Four Dead Horses

by KT Sparks

  First up was a fireplug of a Jillaroo in a sky-blue cordovan and matching cape. She recited “The Horse Drawn Hearse” by Bush poet Jack Drake. Martin had not made much of a study of the Australian cowboy bards, but he knew this piece and appreciated it as the omen it was, though whether good or bad, he remained undecided. Second came a cheerful guitarist from Alberta, who chirped and plinked about love and loss to a bouncy beat more suited for the coffeehouse than the saloon. And finally, the young poet Shadd Piehl. His blank verse was angry, lyrical, literary, smart. Martin heard his younger self in every stanza.

  He stayed in the Cedar Room for the next show, an open mic session. He had had no idea such events went on at Elko; they had never been broadcast during the Cowboy Poetry Hour’s coverage, and yet they were scheduled every day, sometimes twice a day, thrice on Saturday. Had he just attended one year, he would have discovered he could have performed, with no more qualifications than the ability to write his name on the sign-up sheet.

  Once the recital began though, Martin decided he was glad he had waited for a higher profile, if less conventional, onramp to Elko. A dentist from San Francisco read an ode to home brewing from a spiral bound notebook. A hunchbacked matron in a pink polyester tracksuit used most of her time to bemoan her long-dead father’s decision to leave the family ranch to her younger brother. In her last few minutes, she read an original work titled “When Daddy Carved the Turkey.” After, she took the seat in front of Martin, and he smelled malt liquor, IcyHot, and nerves in the sweat soaking her jacket’s back. The last act was a half-hearted Caitlyn imitator—waist a little thicker, braid a little looser—who belted out S. Omar Barker’s “Purt Near” as her mother offered up lines in a stage whisper from the front row.

  The session made Martin sad. This was real life at its thinnest, and that was something he never thought he would find at the confluence. That such people were here and reciting and, more than he, fitting in, hit him in the chest like a round of buckshot. He rose to go, but the smelly and bitter hunchback in front of him tugged at his sleeve.

  “Don’t leave,” she said. “People have been waiting in line to get in for the next show. Glenn Mayfield, Austin Miller, Beaufort Giles. Keep your seat, young man.”

  Martin sat and nodded a thanks, for the tip and for the “young man.” Of course, he would stick for Beaufort. And Mayfield and Miller were legends. Martin checked his schedule. The program was called “Western Characters.”

  Miller led off. He stroked with two thumbs his wooly white mustache, glanced at the two other poets, frail in their folding chairs, and said, “If you look around this year, there’s a bunch of us turned old.”

  That led to cackling and a few stray claps and set the tone for the show, which Martin soon realized was more storytelling than poetry. The warm bite of Miller’s voice, his open stance, the way the other two old men put their hands on their knees and leaned forward to laugh. Martin felt he was back in Jimmy Sneedle’s barn, Beaufort and the hands teasing him about his pronunciation of “Cayuse” or the crease ironed in his Levi’s. When Miller ended a long story with the punchline, “There ain’t no figuring women or sold-off cattle,” Martin laughed until he cried, though he had no idea what that meant.

  This was what he had imagined all those nights, days, months, years he had imagined Elko. These men talking to Martin in their wise and lilting way. These cowboys who knew where they were going and didn’t mind at all if Martin tagged along. The road to Elko had been so crooked, he had almost come to believe it was a dead end. But he was wrong. He had arrived.

  Glenn Mayfield stayed seated, recited “Dangerous Dan McGrew,” sang something about sage, and told a joke Martin had heard before but struck him as new and hilarious when rendered in the ancient cowboy’s slushy drawl. Miller did another round and recounted a man he once knew. “He never had religion,” said Miller, “but he never raised no hell.” The poet managed to make it sound like the worst sort of insult.

  And then it was Beaufort’s turn. He rose from his seat at the pace of the morning sun rising in winter and walked with creaking knees and a fortitude that radiated like a force field from his bent frame. His two friends eyed him with set frowns but did not raise their hands to spot his progress. They let him walk. He smiled and nodded at each then turned and smiled, at Martin? It seemed so.

  Beaufort raised a shaking, spotted hand to his forehead and shut his eyes. He coughed once. Martin leaned forward. He closed his eyes too, waiting for the words to spin out and catch hold. He sensed in his tightening chest what came next, a rush of hot dry wind and thirty years gone. He sniffed for the smells of the barn, listened for the boot scuffs of the hands, and ached for Ginger’s cool touch. He would feel that hard ground under his feet one more time.

  Beaufort began:

  Through rocky arroyas so dark and so deep

  Down the sides of the mountains so slippery and steep

  You’ve good judgment, sure footed, wherever you go

  You’re a safety conveyance, my little Chopo.

  Martin reared back, clipped the knees of the woman behind him with his metal chair, and yelped in unison with her.

  “No,” he said and felt as if he were spiraling down. The barn and the hands and Ginger whooshed to a pinpoint and blinked out.

  “Sit down,” hissed someone to his left. He sat heavily and the woman behind him moaned.

  “I know this isn’t everybody’s favorite.” Beaufort’s voice wasn’t as Martin remembered. It was an old man’s voice, raspy and tired, ready to be done with it all. “But my mother used to read it aloud, and it’s been on my mind lately, so I’ll ask you to struggle through it with me.”

  And struggle Martin did. He didn’t hear every line, though he hardly needed to. The poem was etched in acid on his swiftly disintegrating psyche. The words he did grasp, he heard in his mother’s quavering keen. He shifted left and right in his seat, tried looking at Beaufort and looking away, but it didn’t matter. Martin was back in their living room, urine and bleach fumes mingling with the steam off Julie’s Campbell’s Chicken and Stars. A blast of blood, a burst of iron, the smell of rotting grass as the pony crumpled and fell. Vomit and wet dirt and the whiskey on Dr. Broad’s breath, the gardenias at the funeral home and the Jiffy Pop his dad left burning on the stove after the reception. It swallowed Martin, and he would have run if he could have stood, and he would have screamed if he could have spoken.

  Chopo my pony, Chopo my pride

  Chopo my amigo, Chopo I will ride

  From Mexico’s borders ’cross Texas Llanos

  To the Salt Pecos River, I ride you Chopo.

  Then it was over. Martin looked up at Beaufort and saw nothing but an old man. An old man Martin didn’t know at all.

  Mayfield did one more song, but Martin wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was. He was sobbing so hard, the hunchback turned around and asked if she should go for the defibrillator. Martin buried his face in his hands and tried to gasp delicately until the final applause for the trio died and the murmurs of the departing crowded faded. He sat there still as a young woman unhooked the mike from the podium. He sat there still as the lights thunked off and the air-conditioning wooshed on. He sat until his mother and Beaufort and the cowhorse Chopo faded and were replaced, not with an image but with a vow. This had gone far enough. Helen would not die.

  Julie slugged a frozen margarita out of an enormous clear bowl on a cactus-shaped stem. A clump of crushed ice dribbled from the right side of her mouth and plopped onto the burgundy tablecloth. Martin guessed she had started drinking some hours before they met that evening at the Red Lion’s Aspen Bar and Grill.

  He stared down at the overdone ribeye on his plate. The cooks at Aspen’s broiled beef to just north of burned, no matter how rare he asked for it. He picked up his oversized steak knife and held it aloft, considering how it would be easier to plunge it into his own heart
than attempt to saw off a hunk of the beef. He cleared his throat.

  “The first poem he reads, and it’s ‘Chopo.’”

  Lattner picked up his glass and made to toast with the woman to his left, whom he had introduced as “Baby.” She was a squat bleached blonde with enormous and most certainly fake breasts distorting a glittery tube top with BABY spelled out across the front in metal rivets. She rolled her wide and tired eyes toward him and then to the four shrimp cocktails and three tequila shots arranged before her. She picked up one of the shots, touched it to the rim of his glass, downed it in one, and banged the jigger upside down on the table. She then went back to sucking, with mechanical precision, pink tiger shrimp from their tail shells.

  Julie licked at the salt on the rim of her glass. “Sometimes your mom just pops into my head. Just being like she was at the end.”

  “She was so sick,” said Martin.

  “I was thinking she was so nice. But yeah, she was pretty sick too.”

  Lattner looked up. “They ought to get you another steak. You said rare, bloody, bleu in the language of a culture that knows how to handle du boeuf. That piece of charcoal is an abomination, an insult to the culinary traditions of an allegedly cattle-centric culture.”

  “I can’t go through with it,” said Martin. He stabbed the meat with the knife and left it standing there, a temporary grave marker.

  “They even gave you the little pink toothpick.” Lattner pulled the plastic marker out of steak, shook it at the back of a passing waitress, and stuck it in his teeth. “You need to stand up for yourself. This was a deliberate misrepresentation.”

  “I mean the funeral. I can’t go through with the funeral. Killing Helen or asking you to.” Martin nodded at Julie.

  Baby glanced at him and buried another shot. Julie wiped her nose with a damp cocktail napkin and waved for another round of drinks.

  “I’m serious. I’m done with it all. I’m leaving Elko. Tonight. It’s not what I thought it was, the confluence, any of it. And I’m taking Helen with me. Or letting her go. Or something.”

  Julie bleated once, without mirth. Lattner reached for a shrimp. Baby batted his hand away without looking at him.

  “Noble sentiments, my old friend, but unnecessary. Julie has come to the same general conclusion, but as is her phlegmatic Midwestern wont, she’s done so in a more practical and, may I say, less selfish way,” Lattner said.

  “I can’t kill her,” Julie said. “I think I knew it before we left Conifer. But I got sort of wrapped up in it all, you know? It was fun, in an outlaw sort of way. Like with Dewitty.”

  Lattner chuckled.

  “My mother died that night.” Martin inhaled once, twice, found he could not exhale. His ears popped. The acid of partially digested mozzarella sticks burned at this throat. “My mother died that night.” He thought he might black out.

  “God rest her soul,” said Lattner, and Baby crossed herself.

  Martin could almost feel the bat in his hand again. His fingers ached with gripping. His arms shook and the wooden shaft crashed on Lattner’s skull, sliced through the top of Julie’s head, exploded into Baby’s breasts. A wave of paranoia pressed Martin back in his chair and smothered him in a blanket of red, the red of the blood he envisioned covering the table, washing around the broken glasses, splattering the piles of shrimp shells.

  “Jesus,” he said. He drained half a margarita, and Baby clapped softly. “Why didn’t you say something? Jesus. When were you planning to tell me? Before or after my reading? Before or after PBS started filming?”

  Martin cupped his hands over his nose and mouth and tried to calm his breathing. Anger felt better than fear, so he focused on that orange heat. He realized that he had rarely revisited the night his mother and Chopo died. He had let it go as one of the many and sudden and unexpected ways that cowboy poetry shaped his destiny. He forgot it and waited for the next stampede, the next freak thunderstorm rolling over the mountain. And yet in Elko he met his mother and Chopo around every turn, pinching at him like a misshapen saddle, puncturing his skin with their fangs like a startled rattler. Julie looked into her lap, and Lattner put an arm around Baby.

  “Well?” Martin’s voice rang out. He realized he had achieved some moral elevation, and this settled somewhat his muddied innards.

  “We weren’t going to tell you,” mumbled Julie. “We were going to drug Helen and let her sleep in the straps for the service, like Lee does when he floats horses’ teeth.”

  A waitress delivered two more shrimp cocktails to Baby.

  Martin took a long breath. The blood was receding, dripping off the table, flowing over the worn and diamond-patterned blue carpet, swirling its way back into the kitchen.

  “And then, when, to the strains of my recitation of ‘The Walking Man,’ they backed the trailer into the grave and dumped two tons of dirt on the sleeping Helen…what?”

  “There’s no grave.” Lattner looked up and grimaced. “Didn’t you see Mac’s memo?”

  Martin shook his head. He’d been leaving the logistics to Lattner, who seemed to enjoy answering Mac’s ten or twenty thousand emails a day.

  Lattner pulled a reusable Kroger’s bag from under the table and dug in it, retrieving and rejecting torn and stained scraps of paper. He stared at one, moving his lips silently, then presented it to Martin.

  “Is this it? I don’t understand. No burial?” said Martin, after reading the note through twice. “What renderer? I didn’t arrange a renderer.”

  Lattner dipped a shrimp in cocktail sauce and popped it in his mouth. “There is no renderer,” he said through his wet chewing. “Julie will take Helen to Mustang Manor.”

  “So we didn’t even lie to Lee,” said Julie. She grinned, as if she had not thought of this side serving of rectitude before.

  “Ah,” said Martin and thought: No.

  All that time following cowboy poetry in search of firm ground. Following blindly over whatever mountain cliff, into whatever desert chasm, onto whatever bed of campfire-heated coals it chose to drag him. For a moment this afternoon, right before Beaufort started to recite “Chopo,” Martin believed he had finally found his footing. But the sands shifted yet again, and yet again the way was no more clear than it had been the night he killed Chopo, carried his mother’s battered body into the house, and lay it on the floor beside her bed. He knew he needed to blaze his own trail, to part from Beaufort and the Songs of the Cowboys and the hope of Ginger. Out of habit, he waited for the words of the West to help him explain this to Lattner and Julie, now both beaming at him with blurry moon faces. Kiskaddon, Barker, Charles Badger Clark. Always hissing in his ears. Nipping at his shoulders and back. Shoving him this way and that. Silent now. Thorp, Chapman, Henry Herbert Knibbs. He hadn’t asked before, hadn’t even questioned. He moved his lips and prayed that syllables would follow.

  Grave cold silence.

  “The funeral is off,” he said finally, then paused to listen to the echo in his head. It wasn’t poetry. The words were his. “I’m telling Lina and Vess the truth.”

  Baby snorted and spit a blob of cocktail sauce on Martin’s cheek. “You don’t know nothing about truth,” she said.

  Lattner smiled at her, patted her hand. “We’re engaged,” he said. Baby drained her last shot.

  “She’s right,” said Julie, listing toward Martin’s shoulder. “What’s true about your cowboy poetry? How’s that going for you, living your life by the code of the trail-worn troubadour? Read at Elko, make a splash, fuck that Ginger-bitch, get it out of your system. Please.”

  Martin leaned back and away from the anger in her voice. What right did she have? Was he not allowed his own tragedy? They had conspired against him, against his dream or whatever distorted image they had of it. They had, again, aided and abetted his most foolish instincts. They were not his pardners, never had been.

  “Rea
lly,” said Lattner. “You aren’t the only one invested in this. All you have to do is what you have said you’ve wanted to do ever since I first met you waving your dick at a bunch of drunk welders at The Silver Dollar.”

  Martin nodded. They didn’t understand. This wasn’t about him. It never had been about him. He stood up and headed for the parking lot and Helen’s corral.

  July 27, 2016 at 8:07 PM

  Mac.Cooper@WBEZ.NPR.org

  To: Lina Sharpe

  Reply-To: Mac.Cooper@WBEZ.NPR.org

  PANIC

  Ran into Bob Lattner. He says Oliphant wants out, something about the Hero corpse not Hero, not dead? HE WAS NOT DRUNK. You need to talk to Bob or Martin.

  Should I tell them the grave’s back on? Will that help?

  Mac Cooper

  Special Projects, Communications and Branding, NPR National

  July 27, 2016 at 8:24 PM

  LSharpe@CPH.NPR.org

  To: Mac Cooper

  Reply-To: L.Sharpe@CPH.NPR.org

  Re: PANIC

  leaving stockmans for red lion now to find bob and martin doo not do anything else do not tellthem anything else ill take care of it

  Sent from my iPhone

  July 28, 2016 at 1:04 AM

  LSharpe@CPH.NPR.org

  To: Mac Cooper

  Reply-To: L.Sharpe@CPH.NPR.org

  Re: PANIC

  Found Bob then Martin. Crazy story, but I worked it to a happy ending. Everybody’s back on board. DO NOT mention the switch back to the grave to ANYONE from that crowd, not even that Julie chick. Will make for unnecessary complications. I’ll keep them away from the rehearsal.