The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories

by Patrick F. McManus

  “Staring vacantly out the window is my March hobby.”

  Bun has only one bad habit—positive thinking. With all the really fun bad habits around, my wife picks positive thinking.

  “What I came to tell you,” she said, “is that your youngest daughter wants to know if she can go out on a date with Charlie Harper?”

  Ah, young Charlie Harper! Handsome, athletic, polite, a lad of friendly smile and twinkling eyes, he reminded me of myself as a youth. I remembered how I would stand in front of a mirror working on my friendly smile and trying to make my eyes twinkle. “Absolutely not,” I shouted. “He’s a total fraud. She’s not going out with a wild kid like that! I know his kind. He doesn’t fool me for a minute.”

  I hate disruptions. Slowly I forced myself back into reminiscence. It was still March but a different March, the longest March I would ever know. I was sixteen, up in my room in our old farmhouse working on my hobby of staring vacantly off into space. March had already stretched to the edge of time and back, with enough left over to knit a couple of ice ages. I was sick of March and knew that the only thing that could cure me was May and the opening of trout season. For temporary relief, however, I thought how my first cast would unfurl over the swirling waters of Sand Creek, how my worm and sinkers would caress the water with a soft plop, be sucked beneath the current and drift into the deep hole beneath the big old black cedar stump to the waiting jaws of a . . .

  My name cracked in my ears like a rifle shot. Mom was beckoning me downstairs, her voice strained with urgency. Knowing full well the general portent of my mother’s urgent tones, I descended the stairs at a pace commonly associated with snails.

  “Yeah?”

  “Reverend Twill is here,” Mom said. “He needs someone to guide him up to Rancid Crabtree’s cabin. Mr. Crabtree may be dying.”

  I knew Rancid was supposed to be dying. Nobody needed to tell me that. Rancid had been my friend for a long time. Hunter, trapper, angler, rover, philosopher, Rancid was the sort of man who should live forever! Rancid had said so himself. But now he was dying. I wondered what business a preacher could have with the old woodsman.

  “What do you want with Rancid?” I asked.

  “It’s just the business I’m in,” said the minister. “I heard Mr. Crabtree was very ill, and I thought I might encourage him to repent of his sins.”

  I wanted no part of this undertaking. I knew for a fact that Rancid never thought of himself as sinning but rather just having a good time. Not that Rancid didn’t, in fact, sin. Indeed, just the previous spring I had heard Rancid sin loudly and at great length when a huge cutthroat snapped his leader. I had never thought it my business, however, to explain sin to a grown man.

  “Gosh, I’d like to help you out, Reverend Twill,” I said “but there’s some important business I got to take care of today.” My mother gave me one of her looks.

  Bouncing along in the car with Twill, I pondered Mom’s explanation of why I should guide the preacher to Rancid’s cabin. It was her sound reasoning that persuaded me, its essence condensed to the phrase “Or else!”

  Her “or else” covered such a wide range of my privileges that I didn’t think I should run the risk of refusing to guide Twill on his mission. Rancid was the happiest person I knew, possibly because he had managed to avoid any serious kind of work his entire life. God wouldn’t hold happiness against a person. Rancid even made me happy, which was quite an accomplishment, considering that I lived as the sole male in a house full of prissy women, my mother, my grandmother, and my sister, the Troll.

  The preacher’s car bucked and twisted in the March mud until it turned off on a track that led through the woods to Rancid’s cabin.

  “Good heavens! Are you sure, Patrick, this is the way to Crabtree’s place?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It gets like this most every March. We’re coming to the bad part, though.”

  “The bad part!”

  “Henry Porter lost his horse in there last year. Just up and vanished.”

  Reverend Twill hit the brakes. “Vanished? The horse completely vanished?”

  “Yeah. The bad part: Henry was riding it at the time.”

  “They both vanished?”

  I was just beginning to get the story wound up, when the reverend swung the car around in a sharp arc and headed back toward our place.

  “That’s the worse road I’ve ever seen!” he shouted.

  Actually, it was only a game trail, or had been, since the game had given up using it in favor of the road.

  The Reverend Twill dropped me off at my place and headed back to town, where the sinners were more plentiful and easier to save.

  A couple days later, I walked through the woods to Rancid’s cabin. The sun was out, it was now April, and the old woodsman was sitting on his porch sipping from a jug of whiskey. He was obvious not only still alive but the picture of health.

  After I reported the news to him, he shouted, “The preacher was comin’ out to see me?” he asked. “What in tarnation he want to do thet fer?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “Actually, I was kind of disappointed when he turned back because I wanted to hear your sins myself. You could tell them to me now, if you wanted to. I’d forgive you.”

  Rancid stared at me. “I bet you would.”

  The Stalk

  M

  y friend Retch Sweeney sent me an email last fall detailing a stalk he had just made on a large, gray log bedded down in a grove of young firs. Retch was bow hunting, so it was necessary that he move in relatively close in order to get a shot. At the moment he sighted the log, he was still upwind of it, but the log hadn’t detected him yet. He crouched down and swung far out to one side of the log, maneuvering so he could approach from downwind. He soon was within range without the log having detected his approach.

  It was at this point that Retch noticed the log was a log and not the resting deer he had first thought. Still, he was proud of the skill with which he had stalked the log and was pretty sure that if it had been a deer, it would have ended up in his freezer.

  Retch’s stalk reminded me of the time I was leading three friends on an early morning hunt. We were all teenagers, although I can’t remember exactly how old. My friends were lined up behind me, all of us tramping silently along in the snow. Usually, I wasn’t allowed to lead on our hunts, or on other adventures either, but for some reason that responsibility fell to me on this occasion. Perhaps it was because the morning was beastly cold and it still wasn’t light enough to shoot. Maybe no one expected any activity in the immediate future—who knows?

  As we moved uphill, I glanced around some bushes and saw a herd of snags moving over the ridge and coming downhill directly at us. I gave a hand signal for everybody to squat down behind the bushes. Time passed slowly. The cold became more intense. Occasionally, I would hear an anguished groan from behind me as the chill of the morning sank into young bones cramped in a tense crouch. My hope was that by the time the herd reached us, there would be enough light for us to shoot. Then it occurred to me the snags might be approaching around the other end of the row of brush. I had the whole group follow me in a duck walk to the other end of the brush. Had the snags possessed hearing, they might easily have detected our heavy breathing, groans, and chattering teeth.

  A half-hour oozed by as my frozen ears strained to hear the approach of the snags. The guys had their gloves off, blowing on their frozen trigger fingers. I raised my hand for silence. Then I slowly got up so I could peer over the bushes enough to locate the quarry. That’s when I made out that the herd of snags was the same line of snags that had been there for the last hundred years or so. In the early morning light, enhanced by a hunter’s expectation, the snags had looked exactly like a herd of mule deer approaching us in single-file. I mean it!

  “Dang!” I said, standing up. “They must have cut back over the ridge.” This quick thinking probably saved me from a severe beating from my frozen friends. I’m not sure if they suspected
anything. On the other hand, I never got to lead again.

  Another such stalking experience occurred when I was ten or so. This time, I was the one being stalked. It was the middle of January, and we had been released from school because it was too dangerous for the town kids to walk through the blizzard or for us country kids to wait for the school bus. We greatly appreciated this thoughtfulness on the part of the principal because blizzards could be dangerous in our part of the country. On this particular blizzard day, as we referred to such days, I was returning to my house from several hours of skiing with my friend Vern Schulze. I lived about a quarter of a mile from Vern and was crossing a large field in front of our house when I noticed a large pack of animals prowling back and forth between me and my house.

  I hunkered down in the snow so they couldn’t see me. The animals continued to pace. Even though I couldn’t see them clearly, I was fairly certain they were wolves, probably waiting for me to return home. Somehow they had picked up my scent, probably not that difficult to do, and knew I was in the vicinity. The wolves moved back and forth in a determined fashion, the blowing snow all but concealing the rascals. I made a snowball and threw it at them, but the snow was dry and fluffy and had no effect. In any case, the wolves didn’t seem to notice.

  I soon began to feel frostbite setting in, and it finally occurred to me that I might as well be eaten by wolves as freeze to death. I got up and started walking toward them. It was then that I began to make out a pile of logs protruding from a drift of snow, the same logs that had been there for a year or more. The wolves had vanished. They hadn’t even left tracks, but, of course, the tracks would have been covered by the blowing snow. This goes to show once again how my keen woodsman skills saved me from possible disaster.

  All my experience with stalking as a youngster helped shape my approach to other aspects of life as I grew older. It has been my observation over the years, for example, that the most successful hunters are those persons who focus upon their quarry with intense concentration. It was with this particular kind of concentration that I began to stalk a girl during my senior year in high school. Since a variety of creepos have given “stalking” a bad name, I will, in this instance, use the word “pursuing.”

  As with wild game, the pursuit of a girl requires that you first become aware of your particular quarry. In hunting, you can’t wander about in pursuit of whatever comes along—an elk, a rabbit, a grouse, or whatever. If you hope for any success, you have to keep totally focused on the particular game. The same applies to the pursuit of a girl. You must have the particular quarry singled out.

  One day, my friend Retch Sweeney showed me a photograph of his cousin. I said instantly, “Wow! I’m going to marry this girl!”

  Recovering from a painful fit of mirth, Retch said, “Ha! She’s beautiful, smart, and rich. She’s only seventeen and already in college, whereas you are—well, you!”

  It was true. I was still only a high school senior, poor, with bad hair, bad eyesight, and mediocre grades. I never wore my glasses at school. Anything occurring up near the blackboard was a mystery to me. The only time I wore my glasses was when I was out hunting, and then largely at the insistence of my hunting companions.

  My only attribute in those days was my enormous self-confidence. Nothing in my life provided any reason for this peculiar characteristic, and for some unknown reason I felt certain I could achieve whatever I set my mind to—in this instance, a particular girl.

  She was a Montana girl, by the way, and I highly recommend Montana girls as prospective wives of outdoorsmen. They are hard on the outside and soft on the inside. But my mother-in-law was also a Montana girl, and she was hard on the outside and hard on the inside, so you do have to be careful of Montana girls.

  I possessed the same intensity in pursuing this girl that I did in the pursuit of wild game. Often I’d place myself on stand near someplace I thought she might be passing by. “Oh, hi,” I would say. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “We live in that house.”

  “Ah, that explains it. Would you like to go for a Coke?”

  “No.”

  As with hunting, you can’t be discouraged when the quarry eludes you. The successful hunter needs to learn as much as possible about his quarry. I used my friend Retch as a research resource.

  “Does she like pleasing aromas?” I asked.

  “I suppose.”

  “Maybe she would respond to a particular scent.”

  “I wouldn’t describe your scent as a pleasing aroma.”

  “I was thinking of something along the lines of aftershave lotion.”

  “Might work. That and a shower.”

  I slopped on some of my stepfather’s aftershave lotion, but it had no effect on the girl, although it did bring a nice mule deer buck within easy range. The way it kept flaring its nostrils made me nervous, though, and I missed the shot.

  Once I even tried camouflage. I borrowed one of my stepfather’s dark suits and a tie, and even if I do say so myself, I looked pretty darn debonair. Unfortunately, my stepfather’s legs were several inches shorter than mine. Maybe I should have worn some black socks or even painted my ankles with shoe polish.

  As with hunting, though, persistence paid off. It took several years, but I eventually married the girl. Her previous boyfriend reportedly said he wouldn’t have minded so much if I hadn’t been so funny-looking. Ha! Talk about somebody who needed glasses!

  The Horse in My Garage

  O

  ver the years, my wife and I have successfully managed to indenture ourselves to the usual number and variety of pets that the average child needs to sustain life. As any parent knows, these creatures range in size from a few ounces to half a ton (and if one steps on your foot, you may be sure it won’t be the one weighing a few ounces).

  The portion of suburban sprawl we called home was still zoned for agriculture, an oversight on the part of the county planning committee that allowed us to keep a pet horse on our one-acre spread, which stretches off as far as the eye can see, depending on the air pollution on any particular day. Sooner or later, the planning commission would zone us into urbanity, and we would have to get rid of the horse—the sooner the better, in my opinion.

  Since we had no barn, the horse, whose name was Huckleberry, resided in my garage. My automobile resided in the driveway, in a spot apparently under the holding pattern of a large flock of pigeons—a species of bird apparently not all that good at holding. Not only was I embarrassed to be seen driving a vehicle that looked as if it had been used in a scientific study in pigeon irregularity, but I was tired of having a horse in my garage. It might be inferred from this diatribe that I was a person who isn’t fond of horses. That is wrong. I detest horses.

  Why, you ask, would a person who detests horses buy one? You apparently are not the permissive parent of four young children who absolutely love horses. Also, I was probably suffering from temporary impairment of judgment at the time I made the purchase. The cowboy who sold us the horse made a great show of petting and stroking the beast, apparently to show me how gentle it was. Later, I concluded that he was simply wiping off his fingerprints.

  I learned a great deal about horses over the many years we owned Huckleberry. For example, the basic diet of horses is hay, which you may think of as simply long grass that sensible folks keep mowed close to the ground. Upon going to the feed store for a few bales, however, you discover from the price that it is a rare plant hand-picked on the other side of the world and flown first-class to the feed store. Horses also eat large quantities of oats, a substance smuggled into the country under the dashboards of luxury automobiles. Occasionally, the horse will take for dessert a bucketful of small green pellets compressed from shredded $5 bills. The horse will also seek out a poisonous weed and eat it, for no other reason than his enjoyment in a trip to the vet’s. Although our vet has never told me, I suspect he was formerly a brain surgeon who gave up that profession in favor of one where there was real money
to be made.

  Oh, I almost forgot. Horses also need shoes. I had never expected Huckleberry to provide me with entertainment, but at the time of his purchase I didn’t know anyone who made an occupation of putting metal shoes on horses. Because the process took place behind my garage, I never observed it firsthand. The sound effects, however, were wonderful, including such classics as, “Git off my foot, you bleeping bleep of a bleep!”

  This would be screamed at a pitch so high it was almost impossible to comprehend. The amusement provided by the old horseshoer was almost worth the cost. If you figure in how much he improved my vocabulary, his service was almost priceless. I think the horse enjoyed the process almost as much as I did.

  I have to admit that Huck turned out to be a wonderful horse for children, very seldom taking a bite out of one of them and usually in a place where it wouldn’t show. If the youngest child was put on his back, he would plod along like a creature suffering cardiac arrest. Somehow, Huck managed to judge how much riding experience each rider possessed and adjusted his pace to fit. As he grew older, his docility seemed to increase. Observing this, one day I decided to go for a ride myself.

  “Guess what,” I said to my wife, Bun, in the kitchen one day. “I think I’ll go out and ride Old Huck.”

  “Are you crazy!” she exclaimed. “You don’t know anything about horses.”

  “You may be surprised to learn this,” I said, “but for many years I nursed an ambition to be a cowboy. Now go hunt down that steel thing you put in his mouth, and the leather straps you use to steer him with. Then I’ll show you how much I know about horses.”

  Together we herded Huck up against a board fence and gave him a bucket of oats to munch in preparation for my climbing aboard, as we cowboys say. I had thought about putting the saddle on his back but that seemed a bit of a nuisance, since I planned to ride him no further than the other end of the pasture and back, an area about the size of a football field. Huck appeared to be half-asleep. Finishing off the contents of the bucket, he lifted his head and looked around. He then clamped his jaws tentatively around my wrist, apparently in an effort to prevent me from putting the steel thing in his mouth. Putting the steel thing into a horse’s mouth, by the way, frequently brings on sustained fits of gagging, so for several hours before undertaking the task, it is best not to eat anything. I grabbed the steering lines, climbed the corral fence, and leaped on Huck’s bare back.