Borrowed Horses (39 page)

When I opened my eyes again, Mouse sat next to me. “We sure fucked up our lives,” she said.

“Dave,” I said.

She laughed at that. “You still think this is about Dave? You think this is about the guys we did or didn’t date? This was never about Dave.”

I blinked and was alone. I shook my head to clear it. I needed sleep. “If this isn’t about Dave, what is it about?” I asked, but the darkness refused an answer. Christmas lights lit the neighborhoods with their false colors. A hollow Christ waved from his manger, and plaster reindeer froze on rooftops.

Rivals for Possession of the Dead

I
’d like to blame Jenny for the disaster at the show, but it was Zephyr who started it. Jenny merely brought Hobbes in range. When Hobbes reacted to Zephyr’s vicious bite with a quick kick, my hand was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The carpal bones snapped under an egg-bar shoe.

Jenny, too, heard. What else could explain the triumphant smile as she looked back over her shoulder? Before the pain registered, the sound and the smile did. Zephyr had sucked herself back, and dirt and darkness embraced me. Rolling into light, hooves descended like rain, grazing my arms, pinching skin to dirt and skittering away. The world spun, past and present synchronous in that glaring moment of pain.

Early in the day, the show had promised better. Zephyr, washed and braided, scowled like a tomboy in pink frills, but in spite of the pinned ears, she was beautiful. With her round flanks and her muscled neck, she belonged not to Idaho but to the realms of art: European statues, oil portraiture of English hunters, warhorses carved in Japanese jade. Hobbes was a mere fireplug next to her lithe power. Eddie gave me a leg up, and I felt what it was to be regal. In my velvet cap and long black boots, I was a lady on a lady’s graceful horse. Land was a distant thing below us, something to float across. We moved among the lesser horses and riders, staying on the inside where the judge could see us. It was no contest after all. Zephyr trotted forward with collected suspension, her liquid stride on display, every eye fixed upon her. At the judge’s request, we moved from trot to canter, sharing one mind, scowling together at the meager world.
It’s enough, it’s enough
, her hooves repeated.

The boundaries between us, the mere flesh, dissolved in the acid of a unified will. The muscles I borrowed filled me with a terrifying knowledge of what was possible: the power to maim, to kill, to fly. Hooves were flint on tinder. Hobbes yielded out to pass a horse, moved into us. Hobbes wasn’t being aggressive, but for Zephyr, it was enough. My mind and hers broke as she stretched her teeth forward to find their meat.

From the camp chair, the arena was only present as sound. My shattered hand was full of galaxies, stars exploding in spectacular novas. The show was over. I’d lost my shot at Zephyr. The machine of my body was broken, like my mother’s. The old hospital lesson trumped all: Every body can break.

In the arena, the hooves of the cantering horses said,
Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer
. My hand had not restrained those teeth, and the dream slipped away in the current of her muscled neck. Eddie, on bended knee, held my hand in his, feeling for bones; a limp and mocking version of a proposal. He shook his head and frowned. “Let’s go.” Over his shoulder, I watched a blue ribbon flap, hung on the truck mirror, Jenny’s first.

I didn’t move. Couldn’t. Zephyr, tied to the trailer, watched me. Her ears were neither pinned nor relaxed. Without menace closing its aperture, intelligence shown from her soft eye. She waited for me to speak as if she knew how much was balanced on my answer.

The hoof beats from the ring infected my hand with throbbing. All that I’d silenced returned in that primal cadence. I was hardly more, hardly less broken now than I’d always been.

The amaryllis has opened its large red trumpet that morning, heralding an unknown and unknowable future.

“Joan.” Eddie was lifting me, hands under the armpits. I wriggled free. “No.”

Eddie stood back and tugged at the strand of hair by his ear. “We need to get that hand taken care of.”

“It can wait.”

“Wait for what?”

Zephyr stomped a fly away from her pastern, but her eyes never left me. Even without the saddle’s telepathy, we were thinking together—or, perhaps, it was her thoughts moving my mouth, my brain too garbled with the fall to act. When my voice came, it was not my own. “For the jumpers.”

Eddie stepped back. “You’re not thinking of riding with that hand.” It wasn’t a question.

I turned my gaze on Eddie. My ears rung and my lashes were wet, but most of the shock had drained away, replacing itself with an insistent pain.
If thy hand offend thee
. “You remember back when I first started taking lessons with you on Foxfire all those years ago? The first time you took my stirrups and tied my reins, I was terrified. You said, feet and hands help you communicate, but you can ride without them if you know how to use your weight.”

“That was Foxfire. That was flatwork—you were on a lunge line for God’s sake.”

Zephyr grunted quietly and shook her braids. I said, “I’m only down a hand.” It took every effort of thought to make words.

“It’s just a schooling show.”

“This isn’t about the show.”

Eddie was quiet.

My face was cold and my hand hot, the blood out of balance, but my voice steadied. “You know what I’ve got riding on this.”

“There will be other chances to show that you and Zephyr can do this.”

“When?” I stared at him, willing him to read the determination there. “Months away. I need this, Eddie. I need a way forward.”

“The show officials will never let you ride with a broken hand.”

“You going to tell them?”

He threw up his hands. “I might.” He ran a hand over his cap and looked at Zephyr, who looked at me. “Ah, Christ.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means a holding pattern. It means I’m not doing anything yet but watching Jenny get through her rounds, since you won’t let me take you to the hospital. Stick your hand in the cooler at least. I’ll come back when they’ve finished the hunters and watch you ride a warm up. We’ll see then.” He grabbed his hat, beat the dust from it, and crammed it back on his head. “If you come to your senses before then, let me know.” He walked off.

I squeezed my eyes because there would not be tears.
No rest for the wicked:
Eddie’s words. I dug my hand into the ice between bottles of water, a different kind of pain. “Timothy,” I heard myself growl, the word pushing my hand through the coldness. “Fuck.” I timed fifteen minutes, and put my slender faith in ice, vet wrap, adrenaline, and Zephyr.

I’d been a fool to see the barn as a temple. Its cinders blown across the hills, mingling with dust, I understood the barn for what it was: a physical marker. My body, like all bodies, was the temple, church, cathedral. The rib bones were rafters. The heart, a nave. The brain, an apse. I wouldn’t say I had not been burned, but the flame tempered rather than destroyed. Quenched, the temple of the body was a cold and brutal blade. The cross of cathedrals, the cross of the sword. These things cut both ways.

Jenny rounded the corner with Hobbes, her lip again curling with ill-suppressed glee at my suffering. “Show’s over for you, I guess.”

The blade in me heated. “I never did shit to you.”

“You slept with my husband.”

“It had nothing to do with you.”

“You think I didn’t know? You think I could watch Dave look at you and not understand what was written on his face? I knew him better than you ever did.”

“You knew him, did you? You knew he’d burn the barn?”

“Dave didn’t do that. You did. That’s what you put into him.” Her words came quickly. She’d been turning these thoughts for months and now spilled them forth.

It was my turn to sneer. “Is that what you think? Is that the truth you’ve constructed from all this?”

“You wrecked my life.”

“Dave did that.”

“And then you blabbed the whole affair in front of everyone, making me look like a fool.”

“You did that for yourself, wishing Foxfire dead when he never did a damned thing to you.”

Jenny turned and tied Hobbes to the trailer with shaking hands. He stood patiently, so calm he seemed to have seen all this before. “I used to look up to you,” she said. “I’d watch you on Foxfire and think you were so great.” She pulled a blue ribbon from the last class out of her pocket. “But I guess all sin tells in the end, and the just are rewarded.”

Words fought within, each making a case to be voiced, but in the end, I let Jenny have the last word. When she’d gone, I slid
The Count of Monte Cristo
from my glove compartment and put it in her brush box. She could take Dave back. She could keep him.

I guided Zephyr around the warm-up arena, the reins gathered in my left hand, letting her adjust to the pressure coming from the neck rein rather than the direct pressure of hand against bit. Eddie stood at the gate, cursing under his breath.

The fence pattern was an asymmetrical figure eight, then a loop up the center and down the side to the finish. Ten small fences. I repeated the pattern: yellow vertical to square oxer, cross the long diagonal to the wall coming into the short corner, turn again to red triple combination (two verticals and a Swedish oxer) across the opposite diagonal, up the center to a green vertical, the liverpool, back down the side to the square oxer and yellow backward to finish. Repeating the order brought clarity through the fog of pain.

Eddie looked dubious. “Lots of turns. That first diagonal asks for speed, but carry too much and the wall will give you trouble. You’ll have to hold back a bit. Can you collect her without hands?”

I didn’t reply. The first rider was on course and jumping shallow. Too far from base of the fences, her horse flattened to make the distance. She was clean until the combination, where, predictably, she pulled two rails. Eddie scowled but didn’t comment. Zephyr, too, was watching, head high and eyes on the horses, snorting her superiority.

The second two riders jumped clean. Their pinched knees would never win any hunter classes. They were dangerous, ugly rounds, but the times were respectable. The third rider nearly toppled off at the last fence, his knee acting as a pivot, but he clung to the pommel and managed to find his seat again. The forth, riding a palamino, was good and fast. Her blonde hair flew in a pony tail that would have driven Jack Stewart Flaherty into a conniption. I imagined him calling for a hair net or scissors and giving her the option. But though her hair was sloppy, her leg was not. It did not move from the girth as her horse leapt over each fence cleanly.

The fifth rider took a refusal penalty; her horse coming in too fast to the wall, too uncontrolled, dodged the jump. The sixth and last came in deep to the first fence and pulled a rail, then followed with three more pulled rails in the combination. I hung back, letting the others go first.

Eddie sighed. “Well. There’s your competition.”

I closed my eyes and sustained the vision of a large red bloom. Its phonograph played something faintly, but I couldn’t hear it over the volume of pain clamped in my fist.