Four Dead Horses

by KT Sparks

  Lattner was still looking at his phone. “Given this surprising but welcome change in our fortunes, I propose a couple of days at a Canyon Ranch. There’s one due west of here, outside of Moab.”

  “That place books up a year in advance,” said Julie, then looked at the card. “But I suppose…”

  “…they could find a room for the fabulously wealthy Mrs. Oliphant,” finished Lattner.

  Martin pushed his chair back. He understood that by taking the money and the jeweled clip from his brother’s bedroom, he had committed grand larceny. But this would be larceny on the grandest of scales. And to no noble end, just a couple of days spa vacation for a trio of embezzlers. He reached across the table for the credit card, but Julie snatched it and held it above her head.

  “This is not a game.” He could taste tears in the back of his throat.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “But if it was, I’d be winning for once. For fucking once.”

  Martin banged his glass on the table and headed out of the room. He had no more words for this, a situation even cowboy poetry could not find fertile. He was losing a focus he had had since he was twenty years old. He was a day’s drive from Elko, four days from the confluence, a week from reciting at the biggest event ever held at the confluence. He was where he had always known he would someday be, about to do what he had always known he would someday do. His path was clear, and it was clear he had strayed from it.

  As he turned onto the stairs up to the bedrooms, he heard the clink of fresh ice on glass, and Lattner’s lowest and most sinister chuckle.

  May 24, 2016 at 3:14 PM

  Mac.Cooper@WBEZ.NPR.org

  To: Lina Sharpe, Martin Oliphant, Bob Lattner

  Reply-To: Mac.Cooper@WBEZ.NPR.org

  RE: RE: Site for funeral—FINAL WORD

  So, after all that, the Elko Fair Grounds folks say we can’t do the burial/service ANYWHERE on their property. They say they’ve got too much toxic shit leeching into their well water to feel copacetic with adding embalmed dead horse to the mix. I tried the local cemetery, only one for miles, run by the Perkins family for generations. There’s a story there, but who’s got the time, right? Anyway, they said no animals in the graveyard, not even allegedly famous horses. But good news is, as long as the old lady’s granddaughter can twirl her batons for the cameras at some point, they’ll let us do the service there. So the body will trailer back to the Red Lion after and the renderer will meet the Final Paws crew there. Would have liked the grave, first clump of dirt, etc. for the cameras, but at least we get Vess at the trailer. Thanks everyone for hanging in through all this.

  THREE. MORE. DAYS.

  Mac Cooper

  Special Projects, Communications and Branding, NPR National

  16

  They reached the Red Lion Casino right before the sun dropped into a miasma of pink and orange. Julie had had the Centurion concierge request a temporary corral for Helen, complete with hay feeder and watering trough, adjacent to the parking lot. Martin had questioned whether they would really go that far to accommodate even one as fake rich as Julie.

  “This card will buy you anything,” she had said. “Just ask Lattner. You know he proposed to the spa technician who drained his lymphs at that resort in Salt Lake City.” Martin had not pressed.

  Julie checked in, settled Helen, and begged to be excused from dinner that evening. Lattner left his bags in the car, explaining to Martin that he could have their room to himself.

  “I’m staying with a sister of a friend,” he said, handing Martin a card from the “Rose Briar B&B, Elko’s oldest and cleanest bordello, since 1973.”

  Martin walked to the front desk alone, picked up a schedule for the confluence, then navigated the smoky casino’s spinning wheels and clanging bells and planted himself at the bar between two cowboys in leather vests, black Stetsons, and waxed mustaches. He tried to read the order of events for the next few days but found his eyes swimming in tears he desperately hoped would not spill. He breathed in the air of Elko and found it more nourishment than the two Coors and an overcooked hamburger with bacon and Swiss he’d ordered from the bartender. He was home.

  The next morning, Martin perched on the wide marble edge of an indoor planter and balanced a tiny Styrofoam cup of black coffee on his knee. He watched through a glass wall into the Elko Convention Center’s entry hall as men in cowboy hats, crisp blue jeans, and belts with massive gold buckles greeted women in tight leather vests, perfect ponytails, and hand-stitched boots. An hour before the official opening of the Thirty-Second Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence, and Martin had already been there an hour. Every once in a while, others seeking a place to sit and drink their dollar-coffee, proceeds to the Elko Mining Museum, would join Martin in the small atrium. They looked toward him politely, as if they knew him, because they must have thought they did. Everyone seemed to know everyone. Hugs all around. Back pats and cell phone snaps of the grandkids. Everyone had been here every year that Martin had not. Everyone knew everyone, but no one knew Martin.

  He waited until the wall clock indicated a polite five minutes after nine a.m., the official opening time of the registration desk. He rose and squeezed around a group of Native American women in beads and rugs and out into the main hall. He collected his commemorative pin, which doubled as his pass to all the confluence’s events, at a set of folding tables manned by high school rodeo princesses. He also asked about his speaker’s badge; he and a bright-eyed brunette searched for it unsuccessfully among rows of plastic-encased nametags arranged alphabetically on a red-and-white tablecloth. The display was a roll call of living cowboy poet laureates: Wyatt Wendt, Jerry Brooks, John Dofflemeyer, Linda Hasselstrom, Chuck Hawthorne, Yvonne Hollenbeck, Ross Knox, Wally McRae, Doc Mehl, Waddie Mitchell, Joel Nelson, Glenn Ohrlin, Shadd Piehl, Vess Quinlan, Henry Real Bird, Pat Richardson, Randy Rieman, Kent Rollins, Sandy Seaton Sallee, Georgie Sicking, Paul Zarzyski. And Giles, right there between Dick Gibford and D.W. Groethe. Beaufort Giles.

  When Martin saw the name, his joy that the old man was alive, his thrill that they would meet again, maybe today, swamped his rising shame at not being able to locate his credentials. The brunette princess called over her supervisor, an older woman, who was dressed in the sort of blue jumpsuit favored by French sanitation workers.

  “When are you on again?” she said.

  “Hero’s funeral, Saturday.” The supervisor peered at him through green paisley-framed reading glasses, and he added: “Cowboy Poet? PBS is filming?”

  “Oh, Wyatt Wendt’s thing,” she said. “That’s separate. We don’t have tags for that.” She turned away from the table and hugged a small man in a beaded leather shirt and an eye patch.

  “Sorry,” the rodeo princess said. “Want some Doublemint? It’s free.”

  Martin refused the gum and set himself back up with another coffee in the atrium to monitor the entrants for Lina, for Beaufort, maybe for Ginger. Definitely for Ginger.

  But it was Caitlyn Jordan whom Martin recognized first. He had not thought of the juvenile fiddler since the night she had performed in Pierre, right before Hero died. She flittered at the edge of a group surging in behind a wheelchair holding a bent and grizzled cowboy. A bent and grizzled Beaufort Giles.

  Though changed, so changed over the last thirty years, it was Beaufort, Martin was certain. He glimpsed the old man’s profile between the wasp waist of the child protégé and the legs of a cowboy closing ranks behind her. The old man’s head was slumped forward, but Martin could see that Beaufort was smiling a tight half-smile. Martin remembered it from all those years before, saw it again as if it were filmed in Blu-ray and streamed through his optical nerves. Beaufort’s chin jutted out and the sides of his mouth nudged up his tanned and lined cheeks. He looked as if he were about to drop a punch line, rag on an old friend, or laugh.

  Martin tucked his coffee cup into the ivy and stones behin
d him and stood. He inched by three robust matrons in elaborate woven shawls. The fringe from one caught in a wooden button on his corduroy vest, and he lost several minutes in polite apologies as the shawl owner fiddled to get free in an overly intimate manner, and her companions whispered and giggled over scatological weaving double entendres.

  “Are you a poet too?” asked one, and Martin answered “no” without thinking.

  Once in the main hall, it took Martin several minutes to locate Beaufort and his posse. Or what was left of his posse, which was a pile of bulky coats and Caitlyn leaning against the wall next to his wheelchair. Both she and the old man stared straight ahead, not speaking. She rested a small hand on his thin white shirtsleeve.

  Martin made for the pair, struggling through the crush of confluence attendees, as if he were thigh-deep in Class IV rapids and heading for shore. Something told him this was his last chance. Not Hero’s funeral, but this. He had paused his life at Beaufort thirty years before and had never figured out how to hit play again.

  Determination and fear must have been etched on his face because, as he barreled toward her, Caitlyn started and moved closer to the wheelchair. Beaufort’s gaze and nascent smile remained fixed at some point right in front of the men’s room across the way.

  “Can I help you?” asked Caitlyn, all but her eyes composing into the demeanor of a polished performer. The eyes stayed wide and darting, an appropriate reaction, Martin supposed, to the approach of the sweaty, panting, needy beast he could feel he’d become.

  “Beaufort,” whispered Martin, and the old man looked up. His pupils black moons in the flat blue of his irises. Martin remembered that gaze, clear and steady and, unlike the rest of Beaufort’s face, unmarred by decades of sun and wind, ice and dirt. His hair, still reddish brown, escaped from his straw hat and floated past his ears in uncombed wisps. More wisps, this time of white, flecked his chin and ropy neck. A black scab the shape of South America sat above his left eye and another, Antarctica, on his right temple.

  “Do you know Mr. Giles?” Caitlyn said. Beaufort, eyes still set on Martin, raised a shaking arm and offered a cupped and gnarled hand.

  “Yes,” said Martin. “Yes, from a long time ago.” He took Beaufort’s hand and held it. Beaufort quaked some more and said nothing. “It’s Martin, Martin Oliphant. From Jimmy Sneedle’s,” Martin said.

  Beaufort continued to hold Martin’s hand but turned to Caitlyn. She looked back as if she were reading his thoughts.

  “Jimmy Sneedle’s. That was a long time ago,” she said.

  Martin moved closer to the wheelchair, pressed Beaufort’s hand, and the old man winced.

  “You sent me Songs of the Cowboys. I should have brought it. I meant to return it.”

  Martin was speaking loudly, maybe yelling, he realized. A couple of men who had been chatting in the middle of the hall started toward him.

  “I’m here because of you. Cowboy poetry. I read at Jimso’s Jamboree and Talent Show.”

  Caitlyn’s slender fingers dug into Martin’s damp sleeve. With both hands, she tugged him back from the chair. “Look, Mr. Giles, it’s J.T. …Mr. McJunkin.” J.T. McJunkin, the corpulent poet with the waxed and silver handlebar mustache, edged Martin away from Beaufort and squatted in front of his chair, taking a metal armrest in each hand and tilting his black Stetson until it met the rim of Beaufort’s straw hat. Martin stepped away. Blocked, again. But by J.T. McJunkin, the great poet J.T. McJunkin. Martin had all his books.

  “Do you want some coffee?” Caitlyn asked, still clinging to Martin’s sleeve. “It’s free for performers.”

  Martin went with her. He heard a burst of laughter that had to be J.T. McJunkin, and then Beaufort, his voice thinner than Martin remembered, but clear:

  Oh, here they come to Heaven,

  Their campfire has gone out.

  Martin followed Caitlyn through a cafeteria into an annex where powdered donuts and a coffee machine were set out on a folding table. Standard-issue round eight-tops ringed with beige plastic chairs dotted the room, only a few occupied. The poet and mule packer, Ross Knox, sat at one, holding a mug of coffee under his chin and leaning in toward a taut older cowgirl. Martin was fairly sure it was Deena Dickinson McCall, author of Mustang Spring: Stories and Poems. He had considered using one of her pieces for Hero’s funeral.

  “Why don’t you sit here, sir, and I’ll get you some coffee,” Caitlyn said, guiding Martin to an empty chair at a table toward the back of the room. Her eyes jumped to the door where her father, a famous poet and singer in his own right, had materialized, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, head cocked. Caitlyn blinked something at him. I’m fine. Martin assumed because the man slipped back out of view.

  He watched Caitlyn flit to the food table, smiling and offering a word to the volunteer manning it, a light tap to the old woman in the bright green fedora sitting alone, a wave to the boy with buck teeth tuning a fiddle in the corner. She returned with a steaming Styrofoam cup. The scent of Ivory soap battled with the aroma of the brew as she leaned over Martin.

  “There,” she said. “You have to forgive Mr. Giles for not recognizing you. He isn’t well. And he is very, very old. I’m Caitlyn, by the way. And you’re?”

  “Martin,” he said, “Martin Oliphant. I know who you are.”

  Caitlyn nodded, as if she was not surprised.

  “How do you know Beaufort?” he said.

  “Everyone knows Mr. Giles. He was one of the first. When the confluence just started.” She folded her hands in front of her and bent over them. “This is probably the last time he’ll be here.” She looked to either side and whispered, “Cancer.”

  “Oh,” said Martin and took a sip of the coffee to keep her from noticing the flush he felt crawling up his face. The drink burned his throat and he coughed. He stared at the far wall, trying to sort his feelings. Loss? No, he had lost Beaufort years ago. Grief, maybe, but for whom? Anger, maybe, but at whom? Caitlyn’s eyes darted around the room, as if she was planning an escape. He should let her go, but he needed to know.

  “Do you know Ginger? Beaufort’s—Mr. Giles’s—daughter?”

  Caitlyn’s head snapped back toward Martin, an early bird setting its beak at the worm. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Everyone knows about Ginger Giles.”

  “Is she here?” Martin said, jamming his belly into the table’s edge, almost tipping his coffee.

  “Not here here, like in this room,” Caitlyn said, “but I heard she’s coming. With her husband, whom we don’t know, most of us. She hasn’t been for years and years.”

  “Husband,” said Martin. He knew. He had always known. Why should she have waited for him for thirty years when he hadn’t waited for her for ten minutes?

  “Where’s she been?” he said, and Caitlyn sat up straight, opened her eyes wide, flared her nostrils.

  “Columbus,” she said. “Ohio.” She shook her head. “It’s such a sad, sad story.”

  As Martin listened, he had to agree. Ginger’s story was sad, sad: marriage at twenty-two to Thatch Bourne, a broken bull jockey twice her age; two weeks later, an errant hoof off Ginger’s mare to Thatch’s already dodgy left knee; crutches to walkers to wheelchair; an unsuccessful transition from bronc busting to mortgage banking; bankruptcy; one too many painkillers after one too many shots of Jack.

  “A widow at twenty-three,” Caitlyn exhaled. Her eyes bore into Martin’s eyes for one beat more, then flicked away.

  “What happened then?” he said. “How’d she get to Ohio?”

  “I don’t know,” said Caitlyn, placing her hands on her thighs and craning her head to the left. “She just did. Married a rich guy. Like a banker or something.” Caitlyn stood. “I really should go. The opening ceremony is soon.” She patted Martin on the shoulder and walked away.

  “Sad,” he said to the seat she had abandoned. “Sad.”

&nb
sp; Martin found himself wondering if horses—bad ones, dead ones, fictional ones—had littered the landscape of Ginger’s essence in the way they had his. Perhaps they had that in common. He wondered what would have happened had he made it to Elko as a young man. Caitlyn had been unclear on the timeline of Ginger’s second marriage. Martin worked on quashing the thought that he was the Midwesterner who had been meant to pick up her pieces after Thatch’s death. He, not some Buckeye banker. Martin would have come to her. He never would have taken her away from cowboy poetry, her father, her Western skies and purple plains.

  Martin sat, palms flat on the table, half-filled cup of coffee in between them, until the bottom of his thighs lost feeling, and he couldn’t distinguish them from the top of the seat. He sat as the room drained, refilled, drained, refilled again, drained again, never more than one or two others joining him at the table, not speaking but examining torn notebook pages or worn books or the fold-out confluence schedule. He sat until a third wave filled the room to capacity, and a young man with a white-blond crew cut and red bandana bent over to ask to use the empty chair next to Martin. He nodded his assent, sniffed at the fellow’s plate of spareribs, coleslaw, and cornbread, and stood up. It was lunchtime. He had been at the confluence for four hours, his first four hours at any Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence, and he had heard but one sad story and no poetry at all.

  Back in the main hall, Martin pulled his copy of the schedule out of his satchel and considered his options for the rest of the afternoon. He recognized two of the poets listed for “And We Shall Ride” starting in fifteen minutes in the Cedar Room. He found a seat up front, settled, decided he was too conspicuous. Moved to the back, took a center seat, became claustrophobic when three Stetson-wearing women in matching bowling shirts sat between him and the door. Shifted to a seat on the center aisle, placed his bag next to him, moved it to make room for the videographer setting up there. Debated removing his leather jacket in case it got stuffy, did remove his leather jacket and arranged it on his seat back, apologized to the videographer for knocking into one of her tripod legs, and glared at the white-haired, sloped-shouldered woman who had turned to shush him as the program started.