Part 2

I am in favor of hunting up a crap game and shooting our twenty-nine cents and Jimmie says that is a splendid idea and for me to do so and he will meet me at the pool parlor in a hour. I asks where is he going? And he says the library. And as he has never been inside a library in his life to my certain knowledge, I figure he is telling me in a nice way to mind my own business. Which I does. And in a hour I has run the twenty-nine cents into eight bits and a Masonic emblem.

I meets Jimmie like he said and I can see right away he is exceptional thoughtful. We go to a place called La Cucuracha where the second cup of coffee is free and you gets gravy with your potatoes, although Jimmie seems to have lost his appetite. He keeps transferring his food from one side of his plate to the other until I outs and asks him pointblank what is ailing him.

"Did you ever hear tell of a horse called Pegasus?" he says by way of answer.

"No," I says. "Who sired him?"

"He is out of Medusa by Neptune," says Jimmie.

"I never heard of them, neither," I says shoveling in a mouthful of potatoes and gravy. "What has this here Peg-whoit got to do with you?"

"I am not certain for sure," he says, "but I has got a idea,"

"Which is?"

"Could be he got blowed off his course," Jimmie says, "or got scared by another gadfly or some such, landed in Tijuana and this here Muse comes after him and--"

"Look," I says, "one of us has got a screw loose and it is not me. Begin over and repeat slow and there is apple pie with the dinner and if you do not want it I will eat your piece, if it is all the same to you. Now what was you saying?"

He shoves his plate back. "I am going to break the track record tomorrow," he says, and there is something about the way he says it, some quality in his voice that makes me sit up and take notice all of a sudden.

A kind of creepy sensation comes over me and I am reminded of when I am a kid and the grandfather's clock in the hall would strike during the night. It would go _bong--bong--bong_ real slow and soft, but filling the house, howinever, and making the air vibrate. I would lie there and think, "It is just the grandfather's clock in the hall," but that did not make no difference. My feet would get cold and my eyes near bug out of my head, and I would not have no swallow and I would lie there thinking, "It is just the grandfather's clock in the hall."

I gives Jimmie one of them searching looks you read about, but it does not tell me nothing except that he is a mite tightened-uplike and is letting some fifty cents worth of food go to waste.

"Thanks for the tip," I says. "Who you planning on being up on? Man-o'-War?"

"Ditsy has always wanted a grand piano," he says, "since she was not bigger'n a boot-jack." And he says, "I will get her the best one money can buy."

It is obvious that he tightened up more than I think because there is not enough space in that two-room flat in Cleveland to hold both Ditsy and a grand piano at the same time.

"That will be dandy," I says, "but I am afraid there will not be no grand piano in it. Them things cost folding money."

"Folding money," he repeats and the words sounds like a three-inch sirloin the way he says them--thick and red and juicy. "You know what I am going to have," he says, "I am going to have a pair of handmade boots--them that laces at the ankle--and I am going to have a suit with buttonholes under the buttons on the sleeves. Not just thread sewed to look like buttonholes--_real_ buttonholes I am going to have under the buttons and a yellow chamois bag."

"A yellow chamois bag under the buttons," I says and, recalling to mind a chap named Joe Hankins who fought a bunch of Comanches all one night in a psycopathic ward at a hospital in Louisville, I continues to smile pleasantly while I eases my chair back.

"Yeah," Jimmie says, "lined with flannel so as the bridle will not get scratched up none."

"Sure," I agrees, "flannel."

"Saratoga," says Jimmie, "Havre de Grace, Narragansett, Hialeah, Aqueduct."

"Hawthorne, Churchill Downs, Empire City, Belmont Park, Thistledown," I chimes in nodding like a Chinese laundryman who has lost your wash. I holds my breath and gets to my feet praying that I will be able to ease him out quiet.

"Through?" Jimmie says, cool as a cucumber. "What say we see if we can get a game of pool on the cuff?"

The next day he breaks the track record.

* * * * *

I has thought about it a great deal since then and do you know what I figure? I figure it like this. I figure that Jimmie had got on to a secret. There is a secret to doing everything. Like tight-rope walking, or shooting par golf consistent, or whizzing a ball over a tennis net so as it falls just so and dribbles off before it can be got up off the ground. There is a secret to juggling plates and a secret to pole vaulting higher than anybody else. The plates and the pole and the rope and the golf clubs and tennis racquet is all the same. What I mean is you could take half a dozen plates and throw them up in the air and they would land behind the eight ball. But take these here same identical plates and give them to a juggler and he will make them perform without so much as mussing his tie. Why? Because he knows the secret.

Well, then, why can it not be the same way with horses? I am not saying you can take a plow horse and make him win a race any more than that there juggler can juggle plates made out of pig iron. But I am saying, if you know the secret, you can take a _race horse_ and make him win a race. And, like I said, I has thought about it a lot and I figure there is a secret and Jimmie has got on to it. I figure the secret comes to him in a flash like when you know, in a sort of a burst of knowing, that the dealer has aces back to back. Because from that day on he never rides a loser. Except one. I will get around to that in a second.

Saratoga and Hialeah and Havre de Grace and all of them is not no pipe dream. And neither is Ditsy's grand piano, though it is not in no two-room flat. It is in a living room as big as from here to there. One of them two-storied jobs that goes all the way up to the roof. One of them studio living rooms. And done real classy with drapes and hand-carved furniture and lamps with rose silk on the underneath parts of their shades, and them black-and-white, pen-and-ink-looking pictures on the walls, and a rug that feels like it will arch in the middle and purr if you rub it, it is that soft.

Of course, it does not happen pronto. It starts out gradual with Jimmie's name in the papers--"Keep your eye on So-and-So up on So-and-So"--and then it takes a up curve with the sports writers pegging him with this here Wee Willie and first thing you know he is appearing regular Sundays in the rotogravure, him and Ditsy, holding a horseshoe or a shamrock or this here bridle or such as that, and persons are talking about the "Winkie Technique" and children is eating their weight in cereal because Wee Willie Winkie says as how it has got Vitamin Q and for six box tops or reasonable facsimiles thereof the cereal people will send you a handsome, autographed photograph of Wee Willie on Martinique or Little John or Fireflow or some such as them. And his stock is going up like a fever chart. And he is in the bucks. But I mean _in_, brother.

It changes him some. I do not mean he goes around putting out like he has hung the moon and painted the blue sky; if anything, he quietens down and kind of draws into hisself like. In fact, when he is congratulated on his ability, which he is every time he turns around, he acts like it is making him sick to his stomach. And when the write-ups come out about how modest he is and shy and retiring and how he always tries to give the credit for a win to the horse, why then he acts like he is even sicker and getting no better fast.

Naturally, while most of the publicity is along the lines of sweetness and light, there is some of it as squeezes out a few lemons. Like them that says as how Winkie rides a horse walleyed, and them as hints it is mighty peculiar he does not never lose and a pity, furthermore, because the odds on a horse what is toting Winkie is something to behold in a new all-time low.

Then there is the follow-up gang that always seems to heel to a celeb. Whether he gets to be a celeb by riding horses or eating goldfish or drinking thirty buckets of beer does not make no noticeable difference--they follows. It gets so Jimmie cannot go nowheres without getting the press took out of his pants and he is lucky if the pants is not also took out with the press.

People sends him alligators from Florida and salmon from Alaska. He gets lariats made out of tail hair plaited, and high-heeled boots with tooling. He gets silver spurs, and leather jackets, and saddles, and gloves, and sombreros. He gets blankets and pipes and racks for this and holders for that. He gets a sheep dog, a pair of love birds, a coon cat, a baby leopard, a bearskin rug with the teeth still in it, a stuffed owl, a collection of butterflies, and some twisty horns off a mountain goat all set and glued on a wooden thing to hang on the wall. He gets socks by the gross, handkerchiefs by carloads and one dame even sends him a box of pink silk underwear with his initials stitched in fancy in orchid embroidery.

To give you the idea, one day he appears in the papers cutting a piece out of one of them round coffee cakes and the next day there is nineteen round coffee cakes delivered to his address and he does not _like_ round coffee cakes nor no kind of coffee cakes, but is cutting this here piece to please the press photographer who wants a homey touch.

But for everybody what is giving him something there is two wanting him to give _them_ something. Jimmie used to say he got so he could tell right off who was a givee and who was a gimme. Not that he does not appreciate what is give him, even if he does not keep it, and not that he does not hand out to the gimmes--it is just that he does not want nothing off of nobody and does not want nobody to want nothing off of him.

But when you gets in the major brackets that is not the way things is. So, like I said, it changes him some. Some way, he reminds me of a kid what has eat a quarter's worth of jelly beans all one flavor.

* * * * *

It changes Ditsy, too. Her hair is not loose-like and fluffy no more. It is on the order of a cocker spaniel's, only precise, and her ears has got earbobs in them, and instead of wearing print housedresses she is all diked out in them dresses which is not referred to as dresses, but as "creations." She has got a new wheelchair which is streamlined and has more chrome on it than a limousine, and some bird with a Vandyke and a accent you can spread like marmalade is giving her some kind of underwater massage for her legs, so she should be very happy. She is not, though.

She puts on like she is happy and anybody what does not know her would say, "My, she is happy," and they would be ninety-nine and forty-four hundreds percent wrong because she is not happy by no means. She fools Jimmie because Jimmie is so anxious for her to be happy that, when she keeps saying she is happy, he believes she is happy and it does not occur to him that when you are happy you does not go around saying, "My, I am happy," like you was learning a lesson in memorizing.

When a woman is happy she sings and brushes her hair a lot and says stuff like, "I declare, it is four o'clock _already_, can you beat that?" and she looks smily even when she is not actually smiling. So it is obvious Ditsy is not happy because she is not doing none of them things. When she smiles it is more or less of a lip movement going on under her nose and not having nothing to do with the rest of her face, and she does not sing spontaneous, though when she is in that two-room flat the landlady has had to request her several times to pipe down. And, instead of saying, "I declare it is four o'clock _already_," she just says, "It is four o'clock," like you would say, "The dodo is now become extinct," or, "I see where there in a population of ninety-two in East Gleep, Nevada."

So, as I said, it changes Ditsy, too. And it is pathetic to watch them two, him and her, working so hard at being happy and pretending that life is a bowl of cherries when it is plain life is a onion poultice.

Some time passes and I am here, there, and yonder and word gets around that Jimmie Winkie is hitting the paint which occasions me to be surprised because Jimmie Winkie is never one to hit the paint even in a mild manner. So I am not paying any attention to these here remarks and I am once or twice very near smacking persons in the puss who say that it is a fact that Ditsy is turned into a red-hot momma.

What's that? Oh, that. Well, it seems that this here underwater massage is the stuff and she is able to get around some--not good, understand, but some.

What! Her! Say, listen here, bub--well, all right, no offense taken, but she is not that kind. O. K. O. K. Let it ride. Sure I will have another beer, only do not make no more remarks like that, see. O. K. O. K.

Maybe I do not make myself clear. I mean she has gone in for double-jointed cigarette holders and red fingernails and them long-haired guys what paints a picture of somebody so as they have one eye here and one here and clockwork springs for the top of their head and maybe a spare tire for one hand and a fiddle for the other with a bunch of carrots sprouting out of it.

Anyway, that is what I am hearing and--here's bumps, brother. You know I set and watched a glass of beer bubble from the bottom one night and it bubbled for three hours and a half 'fore it got flat. That was when Ditsy--But I will get around to that quick enough. Now and again I still catches myself trying _not_ to think about it. And it has been a long time. A long time.

What was I saying? Oh, yeah, Jimmie hitting the paint. He _is_ all right because I am setting in a place in Cleveland--having just got off the train--and some fellow comes in and I does not pay no attention until I see he is walking like a banty rooster which is sea-sick. And I yells, "Jimmie!" And he looks up and focuses on me and I see it is true he is hitting the paint and, if his present condition is a fair example, he is hitting it with a capital H.

I am not one to stick my nose in other people's business. I am one who says other people's business is their own business and no business of mine, having found that a nose stuck in other people's business usually gets itself pinned up so as it does not look like a nose for quite a while after.

But this is different. First, it is Jimmie Winkie. Second, he is running a race the next day I have seen by the papers. Third, it will not put no shine on his shoes if somebody says, "Oh, look, is that not Wee Winkie and is he not skizzled?"

To make a long story short, I gets him out of there. I thinks about checking into a hotel, but there is those somebodies again, so there is not nothing to do but get a cab and take him home. The same which I does.

When I first sees Ditsy I also thinks it is true that she has turned into a red-hot momma. She has done something to her mouth so it looks like it has been swatted by a ripe plum, and she is wearing one of them "creations" that does not leave but very little to the imagination, and she is walking with two silver-headed canes, and her fingernails looks like they has been dipped in calves' liver while it is still in the calf.

She is quite a sight for sore eyes until you remembers it is Ditsy and, then your collar gets too tight and you say, "Hello, Ditsy," and she does not say nothing. She just looks at Jimmie until you thinks she does not know who it is and, then, she looks at me and her eyes is the color of a horse's flanks after a workout--dark and wet and velvety--and she says, "Bring him in, Jacks," and, some way, her voice sounds like it is bleeding. And, all at once, you know that underneath all this cover-up she has put on is the same old Ditsy. Worn finer, and kind of tired, but Ditsy.

She knows what to do, too. She does not put him to bed. She has me set him up in the bathroom with his head over the basin and she feeds him soapy water and as fast as one glass full comes up down goes another. And when he says he cannot do it no more, she wheedles him into doing it until his insides is as clean as a old maid's conscience, and his head is woozy but not boozy. Also, I am under the impression this is not the first time them two has underwent this here same procedure.

Soapy water? Best thing on earth. Makes you feel like you has been hollowed out and whittled thin, but it does not leave nothing in you that you would want to wake up with the next morning. Of course, it is not exactly a pleasant treatment while it is going on, but, after it is done, although you could not fight no mess of apes, you could give them a run for their money, if such become necessary.

After some time, Jimmie says in a washed-out voice, "O.K., go ahead. Tell me I am a louse."

Ditsy does not say nothing and I does not say nothing, neither, being busy examining my cuticles.

"I know I am a louse," he continues. "Go on. Get it over with. Go on, tell me I am a louse."

So I says, "You are a louse, period," and I leaves off examining my cuticles and takes up examining Jimmie like he is a rare specimen of garbage that has got in among us while we are occupied elsewhere.

"I was not asking _you_," Jimmie says, and he looks at Ditsy and Ditsy looks at him and Ditsy does not say nothing.

"I beg your pardon," I says, "I thought you was addressing the general public of which there are several that says you has lost hold of your senses."

"Shut up," Jimmie says. "SHUT UP. I did not ask you to butt in, did I? Why do you not go back where you come from?"

"Sure," I says, "I will be delighted. But when you is handing out your interviews tomorrow do not give the credit for the win to the horse--give it to Ditsy, here. _If_ you win."

"What do you mean 'if'?" Jimmie says. "It is in the bag." He laughs. "Literal," he says. "You and Ditsy need not worry none."

"I am not worrying," Ditsy says toneless-like. "It does not matter either way. Nothing does not matter. Any more."

The way she tags that "any more" on to it is horrible to listen to. It has a dead, flat, hopeless sound and I keep thinking, if I look down, I will see it laying there on the bath mat spread out on its back with its eyes rolled up.

It gets Jimmie, too, because it is clear that if Ditsy had batted him on the bean with a lead sock he would not be more took back.

"What do you mean?" he says. "What do you mean?" like that, see, with a up on the end.

"I mean it is no good," Ditsy says. "I cannot stand it. You are not Jimmie Winkie any more. You are somebody else. Somebody else I do not know. Somebody else who I do not want to know. I hope you do lose tomorrow," she says and her words bump into each other and bunch up, like the field in a steeple-chase taking the first hedge. "I hope you lose tomorrow," she says, "and the next day, and the next and the next and next and next, and we can go back to that two-room flat and eat beef stew and take turns washing the dishes and put toothpicks in the windows to keep them from rattling, and play pinochle and watch the car lights come over the Freeway and, maybe, have a pint of ice cream for a treat and ... and ... be ... happy"--and her voice breaks in the middle and she puts her face in her hands and starts crying.

* * * * *

It is a awful experience to see a girl cry. It makes you feel like all your joints has swelled and your ears and feet belong to a two-humped camel.

Jimmie says, "You want me to _lose_?" like he is suffering from hallucinations.

Ditsy keeps on crying.

I gives her my handkerchief and wonders if I ought to pat at her or something.

"I cannot lose," Jimmie says.

"Look," I says, "I think I has had sufficient. I am going."

"I cannot lose," Jimmie says, "and, if I do, they will not call me Wee Willie no more. Guys like Moe Prentice will give me the laugh. I got to keep on winning. I cannot stop now."

"You has not _got_ to do nothing but die," I says, "and if what guys like Moe Prentice says means more to you than Ditsy, here, I would go on off and die if I was you."

"What about your grand piano?" Jimmie says to Ditsy.

"I hate it," Ditsy says through her fingers. "I would like a c-c-canary b-b-bird."

"But I cannot lose," Jimmie says, shaking his fist. "I cannot--unless--" And he quits shaking his fist and uncloses it and looks at it like he expects to find it has varicose veins. And he looks at Ditsy setting there on the floor.

"You mean what you said?" he says.

Ditsy makes a kind of soft _oooooo_ing noise like a stable hound what has been stepped on.

"O.K.," Jimmie says. "O.K." He gets up and sort of wavers a minute and then he goes out and Ditsy keeps on crying and I clears my throat once or twice and wishes she is a horse so as I could gentle her and then Jimmie comes back in and he is carting this here bridle.

"From me to you," he says, plunking it on the floor. And there is a long pause and then he adds, "Temporarily."

Ditsy looks at the bridle, hiccuping slightly like a baby what has been having colic.

"I do not get it," she says, hiccuping again.

Jimmie indicates the bridle. "Remember the time," he says, "that we was in the Home and you found a four-leaf clover in a book what belonged to Miss Watson? I had a toothache, so you snitched the four-leaf clover to put in my shoe so as it would go away--the toothache I mean. Only you said it was 'temporarily' because it was somebody else's four-leaf clover and might have repre ... repercussions being as how it does not actually belong to me. So I did--put it in my shoe I mean--and I got a blind abscess and it was--well, you know how it was."

"I still do not get it," Ditsy says looking at the bridle like she is expecting it to turn into a four-leaf clover.

"It is like this," Jimmie says. "That there"--he points to the bridle--"is the same as the four-leaf clover. Maybe you got a toothache now, but, if I lose, it might turn out to be a blind abscess. So it is only temporary. I am not giving it to you. I am only letting you keep it for me."

"I _still_ do not get it," Ditsy says, blowing her nose in my handkerchief.

"I do," I says. "He is saying you thinks you wants a canary bird when what you really wants is a grand piano, which you have already got."

"You stay out of this," Jimmie says.

"Lay off Jacks," Ditsy says to Jimmie. "He is all right."

"Jacks is a old lady," Jimmie says to Ditsy.

"I am going," I says. Which I does.

* * * * *

No. No more beer. I am not half through with this one. I do not like to crowd them. And, speaking of crowding, that is what I think happens to Jimmie.

Lose? I reckon he does. He does not even get away from the post.

What I mean about crowding, I figure this here horse Jimmie is up on gets crowded quick. There is some crows slow, some easy, some quick. Jimmie happens to be up on Beeknight and, the way I figure, I figure Beeknight crowds quick. You know how it is, out of the barrier, everybody trying for a inside track, some pushing maybe, though this is not noticeable unless you is up. Now them that crowds slow gets out and tries, and them that crowds easy falls in, but them that crowds quick rears up and starts doing the Highland fling. There is not many. But there is some. And, like I said, the way I figure, Beeknight is one of the some.