Maclean Read Free Page B

to see about a little work. There were half a dozen horses in the stalls, but no sign of anyone around. He didn’t want to knock on the office door for fear of interrupting something important, so he walked down along the line of stalls past the great rumps of the horses. Work horses snuffling and moving their feet around, staring at the wooden wall above the bins in front of them. (What did they think about there, each one alone, all day and all night?)
    At the back of the stable was a little workshop. Maclean peeked around the corner of the door. Sam Kelly was sitting astradle a saw horse working on a piece of harness with a leather punch. He didn’t hear Maclean. He was sixty and a little deaf. He was also a little simple, but he was a good man with horses, and he had worked in the stable almost all his life. Jim’s father, old Nate, had hired him. Old Nate had been killed, kicked by a horse one day for no reason at all, straight into the guts so that he died right there on the stable floor just as if he’d been shot.
    The shells came out of nowhere all together. No one heard them because of all the noise on the road—wagons rattling, truck motors roaring, people shouting, cursing. A whole battery must have loaded up and fired all at once, and they must have had the road zeroed in beforehand. The shells landed on both sides so fast that they seemed like one, long, continuous explosion. If the ground had been mud, it would have been bad enough, but it was stone and hard clay, and there was metal flying everywhere. A dozen or more killed on the spot, a lot more wounded. One shell landed beside a wagon and blew it to pieces and killed all the men on it and one of the horses. The other went careening, staggering, half-sideways off the road, screaming like a banshee, trailing harness and half of a broken whiffle-tree and a stream of guts and blood that poured out of its belly. It went fifty yards or more before it finally fell over and died. Afterwards, further up the road, they came to another place where a dozen horses, some still harnessed together, were lying beside the road, bloated, their legs sticking straight out like poles, teeming with flies, blue with them.
    Maclean tapped on the door, and Sam looked up. He was short, fat, and bow-legged.
    â€œHello, Pinky,” he said. “How ya been doin’?”
    â€œGood,” Maclean said. “The very best.”
    Sam looked at him over his shoulder, a look that Maclean knew very well, a look that was asking itself how much he might have had to drink already this morning.
    â€œBusiness good?” Maclean asked. “See you got a few horses in there.”
    â€œNot bad,” Sam said.
    Maclean waited for Sam to perhaps give him a lead in, but Sam just went on tapping at the harness.
    â€œDon’t suppose Jim has any little chores he might want done?” Maclean asked finally.
    â€œCouldn’t say,” Sam said. “He ain’t said nothin’ to me. You don’t know nothin’ about fixin’ harness, I don’t suppose?”
    Sam could be a son of a whore when he set his mind to it.
    â€œWell, perhaps I better ask him,” Maclean said.
    â€œHe ain’t in,” Sam said. “He went downtown to fetch sumpin’.”
    â€œHe going to be long, you think?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Sam said. “He might git talkin’. You never know.”
    â€œNo,” Maclean said. “That’s it.”
    He left Sam and walked back down through the twilight of the stable past the great rumps of the work horses and the idly switching tails. He stood in the doorway and looked up and down the street. There was no sign of Jim, but at the corner of Main Street, four of the boys were hanging around talking. If they saw him, they would guess that he might be into the money, and if they came down and Jim found them there, they would screw up everything.
    He sat down on a wooden bench just