Read All Hat for Free Online Page B

been?”
    â€œIn town,” Jackson said, and he looked at Dean to let him know that he wouldn’t rat them out. It wasn’t out of friendship, though, Dean knew. To Jackson, they weren’t even worthy of the effort.
    â€œWe were in the Slamdance,” Dean told Sonny. “Drinking Scotch whiskey with an angel named Misty. A rack like Pammy Anderson. Right, Paulie?”
    Paulie never said a word, just stood there, his eyes on the ground.
    â€œI want you to take that roan up to the Double B in London to get her bred,” Jackson said. “They’re waiting for her.”
    â€œWhat stud?” Dean asked.
    â€œRiver Ridge,” Jackson said.
    â€œRoy Gowling’s got that good stallion just down the road,” Dean said “You know the one, out of Sky Classic. You could breed her there.”
    Sonny smiled. “Lenny and Squiggy gonna take over the breeding around here?”
    â€œNo, and neither are you,” Jackson said. “You two get that mare loaded and get her up to London. I’m driving in to Woodbine, to see to the Flash. Sonny, you can go sit on the porch and smoke your cigar and do whatever it is you do all day.”
    *   *   *
    The roan mare bolted when they were loading her, slamming Dean against the trailer wall and then running off across the yard. Jackson, afraid that she would head for the highway, called to Paulie inside the barn. The mare was standing on the grass of the lawn, snorting loudly, her ears back, when Paulie came out. He began to talk to her, and as he approached her head seemed to drop a quarter inch with each step he took, and then her ears came forward. When he reached her she nuzzled him like a dog, and he took her by the halter and led her into the trailer without a hitch.
    It was three o’clock by the time Dean and Paulie hit the 401, Dean behind the wheel of the Ford Crewcab, the single trailer behind. Paulie fell asleep before they reached Kitchener. Dean stopped for coffee at a BP station, checked to see that the cantankerous mare was still on her feet, then set out again.
    Dean was getting plenty tired of his situation with his uncle Earl. Of course, Earl wasn’t really his uncle. Dean’s mother had been Earl’s first cousin, and when Dean had had a little trouble with the law—stealing cars, selling grass; trumped-up charges in Dean’s mind, despite the fact that he was guilty of them all—Earl had agreed to hire Dean as a kind of gofer. The judge always looked more favorably on a man who could attest to gainful employment, and Earl’s generosity had kept Dean out of jail. Of course, for Dean it was mostly a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. Maybe Earl did have a fine sense of familial responsibility, but he was getting some cheap labor out of the deal.
    Paulie was another story. He was Earl’s true nephew—his mother was Earl’s sister. She’d never married and had died in Montreal in a flophouse with needle marks up both arms. Maybe it was foul play, and maybe it wasn’t; apparently, she wasn’t someone the cops cared enough about to investigate. Paulie never knew his father—knew nothing of the circumstances of his mother’s union with the man. Whatever the circumstances, the result of that union led Dean to believe that the man was not the sharpest tool in the shed.
    But Paulie had a way with horses that bordered on spooky, and he was a good man at the end of a shovel. Dean couldn’t say the same for himself. He’d started out cleaning stables for the old man, then passed through a procession of menial jobs, proving himself to be ill-suited to each. Whenever he’d made an effort to assert himself, he’d been knocked back on his heels by Jackson or Sonny.
    Now Dean was just spinning his wheels, baby-sitting Paulie and running whatever errands Jackson considered to be beneath his station. And Dean was getting sick of it.