Stormy Weather by Paulette Jiles Read Free Book Online

dark as night and buried entire towns. Nobody knew how to stop them, or why there was a Depression. But Jeanine felt at the moment reasonably safe in Conroe on the humid coast and with twenty-five dollars in bet money.
    Smoky Joe ran against a Houston horse named Cherokee Chief.
    “Don’t hit him,” Jeanine said to the jockey. “Maybe once. But you don’t get a second.” She bent forward and held up one finger in casehe was deaf or had water in his ears. “One hit is all you get. Okay?” Her body was slim and taut beneath the cotton dress, she had the gestural vocabulary of a mime.
    “I know how to ride,” said the boy. “I ain’t taking advice from no girl.”
    Jeanine hurried out among the crowd of men to place bets. She wrapped dollar bills around her fingers for each separate bet, she was intent and serious. She was one of the few women in the crowd but she carried herself in this male territory as if she had special privileges. Smoky beat Cherokee chief by a length. Jeanine had clambered up the stock racks of a truck with the agility of a monkey to watch the dark stallion charge past the finish-line flag as if he were running down some enemy and suddenly it was a wonderful day and here she was in her new dress in the aqua print. She jumped down and ran to the horse’s owner to collect her money. He wore a suit and tie and his hat tipped back, he had a new Buick and a drink in his hand. His car radio was on. The announcer was talking about the first overnight transcontinental flights and that Generalissimo Franco was besieging Barcelona.
    “Hand it over,” she said. The young man laughed and held it high above his head where she couldn’t reach it.
    “What’s your name?” he said.
    “Jeanine Stoddard,” she said. She took hold of his tie and said in a gangbuster’s voice, “Hand over that money, Pretty Boy, and nobody gets hurt.”
    He held it out to her in his closed fist. She unbent his fingers and took the bills, and then stepped forward and kissed him.
    She turned into the hot, noisy evening before it faded into dark, before her father came looking for her. Before he found out she had been kissing strange men. The amount of money she gripped in her hand made her nervous. Andrew Jackson’s severe, drawn face stared up from out of the center of the wadded banknotes. She was afraid shemight lose it or it would be stolen, or her father would come lurching out from behind a trailer and demand it from her. Then he would gamble it away on a blanket somewhere. It would end up as a wad in somebody else’s pocket.
    Jeanine ducked around the late-model Ford truck and trailer and nearly crashed into a man. Half his face was white and frothy. At first she thought he had a white beard or was foaming at the mouth, and then realized he was shaving. He grasped her arm to stop her.
    “Here! You’re going to make me cut my throat,” he said. He shook soap from a straight razor and then let go of her. He looked at himself in the truck’s side mirror and continued shaving.
    It was Ross Everett.
    He said, “Is this the entire extent of your social life, Jeanine?” he said. “Kissing strange drunks at horse races?”
    Jeanine’s face flushed hot. “Mr. Everett. You were spying on me.”
    “Well, it was kind of public.” He ran the razor down his cheek and flung off the foam. “I was just standing here shaving.”
    “You’re going to tell my father.”
    “I expect he’s too goddamned busy.”
    Jeanine put out her hand. “Don’t tell him. I mean it.” She kicked one of his tires. “You are going to tell him. Because you are rotten and evil.”
    “Don’t tell me he’s developed some fatherly instincts all of a sudden. What would he do about it?”
    “He’ll tell my mother.”
    “Good.” He stroked the razor down his throat and slung the soap to the ground. He rinsed the blade and folded it. Splashed water onto his face from a basin sitting on the fender, wiped his face on a pink towel. His