blue dives

Nine steps beneath the traffic's cries

Where raggified ruins and draggified queers

Emerge from The Street Where Nobody Cares.

Begoggled young band rats with boozified squares

Do-Wrongies, Do-Righties and coppers turned kuke

Mascaraed martyrs with Maybellined spooks

Whose triumphs don't matter, their losses remain

Left at the starting gate, all's one and the same

To a furlong of stiffs in a swizzle-stick cave

Though dressed for a ball they're draped for the grave.

Fevered informers or pandering cats

Whose gains are on paper whose losses are cash

(Whiskey is free to all who've just died Others pay double though barely alive)

Straightbroad, boothbroad, headbroad or plain whore

Such fly-by-nighties as can't fly anymore--

Tea-talking strippers with compulsive old lechers

(The sick and the raging arrive in all weathers)

Keybroad and callbroad, cruiser or tout

Careless or wary, shut-in or shut-out

No one cries "Enough!"

On the Kiss-and-Claw route.

Some made of water and some held by wire

Some with their green years yet afire

When a cellophane moon casts a misting light

And pimps have given up for the night

The old jock hears the hooves of races long run

Down a stretch stretching back

Into dreams now done.

Under a paper moon wrapped by DuPont

Some on the nod and some on the hunt

Rider or bettor, thistle or flower

All come at the close to the same night-blue hour.

Where each stirs his bourbon yet none chunks the ice

Where each pays his money yet none knows the price

Where none are seen leaving yet new ones arrive

He drinks by himself in an understairs dive.

Here among cats of various stripe

Some on the heavy and some on the hype

Riders bought out or running to fat

The old jock beats the bar with a swizzle-stick click

"Bartender! Booze! And fetch it damned quick!"

Among bookies gone broke or with money to burn

Gone on the arfy-darfy

Never to return.