by Peter Heller
I turn up Grand Avenue: hardware store, two cafés, pizza shop, Mexican restaurant, ice cream, barber. A throwback. The town is half a mile off the county highway, so there’s only local traffic. I pass the gravel company, the trailer park by the river, cross over the bridge and accelerate up the hill past the high school sign EAGLES AAA CHAMPS!, up to the highway and turn right east. Five drops spatter on the windshield and I don’t care. I can already feel the excitement of stepping off the rounded stones of the bank into the clear green water. The wind from upstream will be in my face, wanting to screw with my cast. I can feel the cold current against the light waders, the warmer rain.
Elbow out the window, I smell the downpour that’s already passed cooling the pavement, the ozone. I drive through Stoker. It’s a town of fifty houses, small and grimy, crammed between the river and the tracks. Coal town. Heaps of it, a small mountain piled in a cone on the slope across the river. Conveyors and silos climb the side of the canyon. Above the coal are broken rock ledges and oak brush all the way to the ridgetop. Mountain lion country.
Out the other side of town and now there is just the river. The canyon opens up and the river is wide and riffled, running low and clear. The road straightens and I floor it. I can see the high rugged wall of the Sheep Mountains still streaked with snow. When I get to the green tanks of the gas well I turn sharply off to the left, cross a bridge and the road turns to dirt and follows the Sulphur. Something in me relaxes. I can see from the darkness and shine of the clay that it has just rained. Nothing now. White patches of cloud moving fast and a mobile shifting sunshine. Everything in this whole country is getting ready to move. Archery season’s in two days and Bob tells me the woods will be thick with bow hunters from Arkansas and Texas and I might have to fish in an orange vest. Never happen. If some sonofabitch from the Ozarks mistakes my white beard for the ass of a deer, well.
I cross another small wooden bridge with a clatter of boards and am now on a rough track with a small clear creek running below me. Across the creek is a fancy log lodge and cabins, the last group of houses before there is nothing. A lifesize bronze bear stands in the forecourt, up on two legs and arms spread to the sky as if he were calling down a rain of locusts.
I can already smell the change. The darker spicier scents of spruce and fir. They come right down to the road. Big tall trees, heavy boughed, the branches trailing little flags of dry Spanish moss. Leaning and dark. And the creek below gathering the light as it gathers the water. The water is nearly blue, greener in the pools, snowy in the rapids, a living pulse reflecting trees and sky and cloud and ducks and crossing elk, and soon yours truly as it runs. My own pulse quickening. The excitement that never changes, of getting wet soon. Of facing off with a bunch of wary fish who may or may not be smarter than me.
The afternoon is somber under cloud, then the edge tugs away and the water sparks in a sudden sweep of sunlight. Can I say that I feel happy? First time in how long? No. Won’t say it. Shut up and inhale and drive.
Up ahead there’s a horse trailer in the middle of the road, horses, men. A short man in a big hat, leather vest pushed open by his belly, holds up a hand. Cowboy mustache. I can see the round of the chew tin in his breast pocket. The lace up cowboy boots called packers. Dirty and cracked. Up ahead a big man with a bigger gut and another big hat, liver colored, is trying to load a little strawberry roan. The horse’s head is strained back, the lead line from the man’s hand to the halter is taut and he is jerking on it hard. He is also yelling which is scaring the mare, I can see her sweatsoaked belly now as she wheels, the slack teats. Her eye back in her head.
“Goddamn it! Rockheaded piece of shit! Yaaaah!”
He jerks hard on the lead, the whole weight of his upper body in the twist of his torso. At the very end of his tug the horse rears. The fat man, more bulk than fat, is at the end of his rotation, he has nothing left, and the rearing mare tears the rope through his hand which I notice is bare. No glove.
The man yells. Or roars like a bear. Too bad the mare doesn’t get all the line and run. She doesn’t. I am staring. The short cowboy who has approached my window is half turned and staring too. The horse didn’t get all the line and before it is out of his palm the man dives for it with both hands and hauls. He is screaming now. He ties it, three fast moves, to a ring at the back of the trailer. The mare’s mouth is foaming. She is hauled back stiff legged, neck extended, trying to get as far away from everything at the other end as she can. She can’t.
“You good for nothing balky shit factory.”
The man’s voice is lower. He doesn’t have to scream, the horse is tied. He can do what he wants. He reaches into the back of the trailer, into the corner by the door, and tugs. Unhitches whatever it is, a wood stave, no, some kind of club, looks like a two by four, polished dark, maybe oak, lathed down, but the corners still on it. The first strike is both hands, from back and behind like a slugger swinging for the fences. The club comes down beside the withers and the mare screams, a sound like a choked whimper amplified, and it fells her, partly. Her front legs buckle. Now I am out the door. I shove it hard against the short man and he stumbles back with a surprised shout and lands on his butt in the dirt. I am jogging, hitching, trying to run down the road on my bad knee and yelling.
“Hey! Hey! What the fuck!” Running, limping, blind. I am blind. That part of me. Same as in the bar that day. Just a red blindness.
“Hey what the fuck!”
Too late. The man hauls back and swings again, this time against the architecture of the mare’s ribs. A thud and blow like the thud of a hollow drum. And crack. The horse, eyes rolling, white foam at mouth screaming, a madness, high, beyond whinny or snort, something human almost. I am on the man. I topple him and he is under me and we roll into the ditch. There is water in the ditch. Cold and it shocks. He is beside me flailing his arms trying to get back and I am hitting him, I feel something give, the pulp of his nose and he is pushing up and back scrambling.
“Hey what the—” He is scrambling back fast then standing above me on the road blinking, his nose trickling blood. Trying to digest. The meteor, the surprise of it. A stranger. “What the fuck was that?” His back to the mare who is still standing, I can see beyond the lip of the ditch, standing and shaking like in convulsions. The big man is looking down at me, holding the club. He must have picked it up. The little man has run up and he is staring too, they are looking down at me, as at some animal they never in this world have seen.
“Buddy,” says the big man. “What the hell was that?”
I stand slowly in the ditch water. Try my left leg, don’t know if I can weight it. Pick up my paint-spattered cap. It’s soaked. They are staring.
I look at him. His face meaty like a ham. He does not look particularly perturbed which makes him a dangerous man. Unconsciously he dabs his nose with the sleeve of his forearm. He’s done it before. I’d rather not talk. I’d rather tear his arms loose from his heavy shoulders like the wings of a cooked duck.
“You were going to kill that horse,” I say finally.
“Well. Maybe. My horse not yours. Headed for the glue factory anyway, that one.”
I stand there. Watching them, not the horse. The two men watching me. I cannot put a name to the hatred. The small one looks back to the trailer.
“Dell? What are we gonna do with her? She won’t load.”
“Cut her loose. She can starve if that’s what she wants. Let the coyotes eat her I don’t give a shit. I’m done.” Looks back to me. “Mister I suggest you mind your own goddamn business. Now and evermore.” They turn, walk away.
The big man called Dell stops in the road as if he just remembered something, turns back. Walks to the edge of the ditch, looks down on me. His eyes are small and colorless, without pity, flat with contempt. He gauges the distance. Then he snorts, a loud hawk, and spits. A heavy dark jet. I flinch back, too late, the phlegm hits the side of my neck, hot, a stink of tobacco. The trickle into my collar. Then he shows me h
is back.
I hear the horse whimper as they approach, like a child’s mew. I hear the metal door of the trailer clang shut, the slide of the bar. Two doors slam, the truck revs, the grind of first gear, the rattle as truck and trailer go on up the road.
I clamber slowly out of the ditch, hitch myself onto the gravel. The little mare is where they left her, standing, in shock, quivering. I wipe my neck with my sleeve—gobbet of snot, trickling tobacco spit, blood. Well.
The mare mews when I approach her. Doesn’t move just shakes. She’s cut, slashed across the back, a wonder he didn’t break her spine, and she’s cut deep, welted over ribs on her left side where the skirt of a saddle might lie. I speak just above a whisper, soft as I can and come slowly. She’s frozen in a paralysis of terror. When I touch her shoulder the quiver and tremor spread outward from the sweatsoaked hide, spread up and back like something seismic. She flinches away from my hand but doesn’t step. As if her hooves, small hooves, shiny and black, newly shod, are glued to the dirt. The lead rope hanging from her halter.
I almost cannot contain—the rage and the tenderness together like a boiling weather front. I stand beside her and breathe. The two of us just stand there.
CHAPTER TWO
I
The Digger
OIL ON CANVAS
20 X 30 INCHES
What I did was gentle her over to a tree by the pullout and tie her there and drive back out to the highway where I got two bars on the stupid phone. Called my neighbor Willy. He’s an elk rancher just east of me. Friendly but not intrusive, neighborly. Bachelor at the moment like me, maybe ten years younger. Told me when I first moved in: If I ever needed anything. Repeats it every time I see him. So I called the number I’d managed to store in my phone and he told me to wait and forty minutes later he pulled up in his own diesel pickup, his own blue six horse trailer, and when he swung down and saw the state she was in he went back to the truck and loaded a feed bag with oats and spoke to her gently like a person who has been aggrieved and injured, and got the bag over her ears and we leaned against my truck and let her eat and calm down.
Willy was in no hurry and neither was I. Now that my chance at fishing was shot for the day. He didn’t seem like the other ranchers I’d met around here. He wore a twisted copper bracelet on his left wrist and he gave off the kind of intelligence of someone who might have read a shitpile of books but would never talk about it. We were in the cool shade of the spruce, smelling the breeze stirring downstream, and he told me he’d grown up in New Hampshire. He took off his raggedy straw cowboy hat and ran a scarred hand through his thinning hair.
“When I first came out here I must’ve stuck out like a finger on a foot,” he said. “But I had good neighbors.”
“New Hampshire? Never knew anybody from there.”
“You can’t move to New Hampshire,” he said, “but you sure as shit can move out of it. First frigging chance you get. You can move there, but. My folks did. From Germany. Don’t ask me.”
He coughed, spat.
“State has a Berlin and a Hanover, maybe enough for them. You know what the closest neighbor gal told my mother when she saw her swelling with her first baby bump? You can have kittens in the oven but that don’t make ’em biscuits. Jeesh.”
Willy said he went to Harvard for a semester, in engineering, he liked to build things, dropped out. Came west and built houses, then cabinets, bought a small farm here and supported it by building kitchens for rich people in Aspen.
“Custom stuff,” he said. “How I got to doing that was I always loved horses. Wanted to be a cowboy all my life. Grew up in Sandwich, New Hampshire, reading those Louis L’Amour books. You know them? About the Sacketts and all? And I loved boats. Went out with some of my buddies and their families in the summer. I liked small sailing boats. How they were built, how everything fit together tight like a puzzle, a place for everything.”
He laughed. Took a can of Red Seal chew out of his vest pocket and pinched a sizable dip, tucked it up under his upper lip, held it to me.
“Thanks.” I waved it away.
“That was gonna make life difficult, huh? Horses, mountains, cowboys and yachts. Never did make anything easy for myself I’ve come to find out.”
He spat on the road, glanced to the mare who was finally eating. It was nice to stand there in the deep afternoon shade, lean against a truck, let things settle. I could hear the creek below and a deerfly buzzed around us. I didn’t mind.
“I was a good woodworker,” he said. “Like my father, and I started out retrofitting big horse trailers, turning the forward end into living quarters, all finished wood, just like the cabin of a boat. Cherry, teak, walnut. Rich people were impressed. Figured I was house broke, I guess. Invited me in for a beer. Started asking could I make their kitchens like the inside of a yacht, too. There’s a dozen breakfast nooks over on the Roaring Fork with chart tables and dedicated weather radios I shit you not. So you can pretend you’re drinking coffee on your sloop. You couldn’t make up the shit I’ve seen.”
“Weather radios?”
“Yup. And VHF type radios, mounted overhead like in the nav station of a yacht, with mics on pigtail cords they unhook and call like the pool deck or the guesthouse or whatever. Everybody a captain in their own dream. Long as they pay me.”
He spat. We watched the mare.
“I’d like to see your paintings sometime,” he said. “Won’t hurt my feelings if that’s not something you do.”
“You come over any time,” I said.
Willy watched the little mare shaking the feed bag for the last oats, raising her nose.
“Why don’t I take her for a while? Till you get set up. I got an empty stall, we’ll throw some hay down, let her heal up, calm down. Don’t want her getting excited and hauling the mail into a bunch of barbed wire. I got a bunch of horses, and I feed every day anyway. And you can sort it out with the outfitter. He’ll have to give you her papers or the brand inspector will be climbing your backside. Nobody wants the good Inspector Madriaga in their face.”
“Dell,” I said. “His name is Dell. The outfitter.”
Willy’s eyes went blank. His face got stony. He didn’t look at me.
“Don’t know him,” he said.
When it came time Willy talked to the mare and stroked her neck and she followed him up and into the trailer like a heeling dog. Go figure.
I can’t get it out of me. My head. The heat of it in my blood.
The picture of the man swinging the club. The man in the picture in my head much bigger than the little horse. The man swinging with a hatred, to kill or not he doesn’t care.
I call Sofia tell her not to come tomorrow. I take the Ocean off the easel. The bearded man swimming happily with his fishing rod through an ocean of women, that seems like a different man than me. The swirling women, the fish, the glad waters, they are in another universe than the one I am in now.
I think of Guernica, the painting. The knife in the horse. A story I read once by one of the Russians, maybe Chekhov, a man beating a horse. How seeing it happen is so much worse. A big man wreaking his anger on a tied horse who cannot even beg.
II
The door of my bedroom opens onto the ramada. The clap of the screen door behind me and a nightjar, startled, flutters out of the little arroyo that feeds the pond. Flutters without sound into the light from the window and on into the dark. Love those birds. They fly up off the dirt roads at night through the beam of the headlights, fly up from where they are roosting in the heat of the ground, a muffled rising like a giant moth, softer.
I light a cheroot and smoke, listen to the burble of water falling through the crease. I was so rattled tonight. Didn’t eat. I followed Willy into his yard and helped him bed down the mare. She seemed to know. Willy handled her with such a sureness, so gentle, she seemed to know that this two legged at least would not beat her to death, probably.
We cut the strings on two bales of musty hay and spread it on the
floor of the box stall, gave her grain in a bucket and water in the cut round of an old tractor tire. Willy dabbed her cuts with a salve like auto grease and we left her to sniff out her new circumstances. Whoever the fucker Dell was, I didn’t give a shit if he signed over her papers or not, there was no way I was going to give her back. It was the one thing I knew, maybe the only one. I also decided I would give Willy a painting. Not sure of what, but the other thing I knew was that Stephen Lily would never hear about it and that I would know exactly what to paint when I got to it.
Now I smoke and breathe trying to shake off the fight. Cloudy tonight like a lid, down over the top of Lamborn. Smell of dampness. The rain that didn’t fall this afternoon is gathering up there. Maybe tonight. Maybe the sweep and drum of it on the metal roof, a sound so loud and whelming and sweet it turns the bed into a little boat and thoughts into a wind that blows on northward. What they should do in psych wards to calm everybody down: build a steel roof over the beds and wash it with hoses, and pump in the smell of wet sage.
I had pulled down one of Pete’s poetry books tonight, the collected T. S. Eliot I’ve been reading, and opened again to the Four Quartets.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
I read the lines and I put the book down open on the counter. If that were true about time. Then. Then we could be together again, could be now. It was redeemable. I couldn’t follow the logic, he was saying it wasn’t, but it was somehow comforting anyway. Can’t explain it. My daughter was not gone, not completely ever. Nor Cristine, her mother. We were held somehow in our circle and would be always. The river flowed around us.