Borrowed Horses (7 page)

The apartment manager met me outside a new building. The architecture was boring and functional, a grey box, and the rent was cheap. From the third story, the body of a hunted deer hung, wrapped in burlap, a slow drip of blood congealing on the sidewalk.

“Oh, God,” the squat man fumbled. “I’ll talk to the tenant. I’ll make him pull that down.”

“Don’t,” I said. My wrist was bruised from Dave’s last visit; he’d grabbed me, and I shut the door on his arm. “I don’t need a tour. The place is fine. I’ll take it.”

I changed phone numbers, becoming anonymous again. He couldn’t find me here. Dave—just another obstacle cleared.

II

Looking For a Fence

Bone and metals can be broken by repeated application of stresses that would be too small to break them if applied only once. This is the phenomenon of fatigue.…An athlete who runs 100 kilometers each week takes nearly two million running strides each year, stressing the tibia nearly two million times. Healing usually keeps pace with fatigue damage, but if it does not, failure or even complete fracture of the bone may result. Fatigue fractures are common in the tibia, fibula, and metatarsals of athletes. They also cause problems in horses, sometimes making them collapse with a broken bone in the middle of a race
.

—Alexander R. McNeill,
The Human Machine

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near
.

—Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”

Shift

W
hile circling, the rider looks toward the first fence, establishing a course, setting its rhythm.

At first, I feared bumping into Dave, but that was only because I’d forgotten how big Moscow is for a town. Twenty-five thousand people provide decent cover. My circle was small and didn’t intersect with many others, and so I made an easy slide back into invisibility. I’d passed Dave only once, going the opposite way on Main Street, each in the cabs of our separate trucks. I’d just lifted my fingers in the standard truck-to-truck two finger wave when I realized which truck I was waving to. In his turtleneck sweater and wire-framed glasses, he reminded me of a picture of Ernest Hemingway that I’d once seen on a postage stamp, only younger, blonder, and better looking. Dave had seen me at once, eyes locking on mine. His gravity exerted its pull, but I shifted my eyes, gripped the wheel, pressed the accelerator. He didn’t have time to turn.

Winter passed, and spring; June built toward hotter July. The nightshift had a peculiar way of erasing time, the dark nights anonymous, one melting into another. Each patient brought a glimpse into other lives, but those moments never lasted long enough. My new apartment felt no more like home to me than my old one had. Shabby and beige, it was just another cold, stacked box nestled between others, like those of us living there were simply neatly arranged cargo waiting to be shipped and processed. Only when I was with Foxfire was there season and time: snow melt, green sprouts unfolding themselves from dirt, breeze, cloud, and at last, heat.

We rode the hills, and their trails led my mind into places I’d avoided visiting. Too soon, I knew, Foxfire would be buried in the pastures that had fed him, that had made him. In the way of natural things, the grasses would call him back, a body to fertilize tender shoots and complete life’s circle. He would return to the earth’s terrible womb where worms would ravage his spectacular body and those soft eyes would resolve into pits and he would be gradually disassembled. All I’d have was a box of ribbons, of trays and bowls, of cups: everything dulling in an attic corner where I would be unable to forget it.

I pressed the thought away. For now, we walked the gravel roads and looked for fallow hills. We practiced lateral movements to stretch his legs and stave off arthritis, but even so, age seemed to overcome Foxy at once. His body was a kind of clock ticking and, with each stiffening stride, winding down.

Like the marks on an unnumbered clock’s face, four events punctuated summer. This was the first: one of the day-shift x-ray techs moved to Boise with her husband. The opening, the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift, paid less, but taking it, I returned to life in sunlight.

Foxy and I went trail riding one day in August. Dust loomed over the roads in the hot, still quiet, pervasive as memory. My mind wandered in its motes.

In college, I’d taken exactly one road trip. The summer after our freshman year, Holly, a girl from my dorm, invited me to her family’s dairy farm in New Plymouth for an August week. If the Pod could make it over White Bird Pass, it could make the whole stretch, and I needed to shake Moscow for a while, where every turn reminded me of Mouse’s death.

I had a six-hour drive, a thermos of coffee, bootlegged Nirvana, a road atlas, a letter from Holly suggesting a route. Plenty. Holly’s directions were comprehensive, giving the easy, straight-forward route, suggesting two possible short cuts to try, and telling me which small towns supported their police departments on speeding tickets.

The first short cut was easy enough. The gravel road cutting from one loop of the highway to the next was clearly marked and shaved a half hour off my drive, so hours later, I tried the second short cut as well, an unmarked gravel road that bypassed Payette. Holly had identified it by landmarks: a fruit stand, a Pepsi sign. I guessed at the road. Perhaps fruit was sold in the small red out-building facing the gas station billboard’s sweating Pepsi bottles.

I followed this road a good way—fifteen, twenty minutes—when it tee’d and I faced my mistake. The stop sign’s silvered divots told of some nameless teenager who killed time with a shotgun. In Holly’s directions, there were no dead-ends.

The horizon held nothing but farmland. To go back would concede a wasted half hour. Roads, even gravel ones, are built to go places, and the most obvious place for this road to go was Payette. I turned right, crested the second hill, and the city spread before me, hazed with gravel dust. A gut decision, a little logic, and I’d found my way.

When I arrived, Holly’s dad, with the thin, wry smile of a middle-aged Idaho farmer (the smile so slight it could be mistaken for a grimace) had said only, “Well, y’aint
too
dumb.” I liked the man, his easy manners, his underlying grin. For him, the only serious thing in the world was the herd—and what could be more ludicrous than cows? The awkwardly angled hips, the dopey eyes, the slow-moving jaws chewing and re-chewing food for four stomachs. The life spent on mud hills, the monotony only broken by the sound of grain sliding down the chute from feed-truck to trough and the twice daily marches into the barn where metal tubes sucked their straining udders.

Now, every false turn beckoned. I couldn’t see any other way to break the tedious circling (trough, mud hill, barn; home, hospital, barn). Jumpers circle to prepare for the course, bending and collecting, and I saw no other obstacle to turn to. On the silent hills, the memory of our conversations replayed. Ever since coming home, I’d lived in memories more than I lived in present time.

I halted Foxy at the hilltop and lay my chest down on his mane, stroking his neck.

We returned from the trail to find a wispy-thin blonde roughly my own age. Her thin, transparent hair poked from the edge of a shiny new safety helmet as she trotted her horse around the indoor arena. Jenny wore white sneakers and blue jeans that appeared to have been freshly ironed.

Zip had been named with a distinct sense of irony. A fat, stubborn Appaloosa whose favorite gait was standing—preferably standing and eating—he was ill-tempered and dead to the aids, whether voice, seat, hand, or leg. He ignored this girl’s kicks and her pleas to “come on, can-ter.” In the relative coolness of the indoor arena, she huffed with effort.

I pulled Foxy’s tack, not bothering to fasten him in the cross ties. I rubbed a soft brush down Foxy’s blaze, and he pressed his warm nose against my cheek, tickling me with his whiskers.

“Geez, Louise,” the girl said, kicking Zip again without effect.
Geez, Louise
? Dawn would’ve put her language to shame with a tapestry of curse words, richer in both metaphor and vulgarity. I stroked Foxy’s neck. This small blonde was a novice to this dusty order. Zip would test her devotion. I returned Foxfire to his stall.

“Need a hand?” I said.

She pulled to a halt and smiled her thanks with eyes as blue and shallow as a kiddie pool.

“I’ll just hop on,” I said.

“Oh,” she swung off awkwardly.

“Joannie Edson,” I said, taking her place on Zip’s back.

“I’m Jenny Mason.”

The name Jennifer always stirred memories of Mouse, plumes of dust that billowed, and then settled. I squeezed Zip forward.

He walked on easily enough. With a firmer leg, he plodded into an unacceptably slow trot, nowhere near tracking up. I asked for a canter, softly first, then more assertively. He ignored both cues. I asked again, this time with a sharp flick of the whip.

He pinned his ears and moved into a quick pony trot; he wasn’t engaging behind, just moving his legs faster. I halted him, backed him five paces to bring his legs under him, and started again with a quick flick of the whip. I got a working trot this time, but he still refused the canter, breaking down again into a rush of quick legs. We halted, tried again. The third time, he gave a flat and jolting canter, his nose thrust forward like he was trying to find the bottom of a feed bag. I pulled him to a hard stop, determined to wake him up to my leg.

I’ve heard it argued that God made the horse for man to ride. As evidence, people cite the bars of the mouth—a toothless stretch of gum perfect for a bit—or the shape of the back and flanks, so perfectly contoured for the rider’s leg. But if we’re going to go there, man too seems designed for a horse. Consider the upright posture, the breadth and shape of pelvis that just spans a horse’s back, the long anchors of our legs hanging either side a horse’s body. Take God out of the equation, and we were still made for one another. The devout will see such things. Even so, horse and rider must study one another, read the texts of each other, to determine whether one unity can be made of this double trinity: two bodies, two hearts, two minds.