by Ian Stansel
“We do,” Henry said. There was that we again. “They get raised for meat, too, but not so much here in this country.”
“You ever try it?”
“I did, as a matter of fact, once in Norway. Long time ago, though. Before the farm. Back in a past life.”
“Recall the taste?”
“Bit strong, like a very ripe venison, I’d say. I don’t think I could eat it now I know the animals. You’re a horseman—would you eat horse meat?”
“I believe I’d knock a man out who offered me the meat of a horse.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Henry said.
“You said ‘we,’” Silas said. “You got a partner here?”
“In a manner of speaking. Maggie and Mira actually own the place. I help tend to the animals. They live there.” He pointed a stubby finger at the main house, then pivoted. “I’ve got that little cottage down the creek.”
Silas hadn’t even noticed it. Tucked between the creek side and a pair of oak trees was the smallest excuse for a dwelling he’d ever seen. Cottage was a stretch. Of course, despite his expanding landholdings, Silas had been living out of a trailer the past fifteen years, so he wasn’t in a position to judge.
“Built it myself,” Henry said, stepping toward his miniature house. “It isn’t big, but it’s big enough.”
It was dark and cool inside, but Henry tugged at a hanging cord and just above them, two muslin blinds rolled back to reveal skylights that doused the room in sunlight. Aside from the wood trim and a table and small desk, the entire place was white, including the coverings and pillows on a twin bed that seemed to double as a couch. On the far side of the room (which, of course, wasn’t so far at all) stood a scaled-down kitchen with a two-burner stove and a sink.
“I’ve got a couple bottles in my pack,” Silas said. “Cab. Nothing special but all right for lunch.”
“Save it for your travels,” Henry said. He got two glasses and poured a Shiraz from a vineyard down south of Big Sur.
Silas raised his glass. “The hounds,” he said.
“How’s that?” Henry asked.
“Old toast. To the hounds.”
“Is that a horse thing?”
“Something like that.”
“To them, then,” Henry said.
It was a good wine and Silas wished he were in a position to relax enough to enjoy it. He sat at the table and stretched his neck side to side. It was so bright now in that little house that it hurt Silas’s eyes, but each moment he closed them for relief, he saw Frank there on the back of his eyelids.
Henry made chicken salad sandwiches with lettuce and tomatoes, a little lump of potato salad huddled on the outskirts of each plate. The food went quick and filled Silas up. He was no different from a horse when it came down to it; no one was. All just animals trying to get by without dying too early. Food is just about everything, whether it’s on a plate or in a trough or straight off some fruiting tree.
He washed the bread and meat and oil down with the wine, and his eyes adjusted to the light and he figured he hadn’t had such a simple and pleasant time in God knew how long. The wine was taking effect. He told this man Henry, “Thanks for all this,” and hoped those plain words communicated something of the depth of appreciation he felt.
After lunch was finished Henry smiled mischievously and told Silas that he would leave the dishes—of which there seemed to be only two, plus a cutting board—for later. They went outside. “Sonoma,” Henry said.
“That’s right.”
“What do you do there in Sonoma?”
Silas’s brain conjured all sorts of occupations—housepainter, mechanic, chef—but none that in this split second sounded plausible. So he told a part of the truth. “I teach horseback riding.”
“Been doing that long?”
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been doing it since before I was born.”
“Maybe you have,” Henry said. “A past life.”
“You buy into that kind of thing?”
Henry smiled. “Not really. I get why people would, though. It’s comforting to think that we get to come back. That this isn’t it. One ride around and then it’s done.”
Silas nodded. If the Buddhists and whoever else were right, what would Frank come back as? A horse? A fly? A blade of grass? Nothing fit. Silas couldn’t imagine his brother being anything but his brother. Maybe somehow after all was said and done they’d both come back as themselves. And if so, what would they do different?
Silas and Henry walked along the bank of the dry creek. “It’s funny that they call it horseback riding,” Henry said after some time. “As if there might be some other part of the horse one would ride.”
This observation amused Silas. “I never thought about it,” he said. “I guess it is funny.”
The two men walked and discussed horses and llamas and the weather. Silas tried to offer as few details of himself as he could but still enough that he wouldn’t seem withholding. He could see this man Henry loved to talk, once he got going, and it was easy enough for Silas to simply walk and listen. Silas luxuriated in the company. He’d entertained the notion of himself as a hermit, living out the rest of his days in a cabin up in the redwoods, somewhere not far from the coast, fishing and subsisting simply. But he wondered with growing concern if this was possible. He’d been a bachelor all his life, and never one to collect a great number of acquaintances, but there’d always been outlets for his social urges: his boarders and students, vets and farriers, the ladies at the grocery. The past couple days had been the loneliest of his life.
They meandered up the hill and passed by the front of the main house. A door squeaked and a woman’s voice rang out. Standing in the doorway was a blonde, maybe fifty years old, nice-looking, with wide hips and high cheekbones. “Oh” was what she’d said, and when Silas turned around she managed “Hello.” Silas nodded to her and kept his eyes toward the ground in a manner he hoped wouldn’t be perceived as strange.
“This is Tom,” Henry said. “Tom, I mentioned Maggie.”
“Your outfit here,” Silas said, turning back halfway. The sun had arched past its height and was just behind the house, so he had an excuse to hold a hand in front of his face.
“Mine and my wife’s,” Maggie said. Silas nodded again and continued to nod, hoping this made up for his lack of words at this development. He knew it was foolish and self-absorbed, but even after so many interactions with gay women—the horse world had no shortage—they still elicited a strange twinge of insecurity, as if their orientation were based somehow on their glimpsing Silas and saying to themselves, Oh, no, no. That’s not for me.
“Tom is riding his horse up north and I found him burgling across the grounds.”
“He isn’t the first. Honestly, I don’t know why you get bent out of shape about it. We don’t even use most of it.”
“Because it’s your land, and private property still means something in this country. Or it should anyway.”
“I apologize again,” Silas said.
“You we forgive,” Henry said, setting a hand on Silas’s arm.
“How long are you staying, Tom?” Maggie asked.
“I’ll be shoving off momentarily.”
But he and Henry kept walking and talking and before he knew it the sky had begun to cloak itself in dusk. Henry invited him to stay for dinner. They’d made it back to Henry’s tiny domicile and Silas remained standing in the room.
“Need to find a camp,” Silas said.
“You’re welcome to stay a night here.”
Silas watched the man tidy the dishes still left out from lunch. “Can I ask you something?” Silas said.
“I suppose.”
“You queer?”
Henry moved himself to the kitchen, pulled a butcher-paper package from the refrigerator. Silas couldn’t tell what was in it beyond a large piece of red meat. His stomach groaned.
“Sometimes,” Henry said.
Silas waited for a fu
rther explanation. When he didn’t get one he said, “You mean you’re like a bisexual.”
“Exactly like one.”
“I always heard that was bullshit. I mean, I’ve heard you either are or aren’t. Gay.”
“People like simplicity and definitions. But the way I see it is, if I fuck everybody, what could be more simple.”
Silas couldn’t help but smile at this. “I’m not, just so you know,” he said.
“Knock me over with a feather.”
“You ever have anything with either of those women up there at the house?”
“I had a marriage with one.”
“No shit,” Silas said. “The one I met?”
“Yes. Maggie. We were married for seven years once upon a time.”
“And now she’s with a woman.”
“She is.”
“And you’re open to either.”
“Fuckin’ California, right?” Henry said.
“I’m not trying to be rude,” Silas said. “You’ve been very kind to a stranger. I just like to know where I stand with a man.”
“You stand in my house, Tom, because I invited you.” He flipped the roast onto a pan. “Now, are you interested in dinner and a place to stay?”
“I am, thank you.”
“What would you like to drink with dinner?”
“Something red.”
Henry looked at Silas askance. “You see me drinking something white with a roast, you can regard that as a sign I’ve taken leave of my senses.”
They ate dinner and sat out front of Henry’s cottage enjoying a second bottle of wine, then dipping into a third. The temperature slipped with the sun. In this moment of comfort, Silas felt his lack of a long-term plan wedge its way into his consciousness. He would have to come up with something—a destination, a permanent alias, and a livelihood for when his cash ran out. It was not difficult to force his brain away from thoughts of prison. To imagine that was to imagine himself as some other person living some other existence. But it would not come to that, he thought, grounding his mind in the reality of his life. He would never let that happen.
Six
They crested a hill along a dusty fire route. Lena pressed Pepper into a trot and Rain followed. Here in this desolate part of California, it was nearly possible to believe that the rest of the world had evaporated or slipped away into some ancillary realm. They broke into canters. Down one crushed rock slope, up another. Rolling beige land everywhere.
They’d been listening to the police scanner for a few minutes now and again but were afraid of losing battery power completely. Lena turned her phone off to end the incessant buzzing and chiming of calls, first from just Riley, then the police too. Lena imagined that if she and Rain were to pass a highway, they might see her name illuminated in amber on a board with the words Missing Adult and a quick description of her escape vehicle, the steed beneath her.
The first half of the day went by in near silence, the two women threading the valleys, as far as Lena could tell, between Petaluma and Tomales Bay. At noon they stopped and lunched on hard salami and bread and drank water. The horses got grain and apples and carrots and, because they’d found a spot under trees on the shore of a cool, small pond, all the green June grass they could want.
Lena said, “I shudder to imagine what your parents would think about you being out here.”
Rain said, “They probably know. Who knows what the cops have put together and who they’ve talked to.”
The girl was right. Lena said, “Jesus, now I feel even worse.”
“I’m not a child.”
“I know you aren’t.”
“If it will make you feel better, for the next however many miles we can talk about how I should turn around, but we both know I’m not going to.”
Lena was surprised by Rain’s tone. Serious. Irritated. A nerve there got hit.
Some minutes later Lena said, “You seeing anybody these days?”
“We don’t need to talk about that kind of thing.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s trivial.”
“I could use some trivial in my life right about now.”
Rain grinned and relented. “I see a guy now and then. He’d like it to be more often, but I just don’t have the time. Or enough interest, I guess.”
“Is he nice?”
“Very nice.”
“Good-looking?”
“Sure. Good-looking enough. And smart and basically funny. He’s fine. He’s better than fine. He’s super. But when it comes down to it, most of the time I’m with him I’d rather be riding. Or cleaning tack or mucking out stalls. Sometimes I think I’m still a thirteen-year-old girl, you know, just wanting to be with horses all the time. I mean, yeah, there are certain needs another person can fulfill. A few drinks on the weekend. Some conversation. A bit of a fuck once a month.” The girl tore into a piece of bread and did not look at Lena.
“Only once a month?”
“That’s what I mean. I feel like I’m supposed to want more of that sort of thing. That year I was in college—everything just felt so stupid. I mean, classes were whatever and it’s good to learn, blah, blah, but everything else, all those kids getting high and trying to rub up on each other, it was all so pathetic.”
Lena said, “It’s experimenting, isn’t it. People trying to figure out who they are.”
“But I already know,” Rain said. “And we only have so much time—” She stopped herself.
That night, with the help of Rain’s phone—which, as far as Lena was concerned, was nearly magical in its abilities—the women found another campsite, complete with a proper bathroom and outlets for charging electronics.
Kneeling at a communal fire in the waning twilight, Rain said, “Your mother got you into horses, didn’t she?” There were a handful of other campers on the other side of the fire, a blanket across their laps, splashing booze into metal camp cups.
Lena said, “She did.”
“She’s no longer with us?”
Lena said, “No. She passed on, back when we were still at the old place.”
“I’m sorry.”
Lena shrugged.
Rain said, “She rode, though.”
“As far as I knew as a kid, it was all she ever did.” Lena smiled and then felt a pressing on her chest and dropped her mouth. “She got started back in England, near Liverpool, where she grew up.”
“I didn’t know your mother was English. That explains some things.”
Lena looked over. “Such as.”
“Little phrases you use. Like the tack room was a mess one day and you said it was all sixes and sevens. I had to look it up.”
“She used to say that, my mother.”
“There are others. ‘Bits and bobs.’ I always figured it was a quirk of yours. One time I remember you said Frank was being shirty.”
“He could be a shirty bastard,” Lena said, letting her voice take on notes of her mother’s Merseyside to amuse the girl.
“So what brought your mother here from England?”
Lena said, “My father. What else. He came for school, chemical engineering, at Princeton. They’d just gotten married back over there, so she came with him, of course. Then he got a job in Chicago, so she followed him there. That’s where I was born, actually. Father took a job out here when I was two, and so Mother packed up again.”
“She trailered horses from place to place?”
“No. No, it was something she did as a girl and then became interested in again later, when I was still a toddler. Father made good money, so it was possible.”
“I’ve never heard you talk about your dad.”
“He died when I was young, nine years old. Most of my life it was me and Mum.”
Rain said, “You ever think about how different things might have been? Like, if your parents had stayed in Chicago? Or if your mother hadn’t met your father?”
Lena said, “No. I don’t think about that kind of thin
g.”
A rustle sounded in the woods behind them. The other campers stopped talking and craned their necks back, and four silhouettes—deer—bounded across the corner of the clearing, then disappeared again into the wood.
“Jesus,” Rain whispered. “Do you think this gets boring? To people who live out here? I mean, people must live out here. A few. You think they see that and just think, Meh.”
Lena said, “I was in an airport one time—this was in New York, Kennedy—and I was having a drink in a bar and started talking to this woman who turned out to be a big bird watcher. Avid birder, this one. And she said she still got chills when she saw a blue jay. Just a regular old blue jay, after something like thirty years of seeing them.”
“That’s so cool. That’s inspiring.”
“It’s passion, I suppose.”
“Do you ever get bored of horses?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
Lena said, “I know. It’s what we breathe. These animals.”
A group of three men and one woman, all about Rain’s age, shuffled over to the fire. One man with a beard carried a fifth of whiskey. “Hey,” the young woman said in Rain’s direction. They sat heavily on the ground near the fire.
“Hey,” Rain said.
The young woman said, “Community bottle, if you all are interested.”
Rain said nothing.
“Go on,” the one with the beard said.
Lena said, “Give it here.”
In the dim evening light Lena saw the young man’s face twist into a self-satisfied smirk, as if it were ever so humorous to corrupt an old lady out here in the wilderness. She poured a couple fingers in her camp cup. She said to Rain, “Have some,” and splashed a bit into her cup.
Lena drank her whiskey quickly, the booze heating her throat and chest. Her shoulders, which had been stiffening against the cold, fell slightly. She rose to her feet. “I’m lying down,” she said to Rain. To the others, “Thank you for the drink.”
“I’ll come too,” Rain said.
“Stay if you want,” Lena said. “Relax.”
Rain hesitated, then said, “Okay.”