Borrowed Horses (15 page)

My anger gave a little. “It hasn’t been an easy day.”

“No,” he said, “not for any of us.” His eyes dropped and his smooth brow creased in thought. He turned and stepped quickly away.

As I closed the door, I heard him ask Cheryl if she’d have a word with him in private—only a small measure of vindication. It hadn’t escaped me that he’d chastised me in public but apologized in private, and the sting of his insult remained.

III

Determining the Line

Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of my

money on her back; and she went over it like a bird. But there was

another fence beyond that and a fence beyond that
.

—Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own

Love-making mimics the act of departure, moonlight

drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life

doing no more than preparing for life and thinking

“Is this all there is?”

—Terrance Hayes, “Lighthhead’s Guide to the Galaxy”

Timothy Like the Grass

Y
ears ago, I broke my collar bone. Foxy had stopped on course at a cross-country event I’d entered on a whim, and I flew headlong into a solid log vertical.

To this day, I don’t know what caused him to stop. We were still drenched from the water obstacle—the only fence that I’d worried about—and were galloping along at a pleasant pace. Water flew from my boots at each stride; his cadenced hoof beats seemed to thunder the announcement of our coming victory. Perhaps I took my leg off, perhaps the shadows shifted, perhaps a mouse ran along the round gap between logs.

At a vertical no different from those we’d jumped a dozen times, Foxfire folded his haunches beneath himself in a magnificent sliding stop, raising clouds of forest loam that rode the breeze to settle where I was flung.

The pain of the break was so overwhelming that, at first, I felt nothing. My mind seemed to fill with the dust floating around me. All I could hear was sliding hooves, long after the slide had stopped.

Foxfire approached and lowered his nose, blowing at and sniffing me. It was as if he breathed the hot pain into me, each snort bringing another surge.

The pain of losing Foxfire was strangely similar to the fracture; it was a sharp, internal hurt, inexplicable to those in the smooth functioning, external world. Then, as now, I knew exactly what was happening to me, yet I was powerless to fix it. This is how pain works: the mind’s clouds rolling in and then away. It felt like losing Mouse all over again. Each sight of him breathed both pains alive.

The image of Dave hung before me all afternoon, his desperate appeal echoing. I could not see Foxfire that day. I couldn’t have my escape route, my solace, my barn, blocked from me by knowledge of his aging. Even if I was able to swallow the ever-more apparent fact of his limits, the barn was infected with Dave; Jenny, his vector. Instead, I went to buy groceries.

The man with the sideburns was back in the express lane. For once, I hadn’t tried to learn his name. He picked up my frozen noodle bowl and regarded me. “You don’t look like your usual feisty self.”

I didn’t answer immediately. The scanner beeped, and the price of dinner flashed on his screen. “Bad day.”

“Want to talk about it?” He scanned milk, looking at me with concern, and I stared at the salmon on his neck, thinking of currents, of muscle and perseverance, of instinct and fate, of tired fish and waiting bears. How did one go home?

“Not here,” I said. “Maybe over coffee.” The words seemed to come from nowhere; I hadn’t thought to say them. The thought Dawn planted somehow came out, though I didn’t know it was growing. The words had merely appeared in my mouth, a cartoon bubble she had shaped for me and inserted between my lips.

He paused a moment. “I’d like that.” The lady behind me shifted her groceries on the long belt with obvious impatience. “My name’s Timothy, by the way. Timothy like the grass, not Tim.” I dropped my gaze. He had not removed his name tag.

The lady behind me huffed, and noisily repacked her items into the plastic basket, heading for another line.

Timothy glanced at the now empty spot behind me, then smirked and looked again at me. “And you’re Joan.” The way he said my name implied he’d always known me, only now he had a label, a signifier to tag the substance.

I pulled my self together. “Someone ratted me out.”

He handed me my receipt and smiled—that whole-face grin he shared with Clint, that all-conquering smile you had no choice but to return. I’d won that smile from him, and he won my smirk. He said, “I’ll never reveal my source.”

I took the receipt and scribbled my name and number on the back. “For whenever you want that coffee.”

He looked at the number for a moment, then folded the paper carefully and put it in his shirt pocket. Each move was methodical, thoughtful. He looked back at me, challenging me with his eyes. I held his gaze. Something elfish flickered there. Something not entirely safe, but too playful to be malignant either. The sands were shifting, the gold sparkling. He said, “Why not just set it up now? How about tomorrow?”

I nodded thoughtfully. “The Beanery, then. Two o’clock.”

I arrived early and bought my own drink. The hot paper of the cup warmed my hands, the coffee strong and black. No favored syrup, no foamed milk, no cream or sugar. I savored the honesty of its hot and oily bitterness.

It was a good day for coffee. The rain promised by yesterday’s clouds fell steadily, and a table of farmers sat in the corner, tipping cup to mouth under the sweat-blackened brim of old caps: John Deere, MacGregor, Caterpillar. College kids huddled in the private glow of their laptops. A lady in a jingle-belled tunic made her way through the tables to meet a bearded mountain man in the back.

This was what I loved most about Moscow, the way it contained all these people, the way they not only tolerated but grudgingly enjoyed each other as they leaned from separate tables to speculate on presidential politics and Super Bowl contenders. I’d never seen another place quite like it. When I left, it seemed so colloquial and small; now it seemed Utopian. Neither view was accurate, though both were true.

Outside the plate glass windows, a small pickup truck sat in the parking lot, several rectangular forms giving shape to the blue tarpaulin tied down over them. A student moving in. An old dresser, some cardboard boxes. A young guy walked out, steaming paper cup in hand. I found myself suddenly nostalgic.

Mostly, I hated moving. Hated packing, hated unpacking, hated finding another beige apartment, hated final inspections. But the move itself—the fleeting moment when everything I cared about fit in the back of my pickup and everything I didn’t care about was disposed of—had a liberty offered by nothing else. Solitude was freedom. With the Chevy’s dual fuel tanks full and the key in the ignition and the truck pointed to the unknown future, there was nothing but potential. A leap into the darkness. Flight.

And then, Timothy walked in. Rain streamed from his jacket, an impervious pelt, and I was aware of a subtle wildness in him—not the lame wildness of studs and leather, but the wildness one meets in deep forests. Rain simply could not matter.

“You ordered without me,” he said. The ghost of his smile played about his lips, but it did not break. He checked his watch. “I’m five minutes early.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t an apology; I hadn’t wanted him to buy my drink. What was I doing here? An object in motion doesn’t get coffee. Dave had called again that morning, reminding me that things were easier to start than to stop.

Timothy set down his rain-soaked backpack and left to order, returning with not only a steaming cup but a large slice of coffee cake and two forks. He slid one to me, his eyes steady on mine to gauge my response. I let the fork rest for now.

“What’s in the bag?” I asked.

“My deepest, darkest secrets.” He leaned across the table toward me like a waggish conspirator.

“Ah.” I nodded. “Mystery man.”

“Of course.” He looked me dead in the eye. “Let’s hear about this bad day of yours.”

All offerings cost, this much I knew, so I said, “I’m supposed to spill my guts and you won’t even say what’s in your backpack?” I cocked an eyebrow and glanced at his bag. “I don’t think so, hot shot.”

“She wants to play hardball.”

I made no comment.

He unbuckled the flap of an old-fashioned rucksack to reveal textbooks. I gazed at them, their spines neatly lined up.

“A student. Figures.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Is that Geology? You taking rocks for jocks?”

“Actually, it’s pretty interesting.”

My radiography coursework had revolved around anatomy and physiology—internal landscapes. Timothy buckled the flap back in place. My look inside was over. He laid his arm across the table, his fingers inches from my own. “Your turn,” he said.

I let the coffee’s bitterness wash over my tongue. I wanted and did not want to be honest. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I couldn’t say I’d been the other woman.

“I have a horse.” I said instead and let that sink in, trying to read his response, trying to determine what course to take from here, constructing a trajectory. His face was open and unimpressed. “Foxfire—my horse—he’s getting older now. We used to jump.” I wanted to back up, to start over. “You ever ride?”

“Just around the backyard at a friend’s house, an ancient old pony, but that was in grade school.”

“I wish I could explain what jumping is like. You fly for this one little moment, and even though it’s almost immediately over, it isn’t. That feeling of flight stays with you. You can carry it for hours, days sometimes.”

I looked for traces of the tell-tale sneer, the disdain for a girl who never got over the pre-teen infatuation with horses, but I couldn’t see any judgment in his open face. Even stranger was that, as I spoke, I realized that I wasn’t evading the issue at all. Dave was only an obstacle, and I was a jumper. Obstacles surely couldn’t bother one who spent her life charging down the nearly impassable.

Again, the familiar yearning yawned within. To jump was to become a cyclone. Energy coils dense and dark inside us; a horse allows it to touch down and explode. I had none.

“The problem is, Foxy is getting too old to jump. It used to be, I had a bad day, and I had somewhere to go. Foxy was the ultimate listener. I never spoke a word. With horses you don’t have to. They know whatever you’re feeling. They absorb your emotions, and you absorb theirs. It’s a depth of communication I don’t think people can have, and it’s been hitting me lately how much I’m going to miss it. Now, I have a bad day at work, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t jump it away.”

“Where do you work?”

“The hospital. I take x-rays.”

He brushed his hair from his eyes. “You must see some pretty gruesome stuff.”

“It’s not so glamorous. Sometimes I get a really nasty case, but mostly, I do pre-op stuff; nothing too gory. Just a lot of people in a bad mood from drinking a quart of barium or whatever. They’re rightfully unhappy, and I just try to help them get through it all. The secretary is the only real horror. Even so, there are some days I just want to forget about it, and there are days when I see things I wished I hadn’t. Sometimes, I just don’t want to think about anything. Horses give me a space to not think, but not feel vacant either.”

He took a sip from his cup and leveled his gaze on me again, waiting for more.

“I’ve always ridden competitively. I spent the last few years in Jersey, training with the Olympic coach.” I turned the empty fork in my hands, studying the dents that marked it, thinking of the way time turns all silvered surfaces grey.

“You were going to ride in the Olympics?”

“No,” I sighed. “Maybe. Foxy had the talent. Had.” Some time-marred objects remained useful; others did not. “Even when we were there, he was slowing down, and I can’t afford the type of horse that can jump the big stuff. Foxy was a total fluke. A gift from God if you believe my parents. Catholics. But, if he was a gift from God, then I wasted the gift, because all that time and effort didn’t amount to jack.”

“That’s no different from me, really.” He stopped himself. “Well, I mean, you were doing something a lot bigger than me going to college, but in some ways it’s similar. I’m spending all this time and money, and I can’t say my life will be any better for me having done it. No one at home thinks it’s worth it. I can hear them now:
You get your degree and so what? You think anyone’s going to hire some half-breed? Then what? You work in a cubicle and get ignored by white people? All to chase some white version of success?
To them, I’m just another superfluous reservation dreamer, and they can’t wait to see life beat me back down to Earth.”