Half Broke

by Ginger Gaffney

Daniel leans forward, elbows resting on his knees. Both of their faces are empty of stress. Whatever happened in this room with this young redheaded man who just exited has given them relief. I wish I could do the same.

  “I’m sorry, guys. I found this. In the hay barn. Just now. Under the floorboards. Under, you know, where we store the hay.”

  My fingers pluck at the paperclip holding the box shut. It sounds like a tiny cymbal.

  “Tony and Randy were helping me load the new hay into the barn when we found it.” I twist the paperclip and open the lid. I lift off my chair and walk over toward James and lay the box down on his lap. He squeezes his knees shut to create a cradle, then he meets my eye. I start backing away, pinching my lips together and shaking my head.

  “I’m sorry. Really sorry, guys. I don’t know who, or how, or when this went down.”

  Daniel and James bend over the box. Their fingers push the contents around, rolling their pointer fingers over the syringes and joints. Daniel stands up and slaps his hand against a small tabletop that holds the only lamp in the room. The light rattles and flickers as if the earth is quaking underneath us. His nostrils flare out to the side. His mouth quivers where his cheeks meet his lips. Under his breath he mutters, “You’ve got to be fuckin’ kidding me.”

  “What in the hell?” James picks up the box in two hands and drops it, then lifts his hands to his head. The contents lie in a loose pile on the floor. Each ingredient has its own contour, its own space, making the quantity of drugs look larger than I had originally thought.

  They look up at me and bark out questions. “When? Where? Who has seen this?”

  “It was just Randy and Tony with me stacking hay when we found it under the loose floorboards.”

  Daniel takes the edge of his collar and wipes his upper lip. James pokes the joints and syringes around the floor with the toe of his boot.

  “Yeah . . . well, yeah, Ginger. This is us. This is who we are. You already know, we’re some of the most fucked-up people. The worst you’ll ever meet.” Daniel folds his shoulders and slumps forward from his core. “We’ll need to get moving on this quickly. Only Randy and Tony know about it?” He straightens his back and sits up.

  With that, James leans forward and places everything back in the box, then shuts the lid. He twists the paperclip until it snaps into pieces and falls to the ground. He tucks the box under his arm and starts toward the door.

  “We’ll be right back,” James says, motioning for Daniel to follow. Outside in the hall, the thick adobe walls make their voices sound like hound dogs baying in the distance. The low notes pause and repeat, emphasizing their confusion, their pain, their need for a decision.

  I have always known I don’t belong here. I’ve never once pointed a needle at my veins, nor had the urge to. Never has one of my parents or siblings overdosed in front of me. No one I know has crashed or wrecked a car from alcoholism or drug addiction or spent time in prison for smashing a man’s head in because he looked at them too closely. I have never panhandled for change on street corners or broken into cars and homes because I was desperate for a hit. Stealing for any reason is beyond my comprehension. My brain doesn’t work like theirs. I don’t know anything about their brains, their bodies. They are ruled by different instincts.

  The door swings open and James leans his head through the jamb. “Ginger, we need to go to headquarters, find the rest of the council, and tell them what’s going on. I think, Daniel and I think, maybe you should go home for the day. We’ll take care of this from here, but we do thank you for coming to us. I’m sorry you have been brought into the middle of this.”

  He’s halfway out the door before I can ask him, “It’s the livestock team, isn’t it?” He gives me a nod and is gone.

  MY DOGS GREET ME as I drive through my gate. Was it my fault? What didn’t I notice? Was I not paying attention? Taking things for granted? I have lived in this valley for over twenty years. I’ve been robbed four times. Saddles, bridles, irrigation pumps, TVs, and computers have all been stolen. I’m not naïve about where I live and who I live around. This river valley, just forty minutes north of Santa Fe, has been dealing with the blight of poverty and drug addiction much longer than the rest of the states. We go back three or four generations of families who have made their living off drugs. Shortly after my last break-in, I bought a gun. In a fit of anger, I went out to the back of my property and shot holes in old beer cans for an hour. I wanted everyone to hear that gun popping off and bullets flying.

  My blue heeler nips at the bottom edge of my jeans. She wants to do something, but I tell her to stay, as I enter the horse corral and halter my gray gelding, Izzy. The sun is high in the sky. It’s 3:00 in the afternoon, and I don’t know what to do with myself. On my way home, I called Glenda and told her everything. She’s the only one who knows how much the people at this ranch mean to me. She’s always said, the horses are what turned our relationship around. She knows how horses, all on their own, can change people’s lives.

  I pick at the rocks embedded in Izzy’s hooves. I need Izzy today. I need his back, his legs, his endless ability to stay present. I decide to go for a ride.

  I throw a small saddlebag over the horn and toss in my cell phone and water bottle. I motion to the dogs to lie down and stay. They question me, with their bellies flat against the warm barnyard dirt, ready to spring forward in unison with my slightest gesture. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” I say. Usually I bring the dogs, but today I want to move out fast. I know they will need water and periods of rest to keep up with Izzy. The pace will be too much for them. I raise both of my hands in a strong, flat signal. It puts a wall between us. The three dogs lie down in the corral dirt and rest their heads on their paws as I leave out the back gate atop Izzy.

  It’s easy in big open land to forget about myself. The sun beats down on brome grass, the yucca, my forehead, and dried sagebrush indiscriminately. We are all made of the same tissue under the unforgiving canopy of a wide open western sky. The reins slip into the creases between my thumb and first finger, the folded skin matches the cracking bark on juniper trees. Izzy’s back is round and stable, like these hills heading east into the mountains. When I get in a tangle, when I can’t think through things straight, I almost always get on a horse. Belle taught me, long ago, that riding horses creates order in my body. Every molecule falls back into its rightful place, even as the world seems to break apart around me.

  How could this have happened? I knew Sarah had her struggles, but Rex? Omar? Paul? Paul, whose eyes were so bright, clear, and sharp. Who told me the first time I met him that he would be the first in his family to rid himself of the cycle of prison. And Flor? She was the stellar leader of the group. Always holding counsel when someone was having a bad day. I feel the tension of the day take up residence in my chest. I push Izzy into a gallop, and we head up the arroyo hitting twenty miles per hour. His flaxen mane whips against his neck as the wind penetrates the holes in my dirty, overworked Carhart.

  We make two turns, first north then east, and head toward the ammo grounds where men in camouflage pull the trigger at broken TV sets. Izzy hears the popping and skids sideways with each shot. My left hamstring cramps and grabs me back on center. He’s hot underneath me. Already I feel the sweat of the saddle stick to his back. My jeans fit wet and tight around my crotch.

  Heading east, away from gunshots, we’ll merge with the Rio de Ancha, the wide, dry arroyo that rolls west from Truchas to the Rio Grande. We climb the first hill and Izzy digs in with his hindquarters. It’s a scramble of push and pull, as his front and hind legs work in unison to motor us up the deep sandy incline. I lift over his neck to get my weight in just the right place where I won’t throw him off balance. I squeeze my quadriceps to his rib cage harder than usual. I need his body to hold me. My legs tremble with weakness I don’t recognize. I grip him like a climber holds the rock face.

  I remember Sarah, on her six-week contract for getting caught having sex in the hay bar
n. Now, I wonder, who turned her in? How long has this been going on? I think about how mad Sarah was on her return to livestock. How she couldn’t trust anyone. Why didn’t she rat them out? Why didn’t she break her silence, come clean, and let Daniel and James know what was really going on? Maybe now she will. Maybe she will tell everything and keep her place on the ranch secure.

  On top of the ridge, Izzy sniffs and puffs, catching his breath and searching for life in this barren landscape. We see tracks. Jackrabbit, deer, cow, calf, and elk. They are loose on this barbed-wire-less landscape. I look down to see who we might meet. Who will notice us? Who will know we are here?

  I look up and see a hint of orange and gray. It slides between the cholla and piñon. Coyote up the hill. Two beats at a trot. An unhurried pace. He shifts his body inside the blending sagebrush, his tattered tail wags over the low-growing gray-blue plant. Izzy rushes forward to chase him and hits the hill flat-backed. His nose is out in front, angling through the cactus. It feels like everything is watching us.

  The chase leaves us empty. We roll downward into a north-pointing arm of the arroyo and return to a walk, then head up a low incline at a lope. The tracks of ravens and crows hop around a snag of juniper where last year’s runoff grabs a pocket of apache plum and makes a bed for desert mice and rabbit. Their little batting triplets of toes, like eyelashes, jump into sequence as we run past them. Izzy feels like a racehorse, churning in the soft sand. The arroyo bends hard to the left and Izzy does a flying change to balance himself. His hindquarters grab like surefooted elk. My hips circle his back. Up. Down. Around and through.

  I don’t often feel as if I belong. People have never been easy for me. What I see on the outside—their gestures, the way they walk, how they hold their heads—doesn’t match the words coming from their mouths. I’m not the girl who never leaves the corner at the party. I’m the girl who doesn’t go to the party in the first place. When I’m with Flor and Sarah, Rex and Paul, even Randy—I know I belong. All our troubles, all our inadequacies, we wear them on the outside. There are no perfect, pretty people at the ranch. We are the ugly, the difficult, the invisible, the broken. Nothing is hidden. It is why horses have always been easy for me. They’re honest. They show me exactly how they feel. How could the livestock team do this? The lies, the sneaking, the hiding? How could they lie about something I thought was so real? How could they tear it apart?

  I turn Izzy hard left, and we scramble up the rim of a barranca. I hear screeching from above. Two red-tailed hawks circle with magpies chasing from behind. The hawks scream and flutter their wings, trying to keep the magpies off their backs. The rim is narrow, dropping steeply on both sides. I feel my butt cheeks squeeze together, trying to make myself feel thinner. I can hear rocks and dirt falling behind Izzy’s hooves, cascading down the embankment.

  There must have been a plan. Two months ago, Omar told me they lost the key to the tack room and hay barn. We couldn’t ride that day. They went to town with Daniel and made a copy from the original. Was it a lie? Did they steal the key? Is that how they got the box in and out of the hay barn? Paul and James also went down to southern New Mexico for Paul’s brother’s funeral, about the same time the key went missing. I know Paul’s family are all dealers. The whole family has been in and out of prison, including his niece and nephews in juvenile detention. It’s a family tradition, he told me one Sunday after breakfast.

  “It goes like this,” he said to me as he squeaked his chair closer to the dining room table and leaned toward me. “I’m in for one year, then parole. When I’m out, usually my brother and sister are in. Whoever is out keeps the business going.” His mom and dad overdosed and died when he was fifteen. He never went to high school. The siblings inherited the business, which ran from their double-wide trailer, night and day, every day of the week.

  When Paul was in prison, he taught himself to read. As his reading improved, he began to teach other men over lunch or at recess. The guards became suspicious over these secret meetings. Fights broke out and Paul was put in solitary confinement. He lived in an eight-by-eight-foot cement-block room, scratching days into the walls and waiting for the fifteen minutes he had each afternoon to walk out into his cage. The cage was even smaller than his room. It was a four-by-four-foot wire-fenced box, completely contained. There was nothing in the cage. No bench to sit on. No other men to talk with nearby. Its only advantage was sunlight. Paul would stare up at the sky and speak to the birds that flew by, to the clouds, to the sun. It was the fifteen minutes in the cage, his fifteen minutes communing with the world, that motivated him to try and break the cycle of prison and drugs. He became desperate to live in the world again. He swore to himself he could do it. He wrote to the ranch for an interview. It took a year to get the interview. He waited another six months for the judge’s recommendation. Almost two years went by before he was transferred here. Was it at his brother’s funeral when they loaded his suitcase with drugs? Is that who brought the drugs onto the ranch?

  My head is spinning stories, bits of memory splinter into my mind as my body rocks back and forth on top of Izzy, heading eastward and uphill toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The Truchas Peaks now straight in front of us, deep snow on their western slopes and in the bowl between them. My home sits at the base of these mountains. Looking up at these two points on the southern end of the Rockies from my porch window every morning lets me know who and where I am. Juniper berries, piñon, and a few pines scent the air. Clouds are coming over the mountains from the eastern plains. I’ll need to head back before the rain hits and the arroyo fills with floodwater.

  There’s lather poking a foamy head out from under the saddle pad resting on Izzy’s shoulders. His gallop has slowed to a traveling lope. One ear is on me, the other pins itself to the landscape around us. The arroyo channel tightens, and the walls climb higher, until it feels like we are being shot through a portal. The light is smoky, and the sun no longer hits the top of our heads. I squint my eyes and bring the world down to a pinhole in front of me. I imagine riding through this bright white dot and out onto the other side. I feel we could ride into that tiny speck of light, weightless and free.

  The reins dangle from Izzy’s neck, and I begin to close my eyes. He slams to a halt, and I land forward on his neck. Three young bucks blend into a tall pile of brush right in front of us, sipping from a pool of water left over from last night’s rain. Izzy holds his head high, watching the animals carefully. The first buck is older; he has three points on each antler. The other two have fuzzy bumps barely visible poking up beside their ears. The middle buck lifts his head and licks at the moisture dripping from the long hairs around his muzzle. He stares at Izzy as he would a brother, deer and horse one and the same. He doesn’t see me, smell me, or care about me. He dips his head back down and keeps drinking. The sucking of their tongues sounds like children drinking from a water fountain.

  Maybe it wasn’t that I missed something, some clue that I should have noticed. Maybe I saw everything perfectly. I saw my students for who they are, not who they used to be. I saw their hope, their hard work, their sorrow. Over the last year, they have carved away at their past and sculpted a partial return, perhaps to the people they were before all the trouble began. Maybe I just saw them like the young buck sees Izzy. Something that seems to belong in this world. The way Paul felt when he started speaking with the birds.

  The big buck turns and walks east up the arroyo. The two smaller ones follow close behind. Izzy watches them leave with keen interest. He drops his head and licks his lips. I jump off and take him over to the watering hole. His hooves sink into the tracks left by the deer. I look down at my own boot marks beside theirs, then reach for the water bottle in my saddlebag and take a long swallow.

  I DON’T CHECK IN at the dining-hall desk two days later. I don’t check in, like I usually do, to see who is scheduled to be down at the barn. It has been more than forty-eight hours since we found the box. I haven’t been sleeping well. I tossed
around in my bedsheets half-awake until three in the morning. At seven o’clock my phone rang. It was Janet, my farrier, wanting to know when we could schedule our next appointment to shoe Izzy. Janet is a recovering drug addict, thirteen years sober. She had warned me about addicts, how high the chances were for failure. I let her know about the box, how I was heading over to the ranch but didn’t know who would still be there.

  “We’re not all going to make it, Ginger. You understand that, right?” she questioned me, reiterating a harsh truth she’s told me before.

  Of course, I know that. I know the path to recovery is a crooked line. Learning how to fall and get back up is the skill this ranch tries to instill in all the residents. The mistake I made, my ultimate failure, was to think what I had with the livestock team was permanent. That nothing could touch it. I should have known better.

  “Sounds like you’ll have fewer friends over there today, Ginger,” Janet said. I know she will hold the hard line. Janet has told me more than once that if she fell back into drugs, she wouldn’t live to see sober again. She knows something I do not. Something I will never know.

  “Next Tuesday is good for me if you can make it.” I changed the subject, and we scheduled our appointment.

  “They are lucky to have you. I hope they know it,” she told me as we said goodbye.

  I DRIVE THROUGH the metal gate, scanning the property for familiar faces. My eyes and the flesh around them are puffy from crying in my truck. I wave toward the residents working in the woodshop where Paul and Rex should be. I wave again to the men in the automotive shop where Omar, Tony, and Randy work. I pass the ceramic studio. Sarah runs the ceramic shop. I see no one in the studio. The doors are wide open, showing the empty chairs surrounding the workstation. Worry sinks further down my body.

  When I turn north toward the corrals, I can see the horses all gathered and tied to the pipe corral railing, but no sign of the residents. As I get closer, Tony and Randy come out from the tack shed and stand ready to greet me. Randy has a greasy mechanic’s hat on with his large hands crammed into the pockets of his baggy jeans. Tony is the picture of control, standing tall and alert, watching me pull down the drive, in slow motion. He opens the driver-side door of my truck as I turn off the ignition. I step out and am greeted with a long embrace. It isn’t a hug exactly. It feels more like he’s hugging me to hold me up. Randy stands back a short distance and can’t look at us.