Fortunes of the Dead

by Lynn Hightower

  The center is rank with cigarette smoke. Janis smoked for an entire week the month she turned sixteen when Mama told her she was old enough to make up her own mind. It wasn’t like her mother to step aside without an opinion and Janis had waited a full three weeks before going out to buy her own package of Virginia Slims. And then the guy at the 7-Eleven wouldn’t sell her the cigarettes, and her mother had gone in and gotten them for her, figuring that if she wanted to allow her daughter to smoke, state and federal law had nothing to do with it.

  Mama hadn’t said a cross word, and had even remembered to get her a book of matches, which pretty much took the fun out of it. And since Janis spent most of her spare time in a barn where she’d die before she lit up (unless her mama caught her and killed her first) the whole thing got pretty pointless. She didn’t want to be like the Dozer boys, who had to run out to smoke every fifteen minutes like they’d die if they didn’t. Plus it made her mouth feel weird and coated her tongue and ruined her taste buds. Plus it was a detriment to French kissing, which was something Janis particularly enjoyed.

  She stops at the vending machines and buys a cup of hot chicken soup, though she is sweating under the coat and sweaters. It is sunny out and the temperature has climbed into the forties. But it will be cold tonight.

  Janis stocks up with a can of grape soda, peanut butter crackers, and M&Ms. She stares down into the parking lot. Pretty full, and the windows of her pickup are illegally tinted black. She can steal a nap after she prepares.

  She sips the soup, puts the vending machine hoard in the front seat of the truck, then walks up the asphalt pathway that leads steeply to a wooded area. The grass near the vending machines is a designated dog-walking area, and a woman with a basset hound on a leash is encouraging her dog to “get on with it or forget the whole thing.” A boy and girl, brother and sister, throw a ball to a Border collie who seems more interested in herding the two of them together than catching the ball.

  Janis grins, thinks about her brothers.

  Keep your mind on your work, she tells herself, as she leaves the top of the path and heads into the woods. Her daddy used to say that to her, and now she says it to herself. She wonders if her dad is taking his blood pressure medicine with the same silly jokes; she wonders how her mother’s roses are wintering over. She wonders if Chris and his wife will break up or stay together, and if Dale will keep that new job.

  She hasn’t called home in such a long time. Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons, she wonders if they’re all still getting together for a big meal after church. She pictures how Mama used to look at them around the dinner table during Sunday lunch and give that special smile to her dad, who would grin back, like their garden variety family was some kind of miracle. And daddy would chime in with the usual Well, hey, how perfect is this? God, how that used to embarrass her when she’d bring a date home.

  Janis is used to being homesick. Like most girls raised in Texas, Janis does not understand why anybody would want to live anywhere else.

  But since Waco, Janis has felt incapable of staying in one place anymore, and the pro rodeo life has suited her very well, satisfying both her restlessness and pursuit of the Quest. She’d known the minute she’d read the note that the Quest was over. She had not expected the sense of relief, the surge of freedom and release. She’d walked away from everything without a second look, gotten rid of the stolen truck as soon as she’d picked up all the caches of money she’d stashed in bank safe deposit boxes between Tennessee and Texas. She drove the old truck into Lake Pontchartrain and paid cash for a pickup of her own. She had a little piece of land out in west Texas, bought and paid for three years ago when she’d had a bit of a scare, and she planned to go there, spend some time training a few horses. No single female alone on a piece of land could slide by without attention, but it would be on a local level, and she could pack up and leave anytime. Or stay forever. Or maybe … maybe even go home.

  She hadn’t seen anyone from home in over three years. No doubt people from her old life came and went without recognizing her, but on one particular Sunday afternoon two years ago, she’d been walking past a hot dog stand in an old pair of jeans with her hair tied back and no clown makeup on and Mr. Biggers had recognized her right off. No surprise, he’d known her all her life. But it was good to see this neighbor whom she’d known since she was knee-high to a grasshopper, as he liked to say.

  “Good Lord,” he had said. “I can’t believe it’s you, honey. You have no idea how much we all miss you. How come you never get home?”

  Luckily, Mr. Biggers never stopped talking long enough to look for an answer and Janis had just stood and looked at him, seeing how the years had added wrinkles, taken away hair, left him with a tremor. He’d never been a good-looking man, and yet the aging just made her feel that much more affection for him.

  He shook his head and grinned. “I’ll never forget you and Dandy winning that rodeo scholarship to Texas A & M.”

  Janis felt her smile fading, but he kept on talking.

  “Everybody in town thought you were so cute.”

  “I take after my mama.”

  A master stroke. Biggers had grinned. “Yes, little girl, you do. And nothing’s changed, honey. Every man in town is still half in love with your mama, including myself, as you well know.” Mr. Biggers shook his head, and stared into space, and his smile faded, too. “How many years has it been, now, since—”

  “Eight,” she’d said, thinking eight years, two months, and a day.

  “God, seeing you sure does bring back the memories. The older I get, the more I realize that memories may be the only thing you get to keep, till you get so old those go, too.”

  In the way of southerners, it had taken him forty minutes to tell her good-bye, and she hadn’t been in any hurry to rush off. But the whole time she’d stood there listening to him she’d wondered what Mr. Biggers would say if she told him she wanted to get old enough for her memories to go away; if she told him that sweet Emma stood at the end of Janis’s bed nearly every night. Sweet little Emma, with eyes burnt out like black sockets, and scars all over her face, holding little Crumpet in a burnt blanket, because no one would take Janis seriously, and then when they did, they had shown no mercy, no mercy at all. What would he say if she told him she lived for the day she did not wake up remembering how hard she’d tried and how badly she’d failed?

  Janis sleeps too long; it is well past dark when she wakes. And even though she feels the quiet and the lateness of the hour, she keeps her eyes squeezed shut, holding tight to that last stream of consciousness where the dream still drifted. She’d been riding Dandy, just the two of them out in a dusty field in Texas, it had been so real. She could feel the horse surging forward in an easy lope—loping on Dandy was like being in a rocking chair. She could smell his own particular horse smell; throw his saddle blanket in a pile of other dirty horse blankets and she could pick his out by the scent.

  There are tears on her cheeks, and Janis sticks her tongue out, tasting the salt like a little girl. She is going back to Texas, and she’ll be riding again by summer. The Quest is over. She is almost done.

  The welcome center traffic has thinned to almost nothing; there are two cars in the lot—one on it’s way out. Earlier, Janis moved her truck to the Kentucky side of the interstate and walked a mile or two, crossing all lanes of fast-moving traffic like a child playing hopscotch. It is eleven twenty-five and Janis has been sitting cross-legged at the edge of the tree line since ten. She is warm enough, wrapped in sweaters and the barn coat. Outdoors at night, Janis is in her element. When most elementary-school kids were doing their homework in front of the television set, Janis was in the barn. When she was older, juggling dating and going to school, nighttime was the best time to get the chores done for a girl who did not like to get up any earlier than she had to. Janis always preferred the sunset to the sunrise. Most of the boys she dated were farm kids of one kind or another, and they’d come over to “help her with her ba
rn chores.” They really came in hopes of getting her alone up in the hayloft.

  Not that she’d let them help, not after she and Mama brought Jim Dandy home. The gelding belonged to no one but Janis, that was clear from day one. Dandy was a nervous horse, and things had to be done a certain way to make him comfortable. He had three water buckets, because he drank a lot and got worried when the supply went low. He had a fan for hot days, his own mineral block, and a stall ball that he ignored. Janis kept him six inches deep in cedar shavings, no matter how much it exasperated her mother, with an extra three inches layered in front of the back window, where Dandy would stand all day watching for Janis.

  Mama had spotted the gelding at a racetrack in Sarasota, being worked as a companion horse, walking the skittish thoroughbreds from the barn to the track. Mama had said something curt under her breath when she saw him. Mama was Irish and she knew a good horse when she saw one.

  There are more horses per capita in Ireland than anywhere else in the world, her mama would say. Then her father would say, There are more Texans in Texas than anywhere else in the world, and Mama would look annoyed. The Irish, her father often observed, have no sense of humor on the subject of the Irish.

  Mama had seen the horse pass while they sat in the stands, and she’d announced that the gelding was out of Jenny’s Fancy and maybe Doc James. How Mama could tell such a thing from so far away, and how she could remember the quarter horse lines when her heart was really with thoroughbreds, was just one of the many amazing things about Myra Winters.

  You had to be able to believe six impossible things before breakfast to survive a single day in the Winters’s household. When Janis and her siblings compared Myra Winters to other mothers they sometimes laughed and sometimes swore, but there was nothing they could do about it. Their mom wouldn’t do the work on their science projects, lead Brownie troops or Cub Scout packs, or make snacks for kids in the afternoon. She’d actually laughed the day Dale told her that Ron Jerrold’s mother made Rice Krispies treats when they went to his house after school.

  Learn how to make them yourself, she’d told him.

  She expected the whole family to pitch in on indoor as well as outdoor chores, and she never asked anybody’s permission or opinion on anything—ever. Janis remembers a sleepover for Peggy Gifford’s fourteenth birthday, and how they all sat around and bitched about their mothers. Judy Something-or-other said she thought Mrs. Winters was completely cool, and much more interesting than anyone else’s mother. Then Peggy said she overheard her mom and Mrs. Hatcher talking, and her mom had said that Mrs. Winters could get away with anything because she was Irish. And Mrs. Hatcher said it was more likely because she had big boobs. Everybody laughed, including Janis, but after that Janis didn’t like Mrs. Hatcher, who had no boobs at all, and she quit babysitting for the Hatchers’ four “darlin’ boys.”

  At the track that day, nobody asked why Mama, who came to look at thoroughbreds, was obsessing about a quarter horse. Janis was thirteen years old at the time, and getting to be a pretty good trick rider. She was just getting into barrel racing but wasn’t much good at it yet. She was good, however, at being a thirteen-year-old pain in the ass, with a smart mouth and a burgeoning interest in slender boys with brown eyes. Mama had clearly decided to redirect Janis’s thoughts and energies.

  Still, it came as a complete shock when her mother looked at her father and said I’m buying from all the way up in the stands.

  “What you going to do with another horse, Myra?”

  “We need a good barrel horse. And anything out of Jenny’s Fancy is a good bet, if you ask me.”

  Janis remembers how the whole family had turned and looked at her. Everybody knew about the plan. Janis had decided she wanted to go to vet school at Texas A & M when she was eight years old, and had never wavered. Farm finances were always scary, and college was a hopeful but not guaranteed possibility. There was good money in barrel racing events; that’s how Janis planned to work her way through school.

  “What do we need some old barrel horse for?” Bob Winters had looked at Janis over one shoulder and given her a wink.

  In spite of having a family bet of two dollars on Dog in the Manger to win, place, or show, the Winters family abandoned the racetrack and trooped to the barn. Dandy was tied outside in the blistering sun. He was fretful and underweight and in serious need of having his hooves trimmed and his teeth floated. Mama stood in the barn doorway with that look on her face that made the rest of the family nervous.

  Janis remembers that one of the stable guys asked them their business, and her mother dismissed him with a command to fetch the owner. It was clear that there was something about the horse’s flank Mama did not like, and Janis remembers her mother whispering to her father about a pitchfork, and it happens all the time when there are idiots in the mix. And though her mother had made the comment under her breath, Janis saw a couple of the hands look up. Mama could be very embarrassing, and she was not one to back down.

  The owner did finally come out, and Janis had nightmares about him for the next year. He was a skinny man with a bald greasy head, and jeans that were loose and sagging on his butt. He had a napkin around his neck, and something sticky at the edge of his mouth, and he’d dismissed their mother with one terse remark that none of the kids heard. Her mama got that funny little smile that meant somebody was in trouble, and she asked Daddy to take the kids out, and said she would meet them by the car in an hour.

  “I’m not going to leave you here, Myra.”

  Janis remembers her father’s exact tone of voice. And she was glad; she did not want to leave her mother alone in this barn.

  But Mama just smiled at him and waited, until he gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, begged her not to hurt anybody or bring on any lawsuits, and herded all the kids away. They’d had snow cones, and stood by the car sticking their tongues out to see whose tongue had turned the most blue. Janis had been keyed up and anxious, and got tired of looking at tongues and eating snow cones, and could not seem to be still. So Chris had hoisted her up on his shoulders, and said he could beat Dale to the forsythia bushes even while carrying their sister’s fat butt. Janis remembers being so mad at Chris and swatting his behind to get back at him, but it only made him laugh and run faster. Dale beat them by a mile. Nobody could run like Dale.

  “You’ll get the horse,” Dale told her as they finally stopped to catch their breath. And Chris told her he was psychic and had a feeling that the horse would be coming home with them that day.

  Chris and Janis had degenerated into part real, part play fighting with sticks for swords, when Dale grabbed Janis and told her to look.

  She would never forget her mother that day—how she had smiled with utter serenity, leading Jim Dandy across the parking lot with nothing but a rope around his neck, because the owner wanted to charge her twenty dollars for a frayed nylon halter, and Mama had said it was in sorry shape and not worth a buck.

  Janis remembers catching her breath, and the feeling she had in her stomach. Dandy was sixteen hands, with massive hindquarters and dainty feet, and he was already bringing his head down and going quieter after an hour or less with Myra Winters. How beautiful they were, almost magical, her mother and that horse—Mama wearing that little navy sheath dress and low heels, her hair in a French twist, with sunglasses perched on top of her head. Janis knew then why Daddy called her mother sprite.

  “Young lady, come over and get your horse. He’s bonding with me, and I’m not the one.”

  “Well, go on then, Janis,” Dale said. And Chris gave her a nudge. They’d had horses of their own for a while now. It was Janis’s turn.

  Janis had been careful, walking over with unhurried confidence, coming in from the side. She was going to take her time with this. She was going to do it right.

  She spoke to the horse and put a hand on his neck, telling him how beautiful he was in her horse voice, which was a calm voice, a bit matter-of-fact, a bit soothing. Dandy had skittere
d sideways, and Janis knew he was wary and afraid. She took the lead rope from her mother, who said, matter-of-factly, Good, Janis, and Janis had used her fingertips to massage little circles into the horse’s neck, just like her mother did with her favorite thoroughbred.

  “Looks a little big for a barrel horse,” one of the brothers said. Janis thinks it was Chris.

  And her mother had winked. “Riding this boy at a canter will be like sitting in a rocking chair.”

  “Lope,” they’d all shouted, because although Mama rode hunt seat and dressage, the rest of the family rode western because it was for God’s sake, Texas after all.

  “One thing now, Janis,” her mother had said, and Janis listened but did not look away from the horse. “Be very careful around this horse when you have a pitchfork. And never let anyone ride him but you.”

  And her father had said something under his breath, and her mother had laughed in that low throaty way that made people stare.

  “Yes, I know, Bob. And generally I agree that either the horse or the rider should be experienced, but I think this is a good match. I’ve got a feeling about this horse.”

  Janis has sifted through this memory so many times it no longer hurts. But she misses Dandy still, after all these years. How agile he had been—impressing the judges who looked askance at his large muscled rump and thought good luck. He was as good as the smaller wiry competitors, and he drew the eye; he was flashy. Janis and Dandy earned purse after purse, until Janis had a secure college fund, not just for herself, but for all the Winters kids.