Borrowed Horses (2 page)

I took a sip of coffee from my beaten commuter mug, listening to hissing and ticks. “Shit,” I whispered to myself, if only to break a little of the silence. I made it into a little song, “Shit, shit, shitty, shittily, shit.”

For four days, I’d driven hard, trying to outrun New Jersey. Only the day before, I’d crossed the Bitterroots and into Idaho, which would have taxed the engine of my old truck even if I hadn’t been driving fast and pulling a horse trailer loaded with everything I owned. A breakdown was inevitable.

So reason said; passion viewed the matter differently. This was all part of the larger accident, ongoing for two-and-a-half years now, beginning with the day I left Idaho and ending with a whole series of breakdowns—first my horse, then my mom, then my truck. Or maybe it started earlier than that. Maybe it started with Mom’s first episode. Maybe it started in elementary school when I first met Mouse. Maybe it happened too far back to remember, on that long forgotten day when I first saw a pony and wanted to ride.

I shook these thoughts away, zipped my checkered hunting jacket, and pulled myself out into the cold. Self-pity wouldn’t get me anywhere. I popped the hood, let the warmth of the engine wash over me. The highway was black and my flashlight was in New Jersey. Kaki, the barn manager, had used it to find her Leatherman in the hayloft and I could still see it amongst the clutter on her workbench, a pulled shoe thrown across it and a bundle of baling twine underneath.

I scanned the horizon for the promise of headlights rising from any hill, but the darkness was complete. My feet breaking through the crusting slush was the only sound. It was a night for chainsaw murders and women never heard from again. I finished my coffee, watching the wafting smoke turn spectral in the moonlight. The Happy Camper Motor Lodge was a couple miles south. They’d have a phone.

I started walking, trying to whistle and make light of the situation. The last time she drove a car, my mother nearly killed me on this very highway. I’d known this road all my life and it had never been more deserted. November was too cold for crickets. No night birds shadowed the sky; no mice scavenged the fields. In an hour, the bars would close, but the drivers who’d come then would likely be drunk.

I was a hundred yards from my truck when headlights shone over the hill and leveled. The wind rose, its deep cold breath burning my cheeks and lifting the hair from my neck. The headlights traveled direct and steady, not wavering with alcohol or exhaustion. Without another thought, I raised my hand and waved.

If you’d asked me who I hoped would rescue me, I would have requested a farmer, middle-aged or older, sensible, slow to speak but quick to lend a hand, a man raised on the code that you help your neighbor. The driver slowed, pulling in behind my battered Chevy in a late model Dodge. His voice, not old but steady, called through the darkness, “Need a hand?”

“If you have time.”

He emerged from the cab, tall and well-built, with a heavy object in hand that I realized, once he turned it on, was only a flashlight, splitting the darkness in two. He stepped into the headlights. His hat said Connor Construction, but it was too clean and unbattered for a workingman’s cap. He looked distracted, and this comforted me. If he was a killer or a rapist, I figured he’d be concentrating on how to pull off his crime, making furtive glances, plotting.

Silently, he shone the flashlight over the engine and I lay my hand on his wrist to direct the beam. He started at my touch and looked at me.

I withdrew my hand and checked the coolant. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is probably the last place you want to be right now, right?”

“I was just out for a drive,” he said.

“At one in the morning?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Thought a drive would clear my head. It’s been one of those days.”

I smiled in the darkness. “You’re telling me.” I turned back to the engine and sighed. “I think I’m going to need a tow truck.”

“You got a cell phone?” he asked me.

“No.”

“No?”

I shrugged. I didn’t make a lot of phone calls. None, if I could help it. “You?”

He pulled a smart phone from his pocket, its face a spiderweb of cracks. “I did.” A smile tugged at his lips, and I laughed with him.

“What happened?”

“Accident. I’ve got a new one coming tomorrow. Your timing is really amazing. How do you not have a cell phone in this day and age?”

“Don’t need one.”

“Do now,” he corrected me, smiling. “Life just changed.”

I liked his easy smile and whatever trace of an accent colored his voice.

“I’m in the motel down the road,” he said, “You can call from there.”

“I hate to put you to more trouble.”

“No trouble,” he said. “I can’t leave you out here alone with a broken truck. You could get killed out here.”

Next to him, I didn’t feel tall or strong. If he wanted to overpower me, he could. I didn’t think he would, but I knew I had nothing to base that feeling on but hope. Somehow, I had the sense of being on autopilot, as if this were all pre-arranged. I climbed into the cleanest truck in Idaho and we drove.

He unlocked the room with a key on a large plastic key chain, scalloped along the edges and marked with the room number in gold paint. For all the years I lived in Moscow, I still only knew the Happy Camper Motor Lodge by reputation. You could rent rooms by the day, the week, or the month.

The hotel room told me nothing about my rescuer. A faded print of an elk looking up from the pool at the base of a waterfall hung over the bed, where an old quilt had been thrown over the edge of a floral polyester bedspread. He placed his key on a well-worn copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo
and nodded to the rotary phone.

“It’s all yours,” he said, granting me privacy by walking back out into the cold night.

Two-and-a-half years earlier, I left Idaho to train with the legendary Jack Stewart Flaherty,
chef d’equipe
of the U.S. Equestrian Team. Like all dream chasers, I was cocky. I imagined that he would recognize my talent and ask me to ride for him and for my country. My absurd dream almost came true. For a year-and-a-half, I spent all of my Saturdays and most of my paycheck at Jack Stewart’s stable, where I trailered Foxy for lessons. I was harassed and badgered and ridiculed and, eventually, transformed from a hard-working girl with a gifted horse into a serious contender for a spot on his team.

Because everything went according to plan, I forgot that every dream relies on circumstance. On the second of October a year before, as Jack Stewart was packing to take himself and his barn full of horses off to Florida for the winter show circuit, he told me that Foxfire wouldn’t be jumping much longer. The arthritis was showing, despite Foxy’s attempts to fake youth and shield that hitching stride from notice. Jack Stewart told me I needed a new horse, a young one, preferably European bred, to continue in this sport—a horse that would cost, he ballparked, somewhere between $150,000 and a half million.

He was used to working with people who would have heard this advice and gone shopping. “Not enough money?” he said in his nasal upper-class Boston accent. “You’re young, you’re attractive. Why don’t you get married?” Instead, I made a vet appointment for Foxfire and tried to plan a new attack, tried to think of any way to fight. For the next year, I rode borrowed horses, working as a catch rider, offering my services to wealthy owners who wanted trophies.

Then, my father called. His voice sounded rougher around the edges than usual, and I knew something had happened just from the sound of his “hello.”

“Is it Mom?” I asked. “An attack?” My mother’s MS was a constant in our lives, but a tricky constant, a constant that never let you know what to expect or when to expect it. Hot weather made attacks more likely, but even in winter, anything could happen. “How bad was it? Is she O.K.?”

“She’s in a wheelchair,” Dad cleared his throat and his voice shifted gears—he was a lawyer again, making a tough case, “but she’s O.K. Just frustrated, you know?”

The plans I made, the owners I courted, the hours I’d spent building trust with their horses, the dream of gold itself—all of it was unimportant once I knew about the chair. “I’ll come home.”

“She was afraid you’d say that. Listen, Joannie, there’s nothing you can do here.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

Dad sighed. “I’m putting your mom on.”

“Wait,” I said, but he called his witness and was gone before I could raise any objections.

“Joannie,” my mother’s voice sounded better than I expected— there was no slurring or hesitancy as often came with a seizure. Her tone was light, even happy. “Don’t listen to your father—I’m fine. I just have some fancy new wheels. Very chic.”

“Mom, I’m coming home.”

“Look, Joannie, you know how I feel about this. You need to be exactly where you are.”

Mom had pushed me to leave in the first place. Three years before, she watched me ride at a show where I took first in every class. A girl on a skewbald cow horse had openly sneered at me from the fence rail. “Joannie Edson’s nothing special. Anyone could win on that big chestnut of hers.” Truth was, Foxy’s power would have been too much for the girl. I’d watched her pivoting off her knee as her horse made his flat jumps. On Foxy, she would’ve popped out of the saddle like the cork from champagne, but there was no point in saying that. I understood. No one had beaten me in a year, and winning local horse shows was beginning to feel a bit like cheating. Mom talked to Eddie while she watched me win that final class. He said I needed to find competition.

“Seattle?” she asked. No. He suggested I go for the top as soon as possible, while Foxy was still jumping well. “New Jersey,” he told her.

Mom sat me down that evening after supper. “You’ve gotten too big for the pond,” she said, her eyes filled with both sadness and pride.

“I can’t leave Moscow.”

“Baloney.” She looked at me and sighed. “Realistically, Joannie, what can you do? Can you stop the attacks from coming? Can you make them less severe?” She sat back and sighed. “A working body is a God-given gift, Joannie. I won’t watch you throw yours away waiting after me.”

Her tone was matter of fact. She wouldn’t hear any arguments, and I understood that leaving her was the greatest gift I could give. She expected great things of me. That was then, when my promise as an athlete felt like a promise I could keep.

I waited on hold for AAA. My rescuer paced outside the room, lighting a cigarette, his face warmed into beauty by the match light he sheltered from the wind with a cupped hand. Trying to keep athletic good health, I’d never taken so much as a puff. Now, I wanted a drag from that cigarette, moistened by this Marlboro Man’s lips. In the midst of failure, I wanted to breathe something into me that was entirely new. Something not altogether safe.

The tow truck wouldn’t arrive for an hour. The man smiled an easy, sunlit smile that made me think of warm beaches and surf. “Guess you’re stuck with me until then. How about a beer?”

He’d already gone to enough trouble.
No
was forming on my lips when I saw what it was he pulled from his cooler: the long brown bottle, the yellow-orange label, the blue stars of a Newcastle Brown. He cracked the top and handed it, my favorite beer, over.