The Stallion (1996) Read Free

were many of the people on these streets.
    While Angelo and Cindy, Max and Betsy walked through the district, a light rain began to fall. The girls on the streets opened folding umbrellas or pulled rain hats out of their pockets. None of them left their stations.
    Max walked beside Cindy. Betsy walked with Angelo, and she slowed down so they could drop back from the others.
    “I thought maybe you’d wait for me,” she said quietly.
    “Wait…?”
    “Little Loren should be your son.”
    “Betsy…” Angelo hesitated, then said, “The whole Hardeman family would have gone into orbit.”
    “Don’t you care as little about that as I do?”
    “You’d better care about your great-grandfather. Number One is capable of…”
    As he hesitated again, she finished the sentence. “Murder. But it’s my father who’d go into orbit. I heard him call you the grandson of the bootlegger who supplied Number One’s liquor during Prohibition. He doesn’t seem to comprehend that we Hardemans are new money. Number One was a bicycle repairman. He built a car, just the way the first Henry Ford did. The two of them were inspired tinkerers, nothing more. Where does my father get off thinking he’s better than the grandson of the man who supplied liquor to his father? By the way, is it true?”
    “It’s true. My grandfather supplied him. Good stuff, too. Number One never missed a sip in all those years.”
    “That’s what he hates most about what happened to him,” said Betsy. “It’s not the wheelchair. It’s being unable to drink his Canadian whisky.”
    “I can sympathize,” said Angelo.
    She took his hand for a moment. “You are married, aren’t you? I mean, really. Is she pregnant?”
    “No. Not yet. We don’t think so, anyway.”
    Betsy shook his hand and then let go. “Angelo Perino, I’m going to have a baby by you. I’ve decided. You just wait and see if I don’t.”
    “Whatever Betsy wants, Betsy gets,” he half sang, essaying the tune from Damn Yankees.
    “And, little man, Betsy wants you,” she finished the line.
    “Well, to paraphrase FDR, you’ll have to clear it with Cindy.” He laughed.
4
    This was his third face. He’d grown up with one, and it had been shattered and burned in the racetrack crash. He had never been satisfied with the second, which Dr. Hans had given him and thugs had broken up in a Detroit alley. That one had seemed false because it had been too youthful for a man his age. Now he had a third face, his second reconstructed one in a little more than three years.
    Cindy insisted on being in the room when the bandages were removed, even though Dr. Hans and the sisters had warned her he would not look right at first. She gasped. “He looks like he’s been out in the sun too long!”
    “Yes,” said the surgeon calmly. “It is red, as we told you it would be. In a week…”
    In a week he was a third man. He did not have the same face he had had before the crash; reconstructing his original face remained an impossible feat for the plastic surgeon. But he did not have the sham young face he had worn for the past few years. His Roman nose had not been restored; it was straight, Teutonic: what Dr. Hans considered correct and handsome. His broken cheekbones had been restored, partly with bone taken from his pelvis. Another piece from his pelvis replaced a hunk of his chin that had been destroyed by the men who had worked him over. The best thing about his new face was that people would not turn and stare at him anymore.
    “I like it,” said Cindy.
    Which to Angelo was all that counted.
5
    In London, in Amsterdam, and on the Riviera, Angelo and Cindy had accepted only one telephone call that was not from a member of their families—a call from President Nixon, congratulating them on their marriage and wishing them well at the Swiss hospital. He said a man like Angelo might want to consider a position in government and asked him to call when he was fully recovered.
    During the weeks