The Horses

by Bill Brooks

  “All of it, I guess…”

  “I’d love to hear you read it to me—pieces of it,” he said. “I think you have a nice voice.” She said perhaps sometime she would, and let it go at that.

  Then the next time, she came out of the house to find him sitting on the porch near dusk. She’d arrived later than usual that day because her daughter was sick, and after she’d arrived, they’d talked away almost the entire afternoon. He was sipping from a glass of whiskey and branch water.

  “You want some?” he said. She hesitated, knowing that they were becoming more and more familiar with each other—that she was reluctant to feel anything toward a man because of Hector, her late husband, the love she still carried for him, thinking that if she began to care for another man, it would somehow be an act of being unfaithful.

  He held forth the glass.

  “I won’t make it too strong,” he said.

  “Sure, why not?”

  She didn’t know why she felt so emboldened except she did not want him thinking of her as weak or fearful of him.

  He went in and got her a glass and poured some of his whiskey into it, and added the branch water from a metal pitcher. She sipped as they sat watching the sun come closer to the ridge line where two gravestones stood. He had told her about his friends who were buried there. How they came to die. It was a very tragic story. She assumed he had killed the men who killed his friends. He did not say he had; she merely assumed it.

  “I like the smell of a man’s cigarette smoke,” she said. It was a habit he’d recently taken up, he confessed. He didn’t know why he had, “Other than it helps keep my hands busy.” She watched him smoke.

  “Would you like one of these too?”

  She again boldly said, “Yes.”

  He started to make her a cigarette, but she stopped him and said, “No, show me how to do it.” And so he did and she smoked it, and they watched the sun descend and sink slowly behind the ridge. Far, far out they saw the Capitans risen against the sky like jagged rock teeth. Farther north, they knew but could not see, rose the Blood of Christ Mountains—the Sangre de Christos.

  It was the beginning of them, that evening of sipping whiskey and smoking together.

  The next time she came, he asked her to stay to supper and he even had it prepared, a sort of stew of beef and potatoes and carrots in a heavy black Dutch oven. They took their meal out of doors. It was a tranquil summer night where the light stayed a long time, turning golden before devolving into dusty haze and ultimately into a purple darkness. The night air came down from the mountains so cool she had to put a shawl over her shoulders. The whiskey helped warm her blood. At home alone, she had practiced rolling cigarettes until she was skilled at it, and when he went to make one for himself, she took the makings and did it for him. He was impressed, and she was glad that he was impressed.

  The next time she stayed for supper he said, “I have a surprise,” and brought forth a large walnut box—it was a Regina music box that was labeled as having been made in Switzerland. He cranked the handle, and it began to play a waltz.

  “Might I have this dance?” he said. She felt flush and eager. And when they danced in the yard, it didn’t matter that he wasn’t graceful as Hector had been. She liked his laughter, the fact that he was tall and broad through the shoulders and chest. She liked too that he took pride in his appearance and that he treated her as an equal, something Hector did not always do.

  The evening sky was streaked a brilliant orange for the longest time in the dying of the day. They danced in the yard as the color drained away, the sky turning to gunmetal edged by growing darkness. It was the first time he kissed her.

  It was the beginning of them as one, and they both knew it.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “Are you?”

  “I think so.”

  “I think so too.”

  He asked if she wanted to spend the night.

  “I should go, what will people think?”

  “Whatever they want to,” he said. “I’m sure they will anyway and that some are already talking about us.”

  He cranked the box again when it wound down, and they danced again in the ever encroaching darkness, the moths throwing themselves at the lamp’s light behind the window glass of the house where Charlie Bowdre had once lived with Manuella in silent desperation.

  Their new beginning continued well into the night and into the next morning just as it had now, this morning after the night of the big storm.

  With happy eyes, she watched him dress, enamored with the ropy muscles of his arms and legs and wished they could have spent the entire day in bed together.

  “I’m going to go care for the horses,” he said again, hitching one gallus over his right shoulder, then the other.

  “I will make us breakfast.”

  He took one last glance at her as she stood naked and brown from the bed, then went out into the cold crisp air and knew instantly why he had felt so troubled that morning as he looked toward the corral and saw all the horses down.

  The stud whinnied as if it understood today’s sorrow.

  And the only word that passed his lips was: “Goddamn.”

  Chapter Three

  “Where you been?” the Mortician said. He’d been awake since first light, sitting beneath the tarp they’d strung between two skinny poplars to keep the storm off them. It rained first, then the rain turned to snow before the storm blew itself out east of them.

  “I went off somewhere,” the half-wit brother said.

  “I can see that, but where you been?”

  The half-wit squatted by the little fire the Mortician had started, reached for the pot of coffee sitting on the embers. The Mortician saw the half-wit’s horse was lathered, its head drooping. Rode hard, he thought, but where to and where from?

  He saw blood on the half-wit’s shirt cuffs when he reached for the coffeepot, his hands and wrists shooting out the end of his slicker, saw flecks of blood up around his hairline and the fat lobes of his ears. What’d this boy go and get himself into, all that blood?

  “You kill somebody?”

  The half-wit sipped his coffee in silence, steam rising from the tin cup like a small cloud. He blew on it with fat pursed lips, staring into the void of his own mind; they were still talking to him even though he’d told them to shut the hell up.

  “Ardell?” the Mortician repeated. “You kill somebody?”

  “Coffee’s hot as a horseshoe.”

  “Fuck the coffee, I asked did you kill somebody?”

  He was a big boy, as most half-wits seemed to be. All brawn, no brain. What they lacked in the thinking department, they made up for in size. Kid brother, that was the thing, otherwise he’d’ve left him on his own a long time ago. But the old lady pleaded with him to take the boy along with him. Coughing on her deathbed red blood into a soiled handkerchief with lace tatting.

  “You can’t just leave him on his own, Cicero,” she implored. “Boy like Ardell will come to a tragic end left to his own devices. Somebody will murder him or else he’ll do something they’ll lock him in the crazy house for. I couldn’t stand the thought…”

  The old lady had raised them even after the old man had run off and left her nearly destitute. She had struggled mightily, taken in laundry, cleaning houses, and eventually selling the only thing she had left to sell, the only thing lonesome men would pay for, the boys’ uncle Hatch included.

  It started with her doing it occasional, then turned more regular. He and Ardell would watch her go off at night, return late into the darkness of predawn, watch as she wearily fixed them a spartan breakfast of salt pork and hard clabber biscuits, then go and flop in the bed and sleep till afternoon, when she’d rise and go out and try and make something grow in a small garden, but without much success. She’d been pretty once, but by the time she’d resorted to doing what she needed to to keep them all alive, she wasn’t pretty anymore.

  But something got wrong with he
r, something in her blood, from all those men maybe, and she became more erratic, cursing without cause, sudden loud outbursts and talking to herself there at the kitchen table.

  One of the men was a physician who drank heavily and he diagnosed her as having syphilis, said it had gone to her brain. Said she wouldn’t live much longer, that she’d die crazy as a coot. Said she’d also become a lunger and if the one thing didn’t kill her, the other surely would.

  “You want, I can give her something to put her out of her misery,” this man told Cicero, who had not yet become known as the Mortician.

  “You mean put her down like a damn dog?”

  “It’d just be a shot of air into her bloodstream. She wouldn’t feel anything.”

  “Christ Almighty.”

  “I know it’s a hard decision, son, but you want to see her end up getting worse than she is, dying slow like this. Slow and awful?”

  She had her lucid moments, but they grew fewer and further apart. Then toward the very end, she pleaded for Cicero to take care of his half-wit sibling, who at the age of seventeen was already a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than Cicero.

  He saw a frightened and dispirited woman near her last.

  “Promise,” she said.

  “I promise.”

  Making her that promise was like cutting the last thread that had tied her to the earth, tied her to the real world. After that she did not come back anymore but stayed crazy. The worst was the day she came into his room stark naked and tried to kiss him.

  “Jesus, Mama!”

  He pushed her away and ran to get the doctor.

  “I tried to warn you,” the old sot said.

  “I want you to give her that shot.”

  “Put her down like a dog.”

  “Yes, you old bastard.”

  The doctor nodded calmly and got his bag and came out to the house. It was raining that night too. Rain and shattering thunder, just like this past evening when he’d awakened at one point to find Ardell’s bedroll empty, his horse gone. He half hoped the boy had just decided to ride off and lose himself to the world. And yet…

  The doctor said to them both, “This will just take a moment, it’s best you wait out here,” and went into the room where she lay muttering gibberish and picking at herself, her pillow stained with bloody phlegm.

  “What’s he gone do?” Ardell said. Even a half-wit instincts trouble when it is afoot.

  “Nothing. Treat the old lady is all.”

  Ardell fidgeted and wrung his hands.

  It seemed like the doctor was in there a long time with her, but finally he came out.

  “She’s at peace now,” he said. “You can go in and say your good-byes now.”

  They went in together.

  “Mama,” Ardell said.

  But she did not answer or move.

  “What’s wrong with her, Cicero?”

  “She’s dead.”

  The half-wit stared at the passive features of his maw, her eyes open, staring, as if in surprise and wonderment; the bubble of air the physician had injected into her veins caught and stopped her heart in mid-beat. Her jaw dropped open as surely as if she’d been poleaxed. The physician, drunk as he was, forgot to close her mouth, or her eyes.

  For a very long time, Cicero Pie, elder son of Louisa Hetheridge Pie, widow of old John Folsom Pie, scalawag and boozehound, had wondered what it was to kill a man. He thought, staring at the old lady, it was time to find out. Went straight to his room where he had a converted cap-and-ball .36-caliber Navy Colt—the only thing the old man left behind, probably because he was too drunk and in too much of a hurry to skedaddle. It rested in a drawer full of old socks needed mending heel and toe; he took it, checked the loads, stepped out into the yard, and discharged it into the back of the physician’s frock coat as he was stepping into his quarter-top.

  “There, you son of a bitch,” he replied to the dying man’s question, Why?

  Ardell wet his pants at the suddenness of it.

  But quickly enough they buried the old lady and the physician in separate graves, hard work as it was to dig two and not one, Ardell doing most of the digging with a pick and shovel while Cicero sat atop a pile of freshly dug earth smoking cigarettes and contemplating futures that he willed into existence. He saw the two of them riding wild, taking whatever they needed from the weak, drinking and fucking whores, and nobody to tell them what to do anymore. If it lasted a week, fine by him. If it lasted a hundred years, better still. Killing, he thought, sitting there as the half-wit dug the graves, was about as simple a thing as a man could do.

  He said, “Before you drop that old fool into the hole, check through his pockets for money, a pocket watch. Most them carry a pocket watch.”

  After the corpses were planted, the two brothers ate the last can of beans and the last can of peaches in the house, then went to sleep in their beds.

  Arising at first light, Cicero set fire to the homestead, and he and Ardell rode away in the quarter-top, their saddle horses tied to the back. They’d ride to the nearest town the opposite direction the one Doc was from, and sell the rig and pocket the money.

  “I’d know how easy this shit was, being a outlaw,” Cicero joked, “we’d a set out in the outlaw business a long time ago.” Ardell still wondered why their maw had died so suddenly and why his elder brother had shot the doctor.

  Cicero watched the half-wit blowing and sipping his coffee and thinking he had become as mysterious as death itself.

  “How’d you get all that blood on you?”

  Ardell looked down at his cuffs, rubbed the side of his face.

  “Snow’s purty, ain’t it?” he said, looking at the thin blanket of freshly fallen snow, glowing, it seemed, even in that early light.

  Cicero pulled on his boots thinking about those last two he’d killed—the bachelors owned them that sheep camp up in that valley north of where they were now.

  How those two old men stood there gawking at Ardell, saying, “What’s wrong with that boy?”

  “Oh, ain’t nothing wrong with him, he’s just a little slow.”

  “By gar!” one of them declared.

  They invited them to a dinner of mutton stew, them funny accents they spoke with, saying how they were originally from a place called Galway. How they came to America to make their fortune.

  “This is cow country mostly,” Cicero saying.

  “Yes, we know.”

  Ardell imitating the bleat of sheep: “Bah, bah, bah…”

  Again they wondered what was wrong with him, and Cicero showed them there wasn’t nothing wrong with him by shooting them both at a distance the span of a kitchen table; so close it set their worn coveralls afire, Cicero putting the flames out with the rest of what was in the stew pot.

  “There you sons a bitches…what is wrong with you?”

  Ardell sitting there with the spoon halfway to his mouth, staring.

  A year earlier Cicero had shot two lawmen in Las Vegas, New Mexico, who were going to arrest him and Ardell for loitering. They weren’t expecting it, but they should have been. They were victims nineteen and twenty in Cicero and Ardell’s year-long journey since having murdered the physician.

  The Las Vegas Optic wrote that the killings were heinous and depraved, and the responsible party was, in the editor’s opinion “…a dealer in death not unlike a skillful mortician…” Several other lawmen appeared on the scene and arrested the brothers and a trial was held, but Cicero was acquitted of homicide by determination that the shooting was self-defense. The fact that Cicero testified the lawman had abused his half-wit brother and threatened to kill him on the spot.

  Hence he earned for himself an odd and chilling nickname—the Mortician—thanks to a yellow journalist wag.

  “I said where’d you get all that blood on you?” Cicero repeated when Ardell did not answer.

  “Horses,” he said.

  “Horses?”

  Ardell nodded.

  “They kept t
alking and talking and talking to me,” he said after several more moments of silence as Cicero moved to the fire and squatted across from the half-wit.

  “What were they talking to you about?”

  “They was saying bad things to me, things about maw,” he said.

  “Goddamn…” muttered Cicero.

  “I went and found them and killed them. Made them shut up!”

  Cicero saw the big butcher knife the half-wit carried. He was not to be trusted with a gun.

  “Well good on you,” Cicero said, for he did not know what else to say.

  Ardell continued to nod. His hip, the one he’d fallen off a roof and cracked just before the old lady died, gnawed at him when it got cold damp weather. Cicero saw how he limped when he stood and walked off toward the bushes and made water, worse than usual.

  Horses! Cicero thought. Fucken boy has lost the last of whatever sense he may have had. Dumber than a turnip, for sure.

  Ardell made yellow circles in the snow that seemed to delight him.

  “Look,” he said. “Look.”

  Chapter Four

  He crossed the snow-laced ground to the corral but he already knew before he got there the horses were all dead. The frozen ground was pocked with bloody frozen pools. The horses lay staring, one eye pointed skyward, glazed from death and the cold. He stopped just there at the rails, the sun not yet risen high enough to have any warmth to it. He blew into his hands. His heart hammered steady inside his shirt, skin, muscle. He’d never seen anything like it. Six horses with cut throats.

  His eyes lifted from the corpses to the land beyond what he owned until they saw the stud standing at the fence line, stock-still watching him. He whistled, and it whinnied and pawed the ground. He figured the reason it too had not been slain was that he’d had enough sense not to fence it in. A horse like that you don’t fence in.

  He crawled in between the rails and examined the animals closer, the way they’d been killed, and wondered about the stealth of whoever had done it. Even if any of them had raised a ruckus, he’d not heard it because of the storm. Whoever did this knew all there was to know about slaughter. It would have taken a big knife, sharp as a razor, and a good amount of strength and skill. Blood was frozen on the inside of the rails and posts, frozen in ropy red streaks that trailed downward like something a little kid with a paintbrush might do.