The Dream of The Broken Horses

by William Bayer

  And now I know why Dad was never able to complete his paper, “The Dream of The Broken Horses.” How could he? How could he ever have published a description of his August 20 encounter with Mrs. F at the motel? Impossible! He'd risk being run out of his profession. He couldn't even have described it to Izzy at their regular Tuesday lunch. Izzy would have been appalled.

  And yet their encounter rings true to me – two lost souls finding solace with one another under unlikely circumstances in a terribly unlikely place. And truly it is the first entry in Barbara's diary that strikes me as having been written without irony or ire.

  But the march goes on. Scanning ahead, I see there are a few more pages of writing, shorter entries, not as dense as the ones I've just read. And so I pick up the diary once again, determined now to read uninterrupted to its end:

  Thursday

  Quiet for once – too quiet perhaps. Decided it was time to call Doris, make up. As expected, she was icy when she heard my voice.

  ‘My only child and she hangs up on me! I tried so hard to bring you up to be a nice, polite girl. What did I do wrong?’

  ‘Spare me the mea culpas, Mom, please.’

  ‘I don't even know what that means. I'm just not as smart and well-educated as you.’

  ‘You're plenty smart and you know it. How're things going at the track?’

  The perked her up. She told me she made four grand last month using her new post-position method. ‘Doesn't matter who the horse is or who the jockey. Just the post position. Not a very colorful approach, but so far it's working great.’

  J called. He's got everything set for Monday night. ‘Just make sure you get your boy out of there this weekend at the latest.’

  I didn't tell J I'm planning to phase T out of my life altogether. Perhaps I'll tell him Sunday night.

  Phoned Jane, told her I've decided to team up with Tess for club doubles. Suggested maybe she should team with Elaine.

  ‘Yeah, the two rejects. Thanks a lot, Barb!’

  Bitter, bitter!

  Friday

  Excellent session with R. Worked on the dream. He said it's important we not approach it in a tormented fashion, rather have fun with it, free-associate, try out ideas, think of it as solvable and not as an intractable puzzle.

  In the end, I told him how happy I was that we'd finally cleared the air.

  He said he was happy too, that he'd learned a great deal from me and hoped he could repay me in kind. He said: ‘I'd forgotten that humanist values must be the basis for a successful analysis. Thank you for bringing that home again.’

  Later with T – told him he's to break off all contact with the Steadmans right away, that someone else will take up the slack and carry the deal through. He looked so relieved, became so sweet, I didn't have the heart to tell him I can't see him anymore after the boys come home from camp.

  We made a lazy, dreamy kind of love, and as always I was touched by his tenderness.

  ‘You'll make some girl very happy,’ I told him.

  ‘I want to make you happy, no some girl,’ he said.

  He recited French poetry from memory, beautiful verses by Rimbaud. Afterwards he told me what they meant.

  ‘I've been thinking about what I want to do with my life. I like teaching, but what I really want to do is write.’

  I told him that if that's what he wants he should pursue his dream. Which gave me an idea – as a parting gift I could send him off to France for a year. Then I worried he might have too much pride to accept a gift so grand.

  Saturday

  Hot tempers today at the club. Seems Tess and I have created a crisis. Word is we've ganged up on everybody else and all we care about is taking home club trophies. What the fools don't realize is that if I cared at all about trophies I'd still take part in equestrian competitions, that I already have sufficient trophies to last me a lifetime, and that tennis is only useful to me as a way to blow off steam!

  Sunday

  Woke up all panicky in a sweat. Bad dream, but it wasn't The Dream this time, was worse somehow, more scary, like I was lying helplessly somewhere in a sea of white while my body was torn apart before my very eyes.

  Later – late dinner with J. He had to get up several times to greet people and solve management problems. I loved watching him work. He looked great in his white dinner jacket, by far the most poised, confident man in the club. Everyone makes nice with him, everyone wants his ear. And I like the way he dispenses favors. Watching him, I decided he's the only ‘real man’ I've ever been involved with.

  ‘We're awfully well-suited,’ I told him when he sat down again.

  ‘Yeah, the society bitch and the hood.’

  ‘Not too bad a combination.’

  ‘Not bad at all,’ he agreed.

  He said tomorrow night some people he knows will take care of the Steadmans quick and neat. When I asked him where he finds people like that, he smiled.

  ‘Haven't you heard, I'm what they call “connected.”’

  ‘The Torrance Hill Mob?’

  ‘Only the papers call them that.’

  ‘What do they call themselves?’

  ‘Just some guys who have a thing going, what they call “our thing.”’

  ‘“Thing” – hmmm. Well, I guess it is a thing, isn't it?’

  ‘Better you don't know, cutie.’ I stared at him. ‘Whatsamatter?’

  ‘If you'd stop calling me “cutie” I'd enjoy your company a lot more.’

  He laughed. ‘That'd be easy if your tits and ass weren't so cute!’

  ‘And your balls and hairy ass – they're just so cute too, you know.’

  He guffawed. ‘What you need is a good fucking.’

  ‘And you're the cute guy who's going to give it to me, right?’

  We skipped dessert, gulped our coffee, then hastened upstairs. The usual – lots of tumbling around, biting and scratching, a few well-placed fanny slaps. Then when he slipped into his dressing gown, poured us brandies, put his feet up, and lit a cigar, I asked him why it was so hard for him to be tender. ‘I know you can be,’ I told him. ‘You were incredibly tender with me three weeks ago.’

  ‘Wanted to show you I could do it, too.’

  ‘So it was just an act?’

  ‘That's a side of myself I don't like to expose to many people.’

  ‘You can expose it to me. I won't tell anyone.’

  ‘Maybe you'll show me your soft side too sometime.’

  ‘I'm hard as nails, J.’

  We laughed.

  As I was getting ready to leave, he mentioned casually that W hasn’t been around for several days. He said he found that odd since W usually comes in on weekends to pick up whatever scuttlebutt's circulating around the club.

  ‘I told W he'd better not try anything nasty with me or some of your friends might have a little talk with him.’

  ‘Well, that accounts for it. You scared the poor man off.’

  ‘I don't think he's dangerous, do you, J?’

  ‘Don't underestimate him, B. If he gets riled enough, no telling what he might do.’

  Monday

  Got up at dawn, rode for two hours, then changed and drove to session. R very sweet, subdued, mellow, all the hard edges between us gone. Told him I'm starting to miss our battles.

  ‘That's because you think sweetness is boring,’ he said. ‘You think you need turmoil to feel alive. Your mother taught you that by her strictness and rectitude.’

  ‘She had no rectitude. She was a fake. She had all kinds of affairs, kinky sex, too.’

  ‘Do you know for a fact she had kinky sex?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘But you sensed she did?’

  ‘I felt it in my bones,’ I told him.

  Later – with T. He kissed me over and over, told me how much I meant to him and that if anything ever came between us he didn't know what he'd do.

  ‘You'd go on with your life like everybody else,’ I told him.

  ‘But nothin
g will come between us, will it?’

  I told him about W and how he's threatened to feed stuff to A about our seeing one another. I told him people know, that maybe it's my fault, I haven't been careful enough, my car's too flashy, whatever, but my point was the story's been making the rounds and that isn't good for either of us.

  ‘We can change where we meet. This place is getting stale anyway.’

  ‘Changing motels won't' help if A has people following me.’

  T lay back on the bed. ‘If this ever comes out, I'll be fired for sure.’

  ‘Don't worry about that.’

  ‘Easy for you to say.’

  ‘Why do you speak to me like that, T?’

  ‘I have so very much to lose,’ he said.

  ‘And I don't? Losing my boys is trivial, is that what you think?’

  He started to cry, said he was sorry, begged me to forgive him. I hugged him, told him that of course I forgive him, but that with the boys coming back next weekend we're going to have to cool it down this fall. I could feel him wince when I said that, his whole body contract. He knows, poor boy, and now I wonder where I'm going to find the strength to tell him straight.

  When we parted, I told him I'd call him late tonight and let him know how everything went with the Steadmans.

  He shrugged. ‘We'll meet here Wednesday, usual time?’ he asked meekly.

  Saw tears again in his eyes when he left.

  Tuesday

  J called in the middle of the night. ‘It's done,’ he said. ‘Burned to the ground.’

  ‘What about the people?’

  ‘Forget them. They don't exist.’

  ‘What are you telling me?’

  ‘Don't think about it, Barb. Just look ahead.’

  ‘You didn't find out anything?’

  ‘I didn't say that.’

  ‘Why are you being so cryptic?’

  ‘It's over, Barb. You're going to have to face the fact that it's all done now for good.’

  I couldn't get back to sleep. Phoned T, told him what J said. He said he didn't understand. Told him I didn't either, but that I'll find out and let him know.’

  Later – early morning, dreamt I was riding through a misty valley. Very bucolic until I noticed another horseman in the distance through the mist. He looked familiar, so I rode up from behind to see who he was. God, it was Goertner! ‘Oh, hello, how are you?’ he asked. Told him I was fine. ‘And your mother – how is she?’ ‘You fucked her, didn't you, Goertner?’ I demanded, furious. ‘Oh, yes,’ he answered grinning. ‘And a mighty sweet fuck she was!’

  I kicked my heels into my horse, galloped away, but no matter how far and fast I sped from him, I could hear his laughter ringing through the valley.

  What a dream!

  Wednesday

  Called J, insisted on seeing him, told him I needed to know everything, I want the whole truth even if it's bad. He said come out to the club tomorrow night and he'll tell me.

  ‘So is it bad news?’

  ‘It's the truth,’ he said.

  ‘Whose truth are we talking about?’

  ‘It's time for both of us to face some facts,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of facts?’

  ‘Facts about your problems, facts about mine, and a few facts about the two of us as well.’

  Jesus!

  Later – told R about my dream, reminded him that Goertner was my old riding instructor, the one I slapped, the first man to go down on me.

  R excited. ‘I'm sure it's a variation on the broken horses dream. What we've got to do now is put the dreams together. I think one is the key to the other, but I don't know which one is the key and which is the lock.’

  Whatever that means!

  Later – bad feeling as I swam laps, then dressed to go over to the F. Have made up my mind today's the day to tell T we have to end it. Feeling anxious as I'm not expecting a particularly lovely afternoon.

  And so it ends.

  Within an hour of her writing that final line, she and Tom Jessup will both be dead.

  So many things amaze me. Most of all, I think, is the mellowness of these last passages, the feeling that she has started to settle things, put there chaotic life in order. She has straightened out her relationship with Dad, is planning to break off her affair with Tom, is prepared to go to war over custody with Andrew, and seems to have decided that she and Jack, the ‘society bitch and the hood,’ properly belong together after all.

  As to going to war with Waldo, there's no clear indication what her final decision would have been, but with the crucial custody case coming up, it's hard to imagine that a fight with him would have done her any good. Also it's clear he lied to the police when he feigned shock that she'd been carrying on her affair with Tom Jessup for months.

  One other thing stands out: that Cody definitely engineered the fire and other vicious events that took place Monday night on Thistle Ridge, and that Barbara and Tom, the latter perhaps unknowingly, were to some degree party to that as well. ‘Burned to the ground,’ ‘they don't exist,’ ‘it's all done now for good’ – I interpret all that to meant that whatever specific information Cody may have extracted from the Steadmans, he learned for sure that Belle Fulraine was dead and would have told Barbara the following evening had she not been killed.

  Closing Barbara's diary, I feel it has put me in close touch with this extraordinary, complex woman, that I now know things about her that even Dad could not have known. Seeing her through her own eyes as portrayed on these pages, I'm able not only to discern her unattractive qualities – selfishness, manipulativeness, and narcissism – but also the decency, integrity, and brave spirit that so often subsumed them. And what I find most poignant, and which belies any suggestion that these pages were intended for anyone's eyes but her own, is her troubled, tortuous, and admirable struggle to know herself.

  In the end, it seems to me, that's her vindication.

  16

  With the diary comes relief: Dad was not the killer and maybe Waldo was. But as relieved as I am, I'm still not satisfied.

  As I walk to the courthouse, I ask myself why I still want to pursue Flamingo. Isn't it enough to know Dad didn't sleep with his patient, was not involved in her death. Why now go on with it?

  The answer, of course, is Barbara. If after months spent studying her image in the Fesse photograph and reading and rereading Dad's case study, I became haunted by her bizarre dream, now that I've read her diary, I find myself even more drawn in. Now, like Dad, bewitched by her personality, I yearn to learn everything I possibly can, including who killed her and the precise manner of her death.

  During lunch break, I take my copy of the diary to a photocopy shop to have an additional copy made for Mace. While I'm waiting, I dash off sketches that illustrate the end of the Foster trial, various views of each side resting its case. This is, admittedly, a lazy way to earn my keep, but at this point I'm so familiar with the principals I can draw most any possible courtroom scene out of my head.

  On my way to the Sheriff's Department to drop off the diary, I once again have the feeling I'm being followed. Deciding to take action, I enter a shoe store, walk to the rear, then suddenly turned and stride back out while staring directly into the eyes of everyone I encounter. No sign of Mr. Potato Head… not that I'd even recognize him if her were there. But at least he's watching, he'll know I'm on to him. A couple minutes later, entering the Sheriff's Department, I enjoy the thought he may think I'm here to report him.

  *****

  Mr. Potato Head: Sometime in the night, I suddenly open my eyes, turn to Pam snuggled against me, feel her warmth, inhale the aroma of her body, and listen as she breathes deeply in her sleep.

  A phrase, ricocheting inside my brain, awakened me:

  He was like a shadow, you never noticed he was there.

  Jurgen said that the afternoon I drew his portrait.

  Who was he talking about? Who was it you never noticed was there?

  It was O'Neill
, Jerry O'Neill, the crooked ex-cop with the alcohol problem who was Walter Maritz's operative. The guy Maritz brought in to track Barbara Fulraine because he couldn’t do it himself since she knew him from his having scammed her. The guy Maritz brought in, because, as he told the cops, ‘I knew O'Neill would fuck up good, and that's just what I wanted.’ Except, according to Jurgen, most everything Maritz told the cops was a lie.

  He was like a shadow, you never noticed he was there.

  That could be a perfect description of Mr. Potato Head. You didn't notice O'Neill because he looked like everybody else, a guy with cop training, expert at following people. Johnny Powell figured him for a cop. ‘He had a cop's way about him. You know – a stache and a cheap suit.’ Except he didn't have a mustache, ‘Just seemed like the type. Said your name then showed me a picture.’

  The night before I interviewed Kate, she tried to draw the face of the man she saw when she was a girl. Her drawings were childish, schematic. I attributed that to lack of skill. But maybe her drawings were accurate portraits of Mr. Potato Head, a man with a generic face who looked like everybody else.

  He was like a shadow, you never noticed he was there.

  Mr. Potato Head knows how to get into a hotel room without disturbing the electronic lock. Mr. Potato Head knows how to follow a man on the street without being noticed. Mr. Potato Head can do a U-turn-and-park maneuver when I try to track his car. All skills an old-time cop would have, an ex-cop, an operative.

  Jerry O'Neill equals Mr. Potato Head? It adds up, could even be true.

  I'm excited. Though it's the middle of the night, I tiptoe into Pam's bathroom to call Mace from my cell phone..

  "That diary's really something," he says. "Can't put it out of my mind. And now Waldo… it's hard to believe, isn't it?"

  "I don't know if it was Waldo or who the hell it was, Mace. I do know that all your Steadman-connected suspects are dead. Cody, the Torrance Hill mob, whoever. But Mr. Potato Head isn't dead and now I think I know who he is."