Half Broke

by Ginger Gaffney

  Sarah works her way through the pause in our conversation. “That’s my story. My family doesn’t want anything to do with me. I’m a flunky. I’ve been in and out of prison and rehab centers my whole life. I’m just grateful the judge sent me here this last time. I hope it sticks.”

  She’s shaking like a leaf in the wind as she speaks. I want to reach out and hold her. But, God, I know I can’t. I feel myself getting dragged into her pain, into everyone’s pain. I felt it with Hawk earlier, and now again. I pull my chair up against my back for support and collect my ponytail into a tighter knot. I need to do something with my nervous hands.

  “And what brought you here?” The voice comes from across the far left side of the table. This man has kept his distance all day, folding his arms across his chest and staring away from me whenever I spoke to the group. These are the first words I’ve heard him speak since I began working Hawk early this afternoon.

  “You gonna teach us something about horses?” he asks. His lips pinch together in a smirk, and his head jiggles like a plastic doll in a rearview mirror.

  “And you are?” I ask.

  “I’m Tony, and I’m a junkie. I’ve done some stupid fucked-up things that no one needs to hear about. But what I want to know is what are you gonna teach us about these horses? You some kind of whisperer or whatever?” It is obvious he isn’t asking a question. Randy laughs hard and chokes on his tortilla. He takes a big gulp of tea and laughs some more. Tony joins in and cracks a grin. It’s an inside joke. No one else at the table joins them.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you guys?” Paul looks down the table at them, then back up to Flor and Sarah.

  “Yeah, like you two could do better than Ginger did today?” Sarah stands up, leans over the table, and shouts at Tony and Randy. “Take your sarcastic attitude and keep it to yourself. We don’t need it.”

  Suddenly every man in the room is staring at our table.

  “It’s alright,” Flor says. “Sit down, Sarah.”

  “You think she can catch them? We’ve had more than ten men at a time out there trying to catch them. How’s she going to do it? That’s what I wanna know.” Tony is talking directly to Flor.

  “Catch who?” I ask.

  “There are two more horses you haven’t met yet,” Flor confesses. “They’ve been here for two years, and no one has been able to catch them. One is hurt, real bad.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They live behind the building we call Headquarters. We feed them there and keep water for them. Once, we tried to run them into a corral. But that’s when the accident happened. That’s when she got hurt.”

  “Hurt? How bad?” I ask with concern.

  “It’s bad. Her face is split open and filled with pus,” Sarah tells me.

  Why didn’t they tell me this sooner? I scoot my rear to the edge of my seat, lean back in my chair, and hold my forehead with the palm of my hand. How in the world could it take two years to catch a horse? I drop my head forward and I stare at the ground. I let out a sigh.

  “Have you contacted a veterinarian?” I ask Sarah.

  “Yeah. But he can’t catch them, either.” Sarah sits forward in her chair and bends around Omar to look me in the eye. “That’s why we called you. We got your number off a flyer at the Española feed store.”

  I had wondered where she and Flor had gotten my number. I look up into Sarah’s pink-cheeked face. Her hand is cupped over her mouth with worry.

  “We can catch them, Ginger, I know it,” Flor tells me. Her voice certain and clear, no doubt lingers in her inflection.

  I’m swelling with doubt. Am I the right person for this? Hawk almost nailed me earlier today, a number of times. How many more of their horses are going to be that dangerous? I must be careful with my body; it’s how I make my living. Not to mention that I’m fond of being alive. No one has offered to pay me. No one on the ranch makes any money. Should I really keep coming? Maybe I could refer them to a different trainer and leave it at that. But who would come if they aren’t getting paid?

  “Are they both mares?” I ask Flor. She’s out of her seat, waiting for me to respond.

  “Sisters,” she tells me. “They came together. Were dropped off without halters or anything.”

  The sun is dropping behind the western Jemez mountains. A blaze of orange and red fills the parking lot outside the dining hall. Little bubbles in the handmade glass windowpanes turn into tiny, blood-red balls, filling the room with rose-colored light.

  The servers take our plates and return with trays of warm biscochitos, drizzled with sugar on top. We stop our conversations and reach for a few of the warm treasures.

  “I’ll have to come back.” The back of my throat is raw with restraint as I chew on one of the cookies.

  “When?” Tony asks. “I wanna make sure I’m here for this.”

  “I’ll be back in a few days. Don’t feed them. We need those mares hungry.”

  “Why do they need to be hungry?” Rex asks with genuine curiosity.

  “Cause we’ll need to bait them into the round pen if we can. Don’t feed them. No one feeds them. You’ll have to let everyone know that those horses get no food. You understand?”

  Everyone nods their heads in agreement.

  I pause for a minute, gaze around the table, and take a long, slow breath. “Flor, Sarah, and I will do this alone,” I tell them. “I’ll let you know when I need the rest of your help.”

  I get up from the table. Tony rolls his eyes. The rest of the men rise with me.

  “Thank you for inviting me.” I look toward Flor and Sarah. “I’ll give you a call. Check with you in a few days.”

  “I’ll get the key to the gate and let you out, Miss Ginger.” Omar moves ahead of me. He walks over to the front desk and asks for the keys. I stand next to the dining hall door and say goodbye to the men sitting at the closest table to the exit.

  “Please come back. You can have dinner with us anytime,” a few of the men tell me as I’m leaving.

  The door shuts behind me. I hear voices, plates, forks, and knives muffle from inside the adobe walls. I’m shaking my head in disbelief as I walk to my truck. I’ve seen a lot of people and a whole mess of horses that need my help. But I’ve never seen anything like this. On my way through the gate, I wave goodbye to Omar. He waves back at me with an open-toothed smile. I turn left out the gate and head north toward home but feel something tugging at me, something chained to the ground.

  MOON AND STAR

  March / 2013

  Luna’s wound site is swollen and full of pus. Her right eye shut and padded, like an overstuffed pillow. It looks like it’s ready to blow. There’s a trickle of yellow oozing from the corner, where the infection has sunk beneath the surface of a five-inch zigzag crack blazing across the center of her face. Without some attention and a long round of antibiotics, Luna will lose that eye.

  Other than her swollen face, Luna’s on her A game. She and her sister Estrella, both black-and-white Paint Horses, have roamed free on this seventeen-acre ranch, uncatchable for the last two years. The ranch residents have chased them into every corner, every structure, even into this seventy-foot round pen. No one’s been able to lay a hand on them. Sarah told me what happened to Luna in our phone call last night. One of the residents, a part-time team roper, part-time drug smuggler from Las Cruces, ran Luna into a stall one afternoon six weeks ago and tried to rope her. His loop fell halfway across her face as she reared up and smacked her head on the twelve-inch overhanging shelter beam. Blood splattered everywhere as Luna shot out of the shelter, knocking the cowboy off his feet and catching her left hip on a T-post. Her flank sliced open like two pink lips parting.

  They’ve had the veterinarian out two different times attempting to treat her. But no luck.

  Today Luna and Estrella are hungry. Everyone has followed my instructions, skipping two days of feed so we can bait the mares into the round pen, lock the gate, then try to catch them. Sarah shak
es a bucket of grain, tempting them out from the alleyway behind the tall building where they seem to find security. She walks across desert weeds, dropping small piles of grain, hoping to lure the sisters across the field and over toward the round pen. The New Mexico sun is already high in the sky, and it’s only midmorning. Estrella moves out in front of Luna and gobbles up the piles. Pieces of rolled oats fall from her mouth as she chews sideways and carelessly. Luna shoves her head to the ground to eat what Estrella has left behind. Pile by pile, they walk slow and steady across the field toward the pen. Until now, Flor and I have stayed hidden inside the hay barn. As they approach, Flor walks to the round pen with two fat flakes of alfalfa. Luna and Estrella raise their heads and watch as Flor opens the gate and places the flakes against the farthest wall. She turns and hurries back into the barn. Sarah advances. Her luring piles of grain are now farther apart. She takes what’s left in the bucket and pours it into the center of the pen. We open the gate and Sarah joins us in the hay barn.

  Estrella comes through the gate first, like a wildcat, slowly lifting each hoof from the knee. She holds her leg up with just enough pause that it looks as though she’s ready to pounce on a kill. Muzzle to the ground, her back arching high, her hindquarters dig in and sink under her body. She drops her head into the pile of grain. Sarah, Flor, and I watch from inside the barn, about one hundred feet from the pen. Luna enters aslant. She twists and turns in every direction, certain that trouble follows her everywhere. She bends over the bright green leaves of the alfalfa with a wary backward twitch of her ears. Sarah moves out from the barn with long, quiet steps and snaps the round pen gate closed behind them.

  We move in closer and watch the sisters silently pick at the clover-sized leaves. The far reaches of their upper lips acting like fingertips, dragging the miniature leaves onto their tongues. Luna’s body trembles as she eats. We can see the shake of it across her topline where her long winter hairs bristle and shimmy across her spine. Estrella lets out a wet blow from her muzzle and continues chewing on the alfalfa. She’s smaller and less athletic. With a short back and barreled belly, she almost looks pregnant. The hollowed-out dish in her nose tells me she is at least part Arabian.

  Sarah and Flor talk in whispers, hashing out some drama that happened in the women’s dorm last night. There are only ten women on this ranch—from what I’ve been told—all of whom come from women-only prisons. There is no such thing as a coed prison, and for good reason. Flor and Sarah have both mentioned to me that living with eighty or so men on this small ranch is one of the hardest things to navigate. Both men and women are constantly getting in trouble for messing around.

  Flor looks down at her hands and spreads each finger out wide, admiring her multicolored fingernails that match the red and purple ribbons woven into her long, ponytailed braid. There’s already a chip in two of her nails, and we haven’t even started yet. They huddle over this major disappointment as I break their reverie and remind them exactly why we’re here today.

  Sarah has a wayward leg that curls out to the side of her body like a pirate’s hook. With each stride, the right side of her body collapses. I worry over how to keep them safe. We must enter this round pen like wolves: intimidating, fierce, demanding respect and accepting nothing less. Sarah is chewing on her cuticles as if they are question marks, and Flor twists the end of her braid over and over.

  “Flor, you ready?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You sure?”

  Flor explained in our first meeting that she’s a compulsive liar. She can’t tell the truth from a lie. She’s been that way most of her life. Around this ranch, she said, they call it false pride. But, for Flor, it’s more than that. She has a thin hold on what’s real and what’s not. Her many years of heroin addiction make knowing the difference difficult.

  I pause, and she recognizes I’m waiting for her to pay better attention, to forget about her ponytail, her fingernails, and return to the business at hand.

  “I’m not sure if I’m ready, Miss Ginger. What would you like us to do?”

  “I need you both to bend your knees; spread your arms and legs out wide; make yourselves bigger. Watch me.” I bend down into a practiced basketball position, spread my skinny frame out as far as it will go, and start to slide sideways—right to left, then left to right, my arms stretched and flapping like flags. “We’re going to have to work as a team in there, one unit, no holes. If they see any space between us, they will try to break through.”

  To my right, Sarah crouches and starts to slide with me; Flor slides on my left. With our outstretched arms and legs, we entwine ourselves into a human wall. Straight and woven but still not strong enough to separate these mares.

  “We need to practice. Flor, stand over there next to the cottonwood tree, please. Sarah, you can stay near the round pen. Bend your knees and take your positions. No matter what crazy shit I do, don’t back away.”

  They laugh but know I’m not joking. Flor shifts her stance wide but gets distracted by a loose shoestring. Sarah can’t stop sucking and picking at her fingers. Neither of them know what’s coming, nor do they know what to expect next. They listen, then they refocus. Flor bobs up and down on the toes of her sneakers, trying to prepare herself. Sarah sighs, then bunches her fingers into fists. She bends slightly from her waist and brings her fists close to her chin like a boxer.

  I run down the road about a hundred feet from them and ask again if they’re ready. They give me half nods, and I haul up the road right at Flor. Screaming, growling, pinning my upper lip to the bottom side of my nostrils. Flor sits low in her stance with her arms out in front, elbows bent, primed to defend herself against my attack. As I get close, she breaks forward at me and yips a cold sound that cracks from the narrow part of her throat. Her spit hits my face like a switch. Now, directly in front of her, I howl an angry call, jump up and down, and try my best to fill up with fury. Flor returns a pitchy scream that sends pins and needles into my ears, followed by two big stomps close to my toes. The earthy smell of her breath anchors me. Sarah turns her head away and covers her face with her hands. Our staged version of a cockfight has her backtracking. Flor’s arms swing wild, elbows knocking at mine. Luna and Estrella have stopped eating and run to the far side of the pen.

  I look over at Sarah, who’s beading up a sweat. “Please don’t do that to me,” she says.

  I drop my arms to my waist and turn to address Sarah. She removes her hands from her face and says, “Maybe, maybe I’m not the right person for today.”

  Her legs are shaking. I can see that my practice session with Flor has sent Sarah into some old trauma. I walk toward her, speaking slow and calm.

  “You are the right person. You certainly are, just stick close to me.” I wave them both together and bring them in front of me. “We’re ready.”

  I watch as Flor and Sarah walk ahead of me toward the round pen. They look like a moving puzzle, broken pieces stuck momentarily together. I wonder how long we can hold our wall intact. Estrella and Luna’s ears follow us as we get closer. They run around the pen at a slow trot. Their bodies move and curve like a school of fish, neat and tucked, swinging in unison with each stride. I hear the crunch of gravel under my feet. I try to relax my shoulders. We must be whole for this to work. The horses will see us for who we are. We’ll have no secrets, no lies to protect us. Just the honesty of our bodies.

  WE ENTER THE round pen and latch the gate behind us. The two mares fly around the perimeter in a panic. Luna is out in front, with Estrella close behind. Flor and Sarah are positioned off the wings of my shoulders, arms and legs spread out wide, forming the needle of a rotating dial, a solid line across the center of the pen. Sarah and I walk forward as Flor moves backward, turning our needle counterclockwise. When the mares turn up their pace, our walking turns into a run.

  We’re looking for a large enough gap between the sisters’ bodies to step in and slice the two apart, put our woman-made wall between them and break their bond.
Flor sees an opening and slides sideways into the break, turning Estrella back to the right while Luna keeps spinning left. The separation cuts our pen and the sisters into two. All hell breaks loose.

  Estrella turns back and forth. She tries to return to Luna, who screeches a piercing note that travels across the pasture and bounces off the twelve-foot adobe ranch walls. Our needle turns as fast as Estrella. The two sisters peel around their separate spheres in a frenzy. The small pen makes our frames look larger than we are. Every turn Estrella makes sends our needle spinning in the opposite direction.

  Behind us, Luna’s in a tantrum. From the corner of my eye, I catch glimpses of her stomping her front hooves to the ground, then rearing toward the sky, thrashing out with her front legs. Flor holds hard to her position, running forward then backward at Estrella’s every turn. Her breath speaks in grunts. The needle spins round and round as our bodies struggle to keep our human wall in place. Sarah is tiring. Her arms and legs shrinking closer to her body as her energy wanes. She’s crossing her legs behind instead of sliding, tripping herself up on each rotation.

  Estrella swoops back to the right and our needle whirls around with her. Sarah loses her balance and is down on one knee. Estrella finds the hole. She breaks through the rift in our wall and gallops back to Luna, catching Sarah’s crooked leg and knocking her face-first to the ground. Luna’s screaming halts. The mares meet up and flank each other, two bodies becoming one.

  Luna’s roars have pulled in a crowd. Residents gather from all around the ranch. In my peripheral vision, I see some of the men from livestock arrive: Rex, Paul, and Omar. Tony and Randy are nowhere to be seen. The men lean into the upper rail of the pen and start asking questions. Their curiosity causes a deep distraction for Flor and Sarah. Sarah picks herself up and slaps at the dust covering her right side. Her face is covered in a pink shade of brown, and her forehead is scraped and pocked with small pebbles. A contagion of adrenaline starts to swirl around us. A mindless fever. A thousand black starlings cackling into the sky.