Bright Shards of Someplace Else

by Monica McFawn

  His sling hangs from the rafters at four points, suspending him inches from the aisle floor. He is hooked to an iv that enters the arched muscle of his neck. Beneath him, white sawdust covers the concrete, and a Rubbermaid box filled with antibiotics, Vetrap, bandages, Betadine, bute, etc., is stored off to his right. His water bucket, grain pan, and hay net are propped up in front of him on a wooden cart. The stall doors, off to his right and left, are decorated with get-well cards. Most of these contain his crude likeness, drawn under rainbows or among a funnel cloud of hearts and stars. A few depict him painting, leaning back and dangling the brush from a dexterous hoof. A tinfoil helium balloon that says “Get Well Soon” is tied around the stall bars, and a small herd of stuffed animals is tucked between them. One of Snippet’s own paintings—irregular puffs of green, blue, and pink floating over a linear red scrawl—stands on an easel in the pony’s view.

  It had been Marti’s idea to put the painting there. Her thought was that the painting might inspire the pony’s healing, remind him of what he needed to get back to. Marti is one-half of Heart’s Journey, the founder and CEO. She’s the emotive one, the one whose mascara is forever running down her face (why does she even wear it?) as she weeps in empathy over an equine’s pain. She’s forty-seven, with the rough look of someone with a past—drugs, spousal abuse, jail time—all this seems inherent in the cut of her Carharts, the crispy taper of her long hair, the tremulous wrinkles that seem to rotate around her mouth as she speaks in that confidential half-whisper, as if she were in hiding with whoever is listening. She seems threadbare, fragile, ready to break down or apart, yet she is so at home at the edge of ruin that she seems interred there, no closer to destruction than she is from health. She is sitting on a grain sack in the feed room.

  Her partner, Judy, is picking up all the medical flotsam that has washed up by the pony, as if he were the shore of a toxic sea. She kicks the dog away from a bloody wad of gauze; she rolls up the Vetrap, combines two nearly empty bottles of iodine. She picks up several syringes and fans them in her hand, as if their needles must be kept apart, then drops them all in the coffee can for sharps. Judy is forty-two; like a twelve-year-old girl left in the elements for thirty years, she is faded, with faint cracks for smile lines, but her childhood form is essentially unchanged, right down to the sloppy long hair and perky joint-floppiness that marks her movement. Unlike Marti, she seems fresh and healthful; she speaks with an insistent but soft voice, as if she knew her good common sense is disruptive enough and aims to dampen its inherent blows. Often she is the one pulling friends and family back from excess or irrationality; she is that steadying hand on your shoulder before you do something rash. She cleans up around the pony and whistles in a strained and breathy way, like someone who has never really learned how. The barn is very quiet, apart from the padding of the dogs, the sighs and shifts of the pony, and the occasional plop of loose stool from him, which hits the aisle with a wet hiss.

  II

  Two vets are heading toward Heart’s Journey. One is Dr. Jim, from Coldwater, a sixty-year-old large-animal vet who graduated from the land-grant college way back. He is extremely tall, with a concave thinness, like a sail full of wind. His hair is mostly white and his face has a grim, angular look whenever he is serious, which he rarely is. Most often, he’s making smooth, small jokes to put people—taciturn farmers, waitresses, strangers waiting in a long line at the bank—at ease. He climbs into his truck adorned with the faded decal of a longhorn (though there are none in the area), turns the key, and smiles when an old George Jones song comes on. In the back of the truck, a canister of bull semen bounces like an antsy child as he eases over the dirt roads. He had to leave his dinner for this call, push his chair away from the peach cobbler and pull on his boots. As he laced up all the eyelets, his wife wrapped his pie slice in tinfoil and asked where he was going. “To see to the crazy ladies’ horses,” he said, and she nodded. She was never in the habit of asking further questions.

  Dr. Jim drives by several farms he does business with—the Skitema dairy, the Yoder’s pig operation, and a smattering of small farms and 4-Hers he seasonally visits. It is a cool day for early September, and the clumped beef cattle in the field resemble a large dark hand softly gripping the hilltop, like a father steering a toddler by the head. He needs to drop the semen off there on his way back from Heart’s Journey. Out of the rabbit hole and onto solid ground. Heart’s Journey—with its silly hand-painted sign, water troughs full of organic herbs and flowers, horses limping around the fields, and pair of unmarried hippie owners—was about as far from John Lidden’s beef operation as you could get. Two women staggering around in rose-colored glasses, believing every beat-to-hell old horse farted rainbows. Still, there was something he liked about the place in spite of himself.

  III

  Dr. Merrill is also on his way to Heart’s Journey. He is forty-nine years old and the lead veterinarian at EquiPerformance LLC. He rarely makes farm calls these days, and his assistant, Susan, seems startled when he says where he’s heading. Horse owners usually come to the clinic, driving up in diamond-chromed gooseneck rigs with matching trucks. On most days, a fancy horse—a dressage warmblood, a jumper, a quarter horse reiner so muscled and slick it looks like rumpled silk—would trot on the pavement strip while he squinted to see any syncopation in the gait. Even when the irregularity was imperceptible, the owners would want a full workup. Dr. Merrill would snap the films up onto the lighted wall, gesturing at the blurred margin of a tendon, the slightly abnormal angle of a coffin bone, the compressed space in a joint capsule. Many of his cases involve vague complaints that sap a performance horse’s brilliance: a short stride, a stiff jump, a sticky turn, all well short of an actual limp.

  He instills hope in horse owners by hunkering down a bit, like a chummy waiter, and offering up a menu of edgy treatments: shock-wave, stem-cell, Aquatred, etc. He reminds his clients that there are options—there are almost always options, things to try—and his looks seem to second him. His eyes are wide set and show a lot of very bright white, so his hazel irises appear to be sinking in milk. This babyish feature is undercut by a bunched brow, as if his eyes were pulling toward each other, like drops of water on a tabletop laboring to flow together. His hair is youthfully tousled, his neck is loose, his ears are tight and thinly veined as buds. His form is hard and thin, giving the sense of having been whittled away from something larger.

  Heart’s Journey is few towns away, and Dr. Merrill merges onto the highway. The landscape is so bleary and overcast that the road seems hyperreal. It reminds him of bad cartoons, where the main characters and scenes are crisp and bright, while everything beyond is summed up in a few gesturing lines. Still, he is glad to push off the day’s appointments. And the idea of the scruffy barn dogs and tame chickens swarming about his legs sounds nice, right about now. He’ll show them, today, that he remembers their names. The bantam, for instance, is Oscar …

  IV

  It says something about you, the vet you choose. Early on, the two women chose vets like spouses choose sides of beds. They needed a vet almost monthly—for routine shots and for the problems rescue horses usually brought with them. Marti preferred Dr. Merrill—a vet who seemed a connoisseur of equine pain, able to treat it, she thought, because he knew all its guises. When he recommended a course of treatment, he spoke in a low, emphatic voice, full of caution and caveats, as if he were revealing some difficult private knowledge. It was that sense of painful confession, married with his intense bedside manner, that made Marti feel at home.

  For Judy, it was Dr. Jim, the cutup country vet with the habit of slapping the horses’ hindquarters like a car hood when he was done with them. He blurted out his diagnoses and waved his hands whenever the women asked for more specifics, as if details were an indulgence he was withholding for their own good. The particularly sorry cases—the really broken down horses—he had little patience for. “Best to let them move along,” he said, his euphemism for euthanasia,
as if they were already passing by on a conveyer. There was something honest, Judy thought, in his refusal to get caught up in anything murky.

  Inevitably, both women see a character flaw made manifest in the other woman’s vet preference. Marti can see that, despite her practical airs, Judy is afraid to delve into real troubles, to live with unknown outcomes. Judy, watching Marti and Dr. Merrill speak nearly cheek to cheek over some sketchy diagnostic, sees a woman who needs coddling, who relishes the minutiae of sickness under the guise of trying to heal it.

  V

  Over the barn, there is a bridge, a large bright-banded arch, as noxious as corporate branding bandied about in a boardroom. The bridge is self-contained; it is like a piece of garden décor that can be repositioned wherever it looks best; it performs no function other than to imitate a bridge, to give a sense of crossing. This is the Rainbow Bridge, and it is referenced often by Marti and Judy as if it were as solid as the feed store down the road. The Rainbow Bridge is animal rescuer parlance for the interfaith zone where dead animals go, the sphere where old, unsteady horses are restored to an eternal youth. Pet dogs who lived in different decades and never crossed paths on earth snort each other’s buttocks in the sky. Cats cash in their unused lives for cloud perches near the sun. Or some such thing.

  The Bridge comes up between the women with some regularity. They’ve kept horses from it and sent horses to it. They’ve pulled horses off slaughter trucks, they’ve outbid the kill-buyers at Shipshewana, they’ve carefully rehabbed starvation cases and neglect cases, calling the farrier in to trim the long, curled hoofs, like elfin slippers, on some of the worst. They’ve also had to put a fair number of horses down—Raven, with the ulcerated, cancerous eye; Henry, with the inoperable colic; the deformed colt Jet, who walked on his pasterns; the old mare Olena, whose ringbone and navicular kept her down so long she developed bedsores. Then there was Yankee, the off-track Thoroughbred who twice flipped over under tack, nearly killing Marti. A particularly troubling case, as he was young and beautiful and completely deadly—

  VI

  Before he left the office for Heart’s Journey, Dr. Merrill had asked Susan to cancel his appointment with his client Deborah and her mare, Luna. Luna is lame again, this time in the hind end. Before, it was the left fetlock. Before that, a string of abscesses kept her out of commission for the better part of six months. Before that, she bowed a tendon. Before that, she popped a splint. There is another before that, but Dr. Merrill likes to pretend the mare has just appeared to him, in the hopes that he can view her present problem, whatever it is, with fresh eyes. The mare is tall and chestnut, with an excessive femininity to her face—long lashes, big, quivery eyes, fine ears, and a buttery muzzle. Deborah has the same kind of look, with jutting plump lips that seem to tussle, as if playfully trying to mount one another. She listens to Dr. Merrill and nods her head. Sometimes she voices a doubt—would Luna ever be right?—and blushes. Of course, Dr. Merrill answers, and Deborah goes brighter and looks down, as if her question were evidence of a small-minded faithlessness and not a reasonable question, considering. Then they move on to the next treatment. This has gone on for almost six years. Nothing in Luna’s radiographs, X-rays, bone scans, ultrasounds, or blood panels has ever indicated anything beyond minor problems and good prognoses, so he never tells Deborah bad news. Nothing that has been wrong with the mare is unfixable, so he fixes each thing. But the mare will not stay sound. After two months of being ridden, she’s dragging a toe around turns. Deborah too ages over these six years. He watches her ripen, then go oversweet on the vine. The lips get dewier, the eyes mistier, the clothing brighter, the figure fuller, so that during a certain appointment—perhaps when they injected the mare’s hocks—Deborah is glaringly lovely, a nearly painful concentration of beauty. Seeing her makes his teeth hurt, as if biting into something too rich. He concentrates on her shoes—soft leather ankle boots, ill-suited to a barn—and sends her on her way with a breezy, encouraging comment: he hopes to see neither of them again soon. The next time he sees them, or the time after that, Deborah’s skin is heavier. The red waves of her hair are dry and compressed into a clip on top of her head, like leaves flattened in a compost bag. The large, wet mouth on the slackened face looks pathological, seductiveness flaring like a growth. The horse still stands at the end of its rope and blinks its fawn eyes, then limps its little limp as Deborah leads her into a jog. She stops the horse and looks at Dr. Merrill with the shamed-hopeful look of a kid pulling back panty elastic to give a glimpse to a playground pal—I dare you to say it’s okay. He pats her back. They bend over readouts and share breath. Assistants shuffle in the hall; he sees the shadowy blips of their shoes under the door, like flickering ellipses. Even as he murmurs assurances he stares at the image, feeling, not for the first time, that it is secretly enchanted, like those joke portraits whose eyes move as you walk by. The image is pristine, textbook; the lesions and edemas blink into view the minute he looks away. The horse is healthy. The horse is not well. Deborah smells gamy; he finds himself rubbing her hair absently, like he would a horse. Just a small problem, here, that’s all.

  Yes, good to get away.

  VII

  Judy wants to be blue. Everything in her midst seems blue. There’s blue print on the bottle of bute. There’s a blue plush goat in the stall bars, and the Vetrap securing the fraying bottom of Snippet’s cast is blue. The sky outside the open barn doors, though it had been overcast for a week, is now a shocking shade of azure, bright even where the sun is not. Even the gray tomcat, who caterwauls high in the hayloft, looks bluish as he flicks his tail over a bar of light reaching through the eaves.

  Judy had taken the True Colors personality assessment earlier that week; it had been free for the heads of local businesses (I run a nonprofit, she’d said). She was sure she’d be a blue (caring, creative, intuitive), but instead the results of the test had pegged her a green (analytical, logical, emotionally detached), and although the facilitators made clear there were “no bad colors,” Judy knew all she needed to know from the other greens she’d been grouped with.

  To her left, a Realtor woman with a drippy spray tan complained about the buzz of the fluorescent lights. To her right, the owner of a cheese shop droned on about her warring skin diseases, how one rash actually healed the other, oblivious to the discomfort of her listeners. Judy looked at the blue group across the room. They clustered around their table like bright birds at a birdbath, tittering with excitement, stretching up to flutter their colors—one woman bounced in her chair, her red hair in a chignon like a curled feather. They laughed, they spoke earnestly and quickly; to Judy they looked like artists transported from an earlier age, writers in a jazz club. I used to be that way, she thought. What happened?

  Snippet is dozing, jerking in his sleep. The tips of his suspended hooves scrape the pavement, throwing off sparks. Judy puts her hand under his thick striped mane. She lays her face against his neck, feeling his long guard hairs, the vestiges of his winter coat that would have been fully shed if he were able to roll in the sand or if he were up to being curried. But he is a horse that hates being brushed, hates typical gestures of affection, and normally Judy’s proximity would have caused him to dance sidewise, to perhaps nip at her coat, to roll his large black eye so the white sclera showed, so that he looked skeptical and affronted, although Judy always got the sense it was a put-on and that Snippet merely liked to play with expectations.

  Which was why, when your back was to him, he would sometimes put his muzzle on your shoulder and nibble very lightly. But when you turned around, he’d gallop off with a squeal, so you were left wondering at his intent: was the closeness the point, and the wheeling away just a way to maintain his toughness, a kind of embarrassed back-pedaling? Or was the wheeling away the point, and the moment of closeness just a joke, just a commentary on how willing you were to believe in his affection, how vulnerable and dense you were?

  VIII

  Dr. Jim is a few miles from Heart
’s Journey. He’s turned the radio off. He’s thinking of the pony’s radiographs and following what he considers to be a foolish train of thought. He doesn’t look at many X-rays in his practice, and he felt bizarrely charmed when he slid them out of the mailer the other day. The pony’s cannon bone—split white against the gray fuzz of the surrounding tissue—looked to him like a thin woman in a white shift, turning away from the camera. A high, small bone chip appeared to be the barest suggestion of a fine upturned nose, lost in the angling of her cheek. An oddly romantic image, like a frame of film from an old silent picture.

  Of course he would recommend euthanasia—nothing else made sense. The pony was just a pet, but his advice would be the same even if it were a pricey herd bull. He has his kit with him and is prepared to put the pony down on the spot.

  He drives slower and slower. The dirt roads, at dinnertime, are nearly empty, and his truck crawls. The films are in a sleeve on his passenger side. He reaches over and taps them out, idly, as if by accident. The image slides out. The woman, again. The crack in the bone is like a sash at her waist. What if he tried to fix the pony? His friends, the cattlemen, would rib him at the diner. They’d laugh and say he’d gone soft in the head, give him shit about retiring. His wife would shake her head in amusement or dismissal, he wouldn’t know. His young son would bark a laugh, bits of sausage and milk spritzing the table cloth.