by Ian Stansel
“I wouldn’t even know who to talk to.”
“You could start with me.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Frank Van Loy. I run this stable. I just found out about the judge and the rider. Just now. I wouldn’t’ve let that happen. It jeopardizes the integrity of the event. You clearly outrode her. Blind man could see that. Damn nice ride. So if you feel the need to lodge a complaint, I’ll hear it out and do what I can to right the wrong.”
Lena looked at him, said, “What could I possibly tell you that you didn’t already just say?”
Frank said, after a moment of thought, “Point taken.”
Lena fingered the bottom edge of her ribbon. “Anyway, I wouldn’t want to do something like that. Like I said, red’s a good color for me.”
“Shoot. You’re a blue rider if I’ve ever seen one. ’Course you should take lessons with me. Then there’d be no doubt.”
He excused himself, tipped his hat again, and disappeared between trailers. “Intriguing,” Sandra said. “Seems not to mince words, at least.”
“Suppose so.”
“Not many men can pull off a hat like that anymore. Not in Marin anyway.”
Lena said, “You want me to get his number for you?”
“Don’t be cheeky. You should give him yours, though.”
“Mother.”
Lena had one more class, a jumper, and she took the opportunity to walk the course beforehand. The woman who’d stolen her blue ribbon was there too, counting strides. Lena told herself she didn’t care, tried to visualize her ride: Fifteen jumps, highest at forty inches, with two doubles, one off a turn, and a triple. Awkward spacing in that second double. A tough little course all in all.
She rode well. Better than well. Roscoe beneath her adjusted his stride for the second double, got over both cleanly. After that, with just a few fences left, she knew she had it. They took the triple easily. After the last fence the crowd applauded and Lena let out a whoop and clapped Roscoe’s neck. On her way out, she saw Frank up in the judges’ booth. He stood over the judge with the long hair.
Lena took the blue this time, then found Frank by the concession stand. “Did you do something?”
He was chewing a bite of hot dog. “Do?”
“Up in the booth, with the judges. Did you tell them to give me the blue?”
“Why would I do that?”
“You tell me.”
Frank said, “If I told them to give you the blue, it might have been to right the wrong of your last class. Or I might have done it just to show I could. To flirt with you.”
“So you did.”
“Didn’t say that.”
Lena pointed at him. “I rode that course cleanly. I rode it better than any other rider in that class.”
“I agree with you.”
“I don’t need you to wield your power or whatever you think you were doing. I don’t need you getting cute.”
Frank looked down at the gravel ground, then up at Lena. “I was up there asking if any of ’em wanted a Coke.”
Lena watched Frank. “Truthfully?”
Frank nodded. He said, “I’m to understand, then, that if I’d done just what you thought I’d done, that would not have been the right way to ingratiate myself with you.”
This was one of the stories they told at dinners with friends or at bars after shows. Their origin story. It got laughs, had a happy ending. After all, there they were. But even through years of marriage and after telling the story countless times, Lena still found herself sneaking glances at her husband, trying to discern a signal—some particular steadiness in his eyes, some easy curl to his smile—that would prove once and for all that this story they told wasn’t bullshit, that he hadn’t, in fact, interfered with the judges’ decision, that she had won outright, that she had not, all those years before, been bought with that blue ribbon.
Five
Through childhood and adolescence, Frank and Silas rode every chance they got. In the arena at their parents’ outfit. Up the trails that led out toward Kent Lake. Down the dusty roads that wound through the San Geronimo and Lagunitas, occasionally passing some early incarnation of the hippie enclaves that would soon dominate so many’s perception of the place. They were explorers, the two brothers, bounding on horseback across the crust of this planet. Their world was so small—just a few square miles—and yet it seemed infinite. Silas felt like they were almost a species apart from the rest of the humans on the planet. They understood each other. They understood the sweet smell of fresh manure and the feel of braided reins gripped under fingers. They understood cool, foggy mornings and the hours ahead limitless in promise.
One day when Silas was nine and Frank eleven they’d ridden off up the dusty roads of Lucas Valley. Silas rode a rather dumpy dun mare named, ridiculously, Linda. Frank took a red gelding fox trotter called Stoney. Late afternoon and clouds had come in off the coast, cutting gray across the ultramarine sky, and Frank was saying that they needed to get back home.
“Feeding,” Frank said.
It was the boys’ job to give the horses in the barn their evening meal, to wing bales of hay over the doors and slip scoops of grain into their buckets. One day not long before, they’d stayed out too long and the old man had had to do the feed; when the boys came in for dinner, no plates occupied their places at the table. The horses don’t eat, they don’t eat. Silas Sr. was rigid when it came to the horses in their barn, but his sons learned early that this was the only way to care for them. Humans bred the animals, brought them into this world of barns and arenas and stalls, and because of this, humans had to put their needs first. The way it was. The way it had to be.
Silas turned his horse and took the lead down the trail. He was just cresting a small berm and passing a rusted old out-of-use gate frame when Linda spooked, reared back. In his interminable airborne moment, Silas spotted the cause of the commotion—a king snake coiled at the trail’s edge, mimicking a rattler. He landed with his shoulder on top of that gatepost. The pain did not come immediately, but when it did, after a second of his being splayed in the dirt, it shot down his arm and up his neck and across his back like nothing he’d ever felt before. It was an extraordinary agony. The snake slithered into the taller grasses, and Linda bolted down the trail, around a corner, out of sight. Frank was off Stoney in a leap. Silas sat up as best he could and Frank said, “Here,” and held Stoney’s reins out to Silas’s good side, and then bounded into the grass. Through the fog of pain, Silas watched his brother scour the ground and then lift his leg and pound a boot into the grass and dirt.
“That son of a bitch’s done,” he said. “You dying?”
“No,” Silas said. “Busted pretty good.”
“Hurts?”
Silas nodded, breathing deeply to keep the tears inside.
“We got to get Linda,” Frank said, and he shouldered Silas up onto Stoney’s back, just off the saddle, then got on himself. Pain ravaged Silas’s hunched frame with every step the horse took. After a half hour they found Linda munching grass through her bit in a meadow. Frank dismounted and slapped Stoney’s saddle and said, “Slide up there.” The older brother rode Linda and led Stoney with reins outstretched. That night the doctor was called to put Silas’s shoulder back into place. The old man gave them food even though they’d missed the horses’ feeding, but Silas was in too much pain and then too stoned on painkillers to eat. He did remember, though, through the morphine haze, his older brother sitting on the bed opposite his, a dreamy, quixotic grin cut across his face, saying, “I wish I could kill that snake again. I’d go back in time and stomp that son of a bitch over and over if I could.” And Silas remembered thinking that the world was full of hazards and unpredictabilities, but the two of them, as long as they stuck together, they’d be safe.
Of course, by the time the old man was on his way out of this world, things had changed. The boys were men. They were running the operation. Virginia had died two years prior, breast cancer. But while her en
d had been mercifully quick—just two months passing between detection and her burial at Mount Tamalpais Cemetery—Silas Sr. was enduring a prolonged and excruciating demise.
Silas had come to his father’s room at the house, one of the two daily visits he dreaded even back when Silas Sr. could still form words, back when Silas had mistakenly thought the situation was at its lowest, back before he understood that the thing eating away at his father’s lungs would do far more damage before it was done. Silas couldn’t count the number of days he’d figured the old man wouldn’t make it through the night, and yet time after time there he was the next morning, his wet eyes pointed at the ceiling, his gaunt chest rising and falling slowly and nearly imperceptibly.
“Frank, he’s got brains,” Silas Sr. said, swiping a hankie across his spit-glistening mouth.
“He’s a smart one, all right,” Silas said, capitulating preemptively. Not everything had changed.
“All this with the English, I never thought of it. I’m too old-fashioned.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” He sat on the old man’s bed.
“It ain’t good. Only people think the old ways are better are sentimental old dipshits. Or people making excuses. Business sense is what your brother’s got. Never my strong suit. Not yours either, I guess.”
“It’s my operation too,” Silas said.
“Maybe according to the bank and maybe as far as some of the riders around here see it. But this is his thing he’s building. You know that as well as I do. You got horses down, that’s for sure. You know those animals. Maybe better than me. Definitely better than your brother. But that isn’t brains. That’s in your bones. It’s running through your veins. It’s physical, is what it is. Your brother’s built for this world. You and me are just a collection of dumb old cowboy limbs.”
The words hit like a blow to the head. Silas had thought of his father’s death as the extinction of a species, but now here the old man was telling him, no, you’re the last one. How humiliated he felt, how foolish. He sat there on the edge of his father’s bed, the last dodo, the lone mammoth lumbering across the prairie. Later, in the autobiography he wrote and revised in his head, the story of his life molded and edited to make sense of himself and the world, he had this dialogue with his father down as the moment he knew he would eventually sever himself from his brother and set off on his own. But of course that was simplifying. Storytelling. Truth was that their dissolution was gradual and sometimes numbingly slow. It was in the works for years. Decades. Perhaps from the moment Silas was born and Silas Sr. set his tiny body onto Frank’s lap and guided the boy’s arms into place to protect the new little one. “You’re brothers,” Virginia would say whenever they’d fight as boys, as if the word itself was meant to mortar them together, keep everyone from crumbling.
⟱
After crossing a meadow, Silas and Disco came to a wire fence that stretched over hills going both north and south. A ways down, Silas eyed a gate, short, not three feet in height. No lock on it, not even a tangle of wire. It would have been easy enough to hop down, kick it wide, and mosey Disco right through. But instead Silas turned his horse and brought her back off the fence some twenty paces and then turned her again. “How about a little jump, girl,” Silas said, rubbing the horse’s neck. Disco responded with a snorted breath. Silas pressed his boots into the horse’s flanks and she leaped forward, picking up speed quickly, adjusting her stride as they approached, and, just as Silas lifted himself up off the saddle, bounding over the obstacle.
“That’s it,” Silas pronounced loudly as Disco slowed. “That’s just goddamned it.” He couldn’t help the smile that crept across his face. Trotting on, Silas ran his blistered fingers through the coarse hair of Disco’s mane.
He saw a man perhaps two hundred yards off making his way down a grassy slope, and the man waved a willowy arm above his head. “Hey there!” the man called. Silas watched him approach from the far side of the field for a good half minute, every second ready to bolt. Run, Silas thought to himself. Go on, go. Give old Disco one good kick and you’ll be out of the man’s sight, over that ridge, in no time. But he didn’t, and he hated himself for it. Aside from a store cashier, he hadn’t talked to another human being in going on three days. Internally, he chided himself for the weakness. Getting lonely. A sorry excuse for an outlaw.
“What are you doing?” the man called.
What are you doing, brother?
“You’re on private property,” the man said as he got closer. He gestured broadly with his arms. He wore jeans and a white button-down shirt and brown boots and a flopping wide-brimmed hat. His beard was graying and he appeared to be in his early fifties, but his voice was high, like a boy’s. “This is all private property.”
“Apologies,” Silas said. “I was just cutting through.”
“I know you were,” the man said, offering a slight smile to offset the awkwardness. “That’s what everybody’s always doing.”
“I’ll be on my way,” Silas said. “I do apologize for any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble. Just a matter of principle, mostly. Did you happen to close that gate back there?”
“Didn’t open any gate.”
“Didn’t open any gate? How’d you get through, then? If you don’t mind me inquiring into your method of breaking onto my land.”
“Jumped it.”
“This one’s a jumper, eh?”
“She does a little of everything,” Silas said.
The man’s face softened as his gaze took in the horse. “What’s she called?”
“Disco,” Silas said, then immediately regretted the information.
“Beauty,” the man said, a bit wistfully. Silas knew the tone. A horse could do things to a person. Some kind of magic in the air between them.
“You know horses?” Silas asked, prolonging the conversation despite the voice in his head urging him to vacate the situation post-fucking-haste.
“No,” the man said. “I’ve never even been on one, except maybe a pony or two at the fair when I was a kid. And I’m not even sure about that.” The man eyed and then pointed to Silas’s bota. “What’s in that horn of yours?”
“Not much at the moment,” Silas said. The man squinted up at Silas. “Little bit of cab left, though. You want some?”
“Is it noon yet?” the man said with a wry grin.
“Somewhere.”
The man popped open the nozzle and took a shot from a good five inches. “That’s all right,” he said.
“You a wine man?”
“A bit of one. Yourself?”
Silas nodded. “Bit.”
The man extended a well-worked hand. “Henry Martin.”
Silas had come up with a name long before this moment, years before, and that name had woven its way into his fantasies of killing Frank, entered him so deeply that it seemed to be nearly as much a part of him as the appellation given to him by his parents. “Tom Young,” he said. It was a good simple name, he thought. A far cry from his own, which he’d always felt was slightly absurd.
“Where are you heading?” Henry asked.
“Nowhere. Just on a wander,” Silas returned.
Henry flicked Silas’s sleeping roll. “A big one, looks like,” he said. Silas nodded vaguely, and Henry seemed to accept this much of an answer as enough. “Where you up from?”
“How do you know I’m up?”
Henry smiled. “You don’t strike me as much of a mountain man.”
“Sonoma,” Silas said.
“That’s where you want to be for grape juice. Beats Napa in my opinion. Quality-wise.”
“It’s an argument a man can make.”
“So no particular destination, then?”
“North. Setting camp along the way.”
“You got Mendocino Forest just up the road,” Henry said. “Decent camping there. Goes up for miles and miles.” They were in a valley and green wooded peaks reared up high to the east, west, and nort
h. “You need a lunch?” Henry asked.
Silas had been living the past two days on dry bread and miserly rations of cold cuts. “I wouldn’t say no.”
“I’ve got a cellar too,” Henry said, “in a manner of speaking.”
Silas dismounted and Henry led him and Disco up over a brown-grassed shoulder. As they humped it, Silas looked down the far side and saw a small ranch set in the bowl. A house, a barn, a few sheds and outbuildings. A creek cut through just on the east of the buildings. In the pasture were tall, long-necked animals. Silas furrowed his brow, squinted his eyes. “What the hell you got down there?” Silas asked.
“Llamas,” Henry said. “We raise them.”
The we threw Silas. We. He imagined walking in the door to that little house and finding a woman watching a television screen emblazoned with his face. Wanted, it would read just beneath. Dangerous. His mind quickly conceived a host of excuses to turn around right then and there, each of them more foolish and unbelievable as the one prior. There was no turning back now. Had to keep moving, steady his breath, step one foot in front of the other, always mindful of the door.
“Don’t suppose llamas eat hay,” he said.
“Of course,” Henry said. He slowed to let Disco come up beside him and then set a hand on her neck. “Some grain too. Yeah, we can get her good and fed.”
They passed by the house and the llama pen, and the animals all watched them, their heads turning and then following in unison, and one near the fence uttered a guttural gargle. Disco watched too, out of the corner of her big eight-ball eye. Henry took them to the barn, where there was an unused pen floored with straw. “This’ll do,” Silas said.
Henry fetched a flake of hay and Disco whinnied at the sound of it. “She’ll be okay here?” Henry said, tossing the hay onto the ground.
“She’ll be okay here,” Silas said. “I thank you.”
Henry brought him to the fence line where a few of the llamas dawdled. They licked their mouths with thick tongues and stamped their cloven hooves into the dirt. Their faces resembled a combination of deer and goat and one of those large-eyed Precious Moments cartoons from way back. “Raise these for wool, then?” Silas said.