by Ian Stansel
An hour later he was cuffed for popping the feed rep, spent a day in jail, and saw a judge who questioned why a grown man, a business owner, a teacher, for heaven’s sake, would act so stupidly. Silas stood in the arraignment room. “Well, my horses were sick and I thought he was trying to fuck me but I see now I was probably wrong about that.”
The judge eyed Silas and said, “Yes, well, regardless,” and sentenced him to community service wherein he was to spend twenty hours over the next six months telling kids in the rougher areas of San Francisco about the glorious horse life.
Ten
Lena and Frank lived in relative peace for the next decade. In fact, Lena would recall this as the time when their marriage was at its best. The period when it felt like their strides were nearly perfectly matched. With Silas gone they drank less, got more sleep. Made love more often. They vacationed, even occasionally in places that had nothing to do with horses. New York. Rome. Or spent simple, long weekends hoofing the hills of the city and sleeping late. Frank even took an interest in the more elevated reaches of culture, accompanying Lena to museums and galleries, concerts that didn’t involve pedal steel guitar.
One night they were invited to the home of one of their wealthiest boarders for a reception for an Italian opera singer touring the States. Frank hesitated only a moment before agreeing to attend. In an opulent living room punctuated by figureless expressionist art, the singer offered a brief aria, a Verdi crowd pleaser, her voice undulating with the smoothness of blown glass and finally reaching a soaring peak that filled the parlor with a sound at once unnatural and utterly elemental. Lena looked up at her husband’s face to find it rapt, his mouth ajar ever so slightly. A momentary silence followed the aria’s conclusion, and then applause overtook the room, no clapping louder or more rapid than that of Frank’s big horseman’s hands. He fit two fingers into his mouth and issued an ear-twisting whistle. And then he cupped a hand to the side of his mouth, called “Bravo!” and let loose a hearty roar of laughter, as if no other reaction could suit such a wondrous display of virtuosity. The rest of the crowd broke protocol and joined him, snickering and grinning, and the opera singer smiled shyly and bowed her head Frank’s way.
In this moment and others, Lena felt again as she had when they’d first met and then married. Hers was the tall man in the Stetson, the one who could charm with a side smile, a wink, the one who shot her fun, lusty looks across a party room and who danced terribly with a tumbler of whiskey in hand, who knew how to make love to her at night and sometimes in the day and who didn’t bother her often in the morning. This was the time, Lena would later think, when Frank became most Frank. All aspects of the man—his roughness, his intelligence, his boyishness, his ambition—were in equilibrium. This was the Frank that she hoped people would recall when they thought of him. It was the Frank she wanted to remember.
And yet through all this, the boys’ feud continued. Silas broke into their house at least once a year. Stole money and old family photos. Cracked Lena’s Springsteen and Emmylou records. Even pissed on their couch, the childish prick. Their son, Riley, came along and grew bigger and knew Silas only as a faint specter hovering around their otherwise mild lives. “He’s nobody, sweetheart,” she’d say to her boy, pulling him to her, wrapping him up. “Nothing for you to worry about.” But she shook at the thought that he would approach Riley one day, outside school perhaps, or while he chalked the sidewalk down from their house. Talk to him, scare him. Even snatch him up. He was a vindictive and unpredictable man, and he hated Frank and, she supposed, herself by connection. It wasn’t impossible to imagine him taking her boy.
She was under no illusion that Frank had been sitting out the feud entirely. She knew her husband and she was not in the habit of deceiving herself. But still she could not accept that he’d been as felonious as his brother. Silas, it seemed, had become unhinged. By all accounts he was winning whatever war he thought they were engaged in; since he’d left, money slid away from the old stable in San Geronimo like runoff. Yet he continued.
Silas was a master trash-talker, and that kind of game went far in the gossipy horse world there in Northern California. All those bored, moneyed folks looking for drama to liven up their days. And if you’re craving drama and you meet the Van Loy boys, you stop looking and start palavering.
Silas had the whole area thinking he’d been the heart, soul, backbone, and balls of the operation. Which was a joke. Silas was a con man. A decent trainer, sure—Lena would allow that. He was better than most. He knew a horse’s mind as well as he knew its body. But despite his repeated claims to the contrary, he was no better than Frank. Lena had seen students bloom and flourish under Frank’s tutelage. Silas was good, yes, but he certainly shouldn’t have been able to compete with Frank and Lena, who herself had become one of the best respected trainers in the county. The two of them complemented each other. Students might slack for Lena from time to time, but when Frank was around, they double-timed, put an extra bit of air between their asses and the saddles. Likewise, when Frank was too blunt with one, Lena was there to offer an encouraging word. Not that she was a pushover. She might have been soft in comparison to Frank, but students would never have described her as such. In fact, the more experience she accrued, the less patience she had for laziness and excuses. One spring afternoon she was cleaning her bridle in the tack room when Rain, then just seventeen, came in and asked if they might talk. “I feel like I’m not connecting with Dexter,” she said. Dexter was a black gelding school horse she’d been riding for a month.
“It takes a while to get used to each other,” Lena offered.
“Maybe I could try Penny?”
“Penny has enough riders. Too many, in fact. Anyway, she’s no easier than Dex. Harder, probably. She’s got a stubborn streak.”
“Any of the other ones?”
“It’s the summer, Rain. You know how it gets with the camps and the pony clubs.”
Rain shuffled her feet. “It’s just—it’s been really hard.”
Lena threw the bridle onto a trunk; the bit clanged against a rivet. “Riding is hard,” she said. “And it isn’t going to get any easier ever. Certainly not by standing around griping and blaming a perfectly good horse for your frustration.”
This was a memory tinged not with guilt at having spoken harshly to the girl, but rather with a sort of pride—pride that on some level, Lena’s approach had worked, that Rain stuck with it, learned to be a horsewoman. And this happened over and over, with dozens of students.
So those notions that Silas sent aloft into the horse world’s ether, that he’d carried the old Van Loy stables, were nonsense. They were, however, effective. As Silas’s operation grew, Frank and Lena’s business at the old barn slowed and shrank. They still had their core boarders and students, but attracting more became difficult, and soon half their stalls stood empty. They cut corners and cut back and scraped by for a couple years, Frank all the while scheming to pay back his brother tenfold for sullying their reputation. What they’d built there in San Geronimo before Silas’s departure was already too large to maintain, and yet every plan Frank came up with seemed to somehow involve expansion. The Van Loy boys were never short on ego. It wasn’t until one day when Frank was outlining a new plan for buying up some of the land on the west edge of the property to develop a steeplechase course that Lena let loose her own ideas.
She said, “What if we went the other way?”
“What other way?”
“Small,” she said. They were in their bedroom. It was nearly ten and Riley, then in junior high, was wrapping up his homework in the next room. “What if we sell this off and start up with something else. I’m tired of this competing, Frank. So let’s play a different game. We’ll have a few stalls, a dozen. We’ll focus our energy on teaching. No more big shows. No events. A couple small, good camps in the summer. Low overhead. We go small.”
Frank sat on the edge of the bed and let his shoulders slump, taking on the architec
ture of the resigned. “All right,” he said. “We’ll start looking. Talk to an agent about putting this place on the market. Let the miserable fucker win.”
“It isn’t about that.”
“It is.”
“Why does it have to be?”
Frank was silent a moment, then cleared his throat and said, “Because we’re brothers.”
But his reluctant acceptance of the new plan soon turned to excitement as they looked at stables up for sale and imagined all they could do with a smaller, more concentrated approach. Frank was the one who’d first used the word boutique, to Lena’s surprise and barely concealable amusement. And this excitement he developed was the reason it hurt Lena so badly when Frank shot his brother.
He hadn’t talked about his brother in months, and without that cloud hanging over them they became what Lena had always wanted them to be: a happy couple working and raising their son and slowly, quietly getting older. They found the new stable in Fairfax, sold the old place, and started anew. So when Frank told her that he wanted to see Silas, she felt her stomach contract.
Frank said, “I think we can settle things.”
Lena shook her head. “That is not what will happen.”
She wasn’t at their bungalow when Silas came over. When it happened. They were still fixing up the new house in Fairfax, and she was there that whole day and evening, painting the bedrooms with Riley—an activity she enjoyed immensely and found therapeutic. As far as she knew, Frank was packing up the kitchen—an activity she abhorred. The phone had already been set up at the new place and she’d talked to Frank just a couple hours before. He said he was making progress and taking a little break. Despite significant slowing, Frank still drank, but it didn’t occur to Lena that this might be what he meant by a break.
Should she have felt some change in the air, some charge buzzing in her ears? She didn’t believe in such things. Rubbish, Sandra would have declared such notions, and Lena would have agreed. But later, thinking back on this day, she would be mildly surprised that she had not sensed a thing. Her life was changing, and yet she remained, for hours, utterly unaware. The sun had slipped down beneath the horizon by the time Lena and Riley completed painting the two main bedrooms. They cleaned up and stopped at a pizza place for takeout, and Lena stood and watched Riley play Ms. Pac-Man while they waited for their food. They ate the crusty corners of the pizza in the car on the way back to the bungalow. Riley ran up the front steps of the house. Lena came along slowly. After he’d gotten to the porch and entered, Riley stood in the living room holding the pizza box, his back to his mother.
Lena said, “Sweet?”
“Where’s Dad?”
A couch cushion tossed. Tumbler glass on coffee table overturned. The tray of the CD player hanging out like a tongue. Just next to where Lena stood in the open doorway, the white wingback chair was flecked with red. Finally, her eyes found the blood soaked into the rug.
Lena said, “Jesus,” then called, “Frank?” She took the pizza from Riley and set it on the coffee table. She told the boy to go back down to the car and lock the doors and wait there.
“Mom, why?” Riley said.
Lena said, “Please.”
She crept through the cramped house but found no one. All was as it should have been, except that she discovered the wooden gun box that they kept on a high closet shelf out and open and empty.
She went to the car and drove with Riley to the old stable in San Geronimo. A night fog had settled over it. No one was there. No people, no horses. A ghostly silence.
When they got back to the house, the light on the answering machine blinked. As Frank’s voice issued from the tiny speaker, Lena inhaled as if she hadn’t breathed in hours. But the relief was short-lived.
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m, uh, in jail. Silas got shot. And I guess . . .” The speaker buzzed as a scratching noise sounded—Frank’s beard against the plastic of the phone. Then his voice came back. “I guess I did it. Guess I shot him myself. Don’t think he’s dead, but who knows. Anyway, come on down here if you want. Don’t know when I’ll be arraigned. I never shot anybody before, but I imagine it might take a while. I guess maybe the neighbors might watch Riley.” He signed off with his customary “All right.” And that was it. Lena’s husband was in jail. Her brother-in-law might be dead. Lena turned and was surprised to find Riley standing there, tears running down his cheeks. She’d forgotten he was with her.
She said, “Jesus. Sweetie.”
Silas lived, of course. He’d been shot in the gut, and the lead passed through him and kept going out the open front door behind him. Cops never found it. The doctors at the emergency room and then farther down into the hospital where he spent the next two weeks had never seen such a clean gunshot wound. Sliced through one of his kidneys, but other than that. They shrugged. Said it was a miracle shot. Damn lucky, they declared Silas.
Frank claimed he was giving the gun—an antique that had belonged to their father—to Silas. A gift. An overture. A gesture of apology and forgiveness. He said he’d invited his brother to the bungalow to make peace, that he’d had enough of the whole goddamn mess they’d made of things and that he hadn’t known it was loaded and that the thing just went off. Didn’t know how or why. He said he loved his brother, through it all.
When it was his turn to talk, Silas told it differently. In the courtroom ten months later he said he’d been invited over to hash things out, yes, and that he’d come in good faith. Said there hadn’t been any accident, that Frank was drunk—as was he—and that they argued and that the elder Van Loy boy held the gun out and shot as purposefully as anybody could.
“What did you argue about?” his lawyer asked him.
“Lot of things.”
“Can you give us any specifics?”
“Hat,” Silas said. “Old Stetson. See, Frank’s business isn’t going well and he wanted me back with him to try to save it. His wife’s got some silly plan about a new outfit, but Frank said that we could reconcile, get back to where we’d been. Me and him like it used to be.”
“And what did you say to this?”
“Said why would I? My business is good. Better than good. Then I thought about it and said, fine, give me the hat and we’ll give it a go.”
“You were going to rejoin your brother in business?”
“I wanted to see how serious he was. Little test. He’s always liked that hat a good deal.”
“And then what happened?”
“Then the son of a bitch shot me in the gut. He muttered something like ‘Forget it’—I didn’t hear him exactly—and he laid me out in the doorway.”
Frank’s lawyers kept him quiet and offered a procession of experts on guns and trajectory and the like, and together they were able to plant a seed of doubt. The unpredictability of an old gun like that. After seven weeks of trial, Frank plea-bargained down to reckless endangerment. He spent fifteen months in the minimum-security wing of San Quentin, during which time Lena opened the new stable, helped Riley adjust to high school, and visited her husband weekly, never once asking if he had indeed asked his brother to rejoin him in business, if through all their plans together for a fresh start, he’d been playing her for a fool. She didn’t want to know. It was a painful bit of pride she would force herself to swallow. She imagined some might chide her for the decision, claiming that the truth was always paramount. Those people could go to hell. She wanted her husband back, her son’s father, and if that meant living with the mystery, then so be it.
⟱
“Mrs. Van Loy,” Detective Ortquist said. “Can you help me understand what you’re doing out here?” He was in the driver’s seat of a gray Chevy. Lena sat on the passenger side. The car was stationary but running, and the windows were shut, making Lena feel trapped. Which, of course, she was. Ortquist was maybe forty-five, fifty, tops. Had the usual cop sternness, but Lena could tell he was a decent sort underneath. A faint ring of pockmarks edged his jawline, and he wore some kind of col
ogne, not offensive or obnoxious but pungent enough to make Lena momentarily self-conscious about the aroma she was giving off after days in the saddle.
She said, “Can I open this window?”
“No.” Ortquist turned a dial on the dash and cool outside air came through the vents, solving nothing. “What are you doing here?”
Lena breathed in, out. “Riding,” she said.
“So it’s, what, a coincidence, your being in this particular spot? So close to where we think your brother-in-law might be?”
Lena said nothing. She’d seen Ortquist before, on the day of Frank’s death. He’d been with the other police, the ones who’d questioned her at her house. But he’d said nothing. She liked him for knowing how to shut the fuck up when a woman had just lost her husband.
Through the window she watched Rain standing on the shoulder of the road holding both horses’ reins. Pepper and Major seemed on edge, stepping in place, swinging their rears, and Rain had to give each of them a quick yank to get them in line. Three uniformed police stood near, their eyes molesting Rain and glancing back toward the car where Lena and Ortquist sat.
“You’re going after him? Is that it?”
“I don’t seem to be going anywhere right now.” Jesus Christ, she thought, he’s getting away.
Ortquist said, “A more paranoid officer of the law might think there was something else happening.”
“Such as?”
“When was the last time you saw or spoke to Silas?”
“For the love of God.”
“Tuesday you said it’d been seven years. Or thereabouts. Sure you aren’t forgetting something?”