The break is open, but the bony column was aligned. The pony is small—five hundred pounds—that is key. What about a weight-bearing cast with longitudinal support? A sort of standing splint? He stops the truck and feels behind his seat. He lays the tire iron on the radiograph.
IX
Marti is in the feed room. The bag she sits on bulges and kernels work their way out of the plastic weave. Mumu, the obese calico, is curled on another bag, kneading and purring, rolling her head around, wishing to be touched. Marti wants a cigarette, but she quit. She wants a drink, but she quit that, too. She wants to leave the barn and go to Rosco’s, dance with Jim, argue with the bartender, drive by the street she used to live on, write a letter to her first foster family, smoke a joint, shout at someone, try on a dress for someone, sleep on a floor, wake up someplace else, but she quit all that, too.
She’s always had a lot of wants. It used to be she felt all of them, the way you feel each staggered drop when it begins to rain. Then they became a weather, nothing to blink at.
With a piece of hay she digs at the crescents of dirt under her fingernails. She hears Snippet struggle in the sling and Judy’s voice quieting him. She should go out there and help her, discuss what should be done with the pony, but she doesn’t feel up to it.
She squeezes her eyes shut and watches the pops of yellow and red, the light show playing in the dark. Those flashes of light—ghosts of light she’d seen, no doubt, the shapes of lamplight and bare bulbs like a visual echo—she bore down on them as if they were concealing something. They were bright shards of someplace else, she always thought as a kid, evidence of another world peeping through. Her stepfather once pushed her down and she hit her head on a planter. Her ears hummed and the light she saw was varied and streaky, as if she were being drawn through a nighttime cityscape on the back of a speeding motorcycle. It wasn’t heavenly or spiritual—it lacked the solemnity—but wildly festive. It seemed more real than her stepfather or the push; both the man and the act struck her as chintzy in comparison, no longer substantial enough to fear. Even as he bent over her and begged her to be okay, rocking and holding her hand, she wondered if he knew he was barely there.
A chicken wanders into the feed room, moving to the beat of its clucks, turning its head and giving her a deeply skeptical look, its ruff of red-gold feathers fissuring as it drops its head to peck at the floor. Marti reaches down and brushes her fingers over his comb; it feels to her like the hand of a limp doll.
X
The thing he had to do, he knew, was to cut Deborah off. Tell her that, given Luna’s long history of problems, she was probably just prone to unsoundness, and the best thing would be to make her a brood mare or a pasture pet. Just cut it off. The whole thing kept shaking him up. Sometimes he came home so distracted that his wife and son seemed to be just so much subclinical white noise, a side project he’d unwisely taken on. Laura would ask him what was wrong, looping her arms around his neck. All he could manage to say was that his mind was on a “hard case.”
He couldn’t tell her about Luna—he was loath to admit his obsession with the case, the lack of progress. There were far more dramatic cases that he could have on his mind, cases he did tell Laura about—a dicey colic surgery on a big-time jumper, a de-gloved pastern freed from barbed wire, barely salvaged, a breech birth unable to be righted. And of course he told her about Snippet, the miniscule pony with the catastrophically shattered leg.
“Is that the one who paints?” she’d said, and he’d looked at her blankly before remembering that yes, the two women had taught the pony to slop paint around. He and Laura had been watching the news when a local interest story on Snippet and Heart’s Journey came on. In the clip, Judy and Marti handed a brush to the pony, who took it in his teeth then flung his head up and down, like an athlete making theater out of working a kink out of his neck. Paint spritzed on the women and the newscaster, an effusive woman with a smile so high and wide it showed all her gums, as if her upper lip were the corner of a yogurt lid, there for ease of peeling.
“That pony’s hilarious,” Laura remarked. She was in fact eating a yogurt on the couch next to him—she was always watching her weight and working out—and her trimness had a parched, vacuum-packed quality, like a foodstuff that would need reconstituting with water to be palatable. His attraction to her had dribbled away as his practice became more consuming, but it struck him not as a loss but as a practical shift, the way you might rehab a horse with sore front heels by developing the carrying power of his hocks and hind end.
On the TV, Snippet was creating a swirl of blotchy colors, his tail a counterweight to the brush, swishing left when he made a right stroke, flagging when he dropped his head and stabbed at the bottom of the canvas. The camera flicked to Marti and Judy, who looked especially eccentric in the studio lights; even with the camera makeup and hair they looked like drifters, gaping at some rare vision unfolding down by the overpass.
The donkey farm on his right tells him he’s a mile or so out from Heart’s Journey. Snippet hadn’t been responding well to the soft cast and the sling, so the next step, if there was a next step, would be a table surgery and then a long, long rehab—at least a year, with much of that time tranquillized to prevent him from thrashing around and blowing out the pins from his bones. A twenty percent chance of recovery, if that. Normally he’d go for it if they would—which they would, at least if the same woman—was it Martina?—was at the helm. He recalled a hushed conversation with her in the tack room; her swimmy eyes searching his, translating all his nuance into two words: hope or hopeless.
He cringes at the thought of it—another vortex. He ought to just recommend euthanasia and be done with it. The afternoon sun moves through the cab of his truck like a hand feeling for something lost. It sets on the chrome details of his bag, where two files are tucked away—one for Snippet and one for Luna. If he puts Snippet down today—or just gives his recommendation and leaves—he can get back to the office and perhaps Deborah can come to a later appointment. There, he will let her know …
Dr. Merrill looks at his bag, the tongue of light on the left handle. Luna’s latest radiograph flicks across his mind unbidden, like it often does. The black and grey fuzz of the image seems to crackle and squirm in his thoughts, as if he were in the process of tuning it in, moving rabbit ears to catch a signal that floats enticingly near. Something in the angle of the pedal bone? … not that it matters. No harm, though, in looking at the radiograph one more time, just to confirm.
XI
The problem is Marti. Being around that woman had changed her, made her harder, turned her green. Marti is so delicate, so emotional, that Judy has had to be strong and coldly logical just to keep some semblance of order around the farm. Marti’s whole personality is like a sculpture Judy once saw of small, very thin reeds fed into each other to make a latticework so fragile it had to be protected from even the breath of the gallery-goers. It was in a glass case, in shadow, since light would degrade the organic material. Judy spent a long time staring at it, trying to figure out what, exactly, was holding it up. It was half-collapsed, so how …? She’d looked at her program. The integrity of the piece depends on the forces of gravity bearing down; it gathers strength as it falls into itself …
Judy always has to do the dirty work: to turn away a horse from the rescue (otherwise they’d become hoarders—something Marti certainly was before Judy came on board), to cease treatment of a too-far-gone horse, to make the call to send a horse to the Rainbow Bridge, to hold the horse’s lead rope while the vet administered the shot. How many lead ropes had she held in this way? How many times did she gently tug down on the rope, encouraging the horse, even as he blinked out of existence, to fold his front legs so he would settle down gracefully, rather than simply fall onto his side, convulsing and struggling, far from the peaceful send-off everyone wanted? And in these cases—when the horse left violently, messily, sometimes banging himself in the head, spraying blood through a smashed nasal
cavity—how many times had she wanted someone there to comfort her? She wants to tell Marti about these times—Marti should at least hear it—but she doesn’t.
There is something about Marti that forces a person to tread carefully. She seems flayed, like some sort of raw nerve flailing around in the world, and her pain seems elevated, deeper, more keenly and destructively felt. It is actually less painful, for Judy, to keep a sad image to herself than to risk Marti becoming upset. It is a kind of power, Judy thinks, to be so vulnerable. Sometimes she wonders if it’s a kind of manipulation, too.
For once, Judy thinks, I want to be the irrational one. I’ll be the one who can’t let go. I’ll call that wack-job Dr. Merrill for once. I’ll keep Snippet going; I’ll throw the rescue’s money at him. We’ll do surgery. Surgeries. Why not? He’s a great pony. Why can’t I lose my shit for once?
She wants to return to the illogic at the base of the enterprise, when they stood among all kill buyers, the slaughter-truck drivers, the farmers with the Skoal-can circles on their back pockets, the married Amish men with their heavy beards, gravely nodding, as if speech itself were too newfangled. The auctioneer, all chin and bald head, compresses and fans out his syllables in a showboating blurt, like a shuffler making an arc of his cards. And then, without even looking at Judy, Marti raises her hand. The auctioneer eyes her and nods. The men turn their heads and take her in: her stained Carharts, her long blond hair, the hardship-scored face with the stunned child-eyes. Some laugh, some grumble. The two women pull their pony—hip #467—from the pen. He is so thin and his coat so poor that he looks like a rug remnant tossed over a wrought-iron fence. His forelock is stiff with cockleburs and stands straight up like a plume; despite his condition he wears it that way, like he knows he is something to see. The two women lead him out, whooping and laughing, giddy with the absurdity of what they’ve taken on.
XII
The last time he’d fashioned a medical device he used a bamboo flute and a ripped shirt. The solider was in so much pain he’d bit a hole in his lip. He pressed the flute to the boy’s shin, tore up his undershirt, wrapped it around and held the excess in his teeth to keep the tension, then tied it off. “Don’t run off or your leg will whistle.” Dr. Jim never joked crudely, nor swore, nor made coarse comments about women, nor employed gallows humor. He was an oddity in the barracks, and while the other men made fun of him often (his nickname was Norman Rockwell), they saw the resilience and subversion in his simple sunny jokes. “Goddamn you, Rockwell,” the boy had said, grimacing as Dr. Jim pulled him to his feet.
When he makes a comment to cut the tension, he likes to watch how it falls on the atmosphere, much like a golfer shades his eyes and traces the trajectory of his shot. The tense, silent people at the bank, for instance, ripple and shift, rolling their eyes, chuckling or smiling tightly. These slight movements break up the scene suddenly and dramatically; it is like a shattered pane of glass finally buckling into millions of shards. They can no longer be a line of silent strangers.
He is joking with himself, these thoughts of trying to fix the pony. He’d have to make this drive over and over to work on the patient. Probably he would work in a haze of incense, Marti or Judy (he never remembered who was who) would talk to him about the pony’s feelings and thoughts, he would be made to contemplate the pony’s paintings, and the pony itself would wobble around, comically debased in the walking cast he’d cook up in his basement shop. He looks at the film again. He thinks of the simplicity of the splint, how easy it would be to try. The look of the cattlemen when they found out.
XIII
The aisle is quiet and Marti ventures out. Judy is out riding the Gator, tossing flakes of hay over the pasture fences while the horses gallop around. Snippet dozes, the white Medicine Hat marking over his ears bright in the afternoon light, like a fresh doily on a worn couch. She pats him, studies one of his paintings, his last before the accident. Most of his paintings were sloppy, flung over the whole canvas and beyond, but this one is comprised of just a few frilly disks of paint, pressed over each other, as symmetrical as if it had been made with a spirograph. It looks familiar, somehow, and then she remembers where she’d seen something like it before.
Marti’s foster mother, Gwen, used to wear a silk flower like that, every day, pinned to her headband, her scarves, or the hem of her shorts if it was hot out. It was blue and green and cheaply made with a fake pearl in the center, but Gwen never went without it. Once, Marti had gotten lost in an outdoor market, a swirling place chockful with wares of all kinds: herbs, blown glass, collectible pins, handmade clothes. She’d wandered away from Gwen to look at a table covered with tumbled stones. The man explained the powers of each one: the bright flecks in the pyrite refreshed one’s courage, while rosy quartz, held to one’s temple, could catch the thoughts of others and refract them into your head. He leaned over the table, took her by her wrist, and tried to place a magnetic bracelet on her. His grip was wet, his eyes pink rimmed, and a winter hat with a leaping deer was pulled low on his gray head even though it was June. She jerked back and realized Gwen was nowhere in sight.
In the haze and heat she walked, looking for her foster mother, trying not to walk in circles, though she kept seeing the same blond women and their clumps of reed baskets swaying in the sun. She looked for Gwen’s feet in their simple Greek sandals, or her streaming scarves, but there were many scarves and feet. Panic hit her. She had the awful feeling that this market was the whole of her existence and she’d be walking by these glass unicorns and bowls of beads forever. But then she saw, through the indeterminate mix of bare legs and colors, Gwen’s perpetual flower. She saw it long before she saw Gwen, as if the flower were a prick of light that opened to reveal her, its petals an aperture.
She hasn’t thought about Gwen in a long time. The flower’s appearance on the canvas again suggested a keyhole to another place, and she remembers that Gwen used to say that she was an indigo child, possessed of a heightened vision and aura. No one else said that about her, so when Gwen got sick and Marti was moved to a new home, she tried to forget it. Auras and visions would not have played well in her second home, that was for sure.
She puts a hand on the painting and a hand on Snippet’s sleeping forehead. She shuts her eyes. A tingle runs through her like a thread; it felt irritatingly minute, like a hair in your mouth. Gwen always talked about the inner eye, how it opened, blinked, and fluttered in response to the vibrations of emotions. Hers had snapped open. Snippet wants to go, she thinks. He wants to slip into the opening he made and enter the new place. She would call Dr. Jim, make herself hold the rope for once, and see.
XIV
To live in a horse’s body is to experience a perpetual loop of sensation, as if each nerve ending were being plucked in a pattern. Sometimes the patterns change or stutter: this is thought. Normally you feel the hair at the base of your tail twice, then the inside of your esophagus; now the order is switched, and that has meaning. Then, of course, there are the eyes, set on the side of the head. It is like being at a themed ride at an amusement park: everything to the side is thrilling and bright, but the area right in front of the car is black. Your world is peripheral. The blind spot in the center of your vision is your center, dark and certain, a void you can retreat to whenever you want. Sometimes the people and buildings and grass and pasture fold over you and push you into that center, like a stone held secret in a fist. At these times, your sovereignty becomes a question, a source of suspicion, a mystery. People holler at you and peer in your eyes with a bright light, trying to see if you are still there.
THE CHAUTAUQUA SESSIONS
My son, the drug addict, is about to tell a story. I can tell because he’s closed his eyes and lifted his chin. I can tell because he’s laid his hands, palms down, on the table, like a shaman feeling the energy of the tree-spirit still in the wood. I can tell because he’s drawing a shuddering breath, as if what he has to say will take all he’s got. He’s putting on the full show because he ha
s a new audience—he’d streamline the theatrics if it were only me. We’re having dinner in Levi Lambright’s recording compound, Chautauqua, in remote Appalachian Tennessee. I’m a songwriter—a lyricist—and I’m here to work on a new album with Levi, our first in fifteen years. Dee was not invited. The only other person who should be here is Lucinda, Levi’s cook. But Dee just showed up, the way drug-addicted sons sometimes do.
Right as he’s about to speak, I reach for the wine bottle and refill my glass, placing the bottle back down in front of me, providing a bit of a visual shield between us. He’s sitting across from me, next to Levi. The kid looks good, I’ll give him that. He’s clean shaven, and his dun-colored hair appears professionally cut. His eyes, where the cresting chaos can most often be seen, are clear and still. They still don’t track exactly right, though. Like his mother, he looks at you out of one eye at a time, like a quizzical parrot. If you look at him straight on, his thin face seems to wobble and shake like a coin on end before it flips back into profile, his mother’s aquiline nose and sharp chin etched in the center of his round boy’s head. On his forearm, his old self-mutilation scars have been scribbled over, I see, with a new homemade tattoo: Trust. I don’t see myself in him at all.
“Okay? Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s kind of a long story.” Dee asks, though he doesn’t pause before going on.
“This happened last week. I was downtown, on some crazy uppers. I think I took some MDMA that night. Maybe just amphetamines. I don’t remember. All I know is I was high, really high, and I’d been dancing and couldn’t find who I came with. So I decide I should go home. But when I leave the club, I can’t figure out where I am. I mean, I only live a block from there. I’m walking down the street and I feel like I’m in a foreign country or something. Nothing is familiar. Somehow I ended up three miles away, in the worst part of town …”
Bright Shards of Someplace Else Page 14