Borrowed Horses (33 page)

“I can make it work for now. Foxfire won’t be around forever.” I wanted to bite back the words as soon as I’d said them. Foxfire deserved better. “Just think about it,” I said, the voice rough in my throat. I ate my sandwich mechanically.

The memory of this morning’s jumps should have kept me floating through the day, but I’d been set roughly back on Earth. The promise those jumps held was a promise I would not be allowed to realize. Always, always, it came down to money. Frustration balled in my throat, but I swallowed it with lumps of sandwich and chased it down with Coke.

For the next hour, we were silent. I watched the hills roll past as we threaded the barren highway between them. Occasionally, we would pass a house with a horse or two in the yard, plain, stalwart animals that wouldn’t spook if someone shot a twelve gauge off their backs. I fought against bitterness. Eddie didn’t owe me this.

The sky was hazy over the horizon near Moscow. “Brush fire,” Eddie said.

“Weird time for one.” We’d had rain only a week ago, and snow was again in the forecast.

Eddie and I watched through the windshield. The smoke grew thicker, spreading dark fingers across the sky, blotting out the sky. The air was dusk-filled. A mile from the barn, ash began to fall on the hood of the truck.

We pulled on, over the crests of the hills and into the ever-thickening haze. The air smelled strange and unnatural. “I hate to think of Foxy breathing this shit in all morning,” I said.

Eddie was silent, his face set and immovable. In his silence, the first seeds of panic germinated. I said, “You don’t think this is a barn fire, do you?”

Eddie ignored the question, slowing to a stop as the flashing lights of a police car permeated the haze. They had blocked the turn to Connie’s. An officer approached the car. He was young. Too young, I thought. His face was a maze of popped pimples. Eddie nodded to the trailer. “I’m hauling a horse to Connie Thornfield’s place.”

“Sorry, sir.” The young officer’s voice was surprisingly deep. “No horses are going there today.”

My heart beat against its cage of ribs. The policeman looked back to the trailer, which jostled violently as Zephyr shuffled and kicked.

“What happened?” From under his beaten cap, Eddie watched the boy, sizing him up, figuring out exactly how much he could ask.

“We’re not sure yet.”

“Barn fire?”

“Looks to be.”

“Any horses killed?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m just here to direct traffic.”

I stared at the boy-man, the unused walkie-talkie strapped to his shoulder. “My horse is there,” I said. “Can’t you talk to someone? Give us more information?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

I stared at him, but he stayed impassive. Eddie turned to me. “We’ll take Zephyr to my place and come back with the trailer. If Foxy needs a place, he’s got one with me until Connie can rebuild.”

The
if
did it. It was Connie’s place, and from what we could see, no horses would be staying there. That much we knew to be fact—there was no
if
about it. The
if
was for Foxy.
If he survived
. “I’m sorry, Eddie,” I said, then turned and jumped from the truck. Around me, officers shouted for me to stop, but what would they do to make me? Pull their guns? I hardly thought so. Foxfire was all that was on my mind. Though ash drizzled from the sky, the burnished copper of his coat blazed in my mind’s eye, pulling me through the disorienting smoke.

I ran without looking back, daring them to hold me back. Panting in the choking air, I sprinted across the road, or tried to. My feet sunk deep into the gravel. Recently and thickly resurfaced, the road gave under my feet like quicksand. It was like running in a nightmare, going nowhere.

My lungs burned by the time I crested the hill. My fleece had gathered soot and turned from blue to grey. Through the smoke, I could make out the shape of a woman pacing behind the fire trucks, Connie. The blackened frame of what had once been her barn teetered. One charred rafter swung and fell, pulling the next five with it. Cinders flew upward like New Jersey’s summer fireflies. “Connie,” I called, but smoke ate my voice. I stood next to her. Black lines ran down her face where tears mixed with ash. “Joannie,” she said, “it’s gone.”

Gone was a flimsy word. Her husband was gone. Her herd, gone. Her brother, gone. Now the dream she’d spent a life building was only as a blackened skeleton.

But a barn was only a building, one she could rebuild. I needed to know that Foxy wasn’t included in all that was gone, but the words clung to the ash that lined my throat. I tasted burnt hay and wood and other things I couldn’t name. Sunny and Hobbes ran the fence line of their pasture; Bill and Zip ran theirs. “Fox,” I finally managed.

Connie, turned to me, the loss of everything hanging on her face.

“Just tell me he was out to pasture,” I pleaded. “Tell me someone got him out.” Fire trucks blocked my view of the stalls.

“It was burning already when I got up.”

“Dawn got him then. Someone got him. Please, Connie. He wasn’t in the barn. Say it.” Tears were welling in my eyes and panic edged my throat, but I blinked them back. This morning, he’d screamed when I left him, and those screams, the last sound I heard from him, echoed in my ears. “Just say he’s O.K. That’s all. He’s in a pasture. He’s a little shook up, but he’ll be all right. Jenny got him, maybe. Someone got him.”

Connie’s shoulders seemed to collapse, and the sound she made was more than a sob. I left her standing there, facing the horses, and went to her house. Through the haze, I found the phone and called Dawn.

“Joan.” The way Dawn said my name crushed all hope. She’d always called me Joannie.

I shook the tone of her voice away. “Tell me what happened,” I said.

“I came and saw Connie hadn’t fed, so I threw Foxy some flakes of alfalfa. He was still a little anxious, but he was settling down. The hay seemed to help. I figured I’d wait and give him his grain when we got back, and we rode out. We were only out about twenty minutes when I saw the horizon. Joannie, you know we rode hell bent for leather when we saw that smoke, but everything was on fire.” She paused to still the quiver in her voice. “I banged on Connie’s door until she woke up, and we called 911. I rode around until they came, looking for any sign of him. I mean, I knew the stall door was shut, I knew there was no way out, but I wanted so bad for it not to be true. When the cops got there, they made us get out. Said it wasn’t safe to be around. Probably right, too, cause I can’t stop coughing, but Joannie, if they’d a let me, you know I’d still be out there looking, just in case.”

The world was spinning. No one had even been close enough to hear his final screams. And me? The one who owed him everything? I’d been the farthest of all. He’d given me a distraction from my mother’s sickness, and he’d offered my life a purpose after Mouse’s death. And I deserted him on one day he’d ever needed me.

How would I endure a world without Foxfire?

I hung up. There was nothing more to say. Wisps of smoke curled from the timbers, but the fire was out. The firefighters coiled their hoses. They were surreal in their blackened yellow coats, the bands of reflective tape glittering strangely in the half-light of the smoke-filtered afternoon. It seemed again that I was walking through a dream, but I wasn’t so lucky. The two far corners of the building still stood upright, the siding melted. On the side closest to us, the side where Foxfire’s stall had been, only a few blackened beams and rafters remained, crazed black, smoking in a heap where they’d fallen. Woodchips, hay, and dry manure. All excellent tinder.

Men in uniform were beginning to look around the exterior of the building. Connie turned to me, dashed tears from her eyes, and cleared her throat. “We saved your truck. Dawn parked it behind the house.”

My keys would still be dangling from the ignition, right where I’d left them. Still, I found myself stepping toward the barn. One of the firefighters put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s too dangerous to go any closer. Hot spots.” His kind eyes, soft and brown as melted chocolate, rested on me. Soot drew dark lines in every crease of his face, aging him beyond his years.

“My horse was in that barn.”

He paused, his hand still on my shoulder. How odd that the gloved touch of a stranger could give so much. “I’m sorry.”

I turned to leave. Images of Foxfire were coming thick and fast: Foxy screaming for me became Foxy screaming in a burning barn with no one to save him. Foxy’s beautiful coppery coat became charred flesh. Foxy’s soft eyes melted into black pits. I had to get away, but there was nowhere to go.

An inch of ash covered the truck’s hood. I cleared the windshield with an ice scraper and cranked its reluctant engine, driving away as if there were a destination anywhere that could take me out of my head.

I pulled into my apartment and walked to the door with my head down, afraid I would see Dave’s truck, afraid he’d be watching. Home was empty with Foxfire gone, the walls bare, the furniture tattered. Home is where people who don’t have horses spend money.

The house was silent, but the noise wouldn’t stop. I remembered the first jump I ever took. Foxfire was young and talented but totally inexperienced. Eddie had us on a lunge line, the whip in his hand to coax Foxfire on, but Foxy only needed coaxing on the first jump. Several paces out, he gave one little stutter step, and Eddie popped the whip in air behind him. Foxy’s ears swiveled from the sound forward, trained on the short cavaletti, and he moved into the collected powerful stride I would recognize so many times before a fence. He jumped the one foot obstacle clean and round as if it had been two feet higher. The jump seemed to last for minutes, not seconds. I just held on and smiled. When we landed, I gathered the reins in one hand to pat his neck, but he needed no praise. The jump itself had been enough. He circled ’round again to it, confidently this time, and from that day until his first run-out in New Jersey, I’d never worried about him stopping at a fence. No matter how tall, how wide, or how solid the obstacle, Foxfire jumped because jumping was what he loved.

There would never be another Foxfire. Once, I turned him out in the arena where Connie had set a course. I hadn’t had time to ride that day. Mom was in the hospital, and I wanted to let Foxfire have a quick run around the arena before spending the night in his stall. I never thought for a moment that he’d jump the fences, but once he saw the standards, they became a game for him. He made his own course, prancing at the end of combination, nickering to make sure we’d seen.

I heard Connie whistle from the cross ties. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “I’ve worked with horses all my life, but I’ve never seen anything like that.” It was Foxfire all over. He was never just an ordinary horse. He was born for greatness, then tucked into an Idaho corner where I was lucky enough to find him.

I remembered, too, the last jump we’d ever taken, the bank he’d jumped after spooking at that autumn pheasant. It was the last time I’d feel that round, raw power, the jump that was Foxfire’s and only Foxfire’s.

There were calls to be made, people to tell. How could I tell my mother? My father? How could I say that the horse they bought to distract me from her disease was dead? To say it seemed to confirm that all hope was gone. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t betray him one more time. I lay on the couch, my face pressed into the throw pillow, willing the world to stop, to change the rules by which it worked. Willing time to reverse itself and let me have Foxfire back.

Truth, Will, Out

O
n the morning of Mouse’s death, we’d had the worst argument of our long friendship. The night before, she and her boyfriend sat three rows ahead of me at the basketball game and never even noticed I was there. My mother, recovering from another attack, insisted I go out, and for the first time, I’d gone out alone. Mouse hadn’t returned my call. Now, I saw why. They were utterly absorbed in each other, pumping their fists as they chanted the fight song, but looking more at each other than at the game on the court. Birds and spiders filled me. I seethed and stared, choking on a cocktail of self-pity, jealousy, and scorn. Mouse had always been there. I needed her. Who else could help me when my mother had another attack? Who else understood?

When he got up in the third quarter to get Cokes, I followed him. Standing behind him in line, I ran my finger around the back pocket of his jeans. He turned to me, confused by my small act of seduction. It was the first time I felt the full scope of my power: the power of an attractive woman to stop a man in his tracks and against his better judgment. I held him with tiger-bold eyes. I moved my body up against his, laid my hand inside his thigh and stroked it up toward his penis. He closed his eyes and shivered, and when I pulled his mouth to mine, his kiss was hungry for me. There were maybe twenty people standing around. Two would have sufficed. By the end of the game, there wasn’t a person in the stands who wasn’t talking about it. I hoped to hurt Mouse as deeply by my betrayal just as her desertion hurt me.

Had she forgiven him, or had she merely washed her anger down with a fifth of vodka? She could barely speak through her rage the morning she called. “Cunt,” she’d said. “You fucking cunt.” She hung up with those words ringing in my ear, the last she would ever speak to me. She’d gone back to him in spite of me.
To
spite me.