Borrowed Horses (18 page)

A stand-off: The mare and I watched each other. The broad muscles of her shoulder and haunches quivered as she watched me. Fire burned in the core of her unblinking eye. Her ears were pinned so flat against her head she appeared not to have ears at all. The mare’s flaring nostrils counted the seconds.

Vigilant, vigilant, I gripped the halter firm in hand and unsnapped one side of the cross-tie, but the mare was strong and she was quick. Her teeth locked like a vice around the denim of my jacket, clamping onto the skin beneath in a vicious bite. I tore my bruised arm from her teeth, wheeled, and before reason could stop me, I punched her in the face.

I’d hit her hard. My knuckles ached with violence, the bone of her skull as flat and unyielding as brick. I barely had time to register shock when she lunged at me, teeth stretched for anything to get hold of. She was not a flight animal either, this one.

I staggered back as rational thought returned. I had hit a horse.

The only thing that kept her from me was the nylon halter that held her in check. I fought to make sense of what had just happened, but Foxfire’s screams were still ringing through the barn as he struck and struck at his door.

Eddie laid a hand on my shoulder, stepping past me to snag the mare by the halter. He didn’t say a word, but stood there stroking her neck until she relaxed ever so slightly under his hands. It took a while. Her eyes stayed white at their rims, watching me. Eddie slipped on the headstall.

I couldn’t meet his eye. “That will never happen again.” My voice was rasping. Tears threatened, and I braced my jaw against them. This was no time for weakness, and tears had never won sympathy here.

Eddie didn’t respond, but he didn’t have to. Self-loathing welled. I sunk back against the wall, disgusted with my behavior. “Get up,” he said, his voice firm but not unkind. The offered reins, a second chance. The ghost-grey horse stamped, and Eddie pulled me to my feet. “What happened in Jersey is over. This is Idaho, and you have a horse to train.”

I took the reins. Foxfire shuffled and called from his corner stall, eyes rolling, pausing now and then to rear up, arthritic hocks forgotten in his madness, and looked over the tall bars of his stall. I hand-walked the mare once around the arena’s perimeter, introducing her to its mirrors and dark corners. She spooked at nothing.

I hopped quickly into the saddle as the mare ran from the weight of my body. I pulled the reins hard against her mouth to slow her canter, but she simply threw her neck back and ran, her head practically in my face, her gallop wild and hollow-backed. I worked the reins: pressure, release, pressure, release, but to no effect. I found the second stirrup with my dangling foot and pulled her sideways into a tight circle, her nose to my knee, until she slowed, dancing in all directions.

“She’s a little sensitive,” Eddie said.

“Track horse, track manners.”

“Not so skittish as your run-of-the-mill track horse. She’s not even listening to Foxy down there, which is more than I can say for her rider.”

I frowned. “Should we move him?”

“Leave him. You need to get over this,” Eddie said. After a moment’s consideration, he added, “next time, we’ll move him.”

Next time. I couldn’t believe he’d want to put me near this horse again.

I hadn’t realized that Jenny was still there until I saw her from behind the fence rail, pale and watching. How much had she seen? The lesson was ugly, and I felt foolish under her gaze. Zip was gone, and I tried to remember if she was out putting him to pasture when I had snapped. Jenny smiled to me as we passed, and the mare kicked at her. How her image of me must have shifted: no longer the riding expert on the fine horse but just Eddie’s awkward student fighting for control.

“Relax, relax,” Eddie said. Jenny waved and left. “Where are those good hands I heard about?”

My shoulders and elbows were marbled with tension, unyielding as rock. I breathed, trying to release them. It’d been easier to relax on Foxfire, who invited my contact, who if anything, leaned into it. The mare held her head high and back, evading any contact with the bit. Eddie drug out poles for her to trot, but she jumped them. There was a moment of relaxation before each leap, and she stretched round and forward, but then she landed and tensed again. The moment was so fleeting it might have been imagined.

It was a short lesson—she didn’t have the stamina for anything more, despite her bravado. When I dismounted, she again ran from under my weight, breaking one of Eddie’s reins and dancing at the end of the one that remained intact. An angry red stripe crossed my palm where the pebbled rubber of the rein chafed it.

“Well, what do you think?” Eddie watched me with his ever-appraising eyes.

“You don’t want to know.”

“You could learn a lot from this horse.” He stroked her under-muscled neck, and she allowed him to do so. “You’ve been spoiled by Foxfire, and you know it. You won’t luck into another one like him.”

I looked at Eddie more closely: the battered cap, those quick, shaded eyes. “You’re not trying to
sell
me this animal?”

“No. No.” He laughed as he said it, hands open wide to stop that thought as he would have stopped a runaway horse. “I’m suggesting that I could give you free lessons on her if you’d be willing to put in some time, say three days a week, training her. I’m going to winter her here at Thornfield—Connie and I have already talked.” After what I’d done today, he had to be desperate.

“Connie know about her manners?”

“She’s met her.” He smiled again in that small, private way of his. “She wasn’t thrilled, but she’s agreed to let the mare have the back pasture. With winter coming, I need an indoor to get her in shape.”

“You’d be working with her, too?”

He nodded. “The other three days. Lesson day, we work her together. You in the saddle, me down here. She needs consistency. We need to work as a team.”

“I don’t know.” Her head hung in the cross ties, finally showing her exhaustion. The flop of her ears was pitiful. I ran my eye over the perfect angle of her shoulder, pasterns and knees. Her bones were impeccable, but bones alone did not make a horse.

“We have to go slow with her, of course, but I think she could show in the spring.”

I laughed. “You’re insane,” I said, but the promise of horse shows was tempting, and Eddie knew it. I took a step toward her to stroke her neck as Eddie had. Immediately, she sprang, eyes white, legs shuffling, and teeth snapping. “Give me some time to think about it.”

“Call me this weekend and let me know.”

I watched her another moment. “What other horses have you got right now?”

“None. They’re all leased out.”

“I thought that was just for the summer.”

“I extended them. Everyone’s getting along well. In fact, I’m hoping Pam’s going to buy Winston at the end of the month. Hansel’s with a girl in Walla Walla, but he can’t jump more than three feet any more. He’d be no good for you even if he was available.”

I gestured toward the mare. “It’s not like she’s jumping.”

“Yeah, but that’s only a matter of time. You need to learn how to handle a difficult horse.”

I walked up to her and ran my hand over the dull fur of her throatlatch. Her eyes never left mine. She was quivering under my touch. “So it’s this horse or Foxfire?”

“Unless you can borrow something else. And let’s face it, Joannie, Foxfire isn’t an option anymore. You know your flatwork. You need a jumper, and with the boys in soccer, I need someone to give this horse some time.”

I picked up a dandy brush and flicked dust and sweat from her coat. “She have a name yet?”

“Her registered name is ‘Luckstar’s Last Zephyr.’”

“Oh God.”

Eddie snorted. “I know. Someone got a little too creative. She’s by Mesrour out of Luckstar—those are good lines for jumpers, but her owners must’ve been quarter horse people to come up with that name.”

Eddie picked up a soft brush and ran it slowly over her face with a mother’s care. “I’ve been calling her Zephie,” he said.

Zephie. As if removing an r could remove her bite. I picked out her last hoof and set it down. No sooner had it touched the aisle than it sprang back as if the floor had been electrified, swinging out to catch me hard in the thigh.

I fell against the wall, biting my lip to keep from reacting.
Deserved
, I thought. We were even now: a blow for a blow. We would start fresh if we started at all.

Over the next week, the bruise would darken into a blue-purple U, like something mimeographed, like something branded.

The Next Storm

I
n New Jersey, I never saw the weather coming. The horizon was tree choked, and the clouds gathered quickly. At the small stable where I could afford to keep Foxy (not run down but running), the barn manager heard it every time. Kaki was a petite woman with a harsh voice and mannish walk. We’d be in the arena, Kaki barking instructions at one of her never-ending string of lesson kids, when suddenly she’d call for everyone to stop. She’d twist her face against the stillness of the sky, listening, then, “Everybody in. Now.”

It wasn’t thunder she heard, but the wall of water approaching. The storms came so fast. One minute we’d be working away in the same old thick mugginess, and the next, sheets of rain rolled across the arena, instantly soaking everything. We’d watch from the sliding doors of that ancient stable, pleasantly dry amidst the deluge, the heady scent of straw made pungent by rain. Five minutes later, maybe ten, it’d be over, and we’d make our way out through puddles quickly draining from sandy footing.

The sweat and mustiness of another gym workout didn’t quite wash away in the shower: that mirrored box of a room, those weighted bars, the heavy stares of men strutting from bench to bench, puffing their chests. Soap and water had made the deep purple of my bruises shine darkly. It’d been four days since the lesson, but Zephyr’s teeth marks were crisply individual. The circle of teeth seemed to have that permanence.

I didn’t want a new horse, and I didn’t want my horse, old. I’d given up two offers of love and now, worse still, my mother had relapsed again, her hands too numb to feel. I’d gone home Saturday to help, but my parents, anxious to show they could cope, wouldn’t let me lift a finger. I stayed late Sunday anyway, and I felt more tired than I would have been if I’d cooked full meals all weekend, washed every dish, and scrubbed the house from top to bottom.

I was in a bitter mood, frustrated at the disease I couldn’t fight. Rather than allow myself to displace anger onto my patients, I hated my apartment. From the beige walls that I was under contract not to paint to the scratching of the cheap, synthetic carpet to the vinyl blinds bending in the morning sun, smudged by the greasy hands of some former tenant and now impossible to clean, this was no place to live. Upstairs, someone had turned the stereo up and now the beats of some unidentifiable song vibrated in the door frames. I was getting too old for this. I stared at the clock while my coffee brewed. The phone’s ring was one straw too many.

“Yeah?” I said, both dreading and hoping that it was Dad. Instead, nothing. I was about hang up on the silence, muttering, “Fucking telemarketers.”

“Um, sorry to call so early.” It was Jenny.

“Oh.” She’d never called me before. “It’s O.K. I’ve been up for a while.” I paused, waiting for her to explain, but there was only silence. “How are you?” I asked.

Another moment’s silence. “Not so good.”

I ran the finger over the dust on my dresser, drawing stick figures on its cherry surface, then hanging them on stick figure giblets like the victims of unguessed words. They stood out bright and clear, though I’d dusted Saturday morning before my dad’s call. Dust gathered quickly in the dry air. “What’s wrong?”

Jenny ignored my question. “Are you riding today? Can I come home with you after?”

“Sure.” I stopped doodling. For once in my life, I seemed to hear a storm in the air. “Do you need to come over sooner?”

“No. Just this afternoon—if it’s O.K. I’ll be at the barn at four thirty. I have to go.”

She hung up before I could reply.

There is an art to taking a good radiograph, to dosing the radiation, to timing the millisieverts. When I look at a body, when I adjust its position, I estimate mass and density, fat and muscle, so I can get the best picture in the fewest tries. Because I’m good at this, I’ve been cross-trained in CT and MRI, but x-rays remain my favorite, so this is where I stay. Despite the speed and economy of computerized radiography, I miss the old gelatin and silver film that I first learned to shoot, the satisfying heft of the white plates we slid into the table, the flop of developed film, all the tangible artifacts of my art.