Blister Jones

About this book

From the book:How my old-young friend "Blister" Jones acquired his remarkable nickname, I learned one cloudless morning late in June. Our chairs were tipped against number 84 in the curving line of box-stalls at Latonia. Down the sweep of whitewashed stalls the upper doors were yawning wide, and from many of these openings, velvet black in the sunlight, sleek snaky heads protruded. My head rested in the center of the lower door of 84. From time to time a warm moist breath, accompanied by a gigantic sigh, would play against the back of my neck; or my hat would be pushed a bit farther over my eyes by a wrinkling muzzle - for Tambourine, gazing out into the green of the center-field, felt a vague longing and wished to tell me about it. The track, a broad tawny ribbon with a lace-work edging of white fence, was before us; the "upper-turn" with its striped five-eighths pole, not fifty feet away. Some men came and set up the starting device at this red and white pole, and I asked Blister to explain to me just what it meant. "Goin' to school two-year-olds at the barrier," he explained. And presently - mincing, sidling, making futile leaps to get away, the boys on their backs standing clear above them in the short stirrups - a band of deer-like young thoroughbreds assembled, thirty feet or so from the barrier.