Chaos Theory

by M Evonne Dobson

  The stable sits on a hill with maple and oak trees all round it. Its driveway curves down from the main road where we’d gunned our way up it last Saturday, and continues through flanking white-painted, wood-fenced pastures before it splits with the left branch leading up to the two west trailer entrances with a people door between. Behind the large doors are two parallel alleyways that stretch to the indoor arena on the east. The driveway’s right turn is a smaller, more formal drive curving up to the small lobby area that juts out to the south.

  The lobby door is a joke. It has a lock, but I could break through with little effort. Usually, it isn’t locked. Peggy fears fire more than break-ins; freeing horses is the priority. The real security is on the two tack rooms; each has a strong metal door and a punch button keypad lock with a changeable combo. Inside the tack rooms are saddles and bridles on one side, small padlocked grooming lockers on the other.

  A dorm-sized refrigerator holds drugs for horses and soft drinks side by side. A rusty Folgers coffee can on top takes your purchase change.

  I walk through the front lobby and down the short hall past Peggy’s office. Stalls line both sides of the first aisle. It’s quiet. Henry sticks his head out the stall door like he loves me.

  I say, “Hey there, Henry.”

  He nickers, wanting a carrot from my pocket. He loves them—not me. He eats one and his lips brush my palm like a gentle kiss. When I don’t offer another carrot, he sighs, turns his butt to me, and dozes off again.

  Near the arena are two open areas for saddling horses. Overhead ties keep horses stationary. Tonight, the elongated head of a Hanoverian shakes his ties with impatient clank clank clank sounds as his rider, North-Carolina-Fiona, a new transfer into my high school class, saddles him for the next lesson.

  Out in the ring, The Great Dee screams as her student half-tracks a leggy thoroughbred along a bank of mirrors. The instructor is a past Junior Olympian not known for her patience. “Wake up. You’re like a tick on a log. Ride, woman, ride!” That’s followed by more orders: “You’re off balance. Get over him, not behind him.” From experience, I knew the tirade would continue for the lesson’s full hour.

  Dee has a non-ending list of potential students. If you don’t measure up, you’re out. You can get dumped for being lazy or late or uncommitted or if your horse isn’t good enough and doesn’t measure up. A bad attitude that matches hers is allowable if you’re good rider—or if your horse is good enough. They say she prays for a lousy rider on a great horse to take a fall and get hurt. Then she can put someone more worthy up.

  Outside one stall is a wheelbarrow half-filled with horse apples, the PC term for horse manure. A slotted rake pops out of the stall and dumps more of the earthy-odor clumps onto the pile.

  “Hi, Trish,” I say.

  She nods, but doesn’t talk. I grab another wheelbarrow and a picker, open the stall across from her, hooking the door chain to keep the horse from escaping, and duck in, putting my back to the task of removing horseshit. There are a lot of stalls to clean before we talk.

  Scoop. Toss. Scoop. Toss. Swish the water in the small self-filling water trough to clean it. Even out the shavings. Then on to the next stall. The work is hard. I peel off a layer of clothes. Two stalls later, I peel off another, sweating.

  The first aisle finished, she takes pity on me. “Break? Wanna soft drink?”

  “You bet.” She hands me one and we lean against the arena opening.

  Helmeted North-Carolina-Fiona nods as she rides her horse, Tracker, past us. The earlier thoroughbred is back in his stall. The dressage lessons are private, but until The Great Dee yells at us, we can hang and watch. Things are falling apart for Fiona. She pushes Tracker out of the movement that’s not working. She takes the rail and circles. Then she returns to the center of the arena and begins the difficult pirouette. It’s a dressage movement where the horse literally canters in one spot and turns. North-Carolina-Fiona breaks a tail-wringing, ears back, and pissed-off Tracker out of the movement. She puts her gelding to it two more times with the same results. She looks ready to bawl, but crying wipes you off The Great Dee’s class list.

  Tracker bucks. His rider keeps her seat on his back, but The Great Dee is ready to blow now. Beside me, Trish stiffens; sets down her soda can, and enters the arena.

  Fiona once more drives Tracker along the arena walls, while Dee screams, “No. Don’t let him out of it. Force him. He’s done this flawlessly for a month!”

  Trish raises a hand and Fiona pulls up Tracker. Dee stops yelling. The freshman takes the bridle, holding the horse while Fiona dismounts, then they trades places. Trish kneels beside the huge horse and feels the area above a hoof. She stands and lifts it, studying it intently. With a frown, she nods toward the tacking area. Without a word, Fiona leads Tracker out and snaps him to the ties. The Great Dee trails them, silent.

  Trish disappears into the tack room and returns with a long-handled pincher tool that farriers use. She lifts the foot, tucking it between her legs. Then she applies the pincher tool to the hoof. Nothing happens. Trish shifts it and squeezes once more. Nothing. She shifts it again and squeezes. This time, the huge horse rears up, ripping his front hoof out from between Trish’s legs. I back up as fast as my legs can move. Underneath the horse and like she’s been expecting it, Trish deftly dodges out of the way as the horse comes back down to all four legs.

  “Easy, boy. Easy,” Trish says and runs her hand over his shoulder. He settles, but his head shakes the ties and he shifts as far from Trish as he can. “Abscess in the hoof.”

  Fiona groans. Dee shoves her hands into her parka and says, “Well, you’re done for now.” Dee’s next student scrambles to finish saddling, and then she and her half draft-half Friesian mare head into the ring. The Great Dee leads the way.

  Fiona’s frightened eyes never leave Trish’s. Her soft Southern accent asks, “How bad is it?”

  Seven

  Trish shrugs her shoulders. “Vet will let you know tomorrow. We caught it early. He’s not limping; just sensitive doing the pirouette to the right. Vet’ll drill up through the hoof wall. The puss will drain out and, hopefully, that little bit of sand that’s worked its way in there comes out with it.”

  Fiona wraps her arms around Tracker’s neck, her fingers wrapping through his heavy mane. “He never messes up like that. He was in pain and I kept riding! Why didn’t I stop?”

  None of us say the obvious: Because it would have ticked off The Great Dee.

  Trish says, “The bad news is he’s out until after Applewood at least.”

  Fiona buries her face in her horse’s sweaty neck and mumbles, “I couldn’t care less about Applewood.” Applewood is the first dressage meet of the season. If Fiona has to skip it, there’ll be problems with The Great Dee.

  Trish tells her, “If you hadn’t stopped, Tracker would have aggravated it. He could have been out for the season.”

  Fiona grabs her grooming bucket full of brushes. She might be exhausted, but a horsewoman takes care of her horse before she takes care of herself.

  Trish and I leave her, pushing our wheelbarrows and apple pickers into the next aisle. I whisper, “How come The Great Dee didn’t see what you did?”

  Trish shrugs. “She’s good at what she does, but that doesn’t make her a vet.”

  “You’re not a vet and you noticed. She should have known something was wrong.”

  Trish just opens the stall door of a large quarter horse and sets to work. Message received. Don’t criticize The Great Dee. Not if Trish wants to keep her job for riding time exchange. Like a good little worker, I put my back into cleaning stalls and shut up.

  By the time we finish, I’m in serious muscle agony. Evening lessons over, Dee and her students leave as we finish cleaning the stalls. Trish turns off the arena’s overhead lights, a job Dee could have done on her way out but hadn’t. The large arena goes dark a
nd we close the big sliding doors. Instantly, it feels warmer without the breeze that crept through from the large arena.

  We move on to the fun stuff. It’s us and the horses. They begin to stomp and shift in their stalls in anticipation. Heads turn toward us. Several nicker. Trish grabs the feed room key from its peg and opens the grain storage bin, measuring oats and pelleted horse feed into scoops. A few get apple-flavored horse treats. Feeding is tricky. Every horse has its own rations and messing it up will cause trouble—real trouble, like colic-horse-dies-in-agony kind of trouble. I follow her instructions exactly, swinging each stall feeder out, dumping the feed in, closing it again, and then returning to Trish for the next two measured scoops for two different horses.

  That chore finished, we climb up into the hayloft to the sound of contented horses munching. Even in the dead of freezing winter, a reminder of summer hits with the scent of mown hay. I drop each feed ration down the small trapdoors to the hayracks below. Trish uses scales to weigh the hay for the touchy eaters.

  No wonder it cost so much to board a horse. And boarding fees don’t cover vet bills, lesson fees, transportation costs, and gear costs. Given the duplex where I’d dropped Trish off, she’d never have the money for the Great Dee’s training level and no hope for a horse of that caliber. Yet it’s obvious that Trish doesn’t let it bother her. I had to admire that.

  We climb down and head into the front room. She cranks up the propane heater, grabs a couple of soft drinks out of the refrigerator, plinks change into the coffee can, and hands me one. We sit down like old cowpokes with our boots on top of the heater grill. We’d worked hard, Trish had saved Fiona and Tracker from disaster, and I really don’t want to spoil the satisfaction of the moment by asking about Julia.

  As it turns out, I don’t have to. Trish looks into the hot blue and red flames in the grate. “Tell me why you had Julia’s photo in your car.”

  I’d practiced this. “It must have fallen out of Daniel’s wallet.”

  “Why didn’t you just say that earlier? Why all the drama?” Then she asks with suspicion, “Why was Daniel in your car?”

  I chew my lower lip and keep quiet.

  Trish studies me long and hard, probably making judgments, but she accepts my silence. “What do you want to know?” she asks. She’s heard the rumors and now I’m a druggie.

  “I want to know who Julia was. I want to understand what happened,” I answer.

  It’s Trish’s turn to stay quiet this time. I don’t push. With my help, we had plenty of time before her mom would worry. Trish normally worked until 11 p.m. or later. That must play havoc with school.

  Trish’s voice takes on that same gentle quality she used with hurt Tracker—Easy, boy. Easy. “No one will ever know why she did it. Until this fall, Julia and I were BFFs.” Trish finishes her soft drink and studies the can like she’s fascinated by it. “I loved her like a sister, Kami. No, more like we were twins. We loved the same things and we were horse crazy. We were never apart except Sundays. Her dad kept her home then—called it church and family day. Then in middle school…”

  I wait, thinking that everything gets complicated in middle school. Everyone hates somebody one minute and loves them the next. Middle school was hell. Or it had been for me. Maybe it had been for Julia too.

  Trish scrapes her boot toe along the grate’s top and then lowers her feet to the concrete floor. “In middle school, the clique stuff started up hot and heavy here at the stable. You know the money crowd versus the normal crowd.”

  I did indeed. I’d disappointed Mom and embraced shit-kicking-asses over riding. Peggy puts up with them because their parents pay the bills for their expensive horses, for countless lessons, and for the horse transport to shows and everything else. Money makes a difference in the horse world. The blue ribbons those girls chalk up mean prestige for the stable, but it hadn’t been my thing. Give me someone to bash on the martial arts mat any day.

  “That was when the advanced lessons started in earnest. We outdistanced the normal lesson horses and anyone with real money bought horses that were going to be or were already something. I was able to keep the normal lessons and my ride time by working here for Peggy, but I didn’t have the horse or the money for Dee’s lessons.

  “It was hard enough in eighth grade, but this year? Julia fell in with a high school clique. Middle school riders float around them like drones to queen bees, generally ignored. But Julia was one of THEM.”

  I’d used the term too, and queen bees don’t tolerate drones or ninth graders in their inner circle. They invited Julia because she had Jamison money. No surprise there.

  Trish draws her arms around her body, stares into the blue and white flames, and goes deep into her memories.

  I prod. Waiting for her to get to the real stuff is driving me crazy. “And then what happened?”

  Trish continues, “Julia and the queen bees hung together while I cleaned stalls. That was awkward. Then after lessons, they went to the mall, and I cleaned stalls.”

  I could imagine it so easily. Trish cleaned stalls while Mom and I rode, and I barely noticed she had been there.

  “We drifted apart.” She says that like it was the continental drift—huge, slow, but inevitably impossible to stop.

  She twists her hands into knots. “I can’t forgive myself for that. If I told her to knock it off…If I told her parents…If I’d begged her to stay friends with me...”

  There are a lot of ‘if-I-only’s’ after a suicide.

  “If I could have made her see how awful those girls were…”

  She throws her empty Coke can against the wall, and I push back in my chair at her anger.

  “They’d smoke, even here in the barn when Peggy wasn’t around. They’d shoplift at the mall, and Julia got caught. They did lots of shit like that. That wasn’t Julia, but she went along. Kami, they didn’t love her like I did. They just wanted to be around a Jamison.”

  Trish keeps talking. I don’t think she can stop once she starts.

  “It’s all Daniel’s fault,” she says.

  The easy out, blame Daniel again. “How was it his fault? He wasn’t even here.”

  “That’s why it’s his fault. Don’t get me wrong. If Julia was like my twin sister, then Daniel was like my brother. I loved him too. He hung out at his dad’s place more than his mom’s when he had a chance, but then he got that DUI. His dad went ape-shit, sending him away. The only place Daniel didn’t go with Julia was here. Back in fifth grade, he’d ride a school horse while Julia rode Diamond. One day, they walked across the pasture when some kid’s spoiled pony went bizarro, stomping and attacking them. Daniel heaved Julia over the fence and got a chunk of flesh bitten off his arm in the process. That did it for Daniel. He tried to stop Julia from coming out. It didn’t work.”

  I remember that pony. Peggy banned it, and the buyers had to take it somewhere else.

  “After that, he only came once to see Julia off to the Iowa State Fair, and only because she begged him.”

  Trish rubs her face with her hands and they tangle in her hair. She pulls at the strands. “She loved him more than anyone—way more than me. When Daniel left for military school, Julia came apart. She drifted faster into that clique. By then, I was mad at her and wanted her to screw up, Kami.”

  Her hands yank at the tangled hair, and several strands come away in self-mutilation. Grief is hard. Feeling guilt after death is probably impossible to avoid, deserved or not. A memory of seeing Grandma drawing her last breath hits me. My guilt and grief washes into the silent void.

  Trish recovers, and having confessed, she falls back to her mantra that lets her ease her personal guilt. “It’s all Daniel’s fault. He abandoned her.”

  I say, “Julia had a part in it too, Trish. She made choices—bad ones, but she made them.”

  Apparently, Trish isn’t interested in putting blame
onto Julia. She jumps up from her seat, and changes the topic. “Do you want to see her horse?”

  I’d rather know what pushed Julia into suicide, but Trish is done talking for now. And maybe space away from my own guilt and grief is good. I say, “Julia’s horse is still here?”

  “Yeah. Her dad’s so freaking rich; he probably doesn’t remember he’s paying the board bills. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine having that much money?”

  More likely, he’s grief-stricken every time he writes the check, but I don’t argue the point.

  Trish leads me back into the main barn and flicks on the aisle overhead lights; dozing horses huff and puff. I follow Trish down the first aisle to a pretty black mare with white socks. She’s nice, but she isn’t as leggy as the dressage horses, and she isn’t in top shape. Her muscles are slack and not rock hard like Fiona’s Tracker. The mare pokes her nose out between the bars and I slip her a carrot from my jacket pocket. Down the aisle Henry fusses at the injustice.

  “I thought a Jamison would have a dressage horse or a jumper.”

  “No. Diamond’s a non-marked paint. Can’t even show her for breed points. Julia started her as a two-year-old.”

  Then I remember the horse. Mom and I saw her ridden, apparently by Julia, one Sunday afternoon. That was apparently an exception. Trish said Julia spent Sundays with her family. The mare was a cow-horse dancing machine and beautiful to watch.

  Trish says, “Dee told Julia that she couldn’t keep up the lessons without a different horse. Dee saw Jamison dollar signs and that meant top Olympic quality horses. Julia could have done it, Kami; I think she could have been in the Olympics. She could have kept Diamond and added another horse, but she didn’t want that. Maybe if she had, she wouldn’t have had time for…all that other stuff.”

  Another if-I-only, but none of this makes sense. Julia’s life wasn’t full of tragedy—just normal crap. What had made her snap?

  I settle on repeating what Trish had said. “What other stuff, Trish?” She hasn’t said a word about drugs, but I can see her expression. “I want to help, but I didn’t know Julia, or anything about her.”