by Lydia Peelle
The ponies bear witness to dozens of pacts and promises. We make them in the grave light of late day, with every intention of keeping them. We cross our hearts and hope to die on the subjects of horses, husbands, and each other. We dare each other to do near-impossible things. You dare me to jump from the top of the manure pile, and I do, and land on my feet, with manure in my shoes. I double-dare you to take the brown pony over the triple oxer, which is higher than his ears. You ride hellbent for it but the pony stops dead, throwing you over his head, and you sail through the air and land in the rails, laughing. We are covered in scrapes and bruises, splinters buried so deep in our palms that we don’t know they are there. Our bodies forgive us our risks, and the ponies do, too. We have perfected the art of falling.
We know every corner of the barn, every loose board, every shadow, every knot in the wood. It is old and full of holes, home to many things: bats and lizards and voles, spiders that hang cobwebs in the corners like hammocks, house sparrows that build nests in the drainpipes with beakfuls of hay until one day a dead pink baby bird drops to the feet of one of the ladies, who screams and clutches her hair. You scoop it up and toss it on the manure pile, and Curt comes out with the long ladder and pours boiling water down the pipe, and that is the end of the sparrows. Curt laughs at the lady, and rolls his eyes behind her back, and winks at us. We wink back. There is a fly strip in the corner that quivers with dying flies. When it is black with bodies and bits of wing, it is our job to replace it, and we hold our breath when we take it down, praying it won’t catch in our hair. And then there are the rats, so many rats that we rip from glue boards and smash with shovels, or pull from snap traps and fling into the woods, or find floating in water troughs where they’ve dragged themselves, bellies distended with poison and dying of thirst.
In the basement is the workbench where Curt never works; above it, rusty nails sit in a line of baby food jars with lids screwed into a low beam. The manure spreader is parked down there in the dark, like a massive shamed beast. When we open the trap door in the floor above to dump loads from our wheelbarrows, a rectangle of light illuminates the mound of dirty shavings and manure, and we see mice scurry over it like currents of electricity. The ladies never go down to the basement. It is there that we sometimes sit to discuss them, comparing their hair, their mouths, the size of their breasts. Did you see that one throw up behind the barn Friday afternoon? Did you see this one’s diamond ring? Did you see that one slip those pills into Curt’s shirt pocket, smiling at him? What were they?
We hear them call their husbands’ offices on the barn telephone and say they are calling from home. We watch two or three go into the little house together, shutting the door behind them. We see Curt stagger from the house and fall over in the yard and stay where he falls, very still, until one of the ladies comes out and helps him up, laughing, and takes him back inside. The ladies hang around when the farrier comes, a friend of Curt’s with blond hair and a cowboy hat, watching as he beats a shoe to the shape of a hoof with his hammer. He swears as he works and we stand in the shadows by the grain room and listen carefully, cataloguing every new word. When he leaves, one or two ladies ride off with him in his truck and return an hour or so later and go back to what they had been doing, as if they had never left. They lock themselves in the tack room and fill it with strange-smelling smoke. When we sit in the hayloft we hear their voices below us, high and excited, like small children. The ladies wear lipstick in the morning that is gone by the afternoon. They wear their sunglasses on cloudy days. Some mornings we see that the oil drum we use for empty grain bags is filled to the top with beer bottles. We watch them, and the rules that have been strung in our heads like thick cables fray and unravel in a dazzling arc of sparks. Then we climb on the ponies’ backs and ride away down the hill.
One afternoon Curt gives us each a cigarette, and laughs as we try to inhale. Look, girls! he says, striking a match on the sole of his boot and lighting his own. Like this. We watch his face as he takes a drag, his jaw shadowed with a three-day beard. Later we steal two more from his pack and ride into the woods to practice, watching each other and saying, No, like this! Like this! We put Epsom salts in Curt’s coffee and lock the tack room door from the inside. We steal his baseball cap and manage to get it hooked on the weathervane. Ha! we say, and spit on the ground. Take that! He throws one of his flip-flops at us. He drags us shrieking to the courtyard and sprays us with the hose. He tells us we stink. We tell him we don’t care.
There is one horse worth more money than the rest put together—it was brought over on a plane, all the way from England. One day we are sitting up in the hayloft, sucking through a bag of peppermints and discussing all the horses we will own someday when we hear an animal’s scream from below. The horse, left tied and standing in the aisle, has spooked and broken its halter, gashed its head open on a beam. Blood drips off its eyelashes to a pool by its hooves and it sways like a suspension bridge. We grab saddle pads from the tack room, the ladies’ expensive fleece ones, and press them to the wound. They grow hot and heavy with blood. It runs down our arms, into our hair. The horse shakes its head, gnashes its teeth at us. We look over at the little house, all the blinds drawn tight. Who will knock on the door? Who will go? We flip a coin. I don’t remember if you won or lost, but you are the one who cuts through the flower bed, who stands on the step and knocks and knocks, and after a long time Curt comes out in jeans and bare feet, no shirt. I hide in the bushes and watch. What? he says, frowning. You point at his crotch and say, XYZ! Without looking down he zips his fly in one motion, like flipping on a light switch. And then in the shadow of the doorway is the lady who the horse belongs to, scowling, her blond hair undone, looking at you like she is having a hard time understanding why you are covered in blood. After the vet comes and stitches up the wound she looks at us suspiciously and whispers to Curt. Later, he makes sure she is within earshot before scolding us. When the vet has left and they have gone back into the house, we knock down a paper wasps’ nest and toss it through the back window of her car.
There is a pond in the back pasture where the horses go to drink, half hidden by willows and giant honeysuckle bushes that shade it from the noonday sun. On the hottest days we swim the ponies out to the middle, and when their hooves leave the silty bottom, it feels like we are flying. The water is brown and rafts of manure float past us as we swim, but we don’t care. We pretend the ponies are Pegasus. And as they swim, we grow quiet thinking about the same thing. We think about Curt—his arms, the curve of his hat brim, the way he smells when he gets off the tractor in the afternoon. You trail your hand in the water and say, What are you thinking about? And I say, Nothing. When we come out of the water the insides of our thighs are streaked with wet horsehair, as if we are turning into centaurs or wild beasts. The ponies shake themselves violently and we jump off as they drop to their knees to roll in the dust. Other days it is too hot to even swim, to move at all. We lie on the ponies’ necks as they graze in the pasture, our arms hanging straight down. The heat drapes across our shoulders and thighs. School is as incomprehensible as snow.
Rodeo is our favorite game, because it is the fastest and most reckless, involving many feats of speed and bravery, quick turns, trick riding. One day late in July, out in the back field, we decide to elect a rodeo clown and a rodeo queen. The ponies stamp out their impatience while we argue over who will be what. Finally the games begin. There is barrel racing and bucking broncos and the rodeo parade. We discover that we can make the ponies rear on command by pushing them forward with our heels while we hold the reins in tight. Yee haw! we say, throwing one arm up in the air. The ponies chew the bit nervously as we do it over and over again. We must lean far forward on their necks, or we will slip off. Then the pinto pony goes up and you start to lose your balance. I am doubled over laughing until I see you grope for the reins as the pony goes high, and you grab them with too much effort, and yank his head back too far. He hangs suspended for a moment before fal
ling backward like a tree on his spine. You disappear as he rolls to his side, and reappear when he scrambles to his feet, the reins dangling from the bit. I jump off my pony and run to you. Your arm, from the looks of it, is broken. Oh shit, I say. You squint up at me through a veil of blood. Doesn’t hurt.
Curt was the one who rescued you. He drove his pickup through the tall grass of the back pasture, lifted you onto the bench seat, made you a pillow with his shirt. And when he couldn’t get ahold of your parents, he was the one who drove you to the emergency room. I rode in the truck bed, and watched through the window as you stretched your legs across his lap, your bare feet on his thighs. I could see his arms, your face, his tanned hand as he brushed the hair, or maybe tears, from your eyes. I sat across from him at the hospital, waiting while they stitched the gash on your forehead and put your left arm in a cast, and I came in with him to check on you. I hung back in the corner when he leaned over the table, and I heard you whisper to him in a high, helpless voice. I watched your hand grope out from under the blanket, reaching towards his. And I saw him hold it. He held it with both hands. Of course I was jealous, and still am. You must still have that scar to remind you of that summer. I have nothing I can point to, nothing I can touch.
It was early in August when the brown pony died. It happened overnight, and no one knew how: whether he colicked and twisted his gut, or had a heart attack, or caught a hind foot in his halter while tending an itch and broke his own neck. When we found the body, we didn’t cry. I remember that we weren’t even very sad. We went to find Curt, who lit a cigarette and told us not to tell the ladies. Then we went back and looked at the pony’s still body, his velvety muzzle, his open eye, his lips pulled back from his big domino teeth. We touched his side, already cold. Later we rode the pinto pony double out to the pond, your arms around my waist, your cast knocking against my hipbone. Behind us the tractor coughed as Curt pulled the pony’s body to the manure pile with heavy chains. We slipped off the pinto, letting him wander away, and sprawled out in the grass. You scratched inside your cast with a stick. Grasshoppers sprang around us. We lay there all afternoon and into the evening, your head on my stomach, our fingers in the clover, trying to think up games we could play with only one pony.
Weeks later we were alone in the barn. We were sweeping the long center aisle, pressing push brooms towards one another from opposite ends, the radio flickering on and off, like it always did. When it faded out completely, we heard the squabbling of dogs out back. We dropped our brooms and ran to see what they’d got. Through a cloud of dust in the paddock we could make out Curt’s dog, his butt to us, bracing himself with his tail in the air and growling at one of the ladies’ fierce little dogs, who was shaking his head violently, his eyes squeezed shut. Between them, they had the brown pony’s head. It took awhile to recognize it. It was mostly bone, yellow teeth and gaping eye sockets, except for a few bits of brown hair that hung on the forehead, some cheek muscle and stringy tendon clinging to the left side. And then we saw the little scrap of green against the white: the pony still had his halter on. This was what the dogs had got their teeth around. Curt had never bothered to take it off. With a final shake of his jaws, the little dog managed to snatch the pony’s head away, and he dragged it around the corner of the barn, Curt’s dog bounding after.
We stood in the slanting September light and watched this. We listened to the dogs’ whines and rumblings, the scrape of the skull against the ground. Then we picked up our brooms, and when we were done sweeping we went and got the pinto pony and rode double down the hill and didn’t think much about it again. Death was familiar that summer. It was in the road, in the woods, in the holes of the foundation of the barn; it was the raccoon rotting in the ditch, and the crows that settled there to pick at it until they, too, were flattened by cars, and their bodies swelled and stank in the heat; it was the half-decayed doe we found in the woods with maggots stitching in and out of its flesh, the stillborn foal wrapped in a rotting amniotic sac in the pasture where the vultures perched. We caught a whiff of it, sniffed it out, didn’t flinch, touched it with our bare hands, ate lunch immediately afterwards. We weren’t frightened of death.
And a few summers later, spinning out of control on a loose gravel road in a car full of boys and beer, we weren’t scared of it then, either, and we laughed and said to the boy at the wheel, Do it again. We only learned to fear it later, much later, when we realized it knew our names and, worse, the name of everyone we loved. At the height of the summer, in the very dog days, I would have said that we loved the ponies, but I realize now we never did. They were only everything we asked them to be, and that summer, that was enough. I don’t know. Lately I’ve been thinking someone should write an elegy for those ponies. But not me.
The Still Point
In Thunderbird, Illinois, I get to thinking the world is going to end. During the day it’s cotton candy and caramel apples, the Howler and the Zipper, the looping soundtrack of the carousel. But at night, when I’m stretched out in the back of the truck on the outskirts of Camper City, trying to sleep in the bowl of quiet left by five hundred people gone home sunburned and broke to their beds, the feeling sneaks in and sits down square on my chest: these are the last days. It’s all going to break up. It’s as if I’m eavesdropping on the secret that history has been whispering to itself all along: the punch line, the trick ending, the big joke. I curl up alongside the wheel well, wondering why I’m the only one who hears it. But morning always comes, daylight burning through the windows, the truck hot as a greenhouse, and I slide out barefoot onto the grass for another slow drag around the sun.
Across the aisle, Dub leans out the door of his camper, shading his eyes and squinting in my direction. “Hurry it up, man, hurry your ass up,” he shouts. “They’re calling for rain today.”
He steps out of his camper as if he’s lowering himself into a pool, gripping the doorframe and easing himself down on one leg, then the other. It takes a while for him to wade his way over. I pull off my T-shirt and crack my neck. The morning is hot and damp as the inside of a dog’s mouth. All around us, Camper City wakes up slow. Generators hum, people light their first smokes of the day, piss out the door. The Haunted House woman puts on the radio and steps out to do her exercises under the awning of her RV, bouncing in a tank top, touching her toes. Everyone struggles to maintain something of a routine. Me, every morning, I remind myself where we are. Now: Illinois. I say it out loud, to make it official.
By the time Dub makes it over he’s sweating and puffing, his mouth a deflated O. He presses a hand to my back window to steady himself. “Get a move on,” he wheezes. “We’ll get an early crowd. Rain in the afternoon. They’re all at home right now, glued to the Weather Channel, changing their plans. I guarantee.”
Dub is always guaranteeing the unguaranteeable: the weather, the whims of people, the quality of questionably constructed merchandise. A born hustler. Me, I couldn’t sell a drowning man a life jacket. We could get no business at all, for what I care. I’d just as soon sit at my table and watch the crows tear around above me, wondering what the hell set down in the center of their field. But still, I’m pulling on a shirt, lacing up my boots. Illinois. Really it’s just another sky, another field, another morning, another sea of faces to come, blank-eyed, slack-jawed, hands on wallets, not as much to see the spectacle as to take something away from it to put up on the shelf.
“Coffee?” Dub jerks his thumb back at the camper, jowls swaying. I nod and slam the tailgate shut. Five months, four thousand miles, Dub’s coffee has been slowly hollowing out my gut. He is a friend, or at least constant as one.
“Christ, it better hold,” he shouts on his way back to the camper, shaking his finger at the sky. “I sure as hell can’t afford a slow day.”
Twenty minutes later, the coffee cranking through me, I head up to the port-a-johns on the midway. Up here, things are slow to creak into gear: the carnies fold tarps, run patchy safety checks on rides, shout to one anoth
er in English, Spanish, Portuguese. Sodas are plunged into ice at the concessions stands, hot dogs are eaten for breakfast, no buns. The old man in the cotton candy stand wearily starts his centrifuge spinning and shakes his cartons of pink sugar. Ed the Giant Steer, led out of his tent so that it can be flea-bombed for the second time in two weeks, sways on his stilt legs and groans, yanking his lead in his handler’s palms, diving for the grass. A heavy roll of ADMIT ONE tickets is dropped in the dust and rolls to a stop at my feet. No one looks up when I pass. I might as well be just another faceless customer, passing through. The outfit is watertight. Us hucksters, relegated to the side strips, we’re nothing but gulls following a fishing boat, swooping in to snatch the leavings.
Most of the vendors down on the back side are already at their booths, counting out money, listening to radios. Yawning, sleep still burning off, looking only half-ready for the droves. I nod to the few I know: Indian Jim, who sells five-dollar sunglasses and isn’t Indian in the least, Danny, the kid, sizzling on pills even at this hour, with his dream catchers and blown-glass beads on cords. They nod back, eyes hard.
I stop at the wing stand to say hello to Kathy. She leans out on the counter with her hands clasped in front of her and smiles big and blank, like she’s waiting to take my order.
“Cole, baby,” she says.
“Good goddamn morning,” I say.
Kathy’s hair, as always, is done in two braids, a hairstyle she must have outgrown forty years ago. No makeup yet, which makes a big difference. She’s wearing a low-necked T-shirt covered with sequins that catch the light and send it sparking all over the place. I can see the tops of her breasts, brown and cooked-looking. Whenever I see them in the light of day, I can’t imagine how I ever find comfort there.