Everyday Psychokillers (7 page)

Joe lived in there with his mother, who waddled around bitching about her heart attacks and wouldn't come off the back stoop when she hollered down to the barn for him and he hollered back, “Use the goddamn phone, Ma, that's why I put a goddamn phone down here!”

And one night Joe was drinking and drinking beer from cans in the sunken living room, and several empty cans rolled around on the dusty-rose carpet by his easy chair, one or two drooling a little of that last sipful, that mixture of drink and spittle they warn you not to drink,
backwash
it's called. He eyed the TV but only half-watched. He felt squirmy because a long day walking in and out of air conditioning can make your stomach lurch and lurch. His mother toddled to the top of the two steps that separated the dining room from the living room, and she watched him as if he didn't know she was there, which he did, and she did—it was mutual pretending. She stood on the living room stoop with her hand on her hip in a nightgown that looked a lot like her house-dress, toting the rolling pin she always carried, even when she wasn't baking. She used it to gesture with, like an enormous prosthetic index finger she could wag.

“Blah, blah, blah!” she said.

That was the last straw for Joe that night, and he pulled an axe from under his easy chair and waved it at her. They waved their instruments, and ran around the sliced-stone fireplace making beating motions and hacking motions in the air. Then Joe's mother slipped craftily out of the circle, and as Joe ran around the fireplace one more time, she opened the front door to the house so that when he came around he'd fling himself right out the door as if by centrifugal force, like a thing on a string when you whirl it and let go. Which he did, and Slam! She slammed the door behind him.

I imagined how funny and appropriate it would be for Joe to wander around outside drunk with his axe and end up writing the sign for his business, seeing the four white horses glowing in the moonlight, quivering there, coated in white glaze, and Joe giggling at his drunken cleverness, hacking at the plaster legs until he realized that even he wouldn't get the joke when he sobered up. He'd merely have ruined his statues.

Headless horses, posted at the farm's entrance to guard or greet, but without eyes and without minds. It kept me going for hours as I walked horses, one of millions of little items to let my mind run around with as I walked—and there was always a horse that needed walking there. So many weren't ready for turn-out but needed some light in their lives, a few minutes to eat grass at the end of a shank, to feel their hips sway, to get their circulation going, to look around, to smell something other than the barn and their particular little box within it.

Or a horse was colicking, which was terrifying, and I walked him to keep him alive. There are all kinds of colics, minor gassy colics, and terrible bowel-wrenching colics. Often it happened to horses that did get turn-out, because the earth was so sandy that sand would collect in their bodies as they grazed, accumulating in their intestines and coating their stomachs. If you didn't get there in time a horse could lie down in his stall to writhe. He could get cast, as they call it, get stuck there, upside-down like a bug, and break a leg flailing against the wall trying to get up, or he could twist his guts and die while you watched. You had to get him out of his stall and keep him moving. It was your best hope.

Sometimes it happened in the night. We'd get a phone call and rush over. We'd take turns, walking the horse up and down the drive, from the barn to the brick bridge with the four plaster horses. A couple times a horse stopped walking and tried to lie down on the pavement and I'd holler at him, or push at his rump, or scream for my mother to come help me get him going. I'd watched a horse go into shock. I'd watched him do what they call the dead spider, watched his legs go straight into the air and then curl up, watched him jerk like an electronic toy. I'd watched his eyes roll back and his lips turn blue.

The occupation of racing, which they'd come to by birth, was against these horses, and the sand was against them, and the heat, too. Some horses went non-sweater, especially horses from up north. At first they'd sweat and sweat, but the sweat couldn't cool them because the air was so full of water that it wouldn't evaporate. After a while their glands or what have you simply gave up and shut down. They'd pant like dogs. Their hair fell out. These horses were swollen with heat, constantly breathing heavily, practically unable to make themselves drink, though in fits they'd toss their buckets, splashing themselves with water. We used baling wire to attach box fans to the bars on their stalls, and these horses kept their heads in the hot breeze, exhausted all day.

I found non-sweaters the most difficult to watch, perhaps because their bodies weren't broken in any visible way. They didn't all have bumps or scars or hobble. They were simply beaten, and not even so much by racing, or by work or humans. They were beaten by living in the air available for them to breathe. It broke my heart to see them, trying to breathe, trying to drink, and to eat. It broke my heart to watch the hope that surfaced in the evening when finally they got a sense of what it might feel like to be a real animal, with a real mind, and ideas, and an ability to move through the world; they'd feel so
light
for a while, I could see them feeling
light
. Little personalities would rise up for a few hours.

One of the non-sweaters had this cat that lived in her stall. The cat would actually sleep on the horse's back during the day, and who knows if the horse liked the cat or was annoyed by the cat, because in the day they were both too exhausted to do anything. But in the evening the cat would come to take a drink of water from the horse's bucket and the horse would knock it in, and I swear the horse was happy and laughing that the cat fell for it every day. It was devastating. Because as soon as the sun came back that horse who made a joke would be mindless again.

Series after series of medical events, horse after horse.

When we'd get a call in the night, about colic or anything else, what I mean is we'd get a call from Gwen. My mother's job was assisting Gwen, who managed the barn for Joe. Gwen, seventy-two, shaped like a plum, worked all day shoveling shit and shuffling horses from stall to paddock and back, bandaging and medicating. This was a forty-stall barn, with forty horses, all on special regimens for recovery. It was insane work. There were no hours, for one thing. She woke up and worked until the work was done, and that could take twelve hours or it could take more. Horses shit and hurt themselves every day of the week, and there is never nothing left to do: a pile of mending, or tack that hasn't been oiled for months, or a kicked-in stall door or tractor to fix.

It's hard work the way fruit picking is hard work, but it's also hard work the way cement laying is hard work, and you get knocked over and stepped on and cut yourself and fall. It's also hard work the way teaching school can be hard work, when you love the little creatures and then you have to send them into a world you know they didn't choose and you know is bad for them, or you merely send them home and it's the same thing, you send them off to be wrecked by people. And it's intellectually hard work because you have to learn the horses' bodies and medications and the various arguments for various courses of action. It's hard work because you have a boss and the horses have owners and trainers and vets, all of whom are often assholes, because any time you're dealing with beauty you attract assholes.

And it's hard work because a lot of the time you are uninformed because you are unqualified and no one told you, and no one really cares that you don't know what you're doing, so it's hard because you fuck up and a horse can be in more pain than ever. Morally, it's hard work. All the time you have to think about what could possibly ever be the right thing to do. Also of course there is very little money, much less, for instance, than minimum wage. All cash, too, which is fine until Joe just decides you don't get paid at all.

Gwen was British. She'd kept her accent. At thirteen she ran away to the circus and traveled with it on one of those fabulously painted trains, and then traveled with all the animals and the costumed people in a ship that carried the circus over the ocean to Canada. When it disbanded, when times got tough and too many animals got sick or died, or when Gwen got married to a magician, or to some local barkeeper in some frozen Canadian town, or when she just left it, left the entire circus there on the side of the road, I don't know when, but at some point she got a husband and some children, and I believe they stayed in Canada for a long time, must have been. I could think through what I knew of Gwen's history so quickly it seemed she could not possibly be old, that even after she'd gone through two whole invisible countries and two whole invisible families, Gwen and I could each tell our life story in exactly the same amount of time. In fact, we did. She'd tell a bit of hers and I'd match her each time, or she let me think I could. She was that warm to me, that convincing. She made me feel our lives were exactly the same size.

Sometime later, after running away and after the circus, after the train and the ship, and Canada—and this part my mother told me, the only part Gwen never mentioned—she said Gwen, who was at that point already what you call a senior citizen, with no husband or kids in sight—who knows what happened, they disappeared—Gwen lived in a box on Miami beach, and survived on dog food. Imagine. She's crouched in her box watching waves lap the cardboard. Tough, round Gwen in her white hair like a cap, holding her aluminum feeding bowl, eating from it with a big spoon like it was cereal, looking from her box over the ocean, half in shadow in the afternoon.

No lie. Absurd and absolutely true at once.

Then she got a job at the track, grooming, because she knew animals from her circus days and you could sleep in the tack room. Spiders were as large as hands in there, and rats were the size of cats and in the night they tumbled the lids off the trash cans of grain. Gwen would wake startled and have to coax herself back to sleep quickly or she'd never get enough, but she rose bright as a bird each morning and clicked on the radio, and before dawn the horses in her care were clean and tacked for the exercise riders who arrived, stamping, laughing with cocaine at five. Hot, hot, all day, but there is nothing like the sound of twenty chewing horses in the dusk, the depth of contentedness that shifts into a stable once the people are gone, the rhythm of teeth below the barn fans, when it's as if one single fly is left in the world and it's making the rounds, buzzing crosshatched into one stall and then the next, because in each stall it enters, a horse switches its tail once, and you hear one tail switch and then another, under the sound of the fans and over the sound of the chewing, until the fly moves away from the shedrow and into the night. Twenty horses, like twenty tucked-in orphan girls in two rows of ten single beds, each under her own tidy window with its four even panes.

I think I didn't know British people could be poor. I imagined her running from a castle with teacups tied into her bandana bundle. I imagined her galloping across green fields with foxes, the flowing mane of her circus pony, a bugle to her lips.

Then she got this job at this lay-up stable with the headless plaster horses, a place called Sandpiper for the soft skittery brown birds that dash across the vast tracks at training stables in the dawn, birds we never saw at the lay-up stable. Instead we saw mostly cattle egrets, white birds that stood like emaciated bowling pins, one and then another in the fields, or that walked behind a grazing horse, bending in the quickest pitch of motion for any bugs lifted with the horse's hoof. The job at Sandpiper included a camper for Gwen to live in. She'd been running the forty-stall barn herself until she got kicked, broke her arm, and convinced Joe, who owned the place, to hire my mother, who'd come looking for work.

Between the barn and the house was a small above-ground pool, about four feet deep, about the size of a box stall, actually. When it was too hot to help my mother even by rolling bandages, I'd get to sit in the pool, and one afternoon was so hot Gwen joined me, standing on her toes, buoyant, and leaned against the pool wall with her cast on the redwood ledge, lifting one leg and then the other through the water, feeling each leg cut and bubble the water as it rose. It was so hot that although we filled it from the hose the pool grew warm as a bath. Flies circled our heads, big stinging greenheaded horseflies, and mid-sentence Gwen would dunk her head and flip her hair back, which was white and stood up like a punk rocker's when it was wet. She flexed and unflexed her hand in the cast, touching her index finger to the plaster bridge that divided it from her thumb. From time to time she'd slide under with her arm raised, let herself slip down with her elbow at her head, making a kind of inadvertent Black Power gesture like I'd seen in movies, a gesture like an accidental cheer, her eyes closed and her face peacefully blurred underwater.

We talked about songs on the radio and a couple other things, a couple of the horses, and a dog that had been hanging around. Then she asked me about Adam Walsh, the boy in the news who'd been abducted from our mall, whose head was found in a canal one hundred miles north of us. She asked me what I'd been thinking about that.

Gwen knew my mother and I had fought that morning. I wanted to take the bus to the mall because some girls I knew were going. My mother said no. She said it was too complicated and she didn't know what time she'd be done with work, or which bus I should take or what. I was mad, and hot, and a horse had stepped on my foot because it was so hot I couldn't pay attention. I'd been walking a horse that had his legs blistered with Reducine. In fact I'd held him for the tranquilizer and watched my mother apply the black tar to his legs with a corncob, wearing rubber gloves to protect her hands. I could smell the chemicals working at his skin. My stomach quaked when I thought of it. My neck clenched as we walked.